How many times do you have to contact or interact with a customer before they’re ready to buy?

There’s no single answer, of course. It depends on your industry, your products, the individual customer, their history with you, etc.

But almost without exception, the answer is never “once”.

The more expensive, the more complex, the more important, the more risky that the purchase is, and the less that your customer already knows about you; the more it takes before they’ll be ready to buy.

According to Brian Carroll, author of Lead Generation For The Complex Sale, “Up to 95 percent of qualified prospects on your Web site are there to research and are not yet ready to talk with a sales rep, but as many as 70 percent of them will eventually buy a product from you — or your competitors.” If you follow up.

The same is true whether you use networking, direct mail, TV advertising, referrals or social media. It takes multiple contacts to build up the necessary trust and credibility before most clients will be ready to buy.

Most businesses know this, at least intuitively. But what typically happens in practice is that they focus their attention on the glamorous side of marketing and sales. Generating new leads and closing opportunities.

If someone is not ready to buy right now, they’ll file away their business card and switch to chasing the next “hot prospect.”

And all the while that “not ready to buy” prospect will be getting closer and closer to buying. They’ll be getting increasingly frustrated by their problems and beginning to look for a solution. At that point who are they likely to turn to? The business that’s kept in touch and had multiple contacts with them, or the one who filed away their card and focused on other hot prospects? Clearly the former.

Nurturing your relationship with a potential client before they’re ready to buy is the critical missing link that can make the difference between winning the sale and not. But it’s something most businesses either fail to do, or if they do it, they don’t do it strategically.

What they fail to realize is that multiple contacts need to be directed.

In soccer, the more you pass the ball successfully between your players, the more likely you are to score. But only if you pass the ball with direction. Your passes have to take you closer to the opponents net and into danger areas where your players are in a good position to shoot. Just tapping the ball backwards and forwards in your own half gets you nowhere.

Similarly, in marketing, it’s not just a matter of meeting or speaking to someone multiple times and magically they’ll be ready to buy from you. You need to progress your relationship with each interaction.

CRM tools like Salesforce.com are brilliant at tracking interactions with potential clients and planning future ones. But planning must be more than setting a date. You need to understand for each potential client involved in a purchasing decision what they need to know and feel to be ready to hire you. And then you need to demonstrate those factors to them through your future interactions.

Let’s take a simple example: a leadership coach who’s met a potential client executive at an industry conference. From an informal chat, the coach was able to glean that the executive was most worried about the lack of teamwork amongst her senior staff. Not a big enough issue yet that she was looking to hire someone to help. But it was clear to the coach that at some point in the next 3-6 months she could well decide to do something about it.

How should our hero proceed?

Well, first he needs to think through what the executive would need to know and feel to be ready to hire him. It could be she needs to know that coaching is an effective approach for dealing with teamwork issues. Or that other businesses who’ve used a coach like this have seen their teamwork improve and a resultant improvement in their bottom line. She probably needs to know that our hero has done this sort of work successfully before and worked with similar teams. And she’d need to feel that she and her team would be able to work well with the coach personally.

Whatever factors he comes up with, he then needs to think about how he can demonstrate them to her in future interactions.

So maybe he could send her an article on the ROI of leadership teamwork coaching. Perhaps an invitation to a presentation he’s delivering on teamwork where he uses a number of case studies to illustrate his points (and show his experience). And maybe he can invite her to an upcoming event she’d be interest in where he can chat more informally and build her confidence that the relationship would work.

Of course, you won’t be able to work one of your “know and feel” goals into every interaction with a potential client. But being clear on what those goals are and planning interactions that address them will move you from haphazard relationship building to strategic nurturing and you’ll have a lot more prospects who are ready to buy from you an awful lot quicker. 

Ian Brodie is the author of the free report, 5 Simple Marketing Tweaks That Will Get You More Clients. He teaches consultants, coaches and other professionals how to attract and win more clients and was recently named one of the Top 25 Global Influencers in Sales and Sales Management by OpenView Labs. Get more marketing and sales tips from at Ian at his More Clients blog or connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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