🍇 Is your website all leaf and no fruit?

Hi 👋

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](https://vines.vidacycle.com/), 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.

## Why she cuts it back

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.

## Messaging runs the same way

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?

## The power of little decisions