Figure 2.1

Then I ask the companies to answer another question: How do you know? I ask them to both list the data and the opinions they have that lead them to believe each of their answers.

I kick off the W3 workshop by asking the representatives for each company to take one minute (and only one minute) and write down their answers to these three questions: Whom are you selling to? What are they buying? Why are they buying it?

search is the what we sold. They bought one of three things: sales, leads, or research.

Remember, if you don’t have data, you only have hope. And you aren’t taking on the risk of entrepreneurship because you hope it is going to work. Hope isn’t a strategy. Your goal as a founder is to put as much in your own control as possible. If you get good at data-led planning, you gain a much greater hit rate when developing successful offerings

For companies that sell to organizations and not just individuals, there are really two whys: why the business (as a whole) buys your product or service, and why the actual buyer buys it.

Who? What? and Why?

Because of W3, marketing knew exactly whom they should be targeting. And because of a combination of W3 and the direction provided by coverage, conversion, and CPC, sales also knew exactly the profile of whom we should target. This combination meant that the users we were directing to our customers’ ads were the right customers to convert and

and you have data to back it up, but you also don’t believe they are critically important to the business. Deprioritize work here relative to the higher priority items above.