A quiz won’t fix the wrong positioning.
We build diagnostic quiz funnels. So you would expect us to tell you that every business needs one. Most don’t — not yet. Here is what we check first, and why we will say no to the build if the check comes back badly.
Chris walks through it.
The same argument, out loud, with the examples. If you’d rather read, it’s all below.
Power only transfers when the two ends match.
Chris spent his early career in RAF communications. There, this has a name and a number attached to it. You can have a powerful transmitter and a well-built aerial, and still get almost nothing out the far end — because the two aren’t matched to each other. The power doesn’t vanish. It comes back down the cable at you.
Businesses do exactly the same thing, and almost nobody measures it. Effort goes in — ads, content, outreach, a new website — and most of it comes back as stalled leads, objections you can’t answer, and clients who don’t renew. The instinct is to turn up the power. More traffic into a mismatch just raises the volume of what’s already reflecting back.
This is the part that matters commercially: a quiz funnel is a power increase. It is very good at bringing more of the right people to your door, faster. It is no good at all at fixing what happens when they arrive.
Four things have to line up.
Not four things to be good at — four things that have to match each other. Three out of four isn’t 75% of the result. It’s a mismatch.
Here is the one that surprises people. Thinking most of your market is actively looking is usually bad news, not good. It almost always means you can only see the slice that already is — and you are competing for them with everyone else who can only see the same slice. The people who don’t know yet are the open ground, and reaching them used to be too expensive to bother with. It isn’t any more.
You can get all four right and still lose it in the room.
Positioning lives in strategy and marketing. Selling happens somewhere else, usually with different people, often on a different day. Nobody owns both sides of that join, which is why it is the least-watched part of most businesses and the most expensive.
The pattern is always the same. A firm does the work: gets the message right, rebuilds the site, agrees what it stands for. Then the first sales call opens with the service list. The price gets quoted against a competitor. The proposal reads like everyone else’s. Everything the positioning built gets handed across that join and quietly dropped.
The seam is the cheapest thing on this page to fix, because nothing new has to be invented. The position already exists. It just isn’t arriving.
Two modes, and we name which one you’re buying.
Selling one and delivering the other is its own mismatch, so we say it out loud every time.
Advisory — we read
Where your market actually is, who isn’t looking and why, what the outcome is worth, where the position stops. It ends in a finding, written down, whether or not you build anything with us.
Implementation — we build
The endpoint, the creative, the pipeline, the engine. Built on a finding, never on a brief that arrived without one.
Why the order matters
Implementation without a read upstream is how the same old gets in. It is also how agencies end up building something excellent that doesn’t work.
We run this test on our own work too, not just on yours. If the questions in a diagnostic could have come from anyone’s template, it isn’t a diagnostic — it is the category checklist with a logo on it.
Which dial is sending your effort back?
Seventeen questions, about seven minutes. No email needed to see your read — and it will tell you if a quiz isn’t your answer.