There’s a line that circulates widely in sales, usually credited to Jeffrey Gitomer: all things being equal, people want to do business with their friends — and all things being unequal, they still do.
It’s worth taking seriously, and it’s also the most commonly misapplied idea in selling.
People buy you first
Decisions are made with emotion and justified with reason afterwards. Consider anyone queuing overnight for a phone. That isn’t a specification comparison — it’s desire, and the reasoning arrives later.
In a small business the effect is stronger, because you are part of what’s being bought. Before someone buys your service they decide whether they want to deal with you. If that answer is no, the quality of your offer doesn’t get examined.
So the sequence is: they buy you, then they consider the thing you’re selling.
Which is where most people go wrong
The advice that follows from this is usually: build relationships. Interact with people. Wish them happy birthday. Learn their children’s names.
And done as technique, it’s repellent.
People detect instrumental interest quickly. A birthday message from someone who’s never otherwise engaged reads exactly as what it is — a touchpoint in a sequence. You can feel the difference between someone interested in you and someone working a system, and being on the receiving end of the second is worse than being ignored.
The distinction isn’t subtle in practice: would you still be interested if you knew they’d never buy?
If yes, you have a relationship and business may eventually follow. If no, you have a tactic, and it will read as one.
Which is why I’d put it differently: don’t try to befriend prospects. Be genuinely interested in people, and some of them will become clients. That sounds like the same sentence and it produces completely different behaviour.
Why it works when it’s real
Not sentiment. Risk.
Every purchase carries the risk that it goes badly — the work isn’t done, the money is wasted, the person disappears. Buyers can’t verify any of that in advance, so they use proxies, and knowing you is the strongest proxy available.
Someone who knows you has evidence about how you behave. They’ve seen you be reliable, or generous, or honest about something inconvenient. That’s information no sales page can provide, and it’s why the relationship shortens every subsequent conversation.
Where it doesn’t apply
Worth being honest, because this advice gets applied universally and shouldn’t be.
Urgent needs. When someone’s boiler has failed, they hire whoever answers. No relationship required, and building one first would be absurd.
Genuine commodities. If what you sell is truly identical to the alternative, people buy on price and convenience.
And large formal purchases with procurement processes, where the relationship helps but the paperwork decides.
Relationship selling matters most where the stakes are high, the outcome is hard to judge in advance, and the alternatives look similar — which describes most professional services, and is why it’s the dominant approach there.
What to actually do
Have a profile worth landing on. If you’re doing this online, people will look you up before deciding whether to engage. Make it clear who you are and what you do.
Have real exchanges. A conversation, a call, a coffee. Fewer and genuine beats many and mechanical.
Be useful before you need anything. Answer questions properly, make introductions, share what you know. This is how the relationship gets built, and it only works if you’re not keeping score.
Accept that most won’t buy. Many of the people you build relationships with will never become clients, and that’s fine. What you want is for them to recommend you — which requires them to know what you do, and to have seen you be good at something.
And expect it to take longer than you’d like. People need to encounter you repeatedly before they remember you at all. There’s a widely-quoted number for how many times; nobody can source it, but the underlying pattern is real and it’s slower than anyone wants.
The short version
People come online to be social. They may decide to buy. They emphatically do not come to be sold to.
So your job isn’t to convert relationships into transactions. It’s to be someone worth knowing, consistently, and to be clear about what you do so that when the moment arrives, people think of you.
Be a friend. Not as a strategy — the strategy version doesn’t work, and everyone can tell.
More on building trust before you need it and what changes when people know you.
About the author
Haley Lynn Gray is the founder of Leadership Girl, of In2itive Biz Solutions, and of the Women’s Entrepreneur Network — a community of more than 77,000 women in business.
She writes here about what happens when running a business starts demanding that you lead one. More about Haley →
