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Think about your own business. How many prospects have you connected with who didn’t buy immediately? What happened to them? If you’re like most businesses, you either forgot about them completely or added them to a generic email list that blasts promotional messages until they unsubscribe. Meanwhile, your competitors who understand relationship building are systematically nurturing those same prospects over months, accumulating the seven hours of exposure and 11 touchpoints across four different media needed to win their trust and in turn their business. 🕐
• Whether to use you again for their next project 🔁 • Whether to refer you to their network 📢 • Whether to expand their relationship with your business 💼 • Whether to stay loyal when a competitor approaches them 🔐 If you disappear between transactions, you’re essentially resetting their trust back to zero. After six months of not hearing from you, your odds of getting the next sale are almost the same as a competitor they’ve never done business with. They forget why they chose you in the first place. They become open to alternatives. 😶 The numbers prove it: Customers who rate an experience 5/5 stars are more than twice as likely to buy again, and 80% of satisfied consumers will spend more. But satisfaction doesn’t come from a single great transaction. It comes from an ongoing relationship. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TRUST BUILDING 🧠 The strategy works because of something psychologists call “processing fluency” — your brain’s tendency to prefer things that are easy to think about and feel familiar. But here’s what I’ve discovered after analyzing hundreds of successful implementations: Trust doesn’t build linearly. It builds in phases, and understanding these phases is the key to engineering predictable results. 📊 Phase 1: Recognition (Hours 0–2) Your prospect’s brain is still categorizing you as “unknown.” Their amygdala — the brain’s alarm system — is literally on alert. This is why cold calls feel so intrusive. You’re triggering a threat response. 🚨 Phase 2: Familiarity (Hours 2–4) Something shifts. Your name starts to feel familiar. When prospects see your newsletter or social post, their brain doesn’t have to work as hard to process who you are. You’ve moved from “stranger” to “acquaintance.” 🙂 This is where most businesses stop. They think familiarity equals trust. It doesn’t. ⛔
When those prospects are finally ready to buy, guess who gets the call? 📞 BUT THIS ISN’T JUST ABOUT PROSPECTS 😮 Here’s where most businesses make their second fatal mistake: They think relationship building ends when someone becomes a customer. WRONG. Your existing customers are making decisions about you all the time:
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