Conviction isn't a messaging strategy

How familiar does this sound? A competitor rebrands/refreshes their messaging, your website isn’t performing as well as liked, or the CEO/founder says something feels “not quite right” — and it’s time for a new homepage.

That’s when the debate starts.

The founder has their view and vision. Product thinks the website undersells the core capability. Someone pulls up a competitor's homepage saying, “we should do something like this.” You try to balance all this with the marketing principles you know work.

Everyone in that debate has a valid perspective but it’s missing one key element: the buyer.

The decision often goes to whoever has the most conviction. Not because anyone's acting in bad faith, but because there's no shared reference point to anchor the conversation. Usually, that isn’t the person who’s spent the most time talking to buyers, learning what words push them towards becoming a customer — because in most companies, that research either doesn't exist or never made it into the conversation.

This isn't a criticism of founders or leadership. Being close to a product, watching competitors move, and sitting through difficult revenue conversations shapes a strong view on what the website should say. That view isn't worthless. The problem is when it's the only input.

What happens if that new messaging doesn’t perform well enough? The usual response is another round of revisions. New messaging, same brief and same inputs. It still comes down to whoever makes the strongest case because that's the only reference point available.

I worked with a startup recently where this played out in real time. The head of marketing wanted buyer-focused language that would boost conversions. The head of product wanted the tool to be the hero. The founder had a self-coined phrase that captured his vision for the company and wasn't letting it go.

The founder got most of what he wanted. That's often how it goes. And it's not necessarily wrong, because sometimes founder instinct is good. 

We did manage to get the buyers' own words, the functional jobs-to-be-done language they used to describe the problem, into strategic spots. It wasn't the primary messaging, but that information would have been totally absent without the research.

It’s not a guarantee of founder/C-suite approval — no consultant can truthfully promise that. But it is a tool at your disposal the next time there’s a messaging debate going on.

When someone wants bolder, more aspirational language, the question becomes: did anything like that surface in the research? Sometimes it did. Buyers use interesting, even vivid language when they're describing a problem they've been sitting with for months. If that's in the data, it belongs on the page and now the foundation gives a reason to put it there beyond "it sounds good."

When the research points to something more functional and specific — the kind of language that sounds obvious in a meeting but stops the right prospect mid-scroll — that's also in the foundation.

Homepage debates tend to happen when the page isn't generating pipeline. When the numbers aren't moving, everything becomes a candidate for change.

A messaging foundation doesn't keep the founder or CEO out of the homepage decisions and nor should it. What it does is give you something to work from and defend. It gives the whole team a shared picture of who the buyer is, what they care about, and what language they use and want to hear.

Messaging grounded in buyer language converts because the decisions were based on what buyers actually said rather than what seemed right internally. 

And when the page is generating pipeline, the debate changes. It doesn't disappear or become an easy win, but it changes shape. It becomes a conversation about what buyers said rather than whose version sounds better.