Your buyers will tell you exactly what to put on your website

Your buyers will tell you exactly what words to put on your website — if you ask. Most companies never ask but five conversations is all it takes to build a solid foundation for your website messaging. You don’t need a huge sample size and it doesn’t need to take forever.

Just five structured conversations with your best customers.

Here’s how I structure those conversations, and what I’m listening for that shapes everything that ends up on your web pages. This isn’t a script — these conversations are more organic than that. This structure helps us get to the root of your buyer's motivations and it helps us learn the words they use.

This is where I spend most of my time because this is where pain, alternatives and stakes live.

What I'm listening for are the exact words buyers use to describe their problems. Real words, not marketing and corporate speak.

I start with a simple question: when they bought and what was going on that day. Starting here grounds them in a concrete memory before asking them to reconstruct a timeline that might be months old.

Then we jump back in time, right to the beginning.

I ask them to walk me through the moment they first realised their current approach wasn't working. What was happening that day? I'll often ask environmental questions here, even something like the weather, because it helps them remember more clearly. What I'm learning is what their specific problems were and how they were feeling.

This is where I’m listening for the push — what made the status quo unbearable enough to consider changing. It isn’t a polished version of the problem, it’s the real one in their own words.

When they answer, I don't move on right away. Silence isn't the enemy. I give them time to think, ask for specific examples, prompt them to tell me more. It feels unnatural to sit in that silence, but the first answer is almost always the rehearsed one with real language coming when you go deeper.

This is the language your messaging needs to reflect. Not your internal description of the problem — theirs.

After the struggling moment, most buyers don't immediately go looking for solutions. They spend some time thinking about their problems and what potential solutions could look like.

So I ask them what they did first after realising something needed to change. What did they search for? Who did they talk to? What did they imagine a solution would look like? Again, I’m not only listening for the answers here. The words they use are just as important.

The push is still present here, but something else is starting to form: a pull toward a better situation. They're beginning to imagine what solving the problem could look like, even if they haven't started evaluating solutions yet.

The words they use at this stage come before any/much exposure to your product or your competitors. That's buyer language before your product or your competitors have shaped how they talk about their problems. If there's a gap between what they typed into Google and what's on your homepage, that's a messaging problem worth fixing.

At some point, something made them go from "I should probably do something about this" to "I need to sort this out now."

I ask what made them go from thinking about a new solution to actively looking. Was there a deadline, an event, an unexpected problem, a conversation that forced the issue?

This is the trigger — the specific moment the pull became strong enough to prompt action. Usually it's one thing: a board meeting, a competitor move, a conversation with a CEO, a campaign that underperformed badly enough that ignoring the website was no longer an option.

This is where we find the specific circumstances that make a buyer move. This language belongs on your website.

By this point your buyer is actively evaluating options. This moment tells us what nearly stopped them and/or what finally convinced them.

I ask who else needed to be involved in the decision and what their concerns were, what alternatives they considered and why they didn't choose them, and what almost stopped them from moving forward entirely.

This is where anxiety surfaces. If three buyers share the same concern almost stopped them, that concern needs to be addressed somewhere on your site before they ever get on a sales call.

The pull at its strongest here: the aha moment that tipped them toward buying. A demo moment, a conversation, a piece of evidence that resolved their doubt. The aha moment is often more useful in messaging than any feature or benefit you'd think to lead with.

This might be the shortest moment in the interview but it’s still important.

I ask what having the product lets them do now that they couldn't before. I ask for specific examples and close with: "If you were talking to someone else in your situation, what would you tell them?"

The answer to that last question is how a buyer would sell your product to someone exactly like them, in their own words, without any of your influence.

The goal here isn’t product feedback, it’s language to reflect in messaging.

That's what changes your messaging. Five conversations with the right people and what comes back is the exact language your buyers use to describe their problems, their triggers, and what convinced them to act. This is the foundation your website messaging has been missing.