Where is your funnelactually leaking?
A funnel is seven gears turning in sequence: traffic, message, offer, page, follow up, close, retention. When the machine underperforms, it's almost always one gear, not all of them. Answer seven questions and find the one that's costing you the most.
0 / 7 answered
01How well do you actually know who your best customers are — and are you reaching them?
02When someone lands on your page, does the headline stop them?
03How compelling is what you're asking visitors to do?
04How does your landing-page conversion rate compare to your industry?
05What happens to a lead in the first hour after they come in?
06Of the qualified prospects who talk to you, how many buy?
07After the first sale, do customers stay, repeat, or refer?
Your biggest leak
Answer all seven questions and the single gear leaking the most money — with the symptom that gives it away and the fixes to seal it — appears here.
Plain English
Seven gears. One of them is slipping.
Every funnel runs on the same seven gears. Traffic brings the right people. The message stops them. The offer earns the action. The page converts the click. Follow up keeps the lead warm. The close turns conversations into customers. Retention makes each customer worth more than one sale.
When revenue is soft, the instinct is to fix everything at once, new ads, new page, new offer, all at the same time. That's expensive and it teaches you nothing, because you never learn which change mattered. The truth is that one gear is usually doing most of the damage, and it's starving every gear below it.
This diagnostic asks one honest question about each gear, scores how that part of your funnel is performing, and names the weakest link, the leak to seal first. It's the same triage I'd run on the first call, compressed into seven questions you can answer in two minutes.
The formula
Diagnosis = the gear that scores lowest (ties break upstream)
If 'page' and 'close' both score low, fix the page first, it sits earlier in the funnel, so its leak starves the close beneath it. Upstream gears always get priority.
The seven gears, in order
Each gear feeds the next, so an early leak caps everything downstream. Here's the chain and the symptom that gives each leak away:
| Gear | The symptom when it leaks |
|---|---|
| 1. Traffic | Plenty of clicks but nothing converts, or volume so low the numbers are noise. |
| 2. The message | High bounce, low time-on-page, people leave before they scroll. |
| 3. The offer | People read the whole thing, then don't act. Lots of 'let me think about it.' |
| 4. The page | Decent traffic and a fair offer, but the conversion rate sits below your industry's. |
| 5. The follow-up | Leads are fine on paper but few turn into booked calls or replies. |
| 6. The close | Good calls, warm prospects, low win rate — lots of 'not right now.' |
| 7. Retention | Acquisition looks okay but profit is thin and you're always chasing new buyers. |
Source: The Better Call M seven-gear funnel · 2026
How to read your result
One gear scores far below the rest.
That's your leak. Pour your next effort there before touching anything else. It's setting the ceiling on the whole funnel.
Two early gears both score low.
Start with the one furthest upstream. Traffic and message problems make every later gear look broken when it isn't.
Everything scores middling.
No single catastrophic leak, but no strong gear either. Pick the earliest weak one and build a real strength before optimizing the rest.
You answered 'we don't measure' a lot.
The first leak is visibility. You can't fix what you don't track. Instrument the funnel, then run this again.
After the diagnosis
01Fix one gear at a time
Change the leaking gear, measure, then move on. Fixing everything at once tells you nothing about what worked.
02Always start upstream
An early leak starves every gear below it. Sealing it often lifts metrics you weren't even working on.
03Turn the symptom into a number
Pair the diagnosis with the matching calculator so the leak stops being a hunch and becomes a measured gap.
04Re run it after each fix
Leaks move. Seal one and the next weakest gear becomes the priority. Diagnosis is a loop, not a one off.
05Don't confuse easy with important
The fixable gear isn't always the leaking one. Work the biggest leak even when it's the harder job.
The vocabulary
- Gear
- One of the seven sequential parts of a funnel, traffic, message, offer, page, follow up, close, retention.
- Leak
- The gear losing the largest share of its potential, the constraint on the whole funnel.
- Upstream / downstream
- Earlier gears are upstream; they feed the later, downstream ones. Upstream leaks matter most.
- Speed to lead
- How fast a new lead is contacted, the dominant lever in the follow up gear.
- Constraint
- The single bottleneck setting the ceiling on output; fixing it is where leverage lives.
Diagnostic questions
It asks one question about each of the seven funnel gears, traffic, message, offer, page, follow up, close, and retention, scores your answers, and names the lowest scoring gear as your biggest leak. Ties break toward the earlier gear, because upstream leaks cap everything below them.
Keep going
A calculator tells you what. A call tells you what to do about it.
Send me the account behind these numbers. I'll tell you straight where the money's leaking and what I'd fix first — free, and you keep it whether you hire me or not.