Impulse shopping in the checkout lane may be what drives grocery store profits, but chances are it doesn't do a thing for your business. Your customers are far more likely to need up to nine contacts from you before they trust you enough to buy from you.

Nine!

That's up sharply from when I entered the marketing field lo those many years ago, and you should expect that number to continue rising over your career too. The good news is that there are some very simple steps you can take to eliminate some of those contacts, or at least shorten the time span from initial contact to first sale.

The first step is to acknowledge that we've created our own monster in our efforts to build our businesses. On average, we