The Diagnostic Skill That Separates Strategic Hires from Expensive Ones

Every company I walk into has already tried something, usually more than once. A new agency last year, a website rebuild the year before, a slew of new content. The numbers barely moved.

By the time they call me, they don’t want more tactics. Clients want to know why the last ones didn’t work, and that’s the question most people skip. Or they have a sneaking suspicion and want me to confirm it. More often than not, they’re wrong.

Why Most Engagements Fail Before They Start

I’ve watched this pattern for more than three decades. A company spots a symptom, like declining traffic or flat pipeline, and jumps straight to a fix such as a new SEO strategy, a rebrand, or a burst of paid media. These tactics tend to be band-aids, not cures. They cover the symptom or fill a gap for a while.

Symptoms mislead. Declining traffic can look like a ranking problem when the real issue is positioning. And flat pipeline often turns out to be a proof problem dressed up as a lead generation issue. Symptoms can mask root causes that only an expert eye that knows where to look can catch.

Many consultants and agencies are brought in to confirm the client’s diagnosis and fix the surface issue. They also tend to get fired the fastest. The ones who stay usually push back first and ask to see the data for themselves.

What I Call “Sherlocking”

Early in my career, someone told me I took problems apart the way a detective works a crime scene. Part of it may be due to my ADHD. Another may be my obsession with solving puzzles. And clients who approach me are handing me theirs. So I’d pull apart the messaging, the funnel, the competition, and the customer journey, then put the pieces back together until the real problem showed up.

The name Sherlocking stuck, partly as a joke. It still describes the work well.

I’m eliminating possibilities until one explanation is left standing. Holmes used both abductive and inductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning means observing a set of facts and picking the most likely explanation. Inductive reasoning means building a general rule from specific observations and past experience.

I use both in every diagnostic audit. Over the years I turned this reasoning into a repeatable method with five lenses, applied in order, before I write a word of strategy.

The PULSE Lenses I Run First

Before I write any strategy, I take the “pulse” of the business and its organic growth. I call the method PULSE, and it reads the business through five lenses. Each one answers a single question and stays silent on the others.

Position asks what specific, ownable place the company should occupy in the buyer’s mind. That’s Power Positioning, and FAME breaks it into Focus, Aim, Multiply and Engage.

User asks who the buyer is and where they can be reached, including the surfaces AI now reads. That’s the Bullseye Method and its two reads, Fit and Placement.

Stage asks where the buyer stands. The OATH formula maps it as Oblivious, Apathetic, Thinking or Hurting. Each stage needs a different message, and most companies write for the last two while the first two make up most of the market.

Evidence asks what proof closes the remaining doubt. FORCEPS names seven types: Factual, Optical, Relational, Credential, Evidential, Perceptual and Social.

Legibility asks whether search engines and AI can read, trust and cite the business, because that’s increasingly where buyers go to find experts.

The order matters. Position sets the destination, User and Stage tell me who’s travelling and where they’re starting from, and Evidence clears the road. Legibility comes last because it amplifies whatever the first four already are. I walk through the full method, with a worked example, in the PULSE Diagnostic.

A Diagnosis I Ran This Fall

Here’s what that looks like in practice. This fall I ran The Gauge, my diagnostic engagement, for a Canadian marketing agency. They came in with a clear complaint. They’d published around 40 new pages, from case studies to landing pages and videos, and their search rankings hadn’t moved.

The obvious read was a content problem, so write better pages or more of them. The data disagreed. Those 40 pages ranked for four keywords between them, while competitors with fewer pages ranked for well over a hundred.

The first lens explained most of it. The website described the agency as a specialist in a single category, one the founder told me they’d outgrown years earlier. Every page was optimized for a position the business no longer held.

The other lenses filled in the rest. When I asked ChatGPT about the agency, it couldn’t confirm who they were and leaned on directories and ranking lists instead. The case studies described the work but rarely the result. Sixteen pages had no links pointing to them from anywhere else on the site. And the analytics counted every attempt to fill out the contact form as a lead, spam included.

None of that would have surfaced if we’d started by writing more pages. The second phase now rebuilds the core pages around the agency’s real position first, and the content plan follows from there.

Why the Diagnosis Changes Everything

Skip straight to tactics and the old problems come along for the ride. A new website still carries the positioning problem. A content plan aimed at the wrong awareness stage misses however good the writing is, and advertising without proof only spends faster.

When I step into a fractional CMO, CGO, or CSO role, the first 30 to 60 days are mostly diagnostic. I run all five PULSE lenses, map the gaps, and build a strategy around root causes.

That’s where most of the value gets created. Execution matters, but it’s only as good as the clarity that comes before it. As Jim Rohn put it, when you’re heading down the wrong road, you don’t need motivation to go faster. You need education to turn around.

What to Look for When You Hire Strategic Leadership

If you’re a senior leader evaluating consultants, or a recruiter sourcing fractional executives, here’s the simplest filter I know. Ask them what they do in the first 30 days. This is often the best tell-tale sign of their level of expertise and the soundness of their approach.

If the answer is a list of deliverables, keep looking. If they describe how they’d figure out what’s wrong first, you’re likely talking to someone worth hiring. The best strategic hires don’t walk in with a playbook. They walk in with a flashlight.

What a Good Answer Sounds Like

A good answer is specific about what they’d look at and open about what they’d conclude. Anyone who knows your problem before seeing your data is probably selling a template from their last client.

Listen for whether they name what they’d need access to. That might be analytics, call recordings, win-loss notes, the last two quarters of pipeline, or the people who handle objections all day. Anyone who’s done this work knows the evidence is scattered, so they ask for it early.

Listen, too, for what they’d rule out. Diagnosis is mostly elimination. If someone can’t tell you what would change their mind, they’re matching patterns from past clients.

The Questions I’d Ask Next

Ask what they got wrong on a recent engagement and how they found out. Anyone who’s run enough diagnostics has misread a situation in front of a client and remembers the moment. If they have no such story, they either haven’t done much of the work or won’t admit it.

Ask how they’d know at day 60 that the engagement was working. Revenue lags, and good operators know it, so the leading indicator they name tells you what they watch.

And ask who they’d want to talk to inside the company, and in what order. Someone who talks to the CEO and stops there will build a strategy from one person’s version of events.

What I Wouldn’t Weight Heavily

Industry experience matters less than people think. It shortens the ramp and helps with vocabulary, but it brings assumptions along with it. Some of my sharpest reads came from markets I didn’t know, because I had to ask the obvious questions nobody inside was asking anymore.

Tool fluency matters even less. Learning your stack takes a couple of weeks. Telling a positioning failure from a funnel failure takes years.

Be careful with a polished methodology deck, too. A named framework is useful shorthand, and I use plenty of them. But the deck is the easy part to build. What you want to know is whether they’ll change the plan when the evidence says so, and that comes down to temperament.

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