Buyer research: Your key to more website demos and signups

Your website messaging should be simple. Capabilities? Check. Testimonials? Check. Your story? Check.

But prospects don’t actually care about your software, not yet. They’re looking for a product that’ll help them manage their specific job. Maybe leadership is breathing down their neck about contract reviews. Or they’re drowning in support requests. 

They look for help with this and land on your website. They learn about what your product can do, what makes you special, and who you are. Leading with this on your homepage makes sense internally. 

But your prospects need to hear about themselves.

Founder-led messaging worked when the whole team was hustling to get customers. But the company’s growing and it’s impossible now for the founder to join all the sales calls. 

This is where the website comes in to pick up the slack. The website should be giving prospects all the information they need before they get to a sales call. But often it’s based on messaging that internally sounds good or true.

If it doesn’t, prospects join calls without the basic knowledge of what you do, and your sales team spends too much time explaining. Or you sound like your competitors, even though you're different and — importantly — you have no idea if your competitor’s messaging is working. 

You’re accountable for pipeline but the website, which is the most visible and measurable place to prove pipeline contribution, isn’t pulling its weight.

A recent startup I worked with was leading with “all-in-one platform” messaging on their homepage. It makes sense. They’d built a seriously impressive AI tool that could help in-house legal teams with the whole workflow. It had everything in-house legal could want.

In sales calls and customer interviews no one mentioned needing a “platform.” Instead, every single person was specific about their most pressing job-to-be-done. They either talked contract reviews, legal research, or bulk contract analysis — more often than not only one or two of these.

The “all-in-one platform” didn’t stick because it wasn’t about the prospect or the problems they’re trying to solve. It was based on what internal teams thought prospects wanted to hear.

You’ve probably rewritten and tweaked your homepage either internally or with AI or by briefing a copywriter. The messaging looked good. It ticked all the boxes but without the research foundation underneath, it didn't land with your prospects or inspire confidence in leadership.

You tweaked it again (and again?). You reverted back to internal assumptions within a few months.

This is such an easy trap to get stuck in. You don’t have a huge marketing team and real buyer research takes time. There’s a limit to what you can do when you’re in charge of everything marketing related. 

You get stuck in this cycle because the messaging is based on what sounds good internally. 

The cycle breaks when messaging starts being based on buyer research. It gives you insight into how people without your context talk and think about your product.

Buyer research means every messaging decision has data backing it up, allowing you to trace every sentence back to your buyers. 

I use a two-layer approach. The raw data feeds into a messaging system, not a document that gets filed away. It becomes a tool for sales and marketing to use.

The strategy layer is the foundation. It contains your overall positioning, core value propositions, and key messaging pillars. All messaging decisions trace back here. It’s your single source of truth for messaging decisions. 

The execution layer is a day-to-day tool that helps marketing create assets and sales prep for demos. The execution layer translates your overall strategy into words specific to personas — built directly from the interviews, not reverse-engineered from your existing site, pitch deck, or positioning docs.

Each persona page includes:

The two layers work together. The strategy layer ensures nothing drifts. The execution layer ensures the team doesn't have to start from scratch or improvise every time they need to write something new.

Leadership questioning why you chose to lead with a specific use case? Show them it was the most common problem in the research. People wondering why you chose that particular word in the headline? Show them the exact buyer quote it came from.

When you’ve got this much raw data collected, it’s easy to trace any messaging decisions you make back to your buyers. You have the data to push back against messaging opinions from outside the marketing team. 

Let’s say the founder noticed a competitor uses abstract language in the H1 and wants to do something similar. You check the research data to see if that language pops up. If it doesn’t, you’ve got data to back up your opinion and help you defend your choices.

When opinions come from people who care about messaging but aren’t accountable for the pipeline it generates, you need something more than an opinion to push back with.

Messaging built on how prospects talk and think does two things at once: it tells them what they want to hear, and gives you the data to align your team around it.

When prospects land on your page, instead of thinking “I’m not sure what this company does,” they’ll start thinking “This company gets me and my work problems.” And when you enter the conversation happening in their heads, messaging starts clicking.