How Do I Explain What My Business Does So People Actually Understand It?

One of the hardest parts of marketing a business is that you know too much about your own work.

You know what happens when someone hires you.

You know what they walk away with.

You know the changes you've watched happen over and over again.

So when someone asks what you do, it makes sense that you'd want to explain all of that.

But there's a problem.

The person discovering your business for the first time isn't there yet.

They haven't worked with you.

They don't have the context you have.

They may not even know that they want the thing you're describing.

And that can make completely accurate marketing surprisingly hard to understand.

Start at the point of discovery

This came up in a recent coaching conversation while we were looking at how a business was being described.

There were lots of words available to describe what clients got from the work. They were accurate. They were meaningful. They reflected real experiences clients had.

But when we looked at what people were saying before they became clients, the language was much simpler.

They were trying to understand something.

There was a gap between where they were and where they wanted to be, and they were looking for someone who could help them make sense of it.

That was the point of discovery.

And I think that's an important place to stand when we're trying to explain a business.

Not at the end of the work.

At the moment someone realizes:

I have a problem. I want help with it. What does this person do?

Marketing often gets written from too far ahead

The more experience we have with our work, the easier it is to describe what happens later.

A business owner might say their work helps people become more confident.

Or build a business that works with their capacity.

Or feel more in control.

Or create more freedom.

Those things might all be true.

But they're outcomes.

The person discovering the business might be thinking something much simpler:

I don't know what to do next.

I'm getting inquiries, but people aren't buying.

I'm spending too much time trying to keep track of everything.

I need to figure out why this isn't working.

That's where they're standing when they encounter the business.

If our marketing starts three steps further down the road, we're asking them to make the connection themselves.

Explaining what you do can be more powerful than explaining what people get

There's a lot of emphasis in marketing on selling the transformation rather than the service.

I understand why.

People care about what something will do for them.

But I don't think that means explaining what you actually do is unimportant.

Sometimes it's the most useful information we can give someone.

Especially at the point of discovery.

If I find your business because I'm trying to solve a problem, one of my first questions is incredibly simple:

Can this person help me with this?

Clear language helps me answer that.

The deeper outcomes can come later.

The point of discovery is different from the client experience

Someone who has worked with you for six months has context.

They understand how you think.

They understand your process.

They may have language for changes they couldn't have described when they started.

A person finding your website through Google has none of that.

They're trying to orient themselves.

What is this?

Is it for someone like me?

Does it help with the thing I'm trying to figure out?

That's a very different moment.

And it may need different language.

This doesn't mean simplifying your work.

It means simplifying the explanation of it.

Simple doesn't mean shallow

This is a distinction I come back to often.

A business can do complex, nuanced, highly individualized work and still be easy to explain.

In fact, the complexity of the work may be exactly why the explanation needs to be simple.

The person discovering you doesn't need to understand everything that will happen if they work with you.

They need enough information to understand why they might want to keep looking into what you do.

That's a much smaller job for our marketing.

And I think it can take some pressure off.

Your homepage doesn't have to communicate every possible benefit of working with you.

Your introduction doesn't have to capture the entire transformation.

Your marketing doesn't have to explain the full value of something someone hasn't experienced yet.

It needs to help the right person recognize what you do.

So, how do you explain what your business does?

I often find it useful to mentally move backwards.

Not: What do clients say after working with me?

But: What was happening when they first started looking?

What did they know at that point?

What were they trying to solve?

What would they have needed to hear to understand that this business might be relevant to them?

That's the perspective I'm often trying to uncover in coaching.

Not because there's one perfect way to describe a business.

And not because every business needs the same kind of marketing.

I'm trying to help the business owner separate two different perspectives: everything they know about the experience of working together and what a potential client knows at the moment they discover the business.

Once we separate those, explaining the business often becomes much simpler.

Because marketing doesn't have to explain the entire journey.

It just has to make sense from where your client is standing when they find you.