The relationship building engine: why people aren’t buying yet

When sales go quiet, the first thing most of us want to do is fiddle with the offer. Change the name. Knock a hundred quid off. Rewrite the sales page for the fourth time.

Most of the time I think the offer is fine and the price is fine. People just don’t trust you enough yet. And no amount of sales page rewriting is going to fix that, because they haven’t got far enough to read it.

What a relationship building engine is

Here’s how I put it on my show, and I haven’t found a better way to say it since:

“A relationship building engine just means you insert something into your pipeline or your marketing strategy that has the primary, the sole purpose of demonstrating your personality, your expertise and building connection between you and your audience.”

In plain English, it’s one slot in your week whose only job is getting people to like and trust you. No selling required. It just sits there, quietly warming people up, like a slow cooker you switched on at breakfast.

Why selling to strangers is so much work

I think business is a lot like online dating. Someone following you on Instagram is the equivalent of them swiping right. Lovely! That’s a start.

And what a lot of people do with that first impression is jump straight in and go, “Shall we have babies?” It’s too much. It’s too soon. And it’s needy.

The 0.4% problem

If you try to get your sales right at the start, at the point where people barely know you, you’re trying to convert at around 0.4%. That is a lot of work. Oh my god, it’s a lot of work.

It’s no wonder so many people quit before they’re winning.

Here’s something else I find quite funny, in a painful way. Most marketing tools were built to automate what converts best, which is a conversation. And loads of us set up all the machinery before we’ve ever got good at the conversation. It’s like buying a bread maker before you’ve ever made toast.

The commitment ladder

People warm up in steps, and the last step starts small before it gets big. I call it the commitment ladder.

If you skip that small first yes, you skip all the warming up that would have happened while they had it. So match what you offer to how warm someone is, at every step. A stranger gets a reason to come back. Someone who’s been turning up for months gets asked properly.

Being yourself does the filtering for you

There’s a lovely side effect to all this. When you show up as yourself, week after week, some people will decide you’re not for them. Good! Let them wander off.

The people who stay, and eventually book a call, are people you genuinely get on with. So your sales calls feel like the second or third chat with someone you already know. I’ve written more about why your personality is doing that job.

My engine is a weekly live show

You can build an engine out of lots of things. Mine is a live show, every week, at the same time. For a one-person business I haven’t found anything that does the job better, because one hour gets people spending real time with me, gives me a week of content, and keeps me turning up when I’d rather not.

The whole point is that your main focus becomes building relationships with people, and then you sell to them once they’re a little more warmed up. It feels slower. I promise you it’s quicker than quitting.