Buyer question research

What buyer question research is

Buyer question research produces one thing: the list of everything a prospective customer needs answered before they will hand over money, written in their words rather than yours, with a note of where each question came from and how often it came up. It is a question bank, and it is raw material.

It deliberately stops short of checking your website. Comparing this list against what you have published is a gap analysis, and that service contains this one as its first half. This page exists because some businesses want the questions for the sales team, the FAQ, the proposal template or the next round of writing, and have no interest in auditing the site at all.

When you need one

Three cases. You are about to commission a batch of writing and want the briefs to come from something other than a brainstorm. Your salespeople answer the same questions on every call and nothing is written down, so a new hire takes a year to become useful. Or your inquiries arrive already confused, which almost always means something obvious is going unsaid.

You do not need this on its own if you also want to know which of those questions your site answers already. Buy the gap analysis in that case: the question list comes with it and you avoid paying for the collection twice.

Where the questions come from

Four sources, worked through in order, because the same question sounds different depending on where it is asked.

• Sales conversations. An hour with each person who speaks to buyers, covering what gets asked first and what gets asked in the last five minutes before a yes.
• The inbox. A year of contact-form messages and support email, read for the questions that repeat rather than the ones that shout.
• Customers. Short calls with people who bought recently: what did you need to know, and where did you eventually find it.
• What people type. The phrases that bring people to your site, and what they search for once they are on it, taken from your own data.

Every question is recorded in the words it was asked in. Tidying a buyer's phrasing into your own house language is the main way this work gets ruined.

Questions that appear in only one source are kept and marked as such. Something asked once, by one customer, in one email, is not noise. It is often the thing nobody else was willing to say out loud, and it tends to be the one costing you deals.

What you get

The question bank. One spreadsheet, one row per question. Columns for the question as asked, where it came from, how many sources it appeared in, which stage of buying it belongs to, and who inside your business currently answers it.

The ranked shortlist. Two or three pages naming the questions that sit closest to a decision, in order. A question asked while someone is holding a quote is worth more than one asked out of idle interest, and the shortlist is sorted on exactly that. It also names the questions worth leaving unanswered, because answering them draws in people who will never buy.

The call. Forty-five minutes with whoever will use the list, whether that is a writer or a sales manager.

A worked example

An illustration. A Saskatoon firm that sells and services water treatment systems has two salespeople and a shared inbox. The research produces 47 distinct questions. Nine of them appear in all four sources, and of those nine, four are asked at the point of deciding: how long does an installation take, what happens to my water while it is being done, who is liable if the system damages plumbing, and what does servicing cost after the first year.

The shortlist says those four first, and says the liability question matters most because it is the one people ask last and nobody answers in writing. The firm writes four short pages and hands the same four answers to the salespeople as a single sheet. The other 38 questions stay on the list for later, which is where a question bank earns its second year of use.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, who talks to buyers, and what you already suspect is going unanswered. No charge.
2. Access and introductions. The inbox, your own site data, and an email from you to any customers you are willing to have called.
3. Collection. One to two weeks, mostly governed by how quickly the interviews can be booked.
4. Sorting and ranking. Two or three working days, then the bank and the shortlist arrive ahead of the call.

What it costs

Quoted after the first call, since the cost follows the number of sources and interviews rather than the size of your website. The number is fixed in writing before the first interview. The pricing page shows the four ways of working, and this research is included inside both the gap analysis and the content strategy plan, so it is worth checking whether you are about to buy it twice.

What happens next

The list is a brief. Most businesses turn the top of it into pages that answer properly rather than deflect, or hand it to the sales side as an objection handling document. Some take it into a content calendar and work down it over a year. The research stands on its own and none of those steps is assumed.