Make Money the Old Fashioned Way: Earn It

Nancy Myrland wrote a great post this week on gaining people's trust the old fashioned way: By earning it. Doing it the old fashioned way means that you spend time building relationships and your forsake the ways of our instant gratification culture.

You can read her post here. The gist of the post and the last couple of posts I have written revolve around the same concept: You can't build sales relationships overnight. Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn are awesome and helpful to growing a business, but if you focus on just adding numbers without adding value or quality, then you miss the greatest potential to help your business and its sales.

I don't think it is a new analogy, but building relationships is like farming. You have to care for the soil (your area of expertise), you have to plant good seeds, and you have to water and weed. I know there is another analogy around hunting. But my belief is that hunting is useful in limited circumstances today and the prey, if you take this analogy, of a customer has grown more savvy than most hunters. They have more tools to suss out what you're doing and how you're doing it.

Farmers, on the other hand, are a bit more transparent and they spend more time with their customers at farmers markets... They are talking to the customer, the person they sell to, and learning what makes them tick and what they care about and value.

Farmers are good at earning trust. If you think about many of the myths around farmers, they are often considered not as "intelligent" by those in the big, sophisticated cities. They have "common sense" but not street smarts. But in almost every instance, it is a farmer who has more sense because he or she takes the long view, what I consider "uncommon sense" or wisdom.  Street smarts often get you in trouble because you think of only yourself. Of course, I'm simplifying some of this, but you get the idea.

No doubt, there are hunters who are good at considering the long term and know how to nurture relationships, but I suspect that the farmers just smile because they usually own the land that the hunter has to ask permission to hunt on...