The Ask Formula Deep Dive Survey: how to build it in Gravity Forms and score the answers

The Deep Dive Survey is the first survey in Ryan Levesque’s Ask Formula, from his book Ask. It asks your audience one open question about their biggest challenge, then a few multiple-choice questions that sort them into groups. Then you read the longest answers first. The people who write the most tend to care the most, and their own words tell you what to offer them and how to describe it.

What goes in the survey

• The single most important question. An open question, answered in the person’s own words. Something like “When it comes to [your topic], what’s the single biggest challenge you’re struggling with right now?” Make it required.
• Two to four multiple-choice questions. These sort people into the groups the book calls buckets, for example by experience, business size or what they’ve already tried. Keep each one short.
• Contact details, last. Name, email and phone. Name and email required, phone optional.

Put each question on its own page, so nobody opens the survey to a wall of fields.

Building it in Gravity Forms

1. Install Gravity Forms, plus its add-on for your email tool if you want each response to land there. There are add-ons for ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, HubSpot and others. Check which licence includes the one you need.
2. Create a new form.
3. Add a Paragraph Text field for the single most important question, and make it required.
4. Add a Page field (under Standard Fields) after it. Then add your multiple-choice questions as Radio Buttons, with a Page field between each one. Make them all required.
5. On the last page, add Name, Email and Phone. Make Name and Email required. If your audience isn’t all in the US, set the phone format to International.
6. In the form settings, change the confirmation to send people to a thank-you page, or at least rewrite the message.
7. Turn off the admin notification, unless you want an email every time someone fills it in.
8. Set up the feed to your email tool, so each person arrives with their answers attached. We use ActiveCampaign.
9. Add the form to a page and send people to it.

We recorded this walkthrough in 2016, so Gravity Forms’ screens look different now. The steps are the same.

Scoring the answers

1. In Gravity Forms, go to Forms, then Import/Export, then Export Entries, and download the CSV.
2. Open it in Google Sheets or Excel.
3. Add a score column, set to the length of the answer to the first question, multiplied by 1.5 if they left a phone number. With the answer in column B, the phone in column E and the score in column F, that’s =LEN(B2)*IF(LEN(E2)>0,1.5,1).
4. Add a rank column: =PERCENTRANK($F$2:$F$500,F2). Change 500 to your last row.
5. Add a top 20% column: =IF(G2>=0.8,"Top 20%","").
6. Read the top 20% first. The book covers what to do with them.

When a survey is the wrong tool

The Deep Dive Survey works because it’s short. People answer it in one sitting, from a link, in a few minutes.

A lot of what firms send their clients isn’t like that. An onboarding questionnaire, a tax return checklist or a website brief can take an hour. It needs files as well as answers, and it usually gets finished over several days, after a few reminders.

Gravity Forms can stretch some of the way. It has a save and continue option and file upload fields. It gets harder once you’re chasing people who stall halfway, checking every file, and sending back the ones that are wrong.

Content Snare

Content Snare is built for the longer kind of client questionnaire. Clients open a link, with no account to create, and work through a checklist of questions and uploads. Every answer saves as they type, so they can come back days later and carry on where they left off.

What it adds for this kind of request:

• Automatic reminders to anyone who hasn’t finished, on a schedule you set
• Approve or reject each answer or file, with a comment, so clients fix it without another email
• Conditional logic, so people only see the questions that apply to them
• File type and size limits, and files renamed the way you want them
• Templates to start from, including a web design questionnaire and creative brief

It connects to Zapier and Make, so the answers can still end up in ActiveCampaign or your CRM.

Side note: we’ve used Gravity Forms for everything from feedback forms to project briefs. For short forms on your own website, it’s still hard to beat.