Somebody quoted youa statistic.Where is it from?
This category runs on numbers that nobody has traced. Each of these takes one of them back to the primary source and prints what is actually there: the publisher, the year, the sample, and what that publisher sells. Sometimes the number holds up. Sometimes it turns out to be measuring something else entirely.
Writing the first one is how we found out our own homepage was leaving out a disclosure. That correction is in it.
The quote went quiet. What to send, when, and when to stop
Every page ranking for this question sells software, and most of the numbers on them come from cold email to strangers. Somebody who asked you for a price is not a stranger. Here is what the research supports, what it does not, and the messages we would actually send.
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The email after the visit: what to send when the sales call is over
Every page ranking for this is written by a software company for a salesperson after a demo. Most service businesses make the sale in somebody's kitchen, and the email afterwards decides more of it than the visit did. Here is how to write it, with the two rules everybody quotes traced to where they came from.
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Nobody has measured dental case acceptance
Every case acceptance benchmark in circulation (34%, 42%, 45%, 46%, 47%, 61%, 75-80%) was published by somebody selling the fix. The one independently funded measurement we could find reports 78%, and the gap is a denominator, not your patients.
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What a franchise broker actually earns, from the one filing that has to say
The franchise industry quotes $18,000 to $25,000 per closed deal. That range was never measured by anybody. Two sources with opposite incentives put the real figure around $35,000, and only one of them was legally obliged to tell you.
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The only audited lead conversion rate in home services is legally sealed
A federal regulator subpoenaed a lead seller's own conversion data, found the published rates could not be substantiated, and redacted the real numbers as confidential. Meanwhile the market leader's audited filings put the average lead at $25 to $33, not $50 to $150.
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The follow-up statistic its own author quietly deleted
Every sales blog on the internet repeats it: 80% of sales need five follow-ups, and 44% of salespeople give up after one. We traced both. The page everyone cites is a 404, the author revised the number down and deleted the claim, and the 44% comes from a paperback published in 1987.
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The speed-to-lead study everyone quotes, and the line in it nobody quotes
Every firm in this category cites the same 2011 Harvard Business Review paper. We cite it too. Here is its actual sample, what it actually measured, and the author disclosure that almost nobody prints, including us until this week.
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A missed call does not cost you $1,200
The figure every automation vendor quotes at contractors is the value of the job, not the value of the call. The difference is your booking rate, and correcting it out loud is worth more than the bigger number.
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An entire industry is quoting a 2018 report as if it were current
Executive search has two numbers it repeats about itself. Both come from a benchmark report that was republished with different figures. We had them wrong on this site too, until we checked the edition.
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Every article names its source and what that source sells. If one of them is wrong, it is checkable, which is the entire point. Why we publish this way.