Are you guilty of microwaving customers?

We're 30 days past the infamous New Year's resolutions. But here's where things get hard.

And that's because we've forgotten how long things actually take . . . and that all intentional desired outcomes take energy (work).

In our microwave uber-delivers-in-30-minutes modern culture, it's easy to forget that our body still doesn't zap calories immediately to lose weight, and even if we learn to speed read, we can't immediately apply everything we learn from that book.

The danger here is: we know this truth in our heads - but often fail to acknowledge it on our lives and businesses.

My own microwave fail moment

When my company, Simple Strat, got really serious about our content production about a year into the business, our team started publishing weekly content based on a strategic calendar. The goal was to use the articles to generate leads that would then convert from newsletter subscribers and ebook downloads.

Four to five months in, our data was still relatively flat. And like many leaders, I began to question how much money and time we'd spent on something that hadn't paid off yet.

But then my team gave me a dose of my own medicine:

"Remember Ali, this can take 6-12 months to begin to take hold. The goal is to create a source of leads for years to come, not just right now. We need to stick with it."

So we did.

And you know what? They were right. Today we generate many leads each month from our blog, and even more from our videos and social content. And those leads are actual people looking for help - relying on the trust we've established through content.

Microwaves are for food, not customers

In much of my research, I've discovered that most people know it takes time to implement a new technology. Or a new accounting system. Or develop their employees. Or pursue legal action to protect your product. Or hire great people.

But we've forgotten this when it comes to finding new customers.

Why??

We forget that customers are people. And often we're asking them to understand a complicated problem more quickly, or get buy-in from people who are hard to convince, or worse, change a behavior that's been engrained in them for the last 10 years.

At a very fundamental place, customers are people, individual people -- who need time to identify whether they're solving the right problem in the first place. And then they need time to figure out if your solution will work for them. And lastly, they need to feel like they can trust you.

Trust is not built in a microwave. It can be sped up, but it is not instantaneous.

This also explains why referrals are usually the fastest closing leads, because they've already been told to trust you by the person or company that sent them your way. That's the closest thing you have to a customer microwave!

Concluding thoughts

If you're looking for a quicker source of leads, the first place to go is referrals. If you're looking to a source beyond that, the more you can nurture your audience through content, the faster they will gain trust, understand what you do or sell, and how it will fix their pain.

A few ideas for you:

• Videos or blogs that cover the objections that you know will come up in the sales process
• Podcast interviews that you wish you could have with your customers but serve as an excellent opportunity to have a passive "conversation" with you/your company
• Articles that help your audience further understand the problem they're looking to solve, along with actual, tangible steps they can take to alleviate the pain

Especially when you have a chance to put a human face on a piece of content, that trust does gain speed because it validates the 2 things that Steven M.R. Covey says in his book The Speed of Trust: You demonstrate competence and credibility.

However, before you look at the catalyst for customer acquisition, I would ask you to have a very open conversation with your marketing team, agency, consultant, or whoever works together in your company to acquire new customers.

This even includes the customer success team. If a group of new customers become disillusioned because they were duped in the sales process and the user experience isn't actually what was promised, that will negatively impact the very speed at which you hope to acquire new business.

Final question for you

What do you think? Is microwave culture affecting your results? Or is there something else going on?