It is nine words long, and it changed how I write everything.
Not just landing pages and sales copy. The 1-on-1 LinkedIn messages our team sends every day for clients. The playbooks we give away. The way I describe what we do.
Here it is:
“What do you want to know most about [BLANK]?”
That is the whole survey. Replace the blank with your topic, send it to people who look like your ideal client, and read what comes back.
Before I show you how to run it, I need to explain why it works, because the reason is a lot older than LinkedIn and it is the same reason most outreach gets ignored.
Your prospects are interested in themselves, morning, noon and after supper
Dale Carnegie put it plainly in How To Win Friends and Influence People: people are not interested in you, and they are not interested in me. They are interested in themselves.
David J. Schwartz gave us the working version of it in The Magic of Thinking Big: to get others to do what you want them to do, you have to see things through their eyes.
Everybody nods along at that. Almost nobody acts on it, because acting on it means admitting something uncomfortable: you do not actually know what your prospects want. You know what you think they want.
Those are not the same thing. The gap between them is where most marketing quietly dies.
The time I was completely wrong about my own audience
I was building an online course on content marketing, for an audience that had been buying from me for years.
I assumed they already knew what content marketing was. I figured the useful questions were the how-to ones. How often should I publish? What do I write about? How do I reuse one piece in five places?
So I ran the nine-word survey before I wrote a single line of sales copy. Mostly as a formality. I was confident I already knew the answer.
Several customers, people who had already paid me money for other things, wrote back some version of this:
“I don’t know what that term means. What exactly is content marketing? How do you define it?”
Wow.
That answer became item one in the sales copy: What is content marketing, and why should you care?
Had I skipped the survey, I would have launched a course that opened three steps ahead of where my own buyers were standing. It would have flopped, and I would never have known why.
Here is the part that should scare you: a confused prospect does not tell you they are confused. Nobody wants to admit they did not follow something. They just quietly go away, and you are left thinking the offer was wrong when the problem was the first sentence.
How to run the nine-word survey
Four steps. None of them take long.
1. Write the question.
“What do you want to know most about [BLANK]?”
Swap “most” for “more” if it reads better to you. Keep the blank narrow. “Content marketing” is a topic. “Marketing” is a category, and you will get mush back.
2. Put it in a form, and do not ask for a name or an email.
Google Forms is free and takes about ninety seconds. One question, one text box, no contact fields.
The anonymity is not a nice-to-have, it is the entire mechanism. The moment you ask for an email you have turned a survey into a lead magnet, and people answer lead magnets differently. They perform. They give you the answer they think makes them look competent instead of the answer that is actually true.
You are not trying to build a list here. You already have the list. You are trying to get one honest sentence out of it.
3. Send it with a short note.
Subject line: quick question
So I have one quick, burning question I’d love to get your answer to.
It should only take you a few seconds.
[Answer my 1 quick question here.]
Thanks in advance, I’m excited to read your answers.
4. Ask on LinkedIn too, one-to-one.
This is where it earns its keep for lead generation. Run the same question as a 1-on-1 message to people in the niche you are targeting, whether or not they have ever bought anything from you:
Hi [FIRST NAME], quick one. What do you want to know most about [TOPIC]? Working on something and I’d rather build it around what people actually want than what I assume they want.
You will get fewer replies than you would from a customer list. The ones you get are worth more, because they come from strangers who have no reason to flatter you.
What to do with the answers
Sort them into two piles.
Themes. The questions that keep showing up. These tell you what to build, what to write, and what order to put it in.
Exact words. This is the more valuable pile and almost everyone skips it. Pull the actual sentences people typed. Their phrasing, their nouns, their complaints, spelling mistakes and all.
That second pile becomes your headline, your first line, your LinkedIn message. Not a version of what they said. What they said.
This is the same move we make when we onboard a “Done For You” client, just pointed in the other direction. We interview the client like a reporter and build their campaign out of how they actually talk, because that is the one thing a competitor cannot copy. The nine-word survey points the same lens at their buyers.
This is not a LinkedIn poll, and the difference matters
A poll gives you percentages across options that you chose. That is measurement. It is useful once you already know what the options are.
The nine-word question gives you sentences you did not think of. That is discovery. It is what you run when you suspect your list of options is wrong.
Run a poll when you want to know which of three things people prefer. Run this when you want to find out there was a fourth thing.
The real trap is asking and then ignoring the answer
Schwartz called it trading minds. Ask yourself what you would think of this if you swapped places with the other person. He wrote that in 1959, on a typewriter, with no idea what we would be able to do with a free web form and an afternoon.
We have every advantage he did not have. The only thing that still costs anything is the willingness to hear that you were wrong.
Run it before you build the thing. Not after.
What to do with this
Pick one topic you are about to write, sell or record something about. Write the nine words. Put them in a free form with no contact fields. Send it to twenty people who look like your ideal client.
Read the answers out loud. The sentence that makes you wince is the one to lead with.
If you want more on turning what you learn into content that actually pulls prospects, this is the next read: what to post on LinkedIn. And if you want the version that measures instead of discovers, here is how to use LinkedIn polls for real-time, intent-based leads.
Or, if you would rather have a team do the asking, the listening and the writing for you, that is exactly how our LinkedIn lead generation works for consultants. We interview you, build the campaign in your voice, run the outreach, and book the qualified conversations. You show up for the calls.
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