Ask Five Employees What Your Company Does. Count the Answers.
“What does your company do?”
Easy question, right? It should be. It’s also the one most companies fumble.
Here’s a quick test you can run. Ask five people at your company that question. Somebody from sales, somebody from support, somebody from product, somebody from finance, and somebody in leadership. Write down what each of them says.
You’re hoping for one answer. You’ll probably get five.
And those are the people who work there every day.
Why five answers is a problem
Because every one of those answers gets said to somebody. A prospect. A job candidate. A partner. An investor. A neighbor who happens to know someone who needs exactly what you sell.
And those answers shape how buyers see you. B2B buyers do their homework, sure. But long before anybody runs a formal evaluation, they've already put together a picture of your company from what they've heard, and that picture colors everything that comes after. So if your salesperson describes one company, your support lead describes another, and your website describes a third, the buyer doesn't end up with a fuller picture. They end up with a blurry one.
It kills word of mouth, too. People can only repeat what they can remember. If your own team can’t say what you do in one sentence, your customers aren’t going to say it for you.
It gets worse in sales. When the company doesn’t hand salespeople a clear, consistent answer, they make up their own. Every version sets a slightly different expectation, and some of those are expectations your product can’t meet. That’s how you end up with unhappy customers who bought exactly what they were told they were buying.
How good companies end up here
This is almost never a people problem. Smart teams do it all the time, and it usually comes from being too close to the message.
When you work inside a company, you’re a lot closer to its message than anyone on the outside will ever be. You see everything the company puts out. Every email, every post, every deck. Your market sees a sliver of it. Even the people who signed up for your emails skip most of them.
So by the time you’re sick of a message, most of your market hasn’t heard it once.
And that’s the trap, because repeating yourself is boring. Leaders get tired of the line long before it lands, so they freshen it up. New tagline for the sales kickoff. New framing for the board deck. New headline on the homepage. It feels like progress every time. It’s really just starting over.
Same story inside the company. Somebody presents the positioning once at an all-hands, it goes into a slide deck, and everyone assumes the team’s got it. They don’t. You told them once, and once doesn’t stick.
Take a page from your ops team
Operations people get this better than most marketers do. They don’t expect a process to get followed just because somebody explained it once. They build it into the routine until it happens the same way every time.
Your message works the same way. Repetition is what closes the gap between what you meant and what people actually heard.
Now, in most marketing you repeat the same ideas but change up the wording to keep it fresh. That’s fine. The answer to “What does your company do?” is the exception. Don’t change it up. Same words, every person, every time.
There’s an old saying that repetition is the mother of retention. It’s true, and there’s a practical payoff. Say something enough times and it becomes automatic. Once the answer is automatic, your people quit worrying about what to say and start paying attention to the person who asked.
Now say it until you’re sick of it
Writing the sentence is the easy part. Getting 50 or 500 people to actually say it is the real work.
And it is work. I’ve spent 20-plus years running marketing from inside companies, and I can tell you a sentence like this doesn’t stick because it’s in a brand guide. It sticks when it’s part of how the company runs: onboarding, sales training, the all-hands agenda.
Here’s what I’d do:
Put it where people already look. The website headline, the first slide of the sales deck, job postings, the first page a new hire reads.
Say it out loud. Open the all-hands with it. And leaders need to use the exact words, not their own riff.
Practice it. Have new hires say it back in their first week. Have sales use it in role plays. It’ll feel awkward for a couple of weeks. Then it won’t.
Test it. Once a quarter, ask five people and count the answers. When you get one, you’re there.
Leave it alone. Change it when your market changes, not when you get bored.
That last one is the hardest. Right about when you can’t stand to hear the sentence one more time is when your market is finally starting to hear it.
You don’t need a clever line. You need one true sentence that everybody says the same way. That’s what people remember, and what people remember, they repeat.
So, what does your company do?
And would the person two desks over give the same answer?