Keep in touch with your market and your audience through as many channels as is economically viable.
Include some human contact; visiting, arranging a Zoom call, or phoning. Check in to see how they are.
Those two sentences contain more practical wisdom about sustainable business development than most books on the subject manage in two hundred pages. But they contain something else too: an implicit understanding of human psychology that is worth making explicit, because it is the reason the instruction matters so much.
The pants-on-fire problem #
If a client or prospect has a problem or challenge in their business, they may not make the first contact, even if their pants are on fire.
They might even resort to putting the fire out themselves.
That image is so vivid and so accurate that it is worth reflecting on. A business owner facing a genuine challenge; a supplier relationship that has deteriorated, a process that is failing, a commercial gap that is quietly costing them, will often exhaust their own resources trying to resolve it before reaching out to anyone external. Not because they don’t know help exists. But because asking for help is psychologically harder than most people account for.
Professor Vanessa Bohns of Cornell University, whose research has been featured in Harvard Business Review, has studied the psychology of help-seeking extensively. She describes it as being surrounded by misperceptions. People believe asking for help makes them appear less competent, when in fact research consistently shows the opposite, that people who seek help are perceived as more capable because they recognise both the problem and the best route to addressing it. People believe others don’t want to be approached, when research shows that most people experience a genuine warm glow from helping others. People believe their problem isn’t significant enough to warrant the intrusion.
The result of these misperceptions is the same in every case: the person who could benefit from your expertise waits longer than they should before reaching out, and in many cases never reaches out at all.
Research supports the scale of this problem starkly. 96% of dissatisfied customers don’t complain and 91% of those simply leave without saying a word. They don’t tell you the relationship has soured. They don’t tell you the service fell short. They simply stop engaging, and you discover the loss only when it is already too late to address it. Chameleon
This is why proactive contact is not an intrusion. It is a service.
The proactive versus reactive distinction #
There is a fundamental difference between reactive and proactive outbound communication, and it matters enormously to how you think about the discomfort of making contact before you’ve been invited to.
Reactive contact waits for the customer to signal that something is wrong before responding. By definition; this means the problem has already developed to the point where the customer has decided it warrants external attention which, given the psychology above, means it is probably considerably more advanced than it would have been if caught earlier.
Proactive communication reaches out before the problem is signalled: checking in, staying curious, asking how things are going. It catches the pants before they are fully on fire.
The distinction matters commercially too. Research into proactive customer service consistently finds that customers who experience proactive outbound communication are significantly more likely to stay, more likely to refer others, and more likely to engage with additional services when the relationship eventually matures into that kind of conversation.
When you reach out to a client before they need to ask for help, you shape the fundamental nature of your relationship. You demonstrate that you are invested in their ongoing success, not just in the transaction that connected you in the first place.
As many channels as is economically viable #
The instruction to keep in touch through as many channels as is economically viable is precise and worth following precisely.
Different people are reachable through different channels, and the channel itself sends a signal about the nature of the contact. An email is professional and considered but easy to defer. A phone call is immediate and personal but requires the other person to be available. A Zoom call creates face-to-face connection without travel. A physical visit, where appropriate, communicates the highest level of genuine interest.
Forbes has noted that a phone call remains one of the most intimate forms of connection a person can have with a brand and one of the most effective ways businesses break through noise to attract, engage, and support. Human interaction cannot be mirrored with emails, SMS, or chatbots.
The blend matters. Email creates the context and demonstrates consistent expertise. The phone call converts that context into a conversation. The Zoom or face-to-face meeting deepens the relationship into something that genuinely withstands competitive pressure.
No single channel is sufficient. The combination, maintained consistently, is what keeps your name in the minds of people who will eventually have a need and who, without your proactive contact, might have extinguished their own fire rather than calling the people best equipped to help.
The expertise that was exactly what they needed #
Perhaps, by reaching out to them, you will find your expertise and your solution is exactly what they have been looking for.
That sentence deserves its emphasis. Not “possibly” what they needed. Not “might be useful.” Exactly what they have been looking for already, before you called, before you sent the email, before you made the contact.
The person sitting with a business challenge they’ve been trying to resolve themselves, who receives a warm, unhurried call from someone whose expertise directly addresses that challenge, doesn’t experience that call as an intrusion. They experience it as timing.
Your job is to be the person who calls before the pants are fully on fire; curious, helpful, and consistent. Not because you need the business in that moment, but because the relationship is worth maintaining, whether or not there is an immediate commercial conversation to be had.
“Staying in touch with contacts is as important as getting them in the first place.” — Harvey Mackay.
And on that: concentrate on the activities of prospecting, presenting and following-up.
“The sales will take care of themselves.” — Brian Tracy.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/@richard-bulldomican
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbulldomican/
