The Single Best Question I’ve Ever Asked My Prospects

best customer survey questionThis is going to be one of the shortest posts you’ll ever read from me but I have to get this out there.

I have a long form sales page.

It’s not converting as well as I’d like. I’ve been relying on people going all the way through my free email mini course in order to educate them on the product but without enforcing it as a first step.

Dumb, I know.

But in the past it was working mostly because I was happy to work on all the other random irons I had in the fire and I knew (thought) that Distressed Pro (my site) would continue to grow slow and steady if I just kept doing the things I had been doing…. maintenance mode I suppose. And it did, revenue grew by more than 60% in 2013.

That approach was fine until I set a goal to triple my business this year.

Now it doesn’t feel like that plan is working so well. Bounce and conversion rates  haunt me. My leaky funnel is the first thing I think of when I wake up and often the last thing I think of before bed. I’m running through funnels and sales copy in my head constantly. I’ve become obsessed. What can I do to get this right?

I was trying to develop my sales funnel in a vacuum.

  • Yes, I survey my customers semi regularly.
  • Yes, I get email replies from a large portion of my mini course subscribers.
  • Yes, I worked in the industry for a long time so I have a solid understanding of the struggles and aspirations folks have in that business.

But all that doesn’t tell me why people don’t buy from my sales page.

You can have all the social media interaction you like. You can respond to a sea of email. But what’s happening at the moment that someone is deciding whether or not they want to invest in your product? What’s happening right there at that moment?

I don’t know, um… Why not ASK them?

I’m a big fan of the Conversion Rate Experts.

While I was watching one of their videos they gave this one tip, that actually they sort of blew by, and then said – “it’s sort of like cheating isn’t it?”

My first thought was… “well who is really going to fill that out… nah, that will turn into another untrackable support channel nightmare like the live chat, meh, nah

Then I thought…. WTF am I doing making excuses already about how this will or won’t work? Implement the damn thing and see what happens.

So here’s the question I’m asking:

What lingering question might keep you from starting a trial today? Please be brutally honest.

WOW

The feedback that I’ve received just over the last 3 days has been a HUGE eyeopener.

It’s like my prospects are building the sales page roadmap for me. All of the objections, worries, concerns, not just about the service or security in the cart or whatever, but they’re leaving comments and questions – about their own ability to perform, questions about my credibility about the tour and on and on…

I can honestly say that I am better armed after 2 days of comments than I’ve been after reading countless blog posts and books and ebooks about sales letters.

Do this today if you’re not satisfied with your sales page conversion rate and I think you’ll be AMAZED at what you learn.

6 thoughts on “The Single Best Question I’ve Ever Asked My Prospects”

  1. Brecht, thank you for the post (as always, I am a silent reader, and definitely had to thank sooner for this site and BWK). The idea is great, please keep in touch how fixing that things really changes the conversion rates. Because, as we know, people often tend to say and do different things.

    Reply
    • Yeah so, I guess I should have explained that Christoph so thanks for asking.

      I’m asking on the sales page where the user would do step 1 of the sign up process, so on my long-form sales page. If you have a pricing page I’d suppose that’s the best place for it. The image in this post is what the js slider looks like ,it pops its head up and asks if’ll answer a question. I’m up over 30 replies at this point and the feedback is fantastic. They’ve explained exactly what I need to do to sell better. If you don’t have a thick skin don’t do this… I have a number of pretty harsh critiques in there. In the past this would have bothered me but not in this case or context.

      Reply
      • Heya Brecht,

        Thanks for this post, great idea and I’ve just added something similar to my own site on a page that’s struggling to convert. Out of curiosity, what percentage of people actually write a reply? Is it 10%, 1%, less?

      • Looks like a little less than 10% on a first step cart page that’s converting at a little less than 6%. No noticeable difference in conversion during this period so far.

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