You wouldn't walk across a room, introduce yourself to someone for the first time and ask what you should call your grandchildren.
You wouldn't sit down on a first date and start planning the honeymoon. You wouldn't meet someone at a networking event and ask them to co-sign a mortgage with you. It's absurd. It skips about seventeen steps that actually matter.
And yet business owners do exactly this every day in their marketing and sales.
They put out a post on LinkedIn. Someone likes it, and they slide into the DMs with a pitch for a £5,000 offer. They run an ad, someone clicks, and the landing page asks for a 90-minute strategy session that is clearly a sales call in disguise. They meet someone at an event, swap a few pleasantries and start on their packages and pricing.
It's the business version of asking about grandchildren before you've even ordered a coffee. And people can feel it. They can tell when you're asking for commitment before you've earned permission. They can tell when they're being treated like a transaction, too.
What marketing is for
Marketing is just starting conversations. That's it.
Brand marketing gets people talking about you. Lead generation gets people talking to you. You need both.
Brand marketing is the work you do so that people hear your name and already have a sense of who you are. Might you be relevant to them? It's the content you put out, the way you show up and the reputation you build over time. Lead generation is more direct. It moves someone from "I've heard of you" to "I want to talk to you about my situation."
If nobody knows who you are, your lead generation falls flat. If people know who you are but have no way to start a conversation, all that brand work goes nowhere.
Neither of them is sales, though, and this is where most businesses get stuck. Marketing earns permission for a sales conversation. Sales earns the commitment. Mix the two up and you get friction everywhere.
You get landing pages asking for big commitments from people who barely know you. Ads that go straight for the jugular. Content that feels pushy because it's trying to close a sale when all it had to do was start a conversation.
Or you get sales calls that feel awkward and forced. The person on the Zoom call with you doesn't really want to be there. They clicked a button because the ad was good, but they don't trust you yet and they're still wondering if you even understand their needs. And now you're asking them for a significant investment.
It's the grandchildren question all over again.
The next easiest yes
Sales is helping someone get from "I think this might be right for me" to "Yes, I'm in." That's a big jump. It takes trust, clarity and confidence, and you can't fake any of them with clever copy or pushy follow-up. You earn them by listening, by showing you get what they're dealing with, and by making it clear you can help with a problem that matters to them.
So the first thing you ask for should almost never be the final purchase. Think about it. If someone doesn't know you and isn't sure you understand their situation, why would they say yes to a £10,000 investment or a 12-month retainer?
They wouldn't. So ask for something smaller first.
Maybe it's 20 minutes for a coffee, a quick chat to see if there's a fit. Maybe it's an hour to talk through their situation in more detail. Maybe it's 90 minutes where you go deep on the problem and map out what solving it might look like. Each one is a commitment, but a small one. Low risk and easy to say yes to.
Each small yes builds trust. It lets the person find out what working with you is like without betting the farm on it. The coffee turns into a conversation, the conversation into a strategy session, the session into a proposal, and the proposal into a sale. By the time you ask for the big commitment, it doesn't feel big anymore. It feels like the obvious next step.
What stops people reaching out
If marketing's job is to earn permission for a sales conversation, your content, your ads and your website all have one question to answer: "Why should I talk to this person?" Why they should buy from you comes later. For now it's "Why should I give this person 20 minutes?"
When someone is deciding whether to get in touch, there are questions running through their head, even if they never say them out loud. Will this be a sales pitch, and will I be pressured into something I'm not ready for? Does this person actually understand my situation, or am I about to waste my time?
If your marketing doesn't answer those, people stay on your email list. They keep following you on LinkedIn. They might even think you're great. But they won't reach out, because the risk feels too high.
So answer the questions before they're asked. Say what the conversation is actually for: a genuine chat to see if there's a fit. Use examples from their world and talk about problems they really have. Deal with the worries they're likely to have before they raise them. Show them case studies and results, so they can see you've helped people like them. And make the next step small and specific. "Let's chat" is vague. "Book 20 minutes to talk about [the thing they care about]" is clear.
Do that well and the sales conversation gets so much easier, because the person across from you actually wants to be there. They've already decided you're worth talking to.
Have a look at your own lead generation for a second. Are you asking for a 90-minute strategy session from people who've only just heard of you? Pitching a £5,000 programme in your second email? If so, that's probably why people ghost you after the first call. You're asking for too much, too soon, from someone who doesn't know you well enough yet.
Maybe the smaller yes is a 15-minute call. Maybe it's a one-page audit, or a single session. Whatever it is, it has to be easy and it has to be useful. Something that moves things forward for both of you, without anyone overthinking it.
