Where Your Sales Funnel Is Broken (How to Tell)
Part 6 of the Playing House series. New here? Start with Part 1 →
"Your flywheel is broken somewhere."
I can say that without ever having seen your business, because almost everyone's is. The whole reason your sales aren't spinning the way you want is that there's a gap in the loop. Somewhere along those five stages, the wheel reaches a hole and falls apart before it can complete a turn.
Today we find the hole.
I'm going to walk you through all five stages and give you the questions that reveal where yours is breaking. Be honest as you go. Brutally honest. The point is not to feel good about yourself. The point is to find the gap, because the gap is the one thing holding back everything else. Fix the gap and the whole wheel can finally spin. Keep guessing, and you stay stuck no matter how hard you work.
A quick reminder of the five. Attract brings in strangers. Engage catches them. Nurture builds trust. Retain turns one sale into many. Advocate sends happy buyers back to bring you more strangers. The wheel only spins if all five connect.
Let's check each one. Get out of your own way and answer truthfully.
Checking Attract
Attract is your supply of brand-new strangers.
Ask yourself this. Where do brand-new people come from? Name the actual sources out loud. Not "social media," that's too vague to be useful. I mean specifically, with names. Search? A podcast? Referrals from buyers? Ads? A regular guest spot on someone else's stage?
Now the question that tells the truth. If you posted nothing new for two full weeks, would new strangers still find you?
If the answer is no, your Attract is broken. You don't have traffic sources. You have an algorithm you're hoping cooperates today. The entire front of your wheel depends on you showing up daily and getting lucky, which means you can never stop, never rest, never look away, or the strangers stop arriving.
This is the most common gap I see, and it's a heavy one to carry, because it's the one that makes you feel like a hamster on a wheel. People have a decent product and even a small audience, but no reliable way to bring in new humans. So they're stuck recycling the same crowd until that crowd has heard it all. The wheel can't spin because the fuel keeps running out.
Signs Attract is your gap. Your audience grows slowly or barely at all. Your sales only come when you launch hard and burn yourself out doing it. You feel like you're shouting into the same small room, to the same faces, over and over.
Checking Engage
Engage is whether you actually catch the strangers that Attract brings in.
Ask yourself this. When a brand-new person discovers me, what is the very next step? Is there one? Do they have a clear reason to give me their email or take one step closer? Or do they look once and slide back into the scroll, gone?
The question that matters here. Do you have a working way to turn a visitor into a lead? A free resource, a tool, a quiz, something useful enough that a stranger will trade their email for it?
If you're getting found but your email list isn't growing, Engage is your gap. You're doing the hard work of bringing strangers to the door, and there's no host inside to greet them. They wander in, they wander out, and you never even learn their name. All that Attract effort, leaking straight out the front door.
This one breaks the heart of a lot of hardworking people, because they can see the traffic in their analytics and they can't understand why nothing comes of it. The traffic is real. The catching is missing.
Signs Engage is your gap. You get traffic but your list barely moves. You have followers but no real way to reach them off a platform you don't control. People discover you and then simply vanish.
Checking Nurture
Nurture is whether you build trust with the people who stuck around.
Ask yourself this. The people on my list, do they hear from me regularly? Not just when I'm selling something. Do I show up in their inbox being useful, sounding like me, building the relationship, week after week?
The question that tells the truth. If you emailed your whole list right now, today, would they remember who you are? Or have they not heard from you in so long that you'd land in their inbox as a stranger they forgot they ever met?
If you have a list but it's gone cold, Nurture is your gap. The trust never got built, or it got built once and then starved. So when you finally do make an offer, it lands with a thud, because you're pitching people who don't really know you anymore.
This one is sneaky, because you can have a big list and still have a completely broken Nurture stage. Size means nothing here. Relationship is everything. A small warm list that loves you beats a giant cold list that forgot you, every single time, without exception.
Signs Nurture is your gap. Low open rates that make you wince. Silence when you launch. A list you're almost afraid to email because you've ignored it so long that reaching out now feels awkward.
Checking Retain
Retain is whether your buyers ever buy from you again.
Ask yourself this. When someone buys from me, what happens next? Is there a next thing for them? A reason to come back, a higher tier, a membership, a clear path forward? Or is it one sale and then a polite goodbye forever?
The question that matters. What percentage of your revenue comes from people who already bought from you before?
If the honest answer is close to zero, Retain is your gap. Every sale you make is a brand-new stranger you had to work yourself ragged to earn. You're running your entire business on the most expensive, most exhausting kind of customer, the first-timer, while ignoring the cheapest and warmest one you have, the person who already said yes once.
This is the gap that keeps people trapped on the roller coaster they're so tired of. With no Retain, you have to go find all-new buyers every single month just to stay flat. Just to not go backward. That's exhausting in a way that never ends and never compounds. And recurring revenue, the steady income you've been aching for, the kind that lets you breathe on the first of the month, lives right here in Retain, untouched.
Signs Retain is your gap. Every month feels like starting over from zero. You have no membership and no recurring offer. You never sell to past buyers, mostly because there's nothing built for them to buy next.
Checking Advocate
Advocate is whether your happy buyers bring you new ones.
Ask yourself this. When someone genuinely loves what I do, is there an easy, natural way for them to send me more people? Do I even ask? Do I make it simple? Or do I just hope word of mouth happens on its own?
The question that tells the truth. Can you point to actual new strangers who entered your world this month because an existing buyer sent them?
If you can't name any, Advocate is your gap. And this is the gap that keeps your wheel from ever spinning on its own steam, because Advocate is the stage that feeds the front of the wheel. Without it, every new stranger has to come from your effort and your effort alone. The wheel never starts helping turn itself. You push, and push, and push, and the day you stop pushing, everything stops.
Most people have nothing built here at all. Not because their buyers wouldn't happily refer them, but because they never built a way to make it happen. They left the loop hanging open, so the buyers just finish and drift away instead of circling back to bring a friend.
Signs Advocate is your gap. Every new person comes from your own posting and pitching. You get the occasional kind message but no real referral flow. The wheel only ever turns as hard as you personally push it, every single day, with no help.
What you probably just found
If you went through that honestly, and I hope you did, you likely found one of two things.
Either you found one glaring gap, a stage that's completely empty, and the moment you read it you felt that jolt of recognition. "Oh. Oh, that's it. That's the hole." Sit with that jolt. That jolt is the most valuable thing you've felt about your business in months, because it's pointing straight at the thing to fix.
Or you found something a little harder to swallow. You found that you're thin in three or four stages and only really strong in one. That's common too, especially if you've been playing house. You built the room that felt good to build and left the rest dark. That's not a disaster. It just tells you that you've been working on a single point instead of building a loop, which is exactly the thing we now get to fix.
Either way, you now understand more about why your sales aren't spinning than most creators ever figure out in years of trying. You're not staring at "bad product" anymore. You're looking at a specific, named, broken stage. And a broken stage, unlike a vague feeling of failure, has a fix.
But I want you to do better than my five quick questions today. I want you to actually see your score, stage by stage, in plain numbers you can't argue with.
Get your real score
I built a scorecard for exactly this moment. It walks you through your entire flywheel and shows you where you're strong and where you're breaking, with a real number for each of the five stages. It takes about ten minutes, and you'll come out the other side knowing precisely where your wheel has the hole, no guessing, no hoping, no wondering.
This is the difference between a vague feeling that something's off and a clear map of exactly what to fix first. Most people stay stuck for years for one reason. They're guessing. They work hard on the wrong stage because they never knew which stage was actually broken. The scorecard takes the guessing away and hands you the map.
Go take it now, before you read the next chapter. I mean it. It'll make the next chapter hit ten times harder, because you'll be reading it holding your own numbers in your hand.
It's free. It takes about ten minutes. And it shows you the exact stage that's holding your business back right now.
Once you know where your wheel is broken, the next question rises up on its own. What does it look like when it's not broken? When all five stages connect and the thing actually spins? When the work you've been doing finally starts to pay you back?
That's daily sales. Steady months. The income you started this whole thing to get. And in the next chapter, I'm going to take you all the way inside it, up close, so you stop believing daily sales are luck or magic reserved for other people, and you start seeing them for exactly what they are.
A system. A spinning wheel. Something you, specifically, can build.
Find out exactly where your flywheel is broken
Score all five stages of your Creator Growth Flywheel in about ten minutes and see the precise gap holding your sales back.
Take the Free Scorecard →Frequently Asked Questions
Walk your business through the five flywheel stages and look for the gap. Most businesses are strong in one or two stages and missing the rest. The broken stage, not a bad product, is usually what stops the sales. A scorecard can show you the exact one in about ten minutes.
Attract brings in strangers. Engage catches them and gets their email. Nurture builds trust over time. Retain turns one sale into repeat sales. Advocate gets happy buyers to send you more people. The wheel only spins when all five connect.
That is a broken Engage stage. You are bringing people to the door, but nothing is catching them. You need a free, useful resource worth trading an email for. Without it, people look at you once and leave, and you never get the chance to follow up.
That is usually a broken Retain stage. If every sale is a brand-new stranger, you have to find all-new buyers each month just to stay flat. Selling again to people who already bought is easier and cheaper, and it is where recurring revenue comes from.
Find the stage that is most empty, and fix that one before anything else. Working on a stage that is already fine will not move your sales. The Creator Business Scorecard scores all five stages so you know exactly where to start instead of guessing.
