Why is it that so many marketers apparently can’t calculate the time value of money?

The math involved is fairly simple.

Take, for example, an executive earning $500 per hour.

If you want them to fill out a six-minute survey, that’s $50 of their time.

Do they receive something that’s worth at least $50 (in their eyes) for that six-question survey? If not, why would you expect any significant number of people to take that survey?

As Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time”. So sometimes you can trade time for golf balls (for example, at trade shows, where people get caught up in the hype and alcohol) – but most of the time you need quid pro quo. As in, "give me some quid".

[Consider: the type of person whose time value of money is low enough to make your survey-for-golf-balls worthwhile is probably not your target customer.]

My favorite recent example of this sort of situation was Infoworld magazine, a favorite of mine since their gossip column published my comment on Dell’s customer service hotline (“Please hold, we are currently servicing other customers”. Yikes!).

Infoworld will happily send you a free subscription if you’re a “qualified” professional – eg, if they can lease you as part of their advertising mailing list.

To obtain the free subscription, however, you had to fill out a multi-page survey, which ended up taking me about thirty minutes.

I didn’t know it was going to take 30 minutes. In fact, it was 15 minutes into the survey, as I was starting to get frustrated at how much time it was taking, that I calculated the time value of that survey.

I was shocked to realize how much I was “paying” for my subscription. And of course, by the end of the survey, I was filling in random answers just to finish quickly, so Infoworld was actually doing themselves a dis-service with such a long survey, reducing the specificity and value of their list…

So the good news is that they seem to have wised up. Infoworld’s latest renewal survey was just seven questions long. I have to suspect that as a result of their changes, their lists are cleaner, and their volume of subscribers higher as well.

So check for yourself. How much are you worth per hour, and how much are your customers worth? Do you really need to give ‘em the third degree up front? Or can you lure them in a bit first?

My thinking: be patient. Wait for the second date, ok?

[ps: Please buy my book. http://buynow.stupidmarketing.com -- and tell your friends!] ]