3 Questions Every Customer Wants Answered Before They Subscribe/Get In Touch

As a copywriter, my job is to advise founders how to best deconstruct the fears and objections of their customers. Having written over 20 websites and hundreds of content marketing articles, here are the 3 things I learned resonate the most with potential customers:

1. “Is your price worth the product?”

Price is the most important question for customers by a fat margin. For example, a post I wrote for a plastic surgery practice (“Is Plastic Surgery Really Cheaper in South Korea?”) a couple of years ago still ranks first for a number of keywords and generates about 2,500 visitors per month. Plastic surgery is an oversaturated, extremely competitive content niche with the likes of WebMD not eager to let you in.

But communicating price is far more complicated than just listing it. It’s a delicate mechanic where you have to stay 100% transparent while framing the price in a way that sounds like a steal.

Here are a few techniques how you can frame the price without sounding like a used car salesman:

Payment structure. For large corporations, signing a $1,000 a year contract or a $2,500 service fee is a budget-driven decision. The decision maker doesn’t own the money, they’re just looking to utilize the budget as effectively as possible. For small businesses/solopreneurs, spending $1,000 now means they might not be able to go on a vacation next month. If you can turn the $1,000 price point into a $20/month deal, that has a lot of value for potential customers.

Price framing #1. Spread the price over time. For example, a $30/month deal is essentially a $1/day deal. Who doesn’t have an extra $1 to spend on your wonderful product?

Price framing #2. Compare price to potential gains. For example, if you’re selling a productivity app, how many hours a week does it save on average? If your app costs $100/mo, it just needs to deliver an extra hour of productivity in my life to pay off.

Price framing #3. Like it or not, your price is going to be compared to someone else’s. Apple executives know it, and that’s why they carefully deconstruct “your phone” and compare it to “iPhone.” Comparisons like “3x cheaper than the industry average” are not unethical—they help your customers make up their minds without doing research.

2. “What am I gonna have to do?”

What many product owners fail to understand is that the price isn’t just about the money—it’s also about time. Customers value time over everything else, so your job as a product owner and communicator is to ensure them that they will be able to plug your product into their lives with minimum effort and no disruption.

Apps like Calm are the perfect example of this: you download it, purchase the membership, and then use it before sleep.

Robust systems like Buildertrend (ERP for construction) can be ridiculously difficult to implement into a business. I’ve interviewed one business owner ($1M revenue, 12 employees, lots of contractors) who spent 2 hours a week for the last 6 months just setting up the software. In her eyes, the benefits of the ERP are slowly being overshadowed by all the effort she has to put in.

Your product probably falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. But there are certain communication pointers you can use to ensure the customer they won’t have to rebuild their lives around your product:

1. Integrations. Everyone’s using something—whether it’s Slack, Google Docs or Salesforce. By listing your integrations and briefly explaining how they work you instantly tell the customer ‘hey, we’re not inviting you into our universe—we’re merely trying to improve yours.’ That statement alone is worth its weight in gold.

2. Process. Do I have to migrate my old files? How long does it take to get an account approved? How long will it take for me to get my account up and running? Customers dread long, task-heavy onboarding processes. If you can simplify your whole onboarding process to 3-5 steps, that is of great value to the customer.

3. Support. The same ERP client I talked to was really unhappy with Buildertrend’s increasingly alienated support team. The software company is focusing on bigger enterprises and is neglecting its old, smaller customers. The more difficult your service is, the more you should emphasize your customer support.

4. “What are the downsides of your product?”

Everybody understands that your product is not the be-all-end-all software utopia, so when you try to sell it like one, it just comes across as salesy and ingenuine.

I’m talking about “USPs” like:

Your one stop shop for all things marketing
The only document management system you’ll ever need
Forget X. Introducing Y.

“Show, don’t tell” is a golden rule in any form of communication, and it plays an enormous role when money is involved. People don’t trust your opinion about your product; they want to make their own opinion via information.

But one missed opportunity I see founders make is talk only about the upside of their product. It’s like—would you really trust a date who only talks about their grand achievements and successes? No, you’d instantly label them as full of sh*t.

It doesn’t mean that you have to write things like ‘our product is really slow with Google Docs’ or ‘we didn’t get that Shopify integration because the manager doesn’t like me.’

What is greatly valuable to the customer is a genuine description of how the product is to be used. For example, a product designed for small teams should say exactly that on the website. A product designed exclusively for tech-savvy customers should emphasize that on the website.

This way, you’re both improving your relationship with the target audience and deferring potentially unsatisfied customers from your product. It’s a win win. Honesty always is.

If you’d like to take it a step further, you could even list specific cases when your product is not a fit:

Don’t use this product if you don’t use any marketing automation already
Our product may not be suitable for non-developer audiences
X only works with teams below 20 members

Hope this helps.