Private equity spends millions backing B2B companies with the potential to grow. Then a prospective customer visits the website and can't work out why they should care.
After assessing more than 1,000 B2B homepages, including hundreds of PE-backed businesses, I've seen just how common that disconnect is.
Same category jargon. Same promises. Different logos.
Then I found a cybersecurity company whose homepage told me:
YOU DESERVE TO BE HACKED.
For the first time in hundreds of scans, I couldn't stop reading.
Imagine you're a buyer with a problem.
You've been asked to find a solution. There's money at stake, people to convince and a business consequence if you get it wrong.
You open a supplier's website.
Accelerate transformation. Unlock potential. An intelligent, integrated, next-generation platform.
You read it again.
What problem do they actually solve? Is it your problem? Are they worth another five minutes?
You scroll. You decode the product categories. You navigate the acronyms. You work out what the supplier does, who it's for and whether any of it matters to you.
Then you open the next website.
Same language. Different logo.
The supplier knows exactly what it sells.
The buyer is still trying to work out why it matters.
At Shift90, we've now assessed more than 1,000 B2B homepages through our Value Transfer Index.
The Index examines how effectively a company communicates its value to someone encountering it for the first time.
Can a buyer recognise their own situation? Understand what the supplier offers? See who it's for? Find credible evidence that it works?
We're not measuring the quality of the underlying business. And a weak homepage score doesn't prove a company has a sales problem.
We're measuring something observable: how much work a stranger has to do to establish whether a company is worth investigating.
The sameness is extraordinary.
You could swap the logos on many B2B websites and barely notice.
Not because the companies are identical. Many have remarkable products, impressive people and genuinely valuable capabilities.
But their websites have been written from the supply side.
They explain the category. Introduce the platform. List the capabilities. Teach the visitor how the supplier thinks about the market.
It's what I call supply-side pedagogy.
We make buyers learn our world before demonstrating that we understand theirs.
And we place the burden of relevance on the person least willing to carry it.
The buyer.
YOU DESERVE TO BE HACKED.
Huge. Orange. Confrontational.
I stopped.
Not because it was another warning about cyberattacks.
Because it was an accusation.
You deserve it.
That's an extraordinary thing to say to someone responsible for keeping an organisation secure.
My immediate reaction was: What on earth do you mean by that?
So I read on.
Successful companies are constant targets for attackers. Those who take security seriously don't just test their defenses once a year.
And there was the answer.
CovertSwarm wasn't suggesting that anyone literally deserves a cyberattack.
It was challenging a familiar contradiction: organisations can take security seriously while still relying on periodic tests of their defences.
The headline creates the tension. The supporting copy makes that tension recognisable.
And suddenly there's a reason to investigate. Because I want to know how CovertSwarm intends to resolve the problem it has just presented.
That's what made me scroll to the bottom of the page.
Across hundreds of previous scans, I'd seen suppliers telling buyers why they were impressive.
Here was one making the buyer reconsider an assumption.
Only two of the more than 1,000 B2B homepages we've assessed have earned full marks in the Index for recognising the buyer's situation.
CovertSwarm is one.
That doesn't mean its website is perfect. Nor does it prove that it converts visitors better than anyone else's.
It means something specific.
CovertSwarm has expressed a recognisable buyer situation with a clarity almost nobody else in our sample has achieved.
And then it has done something the score alone doesn't capture.
It has made that situation impossible to ignore.
The orange headline interrupts. The copy gives the provocation meaning. Together, they create a reason to keep reading.
The lesson isn't that every B2B company should insult its prospects.
It's that buyers need a reason to care before they need an explanation of what you sell.
Private equity investors acquire businesses because they believe those businesses can become more valuable.
Often, that depends on winning new customers, entering new markets or expanding beyond the relationships that built the company in the first place.
Which raises an awkward question.
If growth depends on people who don't already know the business, how easily can those people recognise why it matters?
An established customer may understand the company's capabilities, history and reputation.
A new buyer has none of that context.
They arrive with a problem, a set of alternatives and limited patience.
Yet many PE-backed companies communicate as though the visitor already understands their product category, their terminology and their place in the market.
It's a strange mismatch.
Investors are backing growth beyond the existing customer base, while the public-facing story often seems written for people who already know the business.
That doesn't establish that the website is holding back growth. Sales relationships, referrals and other channels may be doing the heavy lifting.
But it does expose a question worth investigating before spending more money on marketing or sales activity:
Are we making it unnecessarily difficult for unfamiliar buyers to recognise our relevance?
That's not a question about prettier websites.
It's a question about whether the business understands the circumstances that bring new customers into the market — and can communicate that understanding.
Why is CovertSwarm's approach so rare?
I don't think B2B companies deliberately set out to confuse buyers.
I think they're trapped by how their industries talk.
Product teams have their terminology. Analysts have their categories. Competitors have their positioning. Marketing has its approved vocabulary.
Eventually, everyone sounds like everyone else.
And somewhere along the way, the customer's circumstances disappear.
We teach the category before establishing relevance.
We explain the platform before identifying the struggle.
We list capabilities before giving buyers a reason to investigate.
Imagine doing that in a face-to-face sales conversation.
A prospect describes a consequential problem.
And you respond with a fifteen-minute presentation about your architecture.
Yet that's effectively what many B2B homepages ask buyers to endure.
CovertSwarm does the opposite.
It starts with a challenge the buyer can recognise, even if they don't immediately agree with it.
And that disagreement is part of what makes the page interesting.
Here's a simple exercise.
Remove your logo from your homepage.
Could a competitor put theirs in its place without changing much else?
Now imagine a buyer arriving for the first time.
They don't know your company, your product or your preferred category language.
They're trying to decide whether you might help with something that matters.
Does your first screen give them a reason to care?
Or must they do the hard work of discovering why you might be relevant?
CovertSwarm reminded me what good looks like.
After more than a thousand scans, it was a welcome surprise.
And credit to the CovertSwarm team for having the conviction to say something that actually makes a buyer stop.
Want to see how your homepage performs through the eyes of a first-time buyer? Run your own VTX scan.
The Right Problem. The Right Bet.