By Abigail Mitchell
Most owners of small firms dislike selling, and most of them are worse at it than they need to be. This piece sets out a different order of operations, drawn from a conference talk and from the answers of seven marketers who were in the room: help someone first, in a way that costs you minutes rather than days, and let the work follow.
There is a particular kind of paralysis that affects people who run small businesses. The cold email gets rewritten five times and never sent. The follow-up call slips to next week, then the week after. When a pitch finally goes out it reads like everybody else’s, because it was written by someone who did not want to write it.
I have run a link building agency from Belgrade for several years and sold most of that work into the United States and the United Kingdom. I am not a natural salesperson either. What I found instead was an order of operations that suits people who dislike selling, and in September I was asked to describe it at the SaaS SEO Alliance conference near Delhi, in a talk called “How I Sell to the US and UK as a Guy From a Third World Country”.
The argument fitted on one slide. Every client I ever got came because I helped them first.
Afterwards, the people in the room were asked what the best thing was that they had learned at a conference, at that event or at any other. Their answers are woven through what follows. They are agency owners, founders and in-house marketers, mostly running small teams, and the striking thing is how many of them arrived at the same conclusion independently.
Why Trust Decides the Sale Before the Pitch Does
A buyer who has never worked with you is taking a risk they cannot fully price. They cannot see inside your business. They cannot verify most of what you tell them. They have probably been disappointed before by somebody who sounded just as confident.
Where you are based matters far less in that calculation than most people fear. Nobody cares what country you are from. They care what you can do, and whether they can trust you.
The buying research points the same way. In 6sense’s 2025 Buyer Experience Report, which collected close to 4,000 responses, 68% of B2B buyers already knew a seller from the vendor that eventually won the deal. The winner was rarely a stranger who wrote a better email. The winner was usually someone the buyer had already dealt with, in some small way, before the purchase was on the table.
Helping is the fastest way to become that person. It lets a prospect see how you think, how quickly you reply and what you are like to deal with, all before any money is involved. None of that can be conveyed in a proposal, because a proposal is a document about how good you say you are.
Agam Grover, Co-Founder at Digital Leap, put the mechanism plainly when asked what he took from the session. “You have to help first, and it will get back to you in different ways.”
The phrase that matters there is different ways. The return is seldom a straight line from favour to invoice. Grover’s agency does a good deal of white-label work, which means a proportion of its business arrives as projects passed on by other agencies months after the original conversation. Sometimes the person who becomes the client is not the person who was helped. It is somebody they mentioned you to.
This is worth remembering on the days when a favour appears to go nowhere. Most of the conversations in which your name comes up are conversations you will never hear about.
The Small Favour Is the Whole Method
The word carrying the weight in all of this is small.
The three examples I gave from my own work were deliberately unimpressive. Organising the list of topics a business should be writing about, which takes about ten minutes. Five story ideas for somebody stuck on a public relations campaign, which takes fifteen. A short list of who a business ought to be contacting, which takes five, because the system that produces it already exists.
Each of those solved a real problem for the person receiving it. None of them cost me anything I would miss. That ratio is the entire method, and the rule I use to protect it is blunt: a good favour costs you minutes, a bad one costs you a day or your money, and it should never cost your money.
Burhanuddin Ratlamwala, Founder at bratz digital, reduced the same idea to four words. “Give small favors first.”
His agency works with business-to-business companies that have long and complicated buying cycles, the kind where nobody signs after a single call and a decision may involve six people. In that world a quick audit or an honest answer to an awkward question is often the first real evidence a buyer gets about how a supplier actually works.
It holds at the other end of the market too. Anand Maheshwari, Director at AI4Web, builds websites for local service businesses, the plumbers and dentists and roofers who have no interest whatsoever in being marketed to. His version is shorter still. “Help someone for good karma, and both sides are happy.”
People running that kind of business do not have the time or the patience for a sales process. Fix one small thing for them and they remember who did it, which is most of what you need.
What Counts as a Good Favour
The best favours come from something you already own that the other person does not: a tool you built, a checklist, a template, or simply ten years of pattern recognition that lets you spot in thirty seconds what would take them an afternoon.
An accountant can glance at a pricing page and find the VAT error. A web designer can record three minutes of screen capture showing what is slowing a site down. A consultant can introduce two people who ought to know each other. A copywriter can rewrite one headline.
None of this replaces paid work. It demonstrates what the paid work would feel like, which is a different and more persuasive thing.
Sales teams see the same effect when they run it at scale. In HubSpot’s survey of more than a thousand sales professionals, nearly 38% of sales leaders said free tools convert best as a lead generation offer, placing them ahead of free content. A tool is useful before anybody buys anything. Content asks to be believed; a tool simply works or does not.
Kshitij Kumawat, CEO at Mediardx, operates in some of the most competitive corners of search, where every prospect has already been promised everything by somebody. His answer was three words. “Help the client first.”
In a market like that, claims are worthless because they are free and identical. Showing a prospect something concrete about their own business, a problem they had not spotted, carries weight precisely because nobody else’s proposal contains it. A diagnosis is specific in a way that a promise cannot be.
Gurpreet Singh Laungiya, Founder and CEO at JC Web Pros, has watched the arithmetic work over a longer period and summarised it in three words of his own. “Freebies return triple.”
He did not offer that as a measured figure and it should not be read as one. It is the impression left by years of running an agency, and it matches what most people report once they have been doing this long enough to see the second-order effects.
Why Generosity Is Not the Same as Working for Free
Give-first advice has an obvious failure mode, and it deserves naming, because a great many business owners are already giving far too much away.
The free proposal that is really a strategy document. The quick call that becomes ninety minutes of unpaid consulting. The discount offered before anyone thought to ask for one. That is not generosity. It is working for nothing, and describing it in more flattering language does not change the bank balance.
A small number of rules keep the two apart.
Measure favours in minutes. If a request would take a day, it is a project, and projects are priced. Give from what you already have rather than building something new for a stranger. Never spend money on a favour, because your time has a limit and your cash has a harder one. Help with their problem rather than your offer, since a favour that only makes sense if they buy from you is a pitch wearing a disguise. And let them come back on their own. One reminder is reasonable. Chasing undoes the goodwill you have just spent time earning.
I go further than this in my own business and deliver the first piece of work before sending an invoice, so that a new client pays for something that exists rather than something promised. I was open at the conference about what that has cost: three cases of non-payment across the whole history of the business, one of which was later recovered. It requires cash reserves and a reasonable instinct for people, and it will not suit everybody.
The principle underneath it travels better than the practice. Take as much of the risk off a new client’s shoulders as you can afford to, in whatever form your business allows.
What Seven Answers Had in Common
Not every response was a paragraph. Asked what he had taken from the session, Chitranshu Sharma, Founder at Growzify Digital, replied simply: “A lot.”
Brevity of that sort is easy to overlook, but it points at something real about how this material lands. Helping first is not a technique that needs explaining at length. It is a reordering, and people either recognise it immediately or they do not.
The harder part is applying it in a company with other people in it. Helping first fails as a personal quirk. If one person gives generously and the rest of the process closes hard, the prospect notices the join, and the generosity reads as a tactic, which is worse than not having offered it.
One Person a Week
The talk ended with an instruction rather than a summary. Take out your phone, pick one person you could help this week, and decide now what you will help them with.
- Paul Hendricks, Founder at AIappOnsite, took that as the main lesson and shortened it to five words. “Help one person every week.” He added that the advice applies as much to somebody in their first month of freelancing as to an experienced business development professional, which is true and is part of why it is easy to dismiss.
The instruction is small on purpose. A month of it is four people and four small favours, none of which required a pitch, a proposal or a sales call. That is not a pipeline and it will not show up in a forecast.
Look at who gets back in touch by the end of the quarter, though, and the arithmetic starts to make a different kind of sense.
