Years ago, I called myself an onboarding strategist. I helped teams optimize first time experiences to turn more trialists into subscribers and enterprise deals.

But over and over, before I wrote a single word, my client champion and I found ourselves putting the entire business strategy under scrutiny. I would ask a few questions about how the company sold its innovation and soon we would be interrogating the entire business strategy - from product, to sales, to positioning, to marketing, to monetization.

“Hire a copywriter and you’re changing your whole business strategy in under a quarter,” is the joke I started telling.

Why? To answer the questions we ask at the start of onboarding project, we often find ourselves evaluating innovation commercialization decisions that we haven’t yet confronted.

If we ask, “Who are our best customers?” and “What does the data say about that hypothesis?” and then if we see the data says we’re wrong about who our best customers are, what do we do? Do we change our messaging to attract a different kind of user? Do we change our product to suit the folks we have vs the people we thought we’d attract?

Before you know it, you have every department across the org facing the possibility that they’ll need to change who they build for.

All this before the project kickoff call has ended.

So when Leah Tharin asked for copy feedback on the Fyxer AI “talk to sales” page last week, I found myself running through the same barrage of new-project questions in my mind. I had surface-level edits pop to mind, but I wondered about the real growth potential of a page as seemingly simple as this one. 

This article is the drill down demonstration I prepared in response to Leah’s invitation. It’s a way of turning that old “joke” about copywriting projects turning into business strategy initiatives into an artifact that explains why I tell it.

Here’s the page:

Here is Leah’s request:

Leah’s phrasing here is a common way to ask for help with copy. Copy is a thing on the page, we look at the page to see how we can improve it.

But a straightforward question about how we can improve copy can imply that the information necessary to improve the page is contained within a) the asset the feedback seeks to improve and b) the mind of the person providing feedback.

“Can I get some feedback” sounds like shorthand for,  “Here is an asset, please look at it and tell me the words I need to add, move, change, or edit to improve it.” 

A fair question, a reasonable hope. After all, no matter what happens between this version and the next version of the page, changing the copy means changing the words. Why not cut right to the chase and say what words we need to change?

However. If we want to turn this page into a true and proper growth lever, we need more than the words on the page and the frameworks in the copywriter’s mind. We need to dive deep down into every decision that led to this page. Every decision, visible and invisible, conscious and unintentional, known and unknown.

So, yes we can give feedback on the words on the page. We can begin our review with a kneejerk response to the words on the page:

This feedback is well and good and I stand by it.

But I still wouldn’t make these changes, at least not only those changes, at least not before asking a few more questions. Even if I did make those changes and no others, I wouldn’t expect to see a meaningful impact on my business’s sales.

At least, not the kind of meaningful impact I know we could make with this page.

No matter how much we revise them, the words on the page are only as strong as the decisions we made about our messaging strategy.

Our messaging strategy is only as strong as the data we have about what our customers care about when they are on this page. 

Our data is only as strong as our skill at studying our readers.

Our skill at studying those readers is only as effective as our ability to choose the right people to study.

And our skill at doing that - our skill at looking at all the many types of people we might want to reach and deciding on the people we most want to reach - depends heavily on how well we are serving our current users with our current product.

Now we’re not looking at just the sales and marketing departments anymore, now product and UX have entered the chat. If we’re going to pick users and buyers to write for, if we’re going to pick our very best readers, we’re looking at our retention and churn signals to understand how well we’re meeting our users needs over time. We’re interrogate whether we’re even attracting the right people in the first place.

As we look at who we help with our product or service, we arrive at the very foundation of our business, the category we’re in, the positioning we’ve chosen or allowed to be chosen for us, and the very problem we have decided we solve better than anyone else in the world. 

Doing that well, helping our customers and users make progress with a problem, hinges on something else: our ability to agree with our colleagues that we are indeed solving that problem, for these people, in this way.

So we start with a question about how we improve our copy on a contact sales page. A few minutes later, the person who said they could help with copy is asking, what business are we in? They’re inviting a founder to wonder, are we on the right path? Is our vision sound? Am I making a huge mistake?

I am working through a way of explaining the interconnectedness of these decisions, as I write this today I’m calling it a “Commercial Context Ladder.” I also tried “Innovation Commercialization Foundation” but that feels like too many syllables.

Very often, we look at a number that is not performing the way we want it to perform. To fix it, we look one layer down. In this case, the asset that’s performing poorly. But the real mettle of the matter is often buried deeper in your business strategy, in other departments, in other rooms, in other decisions, often made years before, sometimes without anyone knowing those decisions were even being made.

If you want to know how to influence the outcomes at the top of the ladder, you need to know how to adjust the decisions at the bottom.

A drill down demo is an exercise where instead of looking at what’s on the page as we might do in a tear down, we’re asking questions about what isn’t on a page. I’ll take you through the questions I ask to drill down to the deep, strategic foundation of the work before we build it back up. 

I’m using the Fyxer page because Leah invited feedback. I don’t know anything about what’s going on inside Fyxer’s business. This page could be doing the job it was designed to do in an adequate way. The assumptions I’ve made could be miles away from what’s really happening. The main point of this exercise is that the page is a jumping off point for the many questions that we ask to understand how to think about improving a page. 

If you’ve ever wondered why a piece of copy felt so hard to fix, why it seemed so intertwined with so many other decisions, this might show you the deep well of context making such a “simple” task so challenging. 

Ready or not, here we go.

We’re all here spending our days tippy tapping on our computers to make things happen. What things? Commercial things, usually. People buying, people using, people opting in.

On this project, our objective might be something along the lines of, “Collect the contact info of qualified leads.” 

Astute readers will see that I’ve already made an assumption.

The assumption “collect the contact info” is based on the email field visible on the top half of the page. The assumption “qualified leads” is based on a hunch that the sales team would prefer to talk with folks who meet a set of criteria that would reasonably lead to a revenue outcome at some point in the near future.  

You might read this explanation of hunches and assumptions and think, “Gosh, Alli, it’s a sales page, obviously leads and deals are what it’s all about.” While it may be true that the convention is common, assuming it applies here is one way we could lead ourselves astray from the outcomes we want to achieve.

The primary objective of this page could very well be to establish that there is enterprise pricing so that buyers at lower tiers perceive certain self-serve tiers as higher value. The purpose of this page could also be to inform potential investors that enterprise sales are happening, even if they’re happening somewhere else, by some other means, on a conference stage or through a strategic outbound or inbound process. If these are the goals, then maybe the page is doing just fine simply by existing.

Since I’m writing this here as a demonstration of the questions I ask to craft a V2, I’m going to choose one of these possible business outcomes and say that it will be the goal of our next version. 

It’s the first of several assumptions I’ll make because this is a demonstration of questions to ask. I’m asking them without being inside the business, so I don’t have an easy path to the answer. Don’t do this in your real work. In your real work, you will have answers to these questions or a way to understand them. Learn what you can before you proceed.

But for our purposes here today:

Let it be true that the business objective of this page is to collect the contact information of qualified leads.

There’s a lot of copy out there. Almost all of it, even the best control-beating treatments, can be optimized, improved, tested, evolved. So why this page? Why now? Why this outcome? 

And what exactly is underperforming?

Maybe we are not collecting many email addresses.

But maybe we’re collecting plenty of email addresses but not successfully booking calls. 

Or maybe we’re booking calls, but when we get on the line we find that the people we’re talking to are not as qualified as we’d hoped or expected they would be. 

Or maybe we’re booking calls, but then we have to book a second call because we haven’t prepared people to show up ready to discuss a pilot program so they have to get someone else, which slows our momentum at a high-energy part of our deal cycle.

So we ask:

How is this page performing today against our stated objective of collecting the contact info of qualified leads?

How is the page performing as part of a broader sales and GTM motion that involves booking calls with people after they submit their contact info?

And…

How is this page performing compared to other parts of our sales and GTM motion?

How would the impact of an improvement in performance on this page compare to the impact of an improvement of performance on another page? Maybe this page is performing poorly, but there’s another landing page that’s crushing it. Maybe that other page is crushing it because it’s tailored to a specific reader and has a great lead magnet. Maybe a better use of our time is to create more content for that user type, maybe an even better move is to create similar content for other user types.

In your real work, you’ll want to know why this page, why now, and why not some other part of the process. You’ll want to know which part of the outcome isn’t being achieved so you can understand if the problem is that you’re not collecting enough contact info or you’re not collecting contact info from the right people.

To proceed with this drill down demo, I’ll make a choice.

The business objective of this page is to collect the contact information of qualified leads.

Let it be true that other touchpoints are performing adequately and that improvements to the volume AND quality of leads submitting their content info on this page is a key goal for this quarter.

If we assume that a successful rewrite will result in more leads sharing contact info, if we assume that more leads sharing their contact info is a higher leverage opportunity than other projects, and if we assume that the copy on this page could be used to allow more leads to self-qualify, then what does our page need to do?

Easy: Our page needs to give people who are qualified leads a reason to hand over their contact information.

Less easy: We need to know a lot about qualified leads so we can join the conversation happening in their head while they are on this page, hovering their mouse over the contact field, deciding whether to suffer the indignity of coordinating a meeting.

On the supply side, we must ask:

Just as if not more important than what a qualified lead looks like to me is what a qualified lead looks like to themselves.

On the demand side, we must ask:

“How does the person reading this page know that they are qualified?”

Except that is not how most people will phrase the question. Most readers will ask:

To answer these questions, we need to know the answer to one of the most overlooked and destabilizing question sets in all of business.

One of, if not the most important lessons I have learned in my working years comes from Joanna Wiebe, who taught me about the Rule of One 10 years ago.

The Rule Of One is officially a copywriting rule but I have applied it to many UX and Product problems. The premise is this:

Every asset you create shall be written for One Reader. One person, in one moment of time, with one Job To Be Done, with one Stage of Awareness.

It should be centered around One Big Idea. One central narrative theme that supports the progress your One Reader wants to make on this page and in the steps that preceded it and those that will follow it.

It should make the reader One Promise. One Promise your business can keep, One Promise about how life will be better if they do what you are asking them to do.

And finally it should make One Offer. Do one thing on this page.

One Reader. One Big Idea. One Promise. One Offer.

All 4 parts hinge on knowing your One Reader in great dynamic detail.

Who is your One Reader - not just generally but in this moment? As they read this page?

What matters to our best customer now, today, in this hour of reaching out to talk to a sales rep?

If I’m going to know the words the person on this page that the reader most needs to hear, if I am going to write for a person who is in this moment facing 9,029 other things on their to-do list, this person who has already had 3 suboptimal customer service experiences this week, this person who has to call the cable company later tonight - what words would this person need to hear to decide that sharing their contact information on this page is more likely to solve their problems than to create new problems?

As you start thinking about your One Reader, you already know some things about them. But to create an asset that will generate the type of outcomes you want to see, you very likely need to understand more about them than you do right now.

Here’s what you need to know:

Buyer type: How your reader interacts with you during the buying process. In a multi-stakeholder deal, they might be the Champion or they might be “Compliance” or “Economic Buyer.” They might never actually use your product but nevertheless hold the power to scuttle the deal. Or they might become a power user but never get a say in choosing you vs another competitor. Often the buying role will be similar across decisions, but not always. Your Champion might be different from the Champion of your competitor, but both Champions may share the same Economic Buyer.

User type: How your person interacts with your product. They might be an Account Administrator or a Read-Only user. Their user type might influence or determine their permissions or it might even influence which interface they use entirely. They might have played a Champion role or they might have been invited 3 years after the deal was done. Often, the user type only exists in the context of the world you have created. An “Account Admin” at Ashby has no privileges at Greenhouse unless they are also an Account Admin at Greenhouse.

Persona: How a person describes themselves. This description relates to how the user experiences their world, even if your product were to vanish tomorrow. This is where you might see a job title show up and remain in force regardless of the person’s role in the buying process. A “Business Owner” is a business owner regardless of whether they use your tool. A VP of Sales is still a VP of Sales no matter whether they are your champion or economic buyer. A “Working Parent” is still a Working Parent if they cancel their meal subscription.

Stage of Awareness: There are 5 stages of awareness, first developed by marketer Eugene Schwartz. The level of awareness relates to how aware they are of the problem you can help them solve. Every One Reader begins in one stage of awareness. Our goal is to move them one or two more stages down by the time they have read the copy on the page. 

The Stages of Awareness are:

Job Story & Switch Moment: Jobs To Be Done is a theory of innovation that contains a great number of threads you’ll want to investigate about your customers. The full application is outside the scope of this drill down demo, but I’ll share the gist. 

One way you might think about JTBD it is this: if a persona tells you who someone is, if their buyer and user type tells you about the mechanics of their relationship with you, and if their stage of awareness tells you how well they understand their problem, then their “Job Story” tells you what progress they’re trying to make and when they are likely to reach for a solution like yours.

Many of us probably want what Fyxer is selling. Maybe we even complain to ourselves, our colleagues, our friends, our family about the pain we have and our desire to call the people who can help. “Man, I really gotta give those Fyxer people a call,” we might say every night before bed, only to wake up the next morning and not make that call.”

But one day we experience a “switch” moment where we stop doing one thing and start doing something else, a la buying from you. That “switch” moment happens in your One Reader’s Job Story. Identify it, and everything about your go to market motion gets easier.

Here’s the catch: you’re not filling the madlib in with ideas from your own brain, you’re filling it in with qualitative research. You get to choose your buyer type or user type, you might get to choose your persona, but you don’t get to choose the stage of awareness or JTBD. That’s something you need to discover. 

If you can’t validate it empirically, you’re guessing. As Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad called it in their Build Better Personas webinar, without data you don’t have a persona, you have fan fiction.

But before you can research, you need to choose which of the many One Readers you’re writing for. 

I don’t work at Fyxer, I’m not familiar with the product. I’m looking at the company as I look at any brand new product for the first time. When I’m behind the curtain of a company’s IT systems and can see the dashboards and listen to the sales calls and absorb the vision from the team, I get one POV. But since I’m on the outside looking in, I can only pick up on clues from the outside. 

I went to the Fyxer site and clicked into the Pricing page. I saw this plan overview page, which made me think, “Hm, Fyxer looks like a product led growth company.”

I see a Personal Tier for $37, a Team tier for $64, an Enterprise tier, plus a free tier. When I click the “Talk to sales” button in the third column, I see the page Leah asked about. 

We can learn a lot from this page, namely that there is at least one selling motion to a single individual. There is another selling motion where that person brings one or more folks on board with a compelling persuasive argument, a case for ROI, or a dictatorial decree. That person has enough authority to use a company credit card. But another reader can’t purchase through an online checkout and needs to Talk to Sales. 

Which means that by the time we get to the enterprise page, how do we know which of the many stakeholders involved in the procurement process are likely to click on this button to form our One Reader profile?

You might look at who has booked the calls in the past. You might look at who has visited the page and not booked a call. In many but all cases you will find that the person booking here is your Champion. That’s what we’ll assume to proceed with our demo, but in a real world you should confirm.

I’m also going to make a similar assumption about User Type, we’ll say that our Champion is a team leader and likely to be an Admin on the Fyxer account.

Let it be true that the One Reader of our sales pages has the Buyer Type of “Champion.” Let it also be true that they have the user type of “Admin”.

So our buyer persona is a champion. I’m not sure yet what user type they are because I don’t really know what Fyxer does yet. So for now let’s move on to the Champion’s persona.

If I look on the home page I see testimonials - splendid. I look at the job titles for clues about who these folks are. I see:

I see several Founders, VP-, and C-level titles. I see folks in sales, marketing, and innovation. 

From this I infer the problems we’re solving here are not industry-specific but likely something an executive at any type of organization is facing.

When I look at the images on the home page, I see suggestions like “send the contract” “follow up on the redlines” “proposal terms” “which deals are waiting on me” “MSA terms” and “pilot fee” that make me think the primary benefit of this tool is for keeping deal flow moving along.

I scroll all the way down to the footer and I start to get some clues about who Fyxer is for and what problems it solves. The comparison section helps me understand the competitive alternatives, “Fyxer vs Superhuman” made me think “aaah okay they’re like Superhuman” which makes me think the category “email inbox management” and the “AI Sales Email Generator” Free tool makes me wonder if sales focused inbox management is the category. 

This is the first moment where I ask, well, is “email for sales leaders” the positioning strategy?

If we are going heavy on solving the problems of sales leaders, then what stops us from really going after it?

Maybe there is a reason inside the business that is leading the Fyxer team to hedge and choose not to go whole hog after sales use cases. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe that reason is a really good reason causing plenty of well-reasoned discussion and consideration. Maybe it’s a lack of evidence to support the strategy and only instinct. 

In a real world scenario, this moment can be make-or-break. We either know who we serve and sell for and we allow the rest of our GTM motion to serve that audience and our R&D team to build for it. Or we do not. It can be true that you might not know yet. You might have good reason for not wanting to point your team at a target you’re still on the fence about.

Let it be true that our champion is an executive with sales email workflow challenges.

We know the buyer type we’re writing for and have an idea of their persona. But what is their stage of awareness related to the problem they face?

To answer that question, we need to know: what exactly is the problem they solve?

It’s sales-adjacent, yes.

For people who lead teams, yes.

Having to do with email management and deal detail organization, I think.

But what exactly is the problem?

When does this problem arise? 

And what is happening in this sales leader’s world that makes them think, “Enough is enough, today’s the day I pick up the phone and call Fyxer to fix it for me.”

I’ll continue to poke around the site to see what I can learn.

“Never miss anything important” suggests “I’m missing important things” and that is a problem, but that problem can present and be solved in infinite ways.

Also – I see now after my third time looking at this home page that there is a clue about the sales positioning with the mice type which suggests the problem is a bit more specific and has to do with managing multiple clients and missing things.

I keep looking and see this screen. I wonder: is the problem we’re referencing here that our team doesn’t have the tools it wants? Or that the other tools are not wanted? What is the problem of teams not having the tools they want?

Is the problem “unscaled productivity” or is it “unproductivity at scale” ?

Another way to see the problems a company solves is to look at the numbers they share in big bold font.

This graphic from the home page starts with 5.6 hours saved, which is cool. It’s not the same as 5.6 deals saved per month or 6 follow-ups booked over 5 times faster. 90% adoption rate is cool, but 90% increase in close rate would be cooler. 25,000+ client-facing teams trusting Fyxer is pretty powerful social proof though. This page isn’t part of my scope today but I’d want to slice and dice these numbers.

Mostly though: I do not see a clear case for what problem Fyxer solves better than anyone else in the world, let alone why anyone should hand over 30 minutes of their calendar to talk to sales. I do not know when I would choose the moment to book that call.

So I need to go find it.

Chances are, if your team has been recording sales calls, you already have 80% of the information you will need to put on this page.

If I was at Fyxer, the next thing I would do would be to run a Buying Committee Research Investigation. In this GTM strategy project, I run Jobs To Be Done style timeline interviews. We also call these interviews “Switch” interviews because they’re all about finding the moment when someone’s attitude and actions “switched” from thinking about an action to taking an action. I run them on every member of the buying committee so I can design experiences of purchase that give every person from Champion to Compliance the information they need to decide to switch. This approach is the source of every giant number on my resume, like 10xings new accounts and 4xing upgrades. Compared to many other methods (especially spending money on a guess without having the evidence to know if you’re on the right track), it is fast and cheap. 

I’m not going to do that research as part of this demo, but I am going to show you what I do as the first step in that process. As a newcomer to any space, I begin by learning how people talk about their problems. I start on Reddit. 

I search for conversations happening on 2 angles:

When I search for Fyxer, I see people talking about the functionality. Does it do what it says it does? How does it compare to other tools?

When I search around the problem I hypothesize we can solve, I see a lot of unresolved pain that I suspect Fyxer could solve.

In that last one in particular I see someone in so much frustration that they’re choosing to lie rather than face the pain of having to tell someone else about a mistake they have made. My, there is a lot to unpack here. If someone mentioned this in an interview, we would probe. 

For now, what I want to probe at though is what this looks like on the other side. My assumption is that the AE who missed the contact follow-up is unlikely to be the Champion who wants to talk to sales here. But the person who received the lie, the person who has heard some version of this tall tale more times than they count, this person is likely to be a champion who just might be our One Reader here. So now I’m going to search again for that pain. 

Maybe it’s the pain that comes from losing deals and not knowing if you’re getting the whole story. Or maybe it’s the pain that comes from feeling like you’ve told your team what they need to do but they still aren’t remembering what to do. Or maybe it’s the pain of simply not having the visibility into which deals are owed which comms. Or maybe something has happened with the commission structure and everyone is looking for other jobs instead of closing.

On the AE’s side we might see this story:

“When I discover I have just lost a deal because I forgot to follow up, give me a way to stay on top of follow-ups in the future so I never lose a commission and don’t have to figure out what to say to my boss.”

And from the VP Sales side, our likely champion tells this story:

“When I discover my team isn’t following up, give me a way to help them stay on top of things that doesn't rely on them feeling motivated and give me a way to see the status of all comms.”

This problem around learning your team isn’t following up and not knowing until its too late might be the problem we solve.

But before I give you another “Let it be true” I will throw a flag on the play here. 

If I’m a VP of Sales who wants to help my team stay on top of follow-ups, presumably I’d want visibility into their progress. Is there a dashboard where I can see the status of all of my deal comms? What about each AE’s average time to follow up after a sales call? Will I be able to see it go up?

Does Fyxer offer both “proactive” reminders to overcome forgetfulness? I think so. What about visibility of other accounts? I don’t know. If we pursue a messaging strategy around this pain, if we design a new experience of purchase around this switch moment, will we be able to achieve that goal with the tools presently at our disposal? TBD.

If we are to go in this direction, what other competitors are we considering? Today we go up against Superhuman, but would we go up against Hubspot one day?

Now that we are talking about Hubspot, if we do go in this direction, are we likely to see our entire business gobbled up by Hubspot in the next 5 years if they introduce similar features? Ought we to consider an intentional strategy to avoid seeing our value go to zero? Ought we to consider intentionally building our product so that Hubspot sees us as a tasty acquisition treat?

Now here we are, researching the GTM motion and market positioning strategy, all from a question about copy feedback on a contact form page. We’re asking questions that bring us to question the long-term product vision, strategy, and roadmap. We’re thinking about the exit strategy of the business and the long-term moat. 

The assumptions your team will make about this decision, about whether they should speak up or keep their heads down and continue plodding along will cause drag on your business’s velocity that you may never see, never name, never know. But it will be there.

But for now, to continue on:

Let it be true that the problem space for Fyxer enterprise is helping sales leaders get visibility into all deal comms and build forgetful-proof systems for deal follow-ups so deals don’t get lost.

You can pick up on someone’s stage of awareness by the clues they leave in how they describe their problem. The person we’re writing for here describes the pain of not following up and losing deals, so they are at least pain aware. They also describe the potential reason for WHY these sales are falling through as being one that is caused by undisciplined or unmotivated sales folks. Additionally, the people we researched who considered Fyxer also named competitors, we will further infer that our One Reader is Solution Aware.

So let us hypothesize that our One Reader is solution aware. They know that there are systems that could help them help their teams. They might be product aware. The folks who are on this page after already being on a lower level team plan may be product aware, but our enterprise plan may be a fundamentally different product offering for a larger team. So for that reason we’ll stick with a Solution aware audience.

The business objective of this page is to collect the contact information of qualified leads.

Other touchpoints are performing adequately and improvements to the volume AND quality of leads submitting content info on this page is an OKR for this quarter.

The One Reader of our sales pages has the Buyer Type of “Champion,” the user type of “Admin”. Their persona is “VP- or C-Level executive of a selling organization”.

Their Job Story is “When I discover my team isn’t following up, give me a way to help them stay on top of things that doesn't rely on them feeling motivated and give me a way to see the status of all comms.”

They are “solution aware” of this problem on this page.

Their Switch moment/Struggling Moment/Moment of High Intensity: “I just learned about a deal we lost because an AE didn’t follow up - and I had no idea they were even waiting for us.”

Fyxer enterprise helps solve this problem by offering sales leaders a way to get visibility into all deal comms and build forgetful-proof systems for deal follow-ups so deals don’t get lost.

Note again that none of this is validated with data.

Now. Now. Now we can continue on with figuring out how to write the rest of our page.

Of the many ways to understand your Big Idea, I'll invite you to consider it thusly: your Big Idea is the single message that you pull forward throughout the experience of purchase your readers flows through.

Your big idea extends beyond the page you’re writing it on. It is something big enough to frame the “contact sales” page and the conversation that the person here is booking. You’ll want to message-match the copy on this page to the page that came before it and to the automated emails and sales conversations that come after it. Every touchpoint from now through account close through onboarding should pull this Big Idea forward.

I’m choosing this Big Idea:

“No one will tell you ‘I forgot’ is the real reason why they lost that deal. But they’ll be glad when you give them Fyxer so they can close the next one. And you’ll be able to see which deals need follow up before anyone else forgets.”

This Big Idea refers to a switch moment (a recently lost deal with an unknown reason and lots of suspicion) and to a near-term outcome (close the next deal) AND to a deeper pain around not being able to have visibility into what deals are outstanding. I pulled it from Reddit, in the real world you’ll also want to look at support tickets, sales calls, and research interviews.

A similar Big Idea is sort of already here with “The tool your team wants.” But presumably the same promise could be made about a little robot that drives around the office offering a sampling of fancy chocolate every Thursday afternoon. If your value proposition could apply to another tool in your category and especially if it could apply to another tool in a completely different category, you will want to try to cut a little closer.

I could probably find you 90 million web sites with this exact same “Talk to sales” UI. You want to be a small customer, checkout here. You want something special? You gotta talk to sales. You want SSO, dedicated support, security audit, custom training for your team, administrator and team features, you gotta talk to sales. 

How many among us want to “talk to sales”?

I want to talk to someone who can answer my questions.

I want to talk to someone who can help me figure out a ballpark range of pricing so I know who I need to ask before I can proceed.

I want to talk to someone who can give me a preview or taste of how the product is going to make my life better in a way that is specific to my unique situation.

And I definitely want to talk to someone on my time, on my schedule, probably now if you had a phone number I could call someone and leave a voicemail like it’s 2005.

But do I want to contact. sales. ??

No. I do not.

So can we perhaps offer something else.

Maybe it’s a “book your ROI analysis” call?

What if it’s not a sales call but it’s a call where we:

So here I am again, looking at ways to improve the copy on the sales page and proposing an entirely new sales workflow.

So we know our One Reader, our One Big Idea, and we have some VOC. We know we want some kind of calendar booking communication submission to happen on this page. And we have enough to start figuring out how we might reframe how we sell. Now let's pinpoint our One Promise.

Our One Promise is our way of communicating to the reader what’s in it for them. In what ways will their lives improve if we keep our end of the bargain we’re making? A lot goes into a really good one. For now, let’s say that we want to offer something measurable, something a reader can know for sure that they have received.

Our One Offer is the one step they take on this page to start seeing the benefits of that promise. In this case, we still want to make a call happen. I’m not going to make too many changes to this part of the page except to say: what if we just book the call today?

My go-to starting point is to pull up my favorite page of Jo’s site, the most valuable page on the Internet, a list of copywriting formulas. I do an edit-find for the headline formula section, pull up some VOC on the other side of my screen, and then spit out 50 or so before I start making any decisions. Jo recommends doing them last, I like to do them first. You do you.

“50 headlines Alli? Are you serious??” Yes. I learned this technique from Jo as a way to find excellent headlines, crossheads, and value props and have started applying it to find new offers, promises, pitches, even product features.

I ran out of space on this beehiiv page so I embedded the headlines in this google doc for you to read.

From here, I pick a few headlines and mock this page up as a potential V2”

If any of the assumptions we’ve made throughout this page were verified with data, I would expect a page like this to generate more qualified leads booking than anything that says “Speak to an Expert.”

You’ll notice at the top I’ve also changed the copy on the old “Speak to Sales” button with one that matches the message on this page, which is that is an ROI call. I’ve also added a “Compliance Call” button because this is an important and reliable part of the process, I’d like to make it easy for folks to find a way to set up this call if that’s the first one they want to have.

I would also expect a page like this to take weeks or months to get off the ground. This page invites an entirely new sales call structure for teams to learn. That sales call relies on an agent that may or may not exist, on a dashboard and report that may or may not be designed, on a product strategy that may or may not include visibility for a senior sales leader. On positioning and a problem space that may or may not be addressable or desirable for Fyxer.

Building that commercial motion is itself a project far and above updating copy. I have a google doc somewhere with the outline for a diagnostic I want to offer folks who book calls with me and haven’t yet made the time to turn it into a CTA. There is always another priority. Agreeing to the strategic shift across an organization, to the new product strategy begotten by the assumptions here is an even more enormous project. 

The Contact Sales page is a portal to your innovation commercialization strategy.

Leah asked for feedback on a “talk to sales” contact page. And here we are. Looking at the home page. Looking at the enterprise page. Looking at some of the highest leverage points in the experience of purchase and asking questions like:

I chose Fyxer because Leah asked for feedback on this page. But the questions, the conundrums, this is what happens when you pick at the copy on any page of any web site. When you ask any business “who is your target customer” and the answer isn’t written down somewhere.

It starts as a copywriting question, maybe a messaging strategy project, but it soon becomes a GTM question. It asks if your product is serving customers the way it ought to. The line of inquiry runs straight through the foundation of your business’s innovation commercialization strategy.

It is hard. Not because of any one decision, one leader, one decision. But because in many ways it is the nature of innovation, the natural outcome of businesses structured the way ours are structured, siloed as we are around departments and decisions and who owns which part of our ideal customer profile. 

It doesn't always make sense to do the project this way end to end. You may navigate to any other page of my web site and find that you do not see the same level of rigor I am advocating for in this article and you would be right. The reason, which is the reason innovation commercialization can be challenging for so many of us, is that we often don’t yet know enough about who we’re writing for because we are still early.

And if you have read this far, down to the end, and thought, my goodness, this is long.

I have some rough news for you: this was a rush job.

In a real world situation, I’d do this work and share it with a head of product, sales, marketing, and a founder as I go.

I’d want to ask questions like:

And many many more.

You can increase the conversions on your “talk to sales page” or any other page of your site.

You will increase them more if you look at what isn’t on the page.

If you consider your “contact sales page” is a portal into your business strategy.

Do you need help getting more closed/won deals out of your GTM motion?

Are you a PLG leader of a team going upmarket? Are you re-launching new packages? Are you trying to figure out how to translate your success selling self-serve to selling to mid-market and enterprise teams? Do you want to land and expand more deals? I can help. Email me [email protected] or use this link to book a call. 

Tell me the problem you’re trying to solve. We’ll talk for 30 minutes. I’ll send you home with one small project you can do on your own. If I think I can help you, I’ll tell you how we can execute a buyer research project or how I can embed with your team your fractional Chief Customer Officer. I’ll give you a quote before we end the call.