The most direct way to find out what your customers actually want is to ask them. Not a survey, not a guess, not a look at what competitors are doing, a real conversation with a real person who has already bought from you, or who matches the kind of person you want as a buyer.
Most small online businesses skip this step entirely, and their marketing suffers for it. Here’s how to do it properly, and why it’s worth more than most of the tools people pay good money for.
Why is talking to buyers so valuable?
When someone buys something from you, they go through a whole internal process before they hand over their money. They notice a problem. They look around. They consider a few options. They hesitate. Then they decide.
Every stage of that process leaves clues, but those clues are locked inside the buyer’s head. You won’t find them in your analytics. You won’t find them by reading marketing blogs. The only way to get at them is to ask.
What you learn from even a single honest conversation can reshape how you describe what you sell, what objections you address upfront, and where you put your energy when it comes to finding new customers. That’s a lot of return for the price of a phone call or a coffee.
What should I actually ask?
Keep it simple. Three questions are enough to start.
What made you buy? This tells you what your offer actually delivered, not what you thought it delivered. Buyers often value something quite different from what the seller expected. The answer to this question is the core of your marketing message.
What nearly stopped you? This is the gold one. Every buyer had a moment of doubt before they committed. Maybe the price felt steep. Maybe they weren’t sure it applied to their situation. Maybe they’d been burned by something similar before. Whatever it was, other potential buyers are probably thinking the same thing, and if you know what it is, you can address it directly in your copy, your FAQ, or your sales conversation.
Where did you first hear about it? This tells you where your buyers actually come from. Not where you hope they come from, not where you’ve been putting the most effort, where they actually showed up from. That’s where you should be spending more time.
Three questions. Write down the answers in the buyer’s own words, as close to verbatim as you can manage. Don’t paraphrase. The exact language people use when they describe a problem or a solution is often the best copy you’ll ever write.
What if I haven’t had any buyers yet?
Then you talk to someone who fits the profile of the person you want as a buyer. A friend, a former colleague, someone in an online group, anyone who genuinely matches your intended audience.
The question changes slightly. Instead of asking what made them buy, you ask: what would you need to see before you’d pay for something like this? What would make you trust it? What would put you off?
This is not the same as asking people if they’d buy your thing. Most people will say yes to be polite, and that answer is close to useless. You want to know what the bar looks like, what evidence, what reassurance, what kind of presentation would actually move them.
Even one honest conversation at this stage can save you months of guessing.
Why do most people avoid doing this?
Mostly because it feels awkward. Reaching out to someone and asking them to reflect on why they spent money can feel presumptuous, or like you’re fishing for a compliment, or like you’re admitting you don’t already know the answer.
None of those things are actually a problem. Buyers are generally happy to talk about a purchase they felt good about. And even if the conversation surfaces some mixed feedback, that’s useful too.
The awkwardness fades quickly once you’ve done it once. And the information you get from a real conversation is so much more useful than anything you could find by staring at a spreadsheet or reading about what’s working for someone else’s business in a different country selling a different thing to different people.
How do I actually make it happen?
Don’t overthink the format. Phone works well because it’s natural and people talk more freely. Email works if that’s how you normally communicate with the person. Coffee works if you’re local. What doesn’t work is a formal survey with a five-point scale, that produces tidy data and very little insight.
Introduce it simply. Something like: “I’m trying to understand what actually matters to people when they’re deciding on something like this, would you mind if I asked you a few quick questions?” Most people say yes.
Then ask your three questions. Listen more than you talk. When something interesting comes up, follow it. Write it down as they say it.
One conversation is enough to start. Over time, if you do this with a handful of buyers, patterns emerge. You’ll start to see the same hesitations come up again and again, the same phrases used to describe the problem, the same channels mentioned as the place they first found you. That pattern is your marketing strategy, sitting there in plain sight.
Try this today
Contact one person, a buyer if you have them, or someone who fits your ideal buyer profile if you don’t. Phone, email, or coffee. Ask them what made them buy (or what they’d need to see before they would). Write down their exact words. Don’t edit or tidy it up. Just capture what they actually said.
That’s it. One conversation. It costs nothing except a bit of nerve, and it will tell you more about your market than most paid tools ever will.
Want a 30-day plan for this?
Have A Go is a free 30-day plan delivered by daily email. It walks you through the practical steps of building a small, sustainable online income, one concrete action at a time. You can get the free Have A Go plan and start today.
