BOOK REVIEW: Ask your way to success

Ask by Ryan Levesque

The author describes himself as "an aggressive student of marketing for more than 28 years,” and as having sold more than $ 30m worth of marketing consulting services to Fortune 100 companies such as Lipton, American Express, Colgate-Palmolive, Whirlpool, Panasonic, AT&T, Kodak and Hallmark.

The subtitle of this book is “The counterintuitive online formula to discover exactly what your customers want to buy… create a mass of raving fans… and take any business to the next level.” The author claims that his book is “the world’s most powerful marketing formula…”

The process Levesque describes should make your customers feel that you are talking directly to them, not at them. This is achieved through the “Ask Formula”, a way of asking questions that will assist you to accurately determine what your customer wants, the language of their context, and the issues and messages they want to hear. Asked correctly, they will tell you what they want to buy, and under what conditions they will be willing to buy from you.

“Instinctively, we ask people what they want. We think if we just ask them, they’ll tell us, and we can sit back and watch the dollars pour in,” says Levesque.

Steve Jobs, a man with a fine sense of what people will appreciate, said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Henry Ford believed that, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses.’”

However, people are good at answering what it is that they don’t want, and what they’ve done in the past. Had Ford asked his potential customers what they do not like about their horse, they might have responded that it is too slow, needs feeding, or only carries one person at a time.

The purpose and value of this book is to offer a formula that will allow you to identify what your customers want, even when your customers can’t quite articulate it. This is the value of the “Ask Formula.”

The method the author uses is a set of surveys. “The secret to spectacular sales (is) all about asking the right questions, in the right way, at the right time.” Levesque’s formula has had success in multiple businesses and has revitalized markets that were previously considered dormant.

When you are able to discover what your customer wants to buy through “somewhat counterintuitive” questions, and you are able to customize a solution for them, they are more likely to purchase from you. If, in addition, you can completely automate this process so it does not require a conversation with every single customer, you have a very powerful digital marketing system.

Executed correctly, these automated surveys will give you priceless information that will inform you of exactly what the customer wants to buy, and when they are ready to buy it. When you are present with the exact product or service when they are ready to buy, you will have a satisfied customer who will return for more.

Through this process of surveying potential customers, you will also be able to identify why they decided not to buy, so you can revise your campaign or correct your offering. When you have this working accurately, you have the ability to scale your business to something much, much larger.

The hard work, however, lies in getting the details of the process correct.

The Ask Formula uses a combination of questions in surveys in a very specific sequence, and requires that you act or adapt to the data you collect in very specific ways. If you are broadly addressing the right group of people for your product or service, the surveys or questions should appeal to their “sense of self-discovery and curiosity.”

The set of surveys operates like a funnel to assist you to clarify who is in your market, to engage with them, and then, further down the funnel, to refine your marketing approach to them and then to benefit by closing sales. Levesque’s “Survey Funnel Strategy” describe a step-by-step, detailed process to apply in your online business.

This funnel is significantly different to the common practice where you, as a prospective customer click on an online ad, are led to a landing page. Here you are immediately asked for your name and email address, and other details you probably would not like to enter, in exchange for a free report or coupon. Then you are shown a webpage with a “one-size-fits-all” offering, and moved too rapidly to the payment section for your payment details. Little surprise that the results are paltry.

The Survey Funnel Strategy offers a slower and more carefully crafted method that will allow you to really satisfy the client so the buying decision is so much more likely. Essentially you succeed by never assuming you know everything about your prospective customer, and you eliminate as much guesswork as possible. Having collected real data, cleverly and carefully, you better understand your market and the natural consumer language it uses.

When people do not buy you need to understand that too, so you can hone your approach for the future.

While the logic of this process is obviously compelling, the value of this book to anyone interested in micromarketing to a mass audience, lies in the clever construction of these surveys and doing the hard work.

Even if you do come to the conclusion that this process is beyond your capability, and you do need to engage the author’s company to do the work for you, you will have picked up great insights along the way.

You will also have seen proof of Levesque’s ability. You were self-selected as shown by the fact that you bought the book. You do know how complex doing the work correctly is, and you are now willing to buy it from a master.

Readability       Light ---+- Serious

Insights               High --+-- Low

Practical              High +---- Low

*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works. Views expressed are his own.