1.  If someone has to work out what you mean, they don’t buy. “End-to-end integrated supply chain solutions.” “Category growth partner.” “Modern logistics for modern retail.” These look like sentences. They say nothing, and the reader has to do the work of guessing.

Hand your homepage to someone outside your company and ask them to tell you what you do. If they pause, that pause is costing you tenders.

2.  Lead with one thing. Hold the rest for the meeting. Most bids put everything on page one, because everything feels important. The buyer finishes the page unable to say what you’re best at.

Open with the single strongest thing. The rest waits until they’re already interested, which is the meeting, not the document.

3.  A narrow lane beats a wide one. The cold chain specialist gets remembered. The provider who also does ambient, and pallets, and reverse logistics, and a bit of co-packing, gets a polite no.

Turning down work that sits outside your lane feels expensive. Being unmemorable is more expensive, and the invoice never shows up.

4.  Words expire, and this is the one that matters most here. “Sustainable” did real work in 2019 and is now a compliance checkbox. “Resilient” peaked in 2021. “Visibility,” “end-to-end” and “AI-powered” are printed on every stand at every trade show you’ll walk this autumn.

If your differentiator is a word your four closest competitors also use, it stopped being a differentiator some time ago. The words that built your reputation are usually the last ones anybody thinks to question.

5.  Different buyer, different fear, different conversation. A grocery category buyer is thinking about availability on shelf and margin. A logistics director is thinking about cost per pallet and service level. A sustainability lead is thinking about audit evidence for the next reporting cycle.

Three different fears. One capability deck for all three is a deck that lands with none of them.

1.  Creative intelligence. Your field, your competitors, and how you actually make money.

Before we write a word, we work out three things.

What is really happening in your field right now, not last year. Who your competitors are and what they sound like, which we do by reading their sites and posts side by side with yours. And how your business actually makes money, meaning which product or service or client type carries the profit.

That last one matters more than people expect. Companies routinely spend most of their communication effort on the part of the business that earns the least. The high-volume, low-margin contract gets the case study. The specialist service carrying the margin gets one line on a services page. It is very common and very easy to fix once you see it written down.

By the end of this check we can usually tell you something uncomfortable and useful: whether you sound different from your competitors, or whether the four of you are saying the same sentence in slightly different fonts.

2.  The damage check. What in your communication is costing you right now.

This is the honest one.

We go through what you already have out in the world. Website, sales decks, proposals, brochures, LinkedIn, the auto-reply on your info@ address. We look for things that are actively working against you.

Contradictions, where two pages describe the company differently. Claims nobody would believe. Sentences that require effort to decode. Pages that promise a thing you stopped selling. Old logos. Dead links. Names of people who left in 2023.

None of this is dramatic on its own. Together it tells a buyer something you never meant to say, which is that nobody is looking after the details.

3.  The voice check. Do you have one, and is it yours.

Then we listen.

A brand voice is just the answer to “does this sound like a real, specific company, or could any competitor put their logo on it?” We take five or six pieces of your writing and read them next to each other. Usually one of three things is true.

You have no voice, so everything sounds like it was written by a committee to avoid offending anyone. Or you have several voices, because five people write in five styles and no one ever agreed on a house style. Or you have a good voice that only exists in one place, usually the founder’s own posts, and it has never made it onto the website.

The third case is the happiest one, because the raw material already exists inside the building. We just have to move it.

4.  The company page. Usually your LinkedIn.

We look at your company page the way a buyer does, in about eight seconds.

Does the top line say what you do in plain words? Is the description written for a customer or for an investor? Has anything been posted this month? Do the posts get replies, or only silence and the occasional like from your own head of sales?

Company pages are the most neglected asset in B2B. They are also, increasingly, where an AI tool goes to work out what your company is. If your page is thin, the machine has nothing to say about you either.

5.  The people. Your employees’ LinkedIn profiles, and whether they engage.

This is the one that tells us the most, and the one nobody expects.

We look at your team’s individual profiles. Are they filled in? Do they describe the company the same way? Does anyone post? And when the company page posts something, does anybody from the inside engage with it?

If your employees never engage with their own company, that is a crack in the wall. And a crack in the wall usually means something structural behind it.

Sometimes it is small. Nobody ever asked them, or nobody told them it was allowed. That is a half-day fix.

Sometimes it isn’t small. People don’t share the company’s message because they don’t believe it, or they don’t feel proud, or they don’t feel safe putting their name next to it. That isn’t a marketing problem. That’s an internal culture problem wearing a marketing costume, and no amount of clever copy will cover it.

We would rather tell you that in week one than sell you a campaign that was never going to work.