You know your product's fabulous. Your buyers, apparently, can't tell. They land on your website, skim a wall of features and "leading platform" language, and feel precisely… nothing, because none of it is about them.
Great messaging does one quiet job: it makes a specific buyer read a single line and think: finally, someone gets my problem!
Below we explain how to make your company's messaging actually speak to the people you're selling to. Either read this, or ask us about Elizabeth II, a complete rebuild of your positioning and messaging to make sure you leave with a story your ICP responds to and your whole team can agree on.
Before you rebuild anything, run the cheapest test in marketing. It costs a whiteboard and twenty minutes.
Pull the homepage headlines and one-liners from five or six competitors. Strip out the logos and every brand cue until it's just the words. Drop your own in there too, unlabelled, and line them all up on the wall. Then get your own team in the room and ask one question: which one's ours?
If they can't reliably identify you, there's your answer. But don’t worry, you're in plenty of company. Most B2B categories have quietly converged on the same vanilla sentence about being the leading platform that seamlessly empowers whatever.
A few more symptoms worth checking:
By the way, if your messaging is genuinely sharp and just scattered across a dozen tools and people's heads, that's a smaller, different job (our free Elizabeth I tool handles exactly that).
The uncomfortable root of every vanilla messaging is simple: you can't write something that speaks to a specific person if you've never decided who that person is. Or worse, if you’re not even trying to speak to a specific person but to everyone.
Ask most teams who they're for and you'll get "mid-market companies" or "anyone struggling with X." Which is always something, but none of those is an ICP! Which means you can only produce generic copy, because there's no specific human on the other end to write toward.
A sharp ICP is a different animal. It's a real, specific slice of the market: their role, the size and shape of the company they sit in, the pressure they're under, and the words they'd actually use to describe the problem at 9am on a bad Monday. Nail that, and the messaging almost writes itself, because now there's a real person to say something true to.
Go read your own homepage the way a stranger would. Odds are it's a proud little monologue about your platform and how "leading" and "end-to-end" it all is. All technically true, and all completely… about you! So a potential buyer seeing it for the very first time learns plenty about what you've built, and almost nothing about whether it fixes their problem.
Buyers read from the outside in, starting with what's going wrong in their day. You lean toward the vendor whose site reads like they've been sitting in your meetings, describing your exact headache back to you before you've finished explaining it. It’s the difference between, "what this does" and "what this means for me".
The messaging committee always starts sensibly, with three or four people who actually own the story. Then the CTO wanders in with a view, a board member catches wind, and the CEO's daughter who just finished her BA in marketing has thoughts too. Everyone softens one line to keep the peace, and out the other end comes something vanilla enough to offend nobody and move nobody.
The two rules we always advise our clients to stick to:
Which is where a proper workshop with Envy earns its keep, so let's walk through what one actually looks like 😉
You hear “workshop” and are already bored? Not with Envy. Our job is to:
Before any of it goes near a homepage, you can pressure-test the new lines with real buyers from your target audience, actual people in your ICP reacting to actual copy. Far cheaper to learn a line falls flat now than after a quarter of budget's chased it.
It all runs on a fixed scope with a defined end, measured in weeks, not the six-month saga that lets your market shift before you've even shipped. You know, going in, what you're doing and when you'll be done.
You walk out with a finished set of messaging you can hand to anyone and for your LLM to run from. Which brings us to the best part…
Something shifts when the messaging finally speaks to the buyer instead of about you. The right person reads a line and feels caught, in a good way, like you've been reading their internal Slack. Replies pick up. Demos get warmer, because people arrive half-sold instead of confused. You stop having to explain what you do and start talking about whether you're the fit.
There's a second win that's easy to miss. When sales and marketing build the ICP together, they finally agree on who they're chasing. The endless "these leads are junk" versus "sales isn't working them" standoff is usually two teams quietly aiming at different buyers, dressed up as a process problem. Agree on the ICP in one room and a lot of that noise just stops.
And because you've got it all in writing, it doesn't just live in the heads of whoever showed up. You drop it into the tools your team runs on, and into the AI they prompt all day, so the story keeps speaking to your ICP long after the workshop wraps. One source, everyone working from it, humans and bots alike.
You came in with a homepage your own buyers skim right past. Fixing it takes more than sharper adjectives, and a lot less than a six-month committee slog. It's a focused rebuild of the story from the ICP up, done in a room tight enough to actually decide who you're for.
Which takes us to Elizabeth II… that’s how we titled our process for rebuilding your positioning and messaging around a real, specific buyer, with the five people who matter and none of the ten who don't. Fixed scope and a defined end. You walk out with fresh positioning, messaging in every length you need, and files your whole team and your AI tools can pull from.