How Many Clients Are You Losing By Not Doing This One Thing?

If you don’t build relationships you won’t build a good business.

Relationship building is VITAL .

You will keep hearing people say that people buy from people they know, like and trust and this is so true. Business happens when people connect with you, when they can relate to you.

There are so many benefits to connecting with your dreamies and building relationships with your dreamies:

• It’s a great way to build relationships
• You understand what your dreamies need, what their challenges are
• Generating content ideas – blog posts, videos, resources, programmes and services
• They may know someone who needs your help
• Or may even be the one that needs your help
• There could be collaboration opportunities
• They may have great connections and help you spread the word about what you do
• You learn from them about random things that make you a more interesting person to know, and more …

Problem #1: We’re impatient, we want instant results! 

Hate to break it to ya honey – Relationship building takes time, don’t expect instant results .

Problem #2: We focus on adding to our tribe, and forget our fabulous current tribe

Make this your new mantra – follow up, follow up, follow up . If you’re not following up on people you’ve spoken to, you can end up losing clients.

Problem #3: We think we have to ‘sell’

Selling is about building relationships – take the word ‘selling’ out of the equation. You are building relationships with people. Some will work with you, some won’t and that’s totally OK because it’s not about selling to them, it’s about connection (which just happens to be one of my top values so that one is a win: win)

Doing a small amount to grow your business each day though makes a huge difference and it feels easy and simple. Isn’t that how we all want our businesses to be?

Selling is about being brave with knowing that what you offer is what people need, feeling confident that you can help people with your products/services. Then you are just having conversations about how to help, instead of trying to push people to buy from you.

A Super Simple Strategy To Start Building Relationships Today

1. Make A List Of Everyone You Know:

• Friends
• Family
• Past colleagues
• Past clients
• People from networking meetings
• Online group contacts
• People from training programmes you’ve done
• Your social media connections

2. Decide On One Area Of Focus, i.e: all of your Facebook connections to start with.

3. Set A Target for how many people you want to connect with in set time period

• Set a daily, weekly or monthly target

4. Invite them to have a conversation with you

5. Diarise – make a couple of simple notes and then set a date to follow-up again in a few months.

One strategy I use with my free Facebook group is to connect with every single person by inviting them to come on a 20-minute call with me. It’s a call to simply connect. I used to say it wasn’t a sales call, and it isn’t, but if I think I can help someone I will tell them, and then invite them onto a separate call to talk through how.

I have 3 separate messages:

1. Invite them onto a chat with me
2. Follow-up if they didn’t have a chat
3. A last reminder to connect with me.

If I haven’t heard from them by the 3rd time then I leave it for a while before contacting them again, usually 9-12 months so that I’m not harassing them. A lot can happen in that time so they might want a call after that time lapse.

You need to keep good records when doing this (Be GDPR compliant on that one too please!) I started with an Excel spreadsheet and I now use Asana to log my follow-up. It doesn’t really matter what method you use as long as you keep a note of when to follow up next. Did I say that follow up is important?!

Work out what the best strategy for you is – make it realistic.

If you want to do 12 people per week are you going to do 6 on one day, 6 on another or 4 lots of 3, or would you prefer to just spend a day contacting people each month? What would work best for you?

So, the key message from this is to follow-up, follow-up. Most people will leave it at the first conversation, or maybe conversation two. I came across a very old piece of paper from a course that I did many years ago that said this:

• 44% of people give up after one “No”
• 22% of people give up after two “No’s”
• 14% of people give up after three “No’s”
• 12% of people give up after four “No’s”
• 92% of people give up after five “No’s”

Now, I’m guessing the numbers will have changed (who knows how old that piece of paper was!) however, it suggests that only 8% of people invite people to buy from them after five no’s. Consider this, 80% of clients might say ‘no’ at least four times before they say ‘yes’. Will you be one of the people that hangs in there and invites them again? No? You could be leaving money on the table.

Ready to do that follow-up now?!

Call To Action: Pull together a follow-up plan for your business, and start to implement it.

If you’d like more help with this, I’ve created a lovely little worksheet to help you create beautiful boundaries in your business.

Remember to check out my Visibility Quiz to find out whether you’re a Visibility Lady, Countess, Princess or Queen. If you’re a guy then please change the names to Lord, Count, Prince and King) Once you’ve got your score I’d love for you to come on over to my pinned post on my business page and tell me what score you got. There’s a chance to win a little prize each month.

Also, I would love to interview Ladies, Countesses, Princesses & Queens on my podcast show, Rock Your Fabulous Biz. I’ll be asking you all about what you do on visibility right now, what’s working for you, what’s not and where you’d like to be. If you’re interested then apply for your spot here – http://bit.ly/PodVisQuiz. In order for your application to be considered, you’ll need to have completed the quiz though as I’ll need to know what you’ve scored etc.