Go With It — Let Prospects Do The Work! Instead of resisting this trend and staying attached to how potential customers used to or “should” get to know your company, go with it and give the prospects the control over how they want to get to know you. Present them with a couple of logical next steps and let them decide how and when to move forward (of course, with some helpful reminders now and then if they’ve stalled). Setting up progressive layers of the onion is key to “receiving sales” or “pulling sales” (much easier than pushing sales). Let the prospects do the work for you! The Layers Are Mutual — Get To Know The Prospects As They Get To Know You The layers enable prospects and vendors to test mutual compatibility with progressive steps of increasing trust and commitment, to minimize risk and costs of a bad fit to both parties. With the layers of the onion, a prospect can engage right away at the level they feel comfortable with, and then can work their way up the trust and commitment layers as they and you see fit. As a seller, now you can more easily test out how much of a fit the customer is for you, before you commit extra time or resources to them! Committing to a bad-fit customer is an enormous cost, and the right layers can help you avoid those landmines. Let Go Give up trying to control how long someone takes to move forward. You’ll have to accept that most prospects who initially sign up for a blog, trial or demo just won’t be ready to do anything. That’s okay—don’t try to force them. But consider if there’s another onion layer you can create to offer to make it easier for them to take another step. Give up trying to control how long someone takes to move forward.