Do you follow up on vague answers?

Vague answers are not answers. "It felt right." "Everything aligned." "I just knew." These sound like reasons. They're actually placeholders for a specific situation that became uncomfortable enough to act on. The real story is always more concrete. And it's almost always one follow-up question away.

Why do buyers give vague answers about why they bought?

It's not evasion. It's how memory works. We don't store decisions as decisions. We store them as feelings. "It felt right" is an honest answer to how the decision felt in retrospect. It's just not useful.

The specific situation that triggered the decision — the meeting that went badly, the competitor that showed up, the deal that fell apart — that's stored somewhere behind the feeling. But no one asks for it. So it stays there.

We accept the vague answer because it sounds complete. Asking further feels like interrogating a compliment. So we don't.

What's actually hiding behind "everything felt right"?

Almost always: a concrete situation that became uncomfortable enough to act on.

A client who says "your about page resonated" almost certainly had a specific moment in mind when they read it. A deal they lost. A conversation they fumbled. A problem they kept running into.

They recognized something in the description. That recognition was the decision. Not the words themselves. The match between what you wrote and what they were already carrying.

The about page didn't win the client. The situation did. The about page just named it.

Why does this matter for our business?

Because the situation is what we need to know. Not the feeling.

If we understand the specific situations that move people to act, we can write for those situations. We can position for them. We can use them in sales conversations to create the same recognition faster.

Without the situation, we're guessing. We write broad content because we don't know what specific thing resonated. We position vaguely because we don't know what actually triggered the decision.

We can't reproduce what we don't understand.

What does a good follow-up question look like?

It's concrete and recent. Not "what made you decide?" but "what situation did you have in mind when you read that?"

Or: "Was there a specific moment that made this feel urgent?"

Or simply: "What were you dealing with right before you reached out?"

These questions invite a story. Not a summary. And the story is where the useful information lives.

It feels like going one level deeper than the situation calls for. It isn't. It's just doing the research that the vague answer didn't complete.

What this comes down to

Buyers give vague answers because no one asks the next question. The vague answer is not dishonest. It's just incomplete. Behind almost every "it felt right" is a specific situation that became uncomfortable enough to act on. That situation is the most useful thing to learn from a client — it tells us what to write, how to position, and what to listen for in sales conversations. We're almost never short on clients willing to share it. We're often short on the habit of asking.

We stop one question short of the answer, and then wonder why we don't understand why people buy.

PS: The easiest version of this is to ask your last three clients: "What was happening right before you reached out?" Do it this week. The answers will probably surprise you.

Frequently asked questions

Why do customers give vague answers about why they chose you? Vague answers reflect how decisions feel in hindsight, not the specific situation that triggered them. Buyers remember the emotional outcome of a decision more readily than the concrete event that preceded it. The specific situation is still there — it just requires a follow-up question to surface it.

What's the best question to ask clients about why they bought? Ask about the situation, not the decision. "What were you dealing with right before you reached out?" or "Was there a specific moment that made this feel urgent?" are more productive than "why did you choose us?" The first set invites a story. The second invites a summary.

How do I use buyer answers to improve my marketing? Look for the situations that repeat. If three different clients describe a similar trigger — a meeting that went wrong, a competitor that arrived, a deal that fell apart — that situation is your content. Write about it directly. Position around it. Use it in sales conversations to create recognition faster.

Is it awkward to ask clients this kind of question? It can feel that way, but it almost never is. Most clients are happy to explain what led to the decision, especially if the experience was positive. Framing it as research rather than evaluation helps. "I'm trying to understand what situations we're actually useful in — would you mind if I asked a few questions?" is usually welcomed.

What if the client genuinely doesn't remember the specific situation? Prompt them with time. "Think back to the week or two before you reached out — what was going on?" Time-anchoring helps people access specific memories rather than summaries. If they still can't recall a specific event, the pattern across several clients will still tell you something useful.

How often should we be doing this kind of customer research? After every significant engagement, at minimum. More useful is building it into your offboarding process so it happens consistently. One structured question at the end of a project produces more useful positioning data than most formal research exercises.