Pop quiz: Can your CFO and board pass the marketing marshmallow test?

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Welcome to another fine edition of Marketing Under The Influence

In 1970, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel sought to understand when delayed gratification — the ability to wait to obtain something that one wants — develops in children.

His original experiments gathered preschoolers from the nearby Bing Nursery School, placed them individually in a room, and gave them a choice: enjoy one small reward (like a marshmallow or pretzel) immediately or wait 15 minutes to earn a second. Some of the children covered their eyes or looked away from the tasty treat. Others passed the time talking to themselves, singing songs, or playing impromptu games with their hands and feet. One even took a nap to delay gratification.

The marshmallow test has since become a cultural touchstone for the idea that patience pays off, often invoked to highlight the importance of delaying gratification for greater rewards.

What does a preschooler's choice between one marshmallow now and two later have to do with marketing? A lot, actually. Like many of the kids in psychological experiments, CFOs and influential board members often lean toward immediate rewards. They want the marshmallow now.

However, unlike children who struggle with delayed gratification, the blind pursuit of quarterly growth has proven implications.

1 quick, measurable outcome now — or the lion's share of demand later?

Before we dive in, there's something you should know. A decade after his original experiments, Walter Mischel followed up with participants and correlated delayed gratification and various measures of success later in life (e.g., higher SAT scores). These correlations have since been debunked by replication studies with larger, more diverse samples, using more rigorous methods.

But don't let that caveat distract you. Because, when it comes to B2B marketing and finance, the predictive validity of the marshmallow test remains in tact.

In marketing, the marshmallow test represents the strategic decision-making by CFOs and influential board members who, instead of choosing one marshmallow now or two later, opt between:

• 1 quick, measurable outcome now: This is the "gumball machine" mentality Jon Miller, founder of Marketo and Engagio, helped propagate a decade ago. It's an approach that favors short-term campaigns with immediately visible and easily attributable metrics (e.g., click-through rates, MQLs). This choice satisfies the desire for fast ROI and "justify budget" for stakeholders and ignores the broader impact of marketing.

• Durable brand equity and mindshare later: This is the long-term investments in brand building, content ecosystems, and audience research that position a brand to earn a spot on customers' "day one" lists — a term referring to the top three solutions they consider when entering the market which, according to 6sense research, choose from 8 out of 10 times. This choice takes patience because the results won't appear on dashboards overnight or be directly attributed to revenue.

For more than a decade, CFOs and boards have focused on short-term gratification of immediate results and the tradeoff between measuring quarterly MQLs and longer-term marketing investments is consequential.

As it stands today, over-indexing on transactional demand generation tactics has led to:

• Waning customer trust: A significant trust gap exists between B2B companies and their customers. While 87% of executives believe customers highly trust their companies, only 30% of consumers actually do. And a staggering

• Rising customer acquisition costs: The average customer acquisition cost (CAC) for B2B was already on the rise before the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing 60-57% from 2014-2019. There haven't been any follow-up studies since but if my discussions with CMOs and CFOs over the past year are any indication, things haven't gotten better since the ZIRP era ended and buying behavior have radically changed.

• Declining SDR productivity: Today's B2B customers don't respond to sales outreach until they're 69% through their buyer journey and, more often than not, have already chosen who'll win their business.

• Sales pipeline stagnation: About 50% of B2B marketers struggled to reach their goals and only 37% of RevOps leaders were confident they'd hit their targets last year.

This framing should shift the discussion away from debates over MQL validity and onto the deeper issue — how short-termism undermines marketing's full potential to drive sustainable growth. But it hasn't yet. MQLs, traffic conversion, and marketing attribution continue to dominate boardroom discussions, forcing marketers to prioritize short-term KPIs over longer-term investments.

Why? Why is it so hard to convince CFOs and board members to wait for the second marshmallow? I'll tell you.

I've been pushing back against the "gumball machine" mentality for six years and spent nearly all of 2024 figuring out how marketers can abandon once and for all. What I’ve learned is that there are two invisible forces that influence strategic decision-making in marketing and finance:

• Social adhesion (e.g., "people like us do this")

• Status quo bias (e.g., "this is how we've always done it")

Together these forces are what make it incredibly difficult to break free from the short-term, metrics-obsessed mindset that has dominated B2B marketing.

Social adhesion and status quo bias are why, when Jon Miller asked me what it’s going to take to convince CFOs and boards to see things differently, my response was “we need a case study.” Because, until someone shares verifiable proof an identical business has successfully passed the marketing marshmallow test, we're stuck between "nobody else is doing this" and "we don't want to go first."

Make no mistake — overcoming this inertia is as daunting as it sounds. It requires more than an ounce of effort and demands a shitload of patience. But abandoning the shortsightedness of measuring quarterly MQLs isn't a fool's errand.

In fact, brands that shift toward long-term thinking and prove the value of delayed gratification sooner rather than later will win more than bragging rights. They stand a chance of winning the lion's share of demand in their categories.

How to reestablish the role of marketing in a broken system, one marshmallow at a time

In Walter Mischel’s follow-up studies, the key takeaway was that delayed gratification isn’t necessarily innate — it can be learned. Many of the children who initially ate the first marshmallow still went on to succeed later in life, likely because they developed self-regulation skills and recognized the importance of patience along the way.

And if preschoolers can learn the merits of self-control, perhaps marketing and finance can, too. After all, the rewards for brands that delay their gratification and invest in longer-term thinking sooner are substantial.

To understand why, let's consider the options again:

• 1 quick, measurable outcome now: Short-term campaigns with immediately visible and easily attributable metrics that typically target the 5% of B2B customers who will buy within a quarter, OR

• Durable brand equity and mindshare later: Longer-term investments in brand building, content ecosystems, and audience research that position a brand to earn a spot on B2B customers' "day one" lists.

Now, imagine you're the CFO at a B2B SaaS company specializing in cybersecurity solutions. Your ideal customers are IT leaders at mid-sized enterprises. For 95% of the year, these IT leaders are not actively searching for new solutions. They're focused on maintaining systems, addressing internal priorities, or simply don't need new cybersecurity tools (yet).

A high-profile breach at a competitor suddenly prompts the IT leader to act. They enter the market, join the 5% who'll make a purchase, and consider three vendors they recall from webinars and thought leadership pieces they encountered months ago during routine browsing or that were recommended by consultants and analysts.

Unless your brand is already well-established in its category, your chances of being on their list are slim to none. It doesn't matter that your product and services are superior. It also doesn't matter how much you spent on performance marketing because B2B customers are more likely to reject a brand they're unfamiliar with than any other reason.

That's not all. Data shows solutions from their "day one" lists 81% of the time — meaning, if you’re not on the list when the IT entered the market, your chances of winning their business drops dramatically.

This is why the marketing marshmallow test matters.

At least it should. Unfortunately, social adhesion and status quo bias continue to undermine rational thinking and strategic decision-making in B2B marketing and finance.

So, what will persuade CFOs and boards to pass the marketing marshmallow test?

I've succeeded at this twice. The first time was six years ago, when arguing against the "gumball machine" put my career at risk. Back then, budget went into marketing and qualified leads kept coming out. It didn't matter that traffic from search engines and major platforms was declining. The performance plateau was barely noticeable on charts with truncated y-axises. My second success story, which was four years ago, had more to do with the nearly a billion-dollars in venture capital and other factors I'd rather not get into.

What earned me and my team the opportunity each time was pointing to Dave Kellogg who said it best: marketing exists to make sales easier.

Nobody — and I really mean nobody, argues with his statement. But how, exactly, marketing makes sales easier is always at the heart of the debate. For more than a decade, SEO, lead forms, six-figure advertising budgets, and massive in-person conferences made sales easier. Now they don't.

Today, making sales easier means ensuring the brand is on customers' "day one" lists — not ranking on Google or achieving a 2% conversion rate on a paid campaign.

And, unless your brand is well-established in its category, getting on the list a lot easier said than done. Just consider what 6sense learned in their 2024 B2B Buyer Experience Report that surveyed 2,509 recent B2B customers and it's clear the cards are stacked against B2B brands today.

• 11: The average number of people involved in B2B purchase decisions

• 4.6: The average number of vendors evaluated by B2B customers

• 11.5 months: The average length of B2B buying cycles

• 8.1 months: The average amount of time B2B customers wait before contacting sales

• 85%: The percentage of B2B customers who have their purchase requirements mostly or completely set before talking to sales

• 72%: The percentage of B2B customers who use consultants or analysts to guide their decision-making

Short-term thinking and the pursuit of immediate outcomes neglect the reality portrayed in these findings, all of which underscore the importance of marketing as a bridge between long-term brand-building and short-term demand generation.

Because, with buying cycles averaging 11.5 months and contact with vendors delayed until 8.1 months in, the brands that win aren’t the ones chasing clicks.

Until next time...

Ronnie

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