Marketing is supposed to involve two people. The writer and the reader. Both getting something they want. But most B2B copy involves only one person — the writer. They sit there producing clever phrases and smart wordplay. They are having a great time. The reader is not involved at all. They are basically alone in the room, reading something written for the writer's satisfaction, and they know it. They always know it.
What company websites reveal
Look at most company websites. The writing is all about what the company wants to say and how they want to say it. Look how clever we are. Look at this elegant turn of phrase. Look at these credentials. The reader does not care about your clever writing. They care about their own problems. They arrived at your website with a question: can these people help me with this thing I need help with? The website answers: here is how proud we are of ourselves. Those are two different conversations. Only one of them results in a sale.
How companies encourage the wrong thing
The insidious part is that companies reward writing that makes them feel good internally. The team reads the new homepage copy and says: this sounds like us. This captures who we are. This is exactly what we wanted to say. They are evaluating the copy as a form of self-expression, not as a tool for persuading strangers. But the strangers are not evaluating it as self-expression. They are evaluating it as a claim about whether this company can help them. Those are different criteria, and internal approval often does not predict external effectiveness. The copy that gets the most enthusiastic response in the Monday marketing meeting is often the copy that does the least work in the field.
The one-sentence test
Read the last thing you wrote to a prospect — email, homepage, ad, whatever. Count how many sentences start with “We” or “Our” or your company name. Then count how many start with “You” or describe a situation the reader is actually in. That ratio tells you who the copy is for. Most B2B copy has a ratio somewhere between ten-to-one and all-we. The copy that serves the reader starts with their world and earns the right to talk about the company's world only after the reader has recognized themselves. If you flip those two, you have lost most of your readers before you have made your case.
What good copy is actually thinking about
Good copy is written by someone thinking about the reader. What do they want? What do they need? What are they afraid of? What have they tried that did not work? What does their day look like right now, in the moment they encounter this message? The answers to those questions should be visible in every sentence. Not because they were researched and documented in a brief, but because the writer genuinely oriented themselves toward the reader and stayed there. Writing that focuses on the reader instead of the company — that is when actual connection happens. That is when the conversion rates go up and the email reply rates double and the sales team starts forwarding the landing page because it finally says what they have been trying to say in every conversation.
Here is the rewrite
Take the last piece of copy that underperformed. Find every sentence that talks about your company. Rewrite each one to talk about the reader instead. Same information, different orientation. “We help companies reduce manual reporting time” becomes “If your team is still pulling reports by hand, you are spending three days a month on something that should take three hours.” Same fact. Completely different reader experience. One is the company talking about itself. The other is someone who understands what your problem actually costs you. That is the difference between copy that is about you and copy that serves the reader. Make it about them, every time, and everything else improves.
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