The Method · What is Selectability?

The odds you're picked.

Visibility is the odds you're seen. Selectability is the odds a buyer, at a given moment, picks you over the alternatives, doing nothing included.

SeenA
SeenB
Seen · pickedC
SeenD
SeenE
Five suppliers weighed. All five were seen.One picked. Four lost.

6sense, 2025: about 4,000 business buyers, purchases of US$25,000 or more.

A choice has seven stages. Seen is two.

Not a funnel. Each has to hold at the moment of choice, in whatever order the buyer meets them.

KeptA year later, she asks the first six again at renewal. The favourite won five stages and lost at Bought. No visibility report would have shown it.

The moment is the unit.

One kind of buyer, at one step, with one need, buying one way. One number for the whole brand hides exactly what you need to know.

One moment, heard three ways

Café group · Deciding

“Can one bookkeeper handle three café sites with different rosters?”
“Is a hospitality specialist worth paying more for, across three sites?”
“What should I ask before moving three cafés to a new bookkeeper?”

5 kinds of buyer × 7 steps = 35 moments. More questions steady each reading; they never add moments.

Example: Monday by Nine, the invented café bookkeeper from the book. Dashed cells are moments that don't exist for this brand: left out, never counted as zero.

Seen isn't selected, written as arithmetic.

Known and Found are the gate. The other four are the quality of what buyers find. A brand nobody finds scores zero, however good its answers.

How do your buyers buy? The mode sets the weights.

Starts on the book's worked example: the café bookkeeper's first moment. Move anything.

Gate√(Known × Found)55
Qualityweighted average of the four38
This momentGate × Quality ÷ 10021

Rarely selected

The score is the weighted average of every moment, from 0 to 100. Moments nearer the decision, and your main buyers, count for more. Every score carries a range.

Breadth beats lumps.

The same amount of presence scores higher spread across more moments. Being on more lists some of the time beats owning half of them.

Evenly: found in half the answers, everywhere71
In lumps: every answer in half the moments50

Four kinds of moment.

Two measures sort every moment. Hidden is the common one: you have the answer and nobody is sent to it.

The machine picks youThe machine doesn't Your site answers the buyer
WonRecommended, and your own page backs it up.
HiddenYou have the answer. Nobody is sent to it.
Your site doesn't
BorrowedRecommended on the strength of what others wrote. Fragile.
EmptyNobody picks you, and nothing of yours answers.

The rules that keep it honest.

They matter more than the formula. They're what stop the score becoming the next visibility number.

Questions that name you don't count towards Found.Appearing when you were asked for proves nothing. They only test whether you’re believed.
Every score carries a range.AI answers vary from one asking to the next. One number alone would claim a certainty nobody has.
Small samples are pulled to the average.Three lucky answers can't make a moment look won.
Not measured means not shown.A stage that wasn't measured is left out. It's never guessed.
A new method resets the baseline.A change of method is never reported as progress.
Only measured outcomes move the score.Publishing a page, finishing a task or switching on a tool does nothing by itself. A score that rises because you used the vendor's product is an advertisement.
Weights and changelog, v1.0Read chapter 30 →

Measure. Fix. Ask again.

A score is only worth taking if it changes what you do next. Find the stage where each moment is lost, fix the biggest gap first, write down what you expect, then ask the same questions again.

What we don't know yet

Nobody has yet shown that a selectability score moves with market share. The weights are judgement until they're calibrated against real sales, and no measure of the odds outranks your own sales data. The method is published so you can check the working, or run it by hand for five moments this quarter.

Run the method on your brand.

Your main buyer, their moments, five assistants asked three times each. One score with its range, and the three gaps to fix first. Free.