Question 1

Our sales team all describe the company differently. What does that mean?

Accepted Answer

When a sales team all describe the company differently, each seller has quietly written their own version of what the business does, and the buyer meets a different firm depending on who picks up the phone. It shows up as six opening lines, six answers to what do you actually do and six sets of proof points that do not add up to a single story. Nobody is going off script, because there was never a script that held. The cost lands in places that look unrelated at first. New hires take months to explain the business, deals stall while a buying committee tries to reconcile two accounts of the same offer, and marketing writes copy that the sales floor quietly ignores because it does not sound like anything they would say out loud.

Question 2

What causes it?

Accepted Answer

The most common cause is that the company grew faster than its language. The founder could explain it in a sentence, then a sales team arrived and each person filled the gap with whatever worked in their last role, which is a reasonable thing to do when nothing better is on offer. The second cause is a message written for the wrong audience. Positioning built to satisfy an internal committee tends to be abstract enough that nobody can argue with it and vague enough that nobody can use it, so sellers translate it into something concrete on the fly and every translation differs. The third cause is a product set that has outgrown its description. Companies that started with one thing and now sell four rarely go back and rewrite the top-level story, so each seller leads with whichever part they understand best and the buyer never hears the whole.

Question 3

How do you fix it?

Accepted Answer

Start with what the buyer already says. Interviews with the people who bought and the people who declined surface the words the market uses, and those words are almost always plainer than the ones on the website. That gives you a line the team can say without wincing. Write the story long and short. A team needs the full narrative for a board meeting and a single sentence for a corridor, and the short version has to be a genuine compression of the long one rather than a slogan bolted on afterwards. Roll it out where the work happens. Homepage, sales deck, onboarding and the first two minutes of a discovery call all have to carry the same words, because a message that lives only in a document goes back to six versions within a quarter.

Our sales team all describe the company differently

Our sales team all describe the company differently

Where the problem actually starts.

The route back to being understood.

Bring it to a conversation.

Where to go next.

Send us an enquiry.