The 7 Hour Rule

Here’s one of my favorite marketing concepts: The 7 Hour Rule.

It says that big decisions take 7 hours, on average.

If you buy a new car, you’ll spend around 7 hours on the decision before you feel comfortable pulling the trigger.

Those 7 hours include going to the dealership and talking to the dealer, taking the car for a test drive, maybe going to a second or third dealership and doing the same thing.

That time also includes doing online research, watching a YouTube video about the car, thinking about it while sipping a coffee, imagining yourself sitting in the car, talking to your spouse about it, and so on.

The 7 hours don’t happen all on the same day, they accumulate over weeks and maybe months.

So this applies to B2B marketing and sales, where you’re selling $10,000+ solutions. These are big decisions for your prospects.

Now this creates 2 problems in traditional sales:

1️⃣It’s very-time intensive & expensive

Because the 7 hours that a prospect needs to spend with you and your offer are the same 7 hours that you or your salesperson needs to spend with that prospect – in the form of discovery calls, demo calls, feedback meetings, maybe inviting them out for dinner and going golfing with them.

So, that’s a lot of salary you’re investing in that deal.

2️⃣It stretches out over a long period

Because obviously, no prospect will sit down and complete a 7-hour session in one day and buy the dame day you. They will accumulate the 7 hours over a long period.

That’s why sales cycles are so long in B2B.

Your prospect needs to find the 7 hours between their already busy schedules to research and educate themselves about you.

On top of that, their schedule needs to align with your salesperson’s schedule, because for most B2B companies, they only way to get this information is through a 1on1 sales call.

To sum up, traditional sales is time-intensive, expensive, and stretches over a long period – which makes predicting revenue extremely hard.

➡️This is where content comes in.

Instead of speaking to your prospects 1on1 for every little detail, you can create separate videos on all the different topics your prospects usually care about before buying. Videos that explain your product, how it works, your pricing, what expertise you have, and so on.

And it addresses the 2 problems:

1️⃣It is less time-intensive because you create the videos once, upload them to your LinkedIn, YouTube, and website, and 100s of prospects can all watch the same video.

2️⃣It condenses the length of the sales cycle because your prospects won’t have to wait to align their schedule with the schedule of your salespeople. They can watch 2-3 of your videos after work or listen to one of your podcasts while commuting by train.

So it shortens the timespan in which your prospects accumulate their 7 hours.