Three positioning tests to run before you rewrite the homepage
A new homepage rarely fixes a positioning problem. These three cheap tests tell you whether the words or the strategy need to change.
Every quarter someone in a B2B company proposes a homepage rewrite. The proposal usually arrives with a competitor screenshot and the phrase “we need to be clearer”. Sometimes that is true. More often the homepage is faithfully describing a position that was never decided.
Before you brief a designer, run these three tests. Each one takes less than a week and costs almost nothing.
1. The lost-deal replay
Pull the last ten deals you lost to a competitor or to “no decision”. Ask the seller to write one sentence on why. Then call three of those buyers and ask the same question. If the buyer’s reason and the seller’s reason match in fewer than half the cases, your problem is upstream of the website.
2. The three-person pitch
Ask your CEO, your best seller and your newest hire to each describe, in two sentences, who the product is for and why it wins. Record it. If you get three different answers, no amount of copywriting will produce a coherent homepage, because the writer will be asked to satisfy all three.
3. The alternative test
On the next five discovery calls, ask what the buyer would do if your company did not exist. The answers are your real competition. If the homepage compares you against companies buyers never mention, the positioning is aimed at the wrong alternative.
What to do with the results
If all three tests pass, rewrite the homepage; it will go quickly. If any fail, spend the money on the positioning work first. A homepage written on top of an undecided position gets rewritten again in six months, usually by a different agency.
