Please don’t make me talk about what we do

Why creating company messaging makes me want to die.

When I was a small child, I was fascinated by the washing machine. I think the sloshing sounds and the repetitive movement lulled me into some sort of trance state. When I got a bit older, it became a great base for my ghostbusters. When I got even older still, my entire work-life felt like drowning in an interminably punishing spin cycle full to the brim with scolding hot custard.

Perhaps if my parents had just bought me a Scalextric we wouldn’t be here now.

I’d managed to successfully repress this chapter of my life until recently. Just when I thought I was out of the washing machine, here it comes with its disgusting custardy hands to pull me back in. We recently started working with a marketing consultancy, who - I want to be very clear - are excellent and totally integral to our growth plans.

But I think I may have said the words, “I will shoot myself in the face” on our last call.

And the reason for this:

“It’s not totally clear what you do.”

Those seven dreadful words. Words I’ve said so many times. Words that genuinely triggered me. Words that slosh around the washing machine as steaming custard melts your eyes.

Immediately everyone on the call started to agree. I picked up the handgun from my desk and inserted the barrel into my mouth. The call went silent. For a moment I felt peace, knowing that I wouldn’t have to spend hour after hour debating value propositions, reviewing one-pagers, or storyboarding template proposals.

Knowing what you do and being able to articulate it is very important for any business - I’m categorically not disputing that. As someone who has spent years in marketing and pivoted to business development, I have a whole series of scars and opinions on this topic.

No one size fits all

First off, knowing what you do and articulating it isn’t actually a challenge for every business. If you sell sandwiches, you don’t need to overcomplicate that. You don’t need to sell effective hunger relief to a niche market; you can just make really nice bread. People will get that.

There are also a wide array of businesses in complex environments, such as B2B professional services that people just understand. Law firms, PR firms, and many others have well enough established heuristics and clearly defined customers who know what they need to not really stress as much about this.?

It’s the same for many tech products: project management, accounting, and instant messaging software for example.

If you have a box you can fit into - one that your target customers understand - do not fight that. You have been given a gift. Build on their understanding, don’t try to trash it and start from scratch if you don’t have to. Many founders resist being pigeon-holed into an existing category. Don’t make life more difficult for your customers. You can be the same but different.

If only everyone should be so lucky.

For start-ups doing something unprecedented or professional services firms with a very distinct offering, there’s a level of education that you need to provide customers to help them fit their need to your service or product.

What follows is not therefore a one-size fits all approach. It’s mainly aimed at high-value complex products and services, where humans are doing the talking.

The spin cycle

Let me unpack the trauma of that washing machine.

For many years I fought to align exactly those kinds of tech start-ups and professional service firms around a common framework that clarified what they did. These things tend to come to a head when you’re pulling together an investment deck, a brand strategy, or a website and need to commit to specific written-down words.

When this happens, people become nervous, resistant, and defensive. It becomes impossible to get alignment. Circular debates rage for hours, weeks, months, years…

Nobody wants to pin anything down - “We just solve important problems” - and, when everyone is too exhausted to care anymore, you arrive at a very high-level compromise of an end-result.

Then a week later someone flies in with some new idea and you all try to repress the whole horrible saga.

And that’s just stable businesses. In volatile and pivoting start-ups what the business does can be topsy-turvy for years.

This used to really frustrate me.

Now I’m delighted to be part of the problem.

I get it now. Selling something complex and genuinely different is not easily repeatable or solid; every conversation is subtly different - it’s? liquid. And the messaging needs to be too.

Marketing doesn’t close

Marketing wants to pin people down to a consistent set of messaging because it makes attraction easier. But marketing doesn’t close. And good business development people don’t want to be pinned down because they need to flex that messaging around their customers.

“The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you.”

― Daniel H. Pink, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

Try being genuinely compelling with a fixed set of messages, without listening, and crucially without customising what you say to your participant.?

Ok - That said, sometimes you just need to send someone a website or a deck.

So what do you actually need to sell?

I want to break this down into three things you need - and one you don’t. They build on each other and should be thought of in sequence:

1. What can you do really well, right now?

If you don’t know this… Good luck. This is pretty fundamental. When Adam and I started Yaya (a product design consultancy) we knew we could do a fair range of different things from marketing and branding to product strategy and design. Helpfully we knew which of those we wanted to do and that they were things people wanted to buy.

Most tech founders know the problem they want to solve and, to some extent, how they intend to solve it.

That said, this can be the start of the spin cycle. For the love of god please avoid that and just pick something to move forward with - anything -? you can always pivot later.

2. Can the people talking to clients link what you do to their problems?

I was talking about this exact thing with a client I’ve been working with for years just last week. We’re currently working together to nail how they articulate what they do. The goal is that everyone understands what they do deeply enough to spin that into the right story for the person they’re talking to. Not a messaging hierarchy, not consistency - fluidity.

Before you start thinking about websites and decks and all that noise, get this bit right. People stress about the wrong things when they start a business or start focusing on their sales and marketing more intently. Yaya didn't even have a name for six months, let alone a website, a brand, or any messaging hierarchy. What we did have was the ability to listen to clients, understand what they wanted to achieve, and to tell a competing story about how we could help them.

That story was different almost every time but it was always the same thing that we were selling. And that worked just fine. It’s still inconsistent now - we see that as a strength, not a weakness.

If your customer-facing people don’t know what you do well enough to build a bridge between that and your customers’ challenges, you’re knackered. If you’re trying to address that particular problem by spending money on marketing, you’re going to end up firing your head of marketing in the next 6 months. It isn’t their responsibility. Each individual needs to own this themselves. If you hear someone asking for a pre-populated proposal template and they’re selling something high value, my gun is yours. Make the effort and have the skill to write something (mostly) bespoke.

As an aside, the original placeholder name we registered our company under was, 'Adam and Phill's Good Design Company'. We thought that was funny, our clients not so much.

Can you write what you do down in a way you’re comfortable with, for now?

Those two things are critical and should be addressed before anything else - let’s call them Minimum Viable Messaging. But at some point, yes, you will need a website. So how should you tackle that?

Well, before you do anything else, relax. Websites aren’t set in stone, neither are decks, and nor is anything else you won’t find in a cemetery.

A good proposition should evolve in line with the business, customer feedback, and a whole multitude of other factors. The reason people avoid this: the washing machine. But simply accepting that you don’t have to get it perfect, reduces the number of spins. Lower the bar and put something out there - it’s much less stressful.

So try something, see if it works. Try something else.

What you don’t need…

If any charlatan comes at you with a proposal that features the following, you can DM me about borrowing my gun:

• A brand onion.
• More than one of: purpose, intent, brand ethos, or any other brand faff.
• A promise of consistently aligned messaging across everyone in the business.
• Month after month of drowning in a custard-filled washing machine.

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