The buyer journey, defined
One buyer, one product or service line, one territory, and the stages from first research to a quote or demo request, written down in your terms.
Paid diagnostic
Demand Diagnostic
A bounded assessment of one buying journey, run before anyone commits a monthly budget. It establishes what your buyers ask, where you are absent or unconvincing, what a qualified enquiry is worth to you, and whether a programme is likely to pay for itself. It ends with a recommendation, and sometimes that recommendation is no.
Who it’s for
An owner, commercial director or growth lead with a specific acquisition problem (a new territory, a product line that is not selling, a launch that is not being evaluated) who wants a straight answer before funding the work.
The outcome
A baseline, an economic test, a prioritised backlog, and a straight answer on whether to proceed.
What you get
The buying questions
The questions that buyer asks at each stage, separated by where they came from: your sales calls and enquiries, search data, or our research. A question a model invented is labelled as such.
A dated baseline
Repeated observations across search and AI answers for those questions, with the engine, location and date recorded. Where an engine could not be read, the gap is shown as missing, not as zero.
The journey review
Your own pages and enquiry flow, checked from the buyer's side: can they find the answer, believe it, and ask for a quote without friction? Crawler access and indexing are checked here too.
The economics test
Using your figures, what a qualified enquiry is worth and how many a programme would have to produce to cover its cost. It is a hypothesis to validate, and we label it as one.
Backlog and go/no-go
A prioritised backlog with the access each item needs (CMS, analytics, CRM, subject experts), and a recommendation: proceed, proceed narrower, fix something first, or do not spend the money.
Why a paid diagnostic, not a free audit
A free audit attracts everyone who is curious and answers a question nobody is paying to resolve. A paid diagnostic is a small commitment from both sides: you put up a modest fee and an hour of someone's time, and we do the work properly, with your economics in it. The free snapshot is still there for anyone who wants to look first.
The diagnostic is also where we find out whether we can actually help. A valuable offer, an identifiable buyer, spare capacity to fulfil more work, and a willingness to tell us which leads were useful: those four things decide whether a programme has a workable route to an outcome. Budget without them is not an opportunity.
What we keep separate
Every diagnostic distinguishes three kinds of statement. Observed facts: what the engines returned on a given date, what your pages say, what your analytics shows. Your statements: what you told us about your buyers, margins and capacity. Our hypotheses: what we think is happening and what might change it.
Blending those is how this category produces confident reports that turn out to be wrong. Keeping them apart means you can see exactly which parts of the recommendation rest on evidence and which rest on a judgement call.
What happens after
If the answer is go, the diagnostic's questions become the programme's measurement panel and its backlog becomes the first month's plan, so nothing is rebuilt. If the answer is not yet, you keep the backlog and can act on it yourself or with your existing agency. Either way the diagnostic is a standalone deliverable with no obligation attached.
Related: how we measure · our own numbers, published · pricing and the economics test · the evidence behind each claim · all three stages
Demand Diagnostic — questions
How is the diagnostic different from the free snapshot?
The snapshot qualifies demand: is there a buying journey here worth looking at? It is capped at one journey, about a dozen questions and two surfaces, and it stops there. The diagnostic qualifies the investment: it adds the economics, a review of your own enquiry flow, the access requirements and a backlog, and it ends with a go/no-go recommendation.
What does it cost?
£750–£1,500 ex VAT, depending on the breadth of the journey and how many surfaces and markets it covers. We confirm the figure before starting, and it does not change once agreed.
What do you need from us?
About an hour with someone who knows what a good enquiry looks like, your rough sales economics (contribution per sale and how often a qualified enquiry becomes one), and read access to analytics if you have it. If you cannot share economics, we can still run the diagnostic, but the go/no-go will be weaker and we will say why.
Will you tell us not to buy a programme?
Yes, when the numbers say so. If you are already well represented for the questions that matter, if your enquiry handling is the real bottleneck, or if the break-even volume looks unrealistic, the recommendation says that. A programme sold into a bad fit becomes delivery debt for both of us.
Find out whether the budget is worth spending
Tell us the buyer, the product and the territory. We will confirm the diagnostic's scope and fee before anything starts.