How to build strong personal relationships with your customers
Demonstrate a genuine interest in things that interest your customer.
Welcome to A Founder’s Life for Me! I’m Alek, and I provide practical recommendations on how to build your company (or career) through my experiences building tech companies. To get free access to all past and future posts, please subscribe below.
Why I’m writing this now
In “Four principles for successful, long-term customer relationships,” I shared my equation for strong customer relationships:
Over the past three weeks, I’ve covered Trust, Value, and Cost. Today, we’ll talk about the final piece of the puzzle: personal relationships.
The more people like you, the more likely they are to work with you. A great read on building personal relationships is “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” That book helped reinforce a lot of the content you’ll read here. In this article, I’ll share my strategies for building personal relationships with customers and how I leverage existing personal relationships to find customers.
My #1 strategy for building personal relationships with customers.
Your customers aren’t always going to be people with whom you’d organically build friendships in your personal life. Your customers will come from a variety of backgrounds and have very different personalities from you. So, how do you build personal relationships with them? My #1 strategy for building personal relationships with customers is to: “Demonstrate a genuine interest in things that interest your customer.”
(1) Demonstrating a genuine interest
First of all, interest needs to be genuine. Do you know anybody that feels fake or that tells you what they think you want to hear? You don’t want to be that person. People have a great radar for when you are faking interest in a conversation. If you’re not being authentic or genuine, you’ll do more harm than good.
For most topics, you can find things that interest you below the surface-level conversation. As an example, on the surface, I’m not someone who is interested in opera music. If I have a customer who is very passionate about opera and nothing else, you might expect me to have trouble building a personal relationship. While I’m not interested in opera music, I am very interested in:
How did they form such a deep appreciation for opera music?
Have they gone to see live performances? What is that experience like?
What’s the community like around opera music? It feels like a very rare thing to find someone interested in opera; who do they talk to about it?
I now want to find someone interested in opera music to ask them! You may have nothing in common with your customers, but if you are curious and break through the surface-level conversation, you’ll find things that genuinely interest you.
Before we move on, imagine the impact of this type of conversation. Most of your meetings start with 5 minutes of small talk. How memorable would it be if someone showed a deep, genuine interest in learning more about something you were passionate about? You’d remember the person you spoke with and feel happy as you think back on the conversation.
(2) Finding things that interest them
The easiest way to find things that interest other people is to ask them how they spend their time. People spend time on the things that interest them, so if you ask them how they spend their time, you’ll figure out their interests. A simple “How was your weekend? Did you do anything fun?” is a great starter question, but the trick is in the follow-ups. A lot of the time, people will answer, “It was great. How about you?” and end the conversation there. But, they spent time on something over the weekend, even if they didn’t feel like it was noteworthy. Here are a few easy follow-ups:
Did you do anything fun with your kids?
Did you get outside at all?
Are you watching or reading anything interesting?
If you pick one that you think is relevant, you’re likely to get more information about how they spent their time. From there, find a genuine, common interest in the topic.
Maybe they had a little league baseball game... I’m not really interested in how the game went, but I am interested in: “What is the experience like for the parent to watch your kid play?” “How do practices work at that level?” “At what point do they stop hitting off of a tee and start with a pitcher?”
It typically takes 2-3 follow-up questions to organically break through to the deeper conversation. Once you do find a common interest, you can talk about it in more depth. As time goes on, you’ll learn more about the person, establish more common interests, and build a deeper personal relationship.
Leveraging existing personal relationships
We’ve now talked about building new personal relationships with your customers. But you also have a huge asset available to you already. Your existing personal relationships. As mentioned in “Four principles for successful, long-term customer relationships,” nearly every good thing that has happened to me has come as a result of long-standing personal relationships.
So, how do you make use of your personal relationships without feeling like you’re taking advantage of your friends, colleagues, and family? The answer lies in the customer relationship equation.
Do you believe you’re delivering more value than you cost?
When I’m deciding whether to sell my product to my friends and family, I reflect on the customer relationship strength equation.
I ask myself, “If I were them and I knew everything that I know about my product or service, would I buy it?”1 If the answer is “yes,” then I believe that I’m delivering more value than I cost; I’m supporting them. If the answer is “no,” then they are supporting me.
If I believe my product costs more than the value it creates for them, I avoid trying to “sell them” on it. You can make these asks but if there’s a high price2 and low value, they’ll feel like you owe them a debt. If left unpaid, then this debt can have a negative impact on your personal relationship in the long run.
If I believe I’m providing more value than I cost, I am supporting them. Imagine a money machine where friends and family could deposit $5 and receive $10 back. Wouldn’t you want to give all of your friends and family access to this machine? In a way, this is what you’re giving them with your product! You are asking them to pay a cost to receive a higher benefit. So, why not share it with them?
It helps to analyze whether value exceeds cost on a case-by-case basis. Some people will need to pay a higher price. Some people will get less value. You know your product, so you can build an understanding of the problem it solves for them, and guide the conversation accordingly. When value exceeds costs, you shouldn’t feel guilty about sharing your product with your friends or family.
How to leverage personal relationships where you don’t deliver more value than you cost
If you understand your friend’s problems and you don’t believe that your product or service can help them, that’s totally fine. A great way that you can still provide value to them at a very low cost is to ask them for introductions.
Let’s say you have a conversation with your friend, Sally. Sally wouldn’t benefit from your product, but she knows people where value does exceed cost. To go back to the money machine analogy, why wouldn’t Sally share the $5 → $10 money machine with her friends? Sally introduces you to her friend Joe because she thinks Joe would benefit from your product. You meet with Joe, and the problem you solve resonates with him (value exceeds the cost). You and Joe start working together to solve his problem. Joe appreciates Sally for making the introduction that solves his problem.
In the example above, Sally gains a reputational benefit for solving Joe’s problem. You are creating that value for Sally at the cost of the time it took her to make the introduction. There are two main factors to consider when asking people to make introductions:
Cost - How easy is it for them to make the introduction?
If they can’t easily think of anyone who would benefit from your product, it will be harder for them to make the introduction.
If they haven’t talked to the person in years, the introduction will be more awkward than if they are good friends.
Trust - Do they trust that you’d provide more value than you cost to the people in their network?
They are putting their reputation on the line by making an introduction, so you need to address their fear by helping them be confident that value will exceed the cost for the friend they are recommending you to.
You can address the Cost factors by reviewing their network for them and identifying people who you think would benefit from your product or service. You can also give them a draft introduction to use when they introduce you and your product.
Addressing the Trust factors can require a conversation about what you’re working on (a call or a few message exchanges) or a link to your website. You believe that value exceeds cost, so it’s just a matter of conveying why you believe that to them.
Build and leverage your personal relationships
My #1 strategy for building personal relationships with customers is to:
“Demonstrate a genuine interest in things that interest your customer.”
You can typically find things you are genuinely interested in by breaking through the surface-level conversation around a topic. You can find things that interest them by asking how they spend their time and asking follow-up questions when you receive short answers.
Recommendation #1: In your next call with 5 people or less, try to breakthrough the small talk and ask deeper questions on a topic. Try and come up with questions you’re genuinely interested in the answer to and see where the conversation goes!
When deciding whether to sell your product to friends or family, if you ask yourself, “If I were them and I knew everything that I know about my product or service, would I buy it?” you’ll gain an honest assessment of their potential experience. If the value exceeds the cost, you’re supporting them by sharing your product with them. If the value does not exceed the cost, you’re asking them for their support. You can create situations where the value exceeds the cost by asking for introductions.
Recommendation #2: Make an honest assessment of whether the value exceeds the cost of your product or service before you sell it to your friends. When “selling” your product, just explain that assessment to them. If your product isn’t a fit for them, you can create value by having them introduce you to others who would benefit.
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I know the full solution, so “Trust” isn’t a factor. I also remove the “Personal Relationship” element from the equation for the moment.