One of the more interesting acquisition problems I've worked on began with a company that already knew how to reach people. The team understood its sector and had customers who valued the product, and they actively did outbound, social media and other direct promotion.
That did not mean the market had accepted the problem the software was built to solve.
Most prospective customers didn't think they needed a new solution. They managed the work through spreadsheets, email and manual follow-up because that was how the sector had always operated. The process consumed time and created avoidable effort, but familiarity made those costs easy to treat as normal.
The acquisition question therefore changed. Instead of only asking how to describe the product more persuasively, we asked how a prospect might recognise the limits of their current process for themselves.
Familiarity can hide the problem
An inefficient process does not always feel broken to the person living inside it.
People build routines around tools they already know. They learn where the spreadsheet fails, who has to chase the update and which workaround keeps the process moving. The inefficiency becomes part of the job.
Research into information-system adoption has found that habit, switching costs and commitment to the incumbent system can affect how users perceive a new one. Familiarity with the current approach can reduce the apparent advantage of the alternative before that alternative has been properly assessed.
More advertising can make a solution more visible. It cannot guarantee that the buyer recognises a reason to change.
This is a different barrier from simple product awareness; this needs a way for the market to critique the status quo.
A diagnostic creates a different first step
The proposed answer was a diagnostic built around the buyer's current process rather than the company's product.
A prospect could assess how mature the organisation's existing way of working was, see how it compared with stronger practice and leave with a practical set of improvements. The output of this was not a disguised product recommendation, but a clearer picture of where the current process created friction and what greater maturity would involve.
That changed the acquisition path.
Instead of every interaction beginning with the company asking for attention, the diagnostic could be distributed through outreach, paid activity and social channels as something a prospect could choose to use. A person outside the company's existing network could engage before agreeing to a sales conversation.
If the diagnosis exposed a meaningful gap, the prospect could choose to opt for a consultation with our team. The team could then help the prospect think through the improvement path and, where appropriate, show how the software supported it.
To assess the diagnostic’s value as a channel, we’d need to see more than completions.I would want to know whether it brought in people the company was not already reaching, whether those people arrived at better-qualified conversations, whether the resulting leads carried more value and whether the model reduced the amount of team effort required before qualification.
The value has to exist before the sales call
This fits a wider change in B2B buying. In a 2025 Gartner survey, 61% of buyers said they preferred an overall experience without a sales representative, while 73% actively avoided suppliers that sent irrelevant outreach.
A useful diagnostic lets a prospect learn something about their own situation first. The company earns the right to continue the conversation by making that first interaction worthwhile.
Forrester's work on buyer enablement recommends testing limited self-service projects and learning from buyer behaviour before extending them. It frames such tools around helping buyers complete part of the purchasing work for themselves, rather than simply giving Sales another source of contact details.
That distinction matters here. A diagnostic that exists only to capture an email address will quickly feel like a form wearing analytical clothing. The result has to be useful enough that the prospect would still value the exercise even if they never bought the software.
Some problems cannot be diagnosed at a distance
There is a risk in taking the diagnostic idea too far.
A questionnaire can identify patterns. It can show that approvals are slow, information lives in several places or teams rely heavily on manual follow-up. It cannot necessarily tell us why.
Organisational context matters. A process that looks immature from the outside may reflect regulation, customer requirements, an unusual operating model or a constraint the diagnostic does not know about.
That’s why the job of the diagnostic is to help someone see where a closer look may be worthwhile. The consultation is where the company can ask better questions, understand the context and decide whether the apparent problem is real. And, if the answer turns out to not be the software, that’s okay too - after all, without that possibility, the diagnosis stops being credible.
A pull mechanism still needs distribution
It is tempting to describe this as a move from push to pull. There is some truth in that, but the diagnostic does not attract an audience by itself. The company still has to distribute it, advertise it, mention it in outbound activity and give people a reason to begin.
The change is in what that distribution asks the prospect to do.
Instead of moving immediately from interruption to product conversation, it offers a useful intermediate decision: examine how we are doing this today.
That can widen the addressable audience because it includes people who are not yet searching for software but are willing to investigate whether the current process deserves improvement.
The proposed diagnostic was therefore not only an acquisition asset but also a way of making a hidden decision visible.
Prospects could examine a process they had learned to accept, understand what greater maturity involved and decide whether improvement deserved attention. Only then did the company's solution become part of a question the market was ready to consider.