Almost always because the positioning was never settled, so the copy had to cover every possibility. When a team cannot agree who the product is for or what it replaces, the homepage becomes a compromise made of abstractions. Nobody signs off on a vague headline enthusiastically. They sign off because it offends nobody.
We see this on most site projects we take on. The client thinks they have a copy problem. They usually have an agreement problem, and copy is where it becomes visible.
So before we write a line of a website, we run a positioning exercise. It takes a couple of hours and it is the highest leverage part of the whole engagement.
Positioning is the set of decisions about what your product is, who it is for, what it competes against, and why it wins. It is upstream of everything. Messaging, taglines and campaigns are what you say. Positioning is what makes those things possible to write.
It is not a tagline, and it is not your mission. A mission statement describes what you intend. Positioning describes how a buyer should file you in their head relative to the things they already know.
It is also not permanent, which is the part teams resist. Positioning that fit when you had ten customers may be wrong at two hundred, because the customers who arrived changed who you actually serve.
The modern reference point for most software teams is April Dunford's book Obviously Awesome, subtitled How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get it, Buy it, Love it, which has sold over 100,000 copies and has been released in an updated and expanded edition.
The core idea we take from it is that positioning breaks down into component pieces that relate to each other, rather than being a single statement someone writes. That reframing matters, because it turns positioning from a creative act into a sequence of decisions a team can actually argue about and resolve.
What follows is our own version of that exercise, shaped by running it with B2B software companies before a site rebuild. It is not a summary of the book, and we would recommend reading the book if you want the full method.
They run in order, and each depends on the one before. What would this buyer use if you did not exist? What can you do that those options cannot? What does that difference make possible for them? Who cares most about that outcome? And what shelf do they expect to find a product like yours on?
The order is doing real work. Teams almost always want to start with the last question, because choosing a category feels like the strategic decision. But you cannot choose a useful category until you know what you replace and who cares, and picking it first is how companies end up in a category where they are the weakest option.
Answer each in one sentence, written down, agreed by founders, sales and marketing together. If two people give different answers to question one, stop there. Everything downstream is unreliable until that is settled.
Ask your last ten customers what they were doing before, and take the boring answers seriously. The answer is rarely the competitor you benchmark against. It is usually a spreadsheet, a manual process, an internal tool somebody built, or nothing at all.
This matters because your differentiation only counts against the thing you actually displace. If you compete mostly with a spreadsheet, then features that beat a rival product are irrelevant to the decision, and the real argument is about effort, error rate and who has to maintain it.
Talk to the deals you lost too, especially the ones that went to no decision. No decision is a competitor, it is the most common one in B2B, and it never appears on a comparison chart.
Because it sets every expectation the buyer brings with them. Naming a category tells people what questions to ask, what to compare you against, what a fair price looks like, and which budget you come out of. Choose the wrong one and you spend every sales call correcting assumptions.
The temptation is to invent a category, and occasionally that is right. Usually it is expensive. Creating a category means teaching the market a new concept before you can sell anything, which is a multi year investment most companies cannot fund. Fitting into a familiar category and winning a clear position inside it is faster and less romantic.
A useful test is whether a buyer could find you in a budget line that already exists. If they would have to create a new line item to buy you, you are category creating whether you meant to or not.
It has raised the cost of being vague, because a model has to summarise you from your own words. When someone asks an assistant what your product does, the answer is assembled from text on your pages. Abstract copy produces an abstract summary, or the model reaches for a third party description you do not control.
Most companies are losing this quietly. Webflow analyzed the websites of 2,000 companies for a study it published in September 2026 and found the median company appeared in only 16% of the AI answers it would want to be part of, and was cited in those answers just 6% of the time.
The practical consequence is that plain language now has a direct commercial payoff. A sentence that names the category, the buyer and the alternative is easy for a model to lift accurately. A sentence about empowering teams to unlock potential is not, and it will be replaced with somebody's guess. Our notes on designing a homepage for a brand nobody knows cover the same problem for human readers.
Cheaply, and in conversation, before a single page changes. Say the new positioning out loud on five sales calls and watch what happens to the questions you get asked. If prospects stop asking what you do and start asking how it works, it is landing.
Then check the sales team actually uses it. Positioning that gets agreed in a workshop and ignored on calls was never agreed, it was tolerated. If the salespeople keep reverting to the old story, they are telling you something about which version survives contact with a buyer.
Only then rebuild the pages. Rewriting a site around positioning nobody has tested is how companies end up doing the same project twice in a year. Our piece on homepage design covers what changes once the story is settled.
Positioning for the buyer you want instead of the one you have. Every company we work with has an aspirational customer, usually larger and more prestigious than their current base. Writing the site for that customer alienates the people who actually buy, and rarely convinces the ones who do not.
The second failure is positioning by committee, where each stakeholder adds a clause until the statement covers everything and means nothing. The way out is to give one person the pen and let the others object to specifics rather than co author.
The third is treating positioning as a marketing deliverable. If the founders and the sales team do not use the same words, the website is describing a company that does not exist, and buyers notice the mismatch on the first call.
Answer the five questions in one sitting with your founders, one salesperson and one marketer in the room. One sentence each, written where everyone can see them. Where two people disagree, mark it and keep going, because the disagreements are the actual output.
Then call three recent customers and ask what they were using before and why they switched. That conversation settles more arguments than any workshop. If you want help running the exercise, or rebuilding a site once the story is clear, we are happy to go through it with you at phoenix.studio.
Tell us where you want to go. We'll tell you how we'd get you there.