“We don’t have a succinct way within 10 seconds of communicating what we do and the value we provide.” The CEO of Focus Solutions, a healthcare IT company where I served as fractional CMO, said that about a business that had built something real over fifteen years. That’s the problem clear brand messaging solves: a stranger should be able to tell, quickly, who you’re for, what problem you solve and why they should believe you.
When they can’t, the instinct is to rewrite the words. In my experience the words are rarely the whole problem. More often, nobody has decided who the company is for, which problem it leads with, or which of its services comes first, and until somebody does, rewording mostly moves the confusion around.
Focus had been through more than one website redesign without fixing it. Its messaging flattened all of that into generic managed-services language, and sales conversations drifted into technical jargon. What changed things was a decision. Focus stopped presenting itself as one more managed IT vendor and took a position no competitor held: the one partner that puts a healthcare organization’s IT, data, applications and security under one roof, judged by whether they serve its clinical and operating goals. Nine months later, its sales team was still using the framework built on that position in prospect conversations. I don’t have a buyer-side measure to show you. The test I do have is that the people selling every day kept choosing to use it.
If your company is better than the way it comes across, or your salespeople spend the first meeting explaining what you do, this is for you, whether you run the company, its marketing or its sales team.
How to tell your messaging isn’t clear
Confused buyers don’t tend to say so. They go quiet, or they pick the firm they understood. So look for the signs in your own pipeline:
- It takes a second meeting to explain what you do.
- Prospects keep asking some version of “so what exactly do you do?” instead of moving on to timing, price and whether you fit.
- Referrals arrive unsure why they were sent to you. People can only pass along what they can explain.
- Your best clients describe you in words that appear nowhere on your website.
- Your website, your sales deck and your salespeople each describe a slightly different company.
If it takes several meetings to get your value across, look at what you lead with before you blame the buyer.
Why the message goes vague
Most of the causes come from being good at the work.
One is being close to it. After years of doing the work, you explain it the way you think about it, with the method, the nuance and the vocabulary that make you good at it. Buyers don’t have that context. They want to know whether you solve their problem, and how you do it can wait until they’re interested. People inside a company are often too close to judge their own message, which is why I think an owner is probably the worst-placed person to judge their own website.
Growth does it too. A company starts with one clear thing it does for one kind of buyer. A good client asks for something adjacent, and saying yes is good business. Years later the website lists every capability with equal weight, and a buyer can’t tell which one you’re actually known for. You can keep doing all of them. The message just has to lead with one.
And sometimes the company has never decided who it’s for. A message written to appeal to every possible buyer ends up specific to none of them, and buyers read general language as a sign you don’t understand their situation. Deciding who you’re not for is often where clear messaging starts.
Clear and short are different problems
The standard advice is to cut words, and sometimes that’s right. But how much a buyer wants to read depends on the buyer. Someone skimming between meetings needs the point in the first line. An engineer or a CFO weighing a large purchase may want the detail, and a page stripped of it can read like a company with nothing behind its claims. When a leadership team tells me a page has too many words, I ask whether their buyer is “someone who is too busy in the day and is just never going to read” or “someone who appreciates the depth.” The answer changes the page.
Jargon is a separate question from length. “Comprehensive solutions” and “driving outcomes” are phrases any competitor could put on its site without changing a thing about how it works, so they tell a buyer nothing. A long page in plain, specific language can be perfectly clear, and a short one built from phrases like those still won’t be.
How to find the clear version
- Make the decisions first. Write down who you’re for, the problem you lead with, the one thing you want to be known for, and the proof that backs it. If the leadership team can’t agree on those, that disagreement is the real finding, and no copywriter can resolve it for you. At Focus, getting there started with my team interviewing every department head before anyone wrote a line of copy.
- Borrow your customers’ words. Ask a few of your best clients how they’d describe you to a peer, and listen to how buyers describe their own problem on sales calls. Their language is often plainer than yours and closer to what the next buyer is searching for.
- Lead with the buyer and the problem. Say who you help and what changes for them. Keep the method, the process and the full service list for the people who are already interested.
- Test it on someone with your buyer’s job. Pick someone who doesn’t know you, give them your homepage for a minute, then ask who it’s for and what you’d do for them. Compare their answer with what the leadership team intended.
- Watch the questions in first meetings. Over the following weeks, notice whether prospects stop asking what you do and start asking how long it takes, what it costs and whether you’ve worked with companies like theirs. If they do, the message is working.
When it isn’t a messaging problem
Sometimes buyers understand you perfectly and still choose someone else. If lost deals keep coming back with price, timing or fit as the reason, rewriting the website won’t change that, and the money is better spent on the offer itself or on the sales follow-up. And sometimes a company really isn’t different from its competitors at the foundation. No message can supply a difference that isn’t there, and until something underneath changes, buyers will compare you on price.
Positioning and messaging work is part of what I sell, and the agency I founded writes messaging for clients, so you should know where my interest lies. A leadership team that can agree on the decisions above, and has a good writer, may not need outside help at all. Help earns its place when the team can’t agree, or is too close to see what a buyer sees. That’s the work I do as a brand consultant, and if it sounds like where you are, tell me about it here.
