On the first Monday of the New Year, my husband and I found ourselves child-free for the first time in 11 days. We didn’t want to squander the opportunity so we settled on a task that must be done together and ideally without assistance from the opinionated, occasionally potty-trained three-year-old or his baby accomplice.
So, we went to pick out a new mattress. We had our preferences going in (medium for me and firm for him) and went back and forth, trying to convince one another why our choice was best.
While we were in a gridlock, the salesman looked at me, perceiving cracks in my resolve, and said, “Forget about how firm it feels to you now. It might seem that way at first, but then it conforms to your shape while maintaining its support. Trust me.”
“Okay,” I thought. “I will give it a try.”
He promised a 30-day return window to switch it out for the softer mattress If we didn’t like it. But he also made us promise not to call him after the first night. “You are going to freak out, but you need to give it time. It is worth the wait of the adjustment period,” he said.
The mattress came, and I couldn’t wait for that first night of blissful sleep. But when I sprawled across it to test it out, I felt a pit in my stomach. It felt like the consistency of a punching bag. “What have we done…it was so expensive,” I thought.
After a few minutes of lying there in sheer panic, I started to sink in a little. My body began to leave an imprint, and the comfort he promised started to take shape.
But it still felt too hard. The next morning, I reached for Advil thinking it even made my body a little sore. “He said not to call after one day, but what about two?” I thought.
Within a few sleeps, the salesman’s hypothesis started to come true. And after a couple of weeks, I can say with certainty that the mattress is borderline magical, and I have (perhaps) never slept better. Not only that, I no longer feel my bedmate tossing and turning—and vice versa.
The waiting period is the hardest part when you try something new.
When you wait to see if it is going to work—if you are going to succeed or fail miserably.
It is the most miserable part of a marketing strategy, too. Will this investment you made in your business prove its worth? Were you right in your hunch that targeting this market with this key message was the right thing to do?
We know. We feel it, too. We are in the business of making a difference with our marketing efforts, and sometimes the wait is excruciating. But we also know, just like the salesman said, it is important not to pull the plug too soon if you aren’t immediately seeing results. It takes time to make an impact—to let the strategy sink in.
The wait is when the magic happens.
