Know what you are selling

Write the offer sentence for the offer you have fixed for the course. One sentence. It must name the buyer specifically enough that a neighbouring buyer is excluded, the outcome in the buyer's terms rather than yours, and the alternative it displaces.

The offer sentence tool, offerline, on this level's practice screen scores each draft on what it fails to name, and refuses the words that hide an outcome; run every draft through it before it goes near a reader.

Then take it to five people who do not work with you and ask each one a single question: who is this not for? Record their answers verbatim. Rewrite, and repeat until the answers converge on the exclusion you intended.

What makes this fail: writing the sentence in a meeting and stopping. The sentence is not the deliverable; the five answers and the rewrites are. Expect four or five drafts. Expect at least one word that felt essential to turn out to be doing nothing, and delete it.

Produces: the sentence, every draft, and the fifteen to twenty-five verbatim answers. Two hours over the fortnight, most of it waiting.

Build three buyer accounts for the single offer, each tied to real purchases rather than a type of person. Each account carries: the trigger event, what they were using before, where they looked, what they typed or who they asked, the hesitation in their own words, what resolved it, and who else had to agree.

Where two accounts share a trigger and an alternative, merge them. You are looking for the level at which the argument you have to make changes, not the level at which the job title changes.

What makes this fail: an account with no hesitation. If all three of your buyers were straightforwardly pleased to find you, the accounts were written from imagination, and every piece of content you build on them will be aimed at people who were always going to buy.

Produces: three accounts, each traceable to named purchases. Three to four hours, after the interviews.