Why Decision Makers Are Distracted

Do you know who Robert Metcalf is? If you eat obscure pigs, you may know that he is a top breeder of same; if you are a techie, you may recall he invented the Ethernet, founded 3Com and, for a while, was a publisher at IDG.

These days he is a VC and breeder of pigs. But somewhere along the way, he found time to write down an observation that the value of a network increases with the square of the number of users: Metcalf’s Law

For those of us who have to read that last sentence out loud a few times, let me illustrate: a one-node network, say one cell phone, is pretty useless. Even two people with cell phones will soon tire of speaking only to one another, making that two-node network worthless. But when you start to scale to thousands and millions of users or nodes, then it’s a party and a valuable one at that.

And, as we know, the bigger the network, the lower the cost to send information across it. The chart below from Bain & Company lays that out very nicely, showing us that from the beginnings of email in the 1990s, executives have been under siege for about a quarter century.

Let me remind you, my B2B friends, that these are the folks we are trying to influence. These are our decision makers. If you are wondering why it’s getting so much harder to sell stuff by email, this may explain a few things. It also suggests we ought to rethink some stuff.

The first thing I would think about is whether our email marketing is actually valuable. It’s essentially free to send an email message, which explains why we do it so much. What if, like physical mail, you had to pay 50 cents or a dollar to get it to the executive?

For those of us who still like to send dead trees around, cost is a huge factor, and it forces us to look hard at our lists, refine our targets and make every cent count in the campaign budget. What if we just stopped spamming our targets and applied the same discipline we do to physical direct? I think there’s a better chance that we would break through the screaming noise machine that is 30,000 messages.

The other thing I take away from this is that, perhaps, it’s better not to be a part of that at all. Perhaps the key to standing out in a world where networks are valuable but conversations are not, is to find a different way to converse.

We are so focused on driving awareness, we forget that awareness has no intrinsic value until it comes time to buy something. Awareness is generally not the issue, it’s relevance and credibility that count, and those are difficult things to pry out of a busy exec’s email.

I’m thinking there is all kinds of opportunity to drag these poor buggers away from their inboxes, Slack feeds and voicemail and help them calm the noise a little. Perhaps at a lovely event involving some wine and a great speaker.

Possibly, it’s just dropping off a terrific book or a great bit of research and offering to buy them lunch to discuss it.

Maybe it’s time to resurrect golf games, boozy dinners, theatre outings and other in-person conversations. Then again, it might be tough to get the invitation through all that clutter.

Related Posts

Preference and Its Pylons
Why Meaning Matters More Than Noise

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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