How Personal Relationships Explain Your Customers

Understanding Your Customers Through the Experience You Have From Your Personal Relationships

Every company has a range of customers that they work with daily, just like you have a range of relationships in your personal life. In your life, you have your best friends, acquaintances, and strangers who you interact with on a daily basis. The types of customers your business serves are very similar. If you think about every customer, you have worked within the last week you may notice some common trends between each one, but you may also notice some major differences.

The differences between your different customers are very important in understanding what it takes to convert them into making a purchase. Not all customers are the same and that means that you can’t treat them all the same. In your day to day life, you don’t treat every person you see the same way because some you know and some you don’t. 

If you think about your customers, the same way you look at different relationships in your daily life you can learn their value and how to treat them all to achieve the best success for your business. Whether the customer your working with is similar to your best friend, an acquaintance or a stranger, you can become more efficient and connect with them better by understanding the similarities.

Best Friends

When you hang out with your best friends’ life goes smoothly and you can convince each other to do things very easily. Life is fun and you spend the majority of your time with this group of people. You know a lot about them and have many of the same values and like the same activities. These are easy relationships to maintain and grow because of all the commonality that the relationship is built on.

In your business, you have a group of customers that are very similar to your best friends. These customers are called your ideal customers. Your ideal customers are the group of people that buy all your products, take little work because they believe in what you provide and often have similar values to your business. Similarly, to your best friends, your ideal customers will support your business and help you succeed because they know you will give them additional reasons to benefit.

Your ideal customers are very important to the success of your business because they often account for the majority of your business and require the least amount of work for you to get the most value.

Acquaintance

An acquaintance in your life is often someone you know but not all that well. You have connections to them through other relationships or interactions. You may know some common hobbies and things that they like or dislike. If you ask someone in this group to do something for you, they might be a bit reluctant to do it or be more willing to say no. 

In your business, this group of people is the ones who have subscribed to your email lists, taken advantage of any free products or information that you provide them. Yet they are still haven’t bought any of your products. At this point, you need to decide on how to proceed. Do you keep chasing them or is it time to cut them loose?

This is when you can run a nurture campaign to find out if you can turn them into one of your best friends or do you cut them loose by making them a stranger. This group often needs to be wooed into becoming a bigger part of your company. By showing them that they are important with a nurture campaign you give yourself the best chance of making them a best friend.

If your nurture campaign doesn’t convert them into a buyer, then it’s time to make them a stranger. Your time is valuable and if they still haven’t bought your product then it isn’t worth wasting your resources anymore.

Stranger

We meet strangers daily and in about 30 seconds we have to decide if they will stay a stranger or if they will move into a new category. Sometimes acquaintances become strangers too, people’s lives change all the time and that means our relationships vary. I’m sure you can think of people you used to talk to every day that are now strangers.

In your business, a stranger can be someone you have never met or a customer whose needs have changed. Sometimes a customer’s needs change beyond a way that you can help them. If you are spending a lot of resources to help a customer, you are taking away from the ways you could be helping other customers that might be more likely to buy.

This group is often harder to find value in and can become ignored when trying to grow your business. Yet this is a really good group of customers to look at because they can tell you some very important information. If you don’t connect with a group of people think about why that might happen. Whether it isn’t the right product for them, or it was too expensive. It could’ve been for any number of reasons but that can be important to find out.

How Can I Relate This to My Business?

In your business, think about what group many of your customers fit into. Who are your best friends who buy everything from you? Who has been on your lead list for months? Who might have been a customer that has opted out? Look at each group and see if they have anything in common. You might find that each type of customer has something in common.

Your best friends’ group of customers probably have a lot in common with each other. It might be they have a common goal or similar values. Whatever it is and however small, it could be what makes all the difference in connecting with other future customers.

Your group of people you have put into your acquaintance section that’s the group you need to pay a lot of attention to. Some customers in here could be strong leads just waiting for the right moment to become one of your best friends. Others in this group you could have been chasing for months and may never buy. These acquaintances may need to become strangers so you can focus on your more qualified leads.

When you need more leads, be specific of what strangers you talk to. Look for the strangers that are similar to your best friends. Think about the qualities your best friends have and take advantage of that knowledge to find strangers who show similar potential. Get talking to them and grow the number of best friends you have.