Ten questions in their words
Everything so far has produced your description of your buyer. This lesson produces theirs, and it is the raw material for Levels 1 and 2.
You are collecting real questions, asked by real people, in the words they used, from sources you did not write. Ten is the working minimum and fifty is better. They come from places you already have and rarely read as a corpus.
- Sales and support conversations. The question asked before the answer was given.
- Search terms that reached you, from your own search console rather than a keyword tool.
- Reviews of you and of your competitors, particularly three-star ones, where people explain rather than praise or complain.
- Comments and replies on content in your category, including content that is not yours.
- Questions on public forums and community sites in your field.
- The messages your salespeople get after a proposal is sent.
The rule that makes this useful: keep the wording. Not the topic, the sentence. "Do I need a licence for this in Nigeria" is not the same asset as "regulatory requirements", and the difference is the whole exercise. A buyer's phrasing is simultaneously your query list for Level 1, your content list for Level 2 and your objection list for Level 3.
"Can I use it if my accountant already does my books, or is it one or the other?"
Verbatim. Carries an objection, a search phrase and a page title, and could not have been written by anyone inside the company, because inside the company the answer is obvious and the question is therefore invisible.
"Integration with existing accounting workflows."
A topic. Nobody typed it, nobody said it, and the fear behind the original, that adopting this means firing someone they like, has been removed.
Two disciplines make the collection worth having.
Record where each question came from and when. A question from a support ticket in the last month and a question from a forum post from 2019 are not equally live, and you will not remember which was which. This is also the beginning of the record-keeping habit that Level 5 depends on.
Separate questions people ask you from questions people ask about the category. Questions asked of you are already qualified: the person has found you and is deciding. Questions asked about the category come from people who may never have heard of you, and they are where Level 1's opportunity lives, because those are the searches happening whether or not you exist.
Then check what you already have. Take your ten questions and, for each, name the page or the piece of content that answers it. Most organisations doing this for the first time find that between half and all of their questions have no page, and that several of their existing pages answer questions nobody asked. That table is the input to exercise 1.A, and it is more useful than any keyword research tool, because every row in it came from a person.
Which source is most likely to produce a question your existing content does not already answer?
You collect fifty questions and find that twelve of them are essentially the same question asked in different words. What should you do?
Notes are kept with your account, alongside your progress and your gate claims. The lesson itself is readable without one.