The Decision Maker PipelineThe Growth Bully
Internal · for Kim · 4 August 2026

The Decision Maker Pipeline

How we get clients, how we sell them, and what we actually deliver. Read it end to end, then give me your notes on the questions at the bottom.

No pricing in this document by design. Tier names are fine to use in conversation, numbers are not.

The one thing to understand first

This is not five products. It is one sales conversation with five landing places.

Everything we sell is the same story: businesses lose money in the gap between generating a lead and closing it, and we find that gap and fix it. What changes between tiers is who does the work, not what the work is.

That matters for you because it means you are not learning five things. You are learning one system, and then learning which version of it a given person is being sold.

The five tiers, plainly

TierWho it is forWho does the work
The Lead Leak Audit
Free		 Anyone. This is the front door and the only thing cold traffic ever sees. They do. It is a self-serve tool that gives them a number.
The Leak Report
Paid diagnostic		 Someone spending real money who wants the true picture, not an estimate. We do the analysis. They fix it, or they hire us to.
LeadLock
Subscription		 Businesses running Meta lead forms with no proper follow up. Narrow problem, narrow fix. We install and run the capture and follow up layer only. Never their ads.
The 30-Day Pipeline
Done with you		 People who want the whole system but want to own and run it themselves. They build it. We teach, review and unblock.
The Decision Maker Pipeline
Done for you		 Businesses with a real sales function who want it built and run for them. We do all of it. This is the retainer.

The rule that makes it work: a no at any tier falls to the tier below rather than ending the conversation. Nobody leaves a call with nothing, and nobody gets sold something they cannot afford to succeed at.

Cycle one

The advertising cycle

How a stranger becomes a booked call.

STEP 1 · TRAFFIC Cold Meta ad Broad. No interests. The copy names the buyer. STEP 2 · THE ONLY LANDING PAGE The Lead Leak Audit 6 questions. Free. Gives them a number. The money fork Two of the six questions sort them, silently. STEP 3 · THREE ROUTES OUT Big enough, has capacity Straight to a booked call. This is the only route that reaches Stephen's calendar. Too small to afford it Sent to the self-serve tiers. Never booked. This is the fix for what went wrong in May. Not ready right now Into nurture emails. Comes back when they are. Costs us nothing to hold. STEP 4 Booked call with Stephen Only qualified people ever land here. Cold money only ever touches the free audit. We never send cold traffic to a paid page.

The whole point of the fork is that it happens before anyone reaches a calendar.

Why the fork exists, and this is the important bit

We ran a version of this in May. The traffic was the best we had produced all year. People clicked, people filled it in, seven prospects booked calls.

Every single one of them was too small to afford what we were selling. The money was spent, the calls were held, and nothing closed.

The traffic was never the problem. We were letting anyone book. So now two of the six questions quietly sort people by size, and only the ones who can actually buy reach a calendar. Everyone else still gets real value, just self-serve.

What this means for anything you write or brief: our ads run broad with no interest targeting, so the copy has to do the targeting. Every hook must name the audience out loud in the first line. "If you run a distribution business in Malta" does more work than any targeting setting.

The three ways people find us

Paid

Meta ads, broad, pointed only at the free audit. Predictable, costs money, scales the moment it works.

Word of mouth

Referrals, now with a formal programme behind them. Cheapest and highest converting. Asked for at two fixed moments, never randomly.

Content

Stephen's LinkedIn and long form. Slow to start, compounds, and warms people up before they ever see an ad.

Cycle two

The sales cycle

What happens on the call, and why the order matters.

FIRST HALF · DISCOVERY Find out which of the five rooms they are stuck in Value: they do not believe it will work. · Money: they cannot pay. · Time: they are too busy. Partner: someone else has to agree. · Fear: they have been burned before. SECOND HALF · PRESENTED TOP DOWN, ALWAYS IN THIS ORDER 1. Decision Maker Pipeline, Partner tier Anchors everything. Rarely sold. 2. Decision Maker Pipeline, core This is the one we want. 3. The 30-Day Pipeline "I want it, but I will build it." 4. LeadLock Narrow fix, small commitment. 5. The Leak Report Nobody leaves with nothing.

Top down, never bottom up. Starting high makes everything underneath feel reasonable. Starting low means the top never gets heard.

What we learned from auditing 200 calls

We went back through every sales call and sorted why each one did not close.

Money65 calls. The single biggest killer, and the reason the fork now exists.
Partner49 calls. The decision maker was not in the room. This is a booking failure, not an objection.
Time26 calls.
Value25 calls.
Fear22 calls.

What that changed

Money and partner together account for more than half. Both are fixable before the call rather than during it.

Money is fixed by the fork in the audit. Partner is fixed by asking, at booking, who else needs to be on the call, and rescheduling rather than running it without them.

Twenty six calls where we sat in an empty room. That is the cheapest thing on this list to fix and we were not doing it.

The referral ask

This is now part of every sales conversation, not an afterthought. Ten percent of what we collect, for twelve months, on anyone they send us.

It gets asked at exactly two moments and never at others: at the close, while they are still enthusiastic about the decision, and at the first real win, when we have proof they can point at. Asking at any other time feels like begging.

Cycle three

What we actually deliver

The mechanism is the same at every tier. Only the hands change.

EVERY BUSINESS HAS THESE FIVE STAGES, WHETHER THEY KNOW IT OR NOT 1. Capture Do they enquire, and do they mean it? 2. Speed How fast does a human reply? 3. Follow up What happens to the non-responders? 4. Show up Do they turn up to the meeting? 5. Close And what happens to every maybe? leakleakleak leakleak These multiply. They do not add. Five stages running at 70% each sounds healthy. End to end it is 17%. Which is why "get us more leads" is almost never the right answer, and why we sell a fix, not a volume increase.

This diagram is the product. Everything we sell is a different way of closing these five gaps.

The delivery arc, same shape at every tier

PHASE ONE Build The CRM, the pipeline stages, the follow up, the funnel pages, the booking calendar. PHASE TWO Traffic Ads live and spending, pointed at something that is already built and working. PHASE THREE Sell The script, the objections, and the scoreboard that keeps everyone honest afterwards.

Done for you, we run all three. Done with you, they run all three and we review. The order never changes: never buy traffic for something that is not built.

The scoreboard, and why it is the real product

Every client ends up with six numbers visible: cost per qualified enquiry, average response time by person, contact attempts per enquiry, show rate, what happened to every maybe, and which stage moved when a month went badly.

Without those, nobody in their business can be held to anything, and every review meeting becomes opinion against opinion. With them, that stops. Including for us. They can hold us to the same board, and that is deliberate.

Who owns what

Stephen

  • Every sales call and every client relationship
  • All filming: ads, the sales video, the course
  • Final sign off on anything client facing
  • Pricing conversations, always

Where I need you

  • Delivery inside the pipeline once a client signs
  • Ad and content production against the briefs
  • Keeping the scoreboard populated so reviews are factual
  • Flagging scope creep the moment you see it, not at month end

One boundary worth stating plainly: at the done-with-you tier we hand over the keys and teach. We do not log in and do it for them. The moment we do it for one member we are doing it for all of them, and the tier stops working for everyone including us.

What I want your feedback on

Six questions. Answer whatever you have a view on, skip the rest. Disagreement is more useful to me than agreement.

1. Is the fork too harsh?

We now turn away people who are too small before they ever reach a call. It fixes what went wrong in May, but we will lose some who would have grown into it. Is that trade right?

2. Is the tier ladder clear enough to explain?

If a prospect asked you the difference between the done-with-you and the done-for-you tiers, could you answer it in one sentence without looking anything up? If not, tell me where it blurs.

3. Which delivery step will break first under volume?

You know the delivery load better than I do. If we sign four new clients in a month, what is the first thing that falls over?

4. Do the ad briefs give you enough to produce from?

The scripts name the audience out loud because our ads run broad. Is that enough direction, or do you need something more specific to work with?

5. Is the scoreboard realistic?

Six numbers per client, kept current. Is that maintainable alongside everything else, or does it need to be four?

6. What have I missed?

The genuinely open question. You see things in the day to day that do not reach me.

Internal document. Not for clients. Tier names are fine to say out loud, numbers are not.

Prepared 4 August 2026 · The Growth Bully Ltd