You explain the company better than your website does. Deals move faster when you're on the call. Your newest salesperson learned the story secondhand and it got thinner in the telling, and the person they train will get a thinner version still.
At that point you're not the brand's biggest asset. You're its constraint.
Positioning is a decision. Messaging is the language that carries it around. Founders do the first and skip the second constantly, then wonder why the company sounds like four different companies depending on who's talking.
Voice is fixed, tone moves
The cleanest version of this comes from Mailchimp's content style guide, still the best public example anyone has published. Their framing: you have the same voice all the time, but your tone changes. One tone at dinner with friends, another in a meeting with your boss.
The practical tool inside it is a list of oppositions, written as "x but not y." Mailchimp's own list includes fun but not childish, powerful but not complicated, expert but not bossy.
The "not" half is what makes it useful. "Expert" on its own is a word every company would claim. "Expert but not bossy" tells a writer what to delete.
Three to five of those pairs will do more for your team's writing than a ten-page brand voice document.
"Leverage our platform to optimise cross-functional alignment and drive measurable outcomes."
Four abstract nouns, no person in the sentence, nothing anyone would say out loud.
And on reasons: "Real-time sync." A feature. The sentence is about your software.
"Everyone sees the same numbers, so the Monday meeting is twenty minutes shorter."
A scene. Someone can picture it, and repeat it.
And on reasons: "Your team stops working from stale numbers." A reason. The sentence is about them.
What actually goes in the document
Four things, and the fourth is the one everyone skips.
The one-liner. A single sentence a stranger could repeat.
Three reasons to believe it, each with proof sitting underneath. A number, a named customer, a result. A reason without proof is a claim wearing a suit.
Objection handling. The two or three you hear most, including the one that annoys you, which is usually the one that's partly fair. Write the answer you'd actually give on a call, not the polished version. The polished version never sounds true.
A vocabulary list. Words you use, words you avoid, and the industry terms you've decided not to touch. Sounds trivial next to the others. It's the part teams reach for most, because it settles arguments without a meeting.
Do this over two weeks
Write the one-liner ten times. Read each aloud. Most die on the second reading, which is what reading aloud is for. Anything that survives being spoken has a chance of surviving a sales call.
Test each against your positioning. If a line sounds great but claims something you never decided, kill it. Good copy that contradicts your strategy is worse than mediocre copy that supports it, because it works, and then it takes you somewhere you didn't choose.
Build the three reasons with proof attached. If you can't find proof, that's information. Either the reason is weaker than you thought, or you need a case study before you need copy.
Write your three to five voice pairs. Force the "not" half. If you can't name what you're not, you haven't described a voice, you've listed virtues.
Hand it to someone who wasn't in the room and watch them use it. Don't help. Where they hesitate tells you more than asking what they think.
Teardown
Mailchimp's content style guide
Mailchimp published their content style guide publicly, which is itself worth noticing. It's a costly signal, in the sense that a company with sloppy writing couldn't have done it.
The guide works because it's about decisions, not adjectives. It doesn't say "be friendly." It gives the voice pairs, then explains how tone shifts by the reader's emotional state, whether they've just finished a campaign or they're confused and asking for help on social.
Worth stealing: they write for the situation, not the channel. Most companies write an "email voice" and a "website voice" and end up with two personalities. Mailchimp has one voice and a set of tones for different moments, which is both simpler and more consistent.
What you leave with
What you now have. A messaging document with a one-liner, three proven reasons, your real objections, a vocabulary list, and three to five voice pairs.
The test. Could a customer who likes you repeat your one-liner accurately, from memory, a week later? If not, it's too clever or too long. Usually too clever. Clever is what you write when you're bored of your own company, and your buyer isn't.
Where this usually goes wrong. Writing it by committee. One person should hold the pen. Committees produce messaging that offends nobody and moves nobody, which is worse than being somewhat wrong in an interesting direction.
What it takes. Three or four days of writing, spread over two weeks. Everything sounds good on the day you write it. Time is the only defence.
