Scale: Episode 4 | “Just tell me what you fucking do”

Dave Heywood (00:00)

Nobody cares about your story or your brand. The market cares about what you can do and whether you can be trusted to deliver the goods. This is Scale, An OX7 Partners podcast, and I’m Dave Heywood Now you might have thought that was some harsh words. But indulge me a little.

Do me a favour. While you’re listening to this, open your website right now and look at your first headline. If it says something along the lines of we’re an integrated partner specialising in bespoke transformation and unlocking human potential.

I want you to do something about that. You might think you sound premium. You might think you’re being buyer-led. You might think that you’re being benefit driven.

But in most cases what we’re really doing is hiding what we actually do behind what is essentially a wall of corporate poetry.

Particularly if you sell something like expertise or

an intangible service as opposed to a product you can touch and feel. It’s really easy for us to overcompensate. But trust me, your your prospects are not waking up at three o’clock in the morning thinking, My God, I really need some holistic alignment in my business.

What they might wake up thinking is something along the lines of shit, our post-merger integration is six months behind schedule and my team are absolutely at their wit’s end.

But regardless of what the challenge is a vague value proposition isn’t just shoddy writing, it has a direct impact across your entire business

a lot of this is the kind of language that’s really easily pulled together if we look at some established competitors we perhaps read a little bit too much into start with why and various other

pieces of literature.

Or we’re so far into the machine that we forget that most people won’t actually have a clue what you do.

A trap we can fall into here is that established firms can get away with slightly abstract statements. So PwC don’t need to explain to anyone that they do accounting and consultancy. And sales force can talk about shaping the future of business till the cows come home because everyone already knows that they sell a CRM. But most of us don’t have that luxury. And if someone has to spend

time and energy figuring out what you’re actually offering here, then you’re failing at the first hurdle.

So let’s look at how people actually buy services.

So marketers like to talk a lot about category entry points. Essentially a fancy term for a very, very simple concept. Buyers only buy when a specific real world trigger happens to them or their business. when someone is actually out in the market looking to hire someone, they’re looking for a really specific solution to that trigger or context.

They’re not looking for abstract methodologies. So if we look at a bad example.

The Strategic Alignment Group do change management.

what they actually say is we help forward thinking enterprises navigate inflection points by harmonizing structural agility and intentional leadership.

What does that actually mean? Are they executive coaches? Do they implement HR software? Anyone’s guess. By not naming a specific tangible capability, they make themselves completely impenetrable.

If your car breaks down, you want a mechanic, not a philosopher.

And so if your messaging lives in the clouds, then the very people you’re trying to attract who are ready to spend money with you right now will skip right past you to the next person who can articulate cleanly.

And so what does this look like when a firm gets it right? If we look at a business similar business, the McChrystal Group. So they’re a leadership advisory firm, and they’ve actually got a retired four star general at the helm

They made a choice to lock in directly into a onto a concrete, universal pain point, corporate gridlock. And so when we look at their description, we help complex organisations transform disruptive change into competitive advantage by replacing rigid, slow moving hierarchies with adaptable networks that drive rapid, localized decision making.

Now that might still be a little bit flowery for some people’s tastes, but regardless, it has a clear problem, slow moving hierarchies, it has a clear fix, adaptable networks, and the result, which is faster decisions.

There’s less mystery here. It still sounds premium and elevated and purpose and outcomes driven, but it’s also completely functional.

A CEO might read that and immediately know exactly when and why to use them.

So when your messaging is a vague cloud of strategic alignment and transformational synergies, it it can have a real downstream impact in various different places. First of all, your sales team can’t write a clean, cold email or bus effective outreach because they have no concrete pitch.

Following on from that, every sales call becomes a grueling game where somebody has to explain in detail exactly what you do.

And it makes it even harder for decision makers and buying committees because

That clarity of offer and where exactly you fit is just really murky.

And there’s some data from Forrester as well, which shows that over 70% of B2B buyers they want to understand what you do on your website before they ever even agree to a phone call. So if you force a prospect to schedule a discovery call just to figure out what you actually sell, well they’re not going to bother. And if it’s very little on your end articulating what you do.

What’s the likes of Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT going to going to pull on? How will they articulate what you do and what you offer?

So I’ve got a little bit homework for you. Don’t worry, it’s really easy.

grab someone, anyone, who doesn’t know your business inside out at all. Show them your website Show them your website for five to ten seconds. Close a laptop. Ask them what do we sell and who buys it?

The answer to that question will be incredibly revealing.

But if I leave you with anything, it’s stop writing corporate poetry.

Start making it really clear what it is you do so people can actually hire you.

Thanks for listening, I hope you found that useful. I’m Dave Heywood and this is Scale, an OX7 Partners podcast.