By Todd Duncan

When a business relationship is a right match, as it grows so does its earning potential. To understand the Law of Incubation, you have to recognize one thing.

There are no shortcuts to building the most lucrative, long-lasting relationships.

Don’t get me wrong here. Following High Trust Selling will certainly secure most of the high trust relationships you desire—and those relationships will dramatically increase your profits in the first few years. But to maximize your profits over time, you must understand the way relationships work.

Go back to our dating analogy. How many stories have you heard of men who invested a lot of time, energy, and creativity trying to captivate a beautiful woman in order to win a date with her? Those stories are fairly common, right? (And so are sales appointments.) Maybe you’ve experienced a similar story. But if you asked the guy pursuing the woman if he thought he’d reached his goal by landing one date, he’d be quick to correct you.

A LESSON YOU SHOULD ONLY LEARN ONCE!

Ninety-five percent of salespeople go 95 percent of the way and get only 5 percent of what’s available to them. Five percent of salespeople go 100 percent of the way and get 95 percent of what’s available to them. You must decide in which group you want to be.

The Law of Incubation says that the most profitable relationships mature over time. To be certain that you get this before we go any further, I want you to understand that we’re not talking about merely having tenacity and a never-give-up attitude. Those are certainly admirable qualities, but they’re not nearly enough to make a relationship last.

The most productive relationships are comprised of people who are committed to consistently adding value where value is most needed. Incubation is the process by which you consistently add value to a client for as long as you do business together, knowing that over time that will ensure that the relationship matures to fruition. Think about it this way: A girl doesn’t stay with a guy because she’s overwhelmed by his persistence. She stays with him because of the value that he adds to her life, and the value that she adds to his.

RELATIONSHIPS THAT REACH MATURITY

The salesperson who adds value after the sale clearly demonstrates that the relationship is more important than revenue, and the person is more important than profits. Incubation is not about getting a sales relationship going. That’s what the High Trust Selling System is for. Incubation is about keeping a sales relationship flowing. While adding value is critical throughout the selling process, following the Law of Incubation is about using the long-term transference of value as your main client-retention tool.

To be successful in high trust selling you must always have a bal¬ance of prospects who are being converted to first-time clients and first-time clients who are being converted to lifetime clients. And while the percentage of time that you spend on securing new clients will probably decrease as your relationships with existing clients mature, the Law of Incubation ensures that every client with whom you do business becomes and remains a client for life.

The most obvious long-term impact of the incubation strategy is client profitability—getting the most business possible from those with whom you do business. The less obvious—but equally significant—long-term benefit of incubation has to do with long-term client referrals. A relationship founded on mutual trust that is fostered over time through a consistent value-adding strategy is the most profitable kind of relationship that a sales professional can ever have.

And besides, why would you want to invest in a relationship and not reap the full benefit? Once you’ve done the leg¬work up front to determine that the relationship is worth the effort, it makes sense to see it through to complete maturity. To not do so is the equivalent of pursuing, dating, and courting a person only to call the relationship off the day before the wedding. And no one wants the effects of that.

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