Free assessment or audit

What is a free assessment or audit funnel?

It is a structured diagnostic offered without charge, in which you examine something real — a team’s development gaps, a founder’s use of their week, a candidate’s positioning and materials, a client’s current habits and data — and deliver findings that are useful whether or not they hire you.

It works because it inverts the usual dynamic. Instead of persuading someone that they have a problem you can solve, you examine their situation and report what is there. The recommendation that follows is a conclusion rather than a pitch, and the prospect has watched you reach it.

What it is not: it is not a discovery call renamed. A discovery call is a conversation about whether to work together; an assessment produces an artefact. The 40 to 60 per cent band belongs to the second, and a thinly disguised sales call converts worse than simply asking for the call directly.

It is also not scalable in the form that works. A quiz is the automated cousin of this funnel and buys minutes rather than hours; it has no published conversion figure in coaching, which is roughly what you would expect from the difference in contact time.

How is an assessment different from the three things it gets confused with?

Four structures that all end in a conversation, separated by what the prospect receives and by the population each figure is measured on.

The 17 per cent and the 40 to 60 per cent are not measured on the same population and are not a like-for-like comparison. What they do show is the difference between asking somebody to commit time and offering to spend some of yours.

What happens between the offer and the readout?

Six stages. The published figure covers the transition from stage four to stage five.

1. The offer

   Made on a landing page, in outreach, on LinkedIn or in a proposal. It names what will be examined and what the prospect will receive, in concrete terms.

2. The qualification

   The stage most often skipped and the one that protects your calendar. An assessment for someone who could never buy costs the same three hours as one for someone who could.

3. The intake

   A form, a data pull, a questionnaire, a document. The prospect does work here, which is itself a qualifying signal and the first piece of their investment in the outcome.

4. The assessment itself

   One to three hours of your analysis, depending on scope. This is the cost centre of the funnel and the reason it cannot be run at volume.

5. The readout

   Live or written, with findings, interpretation and a recommendation. Forty to sixty per cent of completed assessments convert to a conversation at or immediately after this point.

6. The offer of coaching, where appropriate

   Only where the findings support it. Content-warmed prospects close at 30 to 50 per cent on the discovery call, and an assessment prospect is warmer than most.

What does a free assessment convert at, and into what?

The 40 to 60 per cent is measured on completed assessments — people who filled in the intake, supplied the information and received the findings. That is a population that has already invested effort, which is exactly why the rate is high.

Note also what the 40 to 60 per cent converts to. It is a conversation, not a client. Applying a 30 to 50 per cent close to it gives roughly 12 to 30 per cent of completed assessments becoming clients.

What ten assessments actually cost and produce

What does an assessment funnel cost to build and run?

In cash, almost nothing: an intake form, a document template and a scheduling link at $12 a month. It is the cheapest structure on this site to start and one of the most expensive to run, because the cost is entirely in your hours and it recurs with every single prospect.

The comparison that makes this concrete is with paid search, which buys a booked discovery call for $65 to $150. An assessment costs one to three hours of your time, which at $100 to $250 an hour is $100 to $750 per conversation before you have spoken to anyone. On pure unit cost, advertising is cheaper.

What advertising does not buy is a 40 to 60 per cent conversion into that conversation against 17 per cent, nor a prospect who has watched you do the work. The assessment is expensive per unit and efficient per client, which is the opposite profile to most of this site.

The build cost is real but paid once: a practitioner-estimated ten to twenty hours to design a diagnostic that produces genuinely useful findings, plus a repeatable template so the analysis takes one hour rather than three by the tenth time you run it. Templating the readout is the single highest-return improvement available in this funnel.

Who should offer an assessment, and who should not?

How quickly can an assessment produce a client?

Days. An assessment requested on Monday can be delivered on Thursday and converted into a coaching agreement the following week, which makes this the second-fastest structure on this site after paid search.

The speed comes from there being no audience to assemble, no room to fill and no event to schedule. It is one prospect, one diagnostic, one readout, and it works identically whether you have eleven subscribers or eleven thousand.

That makes it unusually well suited to the first year of a practice, when the timeline puts a first paying client at one to three months with active outreach. An assessment gives that outreach something to offer other than a conversation, which is exactly what a first-year coach is short of.

Where does an assessment funnel leak?

Five leaks. The first is the one the data explicitly warns about and the second is the one that quietly destroys a working week.

• It is a sales call in disguise. The documented caution is unambiguous: an assessment only works if the diagnostic is genuinely useful on its own, and a thin one converts worse than asking for the call directly.
• No capacity limit. Free work expands to fill the calendar. Ten assessments is a working week, and a month of uncapped requests can displace the paid work that funds the practice.
• No qualification before the intake. Three hours spent on someone with no budget, no authority and no intention costs exactly what three hours on a real prospect costs.
• Findings with no recommendation. An audit that describes the situation and stops leaves the prospect informed and unmoved. The recommendation is what converts, and it should be specific enough to decline.
• No follow-up after the readout. The conversation happened, the findings landed, and nothing was proposed within the week. Assessment momentum decays like retreat momentum, only faster.

What does an assessment pair with?

It pairs with direct outreach almost perfectly. Outreach’s weakest moment is the third touch, where a vague request for a call converts poorly; an assessment replaces it with a specific offer to examine something, which is easier to accept and harder to ignore.

It pairs with corporate outbound as the standard opening move. A structured diagnostic positions you as an examiner rather than a supplier, and it produces the agreed measure that a pilot programme will later be judged against — the single most commonly omitted element of a corporate pilot.

It pairs with paid search as a better landing-page offer than a booking form. A page offering an audit is asking for participation rather than commitment, which is the difference the 40 to 60 per cent band is measuring. And it pairs with a quiz as its automated front door, sorting requests before any of your hours are spent.

Why does an hour convert like a day?

Across these eleven structures, conversion tracks contact time. Ninety minutes converts attendees at 10 to 20 per cent into a booked call, five days converts calls at 30 to 50 into clients, and one to three days in a room converts attendees at 40 to 60 into long-term clients. An assessment takes one to three hours and converts completed assessments into conversations at 40 to 60 per cent.

Set those side by side carefully. The assessment band and the retreat band are the same number measured on different transitions, and the like-for-like version of the assessment figure — carried through a 30 to 50 per cent close — is roughly 12 to 30 per cent of completed assessments becoming clients. Read that way it does not overtake a retreat.

It does sit far above every other structure here that buys only hours, and that is the thing worth explaining.

The explanation is that every hour of an assessment is spent on that specific person’s specific situation, and the prospect knows it, because they supplied the material and they receive the findings. A webinar spends ninety minutes on a room; an assessment spends ninety minutes on one person.

That is the sharpest version of the pattern this site keeps finding. What conversion actually tracks is directed attention, and duration is usually a proxy for it. Where a structure can concentrate attention rather than extend it — as an assessment does, and as referrals do at a 40 to 70 per cent close — it converts like something much longer.

What happens to 1,000 people in a free assessment or audit funnel?

Each stage applies the recorded rate to the people still in the funnel. Where a stage has no published rate the arithmetic stops, because guessing past it would make every later figure fiction.

Stage rates as recorded on this funnel’s page. Practitioner estimates unless the page states otherwise.

How does this funnel compare with the others on effort and speed?

How do you run a first test of a free assessment or audit funnel?

1. Measure every stage from day one

   Record how many people enter each stage, not just how many clients come out. A funnel with one weak stage looks exactly like a funnel that does not work.

2. Compare each stage with the recorded rate

   Where this page records a rate, hold your own stage against it. The stage furthest below its recorded rate is the one to fix first.

3. Fill in the stages nobody publishes

   Your own numbers for the unpublished stages are the most valuable figures you will have, because nobody else can give them to you.

4. Plan around the recorded speed

   The recorded speed is: days. Do not judge the test before it has had that long.