A few years ago I noticed something about the companies I was working for. Their products were better than their websites said. I don't mean the sites were ugly, though some were. I mean that if you read the homepage and then watched the product being used, the two didn't seem to describe the same thing.

Why would that be? The people who built the product knew exactly what it did. But the homepage was usually written by whoever had an hour free, and it was written to be approved rather than read. Nobody on the approval chain was a stranger. So nobody noticed that a stranger couldn't tell what the company did.

The cost of this is hard to see because it's paid by someone else. It's paid by the sales rep, who starts every call by explaining what the site didn't. I've sat in on those calls. The rep is tired in a particular way, the way you get tired when you do the same unnecessary thing every day.

There's a test for this, and almost nobody runs it, I think because nobody wants the result. Open your homepage next to your strongest competitor's. Find someone who doesn't work for you. Give them five seconds on each, then ask which one they'd call.

Five seconds sounds unfair, but it's about what a buyer gives you. They heard your name in a meeting, typed it in, and formed an opinion before the first sentence finished loading. Everything after that is you trying to undo it.

What loses in five seconds is usually the same things. A headline that could belong to any company in the category. A paragraph where the product should be. A stock photo of two people shaking hands. What wins is also the same: one sentence that says what you do and for whom, one reason to believe it, one thing to look at.

Founders will rework pricing, the deck, the sales script, and leave the first screen alone because "the site is fine." I did this too. The site is where the deal was lost before the rep ever got the lead, and it's the one thing on that list a stranger can tell you about in an afternoon.