The 5 why technique

“Why?”

• Every single toddler since the dawn of creation

A kid learning to speak is a joy to witness.

Their vocabulary grows, and by the time they hit school they’ve discovered a question without limits.

I’m an uncle (not for long!) and have seen the one-word question in small doses.

The ceaseless riposte is the bane of parents:

“Why?”

“Why though?”

“Yeah but why is that?”

“Why does it do that?”

Be like this guy.

Kids continue seeking to understand.

We lose that limitless curiosity as adults, and need to rekindle it when we’re talking to customers.

We’ve already talked about WWWWH.

“Why” gets an additional chapter because its so powerful:

• The first answer to a “why” is always surface-level.
• There’s something about “why” that requires customers to be jolted out of auto-pilot.
• This is where “the 5 Why technique” does the heavy lifting.
• Just like a child more “why” gets more responses.

Unlike a child, you have a bigger vocabulary, and a range of other tools I’ve shown you to help you ask “why” in different ways.

“Why” is a confronting question.

Being kind, listening for feelings words, and digging in will get you closer to important home truths and insights.

Why is this important?

Humans want their needs met, getting your product to speak a home truth helps them connect what they need to what you offer.

Ever received an unknown cold call near dinner time?

Or remember that video for a course you saw yesterday while scrolling through Instagram?

Its marketing that doesn’t cut through.

Every day, the average person sees 1,000s of messages shot at them from all sorts of angles. Billboards on the way to work, radios while they’re travelling in cabs, advertisements on TV or their streaming services… competition is fierce, and the marketing budgets are massive.

You also don’t have a fraction of that budget.

By truly understanding your customers, their feelings, and why they’re important you have a better chance of cutting through because you’ve put in the effort.

Congratulations.

Practice digging in and asking why five times.

It gets better over time if you do the reps.

Its going to feel clunky and hard-to-use to begin with, but remember 1-10-100. Push out those reps to realise their potential.

I’m peppering you with techniques to level up, they all work hard, and complement each other as well.

This sequence is by design.

By the end you’ll be able to make Find-Offer-Notice work for what you need.