B2B Service Providers: We’re Saying Too Much

A messaging message to myself, and others.

What if We Just Said Less? A Lot Less?

Coming out of a few conversations with B2B clients recently, while in the midst of our own agency brand refresh, this has all been very top of mind for me. How much should we or shouldn’t we be saying about ourselves on our B2B websites? The right answer will be unique to everyone of course, but the conventions do seem to have taken over in a major way: SAY IT ALL is how websites are written. But sometimes you have to look up from the well trodden path to realize we’re all on the same road to a destination that really doesn’t make sense for our businesses any longer.

Tired Trends

20 years of SEO wisdom pushes for more-more-more rich content, and 30 years of website design conventions show us how easy it is to just add more text, or add another page. Did we forget to say that one thing? Add a page, publish that sucker. Add, publish. Add more, publish again.

Too many pages, too many clicks, too many sub-menus within sub-menus. Not because designers can’t make things simpler — that’s typically something we do really well. But because the expectation has always been to relay all (ALLLLLLLL) of the information about your company, written by everyone in every department, for whoever might be interested. Websites are informational, and they’re limitless. So let’s add and keep adding. No information shall remain withheld.

We deliberately try to make sure we talk about everything we do, can do, did once, might do in the future. We use our informational websites as our catch-all for every possible message to every possible audience type, in any possible stage of their relationship with us.

This was what made websites so appealing in the first place. They cover so much ground, they can be updated easily and constantly, landing pages can be spun up in an hour for any reason and for any subset of any audience. But it’s resulted in a whole lot of saying way too much, and that’s likely turning our prospective customers away.

Strategy and Message

This is a strategic messaging issue. The hardest thing to do is to say less, but with more meaning. What if we could consolidate the feeling of our client’s desired future state, capture it in a message–a promise of what we’ll deliver–and use that for one very specific goal: to inspire a first meaningful conversation? No body text explaining how we work, no list of services that might be included in the engagement. No misaligned or irrelevant case studies. No over-baked process diagrams pretending to be IP. Just a confident and empathetic prompt, and an invitation to continue the conversation.

I believe this kind of an approach could be stirred up into a very compelling special sauce for service-based businesses. I aspire to reach this level of clarity and simplicity with my own service business–but it is and will continue to be a major challenge. As we write our new website, even with all of this in mind, the page count keeps growing.

I’m not a copywriter, and this work is hard to do. But in a B2B services landscape full of competitors saying it all, isn’t it obvious that we should be trying something strikingly different? We need to make a move to shake up the way we’re perceived when a prospective client pulls up our site. We know that they’ll also pull up our competitor’s site, and three others in three more tabs, that all say the same things as us in a dozen barely-different ways.

How refreshing would it be for your prospective client to see one website in that line-up that presents an entirely different, entirely restrained and confident approach to making their first impression? Who is this service provider that doesn’t feel the need to shout it all from the rooftops? They’re intriguing, they’re bold, they’re willing to stand up and be different, rather than hiding behind the same trends that the rest of these companies have mindlessly adopted. They’re interested in making this conversation about me.

Confidence

I think this approach to website content is mostly about confidence. Knowing that you’ve done the work successfully for hundreds of other clients. That your experience and ability to execute will benefit your new clients in meaningful ways. You know you’re good. Let that show through in your strategic restraint, which will ultimately translate as confidence.

Inversely, by oversharing everything about your service business on your website, you’re likely tipping an underlying lack of confidence, which your prospective customers can sense. If you do 800 different things (check out how big this list is!), how are we supposed to think you’re really expert and amazing at any one of them? You may be strong in many of them, and your ability to combine tailored services may be world-class, but the full list of anything and everything will always make you sound overeager and unfocused.

And the more you talk about yourself, the less attuned you seem to be to their needs. Would you talk at a prospective client for 57 minutes in a 1 hour introductory call, without taking a breath, never pausing to hear their response? That’s what your site is doing. It’s a one way, sure-to-be-distracting ramble about all aspects of yourself. This should be about them. Let them talk. Get them on a call or into your office. Listen, pry, challenge, and then craft the response that’s most likely to resonate and bring them closer to signing. Most B2B service engagements are not closed on a website.

Filling in the Gaps

It is important that you are able to talk about all that other stuff you’d previously littered across your website as ‘content’. If the goal is to have a good first conversation, then you need to be on your toes to answer any and all questions that the prospective client might have about who you are and what you do. By not pre-oversharing everything about you, they have no preconceptions, and you can deliver the perfect version of who you are, what you do, and how it can solve their very specific problem. Everything else is irrelevant. Oversharing it on your site anyway, before you’ve spoken, just loads up the first call with assumptions, biases, and potential misunderstandings.

Say Less

I’ll keep this post short to stay on theme here. Say less, be intriguing, be confident with the first impression that is your website. Encourage real direct contact and communications with the people who represent the client you’re hoping to work with, and then use that first real conversation to build an uncluttered foundation for the meaningful work that’s to come.