Grab a pen. This will take five minutes and save you weeks.
If you're a founder or revenue leader, here's how to test whether your messaging is clear, sharp, and doing its job.
Write down these nine things:
- Three results your clients get from working with you.
- Three characteristics of your ideal client.
- Three reasons that the ideal client might not hire you.
Your messaging isn't ready if you can't write it clearly and quickly. If you can write it, but it's not addressed across your website, pitch deck, LinkedIn, and sales collateral, you're probably losing deals you should be winning.
Here's what this looks like in practice. Say you're a SaaS company that helps HR teams streamline employee onboarding:
Results clients get:
- Onboarding time reduced from 3 weeks to 5 days.
- Fewer errors in compliance paperwork.
- Better new hire experience, leading to improved retention in the first 90 days.
Ideal client characteristics:
- HR lead or People Ops at a Series A/B company with 50-500 employees.
- Growing headcount rapidly and struggling with manual onboarding.
- Has budget allocated for HR tech but hasn't found the right tool yet.
Why they might hesitate:
- They think their internal tools or spreadsheets are "good enough for now."
- They're overwhelmed and see a new tool as more work, not less.
- They were burned by a clunky implementation before and are wary of switching again.
If those nine points aren’t clear in the company’s narrative—through the deck, the pitch, and how the team speaks about the product—there’s a messaging gap that’s holding everything back. Your marketing makes people work too hard to determine why you're valuable.
They'll move on.
If you're the CEO, founder, or investor and the story isn't sticking, this is where to start. Don't start with more leads or campaigns. Start by fixing the message. It can be as simple as this process if you are one product but even at the multi-product level. You don't need to over-complicate it and be clever. Be clear.
Action action action:
Investors, Operating Partners and Heads of Platform — this week's tangible prompt:
Look at any underperforming GTM motion in your portfolio. Ask:
- Can this company explain its value prop in one clear sentence?
- Is their differentiation apparent above the fold on their site?
- Do they speak to real buyer objections or just multiple features?
Push CEOs to rethink the scaling pipeline challenge. More leads won't save you. You don’t need more leads—your marketing just sucks. To repeat the point: most early-stage teams don’t need more leads. They need sharper messaging that resonates with the right buyers and converts the attention they already have.
Run this drill:
- Take their last five LinkedIn posts. Would you engage with them if you didn't already know the company?
- Look at their homepage. Is it clear in 10 seconds what they do, for whom, and why it matters?
- Watch their demo. Is it 80% product tour or 80% buyer insight?
If the answer to any of these is fuzzy — it's a messaging problem, not a lead problem.
CEO prompt:
Have the hard conversation with your GTM team this week:
- Where are we adding noise instead of clarity?
- What's the one idea we want every buyer to walk away with?
- If we deleted every asset except three, which ones would we keep?
Then, go back and rewrite your homepage, your deck, and your next five LinkedIn posts around that.
Good messaging doesn't add more — it strips things away until what's left is undeniable.
That's it for today.
See you next Saturday.
