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Walkthrough · Funnel · getting found and followed up

The people who said maybe

Read this first: none of these examples are about your business

Before the specifics: none of these examples are about your business.

Four businesses can score identically on this check and need four completely different things, because a bakery, a plumber, a software subscription and a training college don't share a single customer in common — and more to the point, they don't share a clock.

That clock is the thing to hold on to. A roof gets replaced maybe twice in a lifetime. Coffee gets bought every morning. A bookkeeper gets changed when something goes wrong, which might be never. Everything in the stage you've been routed to depends on how often your customer genuinely has a reason to come back, and a tactic that works beautifully on a weekly cycle can be actively annoying on a twenty-year one.

So read the examples below as reference, not instruction. The concepts hold across all of them. The specifics won't, and copying a specific from a business unlike yours is how most owners end up running someone else's playbook badly.

Here's the same four stages, read four ways. Find the row closest to what you sell, then translate the rest yourself.

Getting found and followed up What else you sell them Whether they bring you anyone Why they can't just go cheaper
You sell a product Someone browsed and left. Do they get a sizing or care guide and a restock alert, or nothing? The refill, the companion item, the replacement before it wears out. Do you know the replacement cycle? A photo of it in use is worth more than a written review. Do you ask at delivery, or never? A range only you carry; what you've learned about fit across thousands of orders
You sell a service The quote went quiet. Is there a guide on what to look for and a date you'll be back, or does it go in the bin? Maintenance, the next stage of work, the annual check. Sold deliberately or mentioned by accident? The handover is the moment. Do you have one sentence you say every time, and something they can hand on? You know their site, their history, their quirks. Someone cheaper starts from zero — and that's only a moat if you make it visible
You sell a subscription or membership A free tier that's genuinely finished, not a trap with a renewal date. What happens to someone who cancels the trial? Not repurchase — expansion. More seats, a higher tier, an add-on they've grown into Members bringing members, and the community itself doing the selling What's accumulated inside their account: history, settings, data. Leaving costs them that, and they know it
You sell education or training The enquiry that won't enrol this intake. Is there a next intake to hold them for, or something short and free? Not stopping them leaving — finishing is the product working. The next credential, an alumni offer, and separately: what can the employers and partners who benefit from your graduates actually buy? Graduates referring is how education has always grown. Alumni, placement partners, industry boards Accreditation, employer relationships, reputation, and the record of where your graduates ended up

If none of those rows fit, that's useful information too — it usually means your customer is someone other than the person you were thinking of when you answered. Worth running the check again with the other one in mind.

You sent the quote. They said they'd get back to you. That was five weeks ago.

You've probably told yourself they went with someone cheaper. Sometimes that's true. Mostly it isn't — they just didn't do anything at all, because nothing was forcing them to this month.

Here's the part that costs you money. That person is not a dead end. They're a customer with the wrong date on them.

Most of the people who could buy from you cannot buy today. Not because your offer is weak — because of where they sit in their own cycle. Only a slice of your market is in the market in any given month, and the rest are somewhere between "never thought about it" and "probably next year."

So the real question isn't how to get more leads. It's what happens to the ones who aren't ready. Right now, for most businesses, the honest answer is nothing — which means next month's buyers have to be found from scratch, and you pay to find them every single time.

Work out your own number rather than trusting anyone's. How often does a customer of yours genuinely need what you sell? Once every four years? Then roughly a quarter of your market is in play this year, and three-quarters of what you spend reaching them lands on people who can't act. That's not a reason to spend less. It's a reason to build somewhere for them to wait.

Today. Write down, in one sentence, what actually happens to a "not now" lead right now. If the answer is "I follow up when I remember," you've found the leak.

This week. Give them one thing that's useful whether or not they ever buy — a guide, a checklist, a check like the one you just took — and one date you'll be back. Put the date in your calendar, not your head.

This month. Sort your last fifty enquiries into three piles: doesn't know they need us · knows but not now · ready. If you can't do it, that's the finding — you can't route people you can't see.

Where this comes from. Chet Holmes set out the readiness split in his book The Ultimate Sales Machine:1 about 3% buying now, roughly 7% open to it, and the rest somewhere between not thinking about it and not interested. Worth knowing that those are twenty years of his own observation rather than a published study — which is exactly why the calculation above is yours and not his. The rigorous companion is Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia, whose report Advertising effectiveness and the 95-5 rule2 derives in-market share from purchase cycle; Dawes says himself that the well-known figure "is not meant to be a precise rule. We're using it as a heuristic to get the idea across." Ryan Deiss's work at DigitalMarketer is where the discipline of naming an observable stage for every prospect comes from. And Dean Jackson's more cheese, less whiskers framing3 — lead with value, don't show the teeth — is a general posture rather than a follow-up rule, but it's the one that matters most inside a sequence: the failure is the email where the tone switches from gift to sales pitch, and the reader feels it immediately.

What the module adds, and where it actually is. The module builds the sequence — what the waiting offer is for your business, what gets sent when, and how to tell a stage from a guess. It isn't built yet. When it is, the price will be on the page and you'll be able to buy just this one. No call, no application.

When you've done the three things, take the check again. It's free and it always will be. The score moving is the only evidence either of us should trust.

References

  1. Portfolio, 2007 — the tiers are in chapter four. A later revised edition, updated with Amanda Holmes, inverts the pyramid; that framing is hers rather than Chet's. ↩

  2. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, B2B report, May 2021. Frequently misattributed to the LinkedIn B2B Institute, which sponsored and popularised the work but did not publish it. ↩

  3. From his podcast More Cheese Less Whiskers, which grew out of I Love Marketing with Joe Polish. ↩

When you've done the three things, take the check again. It's free and it always will be.

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