Write your ads in your customer's words. Not the boardroom's.
Sabri Suby's Sell Like Crazy says to know where your dream buyer spends time online and how they talk. What I take from it: your best ad copy is already written, by your customers.
Most company ads are written in meeting rooms. You can tell. "End-to-end solutions." "Best-in-class quality." "Your trusted partner."
Nobody responds to them. They don't sound like anyone the customer knows.
I've been reading Sell Like Crazy by Sabri Suby, the founder of King Kong in Australia. What he's really saying is simple. Before you write a word, study your dream buyer. Find out where they spend their time and how they talk. Then write in their words, not yours.
Who your dream buyer is
Your dream buyer is your best customer. Not every customer. The one you'd clone if you could.
Suby asks plain questions about this person. What keeps them up at night? What are they afraid of? What do they secretly want? What have they already tried that failed? And what words do they use to describe all of it?
That last one is where most of us get stuck. Ask yourself honestly: can you repeat one sentence a customer actually said to you? Word for word? Few owners can.
Where they talk when you're not in the room
Summaries of the book mention niche Facebook groups, forums, Reddit, Quora, YouTube comments and Amazon reviews. These are places where buyers speak freely because no seller is listening.
For an Indian business, I'd add a few:
- WhatsApp and Facebook groups for your trade or your city
- Competitor reviews on Google and on marketplaces
- YouTube comments under videos in your category
- Reddit and Quora threads
- Your own sales call notes and complaint emails
That last one is the most overlooked. Your customers already wrote to you. You just filed it.
Their words beat your words
The idea is to join the conversation already happening in the customer's mind. Don't start a new one.
Here's a hypothetical. A company sells water purifiers to factories. Its ad says "advanced multi-stage filtration". Meanwhile, plant heads in an industry group are writing things like "the RO keeps choking every monsoon" and "the service guy never picks up".
Which ad stops the scroll? The one that opens with those words. The plant head reads it and thinks, that's my problem.
Your best ad copy has already been written. Your customers wrote it.
Why this matters as you grow
When a business is small, the founder talks to customers every day. Their language leaks into everything the business writes.
As you grow, that changes. More people sit between you and the customer. Internal language creeps into your ads without anyone noticing.
Watch for three signs:
- Your ads praise your process, not the buyer's problem.
- They use words no customer has ever said.
- Your team likes them, and nobody replies.
If all three are true, you're writing for the meeting room.
Try this week
- Read 30 reviews or comments in your category. Yours and your competitors'.
- Copy the exact phrases into a sheet. Don't tidy them up.
- Underline the three that come up most.
- Write one Instagram or LinkedIn post whose first line is one of those phrases, unedited.
- Compare the replies with your usual post.
You'll learn more from that one test than from another meeting about messaging.