“Get to the point” has never been more at the forefront of our subconscious mind than it is in present day. Attention is so subdivided in the internet era, making it so much more important to communicate our message in the utmost brevity.

Tell me in one paragraph.

Tell me in one sentence.

Tell me in one word.

If you want to extend the conversation, you must bring meaning to the first words you say, that is relevant to your target audience. Otherwise, “Gongggg!!!”, and this Gong Show goes on perpetually.

I recall an associate telling me a story where a new staffer was preparing to give a presentation about a proposed new initiative, to the CEO of Nortel. The presenter had prepared a slide deck of 40 slides. But just prior to the actual start of the presentation, the CEO says to him: “Just give me your best 3”. Being on-the-spot in this situation made it exceedingly difficult to be effective in getting the point across. But at least he was told up front about the attention span that he was going to get, and I am sure that he learned a valuable lesson in brevity.

Another excellent example of this when startups are presenting their business case with the goal of obtaining investment capital. Whether the presenter is at a public pitch event such as Startup Weekend or within the offices of the venture capital firm, the scenario is the same. Much of the important decision making will still happen in the first 5 minutes, whether you are scheduled for a longer time span or not. The number of winning investments is finite. And the VC knows that he must dismiss the non-starters as quickly as possible, in order to continue on the quest for the right investment. If your message does not resonate in 5 minutes, you are done.

Wherever it occurs, this ultra-fast processing of information is borne out of the fact that we are truly in the information age, and there is no shortage of information that is flowing. In fact, there is a continual opening of the tap and the flow of information continues to increase. Consequently individuals are now processing the flow in a rapid fire manner by looking for quick reasons to disregard messaging before investing a deeper level of attention. And it happens whether people are deciding whether to read a book or open an email.

Without question, the universe of writing is changing to adapt to the new behaviors of readers. Within the book publishing industry, we are seeing authors put extra attention on first sentences, as well as building up to the plot much more rapidly than in the past. Readers want to get to “the point” sooner, rather than later. I don’t know how much of a chance a 1,300 page classic like War and Peace would have, if it was a new release in present day.

Within the world marketing, getting attention to the information that you have to offer, has to work well within this new paradigm. It has to resonate immediately with the audience or else it flows down the drainage pipe, never to be given a second thought. Extra attention must be given to all things that our viewing audience will see first. First sentence. First paragraph. Executive summary. Subheading titles. All of these build on each other in rapid succession to capture and hold attention. And for you to do this effectively, means you must really know your buyer and what will resonate with them.

People get excited at the start of a new project. The vision of the gains to be made in a positive outcome really gets the energy and enthusiasm pumped up. The excitement of the start keeps the adrenaline flowing and the whole project gets a strong push in launching. No doubt, this is important. But the positive outcomes will only be realized if we have the discipline to sustain our efforts. Persistence, adaptation, and commitment to the long run, must also be fueled.

Whether you are growing a company, growing a following, or growing a brand, it is a marathon. As is highlighted in a recent study by Inc. Magazine,

“The only statistically significant predictor of a company’s future success is steady growth; short- and even long-term bursts mean almost nothing.”

Clearly this insight must be applied to your demand generation processes. Acquiring and nurturing prospective customers is a steady and on-going process. All the hoopla, glitz and swag that is injected at the start of a new marketing campaign, cannot alone deliver long term success.

But the marathon requires a different set of skills than the sprint. And hence, a different set of metrics to ensure you are achieving the slow and steady set of incremental gains, that will deliver both long term growth and sustainability. So the focus must be on determining the activities that are needed on a continuous basis, and how are we measuring individual and aggregated effectiveness.

Choosing metrics, measuring them, and interpreting them, must relate to your primary objective. So prior to starting the marathon, you must be clear on your destination, and the underlying assumptions which you hold to be true. Especially now, in the mobile-centric digital era that we are in, there is an ever growing number of things that can be tracked and measured. Ultimately, they all relate to the buyer persona and their journey through their buying cycle. But establishing and maintaining the right data set, which gives your business the right report card, is not always easy to establish, and will not stay static.

So what does it take to get this right? It requires a set of processes that are geared to uncovering and understanding why prospective buyers move through the buying cycle in the way that they do. We cannot assume that we have an inherent understanding of customers. We must seek out the data that explains the behavior that we see. And we must determine the right mix of marketing activities that will drive the data that moves you closer to your goals. And this is what the industry refers to as Revenue Performance Management. Eloqua nicely defines it as follows:

“Revenue Performance Management (RPM) is a systematic approach to identifying the drivers and impediments to revenue, rigorously measuring them, and then pulling the economic levers that will optimize marketing ROI and top line growth.”

It may all sound like an unrealizable utopia for your business growth. But the facts are well rooted in the results of the Inc. survey of companies who demonstrated sustained growth over the period 2007-2012. Average annual growth rate amongst companies over diverse industries was 35%. Not too bad in an economic period of huge uncertainty.

I once sat at functional management meeting where the head of R&D presented the latest lab results for a prototype module that was in a more prolonged development period than anyone had expected. The R&D head presented the results nicely formatted in a spreadsheet. But they were bad and dismayed everyone. The president, himself a PhD in the field, took out his calculator and proceed to do his own calculation on a number of rows. Naturally, the R&D head pointed out that all the calculations were already done for him, in another column. To which the president replied, “I know. I want to do the calculation for myself”.

The anecdote reminds me of how it often is with B2B buyers. Especially in the case where they are looking at a new product or service and changing how they do some aspect of their work. “Does it add up?” will certainly be one of the things going through their head. And even though you may have presented all the facts to them neatly, and have done all the necessary extrapolations, they will no doubt still need to add things up for themselves.

B2B buyers need to prove it to themselves, even though your proof may not be disputable. They still want to use their own calculator. And that calculator will have several inputs that are used in the computation of whether it all adds up. They will want to draw on different perspectives.
-How exactly do each of the stakeholders view the solution?
-Is there anything that is a factor in this solution that is being suppressed and plays a part in the success of the purchase?
-How are other people like me dealing with these challenges?
-What are the industry pundits saying?

It is not hard to see why the B2B buying cycle tends to be longer than that of the consumer. The B2B buyer will need enough input for his calculator to make sure that it all adds up. And likely, the inputs will be weighted according to the individual buyer’s perception about how important each entry is. Buyers today are quite conscientious of the investment of both time and money that go into the total cost of ownership. And then there is the user experience, which is gaining an increasingly more prominent role in the buying decision. They are not just buying a spec, they are buying a complete solution.

As B2B marketers, there is no point in sidestepping any of the factors that go into the decision making process. You need to be prepared with a calculator that will work the same as your buyer’s calculator. Hence, it will serve you much better to strive to know what all the factors are, and the weighting that the buyer may assign to them. You must show both sides of the story, whether they are positive or negative inputs into the calculation. Whether you do or don’t, your buyer will still proceed in the same manner. They will want to add it up themselves and prove it to themselves. And it is simply a positive thing if the results agree.