Question 5 — how do we know/measure success?

Small-number honesty: ask them, own doors, holdouts, cost per result, pre-registered decisions.

As it is usually taught: install analytics, track the funnel, report the conversion rate.

What it really asks of you depends on your scale, and here honesty matters more than tooling. Consumer-style analytics assume thousands of events. A business that mails 200 workshops and receives four inquiries is not doing statistics; it is doing careful bookkeeping of small numbers. At that scale the consumer toolkit is theatre. These five instruments are not:

1. Ask them

Add one question to your inquiry intake and your first meetings: "What prompted you to contact us?" Write the answer down every time. Attribution becomes a by-product of the pipeline you already run, and over a year those answers are the truest marketing report you will own.

2. Give each channel its own door

Let each communication carry something only it carries: a dedicated page, a checklist offer, a named contact. When someone comes through that door, you know which communication opened it. The attribution is designed into the offer, not surveilled out of the visitor. No cookies, no tracking scripts, nothing a privacy-conscious buyer would resent. For a company selling trust, the measurement method is also a message.

3. Hold half back

Mailings allow the one honest causal test available at small scale: send to half the list, hold the other half, compare inquiry rates over the window. Where a holdout is impossible, compare against the months before, inside a window you declared in advance.

4. Count contribution, honestly

In long sales cycles no single communication "causes" an order. Measure what a channel contributed to steps forward, and put your decision weight on one number: cost per result, per channel. It is robust, comparable, and hard to fool yourself with.

5. Pre-register the decision

Before the communication goes out, write not only the metric but the decision: "If fewer than [n] [results] by [date], we will [specific change]." A metric without a pre-registered decision becomes an argument afterwards. A decision written in advance becomes learning.

One worked example, end to end

A mailing goes to 200 workshops in one market. The ask: request our comparison checklist (question two, one step, honest). The checklist sits on a page only the mailing links (own door). Half the list gets the mailing now, half in the next quarter (holdout). Expected result: five checklist requests within 30 days (question four, written down). Intake asks every caller what prompted them (ask them). Decision, pre-registered: fewer than five, and the next mailing changes its opening claim.

The closing honesty: you will never fully know why one particular buyer responded. You can always know what each channel costs per result, within a margin that is good enough to decide with. That is what question five is for: not perfect knowledge, decisions.

This week

Add "what prompted you to contact us?" to your inquiry intake today. It costs nothing, and every later instrument builds on it. Then take the five-question worksheet and fill it in for one real communication you plan to send.