Channel Teardowns

• +Operators who ran this specific channel at a company selling to your buyer
• +The person who killed it, where a comparable company tried it and stopped
• +Agency leads holding comparable data across several accounts in the same channel
• +Customers who arrived through this channel, on what actually got their attention

Every expert is at least six months removed from any company they are asked to discuss. No material non-public information may be requested or shared, calls are monitored, and the audit trail is kept for seven years under the FieldSignal compliance framework.

• +A channel is being proposed internally and nobody in the room has run it
• +An existing channel is degrading and you need to know whether it is fixable
• +An agency is pitching and you want an independent read before signing a twelve-month contract
• +You are copying a competitor's visible motion without knowing its economics
• +The board is pushing a channel you suspect is wrong for this buyer and you need more than a hunch

• +Realistic economics for the channel in your category, sourced from operators rather than published averages
• +The failure modes, in the order they usually show up
• +Preconditions: what has to be true before this channel pays, written as a checklist you can hold up against your own situation
• +A verdict with the reasoning attached: run it, run it later, or do not run it
• +Transcripts from every call behind the verdict, so you can check our reading against the source

• +The channel, and what is prompting the question. An agency pitch and a board mandate produce different research
• +What you have already tried in the channel, including the parts that went badly
• +Your rough price point and sales cycle, since both change the economics more than anything else
• +A named internal owner. Teardowns that land with nobody accountable tend to change nothing

01Which channels can you tear down?

Cold outbound, paid search, paid social, SEO and content, partnerships and co-marketing, referral, events and field, community and creator, marketplaces and app stores, and PR. If your motion involves something not on that list, ask. The only real constraint is whether we can source operators who have run it for your buyer.

02Is this a benchmark report?

No. Published benchmarks average across companies that share nothing but a software category, which is why every team reading one quietly assumes it sits on the good side of the median. A teardown is sourced from named-role operators who sold to your buyer, and the ranges arrive with the reasoning behind them. If you want survey-scale numbers instead, that is the benchmarks engagement.

03Can you tear down a channel we already run?

It is one of the most common versions of this work. We interview operators who ran it elsewhere and compare their economics and failure modes against yours. The usual finding is that the channel is fine and one input is wrong, which is a much cheaper fix than switching channels.

04How many operators go into one teardown?

Typically five to eight for a single channel. Fewer than four and you are reading one person's experience. More than about ten and the marginal call stops changing the picture, though we will run more where operators are split.

05What if your verdict contradicts our agency?

Then you have two views and one of them comes from people with no fee riding on the answer. We are happy to put the findings in front of the agency, and their response to the operator evidence is usually informative in itself.