What’s Wrong with Your Homepage? With Anthony Pierri, Co-founder at FletchPMM | Ep. 337

0:00Welcome back to another episode of the Marketing Millennials. I'm Tamara Griminski and I'm stepping in as your guest host while Daniel's out on paternity leave. I'm a career product marketing leader and the former VP of PMM at high growth startups like Kajabi and Unbounce. I'm also a longtime friend of the pod. And while Daniel's off doing dad things, I'll be here bringing you fun combos with some of the smartest marketers I know. Today's episode is all about one of the most misunderstood pages in marketing, the homepage. I sat down with Anthony Pieri, the go-to expert on homepage messaging, to talk about why homepages still matter in 2025.

0:34He had to convince me of this. And how to actually make yours work. Anthony is a longtime friend of mine. He was previously the director of product marketing at Headway and is now the co-founder of Fletch, a product marketing consultancy that has helped 400 B2B software companies find their ideal positioning strategy and bring it to life on a newly crafted homepage. We got into how to find the right recipe for your homepage, the real meaning behind an ideal customer profile, and whether you should aim to summarize or prioritize your message. Plus, Anthony shares his go-to test for knowing if your homepage messaging is actually landing.

1:11If you've ever stared at your homepage and thought, this isn't working, but I don't know why, this one's for you. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Anthony, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Super excited to be here. Amazing. Well, it's been an absolute delight watching you grow your brand on LinkedIn the past two years. And I know you're going to have so many spicy hot takes for our marketing besties today.

2:01But I want to start with a question I've been noodling on for a while, which is, why did you decide to focus exclusively on homepages? And maybe more importantly, do homepages even matter in 2025? Well, I'll try to tackle those two questions one at a time. Why homepages? When we started the business, me and my co-founder, we wanted to help people with their positioning. And so we thought, how can we evaluate their positioning in the first place? And so some of our earliest posts on LinkedIn that got any amount of traction, what we would do is we would look at someone's homepage and we would take the traditional positioning Mad Libs, which for people who aren't familiar, that's like, we are X type of company in X category for X industry and we solve X problem.

2:46I probably should be using different letters now that I'm realizing, you know, A, B, C or something, but you get the point. And so what we would, what we would do is we would look at people's homepages and we would color code each of those different parts of a positioning statement and see, can we find answers to all the questions on someone's website? And nine times out of 10, we couldn't find any answers. No mention of the types of companies they work with, no mention of what problems they solve, no mention of how they're different, anything. And so we would post these mini audits to basically say, hey, you guys need to work in your positioning.

3:17And then people would come back to us and say, can you help me rewrite my homepage? And so we were like, oh, maybe these things belong together. And so over time, it's formed into this whole service that we offer now, where we're specifically helping people figure out their positioning, answering those core questions. Who is our product for? What does it do? how does it help, all that type of stuff. And then giving it a home where it can live in a publicly accessible way. Most of the time when people do positioning exercises, they're as part of like a brand project or some sort of messaging audit or something from an internal product marketing person.

3:52And it lives in a Google Doc and never gets seen again. And so for us, we're like, put it on the homepage. That way everyone can see it. The customers can see it. Your team can see it. investors can see it. And all of a sudden positioning, which is normally this nebulous strategy thing, is now a very customer-facing asset for your whole company. And so that's why those two things ended up coming together. To answer your second question, do homepages even matter? We debated a long time because a lot of our initial customers were early, early stage startups. And a lot of them were selling to their network.

4:30And the people they were selling to might not even have looked at the homepage in the first place. And so the question was, well, is this even going to move the needle? If we put this on the homepage, spend all this time on the homepage, they're not even going to see it. Again, we see the homepage just as a place for the strategy to live that is very easily accessible. But ideally, whatever narrative you land on should get repeated across all of your assets. It should be in your sales narratives, in your sales slide decks. It should be in the product onboarding. When people are logging into the product, they should be seeing those same elements.

5:01A company called Loom, who probably a lot of people are familiar with who are listening to this, records your screen, records yourself at the same time. They positioned it as a way to do quick updates for your team and they positioned it against meetings. And so they were like, skip the meeting and send a Loom. And in the product, they have that same narrative that was on their homepage where you would get in there, you'd run a bunch of Loom recordings, and then they would send you like summaries of like, hey, you saved 15 hours that would have been spent in meetings this week by sending these looms.

5:31So for us, we're like, if the homepage, say in the age of AI, becomes irrelevant and no one cares, it's like, okay, we'll probably pivot to another asset where these things can live. But I don't think it's going to go away or become not important because the AI has to read something. Where are they going to find information? Are they going to attach right to your database and go right to your source? This stuff needs to get fleshed out somewhere. And for us, we were like, what better place than your most accessible marketing asset? I love that. Well, first of all, I love hearing the story of how Fletch kind of came to be in terms of the product that you're offering today.

6:04And like a true product marketer, you listen to your customers, you were evolving and testing while you're getting product market fit. So that's fun. I actually haven't heard that story from you before. And then I like what you're saying about the homepage. Because in the back of my mind, this whole time, I was thinking, do they think the homepage is that important? Like the most important part of the website? What I'm hearing from you is it's not necessarily that. It's that hey, better than storing a Google Doc in a drive that no one's even going to look at, that may never reach a customer. What if the homepage was that most updated version of the messaging and positioning?

6:37And at least from there, you're being held accountable to make it public, right? You're testing, iterating, and then that's permeating all of the other channels and customer experiences you have. Exactly. And to give you a real world example, there's a company that probably most people will know called Klaviyo. Maybe it's Klaviyo, Who knows? But I call it Klaviyo. Yeah. Okay. Same. Somewhere not in the United States. I think it was somewhere in Europe, maybe. So there's probably someone who can correct the pronunciation. But Klaviyo, I'll use it that way. Klaviyo was positioning themselves originally as like an email marketing platform for e-commerce businesses.

7:11And then they repositioned as a CRM for B2C companies. So they did two major changes. They went to a larger product category. Email marketing is just a subset and CRM is bigger. So they brought in the product category and then they brought in the customer base from just e-commerce to all B2C. Lots of B2C is not e-commerce. So this went live on the homepage. And I was talking to someone at one of their competitors and she was saying, I bet the conversion rate dropped when they did that. Because if you were coming for email marketing and you had heard something about Klaviyo, you didn't know exactly what they did.

7:46You land on there. You're like, I heard they do great email marketing stuff. And you see CRM for B2C. You're like, oh, I don't need a CRM. I have a CRM. And maybe you bounce. So potentially the conversion rates drop. But the trade-off, in my opinion, that was probably going on, I don't have any intel of what's going on in the executive says, publicly traded company, maybe you could listen to the board meetings or something. Someone can do that, but not me. I'm going to keep extrapolating. But I'm imagining that the executives in this boardroom said, do we just launch with it or not? And the reason that they said yes was because they were fundamentally changing the company's positioning.

8:24And every company, the bigger you get, wants to default to the way it's always been. And so if you said in a strategy session, you made the PowerPoint, you disseminated it, and you said, this is the new positioning. When that sales rep gets on a call and they say, we're really excited about your email marketing platform, can you tell us, is that sales rep going to go, well, actually we're a CRM now. And I know you thought we were that, but let me tell you about our new positioning. Or are they just going to default to the story they've always been telling? And so my guess is they traded off potentially a drop in short-term conversions for company alignment.

9:00Because now it's on the homepage, people coming into the sales calls are going to say, so I saw you guys are like a CRM. Can you tell me more about that? And now every sales rep is forced to say the messaging that a lot of times, especially product marketers, write the message, it never gets used. And it's like, you know, if I can put that messaging on the most important, most visible asset, it's much more powerful to align the teams. And then the bet would be that in the long-term, conversions do go up. And all of a sudden you've opened up a whole new market, the message you're putting out there, and I've seen their ads and stuff.

9:33It's like, it's all mirroring that. Like it's in the headline and the taglines and the stuff they're running. And so this whole campaign, ideally in a 6 to 12 month time span, maybe all the people coming in are looking for CRM and they're looking to spend more money. There's more of them because it's B2C, not just e-commerce. And this bet will have played off. And side note, as we're even talking about this, this is why we always are very cautious when people say, we really want to work on our positioning because we want our conversion rate to go up. And I'm like, you might just need a conversion rate optimization person.

10:04If you fundamentally change the positioning, your conversion rate will likely go down at first, but then it will go up after you've adjusted everything and the new people are coming through the door. Well, and I've heard you say too, it's like, well, your conversion rate overall might drop, but your conversion rate with your best customer, who you're trying to position to, will go up. And then it's just about getting more of that best customer into the front door, which I think we're saying with the Klaviyo example. Okay. There's a bunch of things I want to get into today, like the nitty gritty of how you actually think about building homepages.

10:34But one question, just to kind of zoom out a bit, is you guys have worked on more than 400 homepages in the last two years, which is probably more than anyone else on the planet. What's something you've changed your mind about that two years ago you felt strongly about when you think about homepages and homepage messaging that maybe now you're like, oh, I was wrong, or I've really evolved my thinking on this? Oh, there's so many things that we've evolved the thinking on. I think for a while, I was obsessed with finding the one perfect homepage wireframe. And every wireframe must follow this exact format.

11:12Like everyone, you know, it's like physicists, they're trying to get the unified theory of everything. And so there's this amazingly elegant concept of like, there really truly exists one specific wireframe that will work for everyone. But as we've seen, it's just not true. And so much of what people expect to see on the homepage is dependent on where they're coming from. So we recently changed our homepage and did something wild and crazy. And I posted about it and got very heated feedback on it. We took our description of our service, which includes the pricing, and we put it in the main hero of the website.

11:49And so in the world of consultants and freelancers and service providers, this is unheard of. You'd be hard-pressed to find a consultant who lists their pricing anywhere, let alone in the hero. And we actually are doing a version of that value-based pricing where we say, if you are bigger, we're going to charge you more money, even though we're doing the identical service, which also is something that you normally hide. You never want anyone to know. And we're like, nope, we have four tiers. It's the same thing. I'm just making you pay more money because you're a massive enterprise. So we put that in the hero.

12:17And a lot of people were like, this is horrible. This is a horrible idea. You're not explaining the story. You're not leading with value. You're not, you're just telling me what it is and what it does. But for us, we're thinking about our overall journey and 99.9 % of our clients come from LinkedIn and they've spent 12 months reading our content, our thought leadership stuff, which is such a cringy word in itself, but you know, like the point of view, what we think about marketing principles and stuff. And ideally we've convinced them that positioning is really, really important and may be the thing that helps get them unstuck in their business.

12:50And then they land on the website. They say, I should really finally, I think maybe I'm ready. They land on the website and they are thinking in that moment, so how does this actually work? I know Anthony and Rob, they do something with positioning, but what does it actually look like? So they're looking for answers to what? And they say, how much does it cost? Because maybe they're way too expensive for me. So they're thinking about price. And so for them, it's like that flow makes a lot of sense. And we've seen it really help. People would get on sales calls before and say, well you know i'm just curious how much you charge i know people are a little and i'm like it's on the website but we had it at the bottom and nobody was scrolling down that far so we're like you know they didn't believe that it was going to be out there so then we've moved it up and now people are asking that question less so i think now when we work with clients a lot of time we will spend of like who's coming to the website where are they coming from what are they expecting what's their level of understanding of the category of the maturity of the market all that type of stuff and then feeding it into what's the best way to to lay out these sections in what order?

13:49What do we highlight where and all that type of stuff? I love that. So you've evolved the recipe and I think I've observed that as well, even in your thought leadership content that you've been posting. Previously, you guys would have more of a recipe or a wireframe. And now it feels like not only is there not a recipe, but there's more of maybe different paths, which is like, oh, are you PLG or sales? Do you have multiple use cases or one use case. So maybe talk to us a little bit about like for, you know, a listener who's listening to this at home and they're working at a, maybe a software company or maybe even an econ company.

14:24Like how do they even think about what are the components that go into the recipe? What are the ingredients and how do they know which ingredient they should be playing with? Yeah. So this really comes down to segmentation. So companies will have multiple segments that they could market to and that they likely are marketing to. And these segments will either have a prioritized list of who's the most important or they won't. And this is a company strategy question. So we believe the phrase ICP, ideal client profile, means ideal as in one, one most important segment, right? Which is not always what people say.

15:05Yeah. A lot of people say, well, we've got, you know, like five or six ICPs. And I'm like, wait a minute. I don't think you know what that word means. Ideal. Right. It sounds like there's just be one. But either way, if you think about it and there's multiple different audiences buying different things from you, you have a decision to make. You have to decide. And we actually split it up into three different approaches. The first one we would say, should you try to summarize the value across all of your segments? And usually you'll see this in like really big enterprise custom solution, like IBM or SAP or any of these types of ones, you'll see their page is essentially a big summary tagline.

15:46And it'll be something like solving business challenges. And they'll be like, people use SAP to handle their complex organization. And you're like, that doesn't tell me anything. Because what's happening is they're summarizing across every single segment. Then one step better than that is if you, we would say, not summarize, but itemize, where it will say, like Rippling was a classic example of this. For a while, Rippling was doing this for a while and then they stopped and now they're back. They had these three columns. And basically the hero of Rippling's page was like something like simplifying work for HR, IT, and finance teams.

16:23So they were just saying, we have this platform and it helps those three groups. And then immediately in the first scroll, it would say, explore Rippling by product. And it was a column that said HR, a column that said IT, in a column that said finance, that each of those had a couple of bullet points underneath them. And so this itemized approach is basically saying, we think it's equally likely that someone would be coming to our page looking for finance, that they would be coming looking for IT, that they'll be coming looking for, and I already forgot the third one, whatever the third one that I said was.

16:53HR, there it is. It's been a long day. So for them, they're like, why try to tell some big global overarching story, like a summary story, that's going to really obscure what the heck we do and leave people like, I don't even understand it. Let's just build these doorways, like we called it the channel changer approach. Let's just build doorways to sub pages where we can tell the deep positioning story. Here's how we specifically help IT teams or specifically finance teams. And they break it up even into sub products. So it's like this big menu. And now it's definitely way clearer than the summarize approach because I can look at a glance and say, wow, there's all these things.

17:30But on the flip side, it's a little complicated for the viewer. They have to navigate your big cheesecake factory menu of all the different stuff that you do. And it really only makes sense if you really are getting like in that example, those three big segments, is it really 33, 33, 33 in terms of the revenue split? And a lot of times it's not, but maybe it's 33, 33, 33 in terms of the executives who want their department to be represented. And so a lot of times we see this because of the committee is like, Well, if I can't have the whole story, then neither can Susie. And I'm fine if we just each get our column and our list, and that's how you end up with this middle one.

18:09The coolest one, and we think is usually the most effective, is in any time there's a business where there is an actual ICP who's not, you know, who's bringing in the bulk of the money or something like that. To treat them as such, and so not to summarize, not to prioritize, sorry, not to itemize, but to actually prioritize one of the segments. So you have summarize, itemize, and prioritize. guys. In the prioritized version, you say, here's my argument for the main segment. You really nail it. And then underneath that, you say, and I also support this other segment and this other segment, and you start to whittle it down.

18:42Prime example of this, not a B2B SaaS example, but everyone will be familiar, Apple. When you go on Apple's homepage, the hero does not try to summarize the value of all their products. It's not like game-changing hardware, transformational ecosystem system experience. If you go on their page, it's not like, here's the menu of all of our different products. The page is literally like, here's the iPad. It just came out. You should buy it. Because in their cyclical release cycle, there is a different product with an ICP that is the most important for that little two-month period or one-month period.

19:15And they're constantly changing the hero always to reflect it. But you will see this also with other big companies like Adobe, for example. I don't know,$300 billion market cap, unbelievably big. They're usually leading with creative cloud. It's like, there it is. This is the main thing that we want people to buy. We have a bunch of other offerings, but those can all get sub priority. Stripe does the same thing. They position the payment suite first. And then underneath it, they start talking about like all sorts of other crazy things that they do. Incorporate your startup in Delaware. You know, here's our carbon removal product.

19:48Here's how you can add Bitcoin to your suite or whatever. But they will talk about payments. And there's a fun activity. If you take any B2B company, or really any company, you can say to ChatGPT or Gemini, what is this company known for in one to two words? And it will be that thing. And it's, it's, it will, with Stripe, it will say payments with Salesforce. It will say CRM with Oracle. It will say databases with Apple. It says the iPhone. And so everyone has a prioritized positioning that we think should be reflected in how you go to market and even in how you divide up a homepage. But you know, it takes guts.

20:24It takes people having executives who are upset, especially in a bigger company. And usually someone has to be a C-level title to be able to make that decision. No, I love that. And I believe in that, like obviously big segmentation fan. I love telling one story for your best customer to make it abundantly clear. I always want that homepage to give them like a sense of belonging. That's kind of the words I use. So let's assume for someone listening, they've gotten that. They've gotten, you know, the exec team to be on board. Yes, we're going to prioritize this segment. We're going to go with that prioritization method that you've talked about.

20:57Now, what is the next step? Because I think if you read a lot of marketing material, you would, you know, probably the next step would be to draft out a list of features and then identify the benefits and then talk about the benefits in the hero. But I know you think a little differently. So I'd love to hear how that approach maybe isn't the best approach and what you would recommend instead. Yeah. So it really comes to, when you're thinking about this ICP, you have to factor in what is the competitive alternative. And this is not normally something people list in their ICPs. So when someone just takes a normal, here's my ideal customer, what they should be like.

21:36They will list out like the size of the revenue, the headcount, the tech stack, the industry, maybe what department, they list all these things. The one thing they don't list is what's the competitive alternative that they would choose other than us. And that will actually tell a lot about what the page should say or not say. And so take any technology. There's always a group of people that you are trying to convince to use a product that is unfamiliar with the category or unfamiliar with the functionality, and you're trying to get them off of manual spreadsheets or something like that and use the software.

22:11As product categories mature, all of a sudden, there's all these new players. And now the question now becomes, why should I switch off my old manual workflow to your dedicated software? It becomes, why you over the other 10 different types of products in the same space? And this is, again, this is based on who your ICP is. And so if you think of something like CRM, like we've been talking about, if you go to CRM, you could say, who do I want to sell CRMs to? And if my target customer is, let's say, brand new businesses that have never even heard the phrase CRM, maybe tiny little mom and pop shops, I am going to talk about the value of my product in relation to the way that they accomplish these workflows without the CRM.

22:59So let's say I take a workflow like keeping track of my sales leads or something, and I'm a mom-pop business. If I was going to talk about the value, I would frame it against that. And I would basically say, listen, in the old days, you would have to write these things all down on pen and paper, maybe in Excel or something. But that leads to all these issues. Now in this CRM, we can actually help you organize all your customer conversations in these dedicated screens. We can show you them in these pipeline views, all sorts of stuff. Makes it 10 times easier for you to keep track of all this stuff.

23:29and then that becomes the messaging. But let's say my target customer is a cool tech company, a B2B SaaS company. They all have CRMs. They're all familiar with CRMs. And so the question I have to ask if I'm the cool new CRM player is, how am I different than Salesforce or HubSpot? Because that's what they're going to be considering. And so in that case, I'm not saying, listen, you should use us to keep track of your deals and give you a single source of truth. They're going to be like, I know, that's what a CRM is. I have one. That's why I want to buy one. Exactly. Like, that's why I have one right now or that's why I'm thinking about buying one.