Read the homepages of ten B2B companies in the same sector and a strange thing happens. They become interchangeable. Innovative solutions, tailored to your needs, delivered by a team of experts committed to excellence.
Everyone writes this. Almost nobody means anything by it. And the buyer reading it, who arrived with a specific problem and limited patience, learns nothing that helps them decide.
Good B2B copy isn’t clever. It’s specific, and it’s about the reader rather than the company.
The problem is usually who it’s about
Most weak website copy fails in the first sentence, by talking about the company instead of the customer.
“Founded in 1998, we are a leading provider of industrial filtration solutions.”
Compare that with what a maintenance manager is actually thinking when they land on the page, which is closer to “will this stop my plant failing its next audit?”
The fix isn’t to remove your history. It’s to lead with their problem and let your credentials support the answer. The company that says “we keep food processing plants compliant with air quality standards, without unplanned downtime” has said more in one line than the founding date says in a paragraph.
Write for the committee, not the visitor
B2B copy has a harder job than consumer copy, because it’s rarely read by one person acting alone.
A typical B2B purchase involves several people, and they want different things. The technical evaluator wants specifications. The finance lead wants to understand cost and risk. The executive sponsor wants to know you won’t embarrass them. And your champion, the person who actually likes you, needs material they can forward to the other three.
That last point changes how you write. Somewhere on your site there should be copy that works when read cold, by someone who never met you, in an email from a colleague. If everything you’ve written only makes sense with context, your champion has nothing to send.
Apply the “so what” test
Take any sentence on your site and ask what a sceptical buyer would say back. If the honest answer is “so what?”, the sentence isn’t finished.
- “We offer end-to-end solutions.” So what? What does that let me stop worrying about?
- “Our team has over 50 years of combined experience.” So what? What have you seen that a newer supplier hasn’t?
- “We’re passionate about quality.” So what? Everyone says that. What do you do that they don’t?
Most sentences survive the test by adding a specific. Fifty years of combined experience means nothing. Fifty years across three plant retrofits in the same regulatory environment means something.
Specifics beat adjectives, every time
The single most reliable improvement to B2B copy is replacing description with detail.
| Instead of | Write |
|---|---|
| Fast turnaround | Quotes within two business days |
| Highly experienced team | Fourteen years working with Ontario food processors |
| Comprehensive support | Someone answers the phone, and it’s the person who built it |
| Trusted by industry leaders | Name three, with permission |
| Competitive pricing | Publish a range |
Adjectives are claims the reader has to take on faith. Specifics are checkable, and being checkable is what makes them persuasive. It also happens to make your pages more useful to search engines and AI assistants, which favour concrete, quotable statements over vague ones.
Adjectives
- “Fast turnaround”
- “Highly experienced team”
- “Comprehensive support”
- “Competitive pricing”
Specifics
- “Quotes within two business days”
- “Fourteen years with Ontario processors”
- “The person who built it answers”
- Publish a range
Say the thing you’re tempted to leave out
The most persuasive sentence on a B2B page is often the one a marketing instinct would remove.
Publishing a price range, when competitors publish nothing. Naming the type of project you’re not right for. Admitting a limitation before a prospect finds it. Saying which of two options is cheaper, when the cheaper one isn’t yours.
These work for a reason that has nothing to do with cleverness. A buyer reading your site assumes everything on it was chosen to make you look good, and discounts it accordingly. A statement that clearly wasn’t written for that purpose breaks the assumption, and everything around it becomes more credible.
It’s also useful commercially. Telling people plainly who you’re not for reduces the enquiries you’d have turned down anyway, which is a strange thing to optimize against.
Use their words, not yours
Every industry has two vocabularies. The one used inside companies, and the one buyers use when they don’t yet know the correct term.
Your website needs both. The internal term establishes that you know the field. The buyer’s term is what they typed into a search box before they found you.
The best source for this isn’t a keyword tool. It’s your sales team. The phrases prospects use on calls, the questions they ask twice, and the things they misunderstand are the raw material for a page that sounds like it was written by someone who has met a customer.
Answer first, explain second
B2B buyers are usually skimming with a question in mind. Copy that builds to its point loses them before it arrives.
Put the answer in the first line of a section, then support it. This is the same discipline that makes a page work well on a phone and the same one that gets passages quoted in AI answers. Write the conclusion, then the reasoning.
It also makes your own editing easier. If you can’t state the point of a section in one sentence, the section probably doesn’t have one yet.
A rewrite, start to finish
Here is a service page opening of the kind we see most often.
Before: With over 25 years of industry experience, Lakeshore Filtration is a trusted provider of innovative industrial air filtration solutions. Our dedicated team leverages cutting-edge technology to deliver seamless, tailored systems that meet the unique needs of each client. We are committed to excellence in everything we do.
Fifty-one words, and a reader learns almost nothing they couldn’t have guessed. Every claim is one any competitor could copy without changing a word, which is a reliable sign that a paragraph is doing no work.
After: Failing an air quality audit can stop a food plant for days. We design filtration systems that meet food processing standards and can be installed without shutting your line down, usually across two or three weekends. We’ve done this for fourteen Ontario plants since 2011, and we’ll tell you upfront if your existing system can be upgraded rather than replaced.
Sixty-eight words, and it does four things the first version didn’t. It names the reader’s actual fear. It states the specific constraint they’re worried about. It offers checkable evidence. And it concedes something against its own interest, which is the line most likely to be believed.
Nothing about the second version is clever writing. It’s the first version with the vagueness removed and the real conversation put back in.
The words worth cutting
A short list of phrases that survive on B2B sites purely out of habit. None of them carries information.
- Solutions (as a standalone noun)
- Innovative, cutting-edge, best-in-class
- Passionate, dedicated, committed
- Leverage (as a verb)
- Seamless, robust, world-class
- Tailored to your needs
- Synergy, in any context
Cut them and you’ll find one of two things. Either the sentence works better without them, or the sentence had nothing underneath and needs rewriting. Both outcomes are useful.
Words Worth Cutting
Write like you’d talk to them
The most practical test we know is to imagine explaining the page out loud to a customer sitting across from you. You wouldn’t say “we deliver innovative end-to-end solutions.” You’d say “we stop your line going down, and here’s how.”
That sentence is almost always better than the one on the website. The gap between how a company talks in a meeting and how it writes on its homepage is where most B2B copy goes wrong, and closing that gap costs nothing but the willingness to sound like a person. If your site says things you’d never say out loud, book a discovery call and we’ll work out what it should say instead.
