The Complaint That Isn't What It Seems
"We need more leads."
I hear this in nearly every first conversation with a business owner. Sometimes they say it differently—"We need better marketing," or "Our sales pipeline is weak," or "We're not getting enough visibility." But the underlying belief is the same: if we just had more people coming in the door, everything would be fine.
So I ask a follow-up question:
"Walk me through what happens after someone becomes a customer. From the moment they say yes to the moment they refer someone else. Every step."
What follows is almost always the same: a long pause. A false start. A verbal sketch that gets increasingly vague after the sale. They can describe the funnel—how they get leads, how they close deals. But the journey after the signature? That's where the story falls apart.
"Well, we onboard them... there's usually a kickoff call... and then we just... do the work."
"Just do the work" is the most expensive phrase in business. It's the craftsperson's instinct—focus on doing the work well, and assume everything around it will sort itself out.
Because hidden inside that vague middle is where the actual value gets created—or destroyed. It's where customers decide if they trust you. Where quality is either consistent or random. Where the experience either earns a referral or ensures they'll never mention your name again.
The problem usually isn't that you need more leads. The problem is that your customer experience is undesigned—and the leads you already have are leaking out through gaps you can't see.
The Invisible Architecture
Every business has a customer experience. Every single one. Whether you designed it or not, your customers are moving through a sequence of stages every time they interact with you.
In the AAAERRR framework, I describe these as seven stages—Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention, Revenue, and Referral. Every customer, in every business, moves through some version of this sequence. No exceptions.
The question isn't whether these stages exist. They do. The question is whether they were designed or whether they just happened.
In most businesses, the answer is: some were designed, and the rest were improvised. That gap—between what's designed and what's accidental—is central to the intellectual heritage of Deliberate Work.
The Funnel (AAA)
Awareness → Acquisition → Activation
How customers get in. This is where most businesses invest their design energy, their marketing budget, and their attention.
The Flywheel (ERRR)
Engagement → Retention → Revenue → Referral
What happens after they're in. This is where most businesses improvise—and where most value gets lost.
Here's the pattern I keep seeing: the Funnel gets the budget. The Flywheel gets neglected.
A founder will spend $50,000 on lead generation while the experience after the sale is held together by tribal knowledge and good intentions. They'll hire a marketing agency while their onboarding process is "whatever the project lead decides to do this time." They'll obsess over conversion rates while their best clients quietly stop referring people because the experience didn't earn it.
You can't out-market a broken experience. Every lead you pour into an undesigned journey is a lead you're paying to disappoint.
The Diagnostic: Stage by Stage
What follows is a stage-by-stage diagnostic. For each of the seven stages, I'll give you the question that matters, the symptoms that tell you something is broken, and what the break actually costs you.
Be honest with yourself as you read these. The point isn't to check every box—it's to find the stage where the most symptoms cluster. That stage is your constraint. That's where your customer experience breaks.
And here's the counterintuitive part: your constraint is almost never where you think it is.
Awareness — Do the right people know you exist?
Before someone can buy from you, they need to know you're there. Not just that you exist—but that you solve a problem they recognize.
Your growth depends on your personal network. If you stopped attending events and taking calls for six months, would any new leads arrive?
There's no consistent visibility strategy. You post on LinkedIn when you remember. Your website hasn't been updated since you launched it. Content is something you keep meaning to get to.
Prospects say "I didn't know you did that." People who know you are surprised by what you offer. The market's perception of you is incomplete or outdated.
You can't describe your ideal customer in one sentence. If everyone on your team was asked "who is our ideal client?" you'd get a different answer from each person.
Referrals are your only channel—and they're random. You're not unhappy with referrals, but you have no way to predict when they'll arrive or influence how many you get.
→ If 3+ are true: you're invisible to your best customers. But be careful—this is the stage most businesses rush to fix when the real problem is downstream.
Acquisition — Can interested people easily raise their hand?
Interest should convert to a conversation without friction or heroic follow-up. The path from "I'm curious" to "let's talk" should be clear and fast.
Leads come in but nobody follows up consistently. Sometimes they hear back in an hour. Sometimes three days. Sometimes never.
You don't know where your best leads come from. You're spending money on marketing but can't trace which efforts produce clients—versus which produce noise.
Lead qualification depends on whoever answers first. There's no shared criteria for what makes a lead qualified. One person's "great fit" is another person's "waste of time."
Hot leads go cold before the first conversation. By the time you follow up, they've already talked to two competitors. The window closed while you were putting out fires somewhere else.
Your contact form goes to a shared inbox that nobody owns. Or worse—it goes to your personal email, which means it gets buried in everything else.
→ If 3+ are true: you're paying for attention you can't capture.
Activation — Can you move someone from "interested" to "committed"?
The transition from conversation to signed engagement should feel clear and professional. This is where trust is either established or eroded.
Proposals are built from scratch every time. There's no template, no standard structure. Every proposal is a creative writing exercise. And it takes three times longer than it should.
Pricing changes depending on who sends it. There's no consistent packaging. Discounts are given ad hoc. Nobody is entirely sure what the "real" price is.
There's a gap between "yes" and actual kickoff. The client says yes, and then... nothing happens for a week. Or two. The excitement from the sale evaporates into confusion about what's next.
Clients are confused about what happens after signing. They ask questions that should have been answered already. "So... what do you need from me? When do we start? Who will I be working with?"
You lose deals you should win because you're slow to close. By the time the proposal goes out, the urgency has faded. The prospect found someone faster—not better, just faster.
→ If 3+ are true: your sales process creates doubt, not confidence. And every qualified lead that leaks here costs you the full price of acquiring them.
The Flywheel — Where Most Breaks Live
Engagement — Does the delivery experience match the sales promise?
This is where value is actually created—the work, the service, the product, the thing you do. If Engagement is improvised, nothing downstream works. You can't retain a client you failed to engage. You can't earn a referral from someone who had a mediocre experience.
Onboarding is different every time. There's no standard sequence. What a new client experiences depends entirely on who they're assigned to and how that person happens to operate.
Clients don't know what to expect or when. They're in the dark about timelines, next steps, and what you need from them. They have to ask. Every time.
Handoffs between team members drop context. When a project moves from one person to another—or from one phase to another—information evaporates. The client has to re-explain what they already told someone else.
Quality depends on who's assigned to the work. Your best people deliver excellent work. Everyone else delivers something notably different. Consistency is a function of staffing, not system.
You hear "I thought someone was handling that." Ownership is unclear. Things fall through cracks that shouldn't exist. Work gets duplicated or—worse—nobody does it because everyone assumed someone else would.
→ If 3+ are true: your product is great but your delivery is random. And randomness is the enemy of trust.
Retention — Do clients see and feel the value they're getting?
Retention isn't about being good at what you do. Lots of businesses are good at what they do. Retention is about making the value visible—so clients never have to wonder whether this is working.
Clients leave and you don't know why. It's not a dramatic exit. They just don't renew. They don't call back. They drift. And you don't find out until it's too late.
No structured check-ins or progress reviews. The only time you talk about how things are going is when the client brings it up—usually because they're frustrated.
Renewals are reactive. You wait until the end of the contract to discuss renewal. By then, the client has already made their decision.
You can't show a client their results in sixty seconds. There's no dashboard, no report, no artifact that makes the value tangible. If someone asks "is this working?" you have to construct the answer from scratch.
Expansion depends on the client asking for more. You don't proactively identify opportunities to deepen the relationship. Upselling feels uncomfortable because there's no structured way to suggest it.
→ If 3+ are true: clients are satisfied but not compelled to stay. Satisfaction is not the same as loyalty.
Revenue — Does value creation reliably convert to revenue captured?
You'd think this one would be simple. You do the work, you send the invoice, you get paid. But the gap between value created and revenue captured is often wider than anyone realizes.
Invoicing is manual and inconsistent. Sometimes the invoice goes out the day the work is done. Sometimes it takes two weeks. Sometimes it doesn't go out at all until someone notices.
You have outstanding invoices older than thirty days. Not because clients are refusing to pay—because the invoicing process is slow, confusing, or attached to a person who's too busy.
Clients are surprised by what they're charged. The scope changed, the pricing wasn't clear, or the invoice doesn't match what they expected. Now a billing conversation becomes a relationship conversation.
Revenue isn't tied to delivered milestones. Payment happens on a calendar schedule that's disconnected from when value is actually delivered. The client feels like they're paying for time, not results.
You avoid raising prices because the conversation is awkward. There's no pricing escalator, no renewal structure, no mechanism for adjusting pricing as the relationship matures. So you eat the cost of inflation and scope creep.
→ If 3+ are true: you're creating value you're not capturing. This is one of the most common and least visible drains on a business.
Referral — Do happy clients actively send you new business?
Referral is the stage that connects the end of one customer's journey to the beginning of the next. When it works, your cost of acquisition drops, your lead quality goes up, and growth compounds instead of restarting from zero.
You have happy clients who've never referred anyone. They like you. They'd recommend you if someone asked. But nobody asks—and you haven't made it easy for them to share.
No system to ask for referrals at the right moment. The right moment is after a win—when the client feels the value, when the results are fresh. But you don't have a process for recognizing that moment and acting on it.
Testimonials and case studies are out of date—or nonexistent. You have years of great work and nothing to show for it. Your best social proof lives in the memories of people who've moved on.
Referrals happen randomly, not predictably. You can't forecast how many referrals you'll get next quarter. You can't influence the number. They just... happen. Or don't.
"Hope for referrals" is your actual strategy. When I ask business owners about their referral process, the most honest answer is usually a shrug. It's the stage that everyone wants but nobody designs.
→ If 3+ are true: your best growth engine is sitting idle. And every referral you don't earn is a lead you'll have to pay for instead.
The Handoff Problem Nobody Sees
Here's something the diagnostic above won't fully reveal: the breaks in your customer experience don't usually happen within a stage. They happen between them.
The transition from Activation to Engagement—from "the deal is closed" to "the work begins"—is the most common break point I find. I've seen it in executive coaching practices, software development firms, construction companies, and marketing agencies. The sale goes beautifully. The client is excited. And then... silence. For days. Sometimes weeks.
The excitement that was so carefully cultivated during the Funnel evaporates in the gap between Activation and Engagement. By the time the work actually starts, the client has already downgraded their expectations.
Here's something I've learned from doing this work across dozens of businesses:
Almost every business owner, when asked "how many unique steps does a project go through from lead to complete?"—gives the same answer. Fifteen to twenty. They shrug. They're confident. It's not that many steps, right?
Then I dive in.
For a relatively simple service—like an executive coaching engagement—the real number is typically 50 to 60 steps across half a dozen workflows. I recently designed one that landed at 49 steps across 6 workflows and 16 stages. The founder thought it was maybe twelve steps.
For complex work—like software development—the number climbs to 150, 200, sometimes more. I designed one that came in at 235 steps across 12 workflows. The founder's initial estimate? "Probably twenty-five or thirty."
The gap between what a founder thinks their business does and what it actually does is not a rounding error. It's a factor of three to five.
Not because the founder is careless—but because the invisible steps are, by definition, invisible. They only see the steps they personally touch. The rest happens in the spaces between.
Now consider the businesses with even more complexity. Home construction—where dozens of subcontractors, inspections, permits, material deliveries, and client decisions interweave across months. Complex consulting engagements where discovery, analysis, recommendation, and implementation each have their own internal workflows. Even your accountant's annual process of gathering your financial information, reconciling it, filing it, and following up—that's not five steps. It's fifty.
Both of these recent designs—the coaching practice and the software firm—revealed the same pattern. Both founders could describe their Funnel clearly. Both had thought carefully about how they get clients. And both had almost nothing designed for what happened after the signature.
The coaching practice discovered their onboarding had no design. New clients signed and then waited—no welcome, no scheduling, no goal-setting. Just silence until the first session.
The software firm discovered they had no formal transition between "deal closed" and "project kicked off." Clients felt excited during the sale, then confused for two weeks while the team internally figured out who was doing what.
Both of these are fires at the output created by gaps at the input. And both were invisible until someone mapped the full journey—every handoff, every transition, every moment between stages.
So look inward. Ask yourself honestly: how well do you actually know your business?
Who Actually Pays for a Broken Experience
When I talk about customer experience breaks, most business owners hear it as their problem. And it is—the lost revenue, the churn, the missed referrals. Those costs are real.
But the owner isn't the only one paying.
Your Team Pays
An undesigned customer experience means your team is improvising every day. They're making decisions without clear criteria, handling handoffs without clear ownership, and context-switching between work that matters and work that exists only because nobody designed it away. Your best people don't burn out from hard work. They burn out from unnecessary chaos—from the friction around the work, not the work itself.
Your Customers Pay
Every improvised onboarding, every dropped follow-up, every "I thought someone was handling that" moment—these are experienced by a human being who chose to trust you with their money, their project, or their business. An undesigned experience isn't just inefficient for you. It's frustrating, confusing, and disrespectful of their time. The best customers you'll ever have are the ones who expected excellence and received chaos. They won't complain. They'll just leave.
Your Future Pays
Every referral you don't earn is a customer you'll have to buy instead. Every client who drifts away is revenue you'll have to replace. Every inconsistent experience is a reputation you're slowly degrading. The cost isn't just what you lose today—it's the compounding growth you never get. A designed Flywheel creates momentum. An undesigned one creates drag.
A broken customer experience isn't just a business problem. It's a people problem—yours, your team's, and your customers'.
Why Tools Don't Fix This
The instinct, when you recognize these breaks, is to buy something. A CRM. A project management platform. An automation tool. Something that promises to organize the chaos.
And tools can help. But only if there's a system for them to serve.
Here's what I see over and over: a business buys a CRM to "fix" their acquisition process. Six months later, nobody uses it consistently because there was never a designed acquisition process to support. The CRM didn't fail—there was nothing for it to succeed at. The chaos just moved from email inboxes to an expensive platform nobody trusts.
This is the Ford principle: technology serves the system, not the other way around. The assembly line came first. The conveyor belts, the welding machines, the automation—those came later, in service of a system that was already designed.
A tool without a system is just a more expensive way to be disorganized.
The work that actually changes outcomes isn't buying tools. It's designing the customer experience those tools are meant to support. That's the work that comes first. Everything else is implementation.
What Designing the Experience Actually Looks Like
When I do this work with a business, the process is straightforward—but it reveals things nobody expected.
We walk through every stage of the customer journey and design two parallel paths: what your team does (the operations) and what your customer feels (the experience). Every handoff, every touchpoint, every moment of truth gets mapped, examined, and deliberately designed.
Here's what changes when you make the invisible visible:
Every handoff has an owner. When work moves from one stage to the next, someone is responsible for that transition. Not "the team" or "whoever's around"—a specific person with a specific role.
Every stage has a clear exit condition. You know what "done" looks like. Not "I think we're good" but a specific, verifiable state that the work has reached before it moves forward.
Every client touchpoint is intentional. What the customer hears, sees, and feels at each stage was designed—not improvised. The experience matches the promise because both were written by the same hand.
The system becomes improvable. You can't improve what you can't see. Once the full journey is mapped, you can identify bottlenecks, measure throughput, test changes, and compound improvements over time. This is the difference between learning deliberately and just doing the same things harder.
The Three Benefits You Don't Expect
When business owners start this work, they're usually looking for one thing: to stop losing customers. To plug the leaks. To fix what's obviously broken.
That happens. But three other things happen that nobody anticipates:
The First Benefit
Your team gets clarity.
When the customer experience is designed, every person on your team knows where they fit. They know what "ready for me" looks like, what "done by me" means, and who's next. They stop guessing. They stop waiting for direction. They stop duplicating work or arguing about ownership. The design gives them something to step into—a role that's defined by the system, not improvised every morning.
The Second Benefit
Sales gets easier.
This one surprises people. But when your delivery experience is designed, your sales conversations change. You can describe exactly what happens after the client says yes—not in vague terms, but in specific, confident detail. You can show them the onboarding sequence, the engagement rhythm, the check-in schedule. The prospect doesn't have to trust your promise alone. They can see the system that delivers on it.
The Third Benefit
The business becomes transferable.
A business that depends on you to run is a job. A business with a designed customer experience is an asset. This is the leap from craftsperson to business person—when the experience doesn't live in your head, when it's documented, systematic, and executable by your team, you've built something that works without requiring heroics. Something someone could buy, or your team could run while you take a month off, or a new hire could step into without shadowing you for six months. That's not just operational. That's life-changing.
Start Here
If you've read this far, you've probably already identified at least one stage where your customer experience is breaking. Maybe more.
Here's the simplest next step I can give you:
Sit down with your team and describe—in sequence—what happens between "new lead" and "happy client who refers someone else."
Every step. Every handoff. Every touchpoint. In order. Out loud.
Where the story gets vague is where the experience is undesigned. Where people disagree about what happens is where the process is inconsistent. Where someone says "that depends"—that's where judgment is substituting for system.
You don't have to redesign everything at once. Find the stage with the most pain—your constraint—and design that first. Make the invisible visible. Then move to the next one.
The Funnel might be where your business starts. But the Flywheel is where your business lives.
Design the experience your customers deserve—and your team will thank you, your customers will stay, and your business will finally grow without requiring heroics to hold it together.
Sources & Further Reading
- On the AAAERRR framework: Minock, J. (2025). "The 7 Stages Every Customer Goes Through—That Most Businesses Can't Name." Deliberate Work. The shared vocabulary this diagnostic is built on.
- On the dual lens of value stream and customer experience: Minock, J. (2025). "Giving Your Business Air." Deliberate Work. How AAAERRR applies as both an internal operations model and an external experience design.
- On the cost of accidental work: Minock, J. (2025). "From Accidental Hell to Deliberate Happiness." Deliberate Work. The four taxes of accidental work—and what it actually feels like to escape them.
- On service blueprinting: Shostack, G. L. (1984). "Designing Services That Deliver." Harvard Business Review. The foundational work on making service processes visible—the intellectual ancestor of Customer Experience Design.
- On customer lifetime value: Reichheld, F. F. & Sasser, W. E. (1990). "Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services." Harvard Business Review. Research demonstrating that a 5% increase in retention can increase profits by 25-95%—evidence that the Flywheel matters more than the Funnel.