You know something isn't working. You don't know what to ask for.

You run a business. There's no reason you should know the difference between a CRM and a marketing automation platform, and the people who do know are mostly the people selling one.

The uncomfortable part is that the words are the only way in. You can't brief someone without them, so you end up asking for a website because it's the word you have, and you get a website, and often that wasn't it.

So the first job is translation. Tell us what's actually happening in the business and we'll tell you which of the words it maps to.

There are three layers. In front of you is how people find you and what they think before they arrive. The thing itself is your website. Behind it is what happens after somebody gets in touch.

A beautiful site with nothing catching enquiries loses them at the back. A perfect follow up system is worth nothing if nobody finds you. Ads pointed at a page that doesn't convert just spend faster.

Almost everybody in this market sells one layer. Web designers sell the middle, CRM resellers sell the back, SEO and ads agencies sell the front. Each can do their bit perfectly well and you can still see no difference, which is why so many people have bought something and felt nothing change.

You can do this yourself in ten minutes and it's worth doing before you talk to anybody, including us.

Search for what you sell, in your area, on your phone, not logged in. If you can't find yourself, the front is the problem. If you find yourself easily, open your own site and try to get in touch as a stranger would. If that's awkward or there's no way to do it besides ringing, the middle is the problem.

If both of those are fine, count what happened to the last ten enquiries. If some got no reply for a day, or nobody followed up when they went quiet, the problem is behind it. Whichever step lost you people is where the money is.

The fix is occasionally one thing, small, and something you can do in an afternoon. Claiming a Google profile you never claimed. Turning on the form notifications that have been going to an inbox nobody opens. Asking your last twenty customers for a review.

When that's what we find, we'll say so. Partly because it's true and partly because telling you otherwise is how this industry got its reputation.

It costs us nothing to be honest about that, and the businesses that come back to us later are usually the ones we told to go away first.

Correct, and you should assume the same about us. What you can do is check whether the recommendation is falsifiable.

Ask why. If the answer refers to something specific about your business that they'd have had to go and look at, that's a real diagnosis. If it's the same answer they'd give anybody, it's a product being described back at you.

That's the test we'd want applied to us too. If we can't tell you what we saw when we looked at your business, we haven't looked.

Both answers are real ones. Small components put together is a genuine outcome and we'll happily do it. The whole thing built properly is a genuine outcome too, and sometimes it's the honest answer, because the thing you have can't be patched any further.

The wrong version is being sold the largest thing because you didn't know enough to argue. That's the one to guard against, and the way to guard against it is to make somebody show you the reasoning rather than the package.

For what it's worth, the answer is small more often than large.

Nobody can price this page honestly, and anybody who tries is quoting the package rather than your problem. That's the whole reason you're on it.

You'll get a number on the first call rather than after three meetings. If it's a small fix it's priced as a small fix, and sometimes it's small enough that you should just do it yourself, in which case we'll tell you how. If you've already got something that works, a CRM your pipeline actually lives in or a site on a platform that performs, we'd keep it rather than replace it, and that comes off the number rather than onto it.

What we won't do is guarantee an outcome. Google changes, Meta changes, and anyone promising you a number of leads by a date is optimising for the promise.

We go and look before we talk. What a customer sees from search through to getting in touch, where enquiries are going and whether any are being lost, whether the brand is helping you or quietly costing you.

Then a call, where you get told what we'd fix first and in what order, and roughly what each part would involve.

You can take that and do it yourself, take it to somebody else, or ask us to do it. All three are fine, and you'll know more than you did either way.