Nobody has ever been promoted for saving 20% of their time

Two sentences about the same product.

"It cuts the time your team spends on partner research by about a third."

"It makes you the person who brought in the channel that hit target."

The first is true, checkable and completely inert. The second is the one that gets forwarded. Nothing about the software changed between them; what changed is whose problem the sentence is about.

Here is Jason Cohen, mid-teardown, on a product being sold to marketers at large companies:

If I'm a marketer at a big company and I want my job to not go away, because big companies are in fact letting people go — you just save my job for frick's sake. Like, that sounds freaking good. You didn't say that.

Jason Cohen

The founder had said everything else. The features were real and the value was real. The pitch simply addressed the organisation, which does not read email, and not the person, who does.

Utility claims and career claims

A utility claim is about the task: faster, cheaper, fewer errors, less manual work. It is what the product literally does, it is what an engineer would write, and it is what almost every B2B homepage leads with.

A career claim is about what becomes true of the reader once the utility claim is delivered. They hit the number. They own the thing that worked. They stop being the person who is always behind. They keep their job in a year when other people didn't.

Career claims are not fluffier than utility claims — they are downstream of them, and they are strictly more specific, because they require you to know who is reading and what they are measured on. That is also why they are rarer: writing one means committing to a buyer.

Not everyone gets to make the dramatic version, and the generalisation matters:

There are a lot of products that maybe don't delight, that you log in because you have to, but they save your job. If you're a founder running a five-person company, well, I don't need to save my job — but what I do need is results. I need more leads.

Rob Walling

So the question is not "how do I make this exciting". It is what does the specific person opening this email need to be able to say about themselves next quarter, and the answer differs completely between an employee at a large company and a founder of a small one.

The test for whether the claim is strong enough

There is a good test, and it is deliberately embarrassing to fail:

I want them to be a member of some random Slack channel of marketing people, or the alumni list of their last company. And I want them to say: dude, dude, dude, I just went to my boss and was like, I'm gonna get us — blah, blah, blah, your pitch. And I want other people on that Slack channel to go: my God, I have to do that.

Jason Cohen

Read your own one-liner and ask whether anybody would repeat it to a peer unprompted. Most B2B copy fails this instantly, because "streamlines your workflow" is not something a human says to another human in a Slack channel. If your pitch cannot survive being said out loud by a buyer to their friends, it will not survive being forwarded to their boss either.

The bar the improvement has to clear

Even a well-aimed career claim fails if the underlying change is too small to notice. The threshold is much higher than most founders assume:

If your site is 30% faster, is that enough to motivate someone to care, to search, to migrate their site, to not migrate away later? It's pretty weak. The reason we said four times faster is we had customer after customer where they had literally data showing that — when it's that much faster, you can just feel it.

Jason Cohen

And the version that applies to everything sold today on the strength of automation:

I try to find a product where it really is true that AI today, even with its failings, really is 3×-ing something. Hopefully 3×-ing more value for the customer, not just saving money. Saving money is a much weaker pitch.

Jason Cohen

A 20–30% improvement is real and it is not a reason for anyone to change anything, because changing things costs more than 20%. This is why "saves you time" pitches underperform even when the time saving is genuine: the buyer silently prices the switching cost and the two cancel.

The practical translation is arithmetic. "Cuts research time by 30%" is a weak sentence. "Forty researched first-meeting packs a month instead of twelve" is the same fact, expressed at a size that changes what someone can plan.

Why your customers will not hand you this

If you are waiting for the career claim to arrive in a feature request, it won't. Here is what happens when you build purely from what customers ask for — a founder listing his enterprise wins: invoicing and POs, audit logs, white-glove migrations, SSO. The response:

I didn't hear anything in there that's exciting or that would light someone up. Everything you told me was: I just have to have this, I don't have a choice. You're alleviating a fear. It's useful — there's nothing wrong with it. But nothing you told me was exciting.

Jason Cohen

And the reason, which is not a criticism of customers:

Any feature that we ever built that was delight usually came from us. Came from our innovation. Customers did not come up with that on their own. That's why we say when you talk to customers to get ideas for features, they're gonna give you table stakes. They're not product people.

Rob Walling

Table stakes clear bars. They do not create advocacy, and they never generate a career claim, because nobody has ever told a peer about single sign-on. Ask customers what is wrong; do not ask them what would be remarkable.

Rewriting one line this week

1. Name the reader. Not the company — the individual, with a job title and a thing they are measured on this quarter.
2. Write the utility claim as a number, honestly. This is your input, not your pitch.
3. Multiply it into something plannable. If the multiple is under 2×, you have a feature, not a pitch — go and find the version that clears 3×.
4. Write the sentence they would say to a peer. First person, out loud, no product name in it. If it sounds ridiculous spoken, it reads as noise written.
5. Keep the utility claim underneath as proof. The career claim opens the email; the number is what stops it sounding like marketing.