If you are building a product (or service) that is intended to help companies and people over the longer-term you have a dilemma on how to get them to long-term.
People have short-term attention spans and may not have the staying power to see things through if they don't start seeing benefits over the short-term. If they abandon your product before they see the value, you have a problem.
You might try to lock them into a longer term contract. The problem is that while you have the money, they still might stop using your product or at least have lost interest. If they don't get the value you have not met your part of the deal; it is a one way transaction.
The solution is to bundle the long-term value with something they can derive some noticeable value over the shorter term. The value over the short-term does not have to be huge, but some sort of of visible progress is required to the bigger benefit.
P.S. Long-term does not mean what it used to either; even that has condensed.
