How do you say what your business does in 5 seconds?

The answer has three parts: the client’s problem, a short name for what you do, and the result for the client. It fits in one to three sentences. Before you write it, find out what clients compare you with and what you have that those options don’t. Then test it on strangers. After five seconds, they should know what you offer, what it will do for them and how to buy it.

Why is one sentence so hard?

April Dunford, a product positioning consultant, describes positioning in Obviously Awesome as context. A client who sees a business for the first time looks for clues: what it is, who it’s for and why they should care. She cites the Washington Post experiment: a violinist whose concerts sell out at once plays one morning by a metro station in Washington, and almost no one stops. Nothing around him tells passersby that something special is happening.

Dunford also advises against starting from the template “for [who], our [service] is a [category] that…”. The template assumes you already know the answers, so you fill it with the assumptions you already had. That’s why I write the sentence about the business last, after five questions.

Five questions before the first sentence

Dunford breaks positioning into five parts plus a sixth, optional one: a trend. She works through them in this order:

1. What would clients do if your business didn’t exist? Often the answer isn’t a competitor but a spreadsheet, hiring someone, or living with the problem. That is what the client compares you with, and what they use to judge what “better” means.
2. What do you have that those alternatives don’t?
3. What does that give the client, and how will you prove it?
4. Who values it most? Describe the traits that will help you find those clients.
5. In what category should the client look for you? The category tells them right away who to compare you with, what to expect and how much to pay.

Take a hypothetical translation agency with eight people. Without it, clients would give the text to a freelance translator, run the manual through machine translation and have their own engineer fix it, or go to a large agency in Warsaw. The agency has translators with a technical education and a glossary of terms kept separately for each client. The client gets a manual that the foreign buyer accepts without rounds of corrections, and the proof is two references from machinery manufacturers. Machinery manufacturers who sell to Germany and Austria value this most. So the category is “technical documentation translation for machinery,” not “translation agency.”

The answer in three parts

Donald Miller, the author of the StoryBrand® method, proposes in Building a StoryBrand 2.0 a short statement in three parts: the client’s problem, the product as the solution, and the result. He starts with the problem, because that is what catches attention. He says to cut the product part down to a name or a short description, because listing features weakens the whole. At the end he puts a picture of the client’s situation once the problem is solved. It doesn’t have to be one sentence.

Two before-and-after examples, both fictional:

• before: “A translation agency with passion. Over 30 languages, years of experience, professional service”;
• after: “The machine manual comes back from the German client with comments, and the shipment is on hold. We translate technical documentation for machinery. The manual passes acceptance the first time, and the machine ships on schedule”;
• before: “Professional forklift servicing, fast and cheap”;
• after: “When a forklift is down, the whole warehouse is down. We service forklifts in warehouses across Silesia and come out the same day you call. The warehouse is back at work before the trucks pile up at the loading dock”.

Every claim in the “after” version has to be backed up. If you can’t show with examples that your manuals pass acceptance the first time, write what you can show.

The test on your website and on a stranger

Miller gives three questions a person should be able to answer after looking at your website for five seconds: what you offer, how it will make their situation better, and what they need to do to buy. This is how I check it:

• show the top of your home page for five seconds to three people from outside your business and outside your industry, then cover the screen;
• ask the three questions and write down the answers in their words;
• count the headline as good if at least two of them answer all three;
• circle every word in the headline that a stranger would need to know from your industry to understand it, and swap it for a simpler one.

The second test is out loud. Miller advises repeating your statement to friends, potential clients and even strangers in line, and watching whether they understand what you offer. Follow-up questions or a request for your contact details are a good sign. Silence and polite nodding mean it needs more work.

When it doesn’t work

If you don’t have satisfied clients yet, the sentence is a hypothesis. You then take the answers to the five questions from conversations with people who might buy, and check them against your first sales.

If clients understand what you do and still don’t buy, the problem more likely lies in the offer or the price than in the words.

With several very different services for different clients, one sentence will come out muddy. In my view, it’s better then to write a separate sentence for each group of clients and decide which one goes on the home page.

And when the name of the service says it all, like a tire shop by the highway, the name, the location and the opening hours are enough.

For tomorrow

Ask your last three clients what they would have done if your business didn’t exist, and write down their answers in their own words.

Read next: an offer clients won’t compare on price alone · how to price your service

Business X-ray in 5 minutes

How this text was written: the research, the choice of sources and the final version are mine. AI helped me prepare a draft; I checked every fact, and I am responsible for this text. — Maciej Chmura

Sources

• April Dunford, Obviously Awesome, ch. 1 “Positioning as Context” (context, the Washington Post experiment with the violinist).
• Ibid., ch. 2 “The Five (Plus One) Components of Effective Positioning” (why not to start from a template; alternatives, distinguishing features, value and proof, who values it most, category, trend).
• Ibid., ch. 10 “Step 8. Find a Market Frame of Reference That Puts Your Strengths at the Center and Determine How to Position in It” (what the category tells the client).
• Donald Miller, Building a StoryBrand 2.0, Part 1 “Why Most Marketing Is a Money Pit,” ch. 2 (three questions in five seconds).
• Ibid., Part 3 “Executing Your StoryBrand Messaging and Marketing Campaign,” ch. 15 (the three-part statement and testing it on people).