Ask Summary

1-Sentence-Summary: Ask shows you a method that helps you take the guesswork out of the equation so you can give your customers what they want even if they don’t know what they want.

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Ask Summary

Imagine you enter a store and browse the shelves because you’re not sure what to buy. Suddenly, a salesperson asks “How can I help you today?”, and you don’t know what to say because you don’t exactly know what you want. Even worse, what if she starts offering you items and telling you their benefits without you even wanting the products? You’ll feel pretty annoyed, won’t you?

That’s exactly the approach most online business owners take when it comes to marketing their products. They show the same offers on their websites and in their emails to everybody and wonder why they’re getting a pathetic response from their audience. Without asking, you’ll never know what your customers want because they themselves don’t know what they want in many cases.

Now you may be wondering, how do you ask what they want if they’re not sure themselves? That brings us to the problem that most marketers don’t know how to survey their audience. They create irritating and tedious surveys that most often capture useless data.

That’s where Ask: 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 comes in. The Ask Formula by Ryan Levesque is a customer-focused method that lets you create hyper-relevant offers so you can get more engagement and sales. As a result, you can serve more people and your business starts booming.

Here are the top 3 lessons that will help you make better offers for your audience:

  1. Know your prospects by presenting surveys they want to take.
  2. Win the trust of your prospects and gradually know them better before making your offers.
  3. Have a strategic plan after making your initial offer.

Are you ready to finally make your customers happy by giving them solutions to the problems they may not even know they had?

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Lesson 1: Create engaging surveys to segment your audience into buckets.

Surveys are boring and tedious. Nobody wants to take them unless you can them more enticing for the prospects. That’s your job as a marketer. You want to begin the journey of your prospects with a deep dive survey to get to know them better. To do that, you must craft the survey in a way that makes people want to respond.

Most people don’t know what they exactly want, but they do know what they don’t want. So starting with a question like “What’s the biggest challenge you’re struggling with right now?” will make people more likely to want to talk about their problems.

Once they’ve landed on the survey page, you need to design Prospect Self-Discovery Landing Page to increase participation.

In these, you start with an intriguing headline and mention the goal of the survey which should evoke interest or curiosity among the prospects. You can also add a short video to make it more engaging. Finally, you can hint your expertise to win your prospects and make them more likely to engage.

For those who respond, you want to collect more information about them to divide them into prospect buckets.

For example, if you help bloggers monetize their blogs, you could segment your audience into bloggers who aren’t making any money, bloggers who are making between $1 to $1000 per month, and those who are making more than $1000 per month.

Lesson 2: Make your hyper-relevant sales pitch only after you know who you’re talking to.

Once you hook the prospects, it’s time to do the Micro-Commitment Bucket Survey. Here, you want to start off with a casual multiple-choice question before you ask more private questions. Avoid the temptation of asking non-relevant questions and only ask questions that will help you refine your segmented buckets.

The next step after collecting enough information and gaining your audience’s trust is to make your sales pitch.

This page should have a diagnosis of their problem and the solution to it. You could think of it like a doctor diagnosing disease and then prescribing medicine to combat it.

Here, you could post a video, talk about the problem, and explain it in more depth.

Then, you want to provide a perfect solution and give a sense of urgency of why it’s important to solve the issue immediately.

Lesson 3: Make the most out of the buyers and non-buyers after making your sales pitch.

Your job isn’t finished once you’ve made your sales pitch. Your next move is to use the Profit Maximization Upsell sequence to continue the relationship with your audience.

Right after they make their first purchase, you can present them with another relevant offer to solve their needs. Now is the best time to do it because they are already in the “buying mode” and they’ve already entered their card information.

The offer can either be a discount on a larger purchase, a solution to a problem they may face in the future or a solution to make it easier or faster to get results.

There’s another segment you don’t want to ignore. These are more than 90% of the prospects who don’t buy.

You can re-engage them by offering them a discount soon after. But even after that, you’ll have prospects who won’t convert. Then is your chance to give them an opportunity to pivot by applying The Ask Formula all over again. You can even use the next survey for your buyers to turn them into repeat customers.

And that’s the continuous life cycle of The Ask Formula.

Ask Review

Ask is a marketing book that focuses on doing surveys the right way to give relevant solutions to the problems of your audience. After reading a lot of business books, I was looking for something unique and that’s when this book caught my attention. In my opinion, it delivered on the promise it made by providing fresh insights to understand the needs of prospects. People are looking for more personalized offers than ever before and this book helps you make that happen.

Who would I recommend the Ask summary to?

The 26-year-old man who wants to start an online business, the 38-year-old entrepreneur woman who wants to grow her business, and anyone who wants to convert online traffic into customers.

Last Updated on October 12, 2022

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Prakhar Verma

When we started out as digital coaches on coach.me (now Better Humans), little did I know that Prakhar and I would still be working together a decade later. Originally from India, he now lives in Bali and holds a Master's Degree in Game Development from Abertay University in Scotland. Prakhar is the founder of Design Epic Life, where he helps people grow into the best versions of themselves with his coaching and awesome writing, such as his book, Soul Scribbles.* He's published 5 book summaries with us, and he regularly reviews various tools and learning apps for us.