Over at CMS Watch, Tony Byrne mentions that he has heard the term “risk of incarceration” being used by reps as a spin on the older and somewhat more traditional meaning of ROI, “return on investment”. That shouldn’t surprise you too much on at least two counts.

First, enterprise content management (ECM) companies have become accustomed to pitching content management as a tool to “keep the CEO out of jail” by providing an audit trail of programs, files, messages and their associated creation, viewing, editing and other interactions. The selling spiel says: “Remember Enron? You don’t want to end up like that so you’d better have a good document management and retention strategy. Oh and if you were scared by Sarbanes-Oxley, there’s a ton more of that stuff coming down the line.”

Second, the company Byrne says he heard using the term was IBM, the company that was the originator, of course, of selling “fear, uncertainty and doubt”.

As I said at the top, I’m not at all surprised but if sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, then this is certainly among the lower echelons of effective sales and marketing. It gets an instant reaction but you might struggle to sell it twice –- as many firms are finding out the hard way.

For the last five years, ECM vendors have been touting regulatory compliance and reputation risk as threats to business. This was a crude but effective weapon in the down market after the dot-com collapse but, having made fortunes from scaring the bejeezus out of firms, the sales guys could really do with a hose down and a fresh approach.