“We Need Better Messaging” Is Almost Never About the Words
Before you hire for messaging, run these 3 checks
Good product, unclear category usually sounds like “we need better messaging.”
When buyers don’t know where to place you, every claim feels optional. Your homepage reads like a menu. Your deck sounds different in every meeting. Sales keeps “trying angles.”
Copy is where the confusion shows up first.
The instinct is to fix the message: write a brief, bring in a consultant, run a positioning sprint.
Before you do, run 3 checks.
Most founders treat all 3 as copy problems. Usually, the words are the last layer to fix.
Whose problem are you solving?
Yahoo never settled the problem definition. Media company. Search engine. Portal.
The definition kept shifting internally, so the market never had a stable frame to adopt.
Then Google named the problem: finding information on the internet was broken. Google won by authoring the problem first. The engineering made that frame believable.
Every market has a hub: the problem definition everything else organizes around. By the time Yahoo tried to sharpen its message, it was sharpening spokes on a flywheel Google had already built.
Start by listening for the frame customers use before you give them yours. Ask them to describe the problem you solve. Don’t seed the conversation. If they reach for industry-generic terms or competitor language, you’re in a borrowed frame.
The goal is precision: customers use your words when they explain the problem to someone else.
What does your customer become on the other side?
Once the market frame is clear, the message has to show who the customer becomes next.
For example:
Before: “We help B2B teams reduce time spent on manual reporting.”
After: “Your ops lead stops firefighting and starts running the function they were hired to run.”
Benefits make the solution easier to understand. Transformation gives the buyer a future to move toward.
The mistake is treating a strong benefit statement as a finished message. “We save your team 10 hours a week” confirms what the buyer already believes is possible. A benefit-only message leaves the buyer in the same reality, just with less pain.
Complete this sentence:
“After working with us, our customer becomes the kind of [role] who [does, decides, or leads] differently.”
If the sentence ends with what the product does or what the team saves, it’s still a benefit.
That sentence is load-bearing. Everything else hangs from it.
What happens after the customer says yes?
The buyer says yes. Then the message leaves the page.
A sharp category piece goes live. The investor deck and customer deck finally say the same thing.
Then a prospect gets on a call with sales.
The rep leads with features. The demo follows the old script. Nobody told them the narrative changed. Or they heard it once and never saw how it should change the conversation.
The message lives on the website. It dissolves the moment a human being takes over.
For example:
The homepage says, “We help ops teams move from reactive reporting to decision-ready visibility.”
But the sales call opens with, “Let me show you our dashboard filters.”
The narrative promised a new way to run the function. The conversation snapped back to product tour.
Test the message in 3 places: the first sales conversation, onboarding, and the 90-day check-in.
At each one, ask:
Does this interaction move the customer toward the transformation we promised, or does it revert to describing the product?
If every touchpoint reverts, the message has no operating foundation.
The fix is translation: turn the narrative into how the business behaves after the buyer shows up.
Run the checks before you hire.
If one fails, start there. The messaging brief gets easier once the real layer is named.
If all 3 pass, hire for copy.
P.S. If you’re unsure which layer is failing, start with the sales call. It usually exposes the truth fastest.