🤗 How to Create Authentic Connections

People buy from people. The vast majority of purchasing decisions are driven by emotion, rather than logic. It is extremely valuable when you can connect with your potential customers, not just simply contact them but truly build a sense of connection.

However, creating a sense of connection can be difficult - especially at scale.

Fortunately, there is good research on this topic. We know what key activities to do in order to create authentic connections with your potential customers. I have outlined the steps for you below:

How to create authentic connections:

1. Initiate Genuine Conversations: Lead with curiosity about them, not yourself. Much like with sales calls, you get more value from asking questions than you do from simply saying what you do. Foster genuine curiosity, everybody knows something you don’t and can help you in some way, equally you can help them.

2. Offer Value Without Expectation: Share insights or help without requiring or expecting anything in return. While providing help triggers reciprocity, it provides much more than that. People see you as a helpful person, a source of insight, a good and likable person.

3. Maintain Regular Touch Points: Send occasional updates, ask about their lives. Follow up on things happening in their lives in a timely manner. People do genuinely want to know about what you do. Be open and honest, let people see behind the scenes. Seeing behind the scenes is particularly important if your communication is primarily uni-directional, if you do not communicate with individuals but share en-masse (such as with influencers).

4. Recognise Their Achievements: Congratulate them on successes and milestones publicly. Be their biggest fan, and mean it. Positivity is contagious. People like people who like them, when they like you they are more likely to help and to buy.

5. Invite Collaboration: Propose working on projects that mutually benefit both of you. Ask for help and for feedback. This works well with big audiences as well as on an individual scale - people like to feel involved, to feel they helped, to feel like they have had a part in creating something to be proud of. Let them help you to create.

6. Reflect and Refine: Analyse what works, adapt your approach, and repeat with others. Track the data, then implement the insights you get from that data.

Make a habit of: reaching out when you have something to give and asking nothing in return. Also make a habit of searching for relevant value to give to people in your network.

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-october-4-2023

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