10 Smart Market Diagnosis and Profiling Questions

This little bit of magic comes from Dan Kennedy’s “The Ultimate Sales Letter Book.”

It’s the ten questions Dan always asks his clients before sitting down to write those blockbuster mail promotions he’s famous for.

Ready?

1. What keeps [your customers] awake at night, indigestion boiling up their esophagus, eyes open, staring at the ceiling?

2. What are they afraid of?

3. What are they angry about? Who are they angry at?

4. What are their top three daily frustrations?

5. What trends are occurring and will occur in their business lives?

6. What do they secretly, ardently desire most?

7. Is there a built-in bias to the way they make decisions? (I.E. Engineers=exceptionally analytical.)

8. Do they have their own language?

9. Who else is selling something similar to them, and how?

10. Who else has tried to sell them something similar and how has that effort failed?

Now, I stumbled onto this list while doing a little light reading this morning (I spend way too much of my time with marketing and copywriting books pushed up under my nose) and was struck by a few things that are worth noting:

-Any list that has the word “esophagus” in it is A OK with me.

-Nowhere in this list does Dan ask for demographics like age, weight or race. (Now, I like to know at least some of that info, but too many marketers make the deadly assumption that all middle-class, 50-year-old white men are the same.)

-Number ten is legitimately something I had never thought to ask before. We all know failure is a great teacher (The most successful people I know today failed many times getting there) but it’s not just a teacher for the folks doing the failing.

Study your competition, and when they fall down, get real close and examine the mud on their faces. You’ll learn something.

And now I’m off to go camping. No blogging, writing or email for 2 whole days. I doubt I’ll survive. Tell Martha and the kids I love them. And don’t you shed a tear. I’m going with my boots on.

c

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