How to Find What's Real

For three weeks I’ve told you your customer can’t tell you the truth.

She wants the fat-free burger and orders the Big Mac. She describes a minivan and drives home a Tahoe. She decides in minute fourteen and spends three weeks building the spreadsheet to prove she didn’t. And the thing she’s actually paying you for is almost never the thing on your invoice.

“Fine, Andy,” you say as you wipe Big Mac sauce off your chin, because reading about all these hamburgers made you hungry. “Everybody’s an unreliable narrator, including me. What am I supposed to do with that on Monday?”

Good news! This is the fun part.

Not because you finally get to outsmart somebody. You don’t…and that’s not the point. Now you get to stop guessing and start knowing. And getting to know a real customer, contradictions and all, is the most interesting work in your whole building. I’m over twenty years in and it still gets me out of bed. Humans are endlessly fascinating. I learn new things every single day.

Enough preamble; here’s the field guide. It’s one instinct — trust what they do, not what they say — and it shows up everywhere you touch a customer: the deal you’re trying to close, the product line you can’t decide whether to kill, the good customer you can’t afford to lose. And to be extra practical, I am throwing in some easy questions to use at the bottom of this article.

1. Climb the ladder of evidence.

This threads through every other tip in this article. Therefore, we start here.

Every scrap of “insight” you have about a customer is sitting on one of three rungs, and most of what you’re trusting is on the bottom one.

• Bottom rung — what they say they’d do. “Would you use this?” “Is this something you’d pay for?” Everyone says yes. Yes is free. This is the McLean Deluxe rung, the one where they tell you who they wish they were.

• Middle rung — what they say they did. “Walk me through the last time this cost you real money.” Better. The past is a lot harder to flatter you with than the future.

• Top rung — what they actually did, watched, not reported. What they clicked. What they renewed. What they quietly stopped using. What they put on a credit card. This rung can’t lie, because nobody’s performing for it.

You’ll be amazed what you can learn if you go full-on Jane Goodall and observe customers in their natural habitat. I enjoy having lunch with a CEO and talking about their problems…but being able to observe them for a few hours in-office, in their natural environment? It is so wonderfully revealing. There’s a reason I do just this with every business that consults me.

Two subtle but important research question traps will drag you straight to the bottom. Leading questions, e.g. “so speed’s really the priority here, right?” where you write the answer and hand them the pen. And double-barreled questions, e.g. “is reliability and price important to you?”; two questions, one answer, and now you know nothing except the two words they’ll parrot back next week.

For every “fact” you think you know about your customer, ask which rung it came from. Then climb. Trade “would you” for “tell me about the last time.” And whenever you can, trade the answer for the behavior; because the survey said minivan and the driveway said Tahoe, and the driveway is never wrong.

2. Go find your own McLean Deluxe.

You have one. I promise you have one.

Somewhere in your business is the thing your customers swore they wanted, that you maybe even built for them, that they walked right past on the way to the Big Mac:

• The premium tier nobody upgrades to.

• The service line the survey loved and the market ignored.

• The feature the focus group demanded and nobody has touched since launch.

• The “our customers keep asking for this!” product that’s quietly bleeding margin while three accounts use it.

None of those got built by idiots. They got built by smart people, the good people on your team who really want the business to win, listening to the bottom rung: to what customers said in a room when saying it cost them nothing. That’s not a marketing or product or sales failure. It’s a listening failure, and it’s fixable the second you go looking.

Pull the numbers on the thing you’re proudest of that the market never rewarded. Don’t defend it. Don’t explain it. Find it, name it, and ask the honest question: is this on our invoice because customers buy it, or because we wanted them to?

3. Win the gut. Then write their press release for them.

Your buyer decides with System 1, the fast emotional brain, and then hands it to System 2 to build the rational case. You’ve met her: she picked the vendor in minute fourteen and spent three weeks on the ROI spreadsheet that “proved” it.

Most companies sell this exactly backwards. They lead with the spreadsheet. They pile logic onto a decision logic was never going to make.

Two jobs here: First, win the gut: the fear you take off her plate, the identity you confirm, the flash of “these are my people.” That’s what actually closes, and it closes early. Then, after the yes is really a yes, you hand her the ammunition. Meaning the case study, the payback math, the tidy one-pager. Not to convince her; she’s convinced. To arm her for the board meeting where she has to defend an emotional decision to people who’ll only accept a rational one. You’re not writing the analysis to win the deal. You’re writing the press release she’ll read aloud to her boss.

Look at your website, your pitch, your proposal. If it opens with logic, it’s arguing with System 2 about a decision System 1 already made. Lead with the felt need. The problem. How she’ll feel when she implements you. Make her the hero.

Lead with what her gut is solving for. Save the spreadsheet for the defense.

4. Read the receipt, not the invoice.

The deepest one, and the one that changes everything upstream of the sale.

What your customer pays for is rarely what you think you sell. The invoice says “ERP system.” The receipt says “the sentence I get to use in the board meeting: we’re enterprise-grade now.” The invoice says “consulting engagement.” The receipt says “the McKinsey logo on the slide my investors will see.” The invoice says “pickup truck.” The receipt says “the kind of contractor people take seriously.”

Career protection. Belonging. Safety. The version of themselves they’re trying to become. None of it shows up on your feature chart. All of it is on the receipt.

Once you stop hearing that as customers being shallow, and start hearing it as them telling you (in the plainest language they’ve got) who they’re trying to become, you’re not fighting anymore. You’re listening. The best part is you might be the only one in your market actually doing it.

For your best customer and your best-fit prospect, write two lines. What’s on the invoice. What’s on the receipt. If those two lines are identical, you haven’t found the receipt yet. Keep digging.

Six questions worth stealing

Frameworks are “nice.” Nice in the way a decorative hand towel is nice: beautiful, monogrammed, and you will be asked to leave the bathroom if you actually dry your hands on it.

Here are some actual questions, using the last few weeks’ worth of concepts and frameworks, that are immediately useful. This is the application of the theory.

Steal them, swap the nouns, and notice the pattern: not one of them asks what someone would do. Every one drags them back to something that already happened, where they can’t flatter you.

When you’re trying to close

• “Walk me through the last time this problem actually cost you something. What happened?” You’re not asking whether they have the problem. You’re asking them to relive it. If they can’t, the pain isn’t real yet, and no feature closes that gap. Better yet, actually observe them with that problem! You will learn so much.

• “Last time you bought something like this and it didn’t work out, what went wrong?” That’s the fear talking, and the fear is what’s losing you the deal. Whatever they describe is the thing you have to de-risk out loud.

• “If you did nothing about this for another year, who notices, and what does it cost you?” Your real competitor is “nothing.” This makes them price it. If the answer’s a shrug, you don’t have a deal — you have a nice chat.

When a customer leaves

• “When did you first start thinking about leaving?” Not why, and not when they cancelled — cancelling is the funeral. You want the diagnosis. The honest answer is almost always months before you noticed, and it points straight at the thing that quietly broke.

• “What were you hoping would be different the week you signed up?” That’s the job they hired you to do. Somewhere between that sentence and the cancellation is your whole retention problem.

When a customer loves you

• “The last time you told someone about us, what exactly did you say?” This one’s gold. Their words are your real positioning, written by the only person who counts. It’s almost never the words on your website. Steal theirs.

• (Bonus, and the sharpest one you own): “If we vanished tomorrow, what would you have to go do?” The answer is what you actually sell: the receipt, not the invoice. If they say “nothing, I’d be fine,” you’ve got a bigger problem than churn.

And a few things to watch instead of ask

Because the top rung is behavior, and behavior doesn’t schedule an interview.

• On a sales call: do they put the next step on the calendar right there, or is it “we’ll find time”? One’s a yes. The other’s a goodbye you haven’t heard yet.

• With your happiest customers: which feature do they open first, and which have they never touched once? They’ll tell you what they love. Their click history will correct them.

• On a churned account: pull the usage graph and find the week it flatlined. That’s when they actually left. The cancellation was paperwork.

None of this is a trick. Every piece of it is a way of leaning closer to what your customer does and further from what she says…and doing it out of curiosity instead of suspicion.

Three weeks ago I told you your customer was lying to you. Then I spent three weeks taking it back. She’s not a liar and she’s not a puzzle. She’s you, holding a wallet. You don’t do any of this to catch her.

You do it to finally know her. And knowing her — really knowing her, Tahoes and ninety-dollar wine and all — is the most interesting job in the building.

So go be a stranger in your own company. Go look at her like you’ve never met her.

And tell me in the comments what you find. Have fun!