Building relationships with your members one conversation at a time

With all the talk about AI, “hacks,” scalability, and productivity, returning back to the one-to-one call is the ultimate relationship hack. You can’t build relationships with thousands of people you don’t know. This year it has become clear that people need connection, and it is a “high touch” marketplace.

That means that anyone in a service-based business, like coaches, consultants, freelancers, marketing professionals, or community builders, must stop scaling so much and start connecting with their members one individual at a time.

The best way to build relationships is simply speaking one-on-one with your ideal members. You may not have prioritized this due to time constraints, but skipping this step will force you to make a lot of assumptions.

If you haven’t asked an ideal community member about their challenges, needs, and goals, you don’t know if your solution will be helpful to them. If you’re unsure who your ideal members are, start with your existing network. Open up your email and phone contacts, Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, or Instagram followers, and find 10–20 people within your network who best fit your ideal member.

Cultivate an environment for conversations.

Suggest a virtual meetup once you’ve identified a few people you’d like to ask to chat. Ask them where they spend time online. Find out if they are active in any online communities, have taken any online courses, or have been a part of any group programs.

Learn about their current lifestyle. Ask them to consider where they are about the problem your community will solve and where they’d like to be in a year. Connect the dots between their experiences and others like them and explain how an online community might be beneficial. It’s proven that significant lifestyle shifts are more easily achieved with like-minded people supporting each other.

Validate their pain and frustration. Ask them why this shift needs to happen sooner rather than later. If possible, find out why they want to change, if they’ve tried in the past, or if they know of others who’ve been successful. Then verify that they are interested in changing, as they may not be ready. (That’s okay! Your goal is to attract those willing and able to participate fully.)

Be strategic about your questions but authentic about your interest. This is a template for speaking with your members, but this is not what you should copy and paste into an email. I work with clients to customize these interviews, but since you are reading this and not working with me right now (unless you are), you will need to know how to fill in the blanks.

To collect the data needed and send out these kinds of messages, you’d need to have a strong relationship with them.

While social media and websites serve the masses, a community is a way to go deeper. You can expedite the sales process by focusing on your ideal member and getting to know the person who could make up your first beta launch.

Here’s what I mean. Most business books discuss the “know, like, and trust factors,” which I’ve mentioned earlier, with needing to develop deeper relationships with collaborators.

Spend time getting to know your ideal members and approach the conversation strategically, focused on the key community questions listed below:

• Do they have the problem you think they have?
• Do they want your help?
• Do they want help from a community of peers?
• Do they want to be a part of an online community?
• Have they been a part of an online community? If so, when and where?

During the call or meetup, you can decide the best approach with this individual, but you’ll want to find out the answers to the questions above and confirm they fit the community concept you envision.

The downside to ideal member interviews is that they take time. You will need to block out time for the following tasks:

• Research your network for potential ideal members.
• Identifying at least 20 that fit your ideal member profile.
• Personally reaching out to each individual with a warm reconnection note to see if they’d be willing to chat with you.

Surveys save time and help creators with large audiences confirm assumptions.

Suppose you’ve been in business for a while and have established an audience through social media, an email list, or networking groups. In that case, a survey may help you identify the best people to speak with before you reach out to arrange coffee chats. You can refine your list of potential ideal members by posing questions that best align with your community concept. Here’s how you can craft and carry out a survey to help you produce a refined list:

• Write out your community purpose, vision, and mission using the information you know about your existing audience.
• Pull testimonials and emails from previous clients to find commonalities among these individuals based on their needs and challenges, which can then align them with the benefits of the community.
• Decide how your community concept can meet these needs and challenges. Rewrite each problem statement as a question. For example, if a past client has said they struggled with getting something done, ask: “Would you be interested in an accountability group to help you accomplish this task?”
• Turn your community’s mission into a written statement that can serve as a call to action for those who need it. Give the viewer a picture of what information you’re seeking, from whom, and what’s in it for them. Include how they can learn about when your community will launch, should they be interested.
• Finalize a list of the most active audience members, then send a survey with fewer than 10 questions. The questions should be short and relevant to their needs, not yours.

Survey Tips

• Have a clearly defined purpose easily understood in 30 seconds or less.
• Make it easy to complete in 5 minutes or less.
• Keep questions brief and to the point (multiple choice, yes-or-no answers).
• Don’t forget to ask if you can contact them for further discussion.
• Give them the incentive to complete the survey (a discount or special offer).
• Assign a deadline to encourage immediate action.

Hire an interviewer.

Finally, if time constraints exist and a budget is available, I recommend bringing in an expert who can ask questions for you. Depending on each interviewer’s method, you may or may not have a role in the process.

As a former journalist and reporter, I am skilled at asking questions, communicating clearly, and uncovering hidden gems during interviews. In 2021, I was hired by Paul Bradly to help him conduct interviews; together, we crafted practical questions and found the best interview candidates to validate our assumptions about the problems his new community would solve. I later interviewed him for the Community Strategy Podcast, and here’s what he had to say about discovery interviews:

Episode 56: Earning your members’ Trust with Paul Bradley

“If you can get people to talk to you, it will be instrumental in helping craft the community cadence. The questions that we used in our discovery process, which was hugely successful, taught me so much about the needs of our ideal members. If you create what they need, they’ll start to engage, and then once they’re engaging, they’ll tell you what they constantly need just with their engagement. Regardless of what your community is doing, whether it’s a huge corporate thing or trying to get people in small groups to pay your subscription fee, it’s all about earning trust.”

Paul later referred me to his colleague, Theresa Anderson, who hired me to conduct discovery interviews as the company Agorapulse was preparing to launch a new product. We worked together to develop questions to ensure the product launch succeeded.

She wanted to work with me to have an unbiased individual asking these questions and to get a different perspective. I knew nothing about their software and wasn’t among their target audience, social media managers. Additionally, I brought to the interviews a willingness to learn about their challenges, experiences, and needs.

Though we began with assumptions about what social media managers experience, we made sure our questions didn’t reflect any bias or preconceptions. (If survey questions unintentionally influence people to answer a certain way, the data can’t be fully trusted.) And as we discovered, many social media managers were doing much more than just reviewing data and reporting to leadership.

We also learned that thanks to their widely varying roles, “engagement” in the Agorapulse community meant different things to different people.

The product Agorapulse was launching was a dashboard for customer metrics. In other words, a place for social media managers to see all analytics in one place. Theresa was able to gain valuable insights from our survey. Her most significant discovery was that the dashboard would not only be convenient for customers but also save them (and their company) time and money. Because Agorapulse had been spending so much time building, launching, and marketing, they welcomed this confirmation that the tool would land well with their target audience.

Episode 73: The Value of Discovery Work with Theresa Anderson

“I feel like discovery doesn’t always get its due as far as how important it is when you’re doing pretty much anything. It’s easy to get in your own bubble.”

What you need before hiring an interviewer:

• Know your expectations and ensure the interviewer understands what you need. Set up a meeting to review the goals, timeline, and outcomes before the interviews are scheduled.
• Make sure the interviewer gets the full picture of your survey’s purpose. Let the interviewer know the kinds of data you’re seeking. For example, if you’re asking about a community you want to build, clarify that you’re looking for honest responses about your customer’s journey, their past experiences in communities, and how they might want to connect with others in yours.
• Ensure the interviewer has experience developing unbiased questions and can gather neutral information. Especially if you have an existing audience, you may need to seek respondents with different perspectives. Let’s say you’re surveying 15–20 people; these may include past clients but also those who’ve engaged with your content but haven’t yet hired you or bought your product.

If someone’s experience with you wasn’t positive, consider asking for their opinion, too. Understanding why your solution didn’t ultimately help them can be just as useful as glowing reviews.

Send questions or comments to Deb@FindCalmHere.com.