Who this is
The model on this site came out of doing the work, not out of thinking about it. Here is what it was built on, in the past tense, because that's the only tense that counts as evidence.
Sixty-five-plus companies, across staffing, healthcare benefits, enterprise software, application security, payments, real estate technology, professional services and business exit advisory. Every one of them arrived with the same shape of problem: several kinds of buyer, one set of words, and language that had climbed until it stopped describing anybody.
Hundreds more have been through the messaging clinic that eventually became this model — a fixed set of questions that finds the thread across buyer types. Enough repetitions that the answers started arriving before the questions were finished.
That's the whole basis of the claim. Not a theory about B2B messaging. A pattern that showed up often enough, in enough unrelated industries, to be worth naming.
Software developer, then project manager, then sales, then marketing, then writing. In that order.
It matters for one reason. The technical side and the sales side of a company describe the same problem in vocabularies that don't overlap, and most messaging fails at exactly that seam — a claim engineering will defend, phrased so a buyer feels nothing, or a claim a buyer loves that the product team refuses to stand behind. Having sat on both sides is how you find the sentence both rooms can live with.
I spent years writing the pages. Websites, campaigns, webinar scripts, cold email, sales enablement — the whole production line, for companies whose buyers were skeptical and whose sales cycles ran long.
I don't take that work anymore.
The reason is in the model. By the time anyone is writing pages, the expensive decisions have already been made, usually by a committee, usually without anyone naming the alternatives. Better writing doesn't recover a bad decision — it just makes it more legible. The value was always in the part that happened first, and that part kept getting compressed into a kickoff call.
So now the first part is the whole engagement, and somebody else writes the pages.
Frameworks and guides written over the last several years, most of them free: Write Headlines That Hit, Why Prospects Ghost You, Reliable Dignified Prospecting, How B2B CMOs Reset The Story, Everything You Need To Know About Copywriters, and the webinar work — Be The One They Want To Watch and 9 Fixes to 9 Unfixable Webinar Problems.
First Contact is the current one, and the only one that matters for what's on this site.
Probably, and it matters less than you'd expect. The pattern isn't industry-specific — it's a function of how many buyer types you have and whether anyone found the thread between them. A staffing firm with four buyer types and a benefits administrator with four buyer types fail in the same way, in nearly the same words.
No. That's the single most useful thing on this page, and it's why it's here rather than buried.
You'll be disagreeing with a scored sheet rather than an opinion, and you'll know which competitor you're betting against. That's a better argument to be in than the one you'd have otherwise.
No. If the work that follows needs a writer, I'll point you at one and stay out of it.
Attention Window — the newsletter, where the thinking gets tested before it gets named.