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What if your lead magnet didn’t just grow your list – it told you exactly who was ready to buy, what they needed, and how much they could invest? Business strategist Maeve Ferguson walks us through building diagnostic assessments that qualify leads, personalize follow-up, and make high-ticket sales conversations feel like a formality. It’s a practical roadmap for SMBs and marketers who want smarter funnels, not just more visibility.
Stop Using PDFs: Smarter Lead Funnels That Actually Convert
Here at flyte we spend more time than I’d like to admit designing PDF lead magnets for our website. (That’s in part because we’re a design and branding firm in addition to being a digital marketing firm, but I digress.)
Your PDF lead magnet download isn’t underperforming because it doesn’t look good, it’s because they ask for almost nothing—and give nothing personal in return.
That’s where diagnostic assessments come in.
Why PDFs Fail (Even When They’re “Good”)
Think about the last PDF you downloaded. Still haven’t read it? Exactly.
PDFs suffer from two fatal flaws:
- Low intent.Signing up requires almost zero effort. Providing an email and hitting submit? Done.
- Generic advice.Everyone gets the same prescription, whether they need it or not.
This creates what my guest this week, Maeve Ferguson, calls spray-and-pray marketing: lots of leads, very little signal.
Diagnostics Flip the Script
Diagnostic assessments ask people to participate, not just consume.
Instead of “Here’s a checklist,” you’re saying, “let’s figure out what’s actually going on in your business.”
That shift does three powerful things:
- Increases time on page
- Raises perceived value
- Builds trust fast
When someone finishes a diagnostic and sees results that feel uncomfortably accurate, the know/like/trust factor collapses. Fast.
The Three Types of Diagnostic Funnels
Maeve breaks diagnostics into three categories:
1. Quiz Funnels (Fast & Scalable)
Short quizzes (7–9 questions) designed to qualify leads and deliver quick insights. Great for high-volume funnels and lower-ticket offers.
2. Score-Based Diagnostics (The Sweet Spot)
These assess multiple pillars of your framework—branding, messaging, lead gen, sales—and highlight gaps. Perfect for agencies, consultants, and SMBs.
Most listeners of this podcast? You’re here.
3. Thought Leadership Assessments (Advanced Mode)
Think Myers-Briggs or DISC. These are deep, licensable diagnostics that position you as category-of-one. Powerful—but not where most businesses should start.
Why Fewer Leads Can Mean More Revenue
Afraid you won’t get enough signups? Not to worry: You want some people to drop off.
Longer diagnostics act as a natural filter. If someone won’t spend eight minutes answering questions, they’re not ready for a $20K engagement.
That’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
Better Sales Calls (Or Fewer of Them)
Diagnostics eliminate the worst sales calls:
- The ones where the prospect can’t afford you
- The ones where you spend 45 minutes “discovering” obvious problems
Instead, you start the conversation knowing:
- Their biggest challenges
- Their readiness level
- Their investment capacity
Maeve calls these “how-does-this-work and when-can-we-start” conversations.
How You Can Use This Right Now
If you run a service business or agency, start simple:
- Identify 3–5 core services
- Turn each into a scored category
- Ask 10–15 targeted questions
The result? A roadmap your prospect understands—and a sales process that respects your time.
Your Next Step
Before you build anything, answer this: What do you actually sell?
Start there. Reverse-engineer your diagnostic from your offers. Alignment beats cleverness every time.
And if you’re still clinging to PDFs…well, now you know better.
Transcript from Maeve Ferguson’s Episode
Rich: My next guest is a business strategist and the creator of The Client Engine, a proven system that helps authors, consultants, and experts transform their intellectual property into diagnostic funnels that qualify leads, pre-sell their brilliance, and drive high-ticket sales on autopilot.
With a background in private equity and a track record of working with seven and eight figure thought leaders, she brings a rare blend of strategic depth and entrepreneurial momentum. Her signature IP engine methodology has helped bestselling authors, global speakers, and high-level coaches scale sustainably without chasing visibility or relying on guesswork.
She specializes in quiz funnels, diagnostic assessments, and the kind of lead gen infrastructure that positions experts as the obvious choice in their market. She’s been featured in Forbes, appeared on GenChem stage, and runs her own consultancy business from her horse farm in Northern Ireland. All while raising two young kids.
In every conversation, Maeve brings clarity, actionable insight, and a deep understanding of what it really takes to turn a body of work into sales engines that last. Today, we’re going to be talking about new ways to engage your audience with Maeve Ferguson. Maeve, welcome to the podcast.
Maeve: Thank you so much. I am really, really excited to be here, and I think we’re going to have a really fantastic conversation.
Rich: Excellent. So let’s start with the horses. Now, did you grow up with horses, or was horse farm something that happened to you later in life?
Maeve: Yeah, so great question. So yeah, I’ve always had horses in my blood. I actually did my undergrad degree in equine science and was an amateur steeple chase jockey for a number of years, until I got smashed up in a race, and that was the end of that.
But I ended up marrying a guy who is also in the horse racing industry. And we have our horse farm now, and it is at the time of recording, it is November. So all of the animals are starting to come back in, out of the fields, in for the long, long winter.
So yeah, just horses has always been part of my blood and part of our everyday life with our kids.
Rich: Love that. Love that. So Maeve, what’s wrong with lead magnets these days?
Maeve: Oh man, where do I start? So if you think about most people in the online world, we are using PDF lead magnets. And what happens for a lot of experts is they spend a lot of time building this beautiful PDF thing. And because it is just kind of generic information, they don’t actually get a lot of conversions out of it. And the trouble with that is what I see in recent years is kind of two main things.
First of all, the level of intent. So you know how easy it is to sign up for something nowadays, we barely have to double click our phone. All we have to do now is look at our phone and, presto, we can sign up for things. So the level of intent is very, very low. Then it is rerouted to spam, goes in there to die. People never open the PDF, nevermind read the PDF, nevermind do what we ask them to do whenever they signed up. And because the level of intent is so low, the value is generic. So whatever is in that PDF lead magnet is one size fits all.
So whether you’re struggling with that problem or not, you’re getting that prescription. And what happens is then it ends up, it’s like what I call spray and pray marketing. It lands with absolutely nobody. And then the whole idea is that whenever you’re going to move in and talk about these diagnostic assessments, they are completely personalized and the level of intent is so much higher.
Rich: I would also argue that the number of PDFs I’ve downloaded over the years that are still in my download photo folder on my computer that have never been opened is countless. It’s an infinite number. So there’s that aspect of it as well.
Maeve: Absolutely. It goes together. Digital dust.
Rich: Yeah, exactly. So instead you have quiz funnels. So tell us a little bit, what is a quiz funnel and how does it differ from these traditional lead magnets like the PDFs that are sitting in my downloads folder?
Maeve: Yeah, I love it. So basically there’s three types of what we call diagnostic assessments. So at the easy end of the scale, we have what’s well known as a quiz funnel.
So this is where we have kind of 7, 8, 9 questions, super easy, quick to go through. Qualifies the lead and gives them a breakthrough or gives them an answer as to something that they’re struggling with. And so that’s the first type, and I’ll get into how it works in just a moment.
At the very other end of the spectrum, we have thought leadership diagnostic assessments. And these are, if you’ve ever been through like Enneagram or Myers-Briggs or any of those types of things, these are a form of diagnostic assessment that are licensable, you can do certification programs, and you’re bringing in qualified leads and truly are able to position yourself as a category of one in your space because other people use your diagnostic in their work. So that’s like the other extreme end of that, super complex to build.
And then in the middle we have what I call score-based diagnostics. And this is where if you have pillars of your framework or in your methodology, if you cover kind of three, four, or five main areas, you can then ask people questions, give them a score in each area, and it almost acts like a gap analysis where people then get to see, “Well, in this area over here, 74%, I’m doing pretty good. But over here, gosh, I’m sitting at 27% and that’s where I need to work.”
And the beauty of all three types of these diagnostics is we’re able to put the right message and the right offer in front of the right person at the right time. And what I mean by that is when people go through these quiz funnels or Scorpius Diagnostics and they answer our questions, the copy that you would see is completely different to the copy that I would see, is completely different to the copy that somebody else would see.
And what happens here is the opposite of what happens with the normal lead magnet is that we have, first of all, the level of intent is so much higher. So if somebody is spending between four and eight minutes going through your diagnostic, that is somebody with a way greater vested interest than somebody who clicked a Facebook ad form and signed up inadvertently to your thing. So there’s a level of intent.
And then on the back end, it’s that level of personalization where somebody lands and it’s like they feel heard and seen for the very first time. It’s not generic, you know, everybody’s reading this message. It’s completely personalized to them, and that really collapses a know, like, and trust factor for you as the business owner, for you as the expert, where the lead starts to say, wow, this is literally, it’s like creepy. Are you inside my head? How do you know that I feel like that? How do you know that that’s exactly what I need, what I want?
And then when we position the offer to them, the offer solves the exact problem that they have just revealed to themselves, and it place positions us then as the obvious choice for them to take that next step.
Rich: So I’m sure some people are listening in saying, that sounds great. But it sounds great that we’ve got this engagement, that we’ve got this personalization, but it’s so much easier to download a PDF. How can we actually get people to take this assessment? It feels like it would be such a smaller percentage of people who engage. What would you say to those audience members?
Maeve: Yeah, so I would say it’s the opposite. So essentially, it all comes down to your hook. So when you ask your people a question that they simply have to know the answer to, and you do that at your very, very top of funnel, your Facebook ad copy, your organic copy should speak to your rich niche. So we’re really positioning this at the upper end of our market. We don’t want any kind of low-end people coming into this. We’re speaking to our rich niche, and that hook is so profound that they simply have to know the answer.
Which then brings them into the diagnostic. And the beauty and the cleverness of how these are built is as soon as somebody is even three or four questions in, they internally subconsciously feel invested in the process. And the further into it they go, then the more likely they are to complete.
And again, I actually use it as a filtration mechanism. So our diagnostic is like 40 questions long. It’s not meant to be a quick and easy gimmicky quiz. So true diagnostics can be very, very long. I actually use it as a filtration mechanism as well, because if somebody doesn’t have the head space or the attention span to go through my eight-minute diagnostic, they’re definitely not going to be a good fit to work with us.
And yes, we have bounce campaigns and all of those things set up, but I actually use it for when people get to the end, they’re categorized as to all of their different scores across all of the different areas. And then that’s layered in with how much they’re able to invest in themselves. Those people who get through the diagnostic are the perfect fit to work with us then, because we’re able to have that conversation, we already know what level they’re able to invest at, we solve their specific problem on the sales conversation because they have just identified it to us.
And the whole angle here is, what is the hook? What is the question that you can ask that whenever your audience are mindlessly scrolling on all of the socials, that they’re just like, I’m going to tick five minutes outta my day and find out.
Rich: I want to come back to that question, so I want to dig a little bit deeper.
So what you’re saying is that you see it as a positive that not everybody is going to want to do this. You set the hurdles at a certain point because your offer, or the offers for the clients you tend to work with, tends to be maybe a bigger ticket item or a more involved purchase, and that’s when these deeper diagnostics are really effective. Is that correct?
Maeve: Absolutely. So we always, whenever we’re building an assessment, so that’s just one use case example. So it’s built very specifically for our business. We always want to start with the offers and then we reverse engineer out of that. So if we have a $17 course, and that’s what we’re selling at the back end of our quiz funnel with a bump and an OTO, and then an upsell into an ascension model on the back end, the positioning top of funnel and who we’re bringing in to buy that $17 thing is a certain type of person.
Likewise, if it’s just off a conversation, but there’s somebody where we’re building one in the manufacturing space, and their contracts can be like hundreds of millions of dollars, so it’s very bespoke. And so for us, for example, we have high ticket services. So I don’t want to bring into our funnel the people who think this is going to be a $5K thing. So what we do then top of funnel in the copy is rich niche positioning. So we’re speaking to the absolute upper end of our market. We’re speaking about high-end. And I don’t mean high-end as a human, I mean high-end business owners. Their struggles are very, very different to somebody who is struggling to attract leads, or nobody seems to want what I have to offer. Those are early-stage problems. So we got to make sure there’s a match between our messaging, top of funnel, who we are trying to attract.
So if I were trying to attract an earlier audience, I would just shift that positioning, shift the hook, and shift the offer at the back end.
Rich: Okay, so you had talked a little bit about ads. And apparently ads, either search or social, are going to be one way that we drive people to these diagnostics, to these quizzes. Obviously, you work with a wide variety of clients, but what are some of the things in ads, what are some of the phrases or questions that you’re asking in the ads that are compelling the right people to click on that link and then go take the diagnostic?
Maeve: Yeah, so this is a beautiful question, and it comes down to two things. And we have relief-based marketing and desire-based marketing. And depending on which cycle we are in, we want to speak to the reliefs, i.e. talk to the pains and talk to the desires of our person.
And this again, is, so whenever we think about what stage of the journey. Is our perfect, what we call a five-star person. This five-star person, what is the stage of the journey that they are at, and what are the pain points that they are struggling with versus somebody who’s at a different stage of the journey?
So say for example, we work with a lot of keynote speakers, thought leaders, bestselling authors, like that sort of caliber in the expert industry. So their struggles is that they fail on all the time. So they are doing keynote after keynote after keynote, but then they’re trying to manually follow up with people who spoke to them from the crowd and scribbled or give them business cards, and they’re having to manually follow up with all of these people who heard them speak. Or they’re doing podcast guesting and they don’t have a good way to turn those guest interviews into clients, so that’s a super, super high-end problem.
So the fact that they’re a keynote speaker means that they are a certain stage of business. And then the whole idea is then that if you want your IP to live beyond your book, if you want your IP to go beyond the stage, and it doesn’t require you to be on all the time, the best way in the world to do that is with a diagnostic assessment that turns your keynote into qualified leads into your business, and then into clients. Or your book into qualified leads and then into clients.
But for example, in your Facebook ad copy, if I spoke about that problem and I was trying to help people who were trying to figure out their niche, that is never going to land because that feels to them like it’s 15 years away being a keynote speaker. Likewise, if I’m starting to have language, like relief-based marketing language, around, oh, are you really struggling to find leads in your business? And, do you feel like the digital course industry is dying? That is going to bring through a very, very new audience that are not at the stage of business where they’re going to be ready to work with somebody like me. So it’s all that ad copy. What PMs are we speaking to? What desires are we speaking to? And make sure that that’s a perfect match for the people that we want to serve.
Rich: Okay. So we’ve talked a lot about some of your core audiences, which are thought leaders, keynote speakers, coaches, and so on. A lot of people who listen to this podcast run or work for small to medium sized businesses, it could be a wide variety. How might a typical SMB, and obviously there’s no such thing as a typical SMB, how might they leverage the same idea for their own businesses?
You know, so I’m thinking about flyte, we’re a digital agency, we offer branding, web design, digital marketing. We work with a wide variety of different clients at different stages. What are some of the things that we might develop that would then engage our best ideal customers?
Maeve: Absolutely. So what I would do is forget about version three completely. So the thought leadership diagnostic, just put a line through that. For SMBs, for agency type things, service-based providers, which essentially is what we are. It is where we want to have a score-based diagnostic where we’re asking people 10 to 15 questions.
So you mentioned four or five areas that you help people with. So you would have your branding score, your visibility score, your messaging score, all of these different things. So if you think of the things that you help people with, each of those would become a score that your leads would get.
They go through your assessment, they realize, gosh, and roadmap side, I got to do this first, then I got to do that, then I got to do that. And this area over here, I’m actually pretty good. So then when they come on a sales conversation with you, not only do you have all of that information about them, you’re able to see their biggest struggle areas and you don’t have to have these awful discovery calls where it’s like, “So tell me all about yourself”, and then the next thing you get 45 minutes of life history. And then at the end they tell you they can’t afford to invest in themselves.
Instead of that, you’re able to laser the conversation into the exact greatest struggle area. Here’s the first thing that we could do to support you, and you’re able to have instead of sales calls, I call them, how does it work? When can we start conversations? Because we can go laser, laser, laser focused. And also inside of the diagnostic, we have identified how much they’re able to invest in themselves. So we’re not getting onto calls with people if we have a $20,000 thing and they have $4,000, $9,000, $7,000 to spend, there’s a complete mismatch there.
And I see so many small to medium business owners, agency owners literally just want to rip their hair out because there’s such a mismatch and they don’t have a mechanism to identify those things upfront. So the beauty is for our business and for our clients’ businesses, is that we have this thing called ‘platinum leads’, ‘diamond leads’, ‘gold leads’, ‘silver leads’, and ‘unqualified leads’.
So if somebody says, “I’m not able to invest in myself”, they don’t even get an invitation to speak to my sales team, they get rerouted and it’s like, cool, no worries. I wish you every success. Much more politely, but here’s my YouTube channel, good luck.
Rich: Right.
Maeve: Come back later when you’re ready. Very politely.
Then for our platinum leads, for example, who’ve indicated that they’re able to invest, say for example, over six figures, we know there are certain service offerings inside of our company that are going to be best suited to them. They get a different invitation and get rerouted to a different application, to a different sales conversation.
Our sales team then go on that conversation knowing the caliber of this person as well as their struggles. Because there’s struggles at every level. And then the person who’s able to invest $10,000 sees different copy and a different invitation and has a different sales conversation. But the beauty is all of this is automated so that when somebody books in and you’re to pull up their profile, we’re able to see exactly what they’re struggling with, exactly what to focus the conversation in on, and also how much they’re able to invest in themselves.
Rich: All right. Let’s talk about a little bit of the mechanics if we can. You know, I assume we come up with these quizzes and let’s just say that we know the kind of questions and all this sort of stuff. Are you using artificial intelligence to score these, or is it just an algorithm on the back end that then spits out things that you’ve already written, but when you get a certain score… I mean, I don’t want to demean what you’re doing, but you get a certain score, and it says, okay, well here’s what’s going on. And it feels very personalized to me. What does that look like on the backend? How are you building out those kind of tools?
Maeve: Yeah, so essentially I’ll speak to the AI piece as well, but the initial diagnostic assessment is infrastructure. So it is built with all of these permutations and all of these variables, and outputs, and copy required for all of these different things that we’ve just spoken about, and that piece is fixed.
And then at the back end, we then build these AI agents that use all of the data that’s coming into our companies every single day to optimize the business over time. And what I mean by that is over time, as we start to run water through the pipes in this infrastructure, essentially it’s like funnel software. We’re able to run water through the pipes, find out about our leads, see who’s buying our $50k thing, or $10k thing, or $7k thing or whatever it may be. And then over time we are able to spot, the AI agents are spotting patterns of behavior. What Facebook ad copy did they come in through and what did they buy?
And essentially, then we have these agents running every single day that feedback to the marketing teams to say, hey, you need to go and focus more on this angle in your Facebook ads if you want to bring in more of the $50k people, because this copy is bringing in $2k people. This copy is bringing in six figure people, and so on. And that just runs on autopilot every single week, depending on your lead volume. We just run it every single week.
And so your marketing team is getting cutting edge information on what to optimize for. We also have AI agents there that review the sales conversations against sales frameworks. We’re able to say, “Here’s what you did well, here’s what you didn’t do so well. Here’s what to do better next time.” All of that process is automated, feeds back to the person who did the sales conversation, feeds back to the CEO, so that there’s continual learning and optimization in the team.
So from the infrastructure point of view, just to answer your question, the assessment itself is a static funnel, and then we use AI agents to optimize it on the backend.
Rich: All right, sounds very cool and borderline futuristic. So when it comes to the offer, have you already pre-planned what those offers are going to be? It sounds like you have different tiers. What are the cases when we should just give somebody a link and say, this is the course you need, or this is the bathroom tile that you need, or whatever it may be? And what are the times when you should say, “You should speak to one of our sales associates”, or whatever it might be?
Maeve: So I think there’s a couple of things here. There is price point. So if you’re selling a $100,000 thing, I know it’s possible to sell it through a Google Doc, but probably, most people are going to require a conversation.
Now, if we’re selling a $7 widget, it’s going to be a click and buy. So what we always want to do is look at that suite of offers initially. That’s where all of this begins, is we look at the offers and then we reverse engineer everything out off the back of that. So there’s going to be a blend of, how are people buying these offers right now? Okay, so are they click and buy? Are they required in a sales conversation? Like we have, for example, we’ve got an application in front of our sales calls, all of those types of things. How are we currently selling it and is it working okay?
So I’m a big believer in there’s no push a button and be a millionaire by Friday. Even though a lot of people peddle that, it just doesn’t work like that. But we got to look at what those offers are and how are they currently converting. And then this thing is not like a Hail Mary. So if you’ve never sold a single thing in your life and you’ve built a diagnostic in the front of it, that isn’t your problem. So I think that’s really, really important. So start with those offers and then reverse out of those offers.
The next step then is to choose the sales mechanism for each of the offers. Then we reverse engineer out of that and come up with the pillars or the scores, the branding score, the messaging score, your sales score, your lead gen score, whatever it may be, so that there’s congruence between the offers that are going to be made on the back, end and the questions that we’re asking.
Because if they’re going through a quiz and it’s all about gardening, and they get to the end and we make an offer that’s about synchronized swimming, nothing’s ever going to convert in a million years. But you would be amazed at how many people have a lack of congruence and then they’re wondering why it’s not making sense.
Rich: So if somebody wanted to get started today building out their own quiz funnels or thought leadership diagnostic assessments mm-hmm. What would be your recommendation? How would they get started?
Maeve: Yeah, so look at your offers, first of all. And this goes for all three types of the quiz funnel, your score-based diagnostic, or the thought leadership assessment. So first of all, look at your offers. Then we come out of there and decide, look at our frameworks. So a lot of people have their frameworks completely formalized, and they’re pretty diagrams and all of the beautiful things. Some people’s frameworks are still inside and they’re brilliant. And a lot of people, you know, I talk a lot about intellectual property and people are like, well, I don’t really have intellectual property. And we do. We just maybe haven’t called it that. So this is your process.
How do you. serve your people? What things do you do? And the easiest way to do that without getting into a whole framework conversation, is when somebody comes to work with me, well, what’s the first thing I do with them? What’s the next thing I do with them? What’s the next thing I do with them? And essentially, your process or your methodology is essentially your framework.
And then from there, you want to decide what is the most appropriate quiz funnel or diagnostic for your business. So, say for example, I have a client that’s in the golf space. They’re spending almost a million dollars a month on ads. A quiz funnel that is like seven questions long, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. They’ve leaked fire through that thing at volume every single day. It’s not well suited for them to have a thought leadership assessment equivalent to Enneagram. There’s a complete mismatch there.
So you want to make that decision as to, is it the quick and fast quiz funnel that is going to bring in qualified leads but is not necessarily going to be a positioning play from a caliber perspective, a category of one perspective. Or do you want, you’re writing your bestselling book, you’re going for the New York Times bestseller. You have this true, deep, intellectual property where you want to be on stage. You want your body of work to become codified and become a household name like Myers-Briggs or INTJ. So it’s like that’s completely different use case.
And then the third use case, which is actually where most people fall. Is where, gosh, I help people with these four or five things, let’s score them on each of these areas. Then they realize where they are, what they want to get to, and hey, presto, just like magic, your services or your offers or your programs or your courses or whatever it may be, are the exact things that solve the gap that they have just identified.
Rich: Okay. And I guess one last question I have is, so how are you capturing the data? In other words. There are plenty of quizzes online that will spit out an answer for me, and I see it right there, and they don’t necessarily capture any of my information. And then I’m assuming, I mean, I know there’s other systems that I am required to give an email address to, a phone number. I may not even get my answers until they appear in my inbox so that the provider can ensure that I put in my real email address. What are your recommendations so that we can make that connection? Or do you just let people do the diagnostics on their own, and the ones who realize they’ve got a problem are automatically going to come back to you?
Maeve: Yeah, no. So I strongly recommend having a lead form on there, and we actually do the positioning of the lead form, top of funnel. And the reason for that is I always equate a lead that is a non-complete, we still have the lead on our email. Maybe their kid cried or the postman came to the door and they got distracted. Okay, so we still have the lead.
I always equate it to the same as a PDF lead who didn’t read your thing anyway? So we still have the lead inside the business. So the name, email address, and phone number is 101 level of data, but actually happens as they go through the diagnostic, every single answer that they complete, even if they’re a non-complete, every single answer is a piece of data. That it’s saved, tracked, we’re able to push all this through to custom fields and we’re able to build a really, really strong picture of what is going on in our market.
And like I’m obsessed with data, because data equals power. Data gives us insight into our market that there’s no other way you would ever get that level of data without having 4,000 conversations with people. And even then you wouldn’t have the same amount of data. And it allows you to do kind of authority positioning plays like we do.
For example, every single month we publish our data and insights report into what’s going on in the expert market. And we’re able to do that due to the volume of data we have inside of our business. It’s proprietary, it doesn’t belong to Facebook or whatever. This is the data inside of our company. And again, back to the AI agent conversation, we are analyzing that all the time to spot gaps in our offers, gaps in our positioning, gaps in what is the main thing that people are screaming out for that maybe we’re not providing right now, but we easily could provide it.
So instead of trying to square peg/round hole people all the time, these AI agents are analyzing that data. They’re getting to see, here’s what people actually want. And again, this is where our AI agent service offerings have come from, is people going through our diagnostics. And we’ve been able to identify this trend and this pattern over time, and that division of our business is absolutely on fire, in a good way.
Rich: Excellent. So for people who might want help in creating their own quiz or diagnostic or in the deeper solutions that you offer, where can they connect with you online?
Maeve: Yeah, so the best place is on LinkedIn, that’s my main platform. I’m also trying to grow my brand-new little Substack, so you can find, we’ll cross post to that. So just go to LinkedIn and search for Maeve Ferguson, that is the best way.
And then if you’re curious about working with us, you can go to maeveferguson.com/application.
Rich: Excellent. We’ll have those links in the show notes. Maeve, an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for your time today.
Maeve: This has been a blast. Lovely. Thank you so much for having me, Rich.
Show Notes:
Maeve Ferguson is the strategist behind The Client Engine, where she helps expert businesses replace weak PDFs with diagnostic funnels that qualify, segment, and convert their best-fit clients. She’s known for building quiz-driven lead gen systems that are both deeply strategic and highly practical. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.