🎧 The One Phrase That Ended a Startup's Six-Month Sales Plateau

In a recent episode of The Way of Product with host Caden Damiano, Marlena Sarunac of The Company Advice walked through a client engagement where a single phrase reversed six months of stalled sales, and what the weeks of work behind that phrase actually looked like.

A technical founding team had been using AI-generated whiteboard images to explain how their product worked. Every feature, every capability, color-coded with arrows. The people in the room who cared about features stayed engaged. The people who were going to write the checks glazed over.

The problem was not the product. The product was real. The problem was that the message was built for the wrong person in the room.

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The wrong audience was paying attention to the wrong things

Users and engineers cared about how it worked. The buyers who controlled the budget wanted to know one thing: what does this do for me?

Marlena and her team spent weeks with this client before anything was written. Not on a logo. Not on a website refresh. On a single question: what is the actual gap this product fills?

When they finally found the answer, it was three words. A phrase a healthcare buyer could hold in one hand. A phrase that, the moment it landed in a meeting, did not require a whiteboard.

The CEO started noticing that conversations were moving faster. The founder, who had been caught in technical details that buyers were glossing over, could finally move past the question of whether what he had built was a product, a feature, or an idea. It was a company. And it was making sales.

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The work nobody sees

It is easy to hear a story like that and think the tagline did all the work.

What preceded three words was weeks of heads-down market analysis, workshops with the full team, and a diagnostic that Marlena runs at the start of every engagement: an asynchronous survey where each member of the leadership team writes, separately, what the product does, who the buyer is, and who the user is.

Nine out of ten times, the answers differ.

The founding team doesn't agree on what their company is. That's almost always true and almost never spoken. By the time a team has agreed on the right phrase, they've also agreed on something far more expensive to discover: what they are selling and to whom. The phrase is the visible artifact of that agreement. The agreement is the actual work.

Marlena puts it simply: you can't skip the process of assembling the ingredients before having your cake. A lot of founders want the icing. What they actually need is the eight weeks of prep before it.

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Brand debt is load-bearing

Founders tend to treat brand and messaging as wallpaper. Something cosmetic. Something you add after the product is built and the sales motion is running.

But brand debt works exactly like technical debt. You can build something genuinely great with no real messaging behind it, and it will catch up with you retroactively. The cost shows up in ghost meetings, unrenewed contracts, and re-architected go-to-market plans. Founders get hung up on the color of the walls of a house that has not been built yet, while the foundation stays unfinished.

The companies that avoid paying double are the ones that do the positioning work early, not as a creative exercise, but as infrastructure.

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👉 Catch the full episode here.

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