Introducing myself, and the one sentence test I run on every brand
Hey everyone. I'm Lalit, and I work in marketing for B2B SaaS companies.
I've spent most of my career inheriting brands that were built by people who were very good at features and very bad at clarity. They had a full page for every capability, a slide for every integration, and no answer at all when I asked what the company actually did. My first move is always the same. Cut the noise in half. Then cut it again. Whatever is left is usually the real thing, and it's usually been there the whole time, buried under twelve paragraphs nobody read.
The test I care about most isn't pipeline or traffic or any number on a dashboard. It's whether a customer can explain what we do in one sentence. If they can't, I don't blame them. That's my problem. Somewhere between what the company believes it is and what the customer understands, something got lost, and my job is to find it and fix it.
I joined because I want to hear how other people think about this. Not the polished case studies, the messy version.
The rebrand that almost went wrong. The homepage that got worse before it got better. The time you cut a feature
from the site and the founder called you personally.
So here's my question for this group. What's the one sentence your customers use to describe what you do, and is it the same one you would use? If they don't match, I'd genuinely like to know which one you think is right.
Glad to be here.
Replies
Great test, and humbling to run on yourself. I'm about to launch a product and I'm realizing I can describe it in three paragraphs but not one sentence yet, so this is a timely nudge. When the customer's sentence and the founder's don't match, which one do you usually end up putting on the homepage?
@workonward I'd use the customer's wording if a new buyer understands it without the backstory. Show each sentence to someone unfamiliar with the product and ask what they'd expect to do first. A catchy line that promises the wrong task is worse than a longer, accurate one.
@al_kub Agreed! A catchy line that promises the wrong task won't do us a service! Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of AI-generated, overpromised, and underdelivered content :(