If you run a B2B company with good technology and deals aren't closing the way they should, you have probably concluded that you need better branding or that the marketing isn't working. That conclusion only hardens once the ad budget has gone up and the pipeline has stayed put. It is a natural conclusion, because the logo, the website and the campaigns are what you can see.
Before you brief a rebrand, ask a recent buyer how they described your product to the colleagues who missed the demo. You rarely get to hear that version, and it may sound nothing like yours. Some founders already suspect the way the product is described is the trouble and want to know how to explain a complex technical product to buyers, and others are sure it's the branding. Either way, your buyer's version tells you more about how your product actually gets bought.
Deals go quiet in a room you aren't in
Let's say you make vibration sensors for industrial plants, and the demo has gone well. The buyer's engineer liked what they saw, asked good questions and said they would take it forward. Taking it forward means explaining your product to people you will never meet, without the demo. So the engineer asks your salesperson for something to send, gets the demo deck, and goes to your website for the rest, where they find a homepage about "intelligent insights" and a datasheet that says nothing about what you do differently. They copy your figures into a spreadsheet to line them up against the supplier the plant already uses, and then try to say in their own words why you are the better choice. In the internal meeting that follows, a procurement colleague asks a fair question about how you compare, and nobody in the room has a good answer. The evaluation slides behind something easier to decide, and a month later your salesperson is told the timing isn't right.
That is why this kind of failure gets blamed on the branding. You hear "timing" or "budget", and you never hear that the buyer's engineer had to build their own comparison in a spreadsheet, so you are left with what you can see. And when you read your own website, nothing seems to be missing, because you know the product so well that your head fills in everything the page leaves out. The engineer in that meeting had no such help. For the half hour that mattered, what you had written down was the only salesperson you had.
A buyer has to be able to understand your product, evaluate it against the alternatives and defend the choice to colleagues. When they can't, the deal takes longer because they are doing the explaining themselves, procurement falls back on price because it can't see the difference, and the person arguing for you has no case to make.
Your product is fine. The way it's described is the problem
When deals stall at a company whose customers stay and whose engineers are proud of what they've built, the product is rarely what needs fixing. What actually needs fixing is the way you communicate your product to potential buyers. Buyers get that from your homepage, your deck, the way your figures are laid out and whatever a salesperson says when someone asks what you do, all when you aren't there to explain, and that explanation is what we call the product description.
At our client Frontgrade Gaisler, which makes radiation-hardened processors for space missions, the product was strong but the product description was a catalogue built for another era. It wasn't organised around how aerospace and defence buyers evaluate a supplier, which made it harder for them to find and assess what the company offered.
A quick test: Is it the branding or the product description?
If you still suspect the problem might be your branding, you can test that in an afternoon with six questions.
- Show your homepage to someone who works in the industry you sell to and hasn't seen it before. Can they say back what you do?
- Ask a new salesperson to explain the product without the deck. Can they?
- Pick a sentence from your homepage. Could a competitor's name go on it?
- Can a specialist reach the specification in two clicks?
- Can someone compare you with an alternative using only what's on your site?
- Take the last deal you lost. Can your team name everyone who had a say in it, and what each of them needed to know?
If you stumble on several of these, your product is hard to explain as it stands, and that makes the product description the place to start. If you pass all six, the product description is probably doing its job and the cause lies elsewhere, perhaps in the brand, the price or the sales process.
Fix the product description first, then the brand
A company that stumbles on how its product is described may well need new branding too, but the order matters: Fix how the product is described first, then make the brand and the marketing say the same thing. A new identity on top of an unclear product description gives you a better-looking version of the same confusion, and more ad spend sends more people to it.
Sometimes the brand really is a constraint, as it was for our client CapillaryFlow, which makes construction systems for golf courses, equestrian arenas and sports fields. Its old name, Capillary Concrete, told buyers they were looking at a material, when what the company had built was a technology. Its own salespeople told us what customers really responded to: beautiful, high-performing grounds, with the technology as the way of getting them. Even there, the rebrand came after a series of workshops on who the best-fit customers were, how they buy and what the brand needed to say to each of them. Once the product description is right, the brand is what carries it to every place a buyer looks, which is why we call brand commercial infrastructure for complex B2B products.
Simplifying loses your experts, and dumping the datasheet loses everyone else
Once a company accepts that the way it describes its product is the problem, simplifying is the advice it tends to get first, and it does the most damage with the readers who matter most. Flattening takes out the detail until the page could be describing anything, and heads of marketing tell us past agencies simplified the technology "so much our engineers cringe". The buyers who know the field cringe too. An engineer evaluating a radiation-hardened processor comes looking for the radiation tolerance, the clock speed and the datasheet. If the specifics have gone, that reader has nothing to check the part against, and has reason to doubt a company that can't describe its own processor properly. You stop being a serious contender at that point, because they move on to a supplier who gives them the figures, and you never find out they came.
Companies that have been burned by flattening often swing the other way and put the datasheet on the page. Specialists appreciate the detail and every word is accurate, but the page still hasn't said what you do differently, and the procurement colleague and whoever signs off can't find their answer in it. Both versions come from writing for no one in particular, when every page on a good website is written for a particular person at a particular point in the buying process. The flattened page is aimed at an imagined general reader and the datasheet page at an imagined expert with an empty afternoon, and neither of those people will be signing your purchase order.
Start with how your product gets bought
Describing a complex product well means studying how it gets bought as closely as you study how it works. Every B2B sale has a shape: how buyers search, what they compare, the order in which they need to know things, who else is in the room when they sign, and what each of those people stands to gain. Most marketing teams have personas on file, but few have traced who asks what, in what order, and what reaches the person who signs. Without that knowledge of who is buying and how, whatever you say about your product is a guess, however well it is written and however good it looks.
Go back to the sensor company. Its buying process might start with a reliability engineer who searches by machine and fault and needs to know whether the sensor will catch a fault on a slow-turning shaft. Someone from automation or IT asks whether it connects to the plant's systems. Procurement wants to know what it will cost over its life and whether the supplier will still be around to support it, and the plant manager who signs off cares about how many unplanned stoppages it will prevent. That is one sensor, four people and four questions, each resting on a different idea of what the sensor is worth, and a homepage about "intelligent insights" answers none of them.
We start every project by studying how the product gets bought, and we study the product itself just as closely. We learn how it actually works from the people who build, sell and use it, in enough depth to understand how a reading is produced or why an alert fires. That depth is what keeps the website accurate, and it is what lets us go on to redesign a dashboard when the software itself needs work.
We also learn who buys it and who signs off, by getting the right people in one room to map the best-fit customers in each segment, how they buy and what motivates them. At our client Viking Analytics, which makes predictive maintenance software, the website had not been structured around how buyers actually make decisions. We joined customer and prospect conversations and worked through the full business before touching a single design file, and the site we built is structured around real buying journeys and customer types.
How buyers buy shapes every layer of how you sell
A map of how your buyers decide reaches every layer of how you sell. It sets the structure of the website, which part of the buying process each page is there to serve, the terms you need to be found for, the story in the deck, what the brand has to signal and what partners are given to sell with. Most website refreshes fix the look and leave the explaining to your sales team, and a prettier site or a nicer brand does nothing for the buyer explaining you in a meeting your salesperson isn't in.
When we redesigned the Frontgrade Gaisler website, we did not simplify the engineering, we made it navigable. The detail stayed, and we rebuilt the information architecture around how aerospace and defence buyers evaluate vendors. The site was built for engineers and optimised for buyers. Search followed the same logic, going after the product names that engineers and procurement leads type when they already know what they need. We also built the sales and marketing strategy and a partner programme to go with it.
Inside each page, the same thinking layers the detail: All of it stays, arranged in the order your buyers need it, so that each reader reaches the part they came for. The approach holds in deep tech and hardware and in complex or technical software products, where technical storytelling comes down to what someone has to understand first so that the next detail makes sense.
Who reads your website, and what each of them came to find
The people who buy your product don't all read your website, and someone outside the deal does. For an engineering-heavy B2B brand, the readers who matter usually come down to three groups: your own engineers, who have to stand behind what it says; the buyer's engineers; and the buyer's procurement people. The last two decide whether to buy.
Your own engineers are the group you'd least expect to find there. But when one of them does visit, there's a fair chance they will cringe. They are also the people who have to answer for it, in engineering review before a launch and on technical calls with the buyer's engineers. Let's say one of your senior engineers joins a call and the buyer quotes your homepage back at them. Two years of work on how the sensor filters out noise has become "intelligent insights", and the engineer now has to explain what the company actually meant.
The buyer's engineers do read your site, closely, and they are asking whether it works: what it does, under what conditions, what it connects to and where the limits are. Marketing to engineers is only part of it, because a deal also needs the procurement reader who has to justify you to their colleagues, and it helps when they have a crystal-clear understanding of what your complex product does because that helps them explain it further down the line.
The buyer's procurement people often get treated as the reader who needs the simple version, but most of them are technical too. What sets them apart is the questions they are asking: what it will cost over its life, whether you'll be there to support it, what certifications you hold, what the lead times are and how you compare. A page that answers those questions does some of your selling in the meeting you aren't in, and whoever signs off mostly sees you through what those two groups bring them.
A listed company has one more process to study: Investors read the website to decide whether to hold the shares, and disclosure rules set what has to be published. We saw how far apart a company's readers can sit at our client Mentice, which makes medical simulation systems and is publicly listed. Clinicians want the technology explained and investors want disclosure, two needs that pull a website in opposite directions. Investor relations came with compliance requirements of its own and became a separate project, with a site built for investors. That left the main site, where a second problem sat. The company had grown by acquisition, and its product range had grown with it, to the point where a visitor couldn't tell what it sold.
We rewrote the content and sorted the whole range into categories that follow how customers look for things, which made complex clinical content findable. Leads through the website went up once the messaging and the structure of the product range were clear.
How to explain a complex technical product to buyers, in five steps
Explaining a complex technical product to buyers comes down to five steps, in this order, because each one depends on the one before it.
1. Learn the technology and how it gets bought
Whoever writes about your product, a new marketing hire or an agency, can't describe a technology they don't understand, so the learning has to come directly from the people who build, sell and use the product. With our client Freepower, which makes wireless charging technology, we made sure our team understood the ins and outs of the technology before the brand work began.
Understanding the technology gets you half of what you need. The other half is how it gets bought, and that includes how buyers describe the problem, which is rarely how you would. The best way we have found of hearing it is to record your sales calls, with the customer's permission. A recording catches what notes miss: the exact phrase a customer used for the problem, the question that came up twice, the moment the last deal stalled. AI is useful for pulling those phrases out, and they are worth using word for word, because copy written in a buyer's own language sounds right to the next buyer who reads it. For a client with a photo documentation platform, the copy was built on the same thing: how logistics and manufacturing teams describe their problems.
2. Replace every generic claim a competitor could make
With the technology and the buyers' words in hand, go through your website sentence by sentence and ask whether a competitor could say the same thing. "A reliable solution" could be anyone, and so could "intelligent insights". "Flags a bearing fault three weeks before it fails" could only honestly be said by a company with the test data to back it, including the conditions it holds under, and it gives an engineer something to ask about and a procurement reader something to repeat in an internal meeting. Most B2B messaging fails the test because it was written to be safe. Up Strategy Lab's Daniel Nilsson has written about why so much positioning sounds the same. A company that sounds like every competitor ends up compared on price.
3. Organise around how your buyers buy, then layer each page
Specific sentences still need a structure to sit in, which should follow how your buyers buy, usually by market or customer type, and by product line where specialists already know what they want. When we started with CapillaryFlow, each product area lived on a separate site and the sales materials were built for one type of buyer. We built one website structured around each audience, with one technology story running across them all. After that, markets that had generated no leads began producing pipeline. The rebrand, partner programme and marketing around the site all played their part, but those buyers now had a place that was plainly addressed to them.
Customer types decide the pages, and the readers inside each customer decide the layers: what it does for you, the proof and how you compare, then the specification. Someone deciding whether you're worth a closer look gets an answer at the top, and someone checking a tolerance can go straight to the bottom. Where export rules or NDAs keep figures off the public site, say what can be shared and how to request the rest. Our guide to copy for high-converting B2B website pages covers the writing itself.
4. Show your data visually, on the website and in the product
Once the information on a page has its place, the form it takes decides how much work the buyer has to do. Technical buyers can read a long block of figures, but that doesn't mean you should hand them one and tell them to figure it out. Show the same data visually and they understand it at once, which makes the whole evaluation easier and helps the sale. In marketing technical products, that means a comparison table in place of a paragraph on how you differ, a diagram of how the system works, and a chart above the lines of specs.
Think back to the engineer with the spreadsheet. Suppose your site had already set your figures, with the test conditions stated, against the usual alternatives, with the full specification a click away. The engineer would still check it, but they could forward one link, and when procurement asked how you compare, there would be an answer in the meeting. If a competitor gets there first, it's their page that gets forwarded, even if their sensor is no better than yours.
Showing data inside industrial software and other complex data products is a separate job, because a website helps someone decide whether to buy and a dashboard helps someone do their work. The two meet in the demo, where buyers first see how the software works and the people who will use it find out whether they can understand the data. At Viking Analytics, whose MultiViz platform analysts use to monitor large industrial asset fleets, demos weren't producing the clarity needed to move deals forward, and we redesigned the platform to be more intuitive, more differentiated and more immediately valuable in demos.
5. Have engineers check accuracy and salespeople check clarity
Two checks finish the job of describing a technical product, and they need different people. Engineers will catch the sentence that is slightly wrong, so they should have the final word on whether something is true. They are poor judges of whether it's clear, since they already know what it means. Salespeople hear every week where prospects get lost, so ask them whether they would say the sentence out loud to a customer.
When to bring in outside help
Explaining a product this way can be done in-house, but companies tend to look for help at one of a few moments: a new head of marketing who is embarrassed by the website, a push into a new market, or a trade show with a date on it. By then the product description is rarely the only thing that needs work, because once it's right the brand, the website, the decks, the campaigns and, for a software company, the product interface all have to say the same thing. When different people build each of those at different times, buyers meet several versions of your company, and whoever is arguing your case in that meeting has to pick one.
Keeping all of that in step is our work, which is why we do the pieces together: positioning and sales material, brand and design systems, the website, and, where the software is part of the sale, digital product design, so that the product description can't drift between them. What holds the pieces together is the study of how your buyers buy, which begins with a plain question about who the company serves and why. Eric Bengtson, CEO of our client Sourcing Allies, a China sourcing partner, describes being on the receiving end of it: "They keep asking who we serve and why, and the sales conversations we have now are better for it."
If you're planning a B2B website redesign, heading into a new market or getting ready for a trade show, book a call with Noel. Tell us where the product description breaks down and we'll give you a straight answer on where to start. No pitch deck required.
