Powerful ideas from top nonfiction
Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 7,000+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trial
Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
Ask summary
Ryan Levesque
The Counterintuitive Online Formula to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy...Create a Mass of Raving Fans...and Take Any Business to the Next Level
17 mins
Brief summary
Ask by Ryan Levesque is a marketing book that teaches readers how to effectively survey their audience to identify their needs and create products that sell. It provides a step-by-step process for creating surveys and interpreting the results.
Table of Contents
Ask
Summary of 7 key ideas
Audio & text in the Blinkist app
Key idea 1 of 7
All too often, surveys fail to deliver what they promise.
The Ask Formula was conceived as a solution to a problem faced by every business owner: how to learn what customers and prospects want? Knowing what is wanted positions businesses to personalize services and answer customer needs.
So how do you find out what is wanted? Well, you could simply send out a survey. Traditional surveys, however, come with several inherent problems.
First, surveys are irritating. Remember the last time your dinner was interrupted by a telemarketer asking for your opinion on a thrilling topic like new soda bottle brand packaging? Exactly – irritating.
Second, there’s no real incentive to answer a survey, since the customers don’t have access to the results. In general, surveys are designed by marketers to help marketers.
Other approaches to asking customers fail because people are only good at two things: expressing what they don’t want and saying what they already have.
Businesses want to know what people want – but those same businesses are no good at helping potential customers figure out what that thing might be. For example, if you’re browsing the shelves at a store and a salesperson asks, “How can I help you?”, she’s not helping you make a choice. Rather, she’s assuming that you already know what you want so that she can help you find it.
But most potential customers have no idea what they want! Just think about the last time you tried to decide where to go out to eat with a group of friends. If you ask them what they want to eat, you enter an endless loop of suggestions and questions, and no decision gets made.
But as a business you still have to find out what people want, even when they can’t quite articulate it. The Ask Formula will help you do this by using surveys in a different and unexpected way.
Want to see all full key ideas from Ask ?
Key ideas in Ask
More knowledge in less time
Read or listen
Get the key ideas from nonfiction bestsellers in minutes, not hours.
Find your next read
Get book lists curated by experts and personalized recommendations.
Shortcasts New
We’ve teamed up with podcast creators to bring you key insights from podcasts.
What is Ask about?
Ask (2015) is based on a simple idea – that learning what your customer wants is as simple as asking. The trick is asking in the right way. Full of immediately actionable insights into customer behavior, Ask gives you all the tools you need to uncover what your customers really want and give it to them.
Who should read Ask ?
- Entrepreneurs, start-ups and online businesses
- Business owners struggling to convert online traffic into customers
Categories with Ask
Book summaries like Ask
People ❤️ Blinkist
Sven O.
It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Added to that the apps ability to suggest kindred interests opens up a foundation of knowledge.
Thi Viet Quynh N.
Great app. Good selection of book summaries you can read or listen to while commuting. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.
Jonathan A.
Life changing. The concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.
Renee D.
Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.
People also liked these summaries
4.7 Stars
Average ratings on iOS and Google Play
28 Million
Downloads on all platforms
10+ years
Experience igniting personal growth