Most adults own a washing machine. Most B2B SaaS buyers sit in broadly similar roles, in broadly similar companies, doing broadly similar work. And yet it’s weirdly easier to explain Persil than it is to explain half the SaaS on the internet.
The washing machine market has one big advantage: it is boring in a very specific, very useful way.
The washing machine advantage
Consumer categories get to live inside relatively stable usage. A detergent brand can assume what the product does, how often it’s used, where it lives, and what “good” looks like. Even when customers are heterogeneous, the use case is coherent enough for the marketing to talk to the whole category without melting into soup.
This is why packaged goods can often afford to be blunt. In many SaaS categories, bluntness is harder to earn.
The homepage that tries to carry everything
SaaS teams often respond to complexity by trying to make one page carry every buyer, every job, and every price point. The result is a homepage that technically includes everyone and practically convinces no one. This usually starts with a reasonable fear: “If we focus, we’ll exclude.” It ends with a more expensive outcome: “If we include, we’ll confuse.”
Same titles, different jobs
In SaaS, “buyer similarity” is often only a surface similarity. Two “Heads of Ops” can share a job title and still buy for different reasons, under different constraints, with different definitions of success.
One is buying to reduce headcount risk, another is buying to satisfy audit, and another is buying because their CEO hates spreadsheets. You are selling a particular change in behaviour, inside a particular workflow, with particular knock-on consequences.
That makes “value” conditional, and conditional value is hard to summarise. April Dunford’s positioning work is useful here: positioning sets the context that triggers assumptions about what the product is, who it’s for, and what it competes with. If your context is vague, the assumptions are random, and your sales team spends the next few calls undoing the damage.
That is where positioning starts to get reduced to copy, a mistake I deal with more directly in What makes us different.
Now add the human reality that B2B buying is group buying.
Gartner research, summarised by Shopify’s guide to the B2B buying process, puts the average B2B buying decision at six to ten people, each bringing their own “what if this goes wrong” energy. Forrester’s B2B marketing guidance goes further and talks about an average of 13 stakeholders influencing decisions across departments.
Your positioning has to help a small committee manufacture enough shared confidence to move.
Why SaaS ends up incoherent on the homepage
SaaS products stretch along at least three axes at once. They stretch by time, because some users churn after the trial and some accounts stay for years. They stretch by value, because one customer is worth £20 a month and another is worth six figures with procurement attached.
They stretch by meaning, because “the product” is really a set of possible jobs to be done that buyers will interpret through their own mess of priorities and politics. This is the part people miss when they say B2B is easier because the audience is narrower. The demographic might be narrower, but the usage is not.
A concrete example: the homepage that tries to please everyone
Imagine a workflow automation SaaS that can be used by finance teams, HR teams, and compliance teams. The homepage headline becomes “All-in-one automation for modern teams,” because nobody wants to start a meeting by admitting they’re choosing a favourite child. The subhead adds “reduce costs, increase productivity, improve compliance,” because every stakeholder wants their own emotional support metric. Then the CTA is “Book a demo,” which becomes the universal sign for “we have not decided who should click this, so you decide.”
Finance clicks and asks about approvals, audit trails, and month-end. HR clicks and asks about onboarding and access controls. Compliance clicks and asks about evidence, retention, and reporting.
Sales tries to run one discovery call format, marketing tries to run one nurture stream, and product tries to run one onboarding. You end up shipping “flexibility” as a feature, which mostly means new settings screens and a longer implementation plan. Meanwhile, the best-fit buyers who would have recognised a crisp promise never get the signal that this was built for them.
Why this keeps happening
First, teams confuse “addressable market” with “addressable message.” A large market still needs a specific first message. It is a cousin of the mistake in Better targeting: using a useful narrowing tool as if it defined the market.
Second, internal incentives reward inclusion. It is easier in a meeting to argue for “platform”. Focus sounds like someone has decided to leave money on the table.
Third, early-stage teams mix audiences.
They try to write one story that works for customers, investors, future hires, partners, and the CEO’s personal identity project, and the language collapses into Dunford’s phrase, “mushy positioning”.
Fourth, lead targets push you towards vague. If your dashboard worships raw volume, you start optimising for “anyone who might be interested,” which is how you end up paying to attract the wrong customers and then calling it a retention problem. Notion Capital’s ICP piece makes this point in a softer register, including the warning that selling to the wrong customers can become a major cause of churn.
Finally, many SaaS categories are still forming. When the category language is unstable, teams cling to breadth because they don’t yet know which use case will stick. That uncertainty is normal, but your homepage can’t be written as a therapy journal.
The wedge earns you the right to expand
A wedge gives the market a first, legible reason to care. It makes value obvious to a specific buyer, in a specific scenario, quickly enough that they can justify the decision to other people.
Geoffrey Moore’s “beachhead” framing is still useful here: pick a segment big enough to matter, small enough to lead, and aligned with what you are uniquely good at. Notion Capital makes a related point: a narrow focus on a pain, a well-defined use case, and a clear customer focus can help you grow faster.
Dunford’s definition bakes the same logic in, because “a well-defined set of customers” is doing most of the work in the sentence. The wedge is how you get out of “we do loads of things” and into “we do this one thing so well it would be weird to choose someone else.”
The bits the homepage cannot fix
SaaS value is often realised after the buying moment, so positioning has to bridge a trust gap as well as explain the feature set. SaaS is frequently adopted in pockets, so expansion depends on product and success motion rather than homepage breadth.
SaaS differentiation is often about constraints. What you refuse to optimise for can be as important as what you promise to optimise for. These are the reasons “all-in-one” messaging so often degenerates into “all-in-one confusion.”
Decisions you actually have to make
The first decision is who becomes the deal champion. If that person does not care, you do not make the shortlist. Dunford makes this a pre-positioning decision rather than a copywriting problem.
The second is the use case you want to be famous for first. Clarity now is worth more than optionality later if the broader message stops the right buyer from recognising themselves.
You also have to decide what you are willing to under-serve. A product that serves every workflow perfectly is called “custom software,” and you do not want that business.
The homepage then has to choose a job. It can act as an overview, or it can act as a doorway. The more it tries to hold every route at once, the harder it becomes for the right buyer to know where to enter.
Expansion needs the same discipline. “We will cross-sell later” is not a plan unless onboarding, pricing, and success are built for it.
The final decision is what proof reduces perceived risk for the buying group. Optimistic homepage language does not give a committee enough to defend the decision. They need enough proof to make the risk feel explainable.
A quick diagnostic that usually hurts
Ask: “If we removed this product tomorrow, which team would scream first, and what would break by Friday?” Ask: “Which buyer would still care if we removed half the features?” Ask: “Which outcome can we credibly promise in 30 days without heroic implementation?”
If you cannot answer those cleanly, your positioning problem is probably a product focus problem wearing a marketing hat.
The detergent comparison breaks here
Laundry detergent gets to sell a stable behaviour to a stable household. SaaS sells change to a messy organisation.
A narrower first promise may feel like a smaller story inside the company. To the buyer, it is often the first sign that anyone has understood the job.
If you still insist on being everything to everyone on page one, the market will solve the debate for you by ignoring you.