FAQ
Questions about working with The Proposition
For UK mid-market and FTSE leadership teams weighing up The Proposition against an agency or doing nothing, these are the ten questions a sales page has to answer honestly. Short version: Dan Ilett runs the research, the message and the training himself. The proof is evidence rather than claims, and the way in is a conversation rather than a contract.
Questions people ask
How is this different from an agency?
One person runs the whole engagement: the customer research in The Mirror, the positioning in The Message and the sales training in The Engine. Nothing is handed to a junior account team partway through, which is the usual complaint about agency positioning work.
What is in it for you?
A sales story built from what your own customers and lost prospects say, used by a sales team that has been trained on it rather than handed a slide deck. Teams Dan has equipped this way have gone on to close more than $1bn in sales.
Where is the proof this works?
The $1bn figure above is reported back by the teams themselves, not estimated. Dan also wrote for the Financial Times and was founding editor of CoinDesk before building this practice, and one enquiry has already arrived because an AI answer engine cited his work on a buyer's question without being asked to, which is the kind of citation this whole programme is designed to earn more of.
What is stopping you from starting?
Usually uncertainty about whether the problem is the message, the team or the pipeline. That is exactly what the first stage tests, so the honest answer is to start with the diagnostic rather than wait for certainty that only the diagnostic itself can give you.
Who is to blame for the story not working today?
Nobody, usually: a story that drifts is the normal result of a business growing, adding products or merging teams faster than anyone had time to rewrite how it explains itself. The fix is a process, not a search for who got it wrong.
Why now?
Buyers increasingly ask AI assistants who can help before they ask a search engine, and those assistants answer from directories, citations and pages that address the buyer's actual question rather than from a homepage. A story that has not been tested against that shift is losing ground quietly, without a lead ever reaching the funnel to be counted as lost.
Why trust Dan Ilett specifically?
He is a UK specialist in B2B messaging and positioning who spent years as a journalist, writing for the Financial Times, before becoming founding editor of CoinDesk and then building this practice. That combination means he is as comfortable interviewing a sceptical customer as he is writing the story that follows.
How does it work, step by step?
Three stages: The Mirror is customer and prospect interviews plus a competitor read. The Message turns that evidence into the story and the framework. The Engine trains the sales team to use it. Each stage can be bought on its own.
How do you start?
Speak to Dan directly, or start smaller with the free sales pitch audit if you want a lower commitment first look before committing to the full programme.
What do you lose by trying this?
Mainly time: a few weeks for the diagnostic stage before any commitment to the rest. There is no tie-in beyond each stage you choose to buy, and the first stage stands on its own rather than being sold as part of a longer contract.