In this episode, Michelle explores why relationship marketing isn't just a growth strategy; it's one of the fastest ways to test ideas, sharpen your messaging, and get real-world feedback before investing months of time and money.
Perfecting your business behind the scenes feels productive, but is it actually slowing you down?
In this episode, Michelle explores why relationship marketing isn't just a growth strategy; it's one of the fastest ways to test ideas, sharpen your messaging, and get real-world feedback before investing months of time and money. Through practical examples and a fresh look at market research, she explains how getting in front of real people can reveal answers no amount of planning ever will.
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Hi, I'm Michelle Warner, and I'm a business designer and strategist, and in the 15 plus years I've done this work, I've noticed the same trend everywhere. Business owners are falling into the trap of centering strategies first, and they need to be centering sequence, because the reality is the steps you take in your business and the order in which you take them is more important than how well you implement any single strategy. So on this show, my goal is to fix that by helping you find and trust your own sequence of actions, rather than blindly following someone else's strategy. Welcome to Sequence Over Strategy.
Why Relationship Marketing Is an Accelerant
And listen, I get a lot of questions about relationship marketing, right? Obviously, it's something I talk about all the time.
So I get questions. What is it? How does it work?
When to use it? Why it matters? But there's one question I almost never get, which is funny, because it's actually the answer to a huge number of questions that I get.
And that question is, how do I use relationship marketing as an accelerant for my business, as a way to test things quickly, as a way to get answers quickly? Nobody asks it that way. But I hear the question that it answers all the time, aka, how do I figure out if this business idea is actually going to work?
How do I know if my messaging is landing? How do I test this new offer without building the whole thing out first? How do I know which marketing is going to actually work for me, the things that I should do for marketing?
These feel like separate questions, and in many ways they are, but also in many ways they aren't, because they can share a similar answer. And that answer is, use your relationship marketing, right? Specifically, let's use it as a way to test fast, and use it as an accelerant against other ways that you might be able to gain information.
And that's because, you know, I talk a lot on this show about relationship marketing as a system, right? As a thing that's baked into your business model, and it's running in the background, and it's this really steady and reliable engine that runs the business. But also, like, there's this other side of it, and I want to acknowledge it, because more and more people, even though they're not asking the question, they're starting to come and give me examples of times that they have used it in this way, and it both surprised them and also really helped them.
So I was like, well, time to say it out loud and talk to you all about it. So that's what we're going to do.
Nothing Survives First Contact With Human Beings
I want to start with a saying that I use a lot, and you may have heard me say this, and that's a saying that nothing survives its first contact with human beings.
And I usually say that because I hear a lot of stories, and this is very understandable behavior, but where you're sitting at your desk and you're designing, like, the most beautiful business, the most perfect offer, you know, the most carefully thought out messaging, and you have to craft these big plans before you actually go and do anything. And I see people losing months and honestly years to that, because none of that process is actually real until a human being encounters it, right? The moment that happens, the moment that you actually put content in the world, that you put an offer in the world, you will learn things that you could not have learned any other way, especially in a planning process.
And this is partially like that Steve Jobs's point, you know, when he's always like, oh, the customer doesn't always know what they want. You can't just ask them because they don't know what the answer is. And so you have to put something in front of them and watch what happens when they react.
And relationship marketing can help you do that. And this is the context in which you hear me talking about this. And when I say, you know, nothing survives its first contact with human beings, I'm constantly asked, hey, do you think my messaging is ready to go?
Do you think this is the right product? And I can certainly share a ton about my experience. But at the end of the day, we don't know until it interacts with human beings.
The Grocery Delivery Example
So there's a great example of this in the book Lean Startup. It's the story of one of the early grocery delivery services and how they got started. And they did get started.
And this is like 15 years ago, probably at this point or even before. So this is way before Instacart and everything were actual things. But when people were just starting to figure out how to do this, they didn't start by building an app and then putting it out in the world and hoping that the app worked.
Right. They didn't start running ads. Instead, they went to the mothers and other heads of households around them.
Their friends and family. And they said, give me your shopping list. And then they went to the grocery store and they came back with the order.
And then they went through it with whoever had given them the list item by item. Right. Is this the quality of produce that you expected?
Is it at the right ripeness? Is this the right brand? Did they make the substitutions in the right order?
Did I think through this in the way that you would have thought through this? And only after they had done that and they started getting confident that the groceries they delivered to their family and friends based off of the list that their family and friends had provided them, only after that started to go well, did they actually start to build something that eventually becomes the grocery delivery services we know today. And they didn't wait until it was perfect to launch an app because it wouldn't have been perfect.
Right. They got it in front of people fast and let those people teach them. And you think about what would have happened if they'd done it the other way, if they'd built the app first, spent the time and money, gotten everything technically right.
And then they find out they're asking the wrong questions about how people actually do think about their produce and how to pick it out. You'd have to go back to the drawing board and you lose months and you lose a lot of money. And so relationship marketing can be your version of going to the grocery store with someone's shopping list in order to get the information that you need.
And I will admit, like I'm biased with this because I grew up in a startup environment. And so I'm very comfortable with doing these minimal viable products or minimal viable ideas to go put them out into the world and get some feedback. And I know that not everybody has had that experience.
And so it can feel a little foreign to go out there with something that's not perfect, but I have to tell you, it is the way to move fast in an appropriate fashion, right? You can move fast by just making a bunch of decisions that who knows how they're going to lead and where they're going to lead to. And it ends up in a big mess or you can move faster, but appropriately faster in terms of getting the best information that you actually need in the most efficient way so that you can get information as quickly as possible, the correct information.
And that's where really relationship marketing again can be your version of this. Because when I teach relationship marketing as a system, I'm teaching you how to build something reliable, something that lives inside your business model and runs consistently. But as I also said, like the relationship marketing, it can be one of these fastest, most efficient ways to get in front of people and to make sure that whatever you're doing does survive that first contact with human beings.
So you don't have to build the full content strategy and hope that the right people find it and then try to figure out like, are they relating to it in the right way and all that. You can just go directly to someone who's already in the room with your people and say, can I borrow your audience for a few minutes? Right?
That's fast market research and it can apply to almost every stage of building your business and all the different pieces of your business. Let me show you exactly what I mean and give you a couple of examples of what this can look like if it's in play.
Finding the Right Clients and Connections
So we're going to talk about like, what are these practical ways?
And when I sit down and think about it, like there's four common areas of your business where relationship marketing can really function as that accelerant and they follow a sequence, which of course matters around here. We like it when things follow a sequence, but I'm sure that I could come up with ways that relationship marketing could happen in other places. But these are the four ones that really stand out and that again become the answers to questions that people are asking, even though they don't know that they should be asking the question.
Let's get into it. The first one is how to figure out your ideal connection avatars or even your clients. And now that's a little bit of a flip, right?
Because what's at the heart of relationship marketing at the heart of relationship marketing is knowing who your ideal connection avatars are so that you can reach your clients. But what if you don't know who your clients are or what if you don't know who your ideal connection avatars are, right? Like you have to find a way to get this right.
And that's one of the first questions in sequence. Like you got to know who these people are, but it's one of the harder questions to answer in your business. And so it's a little bit of a catch 22, right?
You can't really move forward until you know this, but it's hard to know this. And so if you are questioning one of these things, using the concepts of relationship marketing can move you forward really quickly. For example, if you're not sure who your clients are, your ICAs or guesses at ICAs temporary ICAs can help you figure out who your clients should be in the first place.
So let's say you have two or three possible client categories that you're considering, right? Some different client avatars with some tweaks between them, instead of sitting behind your desk, trying to reason your way to an answer or trying to make a decision or trying to figure out which one is going to be best. You can go find one ICA for each category, right?
Let's see, you have three potential clients. You could brainstorm. Okay.
Like who would be an ICA that would get me in front of each of these categories, someone who's plugged into each of these groups. And then you can build a quick relationship with them where you can borrow their audience relatively quickly. And you can do this relatively quickly, right?
You can jump on a podcast. Maybe you can get an introduction. You can borrow their audience for 20 minutes in some way.
And then as you borrow that audience, you're going to learn faster than any amount of desk research can teach you, right? You're going to be able to see who responds to your message. Who do you actually enjoy talking to?
Whose audience lights up? That's the information that you can only get by doing. And when relationship marketing gets you in front of people fast enough to actually use it, you're going to be able to sit back after that after a couple of experiments and say like, Oh, now I know who my client is.
I have a much better idea. And so the same logic applies if you know who your clients are, but you're not sure which ICA categories are worth building, right? And so the same way that we can reach out to some experimental ideal connection avatars and try to reach their audience in order to see which audience we like working with, we can apply the same thing to your actual ICAs.
So if you know who your audience is, but you're not sure who your ideal connection avatars are, which is extremely common by the way, you can do some brainstorming and testing. Instead of sitting around and wondering, you can, you know, maybe identify eight potential ICA types. Now that's way too many to have permanently.
You can't manage that many, but if you're really looking for the two to three who work, maybe you do have eight ideas. And again, instead of trying to reason your way through the list, you can go test a couple. You can reach out to one or two people from each of those eight categories and really quickly, you can see, Hey, which of these ICA types respond the best, right?
We can put aside personality types because we wouldn't want to make any judgments from that. If you happen to run into personality type, who's not a fit, but if you can get in front of their audience and if you can help the ICA understand the value, right? If the ICA understands the value of what you can bring to their audience real quickly, that's an indicator that you're moving in the right direction.
And then if you can get in front of that audience and the audience is responding well, now we have the signs that this could be a really good ICA for you. First of all, the ICA understands the value. So that means in theory that they are going to be easier to connect with, easier to build a relationship with because if the value is really obvious, everybody's going to get on board because we all love win-wins.
And then if you can extend that and see that their audience does in fact also understand it, now we are truly looking at a win-win. So that is a way that you can use relationship marketing as an accelerant rather than a stopper, right? I have people who say, well, I don't know who my client is.
I don't know who my ICA is. So I'm not ready for relationship marketing. And my response is, well, you should be using relationship marketing to figure those things out.
And then once you figure it out, then we can, you know, double down and build the system. So that's one example is if you're trying to figure out who your clients are or who your ICAs are, go do the work anyway from an experimental and curious mindset, see what you figure out. The second one is testing your message, right?
When we're relationship marketing, I talk a lot about how important it is to have a message at that awareness stage that really lands with some impact. And I call this productive and positive haunting a lot on this show, right? And there are other episodes about that, but it's the idea that the right message doesn't, you know, just help people.
It sticks. They can't unhear it. They can't unsee it.
And when there may be repeating a behavior that you won't want them to repeat or doing something that doesn't work that you have explained to them, why it doesn't work, they're going to remember you and you're going to be that little angel or devil on their shoulder that is going to haunt them in a productive way, not in a shaming way, but in a productive way where they're going to be like, Oh yeah, they were right. So here's the thing about productive haunting though. You can't really know if you have it until you're in the room with the right people and you watch what happens, right?
Again, it needs to interact with human beings. So this is a place where I see people really getting into perfectionism and they're scared to bring their messaging out until they know it's perfect, which I can certainly understand. None of us want to go out and embarrass ourselves.
I get that, you know, survival instinct and I appreciate that, but we're not going to know. We can't know until we go out and say it to people. And so when you look at how to test messaging, you can of course do that through traffic marketing too, but I would argue it's really slow, especially when you're starting out because you need enough of an audience.
You need people to be finding you through the algorithms, like getting content marketing up and running in a way that it gets noticed is difficult. Whereas relationship marketing, again, we can go to an ICA, you know, usually you can jump on a podcast relatively easily. You can do some of these things relatively easily and see if people respond.
And now you have your answer a lot faster than if you're continually getting up a bunch of different content strategies. Because what if you do have to tweak something? Now you'd have to get a whole new content strategy up and running instead of just looking for an opportunity to talk to your people and to talk to somebody who spends a lot of time around your people who can validate, yeah, wow, this really did stick in my gut.
You have said something that I'm not going to be able to unhear. Or did you just say something that was, you know, kind of generic and didn't really stick with people? So it's just one of the fastest feedback loops that I know of, right?
You're not having to track analytics and engagement rates and all that stuff. Like you can see or hear a person's reaction in real time and know if you're on the right track. Third way, you can use relationship marketing as an accelerant is in choosing your marketing tactics, right?
Because once you have your messaging, you have to figure out where to deploy it. Where are you going to go say this message? Do you want to guest teach?
You know, do podcasts make sense? Are one-on-one introductions the right move for your business? And again, you can sit around and wonder about this and we have plenty of tools that in theory would tell us what would work, but you don't know until it interacts with a human being.
So you want to go try things and relationship marketing, again, gives you a low stakes way to test a tactic without building a whole content machine around it first, right? You can jump on a podcast. Did you like that?
Did it work? Teach a guest workshop. Ooh, did people value that?
Et cetera. See what feels right and what gets traction. And you're going to know pretty quickly what is and isn't a fit.
And this is kind of what I call like the organized spaghetti version of business building. And I mean that as a compliment, right here, you're not throwing random things at the wall because somebody told you they worked or somebody told you it was required of you. You're running like a real experiment where you're saying, I think this is what I want to do.
I'm going to go out and do it real fast, see how I like it, and then either double down or move on. And so that's the difference between kind of winging it and designing it. When you're winging it, you were just doing anything and everything, like hoping something sticks and there's not really a process behind it.
Here, you're taking educated guesses as to what will probably work based on your business, based on your business model, where it lands on the marketing continuum. But then you're just using relationship marketing to quickly confirm it rather than waiting around. Fourth way, I see relationship marketing really helping with building your business and being an accelerant might be surprising for you, but based on the opening example that I gave should not be, and that's product delivery.
So stick with me. Relationship marketing can accelerate your product development because if you have someone that you can have a real conversation with, you can describe what you're thinking about building and watch how they respond, right? This is the app example.
You're going to use people and you're going to access people from your network, right? A lot of times your clients aren't going to be, you know, your family and friends at home with a grocery list, but rather business connections. And so if you can use relationship marketing to get into some conversations with people about how a product might develop, they may be really surprised at what you hear.
I have had clients who go into preliminary meetings with people who have been in their network. So there's a decent relationship there. They feel comfortable enough to go into a place where they can have an open conversation and they go in and they start describing what they are going to do.
And the other person says, you know what, what about this or we've been thinking about this. Can you do that instead? And that's a moment that gives you different product ideas.
Now you don't want to just customize and chase every single thing that comes up, but you want to have those conversations and recognize and be able to think afterwards like, Oh, was that a valuable idea of something that I have missed? Or was that just somebody who's, you know, inventing something that would be nice for them? That's not really applicable to the rest of my customers.
But often people's reaction will give you clues as to how the market is going to respond, how you might set up a product, right? Is it a phased approach? Is it a curriculum?
Is it workshops? Is it one-on-one coaching? You know, how are you going to implement this and by talking to the people who would actually be buying it or would actually be amongst your customers, you can get their reactions in a very real way.
In the same way those guys did when they were testing their food delivery app and they were shown up at a home with a banana and saying, did I pick the right banana for you? Right? That is how you think about product development is you have an idea of what you're going to deliver and then go bring it to the market and see how they respond because that information is absolute gold, right?
So that is relationship marketing as market research and product development. And it's one of the most underused tools in the small business owners kind of toolkit that we have is we think we have to ask a lot of questions when actually some of the fastest ways to product development is going out there and doing it and watching how it changes when humans interact with it and being able to iterate on the fly and understand that as you iterate, you know you're going to make changes and that's okay because you're getting information faster that way.
Key Takeaways
So those are my four examples of how you can use relationship marketing as an accelerant and it's kind of sneaky five examples because example number one is figuring out who your ideal connection avatars are, but also who your clients are. If you're not sure of those, you can use relationship marketing for that. You can use relationship marketing to test your messaging.
You can use it to choose your marketing tactics, how you're going to show up and you can use it to understand product development and product delivery. How should you deliver your product? And so that's what I want you to take from today is that relationship marketing is not just a system that runs in the background of your business once your business is up and running and perfect and now it just needs a marketing engine.
It's also one of the fastest, most efficient ways to get real information from real human beings at every stage of building that business so that you are not doing, you know, market research can have its place in the world, but a lot of times market research is best done by putting real examples in front of people and relationship marketing is one of the best ways to do that. And again, I'm going to repeat the four areas where I see this work as an accelerant the most, and those are finding your ICAs and your clients, your messaging, your tactics and your product mix. And again, nothing survives its first contact with human beings.
So when you can go and find those human beings, you are moving these really critical points of your business model. You're moving them forward in very real ways that they don't get moved forward when you're just kind of sitting there thinking in theory about what you should be doing. So as always, my friends, thank you for being here today.
If this episode helped you, I'd be so grateful if you shared it with someone else that might help, or if you left a review, which helps others find it. And remember you can always head to themichellewarner.com/podcast to check out previous episodes, jump on the newsletter list, or even drop me an email or message, letting me know what you'd like to hear more about on this podcast or how I can help you in building your own business. And with that, I will see you back here next time.