The Five Frictions in Acquisition
How easy are you to buy from?
I’ve worked with hundreds of businesses that are good at generating leads but struggle to turn them into customers.
The pattern is familiar. Traffic is up. Enquiries are up. But customer growth slows, or each new customer costs more to acquire.
Sooner or later, someone says, ‘The leads are bad.’
Sometimes they’re right. But before you spend more on attracting better leads, there’s a question worth asking.
How easy are you to buy from?
Most businesses think they’re easy to buy from. And when you know exactly where to click, who answers the phone and what happens after an enquiry, it probably feels that way. A customer is figuring all of that out for the first time.
That’s why I developed a model for assessing how easy it is to take the next step at each stage of the customer journey. I identified five places where customers tend to get stuck.
The Five Frictions of customer acquisition
Discovery Friction - customers cannot find you easily. Search, positioning and messaging fail to connect with demand.
First Step Friction - the moment a visitor arrives on your website. Landing pages confuse rather than convert.
Process Friction - leads enter the system, but are poorly handled. Slow response times, broken handoffs, CRM chaos.
Purchase Friction - sales processes that make buying harder than it should be.
Feedback Friction - determines whether the system improves with time.
By assessing a business against these five Frictions, the blocker to growth can be easily identified.
If you tried to buy from your own business today, where would you get stuck?
Is your funnel broken?
You're investing in marketing. Driving traffic to your website. Generating interest.
But not enough visitors become leads. And too few leads become customers.
Something is broken.
Companies I’ve helped
Fix Your Funnel
If your company generates traffic but growth has stalled, the issue is often friction inside the acquisition system.
