You got a score. Here is the work.

You will recognise this if: Your content describes your buyer in words your buyer would never use.

Their language for the problem outperforms yours because recognition comes before trust. People believe you understand them when you say it the way they say it.

What it costs: This is the cheapest differentiation available and the one most teams skip entirely.

You will recognise this if: Read your last ten posts with the logo covered. Could you name the company?

Automation made competent content free. Only proprietary experience is scarce now, so only proprietary experience differentiates.

What it costs: Generic content does not underperform quietly — it actively spends your attention budget teaching people nothing about you.

You will recognise this if: A strong top-of-funnel library, and nothing at all for the person who has to justify you internally.

Committee buying needs an asset per persona. Your champion has to sell you when you are not in the room, and they can only use what you gave them.

What it costs: Most libraries are strong at the top and thin exactly where buyers decide.

You will recognise this if: You publish on a calendar and never on a trigger.

Without monitoring, timing and relevance are guesswork — you are always answering last month's question.

What it costs: You miss the moments when your category is already talking about the thing you are best at.

You will recognise this if: Ask three people why a buyer picks you and you get three different answers — and none of them appear in the ads.

Advertising has to educate, differentiate or validate depending on where the market actually is. Run the wrong one and the budget stops mattering, because you are answering a question the buyer is not asking.

What it costs: Wrong-stage messaging never fails loudly. It converts slightly worse everywhere at once, which reads as a traffic problem and gets solved with more budget.

You will recognise this if: Your ICP is a slide, and it was written by describing the customer you would like to have.

Targeting errors never present as targeting errors. They present as poor conversion rates, long cycles, and a sales team saying the leads are junk.

What it costs: Every downstream number looks worse than your execution deserves — so you optimise the parts that were never broken.

You will recognise this if: You could not say, without opening a spreadsheet, what share of spend is creating demand versus capturing it.

Roughly 5% of your category can buy today. The other 95% are still deciding who they remember. Judge both halves with one metric and the creation half always loses, because it reports badly by design.

What it costs: Spend drifts toward whatever reports cheaply rather than whatever produces revenue.

You will recognise this if: The enquiry came in at 6:40pm on Friday. Someone will see it Monday.

Typical response is around 42 hours. Best in class is under five minutes. You are paying to create the demand and then letting it cool.

What it costs: You buy attention at full price and discard a large share of it on a technicality of timing.

You will recognise this if: Marketing is proud of the engagement numbers. Sales cannot find the case study.

Content without enablement is publishing. It becomes selling only when a prepared human is on the other end of the attention.

What it costs: You pay the full cost of creating attention and capture none of the revenue it was meant to produce.

You will recognise this if: Your best-fit enquiry of the week gets a templated auto-reply, then nothing for a day.

Repetitive work plus unforgiving timing is exactly the combination where automation returns most.

What it costs: Every hour of delay here is spent competing against your own earlier self, at full media cost.

You will recognise this if: A buying-intent DM sat unread over a long weekend.

Interest decays on social for exactly the same reason it decays on inbound forms. The channel is different; the clock is not.

What it costs: You are paying for reach and then declining the replies it produces.

You will recognise this if: It went to the shared inbox. You know how that ends.

Shared inboxes, unclear ownership, and handoffs that lose everything the SDR learned.

What it costs: These losses never appear as losses. The lead simply never becomes anything, and no report has a row for that.

You will recognise this if: There is a queue marked ‘to review’ and nobody owns it.

Slow qualification costs you twice: rep hours burn on bad fits while the good fits go cold waiting their turn.

What it costs: It is the only dimension here that wastes your two scarcest resources simultaneously.

You will recognise this if: ‘Let us talk pricing’ was eleven days ago.

Typical is two weeks or more; best in class is under 48 hours. The difference is almost always process rather than effort.

What it costs: The delay reads to the buyer as how you will behave once they are a customer.

You will recognise this if: Two touches, then nothing — and the lead is still sitting there marked open.

Follow-up is the first thing to lapse when a rep gets busy, and nobody notices it lapsing.

What it costs: A no is cheap and useful. An unresolved maybe costs you forecast accuracy and attention indefinitely.

You will recognise this if: The deal did not die. It stopped, and nobody noticed for three weeks.

The problem is rarely the deal itself. It is that nobody was alerted while it was still recoverable.

What it costs: Stalled deals stay in the forecast, which means they also corrupt your planning while they quietly expire.

You will recognise this if: Reps open the call having skim-read a LinkedIn profile on the way to the meeting.

Research commonly runs around six hours a week per rep, which is the single largest recoverable block in the set.

What it costs: It is invisible on every report, because nobody logs it as anything.

You will recognise this if: Every performance question becomes a ticket for the one person who can pull the data.

The algorithm optimises; humans steer. If the humans cannot read the instruments, you cannot steer — and every automation you add creates a bottleneck instead of removing one.

What it costs: This is weighted heaviest of the five readiness dimensions because it caps the value of everything else you build.

You will recognise this if: Three records for the same company, two of them on the old domain.

Every downstream automation and every forecast depends on this one. Automation does not fix unreliable data; it applies it faster and at scale.

What it costs: This is the dimension that decides whether the rest of your automation is an asset or a liability.

You will recognise this if: Nobody can say when tracking was last verified.

Smart Bidding and every custom rule optimise against whatever you told them success is. Gaps in tracking do not produce cautious automation; they produce confident automation pointed the wrong way.

What it costs: The more you automate on top of this, the faster you move in the wrong direction.

You will recognise this if: Campaign names encode four different conventions and two people's initials.

Scripts and rules act on patterns. Without consistent naming and launch process, automation cannot reliably tell what it is looking at.

What it costs: Standardisation is not bureaucracy. It is the precondition for automating anything at scale.

You will recognise this if: Nobody can tell you how many automation rules are live right now.

When no one owns automation, rules accumulate, overlap and eventually conflict — usually discovered through a spend anomaly rather than a review.

What it costs: The failure mode here is not slow. It is sudden, and it is expensive.

You will recognise this if: Two dashboards, two numbers, and a standing argument about which one is right.

Automated bidding is confidently wrong when the signal is wrong. It optimises hard toward whatever you told it success looks like — including duplicates, and form fills that never become revenue.

What it costs: No amount of creative or targeting work recovers a broken signal, because every experiment you run reads the same corrupted result.

You will recognise this if: The forecast is a feeling, expressed as a percentage.

Forecast accuracy problems are almost always stage-definition problems wearing a disguise.

What it costs: Every other number you rely on inherits this one's error.

You will recognise this if: Monday's pipeline review is ninety minutes of reading the CRM out loud.

The weekly review is consuming selling time to restate information the system already has.

What it costs: It is the cheapest win available and usually the last one anyone gets around to.

You will recognise this if: You bought the advanced platform and use it like the basic one.

Advanced tools in the hands of a team without the data literacy to drive them produce shelfware. The ceiling is the team, not the licence.

What it costs: You pay for capability twice: once for the tool, and again for the work it was supposed to remove.