Hey,
I'm fresh off eight straight weeks of teaching and I have THOUGHTS. The Level Set: This summer I taught sales to a small cohort for eight weeks. The thing everyone needed most was one good sentence. This week: how to write yours.
Long story cut entirely too short: this has been the hardest fucking season of business I've had. Expert Insight of the Week
I have spent 25 years building recurring revenue businesses. This summer was the first time sales itself was the product I sold. Eight weeks. A small cohort of founders, coaches and consultants running expert-led businesses. We built the whole machine together: ICPs, customer interviews, CRMs, funnels, operating rhythms.
And the piece people worked on longest was none of those. Â It was positioning. The one clean sentence that tells a stranger what you do, who it is for and why it matters.
Week one, we drafted positioning statements. Week eight, in our final session, the questions on the table were STILL positioning questions. Is the problem I solve urgent enough? Am I charging for the right thing? How do I frame this so the right person leans in?
So here is the biggest thing this summer taught me: positioning is a muscle. You build it by saying it out loud, watching faces and revising. It takes longer than anyone thinks it should. Including me. And I built the curriculum.
This Week's Shift: From "it depends" → 30 words
Ask an expert what they do and you will usually get a hedge. "Well, it depends on the client." You see every nuance, every exception. So you reach for the safer, forgettable version. "I'm a consultant." "I help businesses grow."Â
The person nods politely and moves on, and a prospect just walked past without knowing you were the answer. Hedging is playing small in sentence form. And without the sentence, you build your answer from scratch by brute force every single time someone asks.
And I know exactly why you hedge. Your work does NOT fit in a neat tiny box. You have 10 or 25 years of expertise that shifts shape with every client, and compressing all of that into one sentence feels like lying by omission.
So please HEAR ME: the 30 words were never meant to hold everything you can do. They hold the one door the right buyer walks through. Every nuance, every exception, every adjacent skill you carry is still yours, and it all comes out in the conversation the sentence earns you.
The constraint: about 30 words. Â I do X for Y so that Z.Â
 X  is what you actually do, in the buyer's language. "I build referral engines" beats "I'm a growth strategist." If a smart 12-year-old could not picture it, it is still too abstract.
 Y is exactly who it is for. "Bootstrapped SaaS founders past $1M ARR" beats "businesses." The narrower you go, the more the right person feels seen. Everyone else self-selects out. That is the point.
 Z  is the "so that." The outcome your buyer loses sleep over: revenue, time, risk, peace of mind. This is the part almost everyone drops, and it is the part that closes. Z answers the silent question every buyer is asking: and then what?
If you are over 30 words, you are describing your services. Keep it concise.Â
What This Looks Like in Real Life
A few snapshots from the cohort... One member walked out of a casual networking event with six follow-up conversations booked, then spent the next week wrestling with whether the problem they solve is "urgent, persistent and painful" enough to charge for. Both things were true at once. This is what honing looks like.
Another reworked their ICP and then reordered their testimonials to match it, because proof lands harder when it points at the same buyer your sentence does. Another built a list of 100 real people to talk to. Refining your positioning statement with your existing network, is a great place to start.Â
In our final session, everyone committed to three specific, time-bound actions. The math we used is simple: the number of clients you want, times four, is the number of ICP conversations you need to start. Your 30 words are how you open every one of them.
→ Your Next MoveI turned this into a free fill-in resource: The 30-Word Positioning Statement Builder, straight from the sales curriculum I taught this summer. The formula, a worksheet, before-and-after examples and the sharpen-it checklist.
[Grab the free builder here]
Write a bad first draft. Then say it out loud. If you flinch, hedge or add a disclaimer, it is not done yet. The real test is whether you can say it at a dinner party, calm and plain, and watch the right person lean in.
Why This Matters
Sales is actually matchmaking. You are looking eye-to-eye with a peer, deciding together whether you are the answer to their expensive problem. And matchmaking only works if you can say who you are for. Your 30 words are the match criteria. Without them you are guessing, and so is your buyer.
On Friday, September 11th I am hosting a free 5-hour live Sales Intensive for B2B consultants and coaches. Noon to 5pm ET, on Zoom, and yes, actually FREE.
In five working hours we will identify the expensive problem you are uniquely equipped to solve, who needs it solved and how to talk about your work so the right people want to pay you for it. Your 30 words are step one. The Intensive is where we build the rest.
→ Save your seat
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