TL;DR
- 4 leaders. 4 answers. None of them matched what clients actually said.
- 5 questions that pull your real brand story out of the people who already believe it
- You can do this with 10 phone calls or 200 Google reviews and an hour with AI. Either works.
If you asked everyone on your leadership team - separately - "why do our best clients choose us?" ... would you get the same answer?
I tried this with a client recently.
4 leaders.
4 different answers.
"We answer the phones."
"It's our expertise."
"They trust us."
"We make it easy."
All true. None of them wrong, exactly. Also none of them useful for putting on a proposal or website. (Unless your goal is to sound like every other company. In which case, nailed it.)
But none of them were what the clients actually said either.
When we looked at the client feedback? The answer that kept coming back was something nobody on the team had mentioned.
Their clients chose them mostly because, during the sales process, they were the only firm that asked hard questions instead of just agreeing with everything. That pushback signaled competence and also that they cared. It made clients feel like they were in serious hands.
That's not "answering the phones." That's not "trust." That's a very specific behavior that triggered a very specific feeling. And nobody inside the company had thought to name it.
I keep running into this with growing companies in the professional services category. You've grown because you're legitimately great at what you do. Clients renew. They refer. They don't leave.
But you've never sat down with those people and asked why. The team makes assumptions and everyone's operating off a slightly different version of the story.
...Now if you don't have the reviews, feedback, or data, start here:
The Best 10 Interview
1 / Identify your best 10: The clients who've stayed the longest, referred the most, or generate the most revenue. People who chose you deliberately and would choose you again.
2 / Ask them 5 questions:
- Why did you choose us over other options?
- What almost stopped you from working with us?
- What would you miss most if we disappeared tomorrow?
- How would you describe what we do to a peer?
- What do we do that others in our space don't?
(Fair warning: question 2 is where things get interesting... And occasionally uncomfortable. That's how you know it's working.)
Already have the data? Mine it first. If you're sitting on Google reviews, NPS responses, or customer surveys, those are answers to these same questions - just unprompted ones. Sometimes the unsolicited version is more honest. (People are surprisingly eloquent when they think nobody's analyzing it.)
3 / Find the patterns: The gold isn't in any single answer. It's in what keeps showing up across all of them. Repeated language. Shared emotions. The same decision triggers over and over.
β
If using AI here, ask AI to identify recurring themes, emotional language, decision triggers, etc.
4 / Pressure-test everything: Hold those patterns up against your website, your sales deck, your elevator pitch. Every place the language doesn't match is a gap that's quietly costing you.
5 / Draft from their words, not yours: Create 3 versions of your core message using only language from actual client feedback. No corporate polish or jargon.
In the news:
π° HubSpot's 2026 State of Marketing found only 52% of organizations can clearly articulate what differentiates them... the ones that do refresh their messaging based on real data, not internal assumptions.
π° 6sense reported 94% of B2B buyers used LLMs during their buying journey in 2025. Unclear messaging is now a branding problem AND a visibility problem.
π° Bain & Company found increasing customer retention by just 5% can boost profits by 25-95%. Understanding why your best clients stay changes both retention and acquisition.
Dani's challenge of the week ;)
Pick one path this week.
Call one client and ask the five questions. Or pull your last 50 google reviews and ask AI what patterns show up.
Either way takes less than an hour. And I think you'll hear something your team has never put into words.
Once you have the patterns, put them to work. Rework your homepage. Update your sales deck. Brief your marketing team. Train your AI tools on it.
The goal is to close the gap between how your best clients describe you and how you describe yourself... everywhere.
That's all for this week. I'm off to somehow produce valentines for every kid in four classrooms before pickup. The strategy is unclear... but the deadline is real. π