One of the biggest mistakes I see when companies are performing ‘Random Acts of Marketing’ is that they skip important steps or parts of their GTM strategy.

Developing the right positioning is something I discussed last week. And that’s still paramount, but once that’s done, you need to move into messaging.

When I’m reviewing a company's digital presence, I’ll review their website, go through their landing pages, and the emails tied to their follow-up.

Sometimes, on the surface, everything looks pretty solid. The brand may look clean. The site design may be modern. Teams usually aren’t phoning it in. Most of them invest real time and energy into building something they are proud of.

However, when I start to comb through it all, the problems become apparent.

Some of the signs are things like the words look polished, but they just don’t pull me in. They don’t make me feel anything. They don’t make the next step feel obvious. Most importantly, they don’t sound anything like the buyer.

In these cases, it sounds like the company talking to itself. And, that's a bigger problem than most B2B teams realize.

And, these companies may make the excuse that it’s a traffic problem… or a lead volume problem… or a channel problem. Some of that may actually be true. But from my experience, the issue shows up much earlier than that.

The issue is that the words aren't doing their job. The message isn't carrying enough weight. The copy isn't creating enough clarity, urgency, or trust for the next step to happen the way it should.

So the team goes and looks for a bigger fix.

Look, don’t get me wrong… every now and then, they probably do need one of those things.

But not before they fix the words.

Because if the copy is weak, more traffic just means more people bouncing. More clicks just means more wasted spend. More leads just means more pressure on sales to explain what marketing should've made clear in the first place.

That's why I keep coming back to this idea over and over again. Better copy first.

I’ve heard this quote before from a fellow marketing leader:

Not because copy is some magic trick. Not because headlines solve every problem. But because words sit at the center of almost every part of the revenue engine.

They shape the homepage. They shape the landing page. They shape the sales email. They shape the follow-up. They shape how your team talks about what you do. And if those words are fuzzy, generic, passive, or overcooked, everything downstream gets harder.

That's exactly what I typically see when reviewing a company’s website.

The homepage sometimes tries too hard to sound impressive that it forgots to be clear. The landing page talks about features before it’s even earned the right to talk about outcomes. The emails sound too "professional," but not persuasive. And the CTA language feels like it was written by somebody who didn't want to be too direct.

In other words, the copy isn’t bad because it’s ugly. It’s bad because it’s too cautious.

That happens all the time in B2B.

Somewhere along the way, teams start writing for internal approval instead of market response. They choose language that sounds safe. They lean on category jargon. They use phrases that make sense in strategy meetings but don't really mean anything to the person reading the page.

So instead of saying what the buyer is actually trying to solve, they write something broad and polished and forgettable.

And then they wonder why the conversion rates feel soft.

The truth is, good copy doesn't just "sound better." It reduces friction. It helps the right person understand what you do faster. It sharpens the story. It helps sales walk into warmer conversations. It gives follow-up more teeth. It creates momentum.

That's why before I tell a company to go get more traffic, I want to know if the copy is pulling its weight.

If it isn't, that's where I'd start.

The tricky part with copy is that weak copy doesn't always fail in obvious ways.

Sometimes it's not that nobody converts. It's that not enough of the right people convert. Or sales gets calls that feel colder than they should. Or prospects keep asking basic questions your website should've answered already. Or reply rates on follow-up stay low, even when the audience is qualified. Or the team keeps debating tactics when the real issue is that the message never landed in the first place.

That stuff compounds.

Bad copy makes marketing work harder for the same result. It makes sales explain more than they should. It makes the buyer do too much mental lifting. And when buyers have to work to figure out what you mean, they usually don't reward you for it. They move on.

That's why I don't really separate copy from pipeline the way some people do.

Copy is pipeline.

Not in a fluffy brand-awareness-only kind of way. I mean directly. If your words don't create movement, your funnel slows down. If your copy doesn't reflect how the buyer thinks, your message gets ignored. If your CTA doesn't create a clean next step, interest dies in the gap.

And when that happens, teams usually misdiagnose the issue.

Look, I’m not saying these are lies... they can still be true. But, to a degree, it’s sort of an excuse. The copy just didn’t do enough/

Most of the bad copy I see comes from 1 of 4 places.

The first is that it talks too much about the company and not enough about the customer. A company will spend a hundred words explaining who they are, what they believe, how they approach the market, and how long they've been doing it, before they ever say anything that makes the buyer think, "yeah, this is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve."

The second is that it sounds like a category page, not a conversation. It uses language that feels broad and polished and technically correct, but not language that a real buyer would ever say out loud. The market doesn't reward you for sounding official. It rewards you for sounding relevant.

The third is that it avoids tension. A lot of teams are afraid to be direct. They don't want to sound too salesy. So they soften everything. They water down the problem. They make the CTA overly polite. They avoid pushing on pain, cost, risk, or urgency. But if nothing feels at stake, there's no reason to move.

The fourth is that the copy doesn't connect across the whole journey. The homepage says one thing. The landing page says another. The sales deck takes a different angle. The follow-up email sounds like it came from another company. That creates drag. Not because each asset is terrible on its own, but because the buyer never gets one clean, connected story.

That's where a lot of revenue friction lives.

Not in one giant mistake.

In a bunch of small moments where the message gets weaker than it should.

Your headline has one job. Get the right person to keep reading.

That's it.

Not to win an award. Not to impress your boss. Not to cram in every service you offer. Not to sound enterprise enough for people inside the company.

A strong headline tells the reader one of three things fast: what problem you solve, what outcome you help create, or who this is for. Sometimes it does more than one. But it needs to create instant orientation.

If someone lands on your page and still has to figure out what you do, that's a problem. And I don't mean after a full page scroll. I mean within a few seconds.

The market is moving too fast for vague headlines.

A lot of weak headlines sound like this: strategic solutions for modern growth, integrated services for operational excellence, driving transformation through innovation. That kind of copy feels polished, but it's empty. It could belong to almost anybody.

A better headline gives the buyer something they can hold onto. Something concrete. Something they can repeat back.

Clarity is what creates motion. Not cleverness.

Once the headline earns attention, the subhead needs to do the real explanatory work. This is where you help the reader understand what you do, who you help, and why it matters without turning the page into a wall of company language.

This is where a lot of teams either say too little or way too much.

If the subhead just repeats the headline in different words, it isn't helping. If it tries to explain your whole company in one breath, it usually turns into mush.

Good subheads create direction. They help the reader feel grounded. They answer the natural next question without overloading the page.

And this is where buyer language matters a lot.

If your customer says, "we're wasting time chasing junk leads," and your website says, "we align cross-functional demand generation and revenue acceleration," you have a language gap. The issue isn't that one phrase sounds smarter. The issue is that only one of them feels real.

Your copy doesn't need to sound simpler for the sake of sounding simple. It needs to sound closer to the way the buyer already thinks.

Because when people feel understood, they keep going.

This is the place where too many teams lose their nerve.

They'll spend weeks building a campaign, shaping the offer, and designing the page, then end the whole thing with some weak CTA like learn more, submit, or contact us. That's not a meaningful next step. That's a placeholder.

The CTA should feel like the natural continuation of the problem you just helped the buyer understand. It should match the temperature of the moment. It should lower friction and create direction.

If the buyer is early, maybe the CTA is educational. If the buyer is warm, maybe it's direct. If the buyer is comparison shopping, maybe it needs to emphasize clarity or specificity. But whatever it is, it can't feel disconnected from the rest of the story.

It also needs consistency.

If your homepage invites one kind of action, your landing page asks for another, and your sales rep follows up with a totally different tone, you don't just have a copy mismatch. You create confusion. And confused buyers rarely accelerate.

Strong CTAs don't have to be aggressive. But they do need conviction.

This is the most underrated copy problem in a lot of B2B companies.

Teams spend so much time on the front-end content that they forget the follow-up is part of the sales experience too. Someone downloads a guide, fills out a form, clicks into a landing page, or asks a question, and then the follow-up they get sounds like it was generated from a template nobody has touched in three years.

"Just checking in."

"Wanted to follow up."

"Bumping this to the top of your inbox."

That's not follow-up. That's administrative noise.

Good follow-up copy reflects the moment. It shows the buyer that you understand what they did, what they might be thinking, and what the logical next step is. It carries the context forward. It makes the conversation feel connected.

And this is where copy can create huge leverage for sales.

Because strong follow-up keeps the buyer engaged without forcing a rep to reinvent the message every time. It reinforces value. It keeps trust moving. It helps the communication feel human, even when some of the motion is automated.

Especially in longer B2B sales cycles, where a lot of deals are won or lost in the middle, not at the beginning.

Before you go add budget, redesign the site, or demand more leads from the market, pressure test the words.

That's the work. Not glamorous. Not always fun. But incredibly important.

Because better copy doesn't just improve marketing performance. It improves the entire experience of being sold to. It makes your company easier to understand, easier to trust, and easier to buy from.

And in a noisy B2B market, that matters more than people think.

I've seen teams try to outspend a messaging problem. I've seen them try to automate around it. I've seen them bury it under more activity.

It almost never works the way they hope. The better move is usually simpler.

Better copy first because great copy is sales at scale. It can sell around the clock while you’re sleeping.

If you want, reply with COPY and I'll send you the 4-part copy audit I'd use first.

Javy

P.S. — Is there a topic or strategy that you’d like me to unpack? Drop me a line. Let me know what you’re thinking of. And, I’ll get it queued up for an upcoming newsletter.

I joined Graham Peelle on Flywheel Leadership to talk about something a lot of B2B teams miss: when the message is fuzzy, the whole go-to-market engine has to work harder than it should.

We got into why positioning is the fight you choose, why trying to market to everybody waters down the story, and why founders need to be more visible if they want the brand to feel like it actually stands for something.

If the words on your site sound polished but still don't land, this one's worth your time. Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube.

If you want proof that more traffic isn't always the answer, this Paid Media Turnaround Case Study is the right companion to this week's issue.

I broke down what happened when we stopped chasing cheap leads and rebuilt the system around better-fit buyers, tighter ICP enforcement, and closed-loop feedback instead.

It walks through how we pushed ICP lead mix from roughly 15% to 95%+, cut CAC to around $300, and built a much cleaner revenue engine without pretending more volume was the fix.