For a ‘lonely’ hard working freelancer that relies on clients to pay the bills, that’s a BIG deal to say NO to.

So why the heck did you do that?

Helping coaches SUCCEED is my primary motivation. If I were just in it for the money, heck yeah, I’d have taken that contract.

However, there are certain telltale signs where you can see that no matter what you do, certain coaches will fail because their know-all ego gets in the way.

As a marketer and copywriter, my focus should be on the copy and the message, NOT on a battle the business owner...

To put some context on this story, read this reaction after I sent my Client Onboarding Questionnaire to start RESEARCH on the clients' Avatar, the products, the offers and, where applicable, the Attractive Character.

This questionnaire is just the start. We (copywriters and marketers) KNOW that the success lies in the research and getting a DEEP understanding of WHO we talk to, WHAT they really want, and WHY they’d need the solution we offer.

When you get this as an answer, I started to wonder:

Yes, the questions we ask business owners about their business, avatar, products, offers etc… are extensive, probably about an hour’s work.

What’s an hour of commitment to have someone build out a marketing campaign that is worth 6-7 figures?

What does that tell you about future cooperation/feedback/input from this client?

So what’s the point of these 31 questions we ask the business owner?

The idea, amongst others, is we want answers to 6 key areas in our research phase:

We don’t sell a product or a service; we sell an outcome!

Anyway, back our story....

I tried to get the importance of research and information across:

If the reply is “[Get lost with this] I know my avatar already”, big alarm bells should go off

EVEN if that may be true, and even if you HAVE done thorough research in the past, it NEVER hurts to do this again as almost ALWAYS new things come up.

The second big pillar during the research phase is asking the target audience.

We do this through a SURVEY. We ask the business owner to send it out to both the past buyers and leads (non-buyers) on their email list.

A survey is another invaluable tool to hear from the target audience,find out about their motivations IN THEIR OWN WORDS.

Our survey has both a mix of multiple-choice and open questions. The latter are extremely valuable to understand the language and wording the target avatar uses to talk about their pains, problems and desires.

There is nothing more powerful than being able to use the target's own language in your copy and you can ONLY get that through research.

If the business owner already shows an “I know this already” attitude from the beginning, then I know I will end up wasting energy on the wrong things.

The moral of the story...if you want to succeed, and you want to hire someone, don’t snub those that aren’t as lazy as you are.

You may miss the chance to actually achieve something by not taking Easy Street (which takes you to nowhere).

This is how the full conversation went…. and that was that!