What we learned running our own diagnostic

The starting point

RevOps Studio is a business where the same person sells and delivers. All new business came through a personal network. Opportunities were tracked in a notes tool, not in a CRM pipeline. A commercial pilot had three ways in (the warm network, qualified newcomers and partners), and the website had three months of commercial life without a single lead.

What it found

The finding with the highest confidence was the most uncomfortable one. Against a target of 10 to 12 qualified newcomers, 1 had come in.

Cold outreach was answered at a normal rate for B2B, 3.4 to 4%, but it produced no meetings. And 85% of the contact base bought for it was still untouched.

Three more things came up that we weren't looking for:

• Four pricing structures coexisted, and none was public. Each proposal was built almost from scratch.
• Visibility on the topic that decides the purchase was about four times lower than the most visible competitor's, and 91% of the site's inbound links came from spam sites.
• The sales cycle wasn't what we thought. The measured cycle ran from 19 to 63 days, against the three to six months assumed. And two of every four priced proposals were won.

What wasn't the problem

This part matters as much as the last. Closing worked: short cycles and half the priced proposals won. Had we invested in conversion, we would have fixed what wasn't broken. The bottleneck was at the entry, not at the close.

What we decided at the checkpoint

A checkpoint is a validation meeting, not a presentation. You arrive having seen the work and decide with it in front of you. We decided three things in line with the recommendation:

1. Close or discard the opportunities already open within four weeks.
2. Work on qualified entry in parallel.
3. Take cold outreach out in the meantime.

And on two points we decided against it:

• Keep the declared ideal client. The diagnostic proposed adjusting it, and we kept it.
• Keep a second line of work separate. The diagnostic proposed folding it in, and we kept it apart.

We also rewrote the promise, but not with the wording the diagnostic proposed: around business value and the impact of the process.

What you do when you decide against it

Deciding against the recommendation is legitimate; that's what the checkpoint is for. What doesn't help is deciding against it and forgetting about it.

So the riskiest decisions taken against the recommendation were written down as hypotheses, each with the criterion that would prove it wrong. If the criterion is met, the decision is reviewed without argument. A disagreement stops being an opinion and becomes something you can check.

What was delivered

The Revenue Diagnostic, the Client Master Brief, the Knowledge Base and the Competitive Landscape. With them, the revenue chain in eight stages, an impact-by-effort matrix and a 12-week sequence.

Where it stands

In progress. The four-week experiment on qualified entry started on 23 September 2026. We'll publish the outcome once it has been measured, whatever it is.

What to take from this if you're thinking about running one

• Expect the strongest finding to be the one you like least. It usually is, because it's the one nobody wanted to measure.
• Ask to be told what isn't the problem. It saves you the wrong investment.
• You can decide against it. But write down how you'll know if you're wrong.

Read the full guide to the revenue diagnostic →