For an owner choosing how to reach more suitable customers and unsure whether the team can support the route.
01Start with how the customer finds a way forward
Choose one customer situation and reconstruct how people currently look for help. Who notices the need? Who searches, recommends, shortlists and approves? A channel that reaches the user may not reach the person who can authorize the work. A broad audience may contain few people facing the relevant decision at the relevant time.
Use actual accounts and permitted enquiry records to distinguish discovery from influence. A buyer may first hear a name from a colleague, inspect a website later and finally use a contact form. Treating the form as the whole route would miss the relationship that made the search possible.
02Compare the relationship, not only the reach
For each possible route, write who controls access, what earns attention, what the customer expects and how the next step happens. Direct outreach asks the business to establish relevance before attention is earned. A referral can carry borrowed trust and an inaccurate expectation. A marketplace can make comparison easier while constraining how the offer is presented.
Seth Godin discusses distribution, permission and the smallest viable audience as parts of entrepreneurial value creation.1 Those ideas do not select a channel for you. They prompt a more useful comparison: can this route connect a particular customer need to a promise the business can keep?
A route must fit the customer and the operation
| Area | Question |
|---|---|
| Customer access | Who can this route reach at the relevant buying moment? |
| Expectation | What promise will they hear, and from whom? |
| Next step | Can a suitable person understand and take it? |
| Operating work | Who maintains, responds, qualifies and follows through? |
| Learning | What observation would change the channel decision? |
03Name the work after the enquiry arrives
List the tasks the route creates: preparing accurate information, answering questions, checking fit, producing a proposal, maintaining records and delivering any response commitment. Name who can do each task. A route that generates attention before the team can respond creates a different problem from a route that generates no attention.
Record the limits and dependencies as well. These might include a platform’s permitted uses, a referrer’s understanding of the offer, required content upkeep or an employee’s available time. Distinguish current, verified terms from assumptions. The channel decision should include the continuing operating work, not just the launch activity.
04An illustrative channel comparison
Imagine an engineering service for facilities teams. A sector marketplace may reach active searchers but encourage comparisons against a narrower standard service. A trusted specialist’s referral may explain the fit more accurately but arrive irregularly. A targeted educational event may expose the right problem while requiring substantial preparation and follow-through.
None is automatically the best route. In this invented situation, the team could examine recent buying episodes and test one accurately described proposition through one suitable route. It would record who responded, what they understood, what happened next and how much work the team needed to support it. No demand result is claimed here.
05Set a learning question before expanding
A useful early question might be whether the route reaches people with the relevant need and whether they can understand and take the proposed next step. Record mismatches and unanswered enquiries alongside promising conversations. Decide in advance which observation would justify another bounded test, a changed proposition or a pause.
Some channels have a long or irregular buying cycle. An early absence of enquiries may be inconclusive, and a single promising introduction may be unrepeatable. State the observation window and its limits. Use the worksheet to choose what to learn next; it cannot forecast revenue or replace evidence about the customer and the actual channel.
Write one channel fit brief
Compare actual routes to one customer situation. Mark observations, assumptions and current terms separately.
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Sources and limits
Source pages checked 10 October 2026 UTC. The worksheets are editorial aids; they have not been validated as predictive assessments.
- Seth Godin · Creating value as an entrepreneur. 7 March 2023; checked 10 October 2026. Author’s perspective. Supports attention to customer traction, permission, distribution and a defined audience. It does not prove that any particular message or content plan will create demand.
Our interest
Heritage is taking first conversations about paid advisory work on growth. You can use this guide and its worksheet independently, without engaging Heritage.
Service work, The Read included, is a separate relationship: if we become interested in buying a business we are working with, we stop that work and tell the owner plainly before any purchase discussion begins.
This article is educational. It is not individual legal, tax or investment advice, an offer or a promise of results.
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