[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.