Ask Paperback – April 21, 2015

It's clear that his Levesque's intention with this book is to use it as one big lead generation piece instead of something to educate those who bought it. While this book does have some really valuable information in it (which is why it's getting two stars instead of one) the entire first half is just fluff. Throughout the book he tries very hard to get you to join his mastermind group and more.
Further, I subscribed to his email list and when I unsubscribed he upped the amount of emails he was sending! That is so shady. I don't like supporting people without integrity and won't be buying anything from Ryan in the future.

This is yet another book that is disturbingly perpetuating the epidemic you see in marketing books on Amazon these days. Upsells. The book is full of references to the author's paid software, course and mastermind group. It skims over the details and is simply a lead on to the ultra expensive stuff the author sells. The material is somewhat useful, but what with having to skip over upsells every other page, you won't get much benefit out of it. Until of course you buy the upsells. Did I say upsells?

The author describes himself as "an aggressive student of marketing for more than 28 years,” and as having sold more than $ 30m worth of marketing consulting services to Fortune 100 companies such as Lipton, American Express, Colgate-Palmolive, Whirlpool, Panasonic, AT&T, Kodak and Hallmark.
The subtitle of this book is “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.” The author claims that his book is “the world’s most powerful marketing formula…”
The process Levesque describes should make your customers feel that you are talking directly to them, not at them. This is achieved through the “Ask Formula”, a way of asking questions that will assist you to accurately determine what your customer wants, the language of their context, and the issues and messages they want to hear. Asked correctly, they will tell you what they want to buy, and under what conditions they will be willing to buy from you.
“Instinctively, we ask people what they want. We think if we just ask them, they’ll tell us, and we can sit back and watch the dollars pour in,” says Levesque.
Steve Jobs, a man with a fine sense of what people will appreciate, said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Henry Ford believed that, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses.’”
However, people are good at answering what it is that they don’t want, and what they’ve done in the past. Had Ford asked his potential customers what they do not like about their horse, they might have responded that it is too slow, needs feeding, or only carries one person at a time.
The purpose and value of this book is to offer a formula that will allow you to identify what your customers want, even when your customers can’t quite articulate it. This is the value of the “Ask Formula.”
The method the author uses is a set of surveys. “The secret to spectacular sales (is) all about asking the right questions, in the right way, at the right time.” Levesque’s formula has had success in multiple businesses and has revitalized markets that were previously considered dormant.
When you are able to discover what your customer wants to buy through “somewhat counterintuitive” questions, and you are able to customize a solution for them, they are more likely to purchase from you. If, in addition, you can completely automate this process so it does not require a conversation with every single customer, you have a very powerful digital marketing system.
Executed correctly, these automated surveys will give you priceless information that will inform you of exactly what the customer wants to buy, and when they are ready to buy it. When you are present with the exact product or service when they are ready to buy, you will have a satisfied customer who will return for more.
Through this process of surveying potential customers, you will also be able to identify why they decided not to buy, so you can revise your campaign or correct your offering. When you have this working accurately, you have the ability to scale your business to something much, much larger.
The hard work, however, lies in getting the details of the process correct.
The Ask Formula uses a combination of questions in surveys in a very specific sequence, and requires that you act or adapt to the data you collect in very specific ways. If you are broadly addressing the right group of people for your product or service, the surveys or questions should appeal to their “sense of self-discovery and curiosity.”
The set of surveys operates like a funnel to assist you to clarify who is in your market, to engage with them, and then, further down the funnel, to refine your marketing approach to them and then to benefit by closing sales. Levesque’s “Survey Funnel Strategy” describe a step-by-step, detailed process to apply in your online business.
This funnel is significantly different to the common practice where you, as a prospective customer click on an online ad, are led to a landing page. Here you are immediately asked for your name and email address, and other details you probably would not like to enter, in exchange for a free report or coupon. Then you are shown a webpage with a “one-size-fits-all” offering, and moved too rapidly to the payment section for your payment details. Little surprise that the results are paltry.
The Survey Funnel Strategy offers a slower and more carefully crafted method that will allow you to really satisfy the client so the buying decision is so much more likely. Essentially you succeed by never assuming you know everything about your prospective customer, and you eliminate as much guesswork as possible. Having collected real data, cleverly and carefully, you better understand your market and the natural consumer language it uses.
When people do not buy you need to understand that too, so you can hone your approach for the future.
While the logic of this process is obviously compelling, the value of this book to anyone interested in micromarketing to a mass audience, lies in the clever construction of these surveys and doing the hard work.
Even if you do come to the conclusion that this process is beyond your capability, and you do need to engage the author’s company to do the work for you, you will have picked up great insights along the way.
You will also have seen proof of Levesque’s ability. You were self-selected as shown by the fact that you bought the book. You do know how complex doing the work correctly is, and you are now willing to buy it from a master.

Readability Light ---+- Serious
Insights High --+-- Low
Practical High +---- Low

*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works.

Already doing surveys in your business? This book will be a little help for you to tweak your process. Don't expect deep and detailed instructions and examples. I am doing surveys many years and thanks to this book I was able to modify them a little. The book also helped me to understand why consumers answer and react to one kind of surveys and don't to another one.

If you are not doing surveys, start. This book will help you with techniques and orders of processes very well. Not so much in psychology behind surveys, but for starters very good.

I started with the second part of the book that contains the formula. I was able to apply it within a day in my business and see some results. Then I felt something is missing and read the first part of the book for the backstory. However for me, as an advanced "surveyor" I still feel there is something missing. Maybe more details, more examples. Maybe small details that are missing: For example there is the body of the email you should send. However I know the most important thing is the subject line of the email to get it opened. And there is sometimes only one, sometimes there is no recommendation on that. I would welcome like 5 subjects that Ryan tested and why he thinks those work and others don't.

There are also links to a bonus section that you can access online. Some of the bonuses are perfect. Like the one that shows you all of the questions and how it looks online. However some things are missing there too, mainly those that are missing in the book too (subjects anyone?).

Conclusion: I would recommend the book to anyone selling anything online or offline. If you are doing surveys already, you can get some insights too. However don't expect that the book will get you all of the answers or to be a complete guide to the galaxy of survey making. Sometimes you feel like the author gives you 100 % of the know-how, sometimes you feel there is missing something. And rightly so. There are links to products from Ryan or others that can help you further, but expect it to cost 10-100x more than this book. You get what you pay for – a guide of what worked for him in the past, made him millions, took years to develop and he tries to transfer those years of knowledge gaining on the reader within few hours. If I was writing it, I would go deeper. Also expect him to offer you his software (I would do it too). ;)