# Playbook: Great Leads Selection

> Choose one of six lead types — Offer, Promise, Problem-Solution, Big-Secret, Proclamation, Story — strictly by awareness stage.

## Origin

**Michael Masterson** (pen name of **Mark Ford**) & **John Forde**, *Great Leads* (2011). This is the operational bridge between Schwartz's theoretical Awareness axis (1966) and an actual opening paragraph. Where Schwartz says "match your message to the prospect's mental state," Masterson/Forde say: here are the six ways an opening can *be*, ranked from most direct to most indirect, and here is exactly which one to use at each of the five awareness stages. This is the only playbook in the set that isn't optional — per §5.1, it's the master's **first computation** on every job, before any other school gets applied.

## When to use it

- **Always, at the top of every job.** This isn't a situational tool like the others — it's the mandatory first decision that determines which of the other nine playbooks even makes sense to layer on top.
- Whenever a brief specifies (or the master has confirmed) an awareness stage — if that stage is missing, per §1.2/§5.1, the correct move is to stop and request it, not to guess a lead type.

## When NOT to use it

- There is no "don't use it" case for the selection step itself — skipping it is the single most expensive and most common error in the discipline (§3.1: "wrong-stage copy is the #1 conversion failure"). What can be misapplied is treating the *chosen* lead type as license to skip everything else — a Story lead for an Unaware audience still needs proof, a single CTA, and a named mechanism downstream; the lead type governs only the opening ~100-800 words.

## Step-by-step build

1. **Read the awareness stage off the brief** (Unaware / Problem-Aware / Solution-Aware / Product-Aware / Most-Aware). If absent, stop.
2. **Map to lead type** using the deterministic table in §3.1:
   - Unaware → **Story** or **Proclamation** (indirect; dramatize a symptom or make a bold claim; no product mentioned yet).
   - Problem-Aware → **Problem-Solution** or **Big-Secret** (name the pain vividly; PAS-style agitation lives here).
   - Solution-Aware → **Problem-Solution** or **Promise** (position your mechanism as the best category answer).
   - Product-Aware → **Promise** or **Offer** (lead with the differentiating benefit plus proof).
   - Most-Aware → **Offer** (product, price, urgency, guarantee — up front, no throat-clearing).
3. **Declare the tag** — write the lead type and awareness stage as an explicit, visible tag on the artifact (the §8 rubrics require this to be checkable, not implicit).
4. **Write the opening to spec** — 100-800 words (Masterson/Forde's figure for the portion of a long-form piece that does ~80% of the persuasive work), staying strictly inside the chosen lead type's register until the piece transitions into the shared spine (mechanism → proof → offer, §3.2).
5. **Cross-check against sophistication.** Awareness picks the lead type; sophistication (§3.1 axis 2) picks how much mechanism-naming that lead type needs to carry — the two axes multiply, per §3.1's explicit instruction.

## Worked mini-example

Brief: prospect is **Problem-Aware**, market is **Sophistication Stage 3**.

Lead type selected: **Problem-Solution**, tagged.

Opening (Problem-Solution lead, ~120 words): "You've hit the same revenue ceiling three years running. It isn't a motivation problem — you work harder than most people you know. It's that everything you've built lives in your head and your calendar, not in an asset a buyer could underwrite. That's not a character flaw. It's a structural gap, and there's a specific mechanism for closing it: the 8-Level Readiness Ladder, which converts scattered client work into a graded, provable asset. Here's how the ladder works..."

Note the lead type (Problem-Solution) stays intact through the pain-naming, then hands off into the Sophistication-3-required named mechanism, satisfying both axes at once.

## How the verify gate applies

Every §8 rubric that touches a lead (`sales-page`, `vsl-script`, `landing-hero-variants`) requires the **lead-type tag** and **awareness-stage tag** to be present and internally consistent — this is Great Leads Selection made into a linter check, not a suggestion. §8.5's `landing-hero-variants` rubric goes further: **all variants sharing the same lead type is itself a failure** — diversity across the six types is required when producing a variant set, forcing the writer to actually exercise the selection table rather than defaulting to one favorite lead every time. An undeclared lead type on any deliverable is treated, per §8.6, as evidence the primary computation (§5.1) was skipped entirely.