This Market Research Strategy Will Guarantee You Sign More Clients and Make More Sales

The Biggest Lie Beginners Believe About Marketing

When I first got into entrepreneurship, I had this veil over my eyes. I remember watching dropshipping tutorials, Facebook ads breakdowns — all of it. These guys would say things like, "Make a claim, like '9 out of 10 dentists recommend this tooth powder.'" And I'd sit there nodding, writing down these generic, low-impact claims, and just... keep trying to sell things.

It didn't work. Obviously.

But it took me about a year and a half to finally break past that veil and understand why it wasn't working.

The answer changed everything: you're not working an input-output machine. You're speaking to individual humans.

No formula. No template. No "just write this in your ad and watch the sales roll in." That's not how any of this works.

The Instagram Agency Mistake That Taught Me Everything

My first agency was an Instagram growth agency. I literally copied the business model from two guys I found online — their value proposition was simple: "We'll help you get more followers."

I figured I could do better. I'd make a smarter claim. So I positioned it as: "We'll help you make more money on Instagram."

Made sense to me. More money is better than more followers, right?

Except my niche was fitness coaches and influencer-adjacent people — and here's the thing I missed completely: they didn't actually care about making money on Instagram. They just wanted more followers. That was it. That was the whole game for them.

I had made an assumption that was totally wrong. And that assumption was killing my business.

The moment I switched back to leading with follower growth, things started moving. Not because "more followers" is a smarter claim in some universal sense — but because it was the right claim for the specific humans I was talking to.

Why Most People's Offers Have No Evidence They Even Work

Here's a pattern I see constantly: someone learns a few high-income skills — a little Zapier, some copywriting, some sales — and then tries to stitch them together into an offer with a value proposition that has zero evidence behind it.

They heard "build an agency" or "start a consulting business," so they just... make something up. They guess at what the market wants. They assume.

That's the trap. And I fell into it too.

You cannot sit in a room and think your way to the right message. The market tells you what it wants — but only if you shut up long enough to listen.

The Exact Tactic That Spiked Our Opt-Ins Immediately

A few days before recording this, one of our setters on the Client Ascension sales team was sharing text message conversations with prospects in our team chat.

Two lines stood out:

• "I've wasted so much money on Facebook ads."

• "I don't want to have to rely on an outside agency to get clients."

I took that exact syntax — those exact words, almost verbatim — and dropped them onto our landing page. Then I ran a split test in ClickFunnels.

Immediately. More opt-ins. More sales calls booked. Done.

Not because I'm a genius copywriter. Because I stopped putting my words in my prospects' mouths and started using their words instead.

Precision Language Is the Real Skill

This is the thing that separates people who grow from people who plateau: finding the precise language your prospects are already using.

Not what you think they care about. Not a cleaned-up, professional version of their problem. The raw, unfiltered syntax they use when they're frustrated, stuck, or searching for a solution.

When we first launched Client Ascension's cold email offer, we targeted marketing agencies. The pitch was: "If you're a marketing agency, we'll show you how to get clients with cold email."

And that would have capped us. Permanently.

Because it's not just marketing agencies who need cold email. It's B2B companies. Consultants. Freelancers. Anyone with an offer they're selling to another business.

If we had stayed locked into that narrow claim — "marketing agencies, scale to $30K/month" — we never would have reached $500K/month. The correct claim wasn't there. It didn't match the full range of people who actually needed what we were selling.

How to Actually Do This Research

You don't need a fancy framework. Here's what actually works:

Listen to sales conversations

Record your calls. Have your setters share text conversations. What exact words are prospects using to describe their problem?

Read the complaints

Forums, Reddit threads, Facebook groups — wherever your market vents. Screenshot the exact phrases they use.

Test ruthlessly

Put those words on your landing page, your cold email subject lines, your ad headlines. Run split tests. Let the data tell you what resonates.

Stay open to being wrong

I was wrong about what my fitness coach clients wanted. I was wrong about who needed cold email. You will be wrong too. The goal is to find out faster.

The Bottom Line

You might think you know what your market wants. You probably don't — not yet. And that's fine. The skill isn't knowing. The skill is building the systems to find out, then acting on what you learn without ego.

Use their words. Not yours. That's the whole strategy.