Playing The Long Game

A marathon runner knows that every mile matters, but no single mile wins the race.

Commercial growth works the same way. In a young company, pilots, logos and pipeline can feel existential. In an established one, it's retention, price increases and new solutions to drive growth. But optimize too much around the next mile marker, and you lose sight of where you're going.

I see more of that across the insights industry right now. Fragmentation, tighter budgets, AI and new entrants have created urgency and fear of missing quota, being disrupted or falling behind. The response is often more leads, more automation, more outreach, more innovation, more noise.

Playing the long game isn't about moving slowly. It's about managing the pace in front of you while keeping the finish line in mind.

After 15+ years working with global enterprise brands, I've learned that very little happens in isolation. A research brief connects to an organizational priority, a business problem and, ultimately, something happening outside the organization. Good strategic selling means being able to move up and down that chain and asking why until you understand the underlying business need.

Doing that requires context across three layers: the market, the insights industry and the customer.

The Market: Be Mindful of the Context in Which Your Customer Operates

Understand what is shaping demand.

Put yourself in your customer's shoes. Research questions don't originate in a vacuum; they're shaped by the market pressures, consumer shifts and growth challenges the business is navigating. Understanding that bigger picture helps you understand why the question is being asked in the first place.

Businesses continually navigate familiar tensions: value vs. volume, investment vs. efficiency, breadth vs. specialization, global scale vs. local growth. Where the balance sits changes with economic conditions, consumer behavior and competitive pressure.

The recent inflation cycle across food and beverage illustrates the move from price-led to volume-led growth. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Mondelez and others benefited from periods of strong pricing; as consumers became more pressured and volumes softened, priorities turned toward affordability, penetration and finding new households, markets, occasions and channels for growth.

A similar shift is happening from breadth toward focus. P&G and Unilever once epitomized the CPG conglomerate. Today, companies are concentrating where they have the strongest right to win, from snacking at Mondelez and Mars to focused consumer health businesses like Haleon, Kenvue and Opella. The question has shifted from “How many categories can we compete in?” to “Where can we build the greatest advantage?”

These shifts matter because they change where companies invest, what they prioritize and the questions they need answered. Knowing the customer means knowing the market they operate in and how changes outside their walls shape the questions being asked inside them.

The Insights Industry: Put Disruption in Perspective

Know how solutions are evolving.

AI is changing market research. But disruption isn't new. We've moved through online research, social listening, e-commerce data, automation and SaaS tools. Each wave brought some version of the same declaration: Everything is about to change. But everything doesn't change at once. Technology moves through established adoption curves, from early experimentation and hype to broader acceptance and productive use. Understanding where a technology and your customer sit on that curve helps sellers be intentional about where and how to introduce change.

Right now, the market is crowded with new solutions, including synthetic respondents, AI-moderated research, automated analysis and agentic workflows. The temptation is to lead with the innovation: Here's what we can now do. But a new capability only matters in the context of the customer. What problem does it solve? Where does it fit within their existing research ecosystem? Is it adding value or simply adding something new?

AI is also forcing companies to break down functional silos. Its value isn't confined to insights or marketing; it cuts across commercial, finance, digital, innovation, R&D, supply and operations. As clients figure out how those workstreams connect, we need to do the same across the insights industry: look beyond agency silos, understand where different capabilities fit and partner when the bigger solution requires more than one provider.

The best sellers won't ignore what's changing. They'll understand the broader ecosystem and what will create the most value for the customer, recognizing that their solution may be only one part of the answer. Keep the customer's bigger need in view and embrace change without letting the urgency around it dictate the pace.

The Customer: Know How the Business Works

Connect solutions to demand in a way that fits your customer's business.

Know your customer's organizational dynamics. The org chart is more than reporting lines; it's a map of how the business works. Look at where budgets sit, where business needs originate, how global, regional and local teams interact, which KPIs each function owns and where decisions actually get made.

P&G has long been an archetype of global category leadership, with significant strategy, innovation and insights capability sitting at the center. Coca-Cola combines the power of a global brand with a distributed bottling and route-to-market network, making regional and local execution critical. Mondelez has deliberately emphasized a “local-first” model, pushing greater accountability closer to markets while still leveraging global brands and scale.

These dynamics evolve over time as companies rebalance global scale against local speed, relevance and accountability. History helps you recognize the pendulum swings, because restructurings, leadership changes and new mandates are rarely entirely new. More often, they signal another shift in where power, priorities and investment sit.

Knowing the customer means understanding the business over time, across teams and geographies, and up and down the organization. That depth builds trust and earns the right to become a partner, not simply another provider.

Mile Markers Still Matter

None of this is an argument against short-term accountability in selling.

A marathoner who ignores the mile splits isn't going to have a very good race. You need pipeline discipline, conversion and revenue. You need to know when you're off pace and adjust. The mile marker is information, not the destination.

When the market gets anxious, the temptation is to sprint with more leads, more messages, more automation, more pitches, more pressure. That might produce a quick win, but it can also exhaust the runner and erode the trust you're trying to build.

Our industry should be unusually good at resisting that temptation. Market research is about putting data in context, recognizing patterns, staying curious and asking why. Bring that same discipline to how you sell. Know your customer's business, category, history and organization. Listen to earnings calls and stay on top of industry news. Be clear about what you do and what you don't do. Keep asking why until you can connect today's research question to the business outcome leadership is trying to deliver.

Playing the long game means putting the customer's bigger goal ahead of the immediate sale. Do that consistently and you build something harder to automate or disrupt: trust.

Stay curious enough to understand what is changing and experienced enough to recognize what isn't. Hit the mile markers. But run the whole race.