The Marketing Diagnostic

Something isn’t working in your marketing. Before you do more, find out what is actually going on.

A conclusion you can defend. A next move you can justify. And a clearer understanding of what still isn’t known.

there are too many plausible solutions

The problem is rarely a shortage of things to try.

AI can give you ten credible explanations for a stalled pipeline. It can recommend a new positioning strategy, a new website, more content, paid acquisition, a CRM, a sales hire or a different offer. Your agency can do the same. Your competitors can do the same.

The harder question is whether any of those answers explains your result, and whether the recommended move makes sense given your situation and constraints. 

The Diagnostic is the examination between ‘here are some things we could do’ and ‘this is what we have enough evidence to do next.’ It establishes which explanation best accounts for your result, and what follows from it.

Establish which explanation best accounts for the result of your particular uncertainty, and what follows from it.

  • KES 75,000.00
  • One focused Diagnostic
  • Written Diagnostic Report within 7 business days
Request a Diagnostic
View a real example

You may already know what you want to do next.
The harder question is whether it will solve the problem.

  • A stalled pipeline can look like a lead-generation problem.
  • A weak conversion rate can look like a lead-quality problem.
  • A website that produces little business can look like a website problem.
  • An underperforming agency can look like an agency problem.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes the constraint sits somewhere upstream.

Challenge the explanation and you may change the recommendation

What you are seeing

Revenue is stalled

Several explanations may fit

A

Visibility may be the constraint

The business may simply not be reaching enough of the right buyers.

WE’D EXAMINE

Who currently sees the business, who should see it, how qualified that attention is, and what happens after it arrives.

B

The offer may be the constraint

Buyers may be aware of the business but still have insufficient reason to choose, prioritise or pay for what it offers.

WE’D EXAMINE

What buyers are trying to solve, what they value, what they compare, and where the current offer fails to make the commercial case.

C

The commercial system may be the constraint

Demand may exist, but something between interest and purchase may be preventing revenue from materialising.

WE’D EXAMINE

Lead quality, qualification, sales handover, follow-up, conversion patterns and where prospective buyers actually leave.

The common assumption

“We need more visibility.”

That may be true. But more visibility can also mean more attention from the wrong buyers, more leads that cannot convert, or more traffic hitting an offer that isn’t compelling.

Before increasing volume, we need to establish whether volume is actually the constraint.

The recommendation depends on the diagnosis. Change what you examine, and you may change what you recommend.

What you are seeing

Leads aren't converting

Several explanations may fit

A

The demand may be poorly qualified

Marketing may be generating attention from people who lack the need, authority, budget or urgency to buy.

WE’D EXAMINE

Who is entering the pipeline, why they entered, what makes a lead commercially qualified, and whether the targeting is attracting the right demand.

B

The offer may not make the decision easy

Prospects may understand what is being sold without seeing enough value or reason to priotise the purchase.

WE’D EXAMINE

The buyer’s problem, alternatives, perceived risk, value calculation, pricing, and the point at which interest turns into hesitation.

C

The sales process may be leaking demand

The right prospects may be arriving, but something in the journey from enquiry to decision may be breaking down.

WE’D EXAMINE

Response time, qualification, handover, sales conversations, follow-up, and the actual reasons opportunities are lost.

The common assumption

“We need better leads.”

That may be true. But low conversion can also mean the offer is poorly structured, the wrong buyers are being attracted, the sales process is losing qualified opportunities, or prospects are not seeing enough reason to act.

Before changing the lead source, we need to establish what is happening between enquiry and purchase.

The recommendation depends on the diagnosis. Change what you examine, and you may change what you recommend.

What you are seeing

The website isn't producing enquiries

Several explanations may fit

A

The proposition may be unclear

The website may be communicating what the business does without making its relevance to the intended buyer sufficiently clear.

WE’D EXAMINE

Who the site is for, what problem it addresses, what buyers need to understand and whether the proposition matches their priorities.

B

The traffic may be wrong

The site may be receiving attention from people who were never likely to become customers.

WE’D EXAMINE

Traffic sources, search intent, audience fit, buyer intent and what happens between acquisition and enquiry.

C

The conversion path may be the issue

The right people may be arriving but encountering too much uncertainty, friction or commitment before taking the next step.

WE’D EXAMINE

The buyer journey, trust signals, calls to action, commercial ask, where qualified visitors stop moving.

The common assumption

“We need a better website.”

That may be true. But a website can fail to produce enquiries because the wrong people are reaching it, the proposition isn’t compelling, the buyer doesn’t understand its relevance, or the next step asks for too much too soon.

Before rebuilding the website, we need to establish whether the website is actually the constraint.

The recommendation depends on the diagnosis. Change what you examine, and you may change what you recommend.

What you are seeing

Revenue is stalled

Several explanations may fit

A

The problem may pre-date the agency

The agency may be executing against a brief that never established what marketing is actually expected to solve.

WE’D EXAMINE

The original business problem, strategic brief, success measures, assumptions and what the agency was actually asked to change.

B

The activity may be measuring the wrong thing

The agency may be producing strong activity while the business is measuring success somewhere else.

WE’D EXAMINE

Current metrics, commercial outcomes, attribution, lead quality, and whether reported performance connects to the business result that matters.

C

The bottleneck may sit inside the business

Marketing may be generating interest that the internal commercial system is not equipped to convert.

WE’D EXAMINE

Lead response, sales ownership, follow-up, operational capacity and what happens after marketing hands over an opportunity.

The common assumption

“We need a better agency.”

That may be true. But an agency can also appear ineffective when the business has given it an unclear commercial problem, is measuring activity instead of business outcomes, or has an internal bottleneck between marketing and sales.

Before changing agencies, we need to establish whether the problem sits with the agency, the brief, the measurement, or the system around it.

The recommendation depends on the diagnosis. Change what you examine, and you may change what you recommend.

How businesses end up doing more without getting much wiser.

Marketing is supposed to help the business create a commercial result. But when the result doesn’t materialise, the response often becomes another marketing decision: More leads. New channel. New website. New agency. More content. More spend. A rebrand.

At that point, the organisation may be making marketing decisions without having established the business problem those decisions are supposed to solve.

The Qallann Marketing Diagnostic Clinic creates a deliberate pause between “this isn’t working” and “here’s what we’ll do next.”

THE INTERVENTION SPIRAL

When a result isn’t where it needs to be, the pressure is to do something. An explanation forms. An intervention follows. If the result doesn’t change, the explanation changes too.

This is how businesses end up changing everything except the explanation. The business becomes exhausted without becoming wiser.

    The Marketing Diagnostic Between stage 02 and stage 03

    What is actually going on?

    Before the explanation becomes an intervention, we examine the evidence, test the explanation against it and establish where the problem sits.

    1. 01ExamineThe evidence behind the explanation
    2. 02EstablishWhat is driving the result
    3. 03DecideProceed, change or stop

    Qallann interrupts the cycle by examining the explanation before recommending the next move.

    WHEN THIS IS THE RIGHT EXAMINATION

    Some business problems have an obvious-looking next move. The problem is that the same result can have several causes.

    The Diagnostic is for situations where the proposed move could be right, but there is more than one credible explanation for what is happening. 

    You might be dealing with:

    • Revenue isn't growing despite continued marketing activity.
    • Leads are coming in, but too few are becoming business.
    • The business is getting attention, but not enough commercial demand.
    • A new offer isn't gaining the traction you expected.
    • A significant investment hasn't produced the expected result.
    • You've changed the marketing, but the underlying problem remains.
    • The business keeps changing direction without becoming more certain about what is actually wrong.
    • You're under pressure to respond to what competitors are doing, even though you don't know whether the same move makes sense for your business.
    • You're about to make another consequential move because the last one didn't resolve the problem.

    In each case, the visible result does not reveal its cause. 

    WHAT WE EXAMINE

    We tell you what we need after reviewing your request. Limited or missing records are part of what we examine. The question determines the examination.

    We identify the evidence most capable of changing the conclusion. Depending on the problem, that may include:

    • commercial performance and revenue patterns
    • the offer, pricing and proposition
    • customers and buyer behaviour
    • marketing and demand generation
    • lead quality, conversion and sales
    • the path from attention to purchase
    • positioning
    • internal processes or dependencies
    • what currently depends on founder or individual judgement

    You won’t be asked to provide everything about the business. We tell you what we need after reviewing the problem.

    WHAT MAKES A GOOD DIAGNOSTIC QUESTION?

    The Diagnostic works best when there is:

    • A defined result
      Something is happening that should be different.
    • A decision attached to it
      You are considering a specific change, investment or intervention.
    • A genuine uncertainty
      There are several plausible explanations, and you do not know which one deserves to drive the decision.
    • A bounded examination
      We can identify the evidence and people relevant to answering that question without conducting a full business review.

    You do not need to know the diagnosis before you request one. You do need to be able to describe what is happening and what decision is now in front of you.

    What you get

    Think of this as the difference between prescribing an intervention and establishing what requires intervention.

    You receive a written Diagnostic Report: a record of the reasoning behind your next move. You leave with a basis for action.

    01

    The problem

    What is happening, and what decision or intervention is currently being considered.

    02

    The evidence

    What we examined, what it tells us and where the evidence is strong, weak or contradictory.

    03

    The explanation

    04

    The constraint

    Where the problem appears to be occurring and what is upstream of it.

    05

    The decision

    What the evidence supports doing, changing, delaying or stopping.

    06

    The next move

    The intervention that makes sense now, based on what the examination established.

    07

    The unknowns

    What we still cannot establish and what evidence would be needed before making a larger commitment.

    WHAT YOU CAN AVOID BY EXAMINING FIRST

    When a result is disappointing, continuing to act feels safer than stopping to examine it.

    Sometimes it is.

    But every new intervention commits money, management attention, team capacity and organisational credibility. It also creates new information that can become harder to interpret when several changes happen at once.

    Many businesses are already inside one of these without knowing it. Examining first is how you find out, before more money moves.

    Paying to fix the wrong part of the business

    Budget goes into more ads, content or campaigns when the real limit sits elsewhere, such as an offer buyers hesitate over or a sales process that loses them. The spend looks busy and revenue stays where it was. Examining first shows where results are actually being held back, so the money goes there.

    A new agency, marketing hire or platform is brought in because results disappoint. If the cause sits upstream of them, such as an unclear brief, a positioning gap or a goal nobody agreed, the replacement inherits the same problem and you pay for the learning curve again. Your existing team also keeps compensating with extra effort in the meantime. Examining first shows whether the people need to change or the conditions they work in.

    A rebrand, pivot or new market is chosen because something isn’t working. The change can discard what was working along with what wasn’t, and the business starts again where an adjustment would have done. Examining first shows what to keep, what to change and what to stop.

    A competitor launches a website, a campaign or a content format, and the pressure to match it arrives quickly. Their choice rests on their buyers, their position and their reasons, and none of those are visible from outside. The business ends up doing something because others do in the hope that sales follow. Examining first asks what your own buyers need before anything is copied.

    AI tools return clear, confident recommendations in minutes. They draw on general patterns and have no sight of your buyers, your numbers or your market, so a coherent plan can still be about the wrong problem. Examining first tests the answer against your own evidence before the business commits to it.

    A sensible intervention can still be premature if something else needs to happen first.

    A website, campaign or hire is commissioned first. The questions it depends on, such as who it is for and what it needs to say, get answered halfway through or after launch. The work is then redone or released on guesses, and the cost arrives as rework and delay. Examining first sets out which decisions come before which work, so the build starts on settled ground.

    After months of effort and spend behind one explanation, it becomes harder to question, because stopping feels like admitting the money was wasted. Continuing is a decision too, and the earlier spend is gone either way. Examining first lets you judge the explanation on the evidence it has produced, whatever it has cost so far.

    The value is knowing why the next move follows from what you have established, rather than simply being the next plausible thing to try.

    The Diagnostic exist to establish whether the next commitment is justified by what you actually know.

    A real diagnostic

    The sample below shows the reasoning a Diagnostic can contain. The scope of each examination is determined by the question being answered. We do not review everything about a business. We examine what could change the conclusion.

    What happens when the explanation doesn't survive examination?

    CONTEXT

    An established organisation with a long track record and a recent move to a commercial model before the engagement.

    It had sector credibility, communications capability, a growing audience, website traffic, content, webinars, events, a rebrand, CRM activity, and several business-development hires.

    But the CEO still closed new commercial work. No sale could be reliably traced to business-development activity.

    THE PROBLEM

    New business was not coming from marketing or business development.

    “What should we change to turn existing marketing activity into new business?”

    THE ACCEPTED EXPLANATION

    “Buyers do not understand what we do.”

    THE RESPONSE

    • More content.
    • More marketing.
    • More visibility.
    • Another sales hire.

    WHAT QALLANN EXAMINED

    Qallann reviewed the evidence relevant to the decision, including available CRM and sales records, new and repeat-business patterns, hiring history, marketing and content strategy, annual OKRs, the sales process, and perspectives from the CEO and marketing lead.

    WHAT THE EVIDENCE SHOWED

    The organisation had credibility and attention. It had evidence of buyer demand: the CEO could close work and repeat business continued.

    But the organisation could not consistently reproduce what the CEO did in a commercial conversation. Four business-development hires had not converted the same opportunity into traceable sales.

    The evidence made “insufficient marketing activity” less convincing as the primary explanation.

    THE DIAGNOSIS

    A commercial-translation problem that was being treated as a marketing-activity problem

    THE NEXT MOVES

    • Do not add another business-development hire.
    • Do not increase marketing spend.
    • Do not make the organisation more visible yet.
    • First, define the buyer problem, the offer, and the founder-led sales logic so that someone other than the CEO can sell it.
    Read the sample Diagnostic Report

    How the Diagnostic works

    01

    Submit the problem

    Tell us what is happening, what you are considering doing, what you have already tried, and what you are uncertain about.

    02

    We determine the examination

    We review your submission and confirm whether the question is appropriate for a Diagnostic. If it is, we identify the evidence, documents and people relevant to this particular examination.

    03

    We examine the problem

    We hold a 90-minute working session with the people closest to the question, chosen according to the problem. We examine the relevant evidence and test the explanations against it. 

    04

    We write the Diagnostic Report

    We document what the evidence supports, where the problem appears to sit, what follows from the finding, and what remains unknown; delivered within 7 business days of the working session, once we have received all required materials.

    05

    We walk you through it.

    We hold a 30-minute readout to explain the conclusion, answer questions and confirm the immediate next move.

    Investment

    • KES 75,000.00
    • One focused Diagnostic
    • Written findings within 7 business days

    Included

    • Pre-session review
    • Evidence and information request tailored to the problem
    • One 90-minute working session with the relevant people in your organisation.
    • One concise Diagnostic Report delivered within seven business days.
    • One 30-minute delivery readout to clarify the conclusion, answer questions about the diagnostic, and confirm the immediate next move.
    • Diagnostic is run by a senior Qallann strategist

    Not included

    If further work is justified, it is scoped separately. You may do it internally, appoint Qallann, or use another provider.

    Request a Diagnostic

    Bring us one result that isn’t where it should be, the decision you’re considering because of it, and the uncertainty stopping you from being confident in that decision.

    We review every request before confirming whether the Diagnostic is the appropriate starting point.

    Before you make the next move, know what you're solving.

    Request a diagnostic

    Common questions about the Marketing Diagnostic

    Every Diagnostic is run by a senior Qallann strategist. Lorraine Agutu, founder of Qallann, leads the work: she runs the interviews, examines the evidence and writes the Diagnostic Report. She has worked on marketing decisions across African markets for more than a decade, from regional marketing at Nestlé across 22 countries to fractional CMO and advisory work with founder-led businesses.

    The Diagnostic follows one business problem from the decision to the evidence behind it. That focus is what makes 7 business days enough.

    The 90-minute session is for the interviews with the people closest to the decision. The remaining time goes to reviewing the evidence appropriate to your situation on our own and following the problem to where it sits. The materials differ by decision, because a sales hire, a rebrand, a pricing change and a new market are each examined differently.

    Bring the people who own the decision, hold relevant evidence, understand the operating reality or will act on the outcome. Depending on the decision, that may include the CEO or founder, the finance, sales, marketing or operations lead, a business-unit leader, a co-founder or a board representative. We advise on the right group during intake.

    It begins when we have all final required submissions and have completed the Diagnostic session. The request form starts the assessment and does not start the delivery clock. If we need anything further after reviewing your submission, we tell you before the examination begins.

    The Diagnostic is based on the question, evidence and scope established before the examination begins. If the readout surfaces a clarification or a material piece of evidence that is relevant to the original question, we assess whether it changes the finding. If a new question or a materially different problem emerges, we treat it as a new request, and the original Diagnostic Report stands. It may need a separate Diagnostic or a broader review, depending on what needs to be established.

    No.

    It gives you the strongest conclusion that can reasonably be supported by the evidence and context available.

    The quality of the Diagnostic depends partly on the quality, relevance and completeness of the information available to us.

    Where the evidence is insufficient to support a conclusion, we will say so.

    A useful diagnostic makes uncertainty visible. It does not disguise it as certainty.

    Each of these is useful information. The Diagnostic sets out what can responsibly be concluded, what remains assumption, and the one missing question or source of evidence that matters most to the decision. Where the evidence points in different directions, we test each competing explanation against it and identify the decision that has not yet been resolved clearly enough. Sometimes the right conclusion is: “Do not spend the money yet. Establish this first.”

    No. The Diagnostic examines the evidence you already hold and the information you share about how the problem arose. Research, strategy development, campaigns, content and other work to resolve the problem sit outside it. Where the decision needs new research, the Diagnostic Report names it as the next step.

    You receive a verdict on the decision, the evidence behind it and the next step. Who carries out that step is up to you.

    That is a valid and useful outcome. The Diagnostic tests whether the explanation is supported strongly enough to justify the decision. When it is, the verdict is to proceed, and you have a documented basis for going ahead, a clearer sequence and the evidence behind it.

    The conclusion follows the evidence. The verdict may be to proceed, to change or to stop, and in many cases the next step involves no one at Qallann. Any further work with us is a separate decision, made after you have read the Diagnostic Report.

    Everything you share is used only for the Diagnostic and treated as confidential; we sign an NDA before you submit anything.

    Review our Privacy Policy.

    Yes.

    The Diagnostic Report belongs to you. You can use it to align internal teams, challenge an assumption, assess a proposed investment, pause work, brief an existing supplier, or decide to change direction.

    It is not written to prosecute a supplier. It is written to clarify the decision.

    The Diagnostic examines one focused business question. If growth has plateaued, several initiatives are running without resolving the problem, or the constraint may sit across the wider system, the Operational Momentum Review may be the better starting point. We assess this from your submission before confirming the Diagnostic, and we tell you if a different scope fits better.