In today’s hyperconnected and hypelinked world, the information flow is mind boggling. The ability to communicate effectively has never been more important. And sticking to a system that enables your message to be heard becomes a must.

I recently listened to Patrick Lencioni speaking about the four disciplines of healthy organizations at the forum put on by the World of Business Ideas. Not surprising, after a company gets this whole leadership team and purpose figured out, the need to communicate becomes paramount. More specifically, the need to over-communicate critical messages becomes essential.

And why does he need to stress this emphatically to a room full of executives?

Because employees, like people, are awash with messages. The skill of ignoring messages is something that they have gotten really good at. And the typical story goes something like:

Management says:

‘Employees are our greatest asset”

“Quality is job 1”

“Customers are always right” wah wah wah wah…

And the employees say:

“…whatever, the last company that I worked at said that. The next one will to. This will all come to pass.”

But from the executives perspective, the ironic thing is that many executives don’t want to be redundant in their messaging. They see it as inefficient. An insult to their listeners.

Yet, research shows that employees in an organization need to hear things 7 times before they believe it. And that is how communication gets lost. The amplification of repetition does not make it to 7 times.

Well, guess what?

In the world of getting customers, it takes an average of 7 touches to get through. We might as well start calling it Super 7. I find it ironic that we actually have a lottery by this name.

Patrick Lencioni might as well put on a marketing hat and fill the room with marketing folks. All of the same things apply. Buyers and customers are bombarded with messages. They are completely jaded in the fact that they have heard it all before. And the natural reaction is to ignore the message, and keep dismissing it. Until perhaps, it has taken on some level of permanence and has some semblance of being real.

The only way to break through is with repetition. Within companies, executives must repeat critical messages. Within the marketplace, your critical marketing messages must be repeated. It must be repeated in different ways, and through different channels. This is where the real challenge lies. Finding ways to tell your story such that the core marketing message is carried along with it.

Just like executives with their employees, companies cannot fear being redundant in their marketing message. They cannot fear being redundant, overbearing, or annoying. If they believe in what they have to offer, they must continually seek out different ways to get the message out. There will be pushback in different forms, no doubt. But that is not the most important measure. The true measure of your core marketing message is in how many people are hearing it and listening to it. Eventually.

“Repetition is the mother of learning”. In the marketing context, it means that your message must be repeated in order to be learned by your target market. And so it become that “Repetition is the mother of marketing”.

Do you remember when you were a kid and you would fight for the front seat of the car?

As soon as you were old enough, you were in the scrap. Whether it was your brother, sister or the family dog, it didn’t make a difference. There was always that drive to win the front seat. Being stuck in the back seat just did not compare. The view was not as good, you couldn’t control the stereo, and if it was a 2-door, you would have to wait to be let out. The front seat just ruled supreme.

In our world today, there is change and flux that is touching all industries, driven by whatever combination of technologies that are pushing it forward. Yet, in some companies and in some industries, the marketing function seems to be stuck in the back seat. Or perhaps given very limited and temporary status in the front seat.

Yes, yes, I know, there is the closest sibling, sales. And I am completely respectful of the sales function. After all, nothing really happens until there is a sale. But to continue the car analogy further, driving visibility may not be so good in many markets. The weather may be changing rapidly. The road may not be straight. The grade may not be even. This really would be a good time to have marketing in the front seat.

Marketing is not the tip of the sword. Sales reigns supreme in that role. But marketing must be expected to look further out, and provide that needed navigational guidance for where the car is going. It’s just not going to happen from the back seat. Back seat driving just doesn’t work.

So what does it mean for marketing to be in the front seat? It means that it has to be treated as being grown-up enough to be in the front. It must be given goals and resources to fulfill its key responsibilities. And there must be meaningful metrics in place to determine whether it is safe to keep driving.

The single most important measure for marketing must be whether it is making that distant connection, with those destination points that are not yet close enough for the sales function. Those connections have to be made at multiple distances.

But it is not an easy task, and marketing is bound to make mistakes and be fooled in where it takes you. And throwing marketing into the back seat again will not make it better. Instead, it is much more useful to figure out what the errors are that have occurred. And what is the thinking, the assumptions, that has put you in the position you are? All of these things must be tracked if marketing is going to get better at its task.

At the pace of change today, it means that the road ahead is constantly changing. Marketing must take on duties from the front seat. More must be expected from it. And the learning from the journey must be shared so that it brings a synergy to the operation of the car. You are in a race out there. And you want to get to your target faster than the next guy.

I don’t remember my dreams and I don’t give it a second thought. A good night’s rest is all that I care about. But when I watched the movie Inception, one of the greatest science fiction movies of our time, it kind of makes me never want to have a dream again. Whether I remember anything or not. At least not anywhere near a sleep lab.

The premise of the movie is that two or more people who are hooked up to a fictitious dream machine can share the same dream. The plot is based on the science of lucid dreaming, where an individual who is having a lucid dream can actually control what they are dreaming about. So the lucid dreamer can share their constructed or lucid dream with the natural dreamer, who is not conscious that they are in a dream at all. All the connections go through the fictitious dream machine. Thankfully, it would take some super advanced quantum computing to actually transcode and synchronize all those EEGs.

The storyline of Inception is about a team of lucid dreamers who are on a mission to implant an idea, by way of the dream, into the mind of a powerful oil executive. But when you look at the situation, whether it be a dream or reality, the right set of circumstances need to be created in order to get someone to willingly think about something, and consider the alternatives.

Now when it comes to marketing, there is no way around it. In order to get your message through, you need to get inside the head of the customer. You must know or seek to understand those things that are going on in your customer’s mind. You must think like a customer if you are going to introduce new ideas to the present situation. If you cannot somehow assimilate yourself into the conversation going on inside the customer’s mind, you cannot expect to get real attention for the ideas or solutions that you want to introduce.

When prospective customers are dealing with their problems, there is typically not a flash idea where a complete solution presents itself. Rather, ideas are planted in some manner, and they must germinate before action occurs. Here is a key point. For any idea to be planted, it must be relevant to that existing context of the customer’s situation. For the idea to germinate, there are bits and pieces of information or insights that get aggregated through different customer experiences. If you can connect with that train of customer experiences, through various touch points, you can place yourself on the path to consideration.

Now, this is not as simple as an autosequence stream in your marketing automation; although that could help. But, it is going to take more than your medium alone. Naturally this is where the outside world comes into play. There must be proof out there that your ideas are a viable way forward. And that proof must be perpetuating itself throughout conversations that are going. People may be wary of herd mentality, but somehow they still look to what the herd is up to.

So there you have it. To successfully market and sell your solution to a problem, your messaging must fit into the conversation that is going on inside the customer’s head. You can share their dream, their vision, and you can strive to extend the framework to include your solution. But you won’t be able to get there through your own efforts alone. Your messaging, and your solution must fit or complement with the big picture of where things are going. If they don’t, it turns into a nightmare.

I was reading about the beginnings of the mobile payments processor Square in Technology Review. The setting is December 2008 shortly after Jack Dorsey had been replaced as Twitter’s CEO. He was back home in St. Louis visiting for a while, and he bumped into Jim McKelvey (a semi-retired entrepreneur). Although Dorsey had worked for McKelvey as a teen, they had not spoken in years. But as they were catching up on things, they immediately decided that they wanted to work together again – without knowing what it is exactly that they wanted to do. So they spoke every week and one day in February 2009, McKelvey had an incident that was the epiphany for Square.

The part that is quite interesting is that they knew they wanted to work together, without knowing what it was that they were going to work on. So it was during that serendipitous encounter that two entrepreneurs had a chance to share visions. They hadn’t picked a problem to solve. But they knew they were on the same wavelength in terms of the nature of problems. Something big.

It is being on the same wavelength that makes things click. And this is the state that you must strive for with new prospective customers. It is the ultimate state where a potential customer completely shares in your thinking about the problem and just wants to work with you.

In today’s web-centric environment, relationships are started or qualified as much digitally, as in any other way. Think about when you hear of something new. What do you do? Whatever the topic. A company, a person, an event, a place, just some “thing”. More than likely, you will reach for your smartphone, or your keyboard, or your tablet. It is unlikely that you will pick up the phone to call anyone.

And so it begins. The on-line learning process is where your prospective customers will begin their journey. And, it becomes so vitally important for your embryonic digital relationship to facilitate that learning. Your digital presence can’t be just be like an ad. If it is, it will get the same amount of attention as an ad. It really needs to be more like an infomercial.

The marketing and the selling comes second. Before a prospective customer will decide to engage, they need to feel that the information that you are sharing, the insights that are being presented, do in fact apply to their situation. They must see themselves in the context you create, and understand the message. If you own these insights, you increase the desirability to take things to the next level.

And getting to that utopian state will require an investment in communication channels, many of which are digital, in order to keep the learning process going. It is a continual nudging process, with some level of tracking mechanisms to assess how effectively your message is getting through.

You will only get to a willingness for a meaningful encounter, where the prospect is willing to reveal something about their real situation, once you have earned the respect of the prospective customer. If they have learned with you, there is a natural progression that they will want to work with you. If they see that you are on the same wavelength and that your goal is to make them successful, the rest of the details may not be as important.

If, as a sales person, you have ever targeted a new account by going straight to the top, you know what happens. You get sent down to the starting point. Of course, more than likely, you understood that going straight to the top was a long shot. And at least you ended up at a correct starting point to pursue your account development strategies.

Starting your sales process at the bottom of the corporate structure, is not just a ploy to shield the senior decision maker from interruptions. It is also a built-in mechanism for the company to de-risk their engagement with new and unproven suppliers.

This is an important point. Companies always strive to take the risk out of everything they do. Even after you are selected, companies will continue to expend effort to de-risk their decision. So when you are at the beginning of the process, it is advantageous to take this into account by bringing levels of risk that are palatable.

That means that you don’t get to start the relationship with the million dollar sale, or the multi-year commitment, or whatever is akin to a big deal. If you did, the sales cycle would be quite lengthy and you would likely starve along the way.

What is effective is the starter package. By design, the starter package needs to be put together so that the risk is low. And this goes beyond the financial part of the risk. The chance that it will not work, the chance that it will disrupt other processes; all of the risks need to be low.

Of course, a guarantee is important because it does demonstrate the supplier’s commitment to take a risk. But we are not just talking about ‘the guarantee’ because it does not provide for any recovery of the non-financial resources that may have been expended on your product offering.

From a marketing perspective, the product offering must be packaged in a variety of ways. Of course, each offering must have a compelling value proposition in its own right. But the entry point to the relationship, “the starter package”, is especially important. Because this is how momentum and inertia are created to grow the customer. Growing the customer can entail moving them up to a fuller package addressing the same need. Or just as good, a successful experience with the starter package, lowers the risk barriers for other products that you may offer.

Examples abound in all industries. Accountants often start with tax returns, and somehow move into consulting and advisory roles. Microsoft started with an operating system, then office productivity tools, then server software etc. Symantec started with a bunch of miscellaneous PC utilities, and built upon that success substantially.

The key is to recognize that the starting point is necessary as a way for the customer to de-risk their initial engagement with you. You may in fact have a great product offering, with a great value proposition. And your marketplace may even be warming up to it nicely. But if it does not fit into the entryway that is provided for it, it becomes really hard to get started. It is important not to ignore this. Many a competitor has been able to seize a market position, simply by having an entry point that made it easy to get started.