The Myth of “The One Thing That Works”

22 June

Most marketers will know this scenario. Pipeline is quieter than you’d like. The team gets together to discuss what can be done differently. And somewhere in that discussion, the question comes up:

“What’s the one thing we can do right now to move the needle? There must be something we’re missing - some lever we haven’t pulled yet.”

Sometimes it shows up as competitive curiosity. The head of sales or managing director has just been to an event and comes back and feels like we’re falling behind. “XYZ just did this and it seemed to land really well - why aren’t we focussing on this instead of the other things?”

And then there’s the one that had its moment about a decade ago but still surfaces occasionally: The desire to go viral. In a previous role, we had actually briefed an agency to develop a viral campaign, everyone got caught up in the idea of it - then the budget came back and the whole thing quickly dissolved. Which, looking back, was probably the right outcome. Not because viral moments don’t happen, but because “going viral” is not a strategy - it’s a hope.

It’s understandable that people feel and react this way about a slow pipeline or when seeing marketing tactics in the field. The intention is good and the business is paying attention, learning and coming forward with ideas, and that should always be encouraged. But here’s the truth I’ve seen play out across dozens of businesses, in very different industries and at very different stages of growth:

There is no one thing.

Why the question keeps getting asked

This isn’t a naïve question. It comes from how marketing tends to get talked about, especially online.

Spend any time on LinkedIn and you’ll see someone announcing that cold email is dead, or that organic content is now the only channel worth investing in, or that if you don’t do paid ads then why even bother getting up in the morning? Every post is framed as a revelation. Marketing is sometimes talked about like puzzle with only one correct answer, and there are plenty of folks around that claim they found the solution.

However – growth does not come from finding a channel nobody else has discovered. Unless something – often unexpectedly – blows up, and even if it does, the effect won’t last long. Especially so in today’s fast paced world, growth comes from showing up consistently, across multiple touchpoints, over a long time. That is a less exciting thing to say, but it’s what the evidence actually shows.

The buyer is already 81% of the way there before you know they exist

According to Dreamdata’s 2026 LinkedIn Ads B2B Benchmarks Report, 81% of buyers had already formed a preferred vendor before they made first contact with any sales team. That means, most of the decision has already been made before your sales team knows the opportunity exists.

So the question is: What is happening during that 80%, and who in the business is responsible for it?

The answer is marketing. Not the version that runs a campaign and moves on.

The version that has been present, consistently, in all the places a buyer was looking before they ever filled out a form.

How buying decisions actually get made

Think about the last significant purchase you made for your business, or even for yourself. A piece of software, a new agency, a supplier you switched to or – a new car.

Did you see one ad and sign a contract? Almost certainly not.

More likely, it went something like this:

You realised that you had a problem
You started looking into and researching it
You found some content and with that, some providers that could address your problem
You spoke to people and they mentioned names
You searched further, looked at a website and read a case study or two
You got distracted by work and life and then the problem surfaced again, and it annoyed you even more
An email arrived at a moment when it was actually relevant
You watched a webinar or read something that answered a question you’d been sitting with
You went to an event and bumped into the people from one of the organisations you thought might be able to help you
And then you booked a call, with your mind already largely made up.

By the time that call happened, you had already crossed paths with that brand multiple times, across different channels and formats. Most of those interactions felt small in the moment, some of them even went unnoticed as you took them in subconsciously. All of them were doing something.

This is why looking for the one channel that ‘works’ misses the point. The buying decision was never made in a single moment. It built up over time, across many moments, some or most of which your CRM probably did not capture.

In a 6-to-12-month sales cycle, staying front of mind is the strategy

This matters more in some industries than others. In SaaS, professional services, and anything involving multiple stakeholders and significant budget, sales cycles of 6 to 12 months are not unusual. The more vendors a buyer is evaluating, the longer the process tends to run.

So the real question becomes: If a buyer is forming a preference over six to twelve months, how often does your brand need to appear during that window to be the one they choose?

There is no single number that fits every situation, but think in terms of dozens of touchpoints rather than single digits. Across LinkedIn, email, search, peer conversations, events, your website, a realistic target might be 20 to 30 meaningful interactions or more before someone is genuinely sales-ready. Some of those will be small. A scroll past a post that still registers the name. Others will be more substantial, a webinar, a long read, a conversation at an event. All of it counts and contributes.

The businesses that consistently win the preferred vendor position are not the ones with the cleverest single campaign. They are the ones who stay present across the whole window, so that when a buyer is ready to move, the name at the top of their list is already familiar.

What actually happens to leads once they’re in the CRM

This is where I see a lot of businesses get the process wrong, and it’s worth being specific about it.

A lead comes in. If it’s ready to move, great. If it isn’t, it tends to get followed up once or twice and then parked while attention shifts to the next new contact.

But if 81% of the decision forms before the first conversation, and the buying cycle runs six to twelve months, a lead that isn’t ready today might still be early in their process. They have months of research ahead of them. The question is whether your brand is part of that research, or whether they go quiet and come back six months later having already decided on someone else.

Nurturing is the answer to that question. And it’s a marketing job, not just a sales follow-up sequence. Done well, it means:

Staying present without being intrusive. Useful content on a regular cadence, not “just checking in” emails that add nothing.
Matching what you send to where someone is in their process. A buyer who is six months from a decision needs different content from one who is six weeks out.
Keeping the brand voice consistent across every touchpoint. If your emails sound different from your LinkedIn posts, which sound different from your website, you are creating friction without realising it – this is even more important in time of AI.
Treating “not ready yet” as a stage in the pipeline, not an exit from it. The contacts sitting quietly in your CRM right now are a significant part of next year’s revenue, if something useful is happening with them in the meantime.

A CRM full of leads nobody is actively nurturing is not a database. It is a list of opportunities that are slowly warming up for someone else.

What the businesses that scale are actually doing

The businesses I have seen grow well are not the ones chasing the tactic of the month. They are the ones who have built a way of operating that holds together across channels and over time, even if they would not describe it as a system.

A few things tend to be true about how they work:

Positioning is clear enough that everyone can repeat it. Not just marketing or the founder. Sales, customer success, the people on the phone with clients every day. When positioning is genuinely clear, it shows up consistently without anyone having to think hard about it.
The message is the same across every channel. Website, sales deck, LinkedIn, email. They are all saying the same thing in different ways, not competing with each other or pulling in different directions.
Channels are connected, not separate. Content informs the email programme. Email supports the sales conversation. What comes up in sales conversations shapes the next piece of content. Nothing sits in a silo with its own set of metrics that nobody else cares about.
Activity is consistent, not just intense when things feel urgent. This is the one that gets underestimated most often. Three months of consistent output followed by six weeks of nothing does not build the same presence as showing up steadily at a lower volume.

And on the channel question specifically, the data is clear. Analytic Partners studied over 3,200 campaigns across TV, print, radio, display, paid search, online video, PR, out-of-home, and cinema. They found that each additional platform added meaningfully to the overall return. One platform produced a baseline. A second added 19% incremental ROI. A third added 23%. A fourth, 31%. A fifth, 35%.

The combination of channels produces returns that none of them would produce on their own. And yet the same research found that the majority of campaigns were still running on just one or two platforms.

The businesses still judging each channel in isolation are missing the point. It is not about which individual channel performs best. It is about what they produce together.

The real advantage is simpler than most people want it to be

There is no tactic out there that your competitors have not already found or could not find tomorrow. What matters is the willingness to execute on an idea, on a tactic, consistently, for long enough to see results.

Running an ad is easy. Sending a cold email is easy. Posting on LinkedIn for a week is easy. Doing all of that in a connected way, for twelve months, while resisting the urge to change course every time something feels slow, is much harder. And it is much rarer.

In my experience, marketing does not fail because the strategy was wrong. It fails because someone stopped.

Usually a few months before things would have started to move. Often right at the point where a lead was finally beginning to warm up.

Where to start

If you are a founder, a CEO, or a senior leader reading this, the answer is not to find a better channel. It is to look honestly at what is already in place:

Can everyone in the business explain your positioning the same way? If not, that is the first thing to fix.
What is actually happening to the leads in your CRM right now? Are they being nurtured, or just stored?
If a buyer in your market takes 6 to 12 months to decide, what does 20 to 30 touchpoints over that period look like in practice? Does your current activity come close?
When a campaign or channel feels slow, what is the decision-making process? Is there a defined point at which you would genuinely call it and move on, or does activity just quietly drop off?

Keeping it real

There is no secret channel. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t ramp up activity when pipeline goes quiet – but that should happen from a baseline of healthy, regular marketing touchpoints, and not as an isolated, limited-time eruption of activity followed by a period of tumbleweeds.

There is a real advantage available to businesses that are willing to show up consistently, across multiple channels, for long enough to let it build. The goal is simple, even if the execution is not: By the time a buyer is 81% of the way to a decision, you want to be the name that springs to their mind by the time they’re ready to make the call.

Christina Zimmer