What makes your business different?

The problem isn't your vocabulary

“We help businesses grow through tailored digital solutions” is not badly written. It is precisely written about nothing. The failure isn't the adjectives; it is that the sentence answers “what do you do?” when the buyer is silently asking a different question: compared to what, and why should I care?

People cannot evaluate anything in isolation. They understand a new thing by slotting it next to a familiar one and noting the difference. If you don't tell them which familiar thing to compare you to, they will pick — and they will usually pick the cheapest, most generic option in your space. You lose the comparison you never chose.

The four parts that make a description specific

• The alternative. What the buyer would realistically do if you didn't exist — a competitor, a tool, a junior hire, or doing nothing. Name it. This is the single most-skipped part and the one that gives the rest meaning.
• The capability you have that it doesn't. Something concrete and checkable, not an adjective. “Faster” is an adjective; “we ship the first working version in nine days” is a capability.
• The value that capability produces. What the buyer actually gets because of it — in their terms, in their metric, not yours.
• Who it matters most to. The buyer for whom this trade-off is obviously right. Naming them is what makes the right person feel spoken to, and it is also what lets the wrong person leave early, which is a favour to both of you.

Assembled, these produce a sentence that literally cannot be pasted onto a competitor's site, because it names them and beats them.

Say it in the buyer's words, not the industry's

The words that belong in this sentence are the ones your last five customers used when they described the problem to you before they hired you — not the ones your industry uses at conferences. Buyers search, skim and decide in their own vocabulary. Every term they have to translate is a moment they might spend leaving instead.

If you don't have those words written down, you are guessing. Go back through your emails, your intake calls and your reviews and copy out the exact phrases. This is the cheapest research available and almost nobody does it.

Then put it where it does work

A positioning sentence that lives in a strategy document changes nothing. It has to be the first thing on the homepage, the first line of the proposal, the thing you say when someone asks at a wedding, and the frame for every post. Consistency is what makes it stick; a different description in each place resets the buyer to zero every time.

The false fixes

“Write a better tagline.” A clever tagline on top of unclear positioning makes you memorable and still unbuyable.

“List more services.” A longer list widens the category and makes the comparison harder, not easier. Specific beats comprehensive.

“Just say we're premium/passionate/different.” Claims about yourself carry no weight. Only the comparison does the work.

Do this in the next five minutes

Questions people actually ask

What makes your business different from others?

Whatever survives the paste test. Copy your description onto a competitor's website and read it again — if nothing looks wrong, you haven't answered the question, you've named your category. A real answer states what the buyer would otherwise do, and one checkable thing you do that it doesn't.

How do I explain what I do without sounding generic?

Stop answering “what do you do?” and start answering “compared to what, and why care?”. Name the alternative, name a concrete capability it lacks, say what that gets the buyer, and say who it matters most to. Four parts, one sentence, impossible to paste onto anyone else's site.

How do I tell potential customers what I do?

In their words, not your industry's. The vocabulary that belongs in that sentence is the one your last five customers used to describe the problem before they hired you — go and copy the exact phrases out of your emails and intake calls. It's the cheapest research available and almost nobody does it.

Related field notes

• I get leads, but they're the wrong ones — a wide market doesn't bring more buyers. It brings more tyre-kickers.
• “You're too expensive” — almost never about the number. What the sentence actually means.
• Why doesn't my landing page convert? — it isn't ugly. It's confusing. The 5-second test that proves it.

Find your real bottleneck

This is stage 3 — Position — and it is the most common upstream cause of problems that look like they live somewhere else: wrong leads, price objections, quiet content. If Position is weak, fixing anything downstream is repainting a wall that's still wet. The free Bottleneck Finder checks all nine stages in five minutes.

Find my bottleneck — free, 5 minutes

No email, no login — your answers are scored in your browser. The complete framework is the book From Stranger to Sold; the first chapter is free.