Internal operating document

The Ninety
Second Funnel

How a practitioner goes from a comment on LinkedIn to a signed Pal On Board build, with the demo page doing the work in the middle. Every stage, the words to use, and the point at which you stop talking.

Section one

The shape of it

Content, then a reply, then a live demo, then discovery, then a proposal, then a build. Six moves. The demo is the hinge, and everything on either side of it exists to protect that ninety seconds.

Everything before the demo exists to earn it. Everything after it is arithmetic. The most common way this funnel fails is not a weak pitch, it is sending a proposal before anyone has heard the coach talk. A proposal before a demo reads as a vendor. A demo before a proposal reads as a colleague showing you something.

StageWhat moves someone forwardTime
1 AttentionThey recognise their own week in what you wroteOngoing
2 The replyOne question, then the offer of a demoSame day
3 The demoThey ask the coach a question themselves90 sec
4 DiscoveryFive questions, on the same call if it is going well15 min
5 ProposalIt lands while the ninety seconds is still freshUnder 24h
6 CloseBuild fee clears, the build is scoped, a date exists3 to 10 days
7 AfterThey have a live client on it, and they say soDay 30+

It is not a coaching program. It is the follow through layer of a practice.

That is the only sentence in this document that belongs in a first conversation. Everything else here is scaffolding for you, not language for them.

Section two

What it takes to sign one

These are planning assumptions, not measured rates. Nothing here has been observed yet, because as of now no clinic has been pitched. Replace each number with your own the moment you have it, and treat the gap between these and reality as the actual report.

Substantive comments on other practitioners' posts, per week40
Your own posts, per week2
Conversations that open, per week6 to 8
Demos booked3
Demos actually held2
Proposals sent1
Weeks of this before the first signature5 to 7

The lever with the highest return is the comment count, not the post count. At a small following, a substantive comment on another practitioner's post reaches their whole audience instead of yours. Ten good comments will outrun ten posts until the following catches up.

What a signature is worth

TierBuild, one timeMonthly floorPer active client above the floor
Solo practitioner$2,950$249$69
Practice$7,500$849$55
Clinic$15,000$2,250$45

Voice minutes are a real cost and not a rounding error. Overage runs at $0.45 per minute above 75 included minutes per active client per month. That 75 minute figure comes from one client in your own practice, not from a book of clients, so check it again after the first clinic goes live.

Solo is where most of your LinkedIn audience sits and it is the volume play. Practice is where the revenue lives. Clinic needs the covered entity questions answered before a number is spoken out loud.

Section three

Pre flight, before a single message goes out

Five things have to be true. Two of them are not true today.

1. The demo page has to work on a phone

Measured at 390 by 844 this week: the proposal table is 520px wide inside a 342px container, and the Price column sits at 544px, which is 154px past the right edge of the screen. A practitioner who opens your link on a phone sees the twelve items and what each one does, and no prices at all, including the package total.

Most prospects will open your link on a phone. This blocks the funnel until it is fixed.

2. The indexing question has to be settled

The demo page is deliberately index, follow because it is a sales asset. It also carries protocol language written for a client rather than for a search engine. Once you start sending that link to strangers, it is sales material and the no health claims rule applies to it. Decide before outreach starts, not after.

3. The coach has to be alive

Check the agent before every single demo call. A dead voice button in front of a prospect is worse than no voice button, because it turns your strongest ninety seconds into an apology.

4. The proposal template has to exist

You are promising delivery inside 24 hours of the demo. That only holds if the skeleton is already written and you are filling in their words, not composing from scratch on a Friday night.

5. No real client URL leaves your hands

Not in a post, not in a DM, not in a proposal, not in a deck, not as an example, not even to prove a point. Real pages carry a full name, age, weight, conditions and the amount they paid. Until every one of them carries noindex, treat those URLs as sensitive.

STAGE 1

Attention

Your audience is practitioners. They are colleagues, not buyers, and they will not respond to a product announcement. They will respond to a problem they had this week.

ChannelLinkedIn comments, then posts
GoalA reply, not a click
Exit triggerSomeone says they have this problem
NeverName the product. Post a link.

The rules for anything you publish here

  • Do not name Pal On Board. The brand means nothing to a stranger, and naming it turns the post into an ad. It belongs in the DM once someone raises their hand.
  • Do not link the demo. Links suppress reach, and the demo is worth more when it is personal.
  • No claims about what any protocol does for anybody. This is a post about practice operations.
  • End by asking how they handle it, not by telling them how to. Replies earn reach, and a reply is a conversation.
Post A, the repetitive questions
Four questions I answered after dinner this week. When do I take this. Can I take it with food. I missed yesterday, do I double up. Is this normal. None of them are hard. All of them were urgent to the person asking. Here is the part that took me years to notice. The client who does not get an answer at ten at night does not call the next morning to say they are stopping. They just stop. How do you handle the after hours questions in your practice?
Post B, silent dropout
Most of the clients I lost, I never got to ask why. They did not book an exit interview. They did not send a message explaining. They went quiet somewhere around week two, and I found out when the reorder never came. For a long time I assumed the protocol was wrong. It was not the protocol. It was the eighteen days between the consult and the follow up, where nobody was holding the thread. Where do your people usually go quiet?
Post C, design over discipline
A protocol that cannot survive being interrupted is not a protocol. It is a test. Somebody misses a day. They go to a wedding. They run out on a Sunday and the shop is shut. If the whole thing collapses at that point, we did not design it well. We handed them a document and hoped. I would rather build something that assumes the interruption than something that punishes it. How much of your protocol survives a bad week?

Comment openers, which matter more than the posts

Forty a week. Each one adds something the original poster did not say. None of them mention what you sell.

Five openers to adapt, never to paste as is
1. The part nobody warns you about is that the client who quits does not tell you. You find out from the reorder that never comes. 2. I used to think this was a compliance problem. It is a scheduling problem. Nothing happens in the eighteen days between appointments. 3. Agreed on all of this, with one thing I would add. The questions that end protocols are the small ones, not the serious ones. 4. This matches what I see. The people who reach day thirty are not the disciplined ones, they are the ones who got an answer the night they needed it. 5. What did you change after that? I am asking because I went the other way and I am not sure I was right.
STAGE 2

The reply and the DM

Somebody comments that they have this exact problem, or they message you. Do not pitch. There are two moves and they happen in order.

GoalA booked demo
Move oneAsk one question
Move twoOffer the demo, not the deck
NeverAttach a PDF at this stage
Move one, the only question that matters
Good to connect. One question while I have you. How many active clients are you carrying right now, and where do you usually lose them?

That answer is the entire discovery call, given away for free, and the client number decides the tier. Read it twice before you reply. Whatever words they use for the problem are the words that open your proposal later, so save them somewhere.

Move two, the demo offer
That is the same gap I had. I built something for this in my own practice. It is easier to show you than to describe. Ninety seconds, and you can ask it anything you would ask about a protocol. Any window this week, or shall I send you two times?
If they ask what it is before agreeing to look
A follow through layer. The client gets one page with their own protocol on it, and a voice coach that knows that protocol and answers at eleven at night when I am asleep. Anything it has not been taught comes straight to me, and the client is told that is what happened. Ninety seconds is genuinely quicker than me typing the rest of this.
STAGE 3

The demo, which is the hinge

Ninety seconds. It is the only part of this that nobody else can show, and it converts far better than any deck. Get to it early, and do not send a proposal before it.

LengthNinety seconds, then stop
PageThe fictional demo client only
They doAsk the coach the question themselves
Ends whenThey ask how much it costs

The five beats

  1. Open the demo page. The fictional client. Never a real one, for any reason, however convenient.
  2. Let them see the shape. One URL, a person's name on it, their products, their schedule, their tracker. Do not narrate it. Let them scroll.
  3. Start the coach and hand them the question. They ask it, not you. The moment that lands is a practitioner hearing a machine answer a question they have answered a thousand times.
  4. Say the escalation line unprompted. It is the objection they are already forming, and saying it before they do is worth more than answering it after.
  5. Stop. Do not tour the rest of the features. The demo is over the moment they say something like how much is this.
The escalation line, word for word
Anything it has not been taught comes straight to me, and the client is told that is what happened.
If the coach fumbles a question. Do not cover for it.
That one is not in its protocol, so it would hand that to you.

The gap in the demo coach's knowledge is deliberate and it is a feature. When a prospect asks something outside the protocol and the coach hands it over instead of guessing, that answers the liability objection better than any sentence in a pitch. If someone reports the coach failing on an off protocol question, the demo worked.

If they ask to see a real client's page
I will not show you another client's page, for the same reason I will not show yours to the next practitioner I speak to.

That refusal is the strongest thing in the whole pitch. It is not a limitation you are apologising for, it is the reason they can trust you with their own book.

STAGE 4

Discovery, five questions

Enough to price it, and enough to know whether to walk away. If the demo went well, this happens on the same call.

AskWhat it is really for
How many active clients at once, and how long is a typical protocolTier and floor
What happens today between the consult and the follow upTheir own words for your proposal opening
Who answers client questions now, and whenWhether the pain is theirs or a staff member's
What does a typical client spend, and how often do they reorderLets them do the arithmetic out loud
Is there a physician attached, or any insurance billingWhether this is a straightforward build or a different price

Question five is the one people skip, and it is the one that decides everything. If the answer is yes to either, do not quote a number on that call.

Letting them do the arithmetic, rather than you
What is a typical client worth to you across a full protocol, and roughly how many go quiet before the end? Multiply those two out loud for me.

Walk away signals

  • A practice with no repeat purchase model. There is nothing for retention to improve, and you will be blamed for that.
  • A practitioner who wants the coach to give guidance they have not written themselves. That is not a discount conversation, it is a decline.
  • A covered entity who wants a date before the business associate agreement, transcript storage and retention questions have answers.
STAGE 5

The proposal

Within a day of the demo, while the ninety seconds is still fresh. Seven parts, in this order, every time, regardless of tier.

#SectionWhy it is there
1What they are buying, in their own words from discoveryOpens with their problem, not your feature list
2The seven components, in orderFramed as what the client experiences, not what the system does
3The coach's scope, in writingThis is the paragraph that gets it signed
4What the practitioner still ownsProtocol, judgement, relationship. Only the repetition is leaving.
5Price, build and recurring shown separatelyNeither number has to carry the whole reaction
6What it does not doHonest exclusions buy more trust than another feature
7Timeline, only if the build has actually been scopedNever promise a date you have not worked out
The email that carries it
Subject: The thing I showed you, in writing [Name], Good to talk yesterday. You said the gap is [their exact words], and that you are carrying about [number] people at a time. Attached is what that looks like built for you. Three things worth reading before the price, because they are the parts most people skip. Section 3 is exactly what the coach will and will not answer, and what it hands back to you. Section 4 is what stays yours, which is everything except the repetition. Section 6 is what it does not do. If any of that is wrong, tell me and I will redo it rather than argue it. DocTA
Section 3, the scope paragraph. Adapt, do not soften.
The coach answers questions about the protocol you wrote for that specific client. Nothing else. It does not diagnose. It does not adjust a dose. It does not interpret a symptom. It is not a general health assistant and it has no knowledge outside the protocol you gave it. Anything it was not taught goes to you, and the client is told that is what happened, so nobody is left thinking they got an answer when they did not.
Section 6, what it does not do. Keep this uncomfortable.
It does not write your protocols. It does not decide who is a good fit for your practice. It does not replace your follow up appointments. It does not integrate with your practice management platform unless we have checked that platform together first. It does not make anybody comply. It removes the reasons people quietly stop.

Things worth refusing

  • A pilot with no fee. Free pilots do not get implemented, because nobody protects what cost nothing. A reduced build fee is fine. Zero is not.
  • Per seat forever with no floor. A quiet month still costs support, hosting and voice minutes, and an unfloored deal loses money exactly when the client is least happy.
  • Withholding the escalation or the tracker to force an upgrade. Every feature exists at every tier. Tiers are sized by the practice, not by feature count.
STAGE 6

Close and build

TriggerBuild fee clears
ThenScope, then a date. Not the other way round.
First deliverableTheir demo page, with their branding
Live whenOne real client is on it

The first thing you build for them is their own version of the demo page, using one of their real protocols with a fictional name on it. It does two jobs at once. It proves the build to them before any client is exposed, and it becomes the page they use to sell the programme to their own clients. Deliver that before anything else and the relationship starts with a win rather than a wait.

The message after the fee clears
Received, thank you. First thing I need is one protocol you have written recently, with the client's name removed. I will build your version of what I showed you, using that protocol and an invented name, and send it back before we go anywhere near a real client. Once you have seen your own page, we scope the rest and I will give you a date. Not before, because a date I have not worked out is just a guess with your name on it.
STAGE 7

After the build

The funnel does not end at the signature. A practitioner with one live client is your best source of the next three, and they will not think to say so unless you ask on a specific day.

Day 7

Check in on the practitioner, not the client. Ask what reached them that should have been handled, so the coach can be taught it.

Day 30

Ask for the two numbers that matter to them. How many questions did not reach them, and how many people reached day thirty.

Day 35

The referral ask, once and clearly, then never again in that quarter.

The day 35 referral ask
One ask and I will not raise it again. Is there one practitioner you would want to have this, who you would be comfortable introducing me to? Not a list. One. If nobody comes to mind, that is a useful answer too and I would rather have it.

Section four

The sequences

Four short ones. None of them is a drip campaign, because the audience is colleagues and a drip campaign reads as one. Each has a defined stop.

A. Conversation went quiet before a demo

Two messages, then stop. If the second gets nothing, they go dormant.

  • Day 3. One line, no pitch, no link.
  • Day 10. Give them an easy exit and mean it.

B. Demo no show

Assume nothing. One reschedule offer, then stop.

  • Within the hour. No irritation, no guilt.
  • Day 4. One reschedule, then dormant.

C. After the demo

The proposal is the follow up. Three touches after it, maximum.

  • Same day. The proposal email.
  • Day 3. One specific question about their build.
  • Day 8. The close or release.

D. Dormant

One touch at day 45, tied to something real, never a bump.

  • Day 45. Something you built or learned since, no ask.
A, day 3
Still happy to show you the ninety seconds whenever it suits. No rush from my side.
A, day 10, the exit
I will leave this here rather than keep surfacing in your inbox. If the after hours questions ever become the thing that is costing you evenings, message me and I will show you what I did about it.
B, within the hour of a no show
Looks like we missed each other. Practice days go how they go. Want me to send two more times, or shall I leave it with you?
C, day 3 after the proposal
One thing I want to get right before you decide. You said [their words for the gap]. Is that mostly happening in the first week, or later on around week three? It changes what the reminders say and I would rather build it correctly than generically.
C, day 8, close or release
Happy either way, but I would rather know than wonder. Is this a not now, or a not this? Not now I will diary and leave you alone. Not this and I will stop, with no hard feelings at all.
D, day 45
No ask attached to this. I changed how the coach handles the missed a dose question since we spoke, because it turned out to be the single most asked thing in my practice. Thought you would find that interesting given what you told me about week two.

Section five

The five objections, and the honest answers

My clients want to talk to me, not a machine

Agree, then reframe. They still do, for the things that matter. What they were never going to call you about at eleven at night is whether to take something with food, and that is the question that ends protocols. In your own practice, clients used it more than they used you, for the small things they were embarrassed to phone about.

What if it says something wrong

It only knows the protocol that was written for that client. It is not a general health assistant. Anything outside that, it hands over. Then show the escalation live. Do not describe it.

I could just send a PDF and some texts

True, and that is most of the value, so do it. The part that is hard to reproduce is the middle of the night. Say that plainly. A prospect who can be talked out of it this easily was going to churn.

It is expensive

Reach for their numbers, not a defence. Ask what a lost client costs them, and let the arithmetic sit in the silence. Do not fill it.

Is this HIPAA compliant

Do not answer yes. Ask whether they are a covered entity, say that if they are it changes the build and the price, and that their counsel decides rather than you. Confidence here is worse than candour, and it is the one answer that could cost you the business rather than the deal.

Can I see a real client's page

The refusal is the pitch. Say it plainly, then carry on. Nobody has ever pushed past this, because the moment you say it they understand you would protect them the same way.

Section six

What never appears anywhere in this funnel

Not in a post, a comment, a DM, a demo, a proposal, or a page you send. These are the failure modes that cost the business rather than a deal.

  • Any outcome. The sale is retention and reclaimed time. It is never about what happens to anybody's health. Even where something is true, saying it converts a software conversation into a regulated one.
  • Any A1C number, any reference to reversing anything, any mention of medication being reduced. Those belong between a practitioner and the person in front of them, and nowhere in a sale.
  • Any completion, adherence or retention percentage you have not measured. If you cannot produce the working, do not say the number.
  • A real client page URL. Ever, to anyone, for any reason.
  • Yes to HIPAA.
  • A date before the build is scoped.
  • An integration with a platform you have not checked.
  • White labelling, unless the tier being sold actually includes it.
  • A feature that exists for DueSmart but not for the wellness stack.

Safe language, which does everything you need it to: clients stay longer, the phone stops ringing with questions, and refill calls go up.

Section seven

The weekly rhythm

The funnel fails from inconsistency long before it fails from bad copy. Four fixed blocks, about four hours a week.

DayBlockTime
MondayComment block. Fifteen substantive comments.45 min
TuesdayOne post, then reply to every comment on it within the hour.40 min
WednesdayComment block. Fifteen more. DMs answered same day.45 min
ThursdayDemo day. Coach checked before the first call.As booked
FridayEvery proposal owed from Thursday goes out. Ten comments.60 min

Demos on one day is deliberate. It means the coach check happens once instead of five times, and it means no proposal is ever more than 24 hours late.

Section eight

The scoreboard

Six numbers, counted weekly. Five of them are activity you control. Only the last one is an outcome, and it will stay at zero for a while, which is normal and not a signal.

NumberWeekly targetWhat a miss tells you
Substantive comments40Nothing else in the funnel can work
Conversations opened6The comments are agreeable rather than useful
Demos booked3You are pitching in the DM instead of offering the demo
Demos held2Booking too far out. Offer times inside four days.
Proposals sent inside 24h100%The template is not ready, so fix the template
SignaturesTrailingJudge this at week eight, not week two

A number you calculated yourself is worth more than any number in a deck. That is true for the prospect, and it is true for you reading this page in six weeks.