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When a vine is left to grow how it wants, it creates a lot of bushy leaves and little sour grapes. But good fruit comes from knowing which leaves to cut and when. 

And I think a company’s messaging is the same. If we sat down together, I think you’d have a hunch where the knife would go on your messaging.

Over the past few months, I have been working with the Regenerative Viticulture Platform, Sectormentor, to refine their positioning and their website’s messaging. I have learned an incredible amount about Viticulture and the wonderful value their tech brings to vineyards across the world. 

But I can't help but think of the similarity between the world managing vines and the process we went through to refine their positioning and messaging.

In late winter, the grower will cut healthy vines back, even down to only a few buds. The vines are left to repair themselves in the frost and strewn around the grower, spread along the floor, would be almost all of last year’s growth. To a newbie like me, it seemed counterintuitive.

But there's a reason why she does it this way.

If you leave a vine to do its own thing, it does what a vine does, it runs. Eventually there’s long canes, a thick canopy, leaf over leaf reaching for the light, and somewhere under all of that lush greenery hides a few small grapes that never came to much.

The plant spent all its energy on growing leaves and had no reason to give its vigour to the ripening of its fruit. 

The grower cuts the vines back to the first few buds so its strength becomes focused, and there’s a conducive environment for growing fruit. The cut is the grower choosing where the vine's energy will run and it has an impact on what she will yield later in the season.

A vine tended this way gives a little more each year, not less.

I've come to think messaging works the same way. 

Left to run, a company's messaging grows in every direction and all at once. Homepages are often written by a marketing team that pulls in the leadership team’s hunches, reactions to investor comments, scientific data dumps, and all the features from the tech folk. 

When building webpages, none of this feels wrong at the moment. It is just like the vine, naturally adding leaf on leaf, season on season.

But eventually, your customer is palming their way through the growth, spending a lot of their time and energy trying to find the fruit. 

If you leave it for another season, it grows again, more canopy and less fruit.

Eventually, people stop coming either because it is easier to find what they are looking for in another vineyard or simply they don’t see any grapes in yours. 

Confusing messaging, too many leaves, is a turn off to a potential customer, it tries to speak to everyone, and therefore, to no one. The best thing you can do is go get the knife. 

So how do you make the cut? 

A grower is skilled in the craft of reading vines. She cuts the strong vines hardest because he trusts that they’ll return strong. There is also intuition, experience, and understanding from working with this dynamic system. The whole skill is in knowing which to cut and which to keep, she has made making a decision a habit. 

This is similar to a problem that I see in messaging, the copywriting isn’t actually a copy problem, it is a decision making problem. Before a pen hits the page, there isn’t a clear decision - what are we wanting from this work?

This is where you’ll cut it back to the first buds. Starting with the following:

Once your focal point is set, you cut off everything else.

With the fruit now clearly visible, a visitor lands on your website and knows, within seconds, that it's for them and there’s no more palming through leaves. You have made it easy for them to see the value, the fruit, and they reach for it.

A grower cuts down to the first few buds to ensure each year has intentional growth. She doesn’t tidy up around the edges as that doesn’t solve the core of the problem. When you strip it right back to look at the underlying structure, decide where you want the energy to grow, and aim for a desirable outcome, you are being intentional about the quality of fruit. 

When I worked with Sectormentor, we built their webpages up over five stages:

The result is a clear, value driven homepage that guides the reader to the fruit of their offer.

If you want a hand making the cut, that's the work I do.

Warmly,

Rob

PS: For technical or complex companies, there is a risk of cutting too much off so that your depth and quality doesn’t show, and that also could prohibit a technically-minded buyer from trusting you. This is where intuition, experience, and understanding comes into play when deciding what needs to be given the room to grow. You can see that balance in Sectormentor’s pages.

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