Four honest questions about your marketing.
Marketing almost never fails everywhere at once. It fails in one place, and the other three keep working well enough that nobody goes looking.
There is nothing to fill out here. No score, no email box. Ten minutes, and most of it you can do on your phone.
If all four come back solid, you don’t need us — and you’ll know that before you reach the bottom of the page.
Three rules, and one thing worth saying first.
- Answer as the owner, not as the person who has to defend the budget.
- Answer about last month, not about the plan.
- “I don’t know” is an answer. It’s usually the most useful one.
Almost none of this damage gets done on purpose. Defaults do it. Templates do it. A handoff between two people who each assumed the other had it. It happens quietly, over years, in businesses run by people who are very good at what they do. If you find something broken below, it is unlikely that anybody chose it.
You’re not too small for this.
The options you’ve been shown were probably built for a company with a marketing department, and priced like it. That’s a fit problem, not a size problem.
And “small business” here means a way of thinking, not a revenue line. Some of the best-run companies we know are owner-led and ship worldwide. What they have in common isn’t scale — it’s that the person who cares most is still close enough to the work to notice when something is off.
Four questions.
Do you know what your customer was worried about before they found you?
Not what they typed into Google. What they were afraid of getting wrong.
- Your website describes what you sell. It never names the situation someone is in when they need it.
- The words on your site are not the words customers use on the phone.
- You can describe your product in detail and your customer in a sentence.
What’s usually behind it: you know the answer so well you’ve lost access to the question. Everyone who knows a subject deeply forgets what it was like not to. That isn’t carelessness — it’s what expertise does to you.
What fine looks likeYou could write down the three things a customer is nervous about before they ever call, and everyone who answers your phone would recognise all three.
Would a stranger believe you?
Not someone who knows you. Someone comparing three companies on a Tuesday night.
- Take your logo off your homepage and put a competitor’s on. Does anything have to change?
- Count the adjectives — quality, trusted, leading, dedicated. Now count the things a skeptic could actually check.
- Your best piece of proof is a story you tell on the phone, and it is nowhere on your site.
- Nothing on the site says what you’re not good at, or who you’re wrong for.
What’s usually behind it: describing yourself is free, and anything free stops carrying information. Proof costs something to produce, and that cost is the entire signal. A number from your own equipment, a customer who’ll take a call, a limitation stated plainly — those are expensive to fake, which is exactly why they work.
What fine looks likeThere is at least one thing on your website that would embarrass you if it weren’t true.
Does the next step actually exist?
Not on the plan. On the site, today.
Do this one now, on your phone. Search for your business. Click your own ad, if you run one. Fill out your own form with a fake name. Then put the phone down and see what happens — and how long it takes.
- The form goes to an inbox nobody has opened this week.
- The page that gets the most visitors has no obvious next step on it.
- A customer has to explain their situation twice, because the first person didn’t write it down.
- Your answer to “what happens after someone contacts us” starts with “well, usually.”
What’s usually behind it: nobody owns the seams. Every individual piece works — the ad is fine, the page is fine, the inbox is fine — and the handoffs between them belong to no one, so they’re the only part that never gets improved.
What fine looks likeYou ran the test above and nothing surprised you.
The last time you changed something, how did you know it worked?
“It felt better” is a real answer. It’s just not evidence.
- The report improved and the phone didn’t.
- You can name what changed, but not what it changed.
- You changed several things at once, so all you have left is a feeling.
- The number everyone watches is the one that was easiest to get.
What’s usually behind it: fast numbers are free and slow ones are work, so the fast ones quietly become the target. And whatever you count starts shaping what you get more of — that part is not a metaphor. Tell an advertising platform that a form fill is a win and it will go find you more form fills, including all the ones your own people would never call back.
What fine looks likeYou can point at one change and one thing that got better, and they’re connected by something other than the calendar.
Four questions, four places.
The same four questions apply wherever your marketing actually happens, and for most businesses that’s four places: how people find you (search and advertising), what they land on when they do (your website and content), what happens after they raise their hand (email, CRM and follow-through), and where people talk about you when you’re not in the room (social and community).
Four questions across four places is sixteen honest conversations. Almost nobody needs all sixteen at once. Most businesses need two or three, in the right order.
What your answers mean.
One weak spot
Fix that one thing. Don’t start a project, don’t rebuild the website, and don’t let anyone talk you into a package because one question came back soft.
Two or three
Start with the earliest one, not the loudest one. Order is most of the answer — a problem at question one makes everything after it look broken, and fixing question four first fixes nothing.
Mostly “I don’t know”
That’s not a failing grade, it’s the finding. You don’t have a marketing problem yet — you have a visibility problem about your own business, and that’s a much cheaper thing to solve.
All four solid
Then you don’t need us, and we’d rather you knew that from a web page than from an invoice. Go do the thing you’re actually good at.
This matters more at your size, not less.
A large company can substitute volume for judgment. With enough traffic, the numbers eventually do the thinking for them — patterns surface whether or not anybody is paying attention.
You don’t have that traffic. Three inquiries is not a trend. So judgment has to do the job that sheer volume does for them, which is why these four questions matter more at your size rather than less.
The other half of that is genuinely better news. You can call the last five people who bought from you and ask why they picked you. They will tell you. That is better information than most large companies can buy at any price, and it is sitting there right now.
Some of this you can’t see from a distance.
Go back through the four questions and notice how much of it happens in a room. How somebody stands at the counter before they work up to asking. How the phone gets answered when everyone is busy. The thing you can point at but can’t quite put into words.
Distance isn’t a character flaw. It’s an information problem.
We’re in Boone. If you’re nearby, say so — some of this is simply faster across a table than over email. The standard doesn’t change either way. Only the access does.
— Eric
These four questions came from somewhere.
Underneath them is a longer piece of work: four principles — understand the human, earn trust, connect the experience, and improve with wisdom rather than hype — worked out across those same four places. Sixteen essays. It lives on Eric’s own site, it’s free, and nothing is held back for a sales call.
The whole thing rests on one line: do not remove expertise from the moments where trust is being formed.
At your size that lands differently than it does at a large company. The expertise is you. There is no bench. The person who knows why the customer really called, and which promise you can actually keep, is one person — and that person is the one reading this.
Read the Human-First Framework →
And if what you actually want to know is where we stand — how we work, what we won’t do — that’s a different page. This one isn’t about us.
Three doors, and the third one is free.
You know which one is broken
Tell us which question came back soft and what you saw. No deck, no pitch — just the conversation.
Start a conversation →You want someone to run it
There’s an application for that, and it’s meant to be one. It asks real questions before anybody promises anything.
Work with me →You’d rather fix it yourself
Entirely reasonable. The full framework is free, it’s all there, and you don’t have to talk to anyone to use it.
Read the framework →