What we talked about
Maeve Ferguson is The Authority Architect, the strategist behind diagnostic infrastructure that transforms established thought leaders from respected but replaceable to Category of One. Creator of The Client Engine, she works with 7-10 figure experts, bestselling authors, and industry authorities including Dr. Arthur Brooks, Jen Kem, and Selena Soo, building the systems that turn intellectual property into assets that qualify, convert, and scale without them in the room. With a background in Big Four accounting and private equity, she runs her consultancy from a working horse farm in Northern Ireland.
Show notes
Maeve Ferguson estimates that 82% of the calls business owners take with prospective clients are with people who were never going to buy, and she has built her entire business around eliminating that waste. Her approach replaces the standard discovery call funnel with diagnostic assessments that score, segment, and route leads before a human ever picks up the phone.
What we covered
- The core problem Ferguson targets is what she calls the discovery call trap: business owners spend 60-minute blocks with unqualified leads, often discovering 56 minutes in that the person cannot afford their program. The diagnostic assessment replaces that process by qualifying and classifying leads automatically before any sales conversation happens.
- There are three distinct types of diagnostics, and she is clear they are not interchangeable. A quiz funnel (7-10 questions, fast) works for volume lead generation, one client in the golf industry runs $1 million per month in ads through one. A multi-dimensional diagnostic, modeled on tools like Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram, is for thought leaders with statistically validated IP who want a household-name authority asset. A score-based assessment sits between the two and functions as a gap analysis tool, scoring leads against pillars of a framework.
- The copy a lead sees after completing a diagnostic is fully personalized to their specific scores. If someone scores well on two out of three pillars, they only see messaging about the pillar where they need help, which means they do not self-disqualify because they see irrelevant content, which Ferguson says is what happens when business owners list everything their program covers.
- One client launched a $14.99 paid diagnostic assessment. Within 60 days it generated $70,000, before counting any back-end upsells, the workshop, or the membership that followed. She notes this was done entirely organically.
- Ferguson makes a pointed argument about books: most authors pour enormous effort into writing but have no system to turn readers into leads. Distribution platforms like Amazon do not share buyer data, so the reader remains anonymous. A diagnostic baked into the book converts readers into identified leads on the author’s list, with the additional benefit that someone who has just finished a book enters the diagnostic with far higher trust than a cold prospect.
- At a mastermind event in March 2025, she saw the writing on the wall for the existing funnel-building industry and pivoted before most competitors noticed the shift. She now runs an agentic AI division inside her consultancy that analyzes diagnostic data daily, identifying hidden high-ticket buyers on client lists and feeding insights back up the funnel to marketing teams.
About Maeve
Maeve Ferguson is a business owner and CEO who builds diagnostic score-based assessments for experts, authors, and thought leaders, turning their intellectual property into lead-qualifying infrastructure that segments buyers and generates revenue as a long-term asset.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maeveferguson
- Website: https://www.maeveferguson.com
Episode 150 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00) Welcome back to the pre-Everett podcast, where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Today, we are joined by Maeve Ferguson. She’s a business owner and CEO who helps experts, authors, and thought leaders turn their intellectual property into diagnostic score-based assessments that qualify leads, build authority, and generate revenue as a long-term…
asset. Maeve’s work is about building a client engine that runs day and night, using data to show where ideal clients are stuck, segment them automatically, and turn sales call into simple how and when decisions. Maeve, welcome to the show.
Maeve Ferguson (00:45) Thank you so much. am really excited to be here and really looking forward to the conversation.
Federico Ramallo (00:52) Honored to have you here today. For people meeting you for the first time, can you tell us a little bit more about what you do?
Maeve Ferguson (01:00) Yes, absolutely. So we work with some of the world’s most extraordinary thought leaders. We think the number one New York Times bestselling authors, Harvard professors, the big, big names in the industry. And we work with them to allow their intellectual property to become an asset inside of their company that does a couple of really important things. So first of all, it acts as a lead qualifying machine, turning
leads in their market into clients and also it gathers the proprietary data points and all of those leads at the back end which in my view is the last moat in this world of AI.
Federico Ramallo (01:43) Right, right. That’s very interesting. And what problem do you see in the market that when you focus on diagnostic instead of more content?
Maeve Ferguson (01:52) Yeah, so I think what I see all the time are people having kind of the standard like digital marketing model and they post on whether it be Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever even running paid traffic and running people to some sort of opt-in that gets a name and email address on that you know at best a phone number and what ends up happening is those leads are not necessarily qualified so most business owners then go on to have
of the awful term that I hate, is like discovery calls, where they’re spending like 60 minute blocks of their life having conversations with people who have no intention of investing in themselves. They are not actually ready to buy. They are not qualified leads at all. And know, 56 minutes into the conversation, the poor business owner discovers that this person doesn’t have two brass cents to, you know, to rub together. Nevermind, you know, jump into their 20K or 50K program.
And it’s a thing that I see happening over and over and over again and what I believe instead is that rather than having kind of PDF lead magnets that nobody ever opens never mind reads we actually give our audience a lot of value in the free thing that we put out. So diagnostic assessments allow us to provide really personalized insightful information for that lead so that they can
discover something about themselves or they can see exactly where they’re blocked or where they’re stuck and what that does then is it collapses the amount of time it takes them to know and trust us whilst also segmenting them into different categories of qualified and unqualified leads. So for example we use a lot of agentic AI systems and we have able to score these leads coming through, identify who are the platinum
them leads and who are the people that we would be better just sending to you know watch our YouTube channel for example because they’re not actually qualified to speak to our sales team.
Federico Ramallo (03:53) Right, right, and this is more valuable when you have higher ticket opportunities, right?
Maeve Ferguson (04:01) No, not necessarily. the way this works, you can at the back end of this, you can have multi six figure offers right down to seven dollar courses. The whole idea is that the assessment and the routing engine that’s built into the assessment puts the right offer and the right message in front of the right person at the right time. So where you have somebody who wants to work with you at a multi six figure level, they don’t want your 10K thing. And the people who are wanting to
work with you at a $47 course level, well they can’t do you the multi-six-figure offer. So the whole idea is that the qualification and the classification of those leads is done inside of the assessment, so the only offer that they see at the back end is the offer that solves the literal exact problem that they just discovered that they have, and most importantly it matches their ability to invest, so it just becomes that no-brainer.
decision.
Federico Ramallo (04:59) interesting. So you
can have different type of offering depending on the type of clients and batches that they have, right? Well, it’s a multi-dimensional criteria problem basically, right? Because it’s not just one thing, right?
Maeve Ferguson (05:04) Mm-hmm.
Exactly, yes, because different
people at different stages of the buyer awareness, different stages of their journey. Some people are ready to solve for this problem today. Some people are just kind of trying to figure out what’s available. They’re not yet solution aware. And then then we have the investment ability layer to layer in as well, as well as what are they actually struggling with? And my love of these assessments is that all of the copy that people see at the back end is complete.
completely personalised to them. So let’s pretend you help people with their niche, their offer and their sales. If they have absolutely no problem with their niche or their offer, but you’re speaking to solving that, that person’s automatically going to think, this isn’t for me. Like that’s not a problem to me. But where we’re able to say to them, you’re fine in this area and you’re fine in that area, but over here, this is where you need support. It’s completely personalised copy and they see different copy to the next
person to the next person to the next person because the infrastructure allows us to categorise people in that way.
Federico Ramallo (06:15) Right, interesting. And the criteria for the categorization is something that you work with your clients before launching the engine, right?
Maeve Ferguson (06:25) Yeah, exactly. normally what we do is we sit down for an entire day, you know, either in person or virtually a full day to do what we call the IP extraction. So we take all of the intellectual property and then essentially we do a dance between the IP and the offers that we want to sell at the back end and then make sure that the diagnostic categories and subcategories and the questions as well as the scoring mechanism make sure that every single lead that goes through the machine
gets categorized and classified in the right way.
Federico Ramallo (06:58) Right,
right. That’s very interesting. you also mentioned that you’re adding value to the lids as well, right? That’s the other component that you mentioned before, right?
Maeve Ferguson (07:05) Mm-hmm.
Yeah, it’s a highly valuable asset to them because if you think about what most people are doing, what your competitors are doing, what they’re doing is they have some form of PDF lead magnet that looks like it was made in 1994 and it’s generic, it speaks to everybody but speaks to nobody. It’s not actually information for them and I see a lot of people put in a painstaking amount of effort into these things but they don’t actually convert because most people don’t even
open it, mind read it, never mind take action on it. And there’s two sides to this as well. There’s the level of intent involved when somebody takes a diagnostic, they are spending, you know, maybe five or six minutes of their life going through this process to learn and discover something about themselves. They are infinitely more likely then to follow up and read the report, etc. Whereas with a normal opt-in, we barely have to like glance
at our phones these days and just you know auto fills our information and we press submit the thing goes to spam and within you know 4.2 seconds we forget the person’s what their name even was never mind you know wanting to read their email never mind wanting to read the PDF and take action on it it’s barely you know a moment in time whereas with the diagnostic we’re actually working with way better quality people because they’re taking the time they are intentional about going
through that assessment to discover something about themselves.
Federico Ramallo (08:37) I see. Interesting. So it’s people that run through a diagnostic, they’re actually looking to solve a problem. So by guiding them towards what is the right solution for them, you are helping both the client, well, both parties, right? On both sides, right? Because you’re guiding the person seeking for help to find the right solution for them, right?
Maeve Ferguson (08:49) you
Thank
Federico Ramallo (09:02) and you
Maeve Ferguson (09:03) Yes, and there’s
also value in the output itself. So they get a, you know, sometimes a 30 page report and deep dive into their personal specific situation. That in itself is a very, very valuable asset. And therefore they know, like and trust the business owner that owns the assessment, you know, even more.
Federico Ramallo (09:26) Right, right. That’s interesting. I think I’ve seen something similar happen with, let me know if this comparison makes sense or not, but I’ve seen the same thing happen with FAQs and having a chat box where you, rather than having a static list of questions, you build a content engine or knowledge engine, and then you can talk with it, right? It’s more dynamic.
Maeve Ferguson (09:33) Hi.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (09:50) what you’re describing is the same thing, instead of having a discovery call and having two or three PDF that I can send you, you can go through this process where you’re going to get, the first outcome you’re going to get is the…
the advice and then the service or product that most fits your needs, right?
Maeve Ferguson (10:12) Yeah, so you’re able to make a call to action.
to that user who that fits where they are, whether they’re a good fit for you. If they’re not a good fit for you, the machine separates the wheat from the chaff, which is what most business owners are doing. They’re having their discovery calls with absolutely everybody and end up finding out that 82 % of them are unqualified to even speak to them in the first place, but they have to go through all of that pain of the discovery calls. The whole idea with this piece of infrastructure is that it weeds all of those
people out, they don’t even get an invitation to hop on a call or buy the thing, it’s just not actually available to them because of how we’re able to build the infrastructure.
Federico Ramallo (10:56) Right, right, which is the issue with FAQs. I mean, you have to read them all through to find which one fits what you’re asking, right? Rather than this, have a dynamic, you have a conversation rather than reading a static document, right?
Maeve Ferguson (11:04) Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Exactly, yeah, diagnostics now with the beauty of everything that is happening in the world right now with AI, these can be completely dynamic experiences. So every single question, you can do the branching logic and completely custom diagnostics now that are completely personalized with that person and exactly what they’re going through.
Federico Ramallo (11:31) Right, right. So how does the, you know, what makes this different from a typical quiz someone might put on their website?
Maeve Ferguson (11:42) Yeah, so there’s three, I get this question, it’s a really valid question, but there’s three main types of diagnostics, okay? So at one end of the spectrum we have what we call the quiz funnel. So it’s seven to 10 questions, it’s fast, it’s quick, it’s easy, it’s not an authority play, so it’s just about bringing in leads at volume, qualifying them and converting, okay? It works really, really well in certain use cases. So we have, for example, a client in
the golfing industry, quiz funnel, they’re running about a million dollars a month in ads, this thing is printing leads. Okay, so perfect example of a use case there. Very, very far end of the spectrum is what we call multi-dimensional diagnostics. And this is where, you know, it’s the number one New York Times bestselling author or Harvard professor or they have intellectual property that has been statistically validated. And this is where you see, for example, a diagnostic like Myers-Briggs.
I’m an INTJ or Enneagram. I’m a three with a four wing. We have these multi-dimensional Diagnostics that ultimately become household names and everybody knows their profile with the know, the big four or five Diagnostics, okay, so it becomes a Household name and it is very much for that super sophisticated intellectual property and then somewhere between the two Lies what we call the score based assessment
And this one acts almost like if you have say four or five pillars of your framework or three or four things that you help people with Essentially what this does is acts as a gap analysis tool so they get a score against each pillar or against each area and then by virtue of that they’re able to see then where is their weakest area, what do they need most support with and therefore here’s how they are most appropriately matched to the offers that you have available that also match the price points
that they are able to invest in. And it’s not like one of these three types is better than the other. It’s just different use cases for different types of intellectual property. It depends if you’re a product, it depends if you’re a service, it depends if you’re using it as an authority play, as a positioning play, depends whether you are running what I call the data play on the backend, where the proprietary data points and behavioral and psychographic behavior of all of these leads
going through are actually creating thousands and thousands of data points about your audience and that when monetized is one of the most valuable assets inside a company that most people are sitting on and they don’t even realize that it is the asset that it is.
Federico Ramallo (14:22) Interesting,
I can see how this is completely different than a quiz, right? It’s a philosophically different thing, although on surface they might look the same, but when you start digging deeper, it’s a completely different approach.
Maeve Ferguson (14:37) Yes.
Very much so, just think
quizzes work really well. Like I’ve been in this quiz funnel diagnostic assessment, whatever you want to call it, world for a number of years now. Quizzes work really well. They’re just, not going to be, if you’re a number one New York Times best selling author and you’re going for a real authority play in the market, a six, seven question quiz just isn’t going to cut it. It is a really, really powerful lead generator that gets you super low CPL.
allows you to segment and categorize all of your leads and things like that, but you’re not going to be cited in Harvard Business Review over a gimmicky quiz either.
Federico Ramallo (15:18) Right, right. Are you also providing feedback to the clients on segmentation that they haven’t seen? Or is your engine focused on the original IP or knowledge that you’re providing to it?
Maeve Ferguson (15:30) Yeah, brilliant question. what we actually do is I always speak to the assessment that it is that it’s ultimately the foundation. OK, so if we try to put bells and whistles on a foundation that is broken, the whole thing is going to fall over. So super, super important to have the IP built into the foundational asset that is the diagnostic assessment. But then what we have now is we have multiple, multiple AI agents that are analyzing
all of the data going through these assessments every single day and these agents are able to identify where our buyers are hiding gaps that we have not yet seen, where we can position our offers in a different way to a specific subset of people. We’re able to assess and analyze which top of funnel ad copy, which hook and which creative brought in the 100k buyers versus the 10k buyers versus the $47 buyers. These agents are able to work
various different points of the diagnostic, grabbing and scraping all of that data and then feeding it back top of funnel to the marketing departments so they can do a better and better job over time. So absolutely it allows us to really figure out gaps in segmentation, it allows us to see where I call it the hidden high ticket buyer finder. This finds the high ticket buyers that are already hiding on your list that the naked eye can’t see because the
only knows what it knows, it’s not able to analyse all the data to that level that the AI agents can underprogram to.
Federico Ramallo (17:04) Right. Yeah, I think that that’s one of the strengths of having agents because they can analyze so much data and find those patterns that for us it takes a lot of time. mean, it’s a lot of trial and error, right? And then once we get those insights, then we humans can make determinations, strategy determination, how to move forward, right? ⁓ I think that’s the best use for agents, right? ⁓ They can augment.
Maeve Ferguson (17:21) Mm-hmm.
Exactly.
Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (17:31) our analysis ability and then, but it’s still us making the strategic decisions to how to move forward, right?
Maeve Ferguson (17:33) you
Exactly, yes, you’re getting your output so the agent is only ever going to be as good as the brain that told it how to analyse it, what to analyse etc and then we need discernment on the back end to take all of the information that is presented to us to know the exact next move we want to make. What most people do is that they aren’t making any decisions because they’re so completely overwhelmed on all of the awful discovery calls that they don’t actually have the time and capacity to do this well.
part just doesn’t actually get done.
Federico Ramallo (18:10) Right,
right. Does your system also support on the content generation and the brand outreach or your focus is on once the potential client lands on the website and then you take over for the diagnostic tool?
Maeve Ferguson (18:25) Yeah.
Yeah, very, very much so. The top of funnel has to be involved because none of these things can work, you know, operating silos. So if we just build a diagnostic assessment piece, if we are bringing in, I like to talk about like running water through the pipes. So if you’re running water through the pipes of your business, i.e. leads, and that water is really dirty, i.e. your top of funnel copy messaging positioning is attracting really low caliber leads, you know, if somebody lives in their car, they’re not going to be paying you 100k to do your
thing, so the whole idea and again one step further into the funnel, if your offers aren’t the right offers to solve the problem that your audience actually wants solved, it doesn’t matter how amazing your diagnostic, that’s not going to convert. So we have to look holistically at the whole end to end piece and one of the most important things that we do with our clients is what we call rich niche positioning. So top of funnel, we’ve to look to what is the
what’s the messaging that we are putting out there and who is that actually attracting into our world and the who that it is attracting does that actually match the offers that we have to sell. So if we’re speaking to for example beginner problems and beginner struggles and struggles that would identify somebody as not having money to invest in themselves and then at the back end of your thinking you’re like here’s my 20k thing or my know 500k thing whatever your number is.
is there’s going to be a mismatch there between the type of people you’re calling out and speaking to and what you have available. And the flip side of that, if you have a super sophisticated market and you’re bringing in really high caliber, really high end thought leaders or people or whoever your people are, bringing those into your world and then you have some $47 click and buy thing and these people want a white love experience. They want to
they want to work with you at a multi-six figure level, they don’t want a stinky course. So it’s like we’ve got to make sure that we’re meeting our markets exactly where they are. And these diagnostics are the routing engine that allows all of that to happen automatically instead of having to work through every single lead manually one by one by one.
Federico Ramallo (20:41) Right, so what you’re talking about is having a gross align between the offer and the expectation, right? And then once you have that alignment, then you can fine tune it with different offerings based on those expectations. Then you can expand that to serve a $50 course or a $50,000 consulting.
you know, project or whatever it is, right?
Maeve Ferguson (21:11) Yes, absolutely.
But I also run into this kind of question a lot. So I bring it up just in case it’s in anybody’s head. Where it’s like, well, I only have one offer. How would this work for me? And how this actually works is, say, let’s pretend you’ve got a 50k offer. what you want to do there is make sure, first of all, that your top of funnel messaging isn’t bringing through $50 people. OK, so that’s that’s like one of one basic level stuff.
So that has to be in place But let’s say you only have one offer and you help people with this one thing What you want to actually do there is position the same offer in various different ways depending on the struggle that the person is just identified So let’s pretend you help people with like I’ll just use a business example like niching down offers sales and mindset They then get a score against each of those areas. Well, if your struggle is mindset you don’t
see the here’s what we do inside sales inside this program you talk about the mindset component you lean into the piece that has just been identified for them and vice versa somebody else is struggling with niching they’re not worried about sales they can’t even figure out who they’re going to help or what they’re going to help them with so we got to have the copy selling exactly the same offer all about the niche problem and then whenever they get inside they’re able to see all of these other things that it supports with but they haven’t
mentally disqualified themselves which is what most people do it’s like here’s all of the things inside my program here’s everything in the shopping trolley I’m just gonna keep stuffing it full of stuff and tell you all of these things you’re gonna get and people are like they self disqualify because they’re like like I don’t need that I’m fine at sales I don’t need that piece but they it’s because the positioning isn’t correct because they haven’t done any segmentation so they have no choice but to tell them everything because they don’t actually know anything about their
Thanks for
Federico Ramallo (23:06) Right, right. mean, if somebody comes with a single offer, then they, and maybe they come like that because they don’t know they could build all these other offers and they’ve been focused on one, then ⁓ you can help them on providing the feedback on what are the other offers that they should start building, right? ⁓ Based on the data that the system provides, right? And as you said, there’s…
Maeve Ferguson (23:20) Thank you.
Thank you.
Federico Ramallo (23:31) There’s a do-it-yourself program client, and then there is somebody that’s looking for a hand-holding consulting high-ticket service. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And as you said, it’s about positioning. If you go to a dealership, you find the cheap car, and then the next, and then the next, and then you keep…
Maeve Ferguson (23:37) No.
Exactly.
Federico Ramallo (23:56) You know, there’s there is a price overlap between all of the all of the cars, right? So you can go from the cheapest to the most expensive. Right. And they always try to upsell you, you know, like, well, if you pay, you know, five thousand dollars more, you can get this, you know, bigger SUV or whatever it is. Right. And and what you’re describing is, you know, being able to bring that that same mentality, you know, when when building this.
this process, right?
Maeve Ferguson (24:25) Yeah, exactly. you want to. So I’m a big believer in that we don’t go and create more stuff just because we can. So every every conversation, every decision like this has to also align with what life do you want to live? Because, know, like say, for example, in a past business of mine, I had the 10K group coaching program and I had nine digital courses and the forty seven dollar courses with the bumps and the OTOs and all of those things. And in the last few years, I’ve moved
Much more into white glove done for you services it matches the life I want to live better than the other So it very much depends on just because you can doesn’t mean you should it’s all about a what life do you want to live and then B as long as it matches the life you want to live What are the offers that your market are screaming out for that you actually don’t provide? But could could do so very very easily, but you you just haven’t done it because you haven’t had that level of awareness before
about your market.
Federico Ramallo (25:23) It’s an interesting topic that you bring in, the life you want to live, because on one hand, you can have a single offer because you’ve been doing the same thing over and over and you’re kind of stuck there. Or you can diversify.
Maeve Ferguson (25:36) or you’re worried
fast and you want to be there.
Federico Ramallo (25:40) Right. Right.
Maeve Ferguson (25:41) Yeah, you don’t have to
be sat there, you can be choosing to be the Navy Seal of your game.
Federico Ramallo (25:48) Yes, yes. But what I’m trying to get is that it should be a conscious decision. ⁓ And what we describing before is people got there for one reason or another, but they didn’t think about it. So how much do you want to diversify?
Maeve Ferguson (25:54) Mmm.
They were just told by the big marketers, yes, like go and do
this, do this, do this. And then they end up with this business and this life that they absolutely despise and they’d be better off in the job, you know, because they hit their lives. You know, you have to be intentional with everything, I think.
Federico Ramallo (26:14) Right, right. Yes
Yes. what I think is that once you figure it out with the data, you can figure it out what diversification would make more sense to do, then you can make the conscious decision, do I want to or not, right? Yeah, that’s interesting. So can you tell us a little bit about how do you turn a book or a framework
Maeve Ferguson (26:28) Mm-hmm.
Yeah. That way. That way.
Federico Ramallo (26:40) into a score-based system that people can trust?
Maeve Ferguson (26:41) Thank
Yeah, so I love this one and I see a lot of authors, it sometimes makes me want to cry when I see an author with an amazing body of work, like they’ve poured their absolute life and soul into a book. Some of them are getting the bestseller lists and they don’t actually have a diagnostic baked into the fabric of the book. And what these diagnostics allow authors to do is to allow their IP to live beyond the book.
most people they do a lot of work to get somebody to buy the book and then it’s like we got to read the book and then if the book ends at the book it was like well that was an interesting book and then they’re off you know paying who knows what to help them solve that problem because they don’t actually have a valuable lead generation system baked into the fabric of the book. Now they might have a QR code off to some awful workbook that nobody ever opens same principle as the PDF lead magnet
But when your assessment is actually based into the fabric of the book, when people are going through that book and then it’s, I call it like layered value, they have gotten value from reading the book, then the assessment takes them from the book onto your CRM, they become a lead and not just some buyer that you’ve no idea who they are. And you are then able to market to them and sell to them obviously, but the value add for them is not only
have they gotten the value from the book, but it’s been further cemented because of the assessment. And then everything that we just talked about, the personalization, the level of intent, the level of interest, the collapsing of the no-like-and-trust timeline, all of those things still apply. It is just on steroids because they’ve come through reading the book and the no-like-and-trust is even higher than somebody coming in cold.
Federico Ramallo (28:34) Interesting, right, right, because the book gives you first some authority, but then if they read the book and there’s no call to action towards a diagnostic, then you’re missing that opportunity, right?
Maeve Ferguson (28:39) Mm-hmm.
Yeah, you’re missing, so many many many authors are missing the lead full stop because their book just ends at the book and most authors even when they have a system to get leads from their readers it’s some sort of crummy workbook that nobody ever actually does or opens so again the desire to actually opt in to get the thing is very low whereas inside of your book when you’re teasing you’re going to discover X about yourself, you’re going to see Y
about yourself, you’re going to learn all of these things. Everybody is self obsessed. Self discovery is one of the know the primary drivers. They actually want to opt in to discover more about themselves and therefore again they are say if you have thousand people reading your book or a hundred thousand people or whatever your number is, the masses are then coming from readers onto your email list which means then you’re actually able to turn that IP into
business on the back end.
Federico Ramallo (29:44) Right. Because if people read the book and then they don’t connect with you, you lose that lead. You never knew that person. Right.
Maeve Ferguson (29:51) You never knew who they were, they were never a lead, they were just
some random book reader that you’ll, unless they tag you on social and you start having a chat and then you ask them for their email address, you’re never going to know who they are. And the whole idea is that this actually turns those readers into leads on your list for you to nurture, value to, and ultimately convert.
Federico Ramallo (30:12) Right, and the distribution system don’t give you that information. mean, Amazon, Audible, they don’t tell you who buys your book, right? Yeah, and then after that, if they connect with you and you don’t have a system that can take care of them, even if you know who they are, now you lose them because you’re not taking proper care of them, right?
Maeve Ferguson (30:27) Thank
There are certain ways of doing it where you can do bulk buys and things like that and sell bulk buys to get email addresses and things like that but for the most part, yeah, most people do not know who their readers are. They’re not leads, they’re just readers at that point.
Federico Ramallo (30:48) Right, right. You could inspire them, but not close a business, right?
Is that one of the most common mistakes you’ve seen people do with books?
Maeve Ferguson (31:01) Yes, there’s two problems. Those who have nothing in there and then secondly those who what I call lazy marketing they whack in a workbook just to have some sort of lead generation thing in there. They’re so spent writing this book that puts so much effort into it and you know the easiest thing in the world is to pop a QR code in there that sends people to a workbook but what’s the level of intent, what’s the level of desire.
for somebody to scan your QR code on page 259, it’s not the same level of desire that whenever you actually bake a diagnostic into it and people want to discover where they stand against others, what their archetype is, etc.
Federico Ramallo (31:46) Right. Right. So, so you think that self-diagnostic is much more effective than pitching on the book, right? Because it comes from within.
Maeve Ferguson (31:58) Yeah, so you mean as in making your offer in the book. think we still have to…
tease our authors inside of the book but another huge mistake a lot of authors make it’s like here’s 20 chapters of my book and each single chapter is just a sales pitch and it’s just you know it’s not actually giving value so to me the best books are if you think about the page turners if you think of the books you actually recommend to people they’re the one that it’s just like completely front-loaded with value you’ve given people so much insight they’ve had so many aha moments
And then when you layer that in with diagnostic questions, they’re like, my goodness, I have to know where I stack up against this. Then boom, automatically it’s free.
Federico Ramallo (32:42) I see what you’re talking about. Yeah, see, I read books where at the end of the book I felt, you know, disappointed that I was pitched the whole time, right? ⁓ Yeah.
Maeve Ferguson (32:52) I was like, ooh, gotta take
a shower.
Federico Ramallo (32:55) Yeah, yeah, I was going to say I fell dirty, yeah.
Maeve Ferguson (32:58) And now it’s
even worse because it’s 20 chapters of a sales pitch and it’s AI generated, 20 chapters of a sales pitch. And that’s the worst imaginable thing you can do if you’re a thought leader, if you’re a true thought leader.
Federico Ramallo (33:06) Right.
Right, right, because people can’t read between the lines that it was a pitch.
Maeve Ferguson (33:16) Yeah, can smell
AI written everything at a thousand paces. You know, and we have an AI, an agentic AI division of the company. We’re way down that rabbit hole. We are big, big, into it. But there’s, in my opinion, there are certain times where it has to be the handwritten word. And that’s the writing of a book as well.
Federico Ramallo (33:34) Right. Interesting. the other thing I was kind of starting to explore is this idea that comes within, right? I mean, it’s different when somebody beats you because you’re being pushed towards, you know.
Maeve Ferguson (33:43) Thanks.
Yeah, versus like I want this, how do I work with you at a deeper level?
Federico Ramallo (33:53) Right, right, I mean I…
Maeve Ferguson (33:54) This happened one of our
clients there recently, big, big, name, super, super famous. And his audience were begging to, how can we continue to work with him? We put them through the diagnosis, they were like, please, please, please, how can we work with you at a deeper level? And he was able then to open up a new membership level to work with people. thousands and thousands of people jumping into that because they were begging for more.
Federico Ramallo (34:22) Right, right. Yeah, that’s interesting because once you have that demand, then you can, as we talked before, you can make the conscious decisions of adding new programs or ⁓ expanding it some way, right? Up to the level where…
Maeve Ferguson (34:31) Yeah.
What’s left in life
you want to live?
Federico Ramallo (34:39) can you share some success stories where you’ve seen this working amazingly?
Maeve Ferguson (34:44) Yeah, so one of my favorites actually is it’s a paid diagnostic and you can have a free diagnostic that’s just a normal kind of free lead magnet and others then charge for the diagnostics. a little bit like you pay a nominal sum for Enneagram and things like that, where it is like a multi-dimensional and the report they get is super, super valuable. You can charge an amount for that and it actually becomes another product line in the business. And one of our clients there,
recently had a $14.99 assessment that we built for him and within the first 60 days it made $70,000 and that’s not including any of the back ends up sales or the workshop or the membership that they offered in the back end. This is just from assessment sales alone and that was all done organically. So it’s a super powerful…
way to add an extra product line to your business where you have that demand and you want to turn it into a paid product.
Federico Ramallo (35:43) Right, right. That’s amazing. I mean, I think that, you know, in the world of AI where everything feels synthetic, right? ⁓ I think being able to, know, and transactional, I’ve seen a lot of, you know, things are more transactional. You see fake videos, fake content that, you yeah, I mean, that’s why I use the word synthetic because, you know, now you don’t know what’s real and what’s not, right? And…
Maeve Ferguson (35:44) Hmm.
Hmm.
Thank
Federico Ramallo (36:09) being able to find products and companies that providing, that actually want to take care of people and want to provide real value, it’s getting more and more extraordinary, right?
Maeve Ferguson (36:17) Yeah, exactly.
Mm-hmm. So did she. So did she.
Federico Ramallo (36:24) So where does GenAI fit into this workflow? And where do you think people should be careful about how they’re using GenAI?
Maeve Ferguson (36:36) So I think there are everybody has their views on this I am very very very for it and I think we just have to make sure that we are using it in the right way for the right use cases. So say for example for us where we have had you know made incredible leaps and bounds even just in the last six months we are now able to build diagnostics and I actually wrote a sub stack on this last week and we’re actually able to build now
diagnostics that even a couple of years ago would have cost multiple millions of dollars to build due to the complexity whereas now we’re actually able to provide that level of sophistication to more and more people at a much more modest investment level because of all of these tools that we now have at our fingertips.
Federico Ramallo (37:24) Right, right, interesting. Yeah, I think that Gen.AI is opening the level of opportunities in so many industries. you know, I mean, you can vibe code out of things that you will need to spend months before.
Maeve Ferguson (37:26) It’s really allowing. Yeah.
Yeah,
even funnel building and things like that. I was at a mastermind event last March 2025 and could see the writing on the wall that the industry that we are actually in will cease to exist. So I was, you know, I’m very, very agile. was like, right, the writing was on the wall. Where do we go? What do we do next? And we pivoted way back then. So now we are already live, we’re in the market, we’re selling these things. We actually have an agentic AI division of the
business
serving our clients because we were agile and moved with it rather than I see so many people it kind of scares me to be honest they are just like completely sleepwalking through life they’ve no idea that they’re about to get completely gobbled up they don’t know that it’s already over and we’re just now in the last the last few months of doing things in the way that we used to do them
Federico Ramallo (38:35) Right. Yeah. I mean, the more I get into this rabbit hole of Gen. AI, the more I realize that the human connections and the human expertise becomes much more valuable than before. Because it’s great we can have all these tools, but if you have no idea what the strategy should be, then you’re just running in circles.
faster, right? But you know…
Maeve Ferguson (38:58) Yeah.
I but feel
like it’s both because it’s also the, I feel like there’s always course corrections in every market, that’s just the reality. And I feel like the course correction that is happening right now and when we see people getting what I call spat out by the industry, and those are the people that are feeling that nobody’s investing in themselves and everything’s a struggle, nothing could be further from the truth. they are being spat out by the machine because they’re being found.
Federico Ramallo (39:09) Right.
Maeve Ferguson (39:29) out that they are average, are just mediocre at what they do and they’re going to be two camps of people, they’re going to be those who excel because they are truly exceptional and when you layer in that human component with being exceptional and with the AI layer it just becomes an unstoppable force where if somebody is just mediocre and or they’re sleepwalking through life and they are not realizing what’s going on in the industry
they will just be spat out by the machine and it’s survival of the fittest. It’s a course correction like we have in any market.
Federico Ramallo (40:03) Right. Right. Yeah. mean, a lot of the jobs are going to be changing. And as you said, mean, skills are going to be, you know, people with mediocre skill. Yeah. I am. I we’ve been evaluating about interviewing people, you know, do we allow them to use AI or not? Right. I actually wrote an article about that. I haven’t published yet, but kind of what I talk about is this idea of
Maeve Ferguson (40:14) They’re already gone.
Yeah.
Yes.
Federico Ramallo (40:33) you if you use AI under the table, you know, covered, then you’re cheating. And that’s, know, that’s not the spirit of what the interview should be about, right? If it’s over, if you’re using AI to, you know, to enhance, but you’re still driving, then, you know, I think it’s a good use for AI, right?
Maeve Ferguson (40:36) Yeah.
Thank
Federico Ramallo (40:53) Yeah, are you using AI as a crutch to kind of hide your mediocrity, right? ⁓ Yeah, and the, I mean, I don’t know exactly where to draw the line, but kind of those ideas. And then the other thing we’ve been exploring is how much, know, agentic AI should we allow on the development side, right? And the best answer I had so far is,
Maeve Ferguson (40:59) you
Hmm.
Federico Ramallo (41:22) I don’t care as long as the output is there, right? And I say, yes, but the token efficiency of somebody that actually knows what they’re doing, right? And can guide the agents with specific questions, you know, it’s going to be 10 times more efficient than somebody that is just, you know, ask AI generic questions, right?
Maeve Ferguson (41:25) Mm-hmm.
Yep.
It’s the same.
Rubbish in, rubbish out, it’s the same as anything. Any walk of life, your iPads are only going to be as good as the brains of what went into it in the first place.
Federico Ramallo (41:52) Yes. So, you know, changing a bit of topic, but if an expert wants to start, you know, this week or, you know, now, what are the first steps you would recommend to, you know, build their diagnostic asset?
Maeve Ferguson (41:59) Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so I always would start with begin with the end in mind. Okay, so where are you sending people? What is your offer suite? Okay, it might be one offer, might have three offers, whatever it may be, just map out that offer suite. And then what you want to do is kind of reverse engineer out of that, what is your IP? So you mightn’t have thought of your intellectual property through this lens before, but what is your IP? What are the pillars of your framework? What are the pieces that
you want to measure people on as they go through your diagnostic to then give them either a score in the gap analysis example that I used or an archetype that where they discover something really amazing about themselves. And then from there, you want to make sure that you’re taking that IP, coming up with the categories that make up each subject, the subcategories that make up those categories. And then ultimately, the questions that you want to ask that when answered in a certain way,
mean something about that person. And then the whole idea is with the scoring and weighting of scoring and inverse scoring and all of the different things that go into diagnostics and the branching logic and different permutations that you can have, we’re able then to marry this top of funnel copy and messaging and positioning through this routing engine, through this mechanism that segments and classifies every single lead right through to your offers. And then that becomes
what I call a permanent asset inside your company. So there’s work to do to build it. But once it’s built, it’s built. And then when you bolt on the AI agents that analyze and optimize everything, it just becomes a self-improving flywheel over time where you build the machine, you run the water through the pipes, and then you let the data guide exactly what you need to do next. And now we just have these amazing AI agents who are analyzing all of that.
data and reporting on it to tell us exactly what move to make next.
Federico Ramallo (44:05) any final advice before we wrap it up?
Maeve Ferguson (44:08) My top advice would be, and this is a quick one that you can do today, is anybody who is having sales conversations with people who are the wrong fit, apply that Rich Nitch positioning lens to your top of funnel messaging and it will completely change the who that you’re bringing in and then the diagnostic becomes a sophisticated machine that you can put into that. But that is such an easy quick one that I see so many people trying.
to sell their offers to people who are on the struggle bus and all they have to do is bring all of their messaging through that rich niche positioning lens, completely change the who that they’re bringing into the world and everything just starts to become so much easier than it is right now.
Federico Ramallo (44:51) Amazing, Maeve, thank you for joining us today.
Maeve Ferguson (44:55) Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.