Something unexpected happens when you market at very small scales. Many of the rules change. Your buyers exist in a superposition of decision states until they are engaged, at which point they collapse into a single state.
It’s not like moving balls through a funnel. It’s not a linear path. They are more like a foam than a homogeneously dense mass.
This is the scale where marketers need to operate when buyers are making high-stakes, knowledge-intensive, reputation-dependent decisions. You work differently when your buyer is putting the safety of millions or billions of dollars in assets on the line and risking the stability of their entire firm on their buying decision. High school physics experiments won’t get you very good results.
Instead, you have to experiment within the fluctuations of decision states. You have to theorize as well as measure. Your inferences about cause and effect need to change.
Skipping several steps in my analogy, that’s why thought leadership matters as much as it does in institutional fintech.