Are you winning “why us” and losing “why this at all”?

Picture someone at a company who’s found your product and likes it. They get why it’s better than the other options. But in B2B, the person who likes you is rarely the person who signs off on the money. Before anything gets bought, they have to go to their boss, their finance team or the rest of the team and answer a much more basic question:

“Why should we spend money on this kind of thing at all?”

If they can’t answer that, it doesn’t matter how good your comparison table is. The purchase never gets far enough for anyone to compare you with anyone.

6sense, a company that sells sales and marketing software, surveyed 4,611 recent B2B buyers. More than half (56%) said convincing their company that this type of product was worth paying for was as hard as choosing which product to buy, or harder.

Why does “why us” get most of the attention?

The way I see it, most teams pour their messaging effort into “why us” because it’s the part that feels like marketing. You can see your competitors’ websites. You can argue about features in a meeting. You can line up proof, logos and comparison pages. It’s concrete, and it looks like progress.

But all of that only helps once a buyer has already decided to buy something like you and is now choosing between options. Until then, your buyer is busy with an earlier conversation, and your comparison doesn’t come up.

The work that helps them there is less visible. It’s deciding what you are, who you’re really for, and why the problem you solve deserves a budget right now. That’s positioning work, and it’s easy to skip because it doesn’t produce a new page or a new feature to announce.

What does a buyer need to understand first?

I think about it as three questions your buyer has to answer, in this order:

What is this, and do we need something like it? This is your category. It tells people what to compare you with and which budget should pay for you.

Is it built for a company like ours? This is fit. It’s how the right buyer recognizes themselves and the wrong one moves on.

Why this one over the others? This is your differentiation, the “why us”.

If the first two answers are fuzzy, the third has nothing to stand on. Your best claims just sound like one more company saying it’s better.

What does this look like on a real homepage?

I worked on positioning and messaging with Findymail, a company that helps sales teams and agencies find accurate contact details for the people they want to reach.

Findymail started as an email finder: you put in a name and a company, you get a verified email address. Over time the product grew into much more, including phone numbers, lists of companies that match your ideal customer, and a service that keeps the contacts in your CRM up to date. As founder Valentin Wallyn put it, “The product evolved faster than the messaging.” The site still talked like an email finder, which suited the lead-gen agencies that had found them early but did little for the bigger sales teams they now wanted.

Through customer interviews, a positioning workshop with the whole team and a rewrite of the core pages, we moved the category to B2B data. We kept “email finder” on the page because that’s the label buyers already know (the same idea as borrowing a familiar category, which I wrote about in June), but it stopped being the main story.

That change gave the buyer a different conversation to have with their boss. “Do we need another tool to look up emails?” is an easy no. “How much is bad contact data costing our sales team?” is a question with a real answer: emails that bounce, reps chasing people who left the company months ago, and a CRM full of contacts nobody can use. Findymail’s homepage now makes that case right at the top, and it puts it plainly: “The emails you find today start going stale once they’re in your CRM.”

Only then does the proof I pushed them to put forward really land: Findymail ranked first for email accuracy in an independent test run by Clay, a tool many sales teams use to build prospect lists. In the first three months after the new pages went live, conversion rates doubled. Their Head of Marketing put it down to people “better understanding what we do.”

Why does this matter before they ever talk to you?

Buyers keep an eye on companies even between purchases. According to 6sense, almost all of them stay up to date on products they might buy, most often by going back to the companies’ websites. And when it’s time to buy, the company they already preferred before talking to sales wins 82% of the time.

AI hasn’t changed that as much as you’d think. The Reality Department, a UK research agency, asked 250 B2B buyers how they used AI tools. The most common use was checking up on a company they’d already found. An AI tool was how a company got onto the shortlist in only 12% of purchases. As they put it, “AI confirms a reputation. It rarely creates one.”

So your story has to make sense without you there. If your homepage, what a colleague says about you and what ChatGPT says about you don’t line up on what you are and who it’s for, your buyer has to sort that out before they can sell you internally. That’s extra work you’ve handed to the person trying to help you.

How do you make the case for spending at all?

6sense also looked at what kicked off each purchase. The ones that went through were more likely to have started with a goal to grow. The ones that stalled were more likely to have started with frustration about the tool the company already had.

That’s worth taking to your homepage. “Your current tool is annoying” is a weak reason to spend money. “This helps you hit the number you’re already being measured on” is a stronger one.

So before your next homepage rewrite, read your page and ask: Would a buyer know what kind of thing this is and which budget it comes from? Would the right company see itself in it? Could the person backing you inside the company use it to explain why this matters for growth, not just what’s broken today?

There’s one case where “why us” really does most of the work: when the buyer already pays for something like you and is only looking to switch, like moving from one CRM to another. They’ve already decided to spend. Everywhere else, the money conversation comes first, and that’s a positioning and messaging strategy problem.

Discovery

I’m speaking at the Scaling SaaS Summit next week

The Scaling SaaS Summit starts Tuesday, and I’m one of the speakers. It’s a free three-day virtual event (November 17-19) hosted by Kevin Sanderson, with about 20 sessions on winning and keeping SaaS customers.

My session, “The Right Way to Use AI in Messaging,” goes live Wednesday: one real SaaS homepage taken from 30 public reviews to a rewrite in the customers’ own words, then tested against the original with simulated buyers. If a homepage rewrite is on your 2027 list, start there. Get your free ticket here.

What happens after someone clicks “Start free trial”?

I wrote a guest case study for Uxia, a platform where AI participants work through websites and apps and record what they do and say. We used it to follow Yirla, a tool that helps marketers make sense of paid ads across channels, from the website into signup and onboarding.

The part that stuck with me fits today’s theme. The simulated buyers understood what Yirla does. But when it suggested a change, like moving budget from one campaign to another, they wanted to know why, so they could explain it to their manager. That’s the internal case again, this time showing up before anyone had even signed up.

It’s synthetic research, so I treat it as a list of better questions to take to real prospects, not 200% validation. Read the Yirla x Uxia case study.

Resonance