ONE THING TO TRY
Find three real questions prospective customers have asked. Separate their exact words from your interpretation, then write one specific, honest answer to a recurring concern.
Help someone make a clear decision
Interest doesn't tell you everything about readiness to buy. Before explaining someone's silence, find out what they still need to understand—including whether your offer is the right fit at all.
Four questions to make your marketing clearer
Outcome: what will this help me do? Fit: does it work for someone in my situation? Evidence: what gives me a reason to believe it? Effort: what will I need to contribute after I say yes?
A useful example, an honest fit statement, and a clear picture of the first week can answer questions that a longer feature list leaves open.
Try this after listening
Choose one offer and find three actual questions from emails, messages, or sales conversations. Write down the exact question, then separately write what you think the person is trying to understand. Choose one recurring concern, answer it honestly and specifically, and listen for what people ask next.
Links from this episode
Transcript
Why interest goes quiet
Hey friends, hope you're doing well. And I'm excited for today's episode. We're talking about this concept of what makes someone feel ready to buy. I think we've all been in the situation where someone asks about what you sell. And if we're being honest, I think most of the time we don't have the perfect sales pitch ready. It's a bit of like, I do this, or I do this, or I work on these types of things. And especially if you're an agency owner, sometimes it can be a little bit confusing. And I think how to structure that is important, but we're not going to be talking too much about that today. but you know, keep listening to podcasts. We'll probably do an episode on it, but it's really the concept of this. When someone asks you about what you sell, they want to know how it works. They ask about the price, you send the details and you think, okay, this is going somewhere. Like they are going to purchase my thing right now. I know this from my own experiences with DevLaunch. If you've ever worked with us with DevLaunch Learn, I'm sure you've sent me a DM or commented on a post or sent an email. And I'll tell you this right now, about 40% of the people that message us will ask three questions and then not respond. And then they'll come back six months later and then they'll do something or ask more questions. That's normal. It's okay. But you've probably been there where they ask all these questions and then it gets quiet. It's easy to fill that silence with your own explanation. The price must've scared them. They must not understand the value. Maybe you need a better closing line. I need to go read four more books or go watch 20 more YouTube videos. Those things are possible, but we can get so busy explaining the silence that we stop paying attention to the person making the decision. They might still be trying to picture what happens after they say yes. Not what you say, but what they're going to do. What is their next step? And that's the question I want to work through today. What makes someone feel ready to buy? How do we make our marketing more useful at that moment? This came up in a conversation on one of our live calls recently. And we were talking about how people feel, how they reason through a decision. How someone moves from being interested to becoming a customer. I've been an agency owner for more than 15 years, own multiple businesses across multiple industries. The questions matter whether we're talking about a service, software, or education, the details change, and someone still has to make that decision whether this commitment makes sense for them. And I think that's important. I want to be careful about the word ‘ready’. We don't get to decide that someone should buy. They may understand everything and choose a different option, or they might have more important expenses. Our job is to help them make a clear decision, including a clear no. I think the power of the no is so good. If you can convince someone to not buy the thing, I don't think that's a bad deal. I think that's just being honest. Sometimes they don't need it. So the decisions are beyond just the deliverable.
The questions behind the decision
When you're close to your work, you tend to describe what you've made. You get all into the details, five pages, a dashboard, six modules, an automation. Those are all real things. But the person listening has to translate them into their own life or into their own business. They start asking the questions of, will this help me get the thing I actually want? Will it work in my situation? Will I be able to actually use it? How much of the week is this going to take? That translation is work. And if you leave all of it to the buyer, they may walk away with more questions than you realize. We've been learning this every single day as we're building DevLaunch is sometimes clarity comes by not just evaluating a collection of pages, but giving more understanding. So they might be worried about wasting another month trying to explain their business. They may be wondering whether they have to write everything themselves. They may be thinking about who will update the site when employee leaves and you tell them the website includes a content management system. They hear a new thing they may have to learn. They don't hear clarity. They just hear more stuff and that stuff might be really great and nothing you said was necessarily wrong. You described the deliverables accurately. You just haven't connected them to the decisions the person's trying to make. So one useful place to start is to listen for four kinds of questions. Questions about the outcome, the fit, the evidence, and the effort. These aren't four stages everyone moves through in order. They're four places to look when your explanation and the buyer's understanding aren't meeting. So let's talk about outcome. What becomes different?
Outcome: what becomes different?
The outcome question is simple to ask and surprisingly easy to dodge. What does this help someone do? If I say we build beautiful websites, you have to decide what beautiful means and why it matters to you. If I say we help local service businesses explain their services and make it easier for the right customer to request an appointment, you have something more concrete to consider. That's a clear answer. That still isn't a promise that a website will produce a particular number of customers. It describes the job the website is being built to support. There is a difference between naming a useful outcome and guaranteeing a result you can't control. The first helps someone understand the offer. The second can create an expectation the work won't meet. Try finishing this sentence about something you sell. After using this, a person will be better able to do what? What is that answer? If your answer is another product feature, keep going. After using this dashboard, they can see what. After watching this lesson, they can make what decision. After hiring this service, what can they hand off? The point is get closer to an actual moment in the customer's day for our imaginary website buyer. Maybe that is a customer calling with the right information because a site explained which service to choose. Maybe it's the owner changing the opening hours without starting another project. Those moments give the deliverables a purpose. So now let's talk about fit. Does this make sense for me?
Fit: does this make sense for me?
The next question is about fit. A person can believe an offer works and still be unsure whether it works for someone like them. Maybe your example is from a company with a full marketing team and the buyer does everything themselves. Maybe the person in your demonstration already knows the software. Maybe the customer needs help getting started while your offer assumes that part is finished. This is where more enthusiasm doesn't necessarily help. If the buyer is asking whether the offer fits their situation, telling them how amazing it is leaves the original question unanswered. So a useful explanation names the starting point. For example, this is designed for an owner who already knows which services they want to sell, but needs help organizing and explaining them online. Or you can start without even knowing how to code, but you'll need time to work through the exercises and test what you build. Only say those things if they're true of your offer. Specificity is valuable because it helps someone recognize themselves in the work or recognize a mismatch before spending money. It can feel uncomfortable to say who an offer isn't built for. That goes back to the no, but a customer who buys the wrong thing creates a problem for both of you. You haven't won much if you make the sale and immediately have to explain why it can't do what they needed. A good fit statement also gives you a better conversation. So instead of asking whether they like your offer, you can ask what their situation requires that they haven't heard you address yet. I love asking these types of questions when I'm doing a sales call or working with our own clients. we've been in business for about 15 years and multiple facets of the industry. And one side of our business is our agency and that's our day-to-day work. We're a full stack marketing and development company and we still have to do sales calls. We have conversations and we still ask questions like this. It's like, Hey, I want to know what things that I haven't asked you that you need to hear. And sometimes they don't know that, but they start poking and prodding and gives me enough information to ask better questions. I think that's the majority of our job all the time is asking better questions.
Evidence: what gives me confidence?
So evidence, let's talk about that. What gives me the confidence? The third question is about that. What gives this person a reason to believe the offer can do the job that you're describing? The evidence doesn't always need to be a dramatic success story, but it needs to be a clear demonstration that it can help. So can a relevant example, an explanation of your process or a small piece of the work that the buyer can expect. Back in the day we remember where we used to have massive portfolios and websites. Now anyone can go to lovable or to an AI builder and build a website in an instant. So the portfolio has less become part of the evidence example. It's been more part of, Hey, this is just a history of work. Our evidence now becomes in reviews, testimonials, referrals. Those are important pieces in a testimonial about how friendly you are may be reassuring, but it doesn't answer a question about whether your software can handle a specific workflow. A screenshot of a finished project doesn't explain how much support the client needed to get there. Maybe that support took 17 months and it really was just a two page website. I've got to match the evidence to the uncertainty. If someone wonders whether the system is difficult to use, show an ordinary task from beginning to end. It's a simple, just record the video. I'm going to do a small plug: VideoFlow, right there. Go use it or go use Loom or go screen record, do whatever you got to do to show that process. And if they wonder how the project stays on track, explain the actual review process. If they wonder that whole process and whether you understand their industry, discuss a real constraint that you understand without pretending every business in the industry is the same. If you look at multiple roofing companies, there are parts that they do that are very similar, but it's not the same. And that's important. You can also be very clear about what the evidence doesn't establish. An example from one customer isn't a guarantee of another customer's results. Just because it worked with client A doesn't mean it's going to work with client B. It can still be useful when you explain the circumstances, honestly. And I'll tell you this right now, clients love when you set expectations and you're honest. So think about a buying a tool for your business. Sometimes the most reassuring moment is seeing somebody can do a boring, normal task with it. And you can finally picture yourself using that same thing. That picture can matter more than another paragraph on your website or another section or another cool animation or another social media post. That part right there probably does more work in the evidence than anything else.
Effort: what happens after I say yes?
So let's talk about effort. What happens after I say yes. And I think this is a big one that we always overlook, but it really is what will this require from the customer? We always think, well, once they pay the invoice, everything's going to be fine and dandy and everything's going to be magical. That's not a real statement. There's a lot of steps involved, even for our own things. When someone signs up, they have to go log in. They have to go start looking at things. They have to download things. There's a whole process involved. So we often describe what we're going to do. And we say much less about what the buyer will need to contribute. They might need to collect information, attend a call, learn a process, ask their team to change a habit or make a decision they've been avoiding. If those requirements stay vague, the buyer has to estimate them. Their estimate may be much larger than the actual work or maybe smaller. We talk about this a lot in our kind of our website stuff. So I want to go back to kind of our fictional website service and kind of compare two different examples. And I'll be honest with you guys, we've done both. So if you're listening to this and you're going, Hey, I'm stuck in this belt. Well, this, there's a process where we're making a move forward. We're making the steps and the right steps to move forward. So the first is we'll need your content before we begin. The second is we'll start the conversation about your business. We'll send you existing logo and photos. We'll draft the pages from that conversation and you'll review them in two agreed rounds. Those are different services if one actually includes the writing and the other doesn't. don't borrow the second description unless you deliver it. But notice how much easier it is to picture the work when the customer's part is very clear. That clarity helps you so much. And it helps you after the sale. You're setting an expectation both of you can work with. A useful question to answer in marketing is what will the first week feel like for the customer? Now, what will they achieve in a year? What happens first? What do they receive? What do they need to bring? Who helps if they get stuck? And I think that's where the connection is where feeling and reasoning start to meet together. So where do feelings fit into this?
Where feelings and reasoning meet
It can be tempting to divide the decision into emotion on one side and logic on the other. In real conversations. Those things can be connected. A practical detail can change how a person feels. Knowing what happens in the first week may make that decision feel way more manageable and seeing relevant examples may help create confidence. Discovering an unexpected requirement may make them hesitate. That doesn't mean we know for sure what a person feels because they ask a particular question, but someone might be asking about support. They might be comparing providers. They might just be estimating the cost of getting help later. They might simply have had a bad experience before. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's just a matter of sometimes they're asking questions so they can help manage those decisions. We need to ask instead of assigning them a motive. You could say, when you ask about support, what situation are you thinking about? This is such a great lead in when you're asking questions because you're setting expectations and able to decide those expectations before any papers are signed or even this, what would you need to understand before you could decide whether this is a fit? Because again, you're giving clarity and expectations before any statement of work or contracts or signups are done and then give them actual space to answer. The useful part often arrives after the first sentence. Their immediate first response usually isn't the answer. It's like the third sentence in and maybe you can learn that the concern isn't the website at all. It's that their team never agrees on the wording and they're afraid another project will stall. Now you can explain how decisions get made. If your service genuinely addresses that problem, then great. And if it doesn't, you can say so. Clarity includes being honest about the work, what you offer and the work that you can't do.
A practical exercise
So here's one practical exercise. Here's something to try after this episode. Once you stop listening to this, unless you're going to go binge more episodes or go watch some DevLaunch content, here's one thing I want you to take 15, 10 minutes, whatever time you got, set aside some time and here's something to try. You don't need to rebuild your entire website or write a sales presentation. Choose one offer that you're actually selling. Find three real questions people have asked before buying it. Go look in your emails, go look in your messages, go, go back to notes. If you have recordings, go use AI to go scan those for each question, write two short lines. The first is write exactly what they asked. The second, write what you think they may be trying to understand and keep them separate. The first is something you observed. The second is your interpretation. That distinction helps you stay curious instead of becoming certain about a story you invented. We do this thing in our mind where we invent stories because we're trying to fill in the gaps of things we don't understand. Now choose one reoccurring question. Does it concern the outcome, the fit, the evidence, the effort, or something else completely different? Write a clear answer you could use in your offer or your next conversation. Make it specific enough that someone can picture what you mean. Keep it honest enough that you actually experience in the process and the systems that will actually match it. So that way you can be honest. If the question is, do I need to know how to code? Don't stop at no. Explain the starting skills, what the tool handles, what the person will need to learn to do or process through. The question is, how long will this take? Explain the parts you control, the parts that depend on their situation. A range with clear conditions can be way more useful than a confident number you can't support. If you say, Hey, in the next 30 days, I'm going to help you make $30,000. Well, there are so many questions I have for that. There is no clear answer. There is no clear depiction of what's going to happen. But if I can give a range of clear conditions of saying, Hey, here's the evidence that supports this. Here's the questions that we ask. Here's the process that goes along this, and here's what's included on your side of the work. Be clear about that. Use the answer in a few conversations and listen to what comes next. Does it start resolving those questions that you're seeing repeating? Does it reveal another one? Have you misunderstood what they were asking? You're looking for a better understanding. One sale doesn't prove the wording worked. One person going quiet doesn't prove it failed. The question I want to leave you with today is:
The question to leave with
what is the person still trying to resolve? Start with something they've actually asked, help them understand that decision in front of them. That's a practical way to make your marketing more useful and a much better starting point than guessing what their silence means. Thanks for listening, guys. Appreciate it. Would love to see you on the next one.