Would Your Business Make the Shortlist When Someone Researches You?
Executive Summary
When a company goes looking for what you sell, the first person sizing you up usually isn’t the decision-maker. It’s the person sent to bring back a short list of vetted options, and by the time that list reaches the boss, you were on it or you weren’t. This article walks you through a simple thirty-minute exercise, the hunter-gatherer test, to see how your business looks to that person, and shows you what to fix first if you wouldn’t make the cut.
Somewhere right now, a person you’ve never met may be deciding whether your business is worth a phone call.
They’re not the owner. They’re not the one who signs the check. They’re the office manager, the assistant, the project lead who got handed a job this morning: “Go find us three good options.”
I call this person the hunter-gatherer. And if you run a small business, they might be the most important audience you’ve never thought about.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. By the time a decision-maker sees a shortlist, much of the vetting has usually already happened. You were either on that list or you weren’t, and nobody called to tell you which.
The good news is you can find out. There’s a simple exercise you can run this week, with no budget and no special tools, that shows you exactly how your business looks to the person building that list. Let me walk you through it.
Who is the hunter-gatherer?
When an organization buys something significant, the decision-maker rarely does the digging themselves. More often, they delegate it.
So someone on the team gets the assignment: find options for a new accountant, a new sign company, a new IT provider, whatever the business needs. Their job is to come back with a handful of vetted choices, usually about three, that the boss can look over with confidence.
Notice what that means. This person isn’t buying anything. They’re recommending. And a recommendation carries personal risk. If they bring back a company that turns out to be a mess, that reflects on them.
So they’re not just looking for someone who can do the work. They’re looking for options they can hand over without worrying about it.
What are they actually looking for?
Put yourself in their chair for a minute. You’ve got a list of maybe ten companies from a quick search and a couple of asks around. You have an hour to narrow it to three. What makes the cut?
In my experience, it usually comes down to a few things:
- Can I tell quickly what this company does and who they do it for? If they have to work to figure you out, you’re probably off the list.
- Is there evidence, not just claims? Real projects, real clients, real answers to real questions. “We’re the best in the area” isn’t evidence. A page that answers the exact question they’re researching is.
- Does this company look current and cared for? A site that feels abandoned raises a quiet question: if they don’t tend to their own storefront, how will they treat mine?
- Will this choice make me look good? This is the one nobody says out loud. The hunter-gatherer wants the boss to glance at the list and think, “Nice work. These look solid.”
None of that requires a big marketing budget. It requires being findable, clear, and credible to a stranger moving fast.
How to run the hunter-gatherer exercise
Here’s the exercise itself. Block off thirty minutes and pretend you’ve been hired by your own best-fit customer.
First, define who sent you. Picture the exact kind of customer you most want more of, and imagine their hunter-gatherer has been told to find three options for what you sell.
Second, go hunting. Search the way they would. Type in the plain-language phrases a normal person would use, not your industry’s terms. Look at what comes up, including where you rank and who shows up around you.
Third, visit your own website as a stranger. Give yourself two minutes, because that’s about what you’d get. Can a first-time visitor tell what you do, who you serve, and why you’re trustworthy? Is there anything a nervous recommender could point to as proof?
Fourth, make the honest call. Knowing what you now know, would you put your own company on that list of three? Not “could you defend it if asked.” Would it make the cut on its own?
What if I run this and I don’t like what I see?
This is the part where it’s tempting to close the browser and go back to work. Please don’t.
If your business didn’t pass your own test, that’s not a verdict on your company. Plenty of excellent businesses are nearly invisible online, and plenty of mediocre ones look great. The exercise doesn’t measure how good you are. It measures how easy you are to choose.
That’s fixable, and you don’t have to fix everything at once. Pick the single biggest gap you found. Maybe your homepage doesn’t say plainly who you serve. Maybe there’s little proof anywhere, few examples, few answered questions, not much a stranger could lean on. Maybe you simply didn’t show up in the search at all.
One gap, one fix. Then run the exercise again in a few months.
The person you’re really marketing to
Here’s the shift worth keeping. It’s easy to picture your marketing speaking to the person who makes the final decision. But often, the make-or-break audience is the person assembling the options: someone with limited time, no industry knowledge, and their own credibility on the line.
Your job is to make their job easier. When your business is easy to understand, easy to verify, and easy to recommend, the hunter-gatherer does your selling for you. They walk into their boss’s office and say, “We need to talk to these guys.”
You don’t need a perfect website or a big campaign to get there. You just need to look at your business through the eyes of the person doing the looking.
Thirty minutes, one honest search. That’s the whole assignment. Would you make the list?
Common Questions
What if most of my business comes from referrals?
Referrals still get checked. It’s very common for a referred name to get looked up online before anyone picks up the phone, and often it’s the hunter-gatherer doing that looking. A strong referral gets you considered. What they find when they check is what keeps you on the list.
What if I don’t show up in the search at all?
It happens more often than you’d think, and it’s usually a language problem before it’s a technology problem. Your site may describe what you do in industry terms while your customers search in plain everyday words. Start by putting the phrases real customers use onto your pages, and go from there.
Do I need to hire someone to fix what I find?
Not necessarily, and certainly not right away. Many of the biggest gaps this exercise reveals are clarity gaps: a homepage that doesn’t say who you serve, or proof that exists in your filing cabinet but not on your site. Those are fixes you can start yourself. Pick one, fix it, and see what the next run of the exercise shows.
How often should I run this exercise?
A couple of times a year is plenty. Run it once now to get your honest baseline, fix the biggest gap you find, then come back to it after a few months to see what changed. It’s a checkup, not a full-time job.
Related Resources
A Simple Website Review For Sales Success
If the exercise showed you your website is the weak spot, this walks you through reviewing it the way your customer would, before you spend a dime fixing anything.
When the Referral Sends Them to Look, What Do They Find?
If this left you wondering how often people are already checking you out without ever calling, this looks at the moment a referral sends someone to your site and what they find when they get there.
Data vs. Information: Forgetting What It’s Like To Be The Buyer
If seeing your business through a stranger’s eyes felt hard, this is a reminder of how much easier marketing gets when you remember what it’s like to be the buyer.