When Attraction Fails, What Is Lacking Is Not the Count of Techniques but a Route That Arrives

You try a new technique and stop within a few weeks. You changed the medium and the result was the same. Ask someone who knows and you are told to narrow your audience. You narrowed it, and what changed is unclear. You have begun to think that attracting customers is something you are not suited to.

Attraction is not the name of one activity. It is a word folding together four stages of differing nature: being found, being taken an interest in, becoming reachable, and judgement occurring. The four are passed in order, so wherever it stalls, the symptom visible from outside is the same single phrase. Four states arrive as one word.

When nobody arrives, the cause raised tends to be on the side of technique. The medium does not suit you, the audience is not narrow enough, the delivery is weak. Each is an observable fact, and repairing it does move things a little. What it moves is the first stage. A technique is a means of realising the first stage, and while something downstream does not exist, no amount of enlarging the first stage changes how many people come through. With nothing moving after a few kinds have been tried, the explanation shifts to aptitude. Not suited to attracting customers, in that form.

The problem lies not in the count of techniques but in whether the route runs from end to end. Since a gap at any of the four produces the same result, the observation that did not work cannot tell you which stage is missing. Move to the next technique without knowing, and the same observation comes back again.

No list of techniques appears here, for that reason. Which medium to use, what to publish, how to write it — every one of these is chosen after it is settled which stage is blocked. Chosen before, attempts accumulate with no way of confirming whether they worked. No comparison of which technique is superior is covered either, since the same technique works for someone whose stages are complete and fails for someone whose stages are not. The decomposition of the symptom of nobody coming also sits elsewhere, in when customers do not come, the visible reasons and the invisible ones. What is placed here is the identification of the stage at which the route is blocked.

Running one route from end to end through the four stages does not take large numbers. Ten people a month at the first stage still makes a route, provided the fourth stage is reached. Add people to a route that does not run and the only thing that grows is the first stage’s figure. So what gets decided first is not where to widen but where the break is. Once the break is located, what follows is not a comparison of techniques but the design of one stage.

Attraction Is Not One Activity but Four Stages

Between a person arriving and a commission holding lie four stages of differing nature.

The first stage is being found. Your existence enters the other party’s field of view. What is required at this stage is exposure, and the majority of techniques address it.

The second stage is interest being taken. After finding you, a reason to read on is generated. What is required at this stage is that the problem you handle and the other party’s situation are visibly aligned.

The third stage is becoming contactable. Not a single viewing but a state in which you can deliver to them. What is required at this stage is a reason for the other party to entrust their contact details.

The fourth stage is a judgement occurring. The other party settles whether to commission you. What is required at this stage is material for settling it.

The four are passed through in order. And if any one of them is missing, the result is the same in every case: attraction is not working.

Commissions do sometimes arrive suddenly, skipping the third stage.

They do. And even then, no stage has been skipped. They found you, took interest, and the judgement occurred on the spot. The third stage is required for holding a means of delivering again when the judgement did not occur on the spot. It is not that it can be skipped, but that for the people who could, the third stage went unused.

The four stages do not necessarily occur in different locations. Within a single article, someone may be found, take interest, and hand over contact details. What is being divided is not locations but the conditions being satisfied.

The position of the blockage shows up as follows. Count, stage by stage, how many people passed through each in a month. If there is a stage that cannot be counted, that stage has not been designed. For an undesigned stage, you cannot even know whether the headcount passing through is zero.

The four stages also differ by orders of magnitude in the time they take to pass. The first takes seconds, the second minutes, the third either on the spot or several weeks later, and the fourth can take months. The scales of time differ, so lining up figures from the same month does not make causes correspond to results. This month’s fourth-stage figure is the result of a first stage several months ago.

Fold the four into the single word attraction and the response appears as a selection of techniques. Techniques correspond to the first stage, so whichever stage is blocked, the prescription that emerges belongs to the first. And since it does not work, you move to the next technique. The state of wandering between techniques is not a problem of motivation but a consequence of how the word is folded.

The Weight of the Responses Sits on Selecting Techniques and Media

Gather what is recommended about attracting customers and it comes to seven, many of which address the first and second stages.

Do not try to gather people indiscriminately. Clarify whom you are most useful to. Grasp why prospective customers buy. Review whether the medium you use suits the audience. Confirm that your selling point is in a form that conveys itself. Analyse competitors. Look at whether the journey from site to application is in order.

Each of the seven has situations where it lands. The observation about not gathering indiscriminately in particular strikes an important part of this territory. Without narrowing whom you gather, the second stage — interest being taken — does not hold. Grasping why people buy also bears directly on the material for judgement at the fourth stage.

The item about the journey being in order handles the third and fourth stages squarely.

On that basis, look at how the seven are arranged. It is not indicated which of the four stages each one concerns. Clarifying the audience is the second stage, reviewing the medium the first, the journey the third and fourth. Prescriptions for separate stages stand in the same list.

This is not a defect on the part of the writer. Which stage a reader is blocked at is unknowable to the writer. Unable to know, listing everything is the honest form.

Doing all of them would clear a blockage at any stage — as reasoning, that holds.

In principle, yes. In practice, all of them cannot be done at once. And repairing an unblocked stage moves no figures, so the result of nothing moving gets recorded as a shortfall in execution.

The seven do not miss the mark. Each one is accurate against its corresponding stage. What is lacking is not prescriptions but a procedure for determining which stage you are at.

Only the prescription to analyse competitors corresponds directly to no stage at all. Looking at what a competitor does does not tell you which of your stages is blocked. What emerges from the analysis is mostly the difference at the first and second stages — what they put out and you do not — and the work of filling that gap becomes imitation. What should be filled and where your blockage sits are in different places.

Execute this list from the top and the order does not match the order of the stages. Clarifying the audience is a common starting point, and clarify the audience while remaining unfound at the first stage and the effect of the clarification cannot be observed. An improvement whose effect cannot be observed leaves you unable to know it was correct, even when it was carried out correctly.

Adding Techniques Acts Only on the First Stage

A technique refers to a kind of being-found. So adding them reaches no further than the first stage.

Found through search. Found through introduction. Found by being mentioned in someone else’s place. Found through advertising. All of them are means of realising the first stage.

Add techniques, therefore, and the headcount passing the first stage rises. And nothing changes at any stage after it. If things stall at the second stage, the added headcount stalls at the second stage in exactly the same way.

This can be expressed as a matter of ratios. Suppose one tenth of those who pass the first stage proceed to the second. Add techniques so that the first stage grows tenfold and the second grows tenfold too. If the third stage has not been designed, however, everything beyond it stays zero however many multiples arrive. Anything multiplied by zero is zero.

That is, with even one stage missing, no amount of enlarging the earlier stages changes the result.

A law of the same shape sits in agricultural science. The growth of a plant is set not by the total nutrients supplied but by the single nutrient in shortest supply. Add all the nitrogen you like and growth will not rise while phosphorus is short. It circulates as the law of the minimum under Liebig’s name, and the person who formulated it was Carl Sprengel, in 1828 (van der Ploeg, Böhm & Kirkham, 1999, “On the Origin of the Theory of Mineral Nutrition of Plants and the Law of the Minimum”, Soil Science Society of America Journal 63(5), 1055-1062).

A route has the same shape. What you add takes effect only where that stage is the one in shortest supply. And which stage is shortest is not knowable before adding. What can be added without knowing tends to be the first stage. Techniques are visible, can be started, and have a visible completion.

It is not that nothing at all changes. Grow the first stage and the absolute count of the small number who proceed straight to judgement rises. What changes is only that small number. And since it was small to begin with, the increase does not reach the level of a felt change.

Adding techniques does sometimes reach the second stage — when changing the medium changed the character of who gathers. In that case, what took effect is not the count of techniques but the change of audience. Whether it worked because a technique was added or because the audience changed must be distinguished, or the judgement about what to add next goes wrong.

Should all the stages be built before adding techniques, then? As an order, yes. The work of building stages, however, can be done while nobody is at the first stage. If anything, building before people arrive means nothing is dropped when they do.

Which stages are passed easily also differs a little by technique. Someone found through introduction arrives already holding a degree of trust, so they pass the second and fourth stages quickly. Someone found through search passes the second stage because the problem they were looking for aligns, while judgement about the writer starts from nothing. A technique is a means of realising the first stage, and it also settles the character of those who came through it.

The work of adding techniques comes with a felt sense of progress. Registering on a new medium, publishing in a new format. It is distinct as work and its completion is visible. The work of designing stages has a completion that is hard to see, and nothing happens immediately afterwards. The quantity of felt progress and the magnitude of the effect tend to correspond inversely.

One Symptom Holds Four Causes

That there are four stages means the same phrase — attraction is not working — holds four meanings.

Stalled at the first stage, the symptom is that nobody is looking. Few impressions. Nobody arrives at the site.

Stalled at the second, the symptom is being seen and passed over. Visits occur and people leave at once.

Stalled at the third, the symptom is being read with no point of contact remaining. Articles are read and responses occur. And there is no means of delivering the next thing.

Stalled at the fourth, the symptom is interest without settlement. Enquiries arrive. Consultations proceed. Nothing moves from there.

Seen from outside, the four are the same. They present in the same form: no commission is occurring. The operations required, however, are entirely different.

And the stage that tends to go unnoticed is the third. The first and second are visible as figures. The fourth is knowable because a point of contact exists. Only at the third do those who failed to pass leave without leaving anything, so the blockage cannot be noticed.

Several stages being blocked at once is not unusual. In that case the order of repair runs from upstream. Repair downstream and, so long as things stop upstream, the effect of the repair cannot be observed.

If the fourth stage is blocked, it must be the most important — that view can be taken. It is the stage with the smallest count. The weight per case, however, is the largest. Importance and count are separate, so which to repair first depends on what is presently short. If the count is short, upstream; if the rate of holding is low, downstream.

The third stage is hard to notice partly because there is a felt sense of articles being read. They are read, and responses occur. That state is indistinguishable from a state of things going well. The fact that a stage sits between being read and being able to deliver next does not rise into awareness for as long as you are being read.

The four stages also differ in how they present once the blockage clears. Clear the first and the figures move at once; clear the third and nothing happens that month, because the effect of more contacts appears only when you next deliver something. The size of the felt sense of clearing is ordered by stage as well. And the smaller that sense, the more readily you forget having repaired it.

Without distinguishing the four stages, other people’s advice appears to contradict itself. Some say increase exposure and some say narrow down. Both are correct and are looking at different stages. Without the distinction of stages, the two are received as contradictory advice, and the matter turns into a separate problem of which to believe.

Spreading Does Not Do the Work That Being Travelled Does

Let me tidy one point about the first stage. The phenomenon of spreading occupies a special position within it.

Spreading is your publishing being carried beyond the range you reach. It enters the field of view of large numbers at once, so as a first stage it works powerfully.

Spreading, however, has no direction. Who it reaches cannot be chosen, so the proportion proceeding to the second stage falls sharply. Large numbers of people whose interest does not align are included.

Furthermore, spreading cannot be used as a route. A route is a path that can be travelled repeatedly. Search can be travelled each time someone searches with the same words. Introduction continues for as long as there is someone introducing. Spreading happens once and has no procedure for reproduction.

That is, spreading is a result and not a means. It is an event that temporarily enlarges the first stage when it occurs, and it does not become an object of design.

This difference bears directly on the allocation of effort. A route becomes easier to travel in proportion to the number of times it has been travelled. Inflow from search stacks up as articles increase, and one successful introduction calls forth the next. Spreading holds no such stacking. Something happening once does little to alter the probability of its happening again.

This is not to say spreading is meaningless. Anyone who proceeded to the third stage on the occasion of spreading stays. Only where the third stage has been designed does spreading get converted into accumulation. Where it has not, what increases is impressions alone.

Aiming for forms that spread easily would make it reproducible, perhaps. The probability can be raised. Lean towards forms that spread easily, however — strong assertion, conflict, surprise — and the character of who gathers changes. People who react readily increase and people whose judgement is careful drift away. An operation raising the quantity of the first stage works in the direction of lowering the quality of the second.

Whether something counts as a route is settled by whether it can be repeated. Search, introduction, mention from someone else’s place, advertising. Every one of them can be travelled again if the same conditions are prepared. The cost per passage differs, and a procedure for reproduction exists. Only spreading holds no procedure.

Routes and spreading also differ in how they are lost. A route thins when it stops being used, and preparing the same conditions brings it back. Spreading leaves nothing behind once it has happened. What remains is the record of that day’s figures, and a record does not tell you what to do next.

Experience spreading once and that day’s figure becomes the baseline. Ordinary days look small beside it. And since spreading cannot be reproduced, the object of comparison remains as a value that can never be reached again.

What the Phrase Bad at Attracting Customers Closes Off

The expression bad at attracting customers is used very frequently, though the portion where nature is actually involved is only a small part of the four stages.

This phrasing has two workings. One is a working as explanation. It gives a reason to a state that is not going well. The other is a working that fixes a range. Being bad at it is your nature, so it gets handled as something that does not change.

The problem is the latter. The moment the trouble is handled as the person’s own nature, the question of which stage things are stalled at stops being asked. The explanation completes at stalled because I am bad at it.

Look at the four stages, however, and the portion in which nature is involved is very small. The first — being found — is a matter of procedure. The third — receiving contact details — is a matter of design. The place nature could affect is roughly the fourth, and only where a format of meeting and speaking with people was chosen.

That is, what feels like an unsuitability is often one of the four stages, and not attraction itself.

And which stage can be identified. Name one scene that makes you feel heavy when you picture it. Speaking in front of people is a matter of format; stating a price is the fourth stage; asking for contact details is the third. The heaviness feels as though it spreads across the whole, and the scenes that actually come to mind tend to be confined to one or two.

Being unsuited to a particular format genuinely happens. Speaking in front of people, pitching to strangers, exchanges by telephone. These are matters of choosing a format, and they can be avoided. Since several formats exist, avoiding an unsuitable format is a choice and not a lack of ability.

Handling it as a nature does have the advantage of sparing you from forcing yourself. There is an advantage. The judgement to avoid what does not suit you is genuinely rational. What is lost is the opportunity to see what remains after the avoidance. Bundle the whole together as an unsuitability and the rest closes with it.

The word is accurate as a record of experience. You tried it and it did not go well. That record is itself a fact. What departs from the fact is the part that reads the record as proof of a nature, and the same record also holds under the reading that the format did not suit. Both readings follow from the same fact, so the fact does not settle the reading.

This phrasing takes a shape that others accept readily too. Say you are bad at it and nothing further is asked. It passes as an explanation, so the occasion to have it questioned stops arriving from outside as well.

No Operation Exists for Moving the Other Party Between Stages

What passes through the four stages is the other party. It is not you.

What you can do is only arrange the conditions for passing. Place yourself where you can be found. Write in a form that makes the alignment of interest visible. Hand over a reason for entrusting contact details. Assemble the material for judgement.

No operation that moves the other party is among these.

This distinction carries practical meaning. Designs that try to move people tend to use deadlines and scarcity. Only now, few remaining, miss this and. These are operations that cut into the time for judgement, raising the rate of passage by shortening the other party’s consideration.

It does rise. And the content of the raised rate changes. People who proceeded without sufficient consideration are included. The fourth-stage figure improves and the quality of what happens afterwards falls.

Where a deadline exists as a fact, it should be conveyed. There genuinely is a capacity; there genuinely is a period. The problem is manufacturing a deadline that does not exist, not conveying one that does. Withholding a fact means making someone decide while lacking material for judgement.

This does not mean doing nothing. The work of arranging conditions exists at all four stages. Keeping your hands off and arranging conditions are separate: the former is neglect and the latter is design. The principle of not moving people is no reason not to design.

A push is sometimes for the other party’s benefit. It sometimes is. And the problem lies in your making that determination. The structure is one in which you settle, ahead of the other party, whether something is good for them. What can be handed over is material for judgement; the judgement itself stays on their side.

The principle of not moving people applies equally at all four stages. Not moving at the first stage means not faking how easily you can be found. Not moving at the fourth means not manufacturing a deadline for the judgement. What changes stage by stage is the name of what you refrain from moving.

Arranging conditions and not moving people are compatible. Assembling the material required for judgement, reducing the places where people hesitate, making procedures legible. All of these are operations that assist the other party’s judgement, not operations that perform the judgement in their place. The dividing line is one point — whether what you are removing is hesitation arising from what is unsettled on your side, or a matter the other party should be considering. The former may be cut away; the latter stays.

Hold to this principle and the rate of passage falls. In short-term figures you lose to designs that move people. What comes back does so after time has passed. People who proceeded after sufficient consideration do not leave partway and do not require the conditions explained again. What looks like a choice made on ethical grounds is in fact lowering the costs of the later stages.

Run One Route From End to End, However Thin

A matter of order. Before widening the four stages, connect one route through them.

Connected means there is a record of one actual person having passed from the first stage to the fourth.

One person is enough. If one person has passed, it is confirmed that all four stages exist. And a stage whose existence has been confirmed can be widened as much as you like afterwards.

Conversely, widen the other stages while one of them does not exist and everything you added stops there. What stopped cannot be observed, so the effect of the widening cannot be known either.

The order, therefore, is run it thin, then hunt for the blockage, then widen. The order actually executed tends to be the reverse. It begins with the work of widening, and whether anything passes through goes unverified to the end.

No revenue occurs at the stage of running it thin. One person passing changes nothing as a business. The purpose at this stage is not revenue but confirmation that the route exists. Mistake the purpose and the value of the passage stays invisible.

One person passing was mere chance — that suspicion is right. One person carries no reproducibility. What can be confirmed is not reproducibility but that each stage physically exists. Confirming existence and confirming reproducibility are separate tasks, and in order, existence comes first.

The design of the arrangement of the stages themselves is treated in the principles of funnel design, and the form of holding several entrances while narrowing the confluence to one in customer journey design.

The widening after one route is open can be done at any of the four stages. Widening the first is the most legible, and repairing a stage with a low rate of passage sometimes produces a larger change for the same effort. Take one tenth to two tenths and the effect equals doubling the first stage. And while improvements in proportion have a ceiling, they cost almost nothing until that ceiling is reached.

Running one route through also has the merit of a clear form of completion. The work of widening has no settled point at which it is finished. Running one route through finishes when the route is through. Work whose ending has a definite shape can be started.

The work of running it thin is invisible to others. Work that increases publishing is visible from outside, whereas work confirming a route looks as though it produces nothing. And what people producing results talk about tends to be the widening stage. The running stage is not interesting as material for talk, so it appears rarely in the information in circulation.

When a Route Opens, Numbers Appear at the Stages

What is asked is not the headcount gathered. It is whether you can now say which stage is working.

First, look at whether you can state the headcount passing each of the four stages.

The figures need not be exact. Look only at whether you can state them. If there is a stage you cannot state, measurement has not been designed there, so whether it is blocked is unknowable too. The count of unmeasured stages is, as it stands, the size of the range you cannot diagnose.

Second, when a blockage is repaired, look at whether only the figure at the repaired stage moved.

If the place repaired and the place that moved agree, the division into stages was correct. If a different stage moved, that is material for reviewing the division itself. Confirming the agreement settles the precision of the next judgement.

Third, stop one technique and look at what decreases.

If nothing decreases when it stops, that technique was not working as a route. If something decreases, that is the stage the technique was carrying. Stopping is one reliable method of measuring the magnitude of a contribution.

None of the three counts the headcount gathered. The three sit on the visibility of each stage, the accuracy of the division, and the difference on stopping. The headcount sits on the result side, and it does not tell you which stage is working, so a rise or a fall in it leaves the state of the route unread.

Across the period of trying a new technique and stopping within weeks, one thing was happening. Each time, what was added was the stage that was not in shortest supply. The stopping came not from boredom but from the addition appearing nowhere. Where the place of addition is wrong, appearing nowhere is the correct outcome.

The reading in terms of aptitude stands on material as well. That nothing moved across several attempts is a thing that actually happened. The two readings part company not at the fact but at whether a procedure for checking follows from it. Nothing follows from the word aptitude. From the word stage follows going to look at which stage is not open. Neither reading comes with a guarantee of being right; they differ only in whether they can be examined.

Smallness is not a defect at this stage. Run the four stages through once and the headcount arriving is probably still small. What has changed is that whatever gets added from there can now be named by stage.

The diagnostic procedure that doubts from upstream downwards is treated in where to begin doubting when the conversion rate is poor, and the third stage itself — holding a contactable state — in the premises of list building. How the stages are arranged across the whole is in the design of a marketing funnel, and the range over which those stages can be turned without labour in systemising a solo business. The decomposition of the symptom of nobody coming is handled in when customers do not come, the visible reasons and the invisible ones, the separation of the figures of a place from the figures of a business in followers not growing is not a problem of the business, and the conditions for continuing to publish in blogging not lasting comes from the difference in how fast things come back.