Stakeholders are important. They own the budgets, sign off on ideas, manage teams, and carry accountability for business results. We often treat stakeholders as obstacles who slow down deadlines, but ignoring them almost always leads to scrapped drafts, unmet expectations, and wasted time. As important as they are, creativity and execution doesn’t come from stakeholders. That’s why they hired us.
I’ve done a lot of B2B website launches. Some went smoothly. Others didn’t. Some were planned, written, designed and launched within a month. Some took six months. The website projects that dragged on the longest were the ones without a true North Star. They were designed to please stakeholders first and for the buyer second.
Everyone in B2B tech has an opinion on marketing because, unlike other roles, marketing is something everyone thinks they can do. As long as every idea is considered and the stakeholder signs off, we get to keep our jobs and go home. We launch the website. We high-five over Slack. And prospects bounce without filling out a demo request form.
The Cost of Content by Committee
When messaging is designed to keep internal teams happy rather than solve a customer’s headache, we create holes across our entire pipeline.
- Demo calls turn into free feature walkthroughs. Our AEs spend forty minutes sharing their screen, clicking through tabs, and explaining how the every tab works. The prospect nods and ends the call with a promise to “review this with the team.” When that prospect tries to justify the purchase to their boss, they can’t explain what problem the software solves.
- Discovery calls move backward. Instead of using a thirty-minute introductory call to qualify budget or learn who makes the buying decision, our sales reps follows a script regardless of who is on the meeting. Sometimes clarifying product confusion before they can even start selling.
- Simpler, inferior products win your accounts. A competitor with half our engineering clout and a fraction of our features walks away with the contract. Their homepage makes the business outcome obvious in eight seconds. In the demo, they show the buyer how their life gets easier rather than an exhaustive feature list.
How to Pull Your Positioning Out of Revision Hell
If you want messaging that moves deals, stop brainstorming in a vacuum and start listening to your prospects.
1. Mine your call recordings for friction. Pull the last ten discovery calls or demo conversations. Listen for the moments where the prospect sighs, pauses, or leans in to vent. Note the language they use when describing their daily issues. Notice their frustration with spreadsheets they hate updating. That emotion is your messaging foundation.
2. Translate features into pain relief. Take your current product sheets and strike out every sentence that just describes how the solution works. Replace it with examples of why (qualitative data) and what (quantitative data). Show them that team will be more efficient when they eliminate six hours of weekly spreadsheet edits. Give the buyer a concrete business case that shows why your thing makes their life better.
3. The “Can anyone else say this?” test. Pull up your homepage. Copy your headline and subhead into a blank document. Swap your company name for your closest competitor’s name. If the sentence still makes sense for their offering, your positioning is DOA. You wrote safe copy that bleeds into the category cacophony. Rewrite messaging around the specific, stubborn problem only your product solves.
Clear positioning does not happen by consensus. Stakeholders are crucial to its success. But it shouldn’t happen by committee either. Create the discipline to set aside egos, cut out the jargon, and speak directly to the person who needs what you have.
Curious how your current site or sales collateral reads to an outside buyer? Contact me, and I will take a look and send back two or three observations on where your content is ignoring your customer.
Content Disclaimer: The ideas and life experiences you read here are 100% my own. However, I use LLMs to outline, revise, or format drafts. I heavily edit the final product, but sometimes there is AI residue.
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