Nine ways recon fails before it starts.

Recon is worth exactly what its answer changes. Before you pay for it, you decide what you need to know about each company on your list, and almost every objective that goes wrong goes wrong in one of nine ways. All nine are catchable before you spend anything.

They come from recon that ran and didn't pay off. They're ordered by how expensive the mistake is, which isn't the same as how obvious it is.

Nothing changes with the answer

The most common failure and the most expensive, because the recon still costs the same. If a yes and a no lead you to do the identical thing, the answer is interesting rather than useful, and interesting isn't a business outcome.

Test it before anything else: what will I do differently with the yeses than with the nos? If the honest answer is "nothing, but it would be good to know," you've found trivia. Drop it and find the thing that does change what you do.

An answer earns its place by sorting. If a yes and a no lead to the same next step, you paid to learn nothing.

The list is wrong, so the answer sorts nobody

Every objective rests on a structural fact that makes the companies candidates in the first place. Whether customers have anything to eat while they wait sorts tire shops into served and unserved, because tire shops have waiting areas with people stuck in them. Put the same objective to parts counters and almost every answer is no, and none of them are prospects, because nobody sits at a parts counter for an hour with nothing to do.

Same objective, same answers, zero value. This one is worth its own page, because it's invisible in the wording: the objective reads fine and the whole list is wrong.

Nobody you can reach knows it

Purchase intent, budget cycles, capital plans and vendor relationships are known by two or three people at a company, and they're rarely the ones anybody reaches. The person who runs the place day to day can't tell you whether the business is considering a major purchase, and no amount of rewording changes that.

The fix is almost never better wording. Either go after something the people you can reach actually know, or accept that you need a different list reached a different way, which is more expensive and slower, and is a real finding rather than a failure.

It takes more than memory

Anything a person would have to look up, check with a colleague, or sit and think about has already lost. They'll hedge, guess, or stop answering, and a hedged answer is worse than none, because it enters your data looking like a real one.

Whether the liability coverage already renewed this year is something a person remembers. Whether they're happy with their current provider is an opinion they'd have to form on the spot, which is why it produces mush.

It's an opinion, not a fact

Some things can't be established by asking at all. Whether the shop is well run, whether the owner is open to new ideas, whether the team struggles with scheduling: these are judgments, and the person answering has to form one about their own workplace. What comes back is a mood. Entered as a yes or a no, a mood looks exactly like a fact.

Go after a state the business is in. A vending machine is there or it isn't. Coverage has renewed this year or it hasn't. Jobs are scheduled on paper or in a system. If the fact only exists as somebody's opinion of themselves, no wording recovers it, and that's a targeting finding rather than a copy problem: what you wanted to know isn't the kind of thing anyone can tell you.

It shows who benefits from the answer

The moment a business can tell there's a vendor behind the interest, the answer gets performed instead of reported. People aren't being dishonest; they're managing a sales interaction, which is a different activity from telling somebody how things are.

Whether a business is happy with its vending provider, wants to switch insurance carriers or would be interested in software is a vendor's agenda, and it gets a defended answer. Whether customers have something to eat while they wait, whether the coverage already renewed, whether jobs are scheduled on paper: those are facts about the business, and they get real ones.

The second set is also framed as the customer's need rather than the vendor's product, and that's a separate test. Whether there's a vending machine doesn't announce a pitch, but it's still what a vending company wants to know; a hungry customer wants to know whether there's anything to eat. Going after the need is also what makes the answer clean: free snacks on a counter and a machine in the corner are the same answer to the vendor, and an objective about the machine would have had to chase which kind. If your objective still has your category word in it, it's probably your agenda in a customer's mouth.

Everyone would say yes

More Instagram followers, more revenue, more growth: everyone on the list wants them, so the answer sorts nobody. It also does damage on the way out, because nobody checks whether a business would like more money unless a pitch is coming.

The fix isn't a reword. It's a different fact. Find out the thing you don't already know, the one that changes how you'd engage them rather than whether they want the outcome. Selling audience growth to realtors, whether they want more followers is worthless, and whether they mostly represent buyers or sellers rewrites the whole pitch. Selling to an ecommerce brand, it isn't whether they want to grow on Instagram but whether Instagram is actually producing orders, which is a real yes or no, and the gap it exposes is the reason to reach out at all.

It's two things at once

Whether a realtor works with investor buyers and handles off-market deals comes back as one yes or no covering two different facts, and you can't recover which. Each half is its own thing to find out, with its own answer.

Only a seller would want to know

The quietest failure, and the one most drafts have. The objective reads fine, survives every check above, and still gets a guarded answer, because the only person who would plausibly want it is someone selling to the business. Then it's a sales pitch however it's worded, and no rewrite fixes that.

The test that matters: would anyone but a vendor want to know this? If not, the fix is a different fact, one the business would tell anybody who asked, not different wording.

Something only a seller would want to know is a pitch with the serial number filed off.

The check that costs nothing

Run every objective against the nine before it runs against a list:

1. What do I do differently for a yes than a no? (If nothing, stop.)
2. What structural fact makes these companies candidates at all?
3. Can the people you'll reach actually know this?
4. Can they answer from memory, without going to look?
5. Is it a state the business is in, or an opinion they'd have to form?
6. Does it reveal who benefits from the answer?
7. Would every business on the list answer the same way?
8. Is it one fact, or two?
9. Would anyone but a vendor want to know?

An objective that survives review and then wastes a whole list costs far more than one rejected in five minutes. Most of the ones that fail in the field would have failed this list on a whiteboard.