I watched a client spend six months planning a program launch. They built the curriculum. They refined the pricing. They mapped out delivery logistics. They got internal alignment with their small, but mighty, team – consisting of a part time marketing coordinator, a finance and sales lead and an executive assistant/operations lead.

Two weeks before launch, they called me. “We need messaging.” (I’m obviously paraphrasing, but that’s what it boiled down to).

So with what little time, access and runway available, I hopped on a 90 minute call with them to evaluate the ‘decisions’ and ‘alignment’ they thought was evident in the launch planning.

Turns out, there was no audience research to back up the ‘people want this’ claim.
The program was entirely built on their understanding of need, with little to bridge the gap between what they knew to be true and what their proclaimed ideal client saw as the ‘tip of their nose’ problem to solve.

And not really surprising, but the launch flopped.

Not because the program was bad – it was and is quite excellent.

Not because the pricing was wrong—it was fair (although pricing is always a level of value communication that seems to be forgotten).

It flopped because the market had no idea it was coming, no context for why it mattered, and no reason to believe it would solve their problem.

The company thought they’d been visible.

They’d been posting content, sending newsletters, showing up on LinkedIn. In fact, they were quite insistent that ‘should this be enough?’ People know we are experts in this. We post daily. They will see that we are experts and then they should just buy from us.

Ya-no. (As we say in Canada).

Diagnosis?

They’d been saying things, but they hadn’t been saying anything that prepared people to buy.

This is the pattern I see everywhere: companies treating communications as something that happens after the important decisions get made.

Finance decides the strategy.

Operations builds the infrastructure.

Sales sets the targets.

Then someone tells communications to “make it land.”

But communications can’t make something land if it was never given the runway to prepare for takeoff.

The Decision Hierarchy Problem

And you’re nodding your head now saying ‘well of course!’ That’s like buying a wetsuit and approaching an elephant and saying ‘make it fit!’. No measurements, no accounting for the emotional, physical, mental and logistic lift required to get you from point a) to point b), let alone the buy-in from the elephant.

And here’s why:
Most organizations operate with an invisible hierarchy.

Strategic decisions happen at the finance level, the operations level, the sales level.

Communications is treated (even subconsciously) as downstream. It’s the function you delegate to, not the discipline you integrate into planning.

This isn’t malicious. It’s structural. Leadership teams don’t wake up and decide to exclude communications. They simply assume that if you have smart people handling messaging, those people can figure out how to communicate whatever gets decided in the rooms they’re not in.

Spoiler: ya-no.

The problem is that communications isn’t just about articulating decisions and ‘making it work’ or ‘finding resonance to push people (or elephants) do buy, buy, buy’.

Communications, especially when offering digital sales, programs and offers, is very much about preparing markets to receive and activate for those offers.

When you only bring communications in at the announcement phase, you’ve already lost most of the leverage. You can craft beautiful copy, design compelling visuals, and distribute content across every channel—but if your market wasn’t primed to care, none of it will convert.

I see this in how companies approach launches. They’ll spend months in internal planning mode, having the right conversations with the right stakeholders, building consensus, refining details. Then they flip a switch and expect the market to immediately understand and respond.

But markets don’t work on internal timelines. Markets need time to shift their thinking. They need a sequence of ideas that build on each other. They need to move from “I don’t know this is a problem” to “I see this is a problem” to “I trust you can solve this problem” to “I’m ready to invest in solving this problem.”

That journey takes months. And if you’re only communicating for the last two weeks of it, or frankly only communicating using one channel, you’re asking people to make decisions they’re not ready to make.

What Actually Breaks Down

When communications is treated as a bolt-on, conversion breaks down in specific ways.

First, there’s misalignment between what you think you’ve been saying and what the market actually heard. You believe you’ve been building momentum. You’ve been visible, active, present. But presence without purpose scatters attention rather than focusing it. Sometimes this looks like building an audience of raving fans, who turn out to not be buyers. This is why we see influencer types with hundreds of thousands of followers having failed merch launches or stalled workshop sales. Because they’ve cultivated people who like and trust them, but not people who turn to them actively to solve acute problems.

I had a client who posted on LinkedIn every week for six months leading up to a launch. They were consistent, which most people struggle with. But when I looked at their content, there was no through-line. One week they talked about leadership. The next week, client success stories. Then industry trends. Then personal reflections.

All of it was fine. None of it was strategic. By the time they launched, their audience had no idea the launch was the logical next step. Because it wasn’t logical—there was no logic connecting the six months of content to the offer itself.

And make no mistake, this is an expensive lesson to learn.

Every piece of content that doesn’t build toward something specific is energy that evaporates. You’re not creating momentum. You’re extending the gap between you, your audience and your successful launch. And once you realize this has been happening, it will realistically take you months to recover and pivot back to a point where your audience will generate consistent revenue.

Second, you waste the most valuable asset you have: your existing audience’s attention. The people already following you, already on your email list, already in your world—they’re your warmest leads. But if you’re not preparing them for what’s coming, you’re squandering that warmth.

Think about how this plays out practically. You have 700 people on your email list. You send them a newsletter every month. But the newsletter doesn’t connect to your offers. It’s helpful, interesting, maybe even valuable—but it’s not strategic.

Then you launch something and suddenly you’re asking those 700 people to buy. Except they weren’t expecting it. They don’t understand how this connects to everything else you’ve been saying. The ask feels abrupt, disconnected, maybe even desperate.

You’ve been communicating, but you haven’t been leading people anywhere.

Third—and this is the one that erodes slowly enough that most people don’t notice until it’s already damaged—there’s a trust breakdown that happens when external messaging doesn’t match internal reality.

The coaching industry is full of this. A coach builds their brand entirely around personal revenue. Every piece of content showcases their income, their lifestyle, their success. Then they launch a program to help others build businesses.

But here’s the disconnect: their success came from building a personal brand and attracting coaching clients. Their program teaches something else entirely—maybe Facebook ads, maybe sales systems, maybe productivity frameworks.

The market gets confused. The external message was “I made money this way, and I can teach you.” But the internal reality is “I made money through personal branding, but I’m teaching you a different method I haven’t personally used to make money.”

This isn’t intentional dishonesty. It’s structural misalignment. And it happens because the coach never integrated their communications strategy with their business model. They built a brand, then bolted an offer onto it without asking whether the brand actually supported that offer.

The same pattern shows up in larger organizations. Marketing says one thing. Sales says another. The product team has a third narrative. Customer success is working from a fourth understanding. Nobody planned these messages together, so the market receives contradictory signals and loses trust.

What Integration Actually Looks Like

When I talk about integrating communications into planning, I’m not suggesting the CEO needs to become a content creator. I’m not proposing more meetings or more bureaucracy.

I’m talking about bringing communications to the table when strategic decisions are being made. Not after, when the job is to broadcast a prebaked decision that might make communicating like rubbing sandpaper on a balloon.

Comms needs to be consulted and in the room during strategic sessions, when the job is to shape decisions with the market in mind.

This is precisely why when I work with clients now, I insist on a regular cadence. Biweekly at minimum. Weekly during high-stakes periods like launches, pivots, or rapid growth phases.

In these sessions, you look backward and forward simultaneously. And my job as a comms lead is to draw attention to what the audience/market/clients asked for and to guide our comms to where the proverbial puck is going. ( I am full of analogies this week folks.)

The backward view asks: What did we say? What landed? What created confusion? What is the market telling us through engagement, through questions, through silence? What patterns are emerging in how people respond to our message?

The forward view asks: Given what we now know, what needs to shift? What’s coming in the next 90 days? What conversations need to begin now so the market is prepared when we’re ready to make an ask? What are we building toward?

This is pre-mortem thinking, not just post-mortem analysis. You’re not only examining what went wrong. You’re anticipating what could go wrong and adjusting before it does.

One of my clients implemented this rhythm and within three months, everything changed. Not because they were suddenly better at writing copy or designing campaigns. But because they could finally see their own patterns.

They realized they’d been launching cold every single time. They’d create an offer, announce it, and wonder why conversion was weak. Now they could see that launches need a three-month ramp. Month one: establish the problem. Month two: demonstrate you understand how to solve it. Month three: invite people to the solution.

Once they could see the cycle, they could plan for it. And once they planned for it, their launches stopped feeling like pushing water uphill and started feeling like opening a door people were already waiting to walk through.

And listen, for a lot of small organizations with massively pressurized revenue goals, the idea of slow-down-to-listen-and-then-speed-up feels not just contrary but unnatural and downright wrong. But then I simply ask, how much time, energy and trust are you burning through by insisting on a pressurized and inefficient approach to your sales and comms?

What would it mean to you if you knew that in three months, you’d have a sell-out, versus now where you are constantly guessing, forcing and ‘we just gotta figure it outting’ yourself through launches?

Seeing the Cycles

When communications is integrated, you start to perceive your business differently. You stop seeing it as a series of campaigns and start seeing it as a set of cycles.

This is the fundamental difference between funnel thinking and flywheel thinking.

Funnels are linear. They assume people enter at awareness, move to consideration, and exit at purchase. They’re calendar-based. They’re push-based. They require constant new inputs because once someone exits the funnel, they’re gone.

Flywheels are cyclical.

They recognize that markets move in rhythms. That trust builds progressively, not linearly. That the same person might need to encounter your thinking five times before they’re ready to act. That some people will buy now, some will buy later, and some will never buy but will refer others who do.

The goal with a flywheel isn’t to push harder. It’s to establish momentum that becomes self-sustaining.

When you plan your communications on a flywheel model, you think in cycles, not campaigns. You’re always in some phase of invite-nurture-convert-retain. You’re always looking at what’s coming next and what came before. You understand where you are in the rotation and what the next phase requires.

This creates something counterintuitive: freedom. When the structure is defined, there’s room for spontaneity. You can respond to current events, share unscripted insights, play with tone and format—because the strategic foundation ensures these moments enhance rather than dilute your message.

The Pre-Launch Ramp

And then… when you can see the cycles, you can build what I call the pre-launch ramp. This is the three-to-six-month period before you open enrollment where you’re systematically preparing your market to want what you’re about to offer.

Let’s say you’re launching a program in June. If communications isn’t integrated, you’re probably planning the messaging in late May. You’re thinking about launch emails, social posts, maybe some ads.

But if communications is integrated, the work started in January.

In January and February, you’re publishing ideas that help your audience see their problem differently. You’re not selling. You’re not even talking about your methodology yet. You’re diagnosing. You’re naming patterns. You’re giving language to something they’ve been experiencing but couldn’t articulate.

This is where thought leadership does its most valuable work. You’re changing the conversation. You’re establishing yourself as someone who understands the problem at a level deeper than surface symptoms.

In March and April, you shift to demonstrating your methodology. You share frameworks, case studies, your approach. You’re still not selling, but now you’re showing that you have a distinct way of solving the problem you’ve been diagnosing.

People start to see you’re not just good at naming the issue—you’re good at addressing it.

In May, you start to invite. You talk about what’s coming. You give people a heads-up that something is opening soon. You create space for questions, for conversations, for people to raise their hands and say “I think I need this.”

By the time June arrives and you actually open enrollment, a segment of your market has been moving toward “yes” for months. The launch doesn’t feel like selling because you’ve already done the work of creating conviction.

This is why integrated communications converts. You’re not interrupting people with an offer. You’re inviting people who are already partway to deciding they need what you have.

What Changes When You Get This Right

I’ve watched this transformation happen with my own business and with clients who’ve implemented this approach. The difference is material.

Launches that used to feel like begging feel like inviting. Workshops that used to get cancelled due to low enrollment now have waitlists. Revenue becomes steadier because you’re not starting from zero every quarter—each cycle builds on the last.

But what really changes is internal.

The constant pressure lifts.

The sense of scrambling disappears. You’re no longer reacting to missed targets or trying to salvage campaigns that aren’t working. You’re planning ahead. You can see what’s coming. Your team can see what’s coming.

One client told me this shift felt like moving from sprinting from a bear to going for a Sunday stroll. They could finally see far enough ahead to make good decisions instead of urgent ones and it just felt better.

And none of this required spending more on marketing. It required integrating communications into strategic planning so that everything the company said built toward something instead of scattering attention.

So, I leave you with this… the question isn’t whether you’re communicating enough. It’s whether your communications are integrated into your strategic planning. Whether they’re building progressively toward specific conversion moments. Whether you can see the cycles you’re operating within and plan accordingly.

This is the work of a diagnostic: to make visible what’s been invisible. To identify where momentum is leaking. To show you the cycles so you can start planning with them instead of against them.

Your launches stop falling flat. Your team stops scrambling. Your market arrives ready to say yes.