Picture your buyer. Let’s call her Sarah.
It’s 2:30 pm on a Thursday. She has back-to-back meetings, fifty unread emails, and she’s trying to figure out what to cook for dinner while simultaneously worrying about her team’s capacity.
She is making roughly 35,000 decisions a day. Her brain is tired. Her cognitive load is maxed out.
Now, she lands on your website. She has been tasked with buying new project management software, a high-stakes purchase that could either transform her company’s efficiency or become a costly mistake attached to her reputation.
She is looking for a lifeline. Instead, you hand her a manual.
This is the "curse of knowledge." And for B2B teams building complex products, it is the single biggest barrier to growth.
The trap of the "Kitchen Sink" website
When you build a complex product, you know exactly how powerful it is. You know it handles procurement, enterprise security, and intricate workflows. Because you know this, you assume Sarah needs to know it too—right now, on the homepage.
So, you write copy that accommodates every stage of the funnel at once. You list every feature. You mix high-level value propositions with technical specs about API integrations.
You assume that if you put all the information out there, Sarah will sift through it, find what’s relevant to her, and connect the dots.
She won’t. She doesn't have the time.
In a world where buyers are increasingly avoiding sales calls and trying to self-serve, your website has to do the heavy lifting. But heavy lifting doesn't mean heavy reading. If Sarah has to work to understand what you do, she will tab-switch to a competitor who makes it easy.
Complexity requires curation, not clutter
The best brands don’t simplify their product; they simplify the path to the product.
Look at the project management space. It is arguably one of the most crowded, feature-heavy markets in SaaS. Yet, players like Wrike, Asana, and ClickUp manage to sell complex tools without overwhelming the user.
How? They don’t treat their website like a warehouse; they treat it like a concierge.
They use use cases and personas to split the traffic immediately. They know that a Creative Director needs to see visual proofing tools, while an Operations Lead cares about resource allocation. They don’t force the Creative Director to wade through IT security compliance just to see if the calendar view works.
The "HubSpot Trap": Why you can’t copy the giants
"But look at HubSpot," teams often tell me. "Their messaging is broad. They talk about 'growing better' and 'AI platforms.' Why can't we do that?"
It is dangerous to look at a market leader like HubSpot and try to mimic their 2026 strategy when you are still in your growth phase.
If you look at HubSpot’s homepage today, it is arguably a mess of contradictions. The hero messaging is vague and doesn't align with the rest of the page. They are trying to speak to everyone—from a two-person startup to a global enterprise—all at once. There is "AI" shoved into every paragraph, and the distinction between the "Platform" and the "Hubs" is blurry.
But here is the difference: HubSpot can afford to be vague.
They have spent fifteen years and millions of dollars building a brand that is synonymous with CRM software. When Sarah lands on their site, she already knows what they do. They have earned the right to be cerebral, adventurous, or even slightly confusing with their copy.
You haven't.
For most of us, "bland and generic" isn't a branding choice; it's a death sentence. You don't have the brand equity to carry a vague message. You need to be specific, clear, and immediately useful.
The fear of leaving things out
The biggest pushback I hear from teams is, "But our enterprise clients need to know about our ISO certification!"
Yes, they do. But do they need to know it in the hero section of the homepage?
This is where the internal battle begins. Sales wants one thing, Product wants another, and Marketing is stuck in the middle trying to please everyone. The result is usually a "Frankenstein" website that says everything and communicates nothing.
How to break the curse: Stop guessing, start researching
So, how do you decide what stays and what goes? How do you know which features matter to Sarah and which ones are just internal noise?
You can’t guess your way out of this loop. You have to research your way out.
Many teams try to skip this step. They jump straight to A/B testing headlines or button colours. But here is the hard truth: A/B testing is useless if your fundamental assumptions are wrong.
If you misunderstand who your customer is or what they actually care about, you are just optimising for the best version of a bad message. You end up with the "winner of the wrong information."
To actually fix the curse of knowledge, you need to leave the building and gather evidence.
1. Interview across the journey
Don't just talk to your happy power users. You need to interview the different humans involved in the deal.
- The buyer: What triggered the search? What was the "urgency" moment?
- The user: What features do they actually log into every day?
- The champion: How did they sell this to their boss?
Often, you’ll find the thing you think is your headline feature is actually a minor detail to them, while the "boring" integration you buried in the footer is the reason they signed.
2. Mine your internal data
You are sitting on a goldmine of feedback.
- Talk to Sales: Ask them about the difference between a small deal and an enterprise deal. What are the first three questions a big prospect asks compared to a small one?
- Analyse lost deals: Look at your closed-lost data. Why did they say no? Was it price, or was it confusion?
- Check churn reasons: If people are leaving, is it because the product didn't do what they thought it would? That’s a messaging gap.
3. Let the data make the decisions
When you have this research, the internal debates stop. You don't have to argue with the Head of Product about whether the "audit trail" feature needs to be on the homepage.
You can simply look at the data and say: "Out of 20 recent enterprise buyers, only one asked about audit trails in the first meeting. It goes on the secondary page."
Research gives you the confidence to curate. It allows you to build a site that respects Sarah’s time, speaks to her actual problems, and helps her make that purchase decision without the headache.
The AI reality check
If the human argument doesn't convince you to simplify, perhaps the technical one will.
We are moving into an era of AI-search. Tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are becoming the new gatekeepers. These bots scan your site to understand what you do and who you are for.
If your messaging is a soup of jargon, conflicting value propositions, and tech-speak, the AI can't categorise you. And if it can't understand you, it won't recommend you.
Wrapping up
Your product might be complex, but your story shouldn't be.
If you are planning a product launch or a website refresh in Q2, don't wait until the design phase to think about this. The structure and the story come first.
If you are tired of guessing what matters to your customers, we should talk.