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Deirdre Martin: Your your website got visitors this week and your inbox nothing. No inquiries, no have you got time for a quick call, not even a tire kicker asking what an audit costs. And I'd say at some point you made peace with that because you told yourself, Nobody buys cyber from a website anyway, right? leads come from referrals. That's just how this industry works. Well, I want to show you what actually happened to those visitors because they did come and their brains deleted your home page before they'd consciously read a single line of it. Now stay with me here because there's a sound in your house right now that you can't hear. It's the fridge. It's hobbing away this very minute, but your brain ran the numbers on it years ago. It's predictable, it's harmless. So that sound doesn't even enter your consciousness anymore. And that is what happened on your website this week. You see, your homepage has never actually been rejected because rejection would mean somebody read the thing and said, no, thank you. What happened is it got filed under fridge, just like that humming that you ignore. And since half the industry started handing their copy over to the same AI tools, that filing decision is getting easier week by week for your ideal clients. So in this video I'm going to show you why the machine that everybody's using to sound better is actually making everyone easier to delete and the one step that it cannot do for you no matter how hard you try to make it, because that step is where the inquiries that you're losing right now actually get decided. So come and sit where your buyer sits for a minute. Picture the person you actually want to hire you, maybe an ops director or a CFO who's just had a fright because the insurance renewal asked questions nobody in the building could answer. And they've got four tabs open on their browser right now, which contain four cyber websites. And they have 10 minutes before they're about to go to their next meeting. So tab one says something like, Comprehensive security solutions tailored to your business, right? Tab two, they're like, hang on, did I read this one already? No, it just kind of sounds the same. And by tab four, the voice in their head is doing what every buyer's does. Seen it, same as the last three. What do these people actually do though? How do I choose between them? And then they say the politest thing that a buyer can ever say, which is nothing, meaning I'll circle back. I blame money, those words have been in your email this quarter. It's where good deals just, you know, die. Because when every consultancy, every business, every firm on the shortlist sounds the same, the buyer's left with exactly one column that they can compare, and that's price. So the work you actually want, the mid sized project, the big retainers. that goes to whichever company they could still remember at the end of the day or at the end of the week. And here's the part that genuinely bothers me about this: the
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founders that this tends to hit the hardest are the ones who are fucking brilliant at the work, who have incredible expertise. And it's a bit like, you know, you have a very particular set of skills that you've acquired over a very long career that make you a nightmare for certain people, right? You're one of those people. You're the Liam Neeson of Taken in cyber terms. And so people are not seeing that. It's like you're that undercover operative. So it just never makes it through the screen. Now You've rewritten your website before, probably more than once. And every time it came back cleaner, more polished, it sounded professional. And that word does so much damage, by the way, because professional is generic And here's another thing: very often it wasn't even you who wrote those words. It was your web developer. They built the site, they make websites for a living. So you trusted that they'd know what should probably go on there. And I totally get why. But think about what that actually is for a second. That's your client asking their IT's poor company to handle their security architecture. Could they take a stab at it? Sure they could. They're close to the systems, but it's never going to be at the level of someone who lives in threat assessment every single day. you've probably made that exact argument to your own prospects, haven't you? Web developers build messaging is a different discipline. and people buy what they read, see, and hear. And so when a web developer needs homepage copy in a hurry these days, where do you think they go and get it? AI. You see, there's a study I think about a lot here. It ran in science advances a couple of years back, researchers looked at what happened When writers work from AI-generated ideas and individually, everyone's writing got better, but collectively it all got more alike, better and more similar at the same time, Because a language model produces the most statistically likely next word. That's how it works. That's its whole job. So ask it for a cybersecurity homepage, and it's going to hand you the mathematical middle of every cybersecurity homepage it's ever seen. So it's very mediocre. which means when you and a couple of thousand other companies all use it to smooth out your messaging, you're all getting pulled towards the same center. It's like a gravitational pull. So 2000 consultancies, one ghostwriter, everybody's delighted with the draft. It seems great. It seems great to you. And researchers have even tracked the fingerprints on this. There are certain words that flooded. published writing the year ChatGPT arrived. Words like delve, that was one of the famous ones, along with intricate and robust. So if your homepage delves into your robust security posture, I have news, a machine wrote that sentence and it wrote your competitors too. Okay, so here's a reframe, and this comes from my own framework called the Uncopyable Code. Building a message that only you could own happens in two phases.
Encoding is turning raw material into words. So the homepage, the pitch deck, your LinkedIn profile, proposal templates, all that sort of stuff. And that's the part everyone thinks is the work, but it's not. Before you do any of that comes decoding. Decoding is finding the raw material in the first place. what you know from yours inside of doing the work, what a client said at the end of a call when the formalities were done, the hill that you'd die on, even if it cost you a prospect. And AI can encode beautifully, quickly, 24 hours a day without ever complaining, and it doesn't cost a whole lot. But the decode needs inside your brain, and the machine can't get in there. Like it's never sat across from your client at that moment where they finally say what they're actually worried about. It has no lived experience and it has no stake in the outcome. So a prompted home page is words built from other people's words. The industry average, nicely formatted. And your buyer's brain is built to ignore exactly that. There's a mechanism called prediction error. And put simply, the brain pays attention to what it didn't expect. Anything it can predict gets filtered out before it ever reaches conscious thought. That's the fridge again. To your buyer's brain, your website is just humming. You can't prompt your way to different. So where does the decode material actually live? Three places, and you can go dig in and find them tonight. The first one is your stance and your point of view. And by that I mean the hill that you would go to die on in a room full of your peers, even though you know it'd turn some buyers away. And maybe you think most pen test reports change nothing because nobody owns the remediation afterwards. Maybe you think half the compliance work in your market gets bought just to make a board feel better or Put a badge on a website, whatever yours is, a machine will never take that position from you because a machine hedges. It's got no skin in the game, and buyers can feel that instantly. They can feel the difference between a claim that costs you something and a claim that costs you nothing. Second, their words. And by that I mean what clients have actually said to you on calls and emails in the debrief after an incident, in that. Offhand line at the end of a meeting. Their exact words in their order with the worry still in them. And one of my own cyber clients described his whole problem to me as explaining what I do so people understand. and the material that fixed his messaging was all already sitting in his inbox. The way his clients describe their own situation in their own language, because when a message is built from the buyer's words, Prospects stop going quiet. They can finally see themselves in it. And here's a quick check you can run right now. You can go and open your homepage and your website and ask yourself one question: Who's the hero on this page? If it's you, because it's got all of your certifications, your methodology, we, this, we, that, our, us, my, whatever, then your buyer can't see themselves or find themselves in the story. Now I'm a certified story brand coach and a level C brand strategist, and honestly. The most common fix that I make on technical firms websites is turning the founder from the hero into the guide. The buyer is the hero. You're the one who knows the way, so you're the guide. And third, your empty space. That's the thing buyers in your corner of the market keep needing that nobody's homepage says. And you find it by reading the market with your own eyes, which again is precisely what the machine can't do for you because the machine is the average of the market. Ask it where the gap is and it hands you the center of the crowd. the gap only ever shows up when someone who's done the work looks at what everyone's saying and notices what's missing. which one do you reckon your site's missing? That stance, that standpoint, your client's words, or the gap? Now, before you go near the home page, there are two detours worth knowing about because I watch smart founders go off and take both of them. Dour one is better prompts. So you think that more context or client persona or a tone of voice that works, all that stuff is going to improve output. But more instructions just give you a sharper average. The prompt shapes what gets encoded is in no way of reaching what was never coded in the first place. And detour two is swearing off the machine entirely. So writing every word yourself by hand like it's twenty nineteen. But if the decode hasn't happened, you will sit down and handwrite the same generic copy, just slower. The input was missing either way. Now, if you're sitting here wondering how much of your own messaging would survive contact with a real buyer, I built a short test for exactly that. It's called Find Your Zag. It takes a few minutes and it shows you where your message blends in and where you've actually got something worth building on. The link is at the top of the description. So the next time you're starting at that homepage thinking it needs better polish, it needs better words, just remember what the polish is. It's encoding and the machine can do that faster than any of us. But the decode, that's yours. It's your standpoint, your beliefs, your client words, the gap your competitors keep walking past, that raw material that only exists from your insights, experience, and knowledge to date. And when you do that work, the website stops being this thing that you keep meaning to fix, but becomes something that buyers read. And then when they arrive on calls with you, they've already decided that they want to work with you. Because sure AI can encode, but it can't decode.