18 Aug 2026 · 5 min
George Kao moved from conversion-focused marketing with pressure tactics to a trust-first approach after burning out. He argues that building genuine relationships and serving audience needs drives word-of-mouth and makes sales easier than manipulation, which erodes trust even when it converts.
The way I used to think about marketing and sales is it's all about conversion. Traffic and conversion, right? And so the actions that I took were all about how can I convert, you know, first try to convert 3% of the audience and then 5% and then 7% and then 10%, etc., etc., etc. Now what happens by thinking that way is we start to try to manipulate other people. And we make the sale, the transaction, the priority. And what happens when you make the sale the priority is that you are in a self-centered— I was in a self-centered state thinking about my own business and my own revenues and thinking about the customer as just almost like a thing to manipulate. Man, you know what? I wasn't alone because this is how most marketers think of us, as units to manipulate. Through a funnel, right? It's a sales or marketing funnel, and we're just like, okay, how can we make the funnel less leaky? People are leaving the funnel. No, we got to make them take the next step and the next step. And I burned out as a result of doing that. I made a lot of money. Well, I made, you know, I made good money, more than most of my peers, but I burned out and my conscience was shot. I was so feeling not aligned. And I'll be honest with you, I mean, when I had conversations with my peers who were doing that, and some of them are still doing it, in moments of honesty, they too felt like something wasn't right. It wasn't aligned. They felt like, yeah, ideally in the world I wouldn't have to manipulate people, but that's how marketing works. That's how sales work. No, it doesn't have to work like that. And in the past 3 years, I finally came to this new state of doing marketing where Here's the key: trust is more important than the sale. Building trust with my audience, truly serving them from my heart, and trust being the result, the natural result, is so much more important to me now than trying to make the transaction happen, trying to make a sale happen. And I think another key is that I'm now thinking long-term. I'm thinking in terms of years and decades in my business and of that relationship with my audience rather than this month I've got to make my numbers. I think that's where a lot of people go wrong. And you might say, well, does that mean that the people who are focused on the transaction and the sale will be more financially well off and will be— No, not necessarily. I know lots of people who try to focus on the transaction and the sales who regularly fail financially. And yet I also know others who focus on serving the audience and building trust with them. And yes, of course, making an offer, a reasonable offer that is a good match to the audience, that's important. That's important for whichever camp you're in, you know, whether you're in the transactional side, sales, profit-first driven, you need a good offer match with the audience. And if you're on the trust side where it's all about service, and being heart-centered, you still need a good offer. That is, you need to be selling something the audience wants. So that is same either place. But once you have an offer that the audience wants, or once you are developing that, then it's the attitude of how you approach the audience that will determine whether you are creating trust with the majority of the audience, and therefore they may not buy that time. Because if you're not focused on the sale, if you're not focused on a transaction, You're not going to do things like, you know, you've got to buy at the end of this webinar. You know, if you wanna buy at the end of this webinar, I'll give you this percentage off, and then if you buy within 48 hours, I'll give you that percentage off. And those are transactionally-based tactics. It pressures people, right? Anytime you're pressuring your audience to transact with you, you are losing trust with a large portion of the audience, even if you convert a small portion of them. And I used to do that, I understand. And I burned a lot of people along the way, right? And a lot of people, marketers who are doing this and teaching this, they're burning lots of people along the way without realizing that they're going to have to build real trust at some point because their business is not going to, they're gonna end up, they're going to fail. Finish burning the market and then realizing, oh my God, now I have to build a real audience of trust. And so that's what I encourage you to do now, is to build an audience of trust. Let people make decisions at their own natural, organic, best pace. And serve, serve in that way of the heart, and you will find that people will spread word about you. Before long, people will spread word about you and sales become so easy as a result.
"Be of good cheer. Think not of today's failures, but of tomorrow's successes...”
