Nurturing is the most important skill in business. More important than sales skills and even your skills at delivering client projects. It’s something that is used at every step of a client’s journey with you.
Join Matt to learn more about nurturing and hear 11 important tips that he wants to share with you to help you nurture better client relationships in your business.
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Hello and welcome to the Nurture Flow podcast, with me Matt Davies. Today, we’re going to talk about why nurturing is the most important skill that you can have in your arsenal.
What do you think would be the most common response if you asked a crowded room of digital business owners what the most important skill is in business?
Many of them would say sales. It’s a fair answer, after all learning how to successfully sell your products or services is going to bring in revenue.
Some might say the skill of actually delivering the work. An obvious choice maybe, since if you’re selling marketing services… you should understand and be able to deliver them right?
But I would argue that nurturing is a more important skill than any other answer that can be presented. Let’s dive into that a little deeper…
When we talk about nurturing in business, we’re talking about the ability to foster and cultivate relationships. To be able to take someone who is a visitor to your website, on a journey, to a lead, a customer and right up to a loyal raving fan.
Nurturing is a skill that is useful in every single step of the journey that a customer will have with you.
Without naming any names, I know of at least 3 digital agency owners who openly admit to not having sales skills and are not the best at delivering the work for their clients. These agency owners all make multiple six figures in revenue each year.
They’ve achieved this by knowing where their strengths are. They spend time nurturing and cultivating fantastic client relationships, whilst employing others to handle sales, project management, and the delivery of the client work.
By building a team and focusing on what they’re good at, they’ve created successful digital agencies that they can continue to scale from multiple 6 figures, right up to 7 figures and beyond.
Blows your mind doesn’t it?
A good friend of mine, Nick Gulic, is currently working on his first course titled: Sell By Helping.
This course came from a talk he did earlier in the year at Agency Transformation Live 2020. Nick gave a fantastic 25 minute presentation about his sales framework and how people could sell by helping.
The whole principle of everything Nick does in a sales meeting is to listen, help and educate his prospective clients. He lets them talk, whilst guiding the meeting in a direction that will get the most benefit for all parties involved.
This is a perfect example of nurturing a brand new relationship. A prospective client will respect you more when you give them time to listen, you ask the right questions and you have a proper understanding of what they do.
I’ll pop a link to Nick’s course in the show notes, so you can take a look at that if it interests you.
As you may have guessed from the name of my podcast, nurturing is extremely important to me. It’s something that defines pretty much everything that Mel and I do in our business, every single day.
We have two main principles that guide our actions. These are: Kindness First and Value First.
Kindness First is the beating heart of everything that we do with Nurture Flow. We approach every situation in our business with kindness. This helps us to build better relationships with our customers.
It’s really important to remember that kindness isn’t a weakness. It’s actually a superpower. I spoke about this topic at Agency Transformation Live 2020 earlier this year. If you’d like to watch the presentation, I’ll add that in the show notes on our website – nurtureflow.com.
Value First is a core principle for our business. It’s really important to us that we lead with value in everything we do. That includes creating content like this podcast, the free video series that we do on the Funnel Packs website, plus the blog posts and emails that we write for our audience.
Leading with value helps you to show your audience that you’re an expert, through the valuable content that you share with them.
Mel and I firmly believe that having a value first mindset helps people to stand out amongst their competitors. It’s why we also ensure that every product we create for our customers is created from a value first perspective. This also allows our customers to stand out from the crowd too.
By effectively nurturing and engaging with our audience, we’re able to build a tribe of people that care about what we do.
I should add in as well, that we’re not worried if someone finds that they’re not aligned with our values. It’s absolutely okay for them to have different beliefs – that’s part of life after all.
Mel and I both make sure that we’re open, honest and transparent in business at all times.
This gives people with similar values an opportunity to be part of what we’re doing, whereas those who have differing beliefs can be gently qualified out and continue on with their lives.
I sent out an email to our Funnel Packs customers on this very topic last Friday, in answer to a customer who had asked:
“What do I do when people unsubscribe from my funnel? It’s making me worry that I’m doing something wrong or that something is out of place. Should I change my approach?”
The simple answer to this is that nothing is wrong and you do actually want people to unsubscribe. This can be a little hard to understand – since we’re often conditioned to believe that it’s “bad” when someone chooses not to receive our emails.
When someone chooses to unsubscribe, all they’re doing is letting you know that they’re not a good fit. That’s it.
There will always be some leads who are not a good fit. There’s nothing wrong with this.
It’s exactly the same process as when someone contacts your business asking for a proposal and you realise that they’re not a good fit for your business. You can take the opportunity to politely decline and move on.
You’ve set up systems in your business to weed out tyre kickers and unsuitable leads. When someone unsubscribes, this is an example of those same systems working to assist you.
Time is precious and a finite resource. It’s far better that you spend your time wisely on people that are actually interested in what it is that you have to say.
So how can you better nurture your customers?
I’m going to share eleven tips with you that I’ve learned over the years that will hopefully help you to nurture and cultivate better relationships with your tribe.
Nurturing is a powerful ally to have in your business. It’s a skill that you can use every single day and at every stage in your customer’s journey.
If you can master just a few of the tips that I’ve shared with you today, you’ll be well on your way to creating better client relationships. These will not only bring you more revenue to your business, but more importantly, more happiness.
It’s too easy to fall out of love with your business when you get stuck working with clients that aren’t a great fit for you. When you set up more effective processes and you master the skill of nurturing, you’ll be able to gently let go of clients that are not fun to work with.
I’d love to hear what your biggest takeaway from today’s episode is. What will you be able to put into action in your business that will help you to nurture better client relationships in the future? Let me know in the comments on our website – nurtureflow.com.
Likewise, perhaps you don’t agree with me that nurturing is the most important skill in business. If you don’t, this is completely okay. Everyone in the world has different opinions and yours is just as valid as mine. Let me know what skill you think is more important and let’s have a discussion about it. My door is always open.
Finally, I just want to add that I’ve recorded and edited this episode today on my 37th birthday. If you found this episode valuable, it would mean so much to me if you would consider donating $5 to your favourite charity.
This is something that I’ve asked our customers to do in our Facebook group, as it would be wonderful if we could all come together to help those who really need it right now.
As always, If you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to subscribe in your podcast player of choice. I’d also be honoured if you’d consider leaving a rating or a review if you feel that the content is valuable to you.
Have a great day ahead, you’re awesome, take care!
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