Ask Before You Sell: Your Customers Already Know Your Market

Ask a direct seller who their customer is and you will usually hear a description of someone they imagine. Women in their thirties. Busy professionals. Health-conscious parents.

Sometimes that picture is right. Often it is a guess that has been repeated so many times it starts to feel like a fact.

The good news is that you don't have to guess. The answer is sitting in your phone, in the names of the people who have already bought from you.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. — Sun Tzu

What versus why

Information tells you what is happening: which age group buys, which product sells most, what the competition charges. It rarely tells you why.

In this business the why decides almost everything. People buy for reasons they feel long before they can explain them, and those reasons are often not the ones on the brochure.

Someone may buy a product for themselves, or for a parent, a child, or a friend who is struggling. If you don't know which, every message you write is aimed slightly to the side of the target.

Ten conversations

Here is a method that costs nothing but a few coffees and some patience. Do it once a year, or any time your sharing stops landing.

• Choose ten people who have already bought from you. Start with customers rather than prospects, because they have already made the decision you are trying to understand.
• Ask for their help, not their money. "I'm trying to understand my customers better. Could I buy you a coffee and ask a few questions?" Very few people say no to that.
• Ask about the decision. Why did you buy? What were you hoping it would help with? What nearly stopped you? Who else did you think of when you bought it?
• Then be quiet. The first answer is usually the polite one. The real answer tends to arrive after a pause, if you are patient enough to leave the pause alone.
• Write down their exact words. Their phrasing becomes your language later, so don't tidy it up.

Look for the pattern

After ten conversations, read your notes in one sitting. You are looking for repetition, not for the most interesting story.

One person is an anecdote. Six or seven people saying a version of the same thing is your market telling you something.

Most people who do this find at least one surprise. Sometimes it's who is really buying. Sometimes it's the reason. Often it's an objection nobody ever said to their face.

Then change what you say

The point of listening is to change your next conversation. If your customers talk about looking after their family, your sharing should sound like that, in their words, not in the language of the product sheet.

Change who you speak to as well. Many builders discover they have been aiming at one group while a quieter, more loyal group was buying all along.

Small shifts in wording and audience often matter more than any amount of extra posting. You stop shouting at a crowd and start talking to the person who was already listening.

Why this is harder than it sounds

Asking feels slow. Most of us would rather be doing something that looks like selling. And listening means hearing things we would rather not hear, such as why someone almost didn't buy.

That discomfort is exactly why it works. The builders who are willing to ask, and to hear the answer, end up knowing their market better than people who have been in it far longer.

Knowing the other side takes two things no report can sell you: the humility to ask, and the discipline to listen before you decide.

So, this week: when did you last ask a customer why they bought, and listen to the whole answer?