I help online businesses who find themselves in situations like these…
“We’re getting cancellations, unused features. Our buyers are using the product for purposes that surprise us. We thought we knew what problem our product was hired to solve, but we no longer do. We need to stop building and building and we need to start digging and digging.”
“I’ve just realized that the page describing my product doesn’t do it justice. It focuses too much on the benefits. I know I can make it communicate more sharply the problem it can help solve for my customers. People finding our site should feel like shouting ‘I feel understood!’”
Or maybe you’re running a service business in a field that’s on the up and up. Maybe you’re past creating deliverables and you’re more into coaching your clients. Maybe you do very custom design or animation work and you want to go for the best of the best. Maybe it’s a technical field, like in DevOps, AI/ML, Cybersecurity, Cloud orchestration, SwiftUI, plugin development for e-commerce shops.
“I’m in a specialty that I know there’s a niche for. And my site is starting to get visited, but the services I’m advertising are unremarkable, a little too scattershot, a little too generic. Better clients, that’s what I’m after. But I know I’m not making the case on what I can do for them.”
Hi, I’m
Pascal.
I offer services where I enter the mind of your buyer, and help you understand their motivations so you can sharpen what you sell; how it’s presented, how you think about what you sell, and to know what to build and what to table.
Maybe it’s that Your Industry Is Changing Real Fast and You Need Your Ear To the Gound
Previously, you were concentrating on a generic profile of buyers. But all of a sudden, those kinds of buyers are down (ie. market downturn, competition), but surprisingly, other kinds of buyers are up. What’s that about? Sharper use cases, new stories. They’re buying your thing despite your generic marketing. Time to dig deeper.
You’d like to move fast, but not waste your efforts on running experiments. You’ve talked to some recent buyers, but something still doesn’t add up. You want to understand what’s going on.
Maybe it’s that Your Product Offers Too Much and Those Features Don’t Sell Like You Hoped
Cancellations, unused features, tepid sales calls. Your product overserves.
You got there by doing the right thing. You listened to your customers and built what they asked for. But now your mountain of features is creating anxiety for new buyers. They look, they pause, they leave. Too much going on here. They didn’t even get to your product, because it’s your home page that drew them away.
Maybe it’s that You're Getting Attention and What You’re Offering Isn’t Sharp Enough
Something happened and you’re starting to be noticed. People get it. You get links sent your way, mentions everywhere. But your home page sells something generic, something comfortable, safe. It’s certainly not producing that “Yes! I feel seen!” response from your visitors.
Enough is enough. Time to sharpen your marketing pages.
Imagining When It’ll All Be Done
- Those new purchase stories you’ll have heard will be top of mind, offering you a deeper understanding of your buyers…
- That marketing page will scream “we understand what you’re going through”…
- Your product team will know what causes someone to buy your product, which of the features is really supporting the “job” your product is being “hired” to do…
- Your strategic direction will have a new vocabulary to describe how your customers need help getting progress on their struggles…
What I Offer
“It’ll take too long to figure it out if I do it myself, and I don’t want to miss the boat. How can we team up?”
/understand – A research boost to focus your product priorities. When you’ve got to take a pause and dig into what motivated your buyers to “hire” your product. Maybe you’re getting cancellations, or people aren’t using the features you’ve developed, and you’re left a little surprised. You can’t continue building and building, and need to start questioning a little bit more.
/review – A professional review of your landing page (or of your draft). You’ve got a landing page, you went far enough on your own, sought feedback, made tweaks, but now’s the time to bring someone in for a review. You don’t want to be an expert in landing page writing, and you’d rather spend your time being an expert on your work. Three options, including one free option. For products and service businesses. Don’t miss the sample videos.
/visualize – A consulting call. Preceded by an email exchange to learn how I can help, the focus of the call (the main value to you) will be about consulting you on what to do next. Additionally, our discussion will give me the information I need to put together a proposal for further work for you, if that’d be helpful (I won’t try to upsell you). CDN$ 250, including our back-and-forth over email ahead of the call and the call itself (about an hour). I’ll wave the fee if you choose to go with one of the above packages.
/diy - Free, a collection of starting points on conducting /interviews, on creating /struggle-first landing pages, and on using the idea of /value-ladders.
/articles - Free, my articles are published every Friday. They cover topics from buyer psychology through the lens of Jobs-To-Be-Done, to copywriting and sharpening your products and services. Sign-up below.
/your-purchase-story - I pay you USD $60 for you to tell me a recent purchase story. I’m looking for a time you hesitated a lot, purchased it for yourself, and a few other things I’m looking for. I might blog about your story too (names and details removed), but that’s basically the deal.
Since You Were About to Ask…
How do I go about doing the buyer research, like you do?
It starts with a messy process of understanding the buyer’s vocabulary, the options she considers, and mostly, knowing that “doing it myself” is your primary competitor here. What will people do in-house, on their own, or learn how to to build? Go hang out in forums and Slack communities, and listen for the pains and struggles. Then your research might take you to conduct purchase interviews, a specific technique that retroactively looks at the story of a purchase (of a competitor, of a piece of software to do it themselves, or a hire). What’s needed: that the buyer went through a good amount of deliberation before the purchase. Here’s a list of questions you could use during this Purchase Interview.
Do you do all the copywriting, including blog posts?
I only write the copy for the marketing pages of your site. I know of a good writer for your blog posts and your guides, if that’s something you’d like some help with.
Do you also do any data analysis, or data infrastructure work?
My focus is on qualitative research – digging through messy anecdotes for clues, finding the trail of motivations that led a person to your door. But I know a guy who does the quantitative part: setting up a data collection system that’s replicable, producing insights from data. We can actually team up if that’s what you’re after: we could offer a complete solution from support channel trends to unearthing new Jobs-to-be-done through purchase interviews.
Do I have to understand the Jobs-To-Be-Done theory, which I see you talk about a lot in your articles?
The Jobs-To-Be-Done theory of buyer behaviour (here’s an intro with some examples) is pretty central to the practice I propose you take up. It insists on concepts like the “struggling moment” being the requirement for any start of a purchase journey, the main trigger for of all jobs-to-be-done. It talks about the Four Forces of Progress, “non-consumption” being your major competition, and how you compete with surprising other alternatives. It’s a strong lens you can use, and I highly recommend it.
Drop by anytime
You just want more lift happening. You want to help your customers lift themselves to newer heights, and that’s exactly what I want for you.
Stay Sharp!
Pascal Laliberté
pascal@hey.com
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
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