Imagine that you enter into Walmart and are walking up and down all of the thousands of aisles because you’re not sure what you want to buy. Suddenly, a Walmart Associate (do those even exist…I’ve never been able to find one when I need one!) comes to you and asks “How can I help you today?,” and you don’t know how to respond because you don’t even know what you are looking for. Even worse, imagine if that Walmart Associate starts offering you different items and telling you all about that item’s benefits without you even wanting the product? That would make me pretty annoyed!
That’s exactly the approach that most online businesses take when it comes to marketing their products and services. Most business websites expect that their customers found their website because they were already searching for your product or service and they know what they want. And that’s not a bad thing… your website is meant to share your products and services to people looking for it! But we can’t forget about those people that ended up on your website and are just unsure of what they want!
Now, you may be wondering how do you ask your potential customer or client what they want if they’re not even sure themselves? Well we have an answer for you! Let’s check out “The Ask Method” by Ryan Levesque!
The Ask Formula is a customer-focused method that lets you create hyper relevant offers to your potential customers to get more sales of your products and/or services. This formula can be boiled down to 3 steps:
STEP 1: Create engaging surveys to segment your audience
You begin your potential customer’s journey with a deep dive survey to get to know them better. To do that, you must build your survey in a way that makes people want to respond. Remember, this survey is for the people that DON’T know what they want, but they do know what they don’t want. So it’s best to start off with a question that will make people want to talk about their problems or needs. Then, ask more questions to segment them into different groups. For example, you could split them into whether they need a birth doula, postpartum doula, lactation counselor, etc.
STEP 2: Make a hyper-relevant sales pitch
Now that you have segmented your potential customer into their individual group AND gained your audience’s trust, it’s time to make your sales pitch. In this page you should show that you have figured out their issue and needs and then provide the perfect solution (and give a sense of urgency) to them.
STEP 3: Make the most out of your new customers by selling them more!
Right after your new customer makes their first purchase, you know that they are in “buying mode” and willing to spend. Now is the time to present them with another relevant offer that can help solve their problem or needs.
This is also the time to re-engage the potential customers that didn’t make a purchase, by getting them to subscribe to a newsletter or providing a discount code.
So why are we discussing this again?
Well, I was perusing the good ol’ Facebook and I ran across Doula Darcy’s post (on August 12, 2021) about adding passive income to your doula business. In that post, she shouted out Amy Porterfield, a digital course business mentor, and her <2 min quiz to help you figure out which direction to take. You can find that quiz by clicking or tapping here.
It looks like Amy is using the Ask Method. Not only is she using the Ask Method, but she is using Ryan Levesque’s own survey building platform bucket.io. Do you know why she is using it??!?! Because it WORKS!
Unfortunately, bucket.io is waitlist only at the moment and is super-pricey. We are talking something like $199 per month AND a $2,000 set-up charge.
So I’d feel terrible if I brought up this incredible sales method, told you it was ridiculously priced, and just left it there. What if I told you we could that if enough people want to make more money with their doula business that we could bring in a survey and quiz builder to Birthing Your Brand’s professional plan at no (zero, zilch, nada) extra cost!
Let’s take a look then, shall we! Here is a quick survey that I threw together:
Doula Business Quiz
Of course that quiz is pretty basic and does not follow the Ask Formula, but it was super easy to create and you can build yours to sell your services!
Here’s how we built it:
Step 1 is to go to the Quiz Builder tool in your website admin dashboard (once this launches…you won’t find it quite yet!). Here you can see that we don’t have any quizzes yet, so we selected the “Create A Quiz” option.
Our first step in creating a new quiz or survey is to complete the basic settings. We will start by giving the quiz a name, a description, and then selecting the type of quiz that we want to create. There are currently 4 different types of quizzes. We went with Survey.
In the Display Settings tab, we can select how to show the quiz, whether in page or as a popup. We also can control if users can retake a quiz, if we want to use a lead generation screen (where the user would have to provide name and email to see their answers), and select from one of the premade templates. Don’t worry, these templates are just guides and you can change the colors, images, and text all you want!
Our next step is to style the start screen. Here I used a title, image, description and button. You could also add a video, or just get rid of the start screen entirely and just have a button only!
Before we start writing all of our questions, we have to decide what our outcomes can be. Thinking of outcomes first helps you keep your quiz or survey organized. We created two possible outcomes (although you could have a lot more), with one being Birth Doula and the other Postpartum Doula.
Now that we have our outcomes all set up, we can start adding in our questions. You can add as many questions as you want and there are multiple different question types, including single choice, multiple choice, yes/no, text, sliding scale, fill in the blank, file upload, and more! After you have created your question and all of the possible answers, you have to map your answers to one of your outcomes. Each answer should be mapped if possible. Don’t worry though, just because they pick one answer doesn’t mean they will have that outcome. The outcome provided at the end of the quiz is the one that is selected the MOST through all of the questions.
At this point your quiz is ready. All you have to do now is go to the shortcode tab and grab your shortcode, then place that shortcode into your page (using the shortcode widget) or post (using the shortcode block) and it will appear on your website!
TLDR: The Ask Method is an awesome way to grow your business and help your potential customers determine what product or service they need from you. It’s best done using surveys/quizzes. If you want it, we can introduce quizzes to the Birthing Your Brand Platform. What say you?
