Messaging that doesn't arm the champion loses deals

I was listening to a sales call recently. A legal associate had been struggling with something — a slow, frustrating process — and had looked for a solution on his own. He found one he thought was right and brought it to his boss. Both of them ended up on the call.

This a pretty common pattern in B2B. The person who finds you and the person who approves the purchase are often not the same. Sometimes there's a seniority gap. Sometimes it's just two people with different roles. Either way, one person to advocate, and one to sign off.

The website is often the first sales conversation in that process, but I find many websites aren't built with that in mind.

The person who finds you has to sell internally on your behalf

When someone in your prospect's company lands on your site and thinks, “this could work,” their next step is often convincing someone else that the company should buy. That internal conversation happens without you in the room, without your sales deck, without anyone from your team there to answer questions or handle objections.

Often what they use to make that case comes from what they understood when they were on your site.

If the messaging was vague, they'll make a vague case. If it spoke clearly to the specific problem they were trying to solve, that's the case they'll make.

The website doesn't just need to convert the visitor. It also needs to give them enough information to convert someone else.

This is optimising for consumption, not just conversion. And it’s the job most website messaging isn't doing.

Written for the approver, missed by the person who found you

The default approach on B2B sites is to lead with business outcomes. ROI. Efficiency gains. Strategic impact. 10X this. Streamline that.

Language that sounds right in a boardroom, written for whoever holds the budget.

But the person who actually lands on your site first often isn't that person. They're looking for something more specific: evidence that you understand the problem they're dealing with right now, not a promise about what the business will look like in twelve months.

They want to know how you make their day-to-day better. This isn’t always the same as achieving some business outcome and could be as simple and functional as “Get an inbox that helps them speed through support tickets.” 

When the messaging doesn't speak to them, one of two things happens. They move on or they bring a weak internal case to the approver.

The approver never got a chance to say yes or no because the champion never got confident enough to make the ask.

But when the website gives the champion enough to build their case, they arrive on a sales call already convinced, already having made the case to their manager. 

That's what it looks like when the messaging is built for the person who found you, not just the person who signs off.