[nickstefan12]

>  the more expensive the service a B2B company provides, the more incomprehensible its website

> I think the big companies do it to get you on the phone — so they can upsell.

I was thinking these things, and then BOOM, he says what I'm thinking haha.

These are sales oriented companies. By contrast, B2C is quantity oriented. They need more customers buying their mostly undifferentiated price tiers. Selling expensive pants vs regular pants isn't worth high touch sales. However, in B2B, selling "really really expensive enterprise plan" vs "regular enterprise plan" is definitely worth high touch sales. They want to do everything they can to get you "interested, but confused" and pick up the phone.

[cerved]

It's an answer that provides a possibly logical reason for the behavior but I don't buy it.

Firstly because inbound phone calls are incredibly rare. Maybe it's more common for people to pick up the phone in the states but in my three years selling B2B SaaS (enterprise and startup) I never received a hot inbound lead on the phone. It's a bit different if your market leader but most companies and products aren't so I don't think it's a valid strategy.

Secondly because if you are doing a proper inbound strategy you need to entice people with content, product demonstrations or trials (ie showing the product).

Finally, if you want to obfuscate your offering, you don't need to hide it behind a bunch of mumbo jumbo. People rarely understand exactly what your product does even if you give them full access to it for a month.

I think the reason is simpler. A mixture of incompetence - B2B companies don't have the marketing savvy of FMCGs - and the fact competitors don't do a much better job. It's harder to write a clear, concise and enticing description of what you do than just generating buzzwordy corporate bs. It looks marketingy, so the copy is going to be signed off by everyone. Besides, everyone else in the industry is throwing around the same buzzwords, so you get this bubble of nonsense speak and everyone just rolls with it.

[adambyrtek]

B2B startups don't rely on inbound phone calls, they want you to leave your email, phone number, and company size in order to "receive a case study", "book a product demo", or "subscribe to a newsletter", and that's when the real sales process starts.

They put a lot of money and effort into sales and marketing, and you underestimate them by thinking that it's a sign of incompetence.

[cerved]

Bro, read my comment.

We're talking about why a lot of B2B tech companies have a lot buzzwordy nonsense instead of descriptions of what they can do for their customers (this is not unique to tech companies, I would say this goes for most B2B) and the theory put forward was that it's to get people to pickup the phone so they can understand what the fuck the product does. This is what I debunked.

I literally worked as a salesrep at a fairly big B2B marketing startup and one of the largest enterprise software companies.

What you refer to is content marketing to generate inbound leads. Those leads would then be put on a mailing list and and an outbound process would start. Except the "book a demo" (inbound lead) which I never recall leading to a good deal.

If you are a small stage startup with a small sales team you can probably get by on inbound but you have to go outbound to saturate the market. Even then, having poor description is going to hurt your Google fu so I don't buy the strategy.

If your the market leader, like salesforce in crm, you're going to see a lot of inbound but that's because people know your product and you're gartner quadrant status. Even then you'd still do maybe 50/50 inbound outbound.

In either case, the "it's shit because it works" argument still doesn't really hold up.

They put a lot of money into sales, they put a lot of money into going to conferences. They do not, however, seem to put really any money into a decent copywriter.

[adambyrtek]

All very good points. I was just saying that in my opinion they might be intentionally abstract to make you feel like they can solve all your problems, and vague enough to convince you to leave your contact details to find out more, but the ultimate goal is to get you into the funnel. I think we agree on most points, I just think it's not necessarily a sign of incompetence.

[cerved]

That might be the case but vagueness doesn't sell.

I'm not saying the message should be an engineering manual of the ins and outs the product but it should be clear, concise and entice customers to give the product further attention.

Consider seo description field of HubSpot

>HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.

Vs. Optimizely

> Be brave, experiment everywhere, and transform your customer experience with Optimizely.

Seriously WTF

[mrhappyunhappy]

Last point is on the dot. I work to optimize websites and bring this issue with clients all the time. In the end, a mid-level in house marketing guru will convince his seniors that this is the way to go - after all how else will they justify their jobs?

[cerved]

Worth noting is I learnt jack shit about copywriting in my communications degree. You'd have to work in an agency, FMCG, media or similar industry to learn that stuff and in my experience, you don't often see that in tech.

I feel your pain. I just brought the Google fu aspect up in another comment.

[princeb]

B2B is kind of an odd place.

some B2Bs started out doing one thing and then end up doing all kinds other random crap that clients just decided they rather have one team managing a whole project rather than spread out over 200 vendors and contractors and managing it themselves. there's nothing wrong with that! some clients are fighting to keep their business afloat instead of spending all day individually managing their service vendors. and if the B2B gets paid for that kind of work, it's sometimes worth doing.

so if you're a B2B with experience herding 200 different vendors and contractors doing odd crap for a single project, why not advertise it? alas when you do it just sounds really generic like "enterprise solutions" or even "everything". i mean, these companies in the article probably started off doing data analytics then ended up being really good at hooking up internal systems with data collection and then also doing consulting and then marketing and every other thing because their clients must have asked for follow up on their products.

to the author of the medium article. if you see that these companies do everything, why not just give them a call and ask them if they can do that one specific thing? chances are, they've done it before, and even if they haven't, maybe they'll do it for you anyway?

[tlb]

Also, the more expensive your product, the higher up the ladder you have to sell because corporate budgets work that way. While people who will be using the product want to know what the product does, senior managers with budget approval want to know something more abstract, like will it improve their ROI by accelerating synergies or leverage their human capital to drive innovation. It can be more important to optimize the website for the people approving the budget.

[yeukhon]

I will second the website optimization for all audiences in general. When I come across a vendor website and I find I am spammed by "read our whitepapers" popups or stop-right-there page, I usually judt quit, unless I find the product interesting. I also prefer if vendor doesn't ask for an email address before letting me download. I get it is needed for marketing, but if I really do like your product, I will follow up.

Finally, usually sales end up with either director of engineering/whatever or VP/SVP, so do a really good presentstion...

[dalbasal]

I think intentional obscurity is probably rare. I think it's more of an evolutionary explanation. We don't get old age illnesses in old age because they're useful, preventing old age illness is just less useful than preventing prime age illness.

Clarity is difficult, and if it rarely makes a difference to businesses then it gets left out.

One reason clarity is difficult is that it requires narrowing what you say. Measurable accountable and integrated business software solutions. From the outside this sounds pointless and meaningless. From the inside it sounds nice and wide, encompassing everything they do. Better too broad than too narrow.

People's CVs sometimes have the same problem, resistance to limiting language.

The reason it doesn't matter is the way they get business. In face-to-face sales, clarity is surprisingly unimportant. It can even hurt by allowing prospects to raise objections without the presence of a salesman. Basically, the company's marketing doesn't matter, so it sucks.

[shaqbert]

More likely that when you don't get it, that you're probably not the target audience. B2B companies typically have pretty narrow target personas, wither their very own set of needs and challenges. They need to get it. The rest does not really matter.

[mseebach]

You may want to get them "confused" (or, to use a more positive phrase, excited), but crucially, you don't want them to get sticker shock. Most software is essentially free on the margin. You don't want to leave $20k on the table by scaring them with a $40k price tag, but you also don't want to charge someone who'd be happy to pay you $50k tens of thousands less, just because you felt called to put a number on your website.

[taneq]

That kind of pricing is bad in the long run, though, because that customer who paid $50k is eventually going to learn that their competitor only paid you $20k and then they're going to be pissed at you about it forever and ever.

[mseebach]

In practice, the $50k customer will typically be getting something tangible that the $20k customer isn't. Perhaps they have a custom feature developed, perhaps they have special on-call/on-site support, perhaps they pay a much discounted unit-price, say $10/user (but for 5000 light users) where the other customer is paying $200/user for 100 heavy users.

If you're selling the exact same product ("exact" in the business-sense that includes stuff like support or long-term price commitments, not in the geek-sense where CentOS is the exact same as RedHat) for two vastly different price points, you should probably make sure those customers don't meet.

[stuartaxelowen]

Um, will they? I've never heard of this happening.

[taneq]

Will they learn about it? Or will they be pissed about it? For the former point, people move jobs, people talk, word gets around. For the latter, that's just human nature.

[marcosdumay]

Or it is just a case of the site contents not having a very big priority, because your contracts come from person to person sales anyway; and the need of never saying anything dangerous, because your sales people will tell all kinds of different stories to all kinds of people, and your site must contradict none.

[nickstefan12]

Definitely could be this as well. The answer to "can the product do _____" may entirely depend on who's asking. If its a big enough customer at a high enough price, they may want the ability to say "yes".