A friend of mine, Anh, invited me into a group I should have simply been grateful for. She’s built a small business of her own and spent years cultivating a genuine community of other small-business owners around her. She’s included me more than once, brought me along to Content Marketing World where she was a speaker, and introduced me to two people who’ve become real relationships. Amy promoted my book. I interviewed Alek for it. Anh has also had me on a monthly call with a small group of business owners who’ve been supporting each other for years.
And instead of just appreciating the invitation, I caught myself sizing up the room. Who has the biggest clients? Who knows the kind of executives I’m trying to reach? Who can help me now?
It was ego, and honestly, it embarrassed me once I noticed it. Sizing up a room full of people who had done nothing but include me is a lousy way to repay generosity. But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized ego wasn’t the whole story. I had started looking at some of my relationships as transactions. And somewhere along the way, I’d drifted from one of the North Stars that built my business in the first place: build relationships, not leads, not prospects, not a pipeline. Build relationships. That’s it.
I Know How It Happened
Like every small-business owner, I have numbers to hit. Quarterly targets, revenue goals, payroll, forecasts, and the question that never fully goes away: where is the next piece of business coming from? When you’re worried about revenue, it’s easy to start looking at everyone through that lens. Is this person a prospect? Do they have budget? Are they a decision-maker? Can they introduce me to one? How do I move this forward? All reasonable questions, until they become the only questions.
Because once that happens, people quietly become opportunities. Relationships become funnels. Conversations become qualification calls. And you start overlooking the very thing that created most of your business in the first place. And, that’s what happened to me. When I stopped looking at these relationships and started looking at as a pipeline. And when I examined where my work has actually come from, I noticed something: it almost always started with a relationship.
Nathan Was a Terrible Prospect
Years ago I met Nathan while doing some work for a large client. If I’d scored him as a sales lead, he wouldn’t have scored well. No direct reports, no budget, no ability to hire me. In CRM language, Nathan was a dead end.
Except Nathan wasn’t a lead. He became a friend. We stayed in touch, talked, and helped each other out where we could. Eventually he changed departments and told his new boss about me. That boss hired me. I built a relationship with him too. Years later, he referred me to his wife. She’s now a client.
Nathan’s boss and his boss’ wife became clients. No sales funnel would have predicted that chain. No lead-scoring model would have told me to invest in this guy because there was business three relationships downstream. If I’d evaluated Nathan solely on his ability to buy something from me at the time, I would have missed a friendship, and everything that came from it.
And Nathan Isn’t the Exception
Once I started looking, the pattern was everywhere. My friend John is a good example. He’s spent his whole career in sales, but John has never really been about converting leads or closing. He’s about the relationship first, and the business, when it shows up, shows up because of that. I couldn’t tell you how many times a conversation with John turned into an introduction, or an introduction turned into something more, simply because he treats people like people and never like they are just accounts.
He’s not the only one. Different friends, different circumstances, same pattern. Very few of the important relationships in my career began with me thinking, how do I close this person? They began with conversations, curiosity, helping someone, staying in touch, doing good work, making introductions, having lunch, sharing an idea, being useful when there wasn’t an obvious payoff attached to being useful. Sometimes an opportunity showed up fast. Sometimes it took years. Sometimes one relationship led to another, which led to another, which eventually led to business. And sometimes no business happened at all. That last part matters as much as the rest.
A Relationship Isn’t a Longer Sales Funnel
There’s an easy way to take the wrong lesson from all of this: don’t focus on transactions, build relationships because relationships eventually generate transactions. No. That’s just transactional thinking with a longer time horizon. If I’m building a relationship with you because I’ve calculated that someday you might buy something from me, I’m still treating you like a prospect. I’m just more patient about it.
The relationship has to have value on its own, whether or not a transaction ever comes from it. Some people I’ve known for years have never hired me, never referred a client, never bought anything from me, and I don’t measure those relationships by that absence. Business is something that happens because of some relationships. It was never the reason I built them.
I Started Looking at the Scoreboard
I’ve always considered relationships one of my strengths. They’ve been foundational to my career. But somewhere along the way I started worrying more about the scoreboard: quarterly revenue, new business, pipeline, sales targets, the things every business owner has to worry about. And without really noticing it, I began evaluating some relationships by their proximity to those goals. Can this person get me where I’m trying to go? That’s a very different question from who is this person, and I’m not proud of how easily I slid from one to the other.
There’s another problem with the first question. I’m terrible at predicting the answer. We all are. I couldn’t have predicted Nathan. I couldn’t have drawn the line from some of the people I’ve met to the clients, opportunities, friendships and introductions that eventually followed. Relationships don’t move in straight lines. They create networks, and networks create possibilities you can’t see from where you’re standing today.
So I’m Resetting My North Star
I’m still going to have sales targets. I’m still going to build a pipeline. I’m still going to ask for business and measure results. Running a business requires all of that. But those things can’t become the lens through which I see everyone I meet. I don’t want to sit in a room wondering who’s important enough for me to know. I don’t want to evaluate someone’s value by the size of their company or whether they can help me hit this quarter’s number. And I don’t want to become so accustomed to being the person who provides value that I can’t let someone else provide value to me. That may be the hardest part, because sometimes building a relationship means giving, sometimes it means asking, sometimes it means making the introduction, and sometimes it means being willing to receive one.
That’s still the work I have in front of me with Anh’s group. I don’t need to rank the room to belong in it. I need to show up, ask for the things I actually need, and let Amy and Alek and everyone else in that circle be as useful to me as I’ve tried to be to them.
Nathan was a terrible prospect. I’m really glad he became a friend instead.
