Who Do You Sell It To?

It was a good sign.

One of Andrew’s students had been running cold email for a new offer. A few people had written back. A couple of them had said, more or less, sure, what do you need from me?

That’s the moment you wait for.

So the student asked them for what any marketer would ask for.

Their wants. Their desires. Their pain points.

Interested people. A clear next step.

And then nothing.

The student brought it to the weekly call, wondering whether to send more volume or change the offer.

Andrew didn’t think the offer was the problem.

He thought the question was.

From the outside, asking for a target market seems harmless. It’s the first thing every course tells you to nail down.

But Andrew had watched what happens on the other end.

As Andrew pictured it, the prospect reads the request and thinks:

A simple yes had just turned into homework. And as Andrew put it, it "can seem like a little bit of a daunting task".

Then he said the thing he’d been noticing on call after call.

These weren’t beginners who didn’t know their business.

They just didn’t speak marketing.

So Andrew had already built his own tool to get around it. His Product and Target Market GPT didn’t ask for avatars or segments.

Two questions a person can answer without a glossary.

Better still, Andrew told the student, don’t make the prospect do it at all. Grab their company website, paste the whole thing in and start from there.

Maybe you’ve been on either side of this.

You’ve filled out an onboarding form full of words like ICP and positioning and typed the shortest thing you could get away with.

Or you’ve sent one, and gotten back exactly that.

Some months later, Andrew was on stage in front of a room of founders.

By then he’d done some 1,900 live calls with business owners. Some had just started. Some had been at it for years.

He asked the room how many of them used an onboarding form for their agency. Then how many of those forms asked something like what’s your offer?

Then he told them what he’d learned. When someone types an answer to a question like that, they give you the bare minimum.

So he’d stopped.

Instead, he gets people on a live call. Even a group call, he said, comes out better than a form.

And he asks very simple questions.

Then:

That second question exists because of the single most common mistake he’d seen across all those calls.

He didn’t sugarcoat how deep it went.

And the classic answer to the second question?

Which, as Andrew pointed out, isn’t going to help you.

So he gave the room another way in. Don’t ask for the market. Ask for a story.

What did they buy? Why?

He also told them to stop typing. Speak the answers. Talk into the computer, go off on tangents, let the ums and uhs stay in.

Then he showed them what plain language looks like.

He asked a hypnotist in the room to describe his offer, ran it through the first step of his process, and read back the result: a two-day, in-person method, summed up as a "system that enables clients to install the identity they want through a proprietary hypnosis method".

But even the AI slips into jargon, he warned. He’d seen it happen with one of his own clients, who runs an AI company. The first draft described her customers as "startups and growth stage companies".

So he kept pushing. When the output gets vague, tell it to "explain it to me like I’m a ninth grader".

By the time he was done pushing, it read "small to mid-sized businesses that are already generating revenue and have moved past early idea stage."

The reason that matters is simple. Her own customers wouldn’t call themselves growth-stage companies.

His test for the whole thing was just as plain. The first page of an offer should be something you could hand to a teenager.

Remember the student whose prospects went quiet?

A couple of months after that talk, Andrew recorded the walkthrough for the first screen of Vibey, the software built around his offer doc.

After you name your offer, the first real step is a box.

No avatar worksheet. No glossary.

And right next to the box, a way out of typing altogether.

Everything Andrew had said on that stage ended up in one box.

Ask in plain words. Let people talk instead of type. Start with what they already know.

Later still, Andrew sat in on a strategy call with an agency team planning a client’s onboarding.

They were talking checklists. Forms. What to ask for before the kickoff.

By then his count had grown.

He laid it out for them.

Ask a founder for their ICP and you get a range.

Ask who’s your favorite customer? Who are your top three? and they start telling you about a real person, by name, and what that person does.

The same goes for the offer.

Zaki, one of the team on the call, didn’t need convincing. His team already ran a full discovery call. But he’d seen the same thing Andrew had.

Every one of these rooms had the same problem underneath.

The business owner knew exactly who bought from them. They’d sold to those people. Served them. Could name their favorite one.

They just didn’t know that’s what target market meant.

So the forms came back with one word, like entrepreneurs. The emails came back empty. And the copy that got built on those answers came out sounding like everyone else.

Andrew didn’t fix that with a better form or a smarter prompt.

He changed the question to one people already knew how to answer.

And then he let them say it out loud.

Think back to that student’s prospects. They’d said yes. They were ready.

Somebody just needed to ask them something they could answer.