As a copywriter, entrepreneur, and human being, I’m all about listening to your audience.

In most cases, you should listen to your audience’s opinion. I’ve done numerous videos and blog posts about how to crawl inside of your audience’s head and understand their motivations and emotions.

You have to listen to your audience’s opinion about what products they need and what types of solutions they’re looking for.

In today’s post, though, I’m singing a different tune.

Human beings just aren’t that simple. We don’t always act in our own best interest, and we often do and say contradictory things.

There are 3 specific instances when your target market is saying one thing and doing another.

When it comes to these 3 specific things, you don’t want to listen to what they say. You want to watch to what they do.

In the video below, I’m going to teach you the 3 times when you should IGNORE your target market’s opinion (at least, what they say out loud).

 

Click your favorite link to tweet it out:

Don’t listen to what people say. Watch what they do. http://ow.ly/ZZDKP @CourtRJ 

3 things you should never ask your target market in a survey via @CourtRJ http://ow.ly/ZZDKP 

Customizing your service to each client is doing them a disservice. http://ow.ly/ZZDKP via @CourtRJ 

 

Ignore your audience’s opinion when it comes to these 3 things:

#1 IGNORE YOUR AUDIENCE ABOUT PRICING

Never ever, ever send a survey asking, “What are you willing to pay for this?”

I mean, you can do it, but the responses will be garbage. Useless. Not something you should be basing your business on.

People are inherently bad at guessing what their actions will be, and they will almost always give you a price that is much lower than what they are willing to pay when push comes to shove.

What’s more important is to figure out what your program is worth in someone’s life by asking:

• What is the ROI of your offer?
• How is your offer enriching their life and what price can you put on that?

Then, it’s your job to push your client out of their comfort zone and ask them to put some skin in the game. I recently heard that 80% of people who buy online courses don’t finish them. I’m sure the number is close to 100% for free programs.

If you need help with pricing: Get my 4-step pricing formula here.

 

#2 IGNORE YOUR AUDIENCE ABOUT WHAT THEY NEED

You should always listen to your audience when it comes to what they want. However, it’s your job to give them what they need. If they knew how to do it, they wouldn’t need you!

If you’re lucky, these two things will be one and the same. However, there is always some gray area where you know that your client needs something while they are saying that they want something else.

Some examples of this include:

• A client wants weight loss, but you know that what she needs is to address the emotional triggers associated with food.

• An entrepreneur wants to make six figures, but as the expert, you know that she actually needs to get focused on how she pictures her ideal life.

• A business owner wants to hire a copywriter to write a sales page for her, but what she really needs is to spend more time developing a product that can sell itself.

 

#3 IGNORE YOUR AUDIENCE ABOUT CUSTOMIZING EVERYTHING BECAUSE YOU’RE AFRAID OF BEING A “ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL”

This is HUGE. Almost every single person I work with has told me, “I’m afraid to systematize my services because it’s creative / intuitive / not one-size-fits all”.

The funny thing? I actually don’t work with any service provider unless they have developed their own signature system. To me, it’s the sign of a true professional.

If you love writing proposals and doing custom projects, you should keep doing what makes you happy and works for your business.

However…

If you want to stop spending so much time creating proposals and start creating more leverage for your time, keep reading.

If your offer is producing a specific result or solving a specific problem for a specific target market, it’s your job as the expert to design a system to get people from A to B.

Ask yourself the following questions to design a signature system:

• What are the core pillars, aspects, or categories of what you do with clients?
• What is the last action someone has to take to get the result? What do they need to do before that? And before that?
• What is every step that someone must take to get from where they are now to where they want to be?
• What are the different sub-categories of clients? How can you design a system that would work for all of them?

Your signature system isn’t going to be PERFECT for everyone. It’s your job, however, to draw the line on who fits the bill for your offer and who does not.