The Guide. How to read your own demand.
Here is how we read a company's demand, step by step, so you can try it yourself. If you would rather hand it to us, ask for a buyer map at the end.
Trace your deals back to the first touch.
Ignore the last meeting before the signature. Find the first moment each buyer heard your name, for every recent deal you remember clearly.
If most of those lines end in a person's name, you are running a network. That is fine, as long as you know it.
Mark each input running or idle.
Outbound, content, referrals, paid. Running means someone owns it and it happens every week whether or not anyone feels like it.
Everything else is idle. That includes the blog post from last spring and the ad test somebody paused.
Watch what a stranger does.
Pretend you are a buyer who has never heard of you. Search your category. Ask an AI assistant for a shortlist. Read your own site as if you have a problem and very little patience.
Note every place you disappear.
Pick the idle input closest to your buyer.
Do not switch everything on at once. Choose the input that matches how your buyers already behave.
If they go looking, start with the answers they will find. If they never look, go to them.
Agree what working means before you start.
Write down the baseline today: what pipeline looks like now, and where it comes from. Without it, every result turns into an argument about feelings.
Things we hear, and what they usually mean.
- "We tried outbound. It did not work."
- Usually a list was blasted with a template. That is a different activity that happens to share the name.
- "Our buyers only buy through referrals."
- Often they buy through referrals because that is the only door you left open.
- "We need more content."
- Content with no reader in mind is a library nobody visits. Decide who it is for first.
Rather we did the read?
Ask for a buyer map. We go through the same steps for your company, write down what we find, and walk you through it on a call. It costs you nothing and commits you to nothing.