Thirty interviews. Three weeks. A dataset nobody can copy.
Call thirty customers you already won. Ask where they first heard your name – not the form they filled out, the first time. Publish what they tell you. Here’s why it works, and why nobody does it.
1. The CRM records the podium. The real selection happened in the parking lot.
The Price Is Right sells randomness: lightning strikes, a stranger sprints down the aisle. Reality – 300 people fill each taping, nine reach the stage, and a producer already interviewed every one of them in line, sizing them up in five seconds. For four decades that was Stan Blits, hunting energy and humor. None of it airs. The broadcast begins at “come on down.” Your CRM is the broadcast.
2. The gap isn’t a rounding error.
Refine Labs published the comparison: their software credited web search for 79% of conversions. Customers credited search 3% – and put 98% of closed-won revenue on dark social: podcasts, communities, word of mouth. SparkToro found 100% of visits from Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp logged as “direct.” That’s not slightly off. That’s a different show.
3. By the time you get a touchpoint, the episode is already taped.
Gartner: B2B buyers spend 17% of purchase time with all vendors combined – 5–6% with any one rep. 6sense: 81% have a preferred vendor before first sales contact. Forrester: 92% start with someone in mind. That demo request isn’t discovery. It’s a formality.
4. Ask the question properly, then shut up.
“How did you hear about us?” on a form gets you “Google” – a hallway, not a room. Ask a human, after the close: “Walk me back. Where were you the first time you heard our name, and who said it?” Then stop talking. The answer is usually a person, a podcast, or a Slack channel you’ve never expensed.
5. Thirty is the number. Five is a story, a hundred never gets finished.
Twenty minutes each is ten hours – three weeks between other things. Below fifteen you’re guessing. Past forty you’re procrastinating with extra steps.
6. The Ted Slauson principle: the guy with the homework wins.
Slauson spent years taping episodes and memorizing prices – a dataset nobody else bothered to build. On the show taped September 22, 2008, Terry Kniess bid $23,743 on the Showcase. Exact. To the dollar. The first perfect bid in 36 years of daytime episodes. Producers cried foul and proved nothing, because the edge was never cheating. It was attendance.
7. Publish it – that’s the part competitors can’t touch.
A rival clones your landing page over lunch and outbids you on your brand terms by Friday. Thirty conversations with your customers, he cannot touch. Publish the delta: what the CRM claimed, what buyers said, the number that embarrassed you most. You get a defensible budget and an uncopyable post.
Stop guessing the actual retail price. Go ask the people who already paid it.