The Reasons Nothing Sells Split into Five States, and the Treatment Differs for Each

The phrase nothing is selling is not a symptom. It is a description of a result.

A symptom is a word pointing to where something is happening. A description of a result points to the state after the event. Confuse the two and the treatment is aimed at the result rather than the cause.

And when a description of a result is treated as a symptom, what tends to be suspected first is the writing. Product descriptions, announcements, the phrasing of proposals. These come first not because the distribution of causes runs that way. At least, not in a field where experience has yet to accumulate. The writing is something you wrote yourself, so the places you could fix come to mind concretely. The number of candidates that come to mind settles the order of suspicion.

The range this single phrase actually covers is wider than it seems. Not being seen, not being read, being read but not taken as being about oneself — all of it falls inside nothing is selling. Because the result looks the same from outside, no need to distinguish them ever arises.

The width of this phrase becomes a problem in proportion to how small the operation is. With few transactions, there is also little material for splitting the five apart. Keep calling it by one phrase while the material stays thin and the treatment gets fixed to one thing.

There are three things to be confirmed here. The first is how many states the phrase points to. It splits into five, and the five occur in different places. The second is the procedure for judging which one you are in. What the judgement needs is not statistics but a handful of actual cases and your own records. The third is why improving without splitting leaves you unable to tell whether anything worked.

Something that cannot be settled belongs here too. Which state is most common does not get settled in this article. The distribution shifts with what you handle, how you deliver it, and the age of the business. A distribution is something you count, not something handed to you.

Methods for making things sell are not lined up here either. Five separate pieces of work correspond to the five states. Because the correspondence is one to one, lining them up before the choice does not help with choosing. What is needed first is which one is occurring now.

Skip that judgement and harm follows. Skipped, the treatment takes the shape of searching for something that works on all five. Nothing works on all five, so the search does not end. A search that does not end tends to continue in the form of improving the writing, because writing always has somewhere left to fix.

And a search that does not end looks like diligence from outside. Your hands have not stopped, so no judgement forms that you are not advancing. What has stopped is not the hands but the narrowing of candidates.

The Three-Cause Account Fixes the Subject to One Party

Three causes come up repeatedly for why a product is not selling. All three are real states and the treatments are apt. And all three carry the same subject.

Insufficient awareness. Accompanied by the account that purchase cannot occur where existence is unknown. Treatments offered include increasing inflow from search, running advertisements, and publishing across several channels.

Value not being conveyed. Described as a state in which what you provide is not understood on the other party’s side. The treatment is clarifying the audience and tidying the way things are conveyed.

Appeal not being conveyed. Described as a state where awareness exists but you are not chosen. Treatments offered include showing cases and conveying things in the form of a story.

Added to these is the observation that the greatest cause is failing to grasp where in the purchasing process people are dropping away — identifying at which of awareness, interest, comparison and purchase things halt.

These are apt both as description and as practical advice. All three are states that actually occur, and the treatments correspond.

Now to the subject. All three causes are described as failures of conveying. Not known, not conveyed, not conveyed. The subject is your side throughout and the verb is conveying throughout.

Cases where the cause is a failure of conveying do exist. This framing is not off the mark. The point is that something does not fit inside it.

The case where the other party already understands fully and has judged that now is not the time. That is not a failure of conveying. It does not fit the framing, so no treatment comes out for it. And when treated as a failure of conveying, the treatment becomes convey more.

Convey more has two directions. Increasing quantity and raising intensity. Increasing quantity means thickening explanations, adding cases, raising the frequency of contact. Raising intensity means strengthening assertions, attaching deadlines, spelling out disadvantages.

Neither works on someone who already understands. The premise that understanding is insufficient is mistaken. And the failure to work gets processed under the reading that it is still not enough.

Raising intensity carries a consequence in the opposite direction. Having content you already understand repeated forcefully is information that the other side has not grasped your level of understanding. Someone who has worked that out discounts the quality of your judgement. What gets discounted is not only that one announcement. The same discount tends to reach what is received afterwards.

Nothing Is Selling Calls Five Different States by One Phrase

The state in which purchase does not occur splits into at least five.

First, not being seen. The page or announcement has not reached the audience’s eyes. In this state the quality of the content has no bearing whatever on the result.

Second, seen but not read. Eyes reached it, but they left within the first few lines. The content exists, but the judgement finished before it was read.

Third, read but not taken as being about oneself. The content was understood but processed as something separate from their own situation. The state that ends with that was a good piece.

Fourth, taken as being about oneself, but not now. Relevance was recognised and the need understood, but the priority sits below others. This state is a correctly performed judgement.

Fifth, taken as being now, but not theirs to decide. Need and timing were both granted, but the authority or the conditions for a decision are not in place. In corporate transactions this appears as an approval process; in personal ones as household circumstances or the state of funds.

The result looks the same from outside in all five. No purchase has occurred. And the five treatments are entirely different.

The first is treated as a problem of routes. The second as a problem of the first few lines. The third as a problem of describing the audience. For the fourth, choosing not to treat it is sometimes correct. The fifth requires handling the decision process.

Distinguishing the five means asking people who did not buy, and that is impossible — so the question runs. Not everyone can be asked. But three of the five can be judged from your own records. Whether it was seen, whether it was read, whether it was reached to the end. These remain as behaviour.

The remaining two — not now, or not theirs to decide — can only be asked about. And those two are limited to parties with whom contact occurred midway. Parties with whom contact occurred can be asked.

Cutting into five is not the only division. The number of gates changes with what you handle. What does not change is that the phrase covers several states.

The moment you split them, the number of things to treat appears to have grown. One problem became five, so the work looks five times larger. In fact it runs the other way: split them and you need only work on the one occurring now.

The five carry an order. Someone halted at an upper stage has not reached the lower ones. So the state at a lower stage is observable only for those who passed the upper ones.

That order carries a consequence for diagnosis. Fix an upper stage and the figures at a lower stage can worsen. More people seeing it means more people leaving unread. In the month you fixed an upper stage, the lower proportion can fall while the actual count rises. Watching the proportion alone makes the upstream improvement look like a failure. Fixing an upper stage worsening a lower figure comes from the stages not being independent. How the stages connect to one another is in marketing design as a whole.

The Cause Lies in Me Is the Reading That Arrives First

When nothing sells for a while, the reading that the cause lies in oneself is the first to rise. This reading is not an expression of humility. It is an expression of the candidates available being located only there.

The writing is something you wrote. You have read it back many times, and the places you could fix come to mind concretely. Candidates like this phrasing is weak and this heading is unclear come out endlessly.

Problems of route, by contrast, offer no material to bring to mind. Which search terms produced how many impressions, where the links come from. Unless you go and look at the records, nothing is in your head.

The side with more candidates gets chosen as the cause. Hands then actually move against the chosen cause. When hands move, something improves. That something improved becomes confirmation that the choice was right.

The phrasing the cause lies in me hides this structure. That sentence contains room for you to act. If the cause lies in you, you can fix it. A state where something fixable has been found feels more forward-facing than a dead end.

But in the first state — not being seen — there is nothing on your side to fix. The cause lies in the design of your routes, and that is a separate matter from the quality of the writing. The cause lies in me and the cause lies in what I wrote get treated as the same phrase, but they point to different places.

The difficulty of forming a habit of consulting records involves the same structure. Going to look at records requires a decision to go and look. That decision occurs when the candidates in your head run out. As long as the candidates do not run out, records are never consulted.

And improving the writing has no upper limit. However much you fix, more fixable places appear. Because it does not run out, no occasion arises for moving to another candidate.

It is not unusual for the cause to lie in the writing. Suspecting it is not itself the error. The point is that the order of suspicion is settled independently of the distribution of causes. You are not looking at the writing first because writing is the more probable cause; you are looking at it first because it comes to mind first.

Seen from outside, the two are the same behaviour. Both begin with a review of the writing. The difference appears when no effect follows. Choosing on the basis of a distribution, you move to the next candidate. Choosing on ease of recall, you look at the same place again.

Nor is judging by ease of recall always an error. In a field where experience is abundant, the causes that come to mind readily tend to coincide with the causes that are actually common. The coincidence breaks down in a field whose cases have yet to collect in your hands. And the stage of starting a business sits exactly in that region.

Line Up Competing Candidates and Build an Observation That Excludes

There is a formulation on the side of science for how diagnosis advances. Rather than raising one candidate and confirming it, line up competing candidates and design in advance an observation that can exclude some of them.

In 1964 the physicist John Platt argued that what separates fast-moving fields from slow ones is not the ability of the researchers but the procedure of inference (Platt, 1964, Science, 146(3642), 347–353). What the fast fields shared was the repetition of one procedure: line up competing hypotheses, design an observation for which each predicts a different result, carry it out, and reduce the candidates.

What Platt contrasts this with is raising a single hypothesis and gathering observations that support it. Observations do gather under that form. They gather, but the candidates do not reduce. A supporting observation may be supporting the other candidates at the same time.

This argument addresses the practice of physics and molecular biology; it is not a claim that business judgement takes the same shape. What carries over is only the direction: however many observations that cannot reduce candidates you pile up, the narrowing does not advance.

Apply that direction to the state of nothing selling. Fixing the writing and watching what happens is the form of raising one hypothesis and waiting for supporting observation. If the figure rises, a reading attaches that the writing was the cause. If it does not, a reading attaches that it was still insufficient. Neither outcome excludes the other four candidates.

The meaning of splitting into five shifts here. Splitting is preparation for choosing a treatment, and at the same time it is the work of creating a state in which excluding observations can be designed.

Concretely, it works like this. The first and second states separate on impressions and opens. Those two figures move independently of the other three candidates. So that observation can exclude one of the first and second.

The third state separates on what a reader says. A state where impressions of the content come back and a state where talk of their own situation comes back do not occur at once. Here too the candidates reduce.

Each time one exclusion advances, what to look at next is settled. That is the actual effect of splitting. Being able to line up treatment candidates matters less than gaining a procedure that reduces them.

And this procedure has an end. Exclude the five in order and one or two remain. The gap between work that has an end and work that does not is exactly the gap between diagnosis and improvement.

Which of the Five Is Occurring Can Be Judged from a Handful of Cases

The judgement is not the work of producing proportions. It is the work of looking at kinds. A small number of cases suffices.

The first and second judgements use records. The number of impressions and the number of actual opens. And how far it was read after opening. With those two, the upper two stages separate.

Even without figures the judgement holds. Ask an acquaintance to see whether they can find the announcement. If they cannot, you are halted at the first stage. If they found it but did not read to the end, the second.

The third judgement uses the reactions of those who read. Look at what a reader says. If impressions of the content come back, that person is reacting as a reader. If talk of their own situation comes back, it is being processed as being about them. If reactions ending in that was a good article continue, you are halted at the third stage.

The fourth and fifth judgements can only be asked about. Ask parties with whom contact occurred why they are not deciding now. I am prioritising something else means the fourth; I cannot decide on my own means the fifth.

A small number of cases gives a rough distribution. Precision of proportion is not required. Knowing which of the five is most common settles where to place your hand next.

What if there has been no contact at all? Then the judgement ends at the first stage. Without contact, the states from the second onward have not occurred. Improving content carries no meaning. However good the content becomes, if it is not being seen the result is the same.

This judgement is also hard to accept. The conclusion that something is wrong with what you wrote comes with work you can begin; the conclusion that nothing has arrived yet does not.

Where a state near zero contact continues, this does not mean content may be left alone. When contact begins, halting from the second stage onward is entirely possible. It is a question of priority, not of necessity.

Judging from a handful of cases carries a limit on precision. A distribution over ten may change over the next ten. So what this procedure yields is not a settled diagnosis but a candidate for where to look next.

Without keeping that in view, the first distribution obtained gets fixed. Once fixed, the cases gathered afterwards are read as material confirming the conclusion already held. There is one way to prevent it: keep taking records after the judgement. Keep taking them and a change in the distribution becomes visible.

Among the five judgements, the third is the most easily missed. It is being seen, and it is being read. In the figures it looks healthy. The state of not taken as being about oneself does not appear in behavioural records.

The Five Have Entirely Different Treatments

Under one nothing is selling, five separate pieces of work run.

Treatment of the first is the design of routes. Where people can enter from, and where those who enter converge. That structure was handled in customer journey design. It is not work on content.

Treatment of the second is the design of the first few lines. What a reader judges, on beginning, is whether this concerns them, and they judge it in the first few lines. What gets judged there is not the quality of the content but whether the audience is them.

Treatment of the third is describing the audience. Unless whose situation you are handling is concrete, a reader cannot map themselves onto it. The more generally you write, the less it is about anyone.

Treatment of the fourth can be no treatment. A judgement that the priority is low comes out of that person’s situation. What you can change is only the information that judgement requires. If it is low once the information is in place, that is a correct judgement.

Treatment of the fifth is handling the decision process. Who decides, and what has to be in place for a decision. This information cannot be known unless asked for.

The five pieces of work differ in the time and the capacities they require. The first is route design, the second and third are writing, the fourth is waiting, the fifth is asking. One nothing is selling puts this range of different work on the table.

Several can occur at once. Not being seen and not being read are not contradictory. In that case, process from the top down, because fixing a lower stage does not reach people halted above.

That the treatment of the fourth is no treatment can be read as too passive. It does not mean doing nothing. It means not working on that party now. The period in which a priority changes does not move through your efforts. It moves when the situation on their side changes.

What is needed then is being in a place that gets recalled when the situation changes. That is the work of maintaining a route rather than of working on somebody. The design on the side of maintaining a route is handled in the premises of list building.

Unable to choose no treatment, you aim the third treatment at fourth-state parties as well — that is, you explain more. The more they are explained to, the more experience they accumulate of being repeated at about something they already understand.

Among the five pieces of work, the one seldom begun is the fifth. Asking about a decision process means asking questions from a weaker position. That difficulty is what creates the gap in the information.

Without Splitting, You Cannot Even Tell Whether Anything Worked

Splitting is needed for more than choosing a treatment. Improve without splitting and the reading of the result never settles.

Suppose you fix the writing and purchases increase. The increase may be because the writing improved. It may be because inflow arrived from another article in the same period. Without splitting, the two cannot be told apart.

Pile up improvements that cannot be told apart and measures accumulate while which worked and which did not stays undecided. Every accumulated measure has to be maintained. The maintenance load rises for certain, and the breakdown of the effect stays unknown.

If the whole is increasing, the breakdown need not be known — that reading is available. While it keeps increasing, that reading suffices. The problem is being left with nothing to suspect when it stops. With no breakdown, you can only suspect everything or suspect what you changed most recently.

And suspecting what you changed most recently is the very form of choosing the nearest candidate. The last thing changed is the thing recalled most vividly.

Further, this suspicion tends to miss. What was changed recently has had less time and so may contribute less to the result. A route changed six months ago has been working throughout. The size of the contribution and the ease of recall can run in opposite order.

Strict separation is not always possible. While the scale of a business is small, movement in the figures does not exceed the range of chance. What is needed at that stage is not statistical discrimination but a qualitative grasp of which of the five is halting things.

Without splitting, no judgement to stop a measure can be made. Since which is working is unknown, none can be stopped. What cannot be stopped is all maintained.

The maintenance load stacks up over time. In a state where load has stacked up, the capacity to try new things falls. As capacity falls, work shifts to adjusting what already exists. Adjustment is performed in an unsplit state, so it produces results that again cannot be discriminated.

The effect of splitting is not only choosing the right treatment. Being able to judge that something did not work is in fact the larger part. Judge that it did not work and the measure can be stopped. Having measures you can stop is the condition for beginning the next one. An operation that only adds eventually stops being able to move.

The cost of being unable to stop is not only time. Every maintained measure is treated as something that might be working. The more things that might be working accumulate, the more candidate explanations exist when something next changes. More candidates make identification harder still.

Sometimes Nothing Is Selling Is the Correct Description

Cases arise where none of the five applies. It is being seen, being read, processed as being about them, the timing has come, and the authority to decide is there. And still no purchase occurs.

In that case the correct description is nothing is selling. And the cause lies outside the object of diagnosis.

Two things are conceivable. One is that the problem you handle does not carry enough weight to be worth paying to solve. The other is that another means of solving the same problem is already in their hands.

Neither moves through improvements in conveying. The former leads to reviewing the framing of the problem itself. The latter leads to handling the difference from that other means. That structure is handled in the choice to stop analysing competitors.

That these two come to light is not a bad result. It is information that emerges beyond the five diagnoses, and information that cannot be obtained without diagnosing.

Diagnosing that far only to find nothing sells is a waste of time — that reading is available too. The waste occurs on the other side, where improvement continues without diagnosis. With the cause in the framing of the problem, you keep fixing the writing. It does not move, so you fix it further. This route has no end.

Reviewing the framing of a problem is the heaviest conclusion available. It should not be reached lightly. It is a conclusion reached after confirming the five in order and finding that none applies.

That this conclusion is possible works, in itself, as a reason to avoid diagnosis. Advance the diagnosis and an answer may emerge placing the cause in the framing of the problem. That answer moves the premises of the work done so far.

Where there are premises you do not want moved, diagnosis halts partway. A halted diagnosis settles into the safe conclusion of improving the writing. This halt never occurs as deliberate avoidance. It simply occurs in the form of time never being secured to examine that candidate.

Even where the cause lies in the framing, rebuilding everything is not necessarily required. The problem you handle can stay the same while changing whose problem it is described as changes the weight. The same content is light for one segment and heavy for another. That difference sits on the side of the audience rather than the content.

The other case — another means already in hand — is handled similarly. Claiming superiority over that means puts you on the ground of comparison. Once there, judgement proceeds on a list of features. What can be placed instead is a description of the part that means does not solve. If that part is small for the person, it ends there. That it ended is itself information usable in the next design.

Whether Resolution Rose Shows in the Candidates That Come to Mind

The confirmation runs on neither revenue nor purchase counts. It runs on what has become available to you as a candidate.

The first indicator is whether the halting stage can be identified. Can you say, in your own words, which of the five is most common? If not, you are still holding one phrase. If you can, the treatment candidates have narrowed.

The second indicator is whether the halting stage moved after a measure was taken. Fixing routes moved things from not being seen to not being read. If it moved, the measure landed. If it did not, the cause lay at another stage.

The third indicator is whether improvement candidates come from somewhere other than the writing. If only revisions to the writing come to mind when you consider what to do, judgement is still governed by nearness. If routes, the description of the audience and the decision process rise as candidates, the split has taken hold.

All three look at the resolution of the diagnosis rather than at result figures. Since nothing is selling is a description of a result, what needs confirming is the fineness of the description.

The reason revenue sits outside the main indicators is the same. Revenue moves the same way whichever of the five stages improves. From the fact of movement, which stage improved cannot be read. And making the next judgement without knowing puts your hand in the same place again.

Resolution rising without revenue rising is meaningless — that view is available. Resolution is not the goal. But in a low-resolution state, neither an increase nor a decrease comes with a reason. An increase without a reason cannot be reproduced. An increase that cannot be reproduced is unusable information as a design for a business.

Raising resolution takes time, and revenue does not rise during it. How much of that period is tolerable depends on the state of the business. In a period without slack, betting on the single most likely cause without splitting is a possible judgement.

Even then, being aware that you bet makes a difference. When it misses, you can move to the next candidate. Forget that you bet without splitting and, when it misses, you fix the same place again.

The procedure for breaking apart which gate people fall at, among those who reached a meeting, is handled in where to look first when the conversion rate is poor.

Settle the number of cases first and you end up running an operation that suspends the judgement until that number is reached. While it is suspended, treatment continues unsplit. Ten cases sometimes show a distribution; depending on what you handle, three sometimes settle it — and the required number does not get settled in this article.

The single phrase nothing is selling covered five states. And what settled the order of suspicion was not the distribution of causes but nearness. Splitting works not only because it lets you choose a treatment. It works because it lets you design an observation that excludes.

Over the next ten cases, count which of the five is most common. What is in your hands when the counting ends is not a diagnosis but a candidate for where to look next. Hold it as a candidate, keep counting, and you will notice when the distribution changes.