Grow your business without asking

The easiest way to grow your business is to stop asking

When I started out in sales, I spent hours on the motorway with audio books playing through the car. Zig Ziglar. W. Clement Stone. Michael Gerber. The lot. I learned a great deal from them, and I am grateful for it. But the world has changed since then, and a fair bit of that old approach feels too pushy for how people are today. The easiest way to grow your business now is gentler. You stop asking, and you start answering.

The world got less salesy, and that is a good thing

W. Clement Stone, one of the voices I had on repeat, liked to open by quoting Henry Ford: "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right." All these years on, that part has aged perfectly. Belief still comes first. It is the tactics that have dated.

The books I had on back then were built on persuasion. Closing the deal. Overcoming objections. "Always be closing." Some of that still holds, and the best of it was really about caring for the person in front of you. But people today can smell a pitch from a long way off, and the moment they do, they close up.

We have all become a little allergic to being sold to. So leaning harder on the old playbook tends to work against you now. The quieter route is not just kinder, it fits how people actually want to be treated. That is the version I have grown into, and it feels far more like me.

Sowing seeds instead of making asks

Here is the heart of it. Instead of asking someone for something, you sow a seed and let their curiosity do the rest.

It starts before the conversation. You decide, quietly, what you would love more of just now. More reviews. More referrals. Then you ready a single honest answer that points gently in that direction, and you keep it in your back pocket.

The lovely part is that you only decide it once. From then on it works away in the background, in every ordinary conversation you have, with no real effort from you. One small bit of preparation that keeps paying off, rather than effort you have to summon up over and over.

It is one changed answer, not a campaign

When people want more reviews or referrals, they usually reach for something to build. A campaign. A system. A clever email sequence. More to set up, and more to keep going.

You do not need any of it. The conversation is already happening.

Someone asks how you are, or whether you have been busy. Instead of the autopilot "yeah, busy", you give an honest answer that leaves a door ajar.

I did exactly this last week. I have been building a prototype, an automatic way of replying to the reviews people leave on Google. I could have set about building a whole campaign to sell it. Instead, when someone asked if I had been busy, I just said yes, I had been working on something I am really excited about, a tool that responds to your reviews and quietly lifts your online presence.

And there came the question I was hoping for. "Oh really, how does that work?" I never pitched a thing.

They asked.

That is the whole idea in miniature. Something that began as an idea became part of a conversation, and now it is becoming part of someone else's reality. I added nothing and sold nothing. I changed one answer.

I have written about how this works for the two things every local business wants more of: how to get more Google reviews without asking, and how to get more referrals without asking Start with whichever you need more of right now.

The bit that disappears is the discomfort

Notice what has gone. The awkwardness. You never had to ask, so the pushy feeling never arrives. That weight you used to carry into these moments was never the work itself. It was the asking. Put it down, and getting more of what you want stops feeling like selling at all.

None of this means running a business is easy. It is not, and I would not pretend otherwise. But this one corner of it, the part you may have quietly dreaded, really does not have to be hard. Sow the seed, leave the door open, and let people walk through it.

Funnily enough, I think old Zig would have nodded at this. It is the same goal he always pointed at, helping more people say yes. Just a quieter road to it, better suited to the world we are in now.

The idea that the important things can be made easier rather than harder is one I found again recently in a book called Effortless , if you fancy going deeper.

If you found this valuable and would like to know more, sign up and I'll let you know when I add anything new.