The invisible middle: how buyers decide before you meet

#BR38

Last week, I had a new business appointment, and I felt alive and excited as always. I reckon if you’re not excited about a meeting that could change the course of your business, even in a small way, something's wrong.

(Fair warning: this edition of Bright Objects is a high-wire act, from 1950s sociologists to a 1970s icon, some relevant musings on art and even clockmakers. Stay subscribed if I fall off.)

6sense surveyed more than 4,000 B2B buyers last year. 80% of deals went to the supplier the buyer already preferred before the first sales conversation. 94% of buying groups had ranked their shortlist before contacting a single supplier.

Your content is running the race that happens before a single word is said at a first new business appointment.

Whether you know it or not, most of the buying cycle actually happens well before this point: I call this the “invisible middle”. 

At any given time, about 95% of your potential buyers aren't in the market. They're not buying. But they are deciding. To reach them, we need to consistently reach them with creative, relevant content.

In 1956, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term to describe the emerging one-way connection between audiences and TV and radio presenters: the parasocial relationship.

Your buyers are building a view of you right now, from your posts, your newsletter and your people's opinions.

A consistent content engine is how you talk to people while they're deciding.

What makes a great piece of creative? For my 7th Form art teacher (that’s Year 13, kids), Alastair Nisbet-Smith, it was the tension between magic (chaos) and structure.

This is true for business content as it is for painting.

Either side of that, and things fall apart: too much structure, and it’s a bland piece of work; too much magic, and it’s a mess. Thinking this way is the antidote to obsessing about a piece of creative. If you’ve got a mark or a gesture that you really liked, but the painting as a whole needed something else, then that gesture is gone.

Alastair is a big proponent of never letting any individual creative element hold you hostage.

We had our lessons in a small downstairs room that smelt of turps and oil paints. In the centre was a large table overflowing with painting books, much loved, with charcoal and paint fingermarks all through them.

Rising to prominence in the 1950s, Willem de Kooning was one of the artists in the books on that table. An abstract expressionist, he focused more on painted gestures and textures than on form, and his work became almost entirely about the tension between structure and magic. His work was a struggle against his own proclivities to create something truly original.

He hated the idea of a fixed style. "Style is a fraud," he said. "I always felt that the Greeks were hiding behind their columns."

He spent about two years on Woman I, scraping it back and repainting it. The structure was buried under the magic.

It’s hard to mention de Kooning without a little personal aside. I went to the Elam School of Fine Arts in the late 90s, and the internationally renowned feminist artist Judy Chicago came to give a lecture.

She spent a good chunk of it taking apart de Kooning’s Women series as misogynistic. It was the first time I'd heard anyone seriously criticise a painter I'd studied that closely (this is adorable if you think about it: this is before the internet, and comment sections).

Afterwards, our dean, Carole Shepheard, introduced me to her and mentioned that I’d recently reconnected with an artist inspo who had got me through a tough project. Chicago asked me which artist that was.

"De Kooning," I said. I don’t remember what happened after that, but let’s imagine the Curb Your Enthusiasm music.

She’d hate to be in the same sentence, but both Chicago's and de Kooning’s works endure. They both reached me even though I lived on the other end of the world.

This is the art equivalent of reaching through the invisible middle.

On Saturday, I learnt a phrase every chef already knows: mise en place. Everything in its place. Before service, every ingredient is chopped, measured and within reach. Nobody photographs the chopping board, but no dish is complete without it.

That’s true of creative business content. Most businesses are cooking to order. It's Monday morning, and someone is writing Monday's post.

So you’re looking for consistent creative, but the answer is unsexy. It's structure.

Do you have 3 or 4 themes you keep coming back to, so every post has a reason to exist? (Marketers call these content pillars.) Can everyone see the same calendar, 6 weeks out? Does everyone know who approves what, and how long it takes? Is it all in one place?

Get that in place, and you've got room for the magic: “newsjacking,” reacting in real time to something timely and topical; the space to tell the story only you could tell; creative work that consistently shows up.

That's what the people in the invisible middle remember.

That brings us to today. Good friend, inspiration, and AI wunderkind Ed Ortega has an overarching philosophy that I really admire: he wants himself and his business to be a clockmaker, not a time-teller.

If you'd like a hand with your own content mise en place, hit reply or book 30 minutes with me.

Cheers, Dave