Field note 01 · the first problem · Field Notes
Why are my leads the wrong ones?
Because the offer is too broad. When a business sells too many things to too many kinds of customer, the outside world hears a blur, and a blur attracts everyone, including everyone you do not want.
What it looks like from inside.
The enquiries come in. Some are for quantities you do not sell. Some want a thing you did once, three years ago, that is still on the website. Some are right on paper and then the first call is twenty minutes of you explaining what you actually do. You start to say "we get leads, but they are never the right ones", and you say it as if it were a marketing problem. It is not.
What it looks like from outside.
A stranger reads your website for six seconds and draws a conclusion. If the page lists nine services, four industries and a mission statement, the conclusion is "they do a bit of everything". That stranger then either leaves, or writes to you about the one thing on the list that nobody inside wants to do. The website is not lying. It is repeating what the business has not decided.
What it costs.
Every wrong lead costs a first call, a proposal you write knowing it will not land, and the hour you spend afterwards wondering why. Add those up over a quarter and you find that the wrong leads are not free. They are the most expensive thing in the sales pipeline, because they consume the same time as the right ones and pay nothing.
The test.
Ask three people in the business, separately, to say in one sentence what it does and for whom. If you get three different sentences, the offer is too broad. The leads are not the wrong ones. They are the right response to a wrong message.
What fixes it.
Fewer things, named plainly, priced on purpose. The products and customers the numbers say to keep, and the ones to stop apologising for. Then one sentence that everyone inside can say the same way. That sentence becomes the website, the proposal and the first thirty seconds of every call, and the wrong leads stop, because they were never being sold to. This is the first fix in Fix & Grow, and it is the first thing a Signal Audit looks at, because it is the one that changes the other two.
Two questions this raises.
- How do I know if my offer is too broad?
- Ask three people in the business to describe it in one sentence, separately. Three different sentences means it is too broad.
- Will narrowing the offer lose customers?
- It loses the ones the numbers say you should not have. It keeps the ones who pay, and it makes the next ones easier to find.
If this is your business, the audit starts here.
Half a day, both of us, your numbers. A written diagnosis that says whether this is the problem, and what to fix first.
Start a Signal Audit