Why does our marketing attract the wrong customers?

The scene I'm in this week

Monday morning I got on a call with the CEO of a B2B software company, right around $16M, and she was frustrated in a very specific way. Her marketer was busy. Blog posts going out, ads running, a lead magnet, the whole machine humming along. Leads were coming in. And almost none of them were the customer she built the company for.

She pulled up her CRM and read me the last ten inbound leads. A solo founder. A two-person startup. A student. A company a tenth the size of her ideal account. A guy who just wanted a free version. Her sales team was spending its whole week on Zoom calls with people who were never going to buy, and the mid-market operations leaders she actually built this for were nowhere on the list.

Here's what she said, and I hear it almost word for word every single week. 'It's not that marketing isn't working. It's that it's attracting the wrong people.' Then the real question underneath it, the one that keeps her up: are we just bad at marketing?

No. The marketing is doing exactly what the message told it to do. Here's the trap. A message built to appeal to everyone gets answered by the people with the most time and the least money. Your ideal buyer, the busy one with the budget and the real problem, scrolls right past a homepage that could be describing anyone. What's actually broken isn't the tactics. It's that the message has no way to say no.

What's actually broken here?

I call it the Flypaper Message. A real magnet has two poles. It pulls some things in and pushes others away. That's the whole point of the word magnetic. A message that only attracts, that's built to be agreeable to every possible visitor, isn't a magnet. It's flypaper. It catches whatever happens to land on it. And the things that land on flypaper are rarely the things you wanted.

A Flypaper Message never names who it's for, never names what it's against, never draws a line. It says 'the platform for modern teams' and 'built for businesses of all sizes' and 'we help you grow.' Every word is true and none of it repels anybody, which sounds like a feature until you realize repelling the wrong buyer is the exact mechanism that attracts the right one.

This is Solution-Focused Marketing wearing a friendly face. When your message is a list of what the product does, it can't repel anyone, because a feature list has no point of view. Anybody curious can raise a hand. And the hands that go up belong to the curious with time on them: students, tire-kickers, tiny teams comparison-shopping ten tools on a Tuesday. Not the VP of Operations who already knows she has the problem and needs to know, in five seconds, whether you're the one who solves it for someone exactly like her.

And here's the part that stings. This isn't a marketing failure. It's usually a company that's genuinely good and genuinely afraid to narrow. Every wide word on that page went up because saying it plainer felt like turning business away. That's a real instinct. It's also exactly backwards. This is just truth: the broader you cast, the more of the wrong fish you catch.

Why is this worse now than ever?

AI dropped the cost of agreeable, for-everyone content to zero. Your marketer can generate a hundred blog posts, fifty ad variations, and a fresh homepage draft before lunch, and every one of them will default to the safe, broad, please-everyone voice, because that's the average of the internet and the average is what a model reaches for when you give it nothing specific to say. Volume was never the moat. Now it's free, and free volume of a Flypaper Message just means you attract the wrong buyer faster and at scale.

There's a second thing, and most founders haven't clocked it yet. Your buyer now meets a machine before they meet you. Roughly half of B2B buyers lean on ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to build their shortlist before they ever hit your site. When that engine reads a homepage that could belong to any of your competitors, it can't attach you to a specific buyer or a specific problem, so it rounds you off to the category average and recommends the company that took a clear position. Brand is the new backlink. In AI search, a clear and consistent brand narrative is what gets a company cited, the way backlinks once drove search rankings. A message with no stance doesn't just fail to attract the right human. It fails to give the machine anything to repeat.

Which is the real diagnosis. A message that welcomes everyone is the definition of an option: one more thing on a list, indistinguishable, chosen on price or skipped on inertia. A rebellion is always FOR someone specific and AGAINST something specific, and that's exactly why it repels. You can't lead a movement that's for all companies of all sizes. The thing that makes the right buyer lean in is the same thing that makes the wrong buyer leave. If nobody's leaving, nobody's leaning in either.

How do you tell if your message has a repel pole? Run these three tests this week

1. 1The Won-and-Lost Fit Audit. Pull your last twenty closed-won deals and your last twenty that stalled, ghosted, or churned. Write down what the won ones have in common: the size, the role, the situation, the specific pain they walked in carrying. Now read your homepage. Does it name that situation anywhere? If your best customers share a pattern your message never says out loud, you're attracting on the wrong signal and hoping the right people show up anyway.
2. 2The Repel Test. Read your homepage and try to find the one sentence that would make a wrong-fit visitor close the tab and leave. A too-small company, a buyer in an industry you don't serve, someone hunting for the cheap version. If there's no sentence that sends them away, your message has no repel pole. It's flypaper. Magnetic messaging has to be able to say who it's not for, out loud, right there on the page.
3. 3The Raise-a-Hand Test. Look at who actually fills out your form or books the call this month. Not who you wish showed up. Who did. Are they the buyer you built this for, or the buyer with the most time and the smallest budget? A broad message gets answered by whoever's bored, not whoever's ideal. The identity of the person raising their hand tells you exactly what your message is really selecting for.

What I see across 200+ B2B companies

When a founder tells me marketing is bringing the wrong customers, I go straight to the homepage, and it's the same thing nearly every time. Nine in ten of these companies have a homepage that would read identically if you swapped their logo for a competitor's. The message describes the product: what it does, what it integrates with, how modern the teams who use it are. It never describes the person on the other side of the screen or the specific mess they're living in.

There's data underneath this. RCKT Marketing found that 57% of SaaS marketers say poor-fit leads stem from unclear or overly broad messaging. Read that again. The majority of the wrong-fit-lead problem isn't a targeting problem or a channel problem or a budget problem. It's a message problem. The words are pulling in the wrong people, and no amount of fresh ad spend fixes a message that can't say no.

“The biggest reason SaaS quietly repels ideal customers is unclear positioning. Founders can't clearly communicate why someone should choose them over every specific alternative available.”

... Indie Hackers

Read that carefully, because it's the exact inversion of what founders fear. They think a sharper, narrower message will repel customers. The truth is the vague message is already repelling the right ones, quietly, invisibly, every day, while it catches the wrong ones on the flypaper. Not one of these founders could tell me, in a single sentence, who their message is NOT for. That's the tell.

How does this play out in practice?

A workflow-automation company I worked with, around $16M, mid-market as their intended market. Their demo calendar was full and their sales team was exhausted, because the calendar was full of the wrong people: solo operators, five-person startups, a lot of 'just exploring.' The mid-market operations leaders they'd built the product for almost never booked. Marketing looked busy and productive. Pipeline looked like noise.

The homepage was a Flypaper Message. 'Automate your workflows. Built for teams of every size. Save time, cut the busywork.' True, agreeable, and aimed at no one. We rewrote it around one specific person and one specific enemy: the VP of Operations at a 200-to-500-person company drowning in spreadsheet handoffs between departments, and the tolerated spreadsheet chaos everyone there had stopped even noticing. The page named that person and that pain in the first sentence. It also, for the first time, made it obvious this wasn't the cheap tool for a two-person team.

Within a quarter, total demo requests actually dropped, by about a third. That number scared them for a week. Then the other numbers moved. The demos that did book were the right buyer, the close rate roughly doubled, and average deal size climbed because they'd stopped selling to people who could only ever afford the smallest plan. Fewer leads, far more revenue. The message finally had a repel pole, and repelling the wrong buyer is what let the right one finally see themselves on the page.

What this means for you

If your marketing is attracting the wrong customers, adding more marketing just pours more fuel on the wrong fire. The fix isn't downstream in the tactics. It's upstream, in the message itself. You have to make the decision most founders avoid: who you're for, who you're against, and what you'll say out loud that sends the wrong buyer away. Write that down once, in a place every page and every rep and every AI tool draws from, and the wrong-fit leads stop at the source instead of on your sales team's calendar.

That written-down decision is what the Magnetic Messaging Framework (MMF) gives you. The Magnetic Messaging Framework is a strategic narrative system built around four anchors: category design, villain framing, an old-way / new-way contrast, and a promised-land outcome. It was developed by Greg Rosner across more than 300 founder engagements to give B2B companies a magnetic, repeatable message that pulls buyers in instead of pushing features at them. Two of those anchors are the exact repel pole your message is missing. Villain framing names what you're against. The old-way / new-way contrast draws the line the right buyer crosses and the wrong buyer won't. That's why it matters here specifically: without a documented framework, your marketer and your AI tools default to the agreeable average, and the flypaper goes right back up on the next page you publish.

1. 1This week, run the Repel Test on your own homepage. Find the sentence that sends the wrong buyer away. If it isn't there, that's your first rewrite.
2. 2Pull your last twenty best-fit customers and write the one situation they share. That sentence, the specific person and the specific pain, belongs at the very top of your homepage, above everything your product does.
3. 3Stop measuring marketing by lead volume and start measuring it by lead fit. A message that catches fewer, better-fit buyers is working. A message that catches more of everyone is flypaper, no matter how full the funnel looks.

PitchKitchen builds Magnetic Messaging Frameworks for founder-led B2B companies in the $5M-$75M range. Founded by Greg Rosner, author of Story Craft for Disruptors, PitchKitchen fixes broken marketing messages and underperforming websites for CEOs whose sales are stalling because their message isn't doing the work. If your leads keep coming in the wrong shape, these two go deeper: Why do B2B sales teams keep asking marketing for new leads instead of better ones? and Should we niche down, or will it cost us deals?. And here's why a clear position outlasts every tactic in the AI era: Strategic Positioning Is the Only Moat AI Can't Copy.