Communication Diagnostic
Before you commit to any of it.
The situation
Something isn’t landing and you can’t point at it. The technical meetings go well. The engineers evaluating you are convinced. Then the process slows, and six weeks later someone mentions timing.
You’ve considered a film, a new site, a rewritten deck. Any of those might help. None of them fixes anything if the real problem is that your market doesn’t know what category you’re in, or that the person signing has never heard an explanation built for them.
The Diagnostic establishes which problem you have before you spend on solving a different one.
Ideal for
- You’re about to commission something and nobody can write the brief
- Deals stall after technical meetings that went well
- You’re entering a market where nobody knows the category
- A new product line doesn’t fit the story you’ve been telling
- Your communication describes a version of the company from three years ago
What’s included
Material review
Website, sales deck, product documentation, LinkedIn. What you’re currently saying, in your own words, before any judgement about it.
Competitor communication map
What the category already claims, and what nobody has claimed yet.
Conversations
Structured interviews with whoever owns the technical explanation and whoever owns the commercial one. Usually two or three people, once each.
Written analysis
Where the explanation breaks, at which point in the buying process, and what it costs. Findings are specific and evidenced from your own material.
Positioning recommendation
What you should own, why, and what you give up to own it. Written as language you can use, not principles you have to interpret.
Twelve-month plan
Which assets, in what order, for which moment in your sales cycle, with budget ranges attached.
Leadership presentation
Ninety minutes with your team. The document does the detail, the session does the argument.
What you actually get
A diagnosis, not an opinion
Findings tied to specific sentences in your own material.
Language you can use tomorrow
The primary line, the supporting paragraph, the answer when a founder is asked what the company does.
A plan with numbers
You stop guessing at budgets from a standing start.
The freedom to walk
The plan is yours. If the diagnostic concludes film isn’t the right investment right now, we’ll say so, and you won’t produce with us.
Common situations
Three quotes, three different projects.
You asked for a film, got quotes ranging from eight to thirty thousand, and can’t tell what accounts for the difference. It’s usually that nobody agreed on what the film should do, so each studio priced a different assumption.
The last one didn’t work and nobody knows why.
The production was competent. The film was fine. It went on the homepage and stopped. Nothing to point at, no lesson learned, and now there’s reluctance to spend again.
Your engineers and your sales team describe the company differently.
Both descriptions are accurate. Neither one is the company’s position, because nobody ever decided what that was.
You’re the first in your market and it isn’t helping.
Being first means no reference customer, no peer to ask, nobody to share the blame with. Buyers read it as risk. Your material reads it as an achievement.
What this leads to
The diagnostic ends in a plan. What the plan recommends usually maps onto one of the four programs, and the diagnostic counts as phase one if you continue.
If your product is hard to understand, let us take a look.
Willing to explore what might need to change. We take on a small number of technical companies a year. Treat how your customers see the product as seriously as the product itself. Let’s have a chat.
Or write directly — hello@metropole.studio