Your Messaging Isn't the Problem

By Bruce Scheer, Inspire Your Buyers®

My dad was one of the best chiropractors in the state of Oregon. My brother followed him into the practice. Growing up around that work, I watched the same thing happen over and over: someone walked in complaining about a stomach ache and walked out having had something adjusted in their back.

The pain was real. The place it showed up was a liar.

That is the most useful thing I learned from two decades of dinner table diagnosis, and it turns out to apply almost perfectly to go-to-market. Because right now there is a CRO reading a quarterly number they do not like, and the conclusion they are reaching is: our messaging isn’t landing. We need a better writer.

They are reading the pain correctly. They are reading the location wrong.

The Big Problem: treating the symptom

Here is the sequence I see, and I see it constantly.

Marketing produces random acts of content. Sellers engage in random acts of conversation, each rep with their own spin on the company story. Nothing ladders up. Nothing compounds. The pipeline looks busy and the forecast does not move.

So leadership does the reasonable thing. They go buy words. A new agency, a fresh messaging framework, a brand refresh, a writer with a good portfolio. Six weeks later the deck is prettier and the deals are exactly where they were.

Hiring a writer to fix a positioning problem is painkillers for a misaligned spine. Feels productive. Changes nothing.

There is a diagnostic question that finds this in about ninety seconds, and I would ask it before I touched a single word of copy. If I asked five of your reps what makes you different, would I get five different answers, and would any of them be right?

Most leaders can answer the first half. It is the second half that stings.

The Risks: what the misdiagnosis costs

Your buyer is already feeling this, and they are quieter about it than your team is.

Gartner found that 69% of B2B buyers report inconsistencies between what a company’s website says and what its sellers tell them, and Gartner’s own analysts warn that this “creates mistrust, potentially putting the transaction at risk.” Seven in ten buyers are already catching your surfaces disagreeing with each other. Nobody files a complaint about it. They just trust you a little less, and you never learn why.

Then it gets worse, because contradiction does not only lose deals. It shrinks the ones you win. Buyers hit with too much conflicting information are 153% more likely to settle for a smaller, less disruptive purchase than they originally planned (Gartner). The buyer de-risks by buying less of you.

And when a team cannot articulate differentiated value, it falls back on the one thing it can always describe: the product and the price. Sellers who lead with features, price, and discounts win 18% of their deals, the lowest win rate of the four strategies Corporate Visions studied. Top performers lead with vision and perspective in 48% of theirs (Corporate Visions and Florida State University, 2026).

That is the business cost. The human cost sits underneath it and rarely makes the board deck. Reps who cannot explain why they win start to believe they are losing on price. Marketing rewrites the same page for the fourth time. Two teams who like each other start to resent each other. Not just revenue. Confidence.

The Desired Outcome: aligned around one differentiated value

Now picture the adjustment taking hold.

Product, marketing, sales, and customer success all describe the same differentiated value, in their own words, to their own stakeholders, and a buyer moving between them hears one company. Your champion walks into a room you will never enter, and the version of you that gets repeated in there is the version you would have wanted.

The gap between those two states is enormous and almost nobody is on the right side of it. Only 4% of companies say they have a clear, consistently understood value proposition. Those that do grew 19% in 2025, against 12% for companies with limited or inconsistently communicated ones, roughly 1.6 times faster (Bain & Company, 2026).

The other 96% are not working less hard. They are working hard in different directions.

And here is the finding that settles the messaging versus positioning argument, and it is not mine. Nearly half of companies, 49%, say their biggest value proposition problem is core product or service differentiation. Bain calls that an existential issue, not a communications one (Bain & Company, 2026).

Half the market is trying to write its way out of a differentiation problem.

The Path: find the misalignment before you adjust anything

I jokingly call myself a corporate chiropractor. It gets a head tilt, which is the whole point, because it makes people ask what that means instead of assuming they already know. What it means is this: I do not start with your words. I start with what is out of alignment between your revenue team and your target buyers, and I work in three moves.

Find value: the diagnosis

Before a word gets written, we work the positioning framework with your leadership team. Six ingredients, and five of them look outward: the market context your buyers already live in, the alternatives they have including doing nothing, your genuinely unique capabilities, the meaningful value those create in your buyer’s own dollars, the target buyers who feel that most urgently and can actually act, and the category you occupy in their mind.

That is Find Value. It is uncomfortable, it is research-driven, and it is where the real misalignment almost always turns up.

Communicate value: the adjustment

Then we build the narrative on top of that position, four beats we call POPS: the Problem your buyer is in, the Outcome when it is solved, the Path through, and the Steps to get there.

Not one story recited identically by everyone. A consistent story, a spine, that a CMO, an AE, and a CSM can each deliver in the way their stakeholder needs to hear it without contradicting the other two. A skeleton rather than a script, which is why it survives contact with a real buyer. That is Communicate Value, and it is also what every AI agent you deploy will inherit, for better or worse.

Quantify value: the relief they can measure

Last, we equip your sellers to build a personalized, defensible business case with the buyer rather than at them. Your champion needs a number they helped construct, because that is the only kind they can defend in a room you are not in. That is Quantify Value.

Diagnosis, adjustment, and relief your buyer can measure. Chiropractors would recognize the sequence.

Next Steps

If any of this landed in a place that already hurt, three things to do.

• Ask five of your reps what makes you different. Do not coach them first. Count the answers.
• Take the free Narrative Assessment. Seventeen questions, five minutes, no email required. It will show you where your story is drifting and what the drift is costing you.
• If it confirms what you suspect, talk with me for thirty minutes about your results. No obligation.

If you need a corporate chiropractor, you know where to find me. I will tell you plainly whether what you have is a writing problem or a spine problem.

Most teams that think they need better words need a better position. The words are downstream, and they always have been.

So before you hire another writer: can your team tell me what you do that nobody else can, and would your buyer agree?

Author

Bruce Scheer is the author of the Amazon bestseller Inspire Your Buyers®. He jokes that he has never worked a day in his life, and in that time he has helped thousands of marketers and sellers go to market with a more compelling story, for HP, Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, Oracle, Dell, Citibank, McKesson, Infosys, Unisys, Tableau, and Fastly. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

Research cited

• Gartner Sales Survey, 2025: 69% of B2B buyers report inconsistencies between the information on a company’s website and what its sellers tell them, which Gartner warns creates mistrust that puts the transaction at risk.
• Gartner, “Gartner Reveals New B2B Sales Approach to Win in Today’s Information Age,” July 29, 2019: buyers given too much contradictory information are 153% more likely to settle for a smaller, less disruptive purchase than they originally planned.
• Corporate Visions and Florida State University, 2026: sellers leading with product features, price, and discounts win 18% of their deals, the lowest of the four strategies studied; top performers use vision or perspective selling in 48% of theirs.
• Bain & Company, 2026 B2B Growth Agenda: only 4% of companies say they have a clear, consistently understood value proposition, and those that do grew 19% in 2025 against 12% for the rest; 49% say their biggest value proposition problem is core product or service differentiation.

For more sourced, graded B2B statistics like these, see the 2026 B2B Narrative Statistics page.

Frequently asked questions

How do I know if I have a messaging problem or a positioning problem? Ask five of your sellers what makes you different, without coaching them. If you get five different answers, or five versions of the same generic claim your competitors also make, the problem is upstream of the words. Messaging is how you say it. Positioning is what you are worth to a specific buyer and why you beat every alternative, including doing nothing.

Why doesn’t hiring a copywriter or agency fix inconsistent messaging? A writer can only make a position clearer, never make it different. If the underlying value proposition is undifferentiated, better words produce a more fluent version of the same sameness. Bain found 49% of companies say their biggest value proposition problem is core differentiation, which it calls an existential issue rather than a communications one.

What does a positioning problem actually cost? It shows up as stalled deals and slow ramp, and also as smaller wins. Gartner found buyers hit with contradictory information are 153% more likely to settle for a less disruptive purchase than they planned, and 69% already report inconsistencies between a company’s website and its sellers.

What is a narrative spine? A consistent structure, not a script, that every team delivers in their own way without contradicting each other. Ours runs on four beats: Problem, Outcome, Path, Steps. Marketing, sales, and customer success each address different stakeholders, so they need room to improvise, and a spine gives them that room while keeping the value story the same.