“Rather naively, Richard, I assumed marketing was easy.”
That’s what a close networking contact confided to me at an event. He’d bought Volume One of Stick to Your Guns and is waiting on Volume Two, so I let him off lightly rather than teasing him about it on the spot. But it got me thinking because it’s one of the most honest things I’ve heard a business owner say in a long time.
He’s not alone, and it isn’t a failure of intelligence or effort. There’s genuine research behind why capable, experienced people consistently underestimate exactly this kind of challenge. A landmark study by Cooper, Woo and Dunkelberg surveyed nearly 3,000 entrepreneurs and found that 81% believed their odds of success were at least 70%, with a third certain they’d succeed outright. Tellingly, when the same people were asked about the odds for a business like theirs, run by somebody else, their estimates dropped sharply. We reserve our optimism almost entirely for ourselves.
Marketing gets caught up in that same optimism. It looks simple from the outside, the way most skilled work does to someone who hasn’t yet tried to do it. Here are the three miscalculations I see most often, including one or two I made myself in my earlier years.
The “Build It and They Will Come” Trap #
This one has a wonderful detail hiding inside it: the phrase itself is a misquote. The actual line from Field of Dreams is “if you build it, he will come”: singular, referring to one specific man. “They will come” is one of the most widely shared collective misrememberings in film history, and there’s something rather fitting about that. The version we all quote is the one we wish were true, not the one that was actually said.
The same wishful thinking shows up constantly in business. Launch the website, publish a few posts, open the doors, and assume interest will follow naturally. It rarely does, not because the product or service isn’t good enough, but because nobody is choosing to actively reach the people who’d want it. Visibility and reach have to be built deliberately. They are not a side effect of existing.
Underestimating the Sales Cycle and the Touch Points It Actually Takes #
The second miscalculation is about time and repetition. Most people picture a buying decision as a single conversation: you make your case, they say yes or no. In reality, particularly in B2B environments, a genuine decision is usually the accumulation of several separate contacts, spread across weeks or months, each one building slightly more trust than the last.
I like to compare a lead generation pipeline to a house build. Nobody expects to pay for a house in a single lump sum on completion. Payment is staged, because the work itself happens in stages: foundations, then structure, then finish. A sales pipeline works the same way. Prospects move through stages too, and skipping ahead rarely works any better in business development than it would on a building site. The right pipeline size depends on your capacity and budget to nurture relationships properly, your conversion ratio, and your industry’s typical buying cycle and; for anything genuinely important to a prospect, that cycle is almost always longer than first assumed.
Underestimating What the Competition Can Actually Do #
The third miscalculation is, in some ways, the most dangerous, because it’s rarely spoken aloud. It’s easy to form a picture of your competitors based on what’s visible: their website, their social presence, their pricing page. What’s invisible is everything else: their client relationships, their delivery quality, the trust they’ve built over years that simply doesn’t show up anywhere public.
Bob Parsons put it plainly: “If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and you wouldn’t have an opportunity.” That’s worth considering because it cuts both ways. Yes, the difficulty is real. But difficulty is also exactly what keeps a market from being flooded. Underestimating competitors isn’t really about assuming they’re weak. It’s about assuming you already understand their full strength, when in truth you’re only ever seeing the part they choose to show you.
What Helps #
None of these three miscalculations are failures of character. They’re simply what happens when a skilled, capable person looks at a discipline they haven’t practised yet and assumes, reasonably enough, that it can’t be that different from everything else they’ve already mastered.
Brian Tracy’s observation seems the right note to end on: “Incorrect assumptions lie at the root of every failure.” The businesses that get marketing right aren’t the ones who never made these assumptions. They’re the ones who noticed, adjusted, and kept going anyway.
My networking contact, to his credit, has already done exactly that. He read the first volume. He’s waiting for the second. That’s not naivety anymore. That’s someone correcting course.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/@richard-bulldomican
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbulldomican/
