The Ask Formula is a series of surveys (or questions) designed to determine what a customer wants, along with customized sales language based on those answers to get that customer to buy. Think of it like a funnel. A funnel is a tube or pipe that is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, used for guiding liquid or powder into a small opening. A survey (or question) funnel operates the same way. You start by asking big wide questions at first, and then those questions narrow, and narrow more, as you ask your customers simple, more precise questions about their situation; until you have enough information to speak to their specific wants, needs, and desires.
People don’t know what they want.
People are really good at telling you what it is they don’t want.
There are two major concepts we need to introduce and differentiate.
The first is the Ask Formula itself. The second is my Survey Funnel Strategy
The Survey Funnel Strategy The pillars of the system are four primary surveys:
- The “Deep Dive” Survey
- The “Micro-Commitment Bucket” Survey
- The “Do You Hate Me” Survey
- The “Pivot” Survey
If you don’t know what the customer wants (or you assume you know what they want), there might be a mismatch between how you’re positioning your product and what the market really wants. Even worse, you might be offering the wrong products or services altogether—both of which ultimately lead to losing sales.
This opened-ended survey is a survey you conduct once, before you build out your online sales funnel. If you don’t have a list, and you choose to build a landing page and supporting website to acquire survey data; the primary goal of this page or website is not to make money or maximize profit, but to maximize learning. Based on the results, you’ll get information to identify your biggest categories or “buckets” of customers, as well as learn the natural consumer language to use when communicating to each of those customer groups in your marketing.
Ask people a series of small, non-threatening, multiple-choice questions prior to asking more pointed and private questions like “What’s your name and email?” Use the answers to those questions to put people into different “buckets” so you can customize your marketing, sales messaging, and the products you introduce to each customer based on what “bucket” (or group) they fall into. When using the most basic application of this survey, oftentimes the question immediately preceding the email opt-in form is what I call the “segmentation question”— a single question that determines which “bucket” that particular prospect will be added to.
This survey goes out non-buyers by email to figure out why they haven’t bought from you.
This survey is used after you’ve done your best job selling your product and the customer simply isn’t buying anything. which of the following options would you like me to talk about next? Would you like to know about Topic A, or perhaps Topic B, or maybe even Topic C?”
Everything we do is about being directionally correct rather than achieving absolute statistical certainty.
The question is: How do you find out what your customers really want—who they are, and how to market to them? How do you put them into “buckets” so you can customize your marketing to them and generate more sales? The way you figure out what the buckets are, what categories your customers fall into, is to ask a certain set of questions to your audience. It’s that simple. Ask.
First open-ended “Single Most Important Question”: the two types of questions people can accurately answer:
- What they don’t want;
- Questions about their past behavior.
Asking people what their single biggest challenge is covers both of those items Both what and why are valuable pieces of information worth gathering and analyzing, which you’ll want to echo back in your marketing By making your survey ugly, you actually create a response bias in favor of people who care enough about the topic to respond in spite of that ugly presentation.
The low-threshold question: “Which of the following best describes you?” is to identify buckets; include a write-in answer as the final option to see if I’m missing the mark. This is yet another data point to help you figure out the most important buckets worth focusing in on.
The next question you’ll see is: “Roughly, what’s the overall size of your own business in terms of... what makes more sense”
The next question in the Deep Dive Survey in our example is: “What’s your primary niche/market?”
The more you can “dimensionalize” your prospect with questions like these, the better; especially when it comes to sharing case studies, success stories, testimonials, and customer feedback.
You should expect to see a degradation in response the deeper you get into your survey. So, for this reason, it’s essential to prioritize the importance of your questions beyond the initial one.
Lastly contact info. And this “Lastly, I may want to follow up with a few people personally to learn about your situation. If you’d be open to chatting for a few minutes on the condition that I promise not to sell you anything; please leave your name and phone number below." The promise of not selling anything is key.
All of this data gives you a complete, multidimensional view of your prospect, so that when you communicate with them in your marketing to them, it feels like you almost know them personally.
All things being equal, the longer a prospect’s open-ended response is, the more likely they are to be a buyer of whatever it is you’re selling. The entire Deep Dive Survey analysis we’ve gone through up until this point has been designed to identify who those hyper-responsive individuals are, based on the score we’ve attached to each response.
Find out is the 80/20 of each question. In other words, across each of these parameters, where does the majority (roughly 80%) of the market fall? Having too many buckets is just as problematic as having no buckets at all. So you want to combine and consolidate those buckets until you’re left with, ideally, three to five buckets that address 80% of your market. These buckets will correspond to the different segments in your market that you address differently in your sales funnel either through:
- Different messaging.
- Different products you sell.
- A combination of the above.
The Prospect Self-Discovery Landing Page On your landing page, what you’re saying is this: “By asking you a few questions we can help diagnose your problem, give you the solution, and even customize that solution to help your particular situation.” Ask a compelling question.
In marketing terms, a take away is when you warn the prospect that if they walk away from the offer on the table, you will “take away” some component or even the whole offer the formula in a nutshell, from the opening “hook” headline, all the way through that final piece, the two “calls to action”, and the “take away” in between.
Wherever possible, I’m looking for 80/20 opportunities like this to reduce the number of potential survey answers to present to a prospect. Generally speaking, all things being equal, the fewer options you present, the easier the question is to answer, and the more likely your prospect will answer the question and move onto the next question in your survey.
On this page, you’re going to be doing two different things:
- You’re going to offer valuable education to your prospect for free
- This education piece will transition into an offer
You want to first provide value and build trust. Not every visitor will be interested or in a position to watch your entire video from start to finish. For this reason, you’ll want to create an “Exit Lander”: a text and graphical summary of the offer you’re making.
- The Big Benefit: What’s in it for your customer when they purchase?
- The Offer: What exactly are you selling?
- The Bonuses: What free extras / bonuses are you including?
- The Price: What discounted price / special deal are you making available?
- Guarantee: What money-back guarantee / risk-reversal are you providing?
- Reason to act now: What’s the deadline, limited quantity, or reason to act now?
Immediately after your prospect makes the initial purchase, you will present them with one or more “one-click upsell” opportunities, where they can add additional products or services—presented one at a time—by simply clicking a button, and without having to reenter their payment information (hence the “one click” in “one click upsell”). These offers are presented after the initial sale is made so as to not jeopardize the initial sale.
There are three frameworks
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UPSELL/CROSS-SELL FRAMEWORK 1: SELLING VALUE
- you are upselling more of what the customer just purchased but at the same or a better-discounted price. This framework works well with consumable products
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UPSELL FRAMEWORK 2: SPEED & EASE OF IMPLEMENTATION
- you’re upselling customers a faster, easier result. This framework works well if you can offer coaching, consulting, software, or done-for-you services that help your customer achieve the result they’re looking for—faster, easier, and with less work on their part.
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UPSELL FRAMEWORK #3: FUTURE-PACING A PROBLEM THEY DON’T YET HAVE
- THE “ALMOST AS GOOD” DOWNSELL. If your customer says “no thanks” to your initial offer, you can offer what I describe as the “Almost as Good” Downsell version of that offer (it’s essentially framed as “80% of the results at 20% of the cost.”)
The Email Follow-Up Feedback Loop: You should always “condition for the click,” meaning that every email needs to have a link that leads elsewhere.