Founder & Chief Executive Officer
After 11 years and somewhere north of 320 projects, the pattern I am most confident about is this. The people answering their clients’ questions and addressing their clients’ problems online are the ones converting leads at a much higher rate than everybody else.
I am not only telling you this from watching clients. I do it myself, and there is a system behind it.
Every single thing you see from me online comes out of a client problem journal. It is a running record of the problems our clients bring us, past and present. I go through it looking for common themes, I notice patterns across completely different businesses, and those patterns become the conversations I have online.
I believe this with my entire soul. If you talk about your clients’ actual problems on your socials, your blogs, and your website, you will generate more leads than you will by promoting yourself.
The reason problem-solving content outperforms promotional content comes down to when people are actually deciding.
Research from 6sense, surveying over 900 buyers who had made purchases above $10,000, found that buyers complete around 70% of their buying journey before contacting a seller. Buyers initiated the contact themselves 83% of the time. In that study the full journey averaged 11 months, with buyers not speaking to anyone until roughly eight months in.
So there is a long stretch where somebody is working through their problem, forming opinions, and narrowing options, entirely without you in the room. Your content is the only representative you have during that period. If what it does is talk about how good you are, it contributes nothing to the thinking they are actually doing. If it answers the questions they are quietly wrestling with, you become the business that helped them before anyone asked them for anything.
Summary 6sense research with over 900 buyers found they complete around 70% of the journey before contacting a seller and initiate contact 83% of the time. Your content is your only representative during that stretch.
Mine is simple. It is a running record of the problems clients bring to us.
Every time a client asks a question, raises a worry, misunderstands something, or describes a frustration, it goes in. The question somebody asked on a discovery call. The thing a client was confused about three weeks into a project. The objection that came up during a proposal. The complaint about a previous provider. The thing somebody assumed was true that turned out to be wrong.
None of this is sophisticated. The discipline is in capturing it rather than letting it evaporate, which is where everybody loses this material. You hear something genuinely revealing on a call, you handle it in the moment, and by Thursday it is gone. Written down, it accumulates into the most valuable content asset you own, because it is a record of what your market actually struggles with rather than what you imagine they struggle with.
Summary A client problem journal is a running record of every question, worry, misunderstanding, and frustration clients raise. The discipline is capturing them rather than letting them evaporate after the call.
Here is the part that makes the journal worth keeping rather than just venting into.
I go through it looking for themes. One client asking something is a conversation. Five clients across five different industries asking a version of the same thing is a pattern, and patterns are what deserve content. When the same confusion keeps surfacing among people who have nothing else in common, you have found something structural about your market rather than something specific to one business.
Those patterns are also the highest-value things you can address publicly, since every pattern represents a question many people have and almost nobody is answering well. The content writes itself at that point, because you have already explained it verbally a dozen times and you know exactly where people get stuck.
Review the journal periodically rather than continuously. Sitting down with a month or a quarter of entries and reading them together is when the themes become visible, and themes are invisible when you are looking at entries one at a time.
Summary One client asking something is a conversation while five clients across different industries asking it is a pattern. Reviewing entries in batches makes themes visible that are invisible one at a time.
If you want to start one, keep the mechanics as light as possible so it survives contact with a busy week.
Use whatever you will actually open, meaning a notes app, a document, or a spreadsheet. Capture the problem in the client’s own words rather than your polished version of it, since their phrasing is the valuable part. Add a line about the context and what you told them. And set a recurring time to review, because a journal nobody reads is just a graveyard.
Pull from everywhere, since client conversations are only one source. Discovery calls, support emails, the questions that come up repeatedly in your comments and direct messages, what people ask you at events, and the things your team gets asked when you are not in the room. Anything somebody genuinely wanted to know belongs in there.
Summary Keep the mechanics light, capture problems in the client’s own words rather than your polished version, and set a recurring review time. Pull from calls, emails, comments, messages, and what your team gets asked.
Here is the connection that makes this more valuable than most people realise when they start.
The way a client describes their problem out loud is very close to the way somebody types that problem into Google. When a client says to me that their website is live but nothing is happening, that is almost word for word a search query. Your journal is quietly collecting the actual language your market uses, which is the thing expensive tools attempt to approximate.
That makes it a direct input into your search engine optimization. Each recurring problem is a blog post, written in the language people actually use, answering a question they are actively searching. This is why problem-led content outperforms promotional content in search as well as with humans, since search engines are matching questions to answers and a page built from a real question is a genuinely good answer.
It matters even more for AI search. AI tools surface content that clearly resolves a specific question, and they weight first-hand experience heavily. A post built from problems you have personally solved 320 projects’ worth of times carries exactly the signals AI optimization for websites depends on. A good SEO company can structure and position that content, and your journal supplies the only part that cannot be outsourced, which is knowing what your clients actually struggle with.
Summary The way clients describe problems out loud closely matches how people type them into search, so your journal collects real market language. Each recurring problem becomes a blog post answering a question people are actively searching.
One pattern feeds everything, which is what makes this efficient rather than another thing to maintain.
A recurring problem becomes a blog post on your website, which is where it does the most long-term work, since it can be found by somebody searching that exact question years from now. The same problem becomes several social posts approaching it from different angles. It becomes a newsletter. It becomes a video. It becomes the thing you say on a podcast. The thinking happened once, in the journal, and everything downstream is formatting.
Your website deserves the most attention here, since that is where somebody in the 70% stretch lands when they go looking for answers. Strong website design organised around your clients’ real questions rather than your service list meets people where they actually are. The business that answered their question before they ever made contact is the business they contact.
Summary One pattern becomes a blog post, several social posts, a newsletter, and a video, with the thinking done once in the journal. Your website deserves the most attention since that is where people land during the research stretch.
Eleven years, more than 320 projects, and the clearest pattern I have is that the businesses answering their clients’ problems out loud convert leads at a higher rate than the businesses promoting themselves.
Keep a client problem journal. Write down what people ask you, what confuses them, and what frustrates them. Look for the themes that show up across clients who have nothing else in common. Then talk about those themes on your socials, your blogs, and your website.
Buyers are doing most of their deciding before they ever speak to you. Be the business that helped them during that stretch.
Sources:
6sense, research survey of over 900 B2B buyers who made purchases exceeding $10,000 in the previous two years (buyers complete approximately 70% of their buying journey before contacting a seller; buyers initiated contact 83% of the time; the average journey lasted 11 months with first seller contact at roughly eight months).
https://6sense.com/blog/dont-call-us-well-call-you-what-research-says-about-when-b2b-buyers-reach-out-to-sellers/
Get a website, SEO, and email strategy that you actually control. Book a free consultation or keep reading.
