Hi Reader,

Yesterday, somebody reached out to me who I haven't spoken to in over three years. They were finally ready to start talking about marketing for their business. THREE YEARS after our first conversation…

(Firstly, good luck to me trying to attribute the lead source in our CRM on this one. Do I create a new deal, or resurrect the old deal with all the notes?! 🫠)

The thing that got to me about this, and why I also made a video on it, is around understanding timing.

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I can't plan for this timing and I also can’t control when someone is ready.

We're doing some good things with our marketing. this newsletter is on a very good cadence (Thanks TL for pushing me!). There's LinkedIn posts, articles, videos and website updates too.

But if someone isn't in the market for our services, or even problem-aware, there's no way they're replying to this email or clicking the contact us button on our website.

They're just not ready.

The 4 stages of buying readiness

• Not in the market
• Problem aware
• Solution aware
• Ready to buy

Eugene Schwartz came up with the 5 stages of awareness. (I've joined the solution and product aware into 1 stage though.)

I think we're all aware of these stages or have seen them in some shape or form.

What I want you to think about today is not the stages, but the triggers that get someone to enter one of these stages.

What matters are the triggers

For your business, what are the triggers that move someone from not in the market to being problem-aware?

And then from problem-aware to finding the solution?

It could be things like:

• They just hired someone
• They've gone through a merger
• New budget has been approved
• The CEO has decided on a new strategy
• The results from whoever they're currently working with aren't great

Whatever these triggers are for your prospects, you need to be creating content in various shapes to talk to people at these various stages, so they become problem-aware and are now starting that journey to finding you.

Understanding the triggers matters.

AI is scrambling the stages a bit

I think a lot of what's happening now is people are going from ready to buy, back to solution-aware.

Because AI as an entire solution now exists.

Give someone a ChatGPT or Claude licence, and the problem is "solved."

Then after a while, they realise this isn’t solving the issue and go back to defining the problem.

The journey isn't always a straight line, so plan for this and create content that then also talks to this back and forth journey too.

My takeaway from all of this

You can't control when someone enters the market.

But you can control whether they remember you when they do.

(I’m going to put this on a bumper sticker ®️)

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See you in two weeks,

Jason