The PULSE Diagnostic and the Five Lenses Behind It

A SaaS company once told me their problem was the messaging. They’d rewritten their homepage four times in a year. Traffic was healthy. The pitch was clear. And they were still parked at the same revenue line they’d hit three years earlier.

On the surface, that looks like a copy problem. It almost never is.

When I step into an engagement, the first thing I do isn’t write. I diagnose. And I’ve learned the hard way not to trust a single framework to give me the whole read, because one lens on its own will lie to you with total confidence.

You see, but you do not observe

That line is Sherlock Holmes, scolding Watson for looking at the same staircase a thousand times without ever counting the steps. A market hands you the same clues it hands everyone else. The edge is reading them in a way your competitors don’t.

So I take the pulse of a business before I touch a word of its messaging or a single page of its site. Each lens answers one question, and only one. On its own, each one produces a clean, confident, wrong answer. Stacked together, they produce a read I can actually act on.

Five questions keep deciding whether a fix will stick. What place should the firm own, and who exactly is the buyer? Where can that buyer be reached, and can the search engines and AI assistants in between read the firm at all? Where does the buyer stand, and what proof will close the doubt?

What PULSE stands for

Letter	Lens	The question it answers	Framework behind it
P	Position	What specific, ownable place should this business hold?	Power Positioning
U	User	Who is the buyer, and where can we reach them, including the surfaces AI reads?	Bullseye Method
L	Legibility	Can search engines and AI read, trust, and cite the firm?	Triple-P, Four Fs, SOME
S	Stage	Where does the buyer stand on the awareness spectrum?	OATH
E	Evidence	Which proof is missing where the buyer goes quiet?	FORCEPS

The acronym is how you remember it. The order I run it in is different, and I’ll get to why.

Position: what place to own

The first question is the one most companies skip. What specific, ownable place should this business occupy in the buyer’s mind?

This is Power Positioning, and it’s not a tagline exercise. The market isn’t a physical space. It’s a mental one. The company that wins is rarely the best in the category. It’s the one the buyer thinks of first when the need shows up.

When I look through this lens, I’m hunting for one gap. The distance between what a company says it is, what its marketing implies it is, and what its buyers actually believe. Those three are almost never aligned, and that gap is where growth quietly stalls.

User: who the buyer is and where they can be reached

Who the buyer is has always mattered in how I diagnose a business. It now gets a lens of its own, because AI changed where and how that buyer can be reached.

That’s my Bullseye Method, and it answers two questions in order. Fit is who the buyer really is, across demographic, psychographic, geographic, and technographic lines. Placement is where that buyer can be reached, mapped as three rings of surfaces around the same buyer: Core, Middle, and Outside.

AI added a new dimension to Placement. More and more of those surfaces are now read, summarized, and recommended by AI assistants before a buyer ever clicks. AI also helps me find Middle and Outside surfaces I wouldn’t have spotted on my own, which I wrote about in how I use AI to find prospects I would have missed.

My check here is simple. Do the people finding the firm match the people who actually buy? And is the firm present on the surfaces where those buyers look, including the ones AI reads?

Stage: where the buyer actually stands

The right buyer at the wrong moment still won’t move. So the third lens asks where the buyer sits before I decide how to speak to them.

That’s the OATH formula, which I built back in 2003. It maps four stages of awareness. Oblivious buyers don’t know they have the problem. Apathetic buyers know but don’t feel the urgency. Thinking buyers are actively comparing options. Hurting buyers are ready to act and just need the friction removed.

Each stage needs a different message. Lead with proof and pricing for an Oblivious buyer and you lose them. Educate a Hurting buyer who already wants to sign and you stall the deal.

Evidence: what proof closes the gap

The fourth lens assumes the position is right, the buyer is right, and the stage is read correctly. Then it asks a harder question. What’s the buyer still not convinced of?

Doubt blocks more decisions than weak offers do. FORCEPS names the seven kinds of proof a buyer accepts: Factual, Optical, Relational, Credential, Evidential, Perceptual, and Social. The lens tells me which kind is missing at the exact point where the buyer goes quiet.

Evidence matters twice now. Buyers need it to believe you. AI engines need it to cite you, because a model quotes specifics, not adjectives.

Legibility: can the machines read you?

The last lens is the newest, and it’s the one that explains a lot of today’s stalls. Can search engines and AI assistants read the firm, trust what they read, and cite it when a buyer asks who to hire?

A firm can have a sharp position, the right buyers, the right message, and real proof, and still be invisible. Its expertise lives in decks and client calls. Its facts don’t match across its site, LinkedIn, and directories. Nobody outside the firm vouches for it in the places AI checks.

I read this lens through the Triple-P Model: Presence (do you show up), Prominence (do you get cited or recommended), and Performance (does it turn into brand searches and pipeline). The fixes come from SOME for citable pages and the Four Fs for brand memory.

Why I run them in this order

The sequence isn’t arbitrary. Position comes first because it sets the destination, and everything downstream exists to deliver a buyer to it. User tells me who that buyer is and where to reach them. Stage tells me where that buyer is standing when the trip begins. Evidence clears whatever’s blocking the road.

Legibility comes last because it amplifies whatever the first four already are. Make a blurry firm more visible and you just spread the blur. Make a sharp one legible and the machines start repeating it for you.

Start anywhere else and the read goes sideways. Start with proof and you stack evidence for a position the company hasn’t earned yet. Start with awareness and you meet the buyer beautifully, then lead them nowhere. Start with visibility and you pay to broadcast a message nobody should hear.

This is also why a single framework is dangerous on its own. Each one is correct about its own slice and silent about the rest. The diagnosis only holds when the lenses agree on the same story.

The SaaS case, read through the lenses

Back to that SaaS company. Three of the lenses did the heavy lifting on that one: Position, Stage, and Evidence.

Through Position, the place they could own was clear and narrow. Their messaging blurred it across three adjacent claims, so the market remembered none of them. That was the first clue, but it didn’t explain the stall on its own.

Through Stage, the picture sharpened. Most of their buyers were Apathetic. They understood the problem and felt no pressure to fix it. But the entire funnel was built for Hurting buyers who were ready to buy now.

Through Evidence, the last piece fell into place. For an Apathetic buyer, the proof that moves them is rarely a testimonial. It’s relational proof, the cost of doing nothing, made concrete enough to feel. Their messaging never put a number on what standing still was costing every month they waited.

The position was blurred, the messaging spoke to the wrong stage, and the proof that raises urgency was thin. We realigned the messaging to the buyer’s actual state. Qualified pipeline rose 197% in 90 days, with no change to the product, the price, or the ad spend.

How PULSE fits with Triple-P and IDEAL

I use three models together, and each has one job.

The Triple-P Model measures. It tells me whether a firm is seen, cited, and paid for its visibility. PULSE locates. It tells me where the constraint sits. And IDEAL runs the work, from Investigate through Decide, Execute, Analyze, and Learn.

In practice, PULSE does most of its work inside Investigate and Decide. I gather the data, read it through the five lenses, and commit to the one constraint holding the rest down. If you want to see that end to end on a stalled organic channel, it’s laid out in how I diagnose why organic growth stalled.

This isn’t only for fractional work

I run this read as a fractional CMO, CGO, or CSO because that’s the seat I’m usually in. But the method doesn’t belong to the title.

An executive repositioning a business unit runs the same lenses. So does an expert building authority around a point of view, or a founder deciding what their company should be known for. The common thread isn’t the role. It’s the depth of judgment behind the read.

That’s the part I care about most. The frameworks aren’t the point. The point is refusing to act on a partial diagnosis, no matter how confident the first clue feels.

Diagnose before you produce

Most teams skip straight to production. They write before they observe, and they end up rewriting the homepage four times in a year while the real problem sits two lenses away.

The PULSE read is slow on the first day and fast for the rest of the engagement, because you stop guessing. You know what to position, who to reach and where, what they’re ready to hear, what proof makes them believe it, and whether the machines can carry it.

If your growth has stalled and the fixes aren’t holding, that’s usually the tell. The diagnosis was partial. PULSE is how I start The Gauge, my diagnostic engagement, or you can book a discovery call and we’ll take the pulse of your market together.

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