This Alphalink article is a continuation of The Importance of Networks in Our Relationships and The Strength of Weak Ties.
And where do customers come from?
If I received one euro for every time I was asked this question…
For a long time, when I founded Alphalink with Pedro Veloso, we were often faced with this question – and where do customers come from?
If we want new customers, let’s see where the previous ones came from, discover that magical source from which they emerge! And then we look at the history of each one, where they came from, how they got to us or how we got to them…
And, invariably, we come to the same conclusion: the customer came from where we least expected!
The first customer
An American lady is having dinner in a magnificent hotel in Évora and asks Jorge, the head waiter: ‘This is so beautiful, and what’s more, it’s an old building, everything is so complicated… who did this?’, and the only name that came to Jorge’s mind was mine.
Jorge wasn’t even sure if the lady wanted to know who the architect was, the builder, the hotel owner or the 15th century monks who launched the original work, but it was my name that he remembered at the time and…. BANG! A new client was born.
Jorge, it should be noted, was someone I’d met half a dozen times and never worked with directly.
A successful partnership
António is a Spanish businessman and is looking for a company to set up a project management partnership. They have clients who need support in Portugal and their company doesn’t have the capacity to do this, but they still want to respond to these clients needs.
At dinner with a couple friend of his, he tells them about this problem. The lady, who is a doctor and knows nothing about construction work, says she has a nephew, an architect, working in Lisbon; perhaps that would be a good place to start.
Of course, says António, and he comes to Lisbon to talk to Jordi. Jordi wants to help, but he hasn’t really understood what António does and what support he needs; he spends a day introducing him to people in Lisbon, but none of them are the partners that António is looking for. On his way to the airport, he remembered Pedro, someone he’d crossed paths with temporarily on some project. He called Pedro, but he didn’t pick up (he was out of Portugal), he called the office, they put me through and…BANG! Thus was born one of the most fruitful partnerships we’ve established to date. We did projects in Portugal, they took us to Spain and we went to Cape Verde together. I can trace the origin of almost half of Alphalink’s current projects back to that contact.
And I could go on telling stories and anecdotes about how clients came to us.
The power of weak ties in our lives
The conclusion is in line with Granovetter’s theory that I presented earlier: weak ties are what makes our network strong. The path that brought all our customers to us always passes through one or more weak ties – someone unexpected, someone we didn’t count on, someone we wouldn’t have thought to speak to when looking for customers.
If you look at the key elements of your life, both professional and personal, you’ll see that they’ve all been strongly conditioned by weak ties: your marriage, your current friends, where you live, the course you took, where you work, your profession, the jobs you’ve held. In the history of each of these elements, there was almost always someone not very close, a weak tie, who played a decisive role and changed the course of your life.
So? Are you convinced of the power of weak ties? I suggest you read the next article, where I develop some practical considerations to be drawn from this phenomenon.
Jaime Quintas
Illustration by Ana Salvado | All rights reserved.
