Here’s the paradox at the heart of most ISV content: the people who understand the product best are the worst possible people to explain it to buyers.
And that person is probably you.
Not because you’re a poor communicator. But because writing copy and writing code require completely different instincts. The best developers in the world make poor copywriters for the same reason the best copywriters make poor developers. These are different crafts. And confusing them is costing you buyers you never knew you lost.
You’ve spent years building something genuinely sophisticated. You know every feature, every integration, every edge case. And when you sit down to write about it, that knowledge pours out. It may be accurate and detailed but it’s completely disconnected from the world your buyer is living in.
According to Gartner, buyers spend just 17% of their total purchasing time with vendors. The rest is independent research, conducted by people who don’t share your vocabulary, your context, or your assumptions about what matters. When you write your own copy, you’re writing for yourself. And your buyers, finding nothing that speaks to their world, leave without a word.
Why B2B buyers choose a Microsoft ISV before making contact
If you’re waiting for signals that your content isn’t working, you’ve already missed them.
Prospects don’t tell you when your website or Marketplace listing fails them. They don’t ask questions, request clarification, or tell you what’s missing. They leave, on to the next vendor on their list. You never know the conversation happened.
Forrester’s research captures exactly how far this has gone, “B2B buying today is a process of confirmation, not selection.” By the time a prospect makes contact, 92% already have a vendor in mind — and 41% have already decided on a single preferred supplier before formal evaluation even begins. 6sense found that the vendor contacted first wins the deal roughly 80% of the time.
That vendor didn’t get through using a better sales process, but with better content. Content that answered the buyer’s questions before anyone else did, in language that made them feel understood. If your content is a catalogue of features and release notes, you’re not in that conversation. You’re not even in the room.
What Microsoft ISV buyers really want from your content
Put yourself on the other side of the screen for a moment.
You’re an internal communications manager. Your intranet is outdated, your employees aren’t using it, and your CEO has asked you to fix it by Q3. You’ve carved out forty minutes to research solutions. You land on a vendor’s blog. The most recent post is a product release note detailing an update to the API. Before that, a company announcement about a new office opening. Before that, a feature comparison table written in language that assumes you know what SharePoint modern experience means.
You don’t feel understood. You feel like you’ve walked into a conversation that wasn’t meant for you. So you go back to Google and try the next result.
That’s not a hypothetical. That’s what happens — every day, on ISV websites across the Microsoft ecosystem. And the founder who built the product has no idea it’s happening, because buyers don’t leave feedback on their way out. They just leave.
This is what seven years of working with Microsoft ISVs has taught us. Buyers don’t want to purchase a set of features, half of which are irrelevant to their needs. They want to buy a solution to their problem. Those are fundamentally different things. And most ISV content is built around the former while the buyer is desperately searching for the latter.
Why product-led ISV content drives buyers to your competitors
Here’s what makes this more than a missed opportunity. Product-led content doesn’t just fail to reach buyers. It actively tells them something about your company — something you almost certainly don’t intend to say.
A blog full of release notes and internal announcements says: we are more interested in ourselves than in you. It signals a company looking inward, not outward. A company that finds its own product more fascinating than its customers’ problems — which, given that the people writing the content built the product, is entirely understandable.
The earlier Gartner stat we mentioned, where buyers spend just 17% of their total purchasing time in contact with vendors means the rest — 83% — is self-directed research. That research is the decision. So, your content isn’t supporting the sales process. It is the sales process. And if it’s talking about your product rather than your buyer’s problem, it’s losing deals you never knew you were in.
The three buyers every Microsoft ISV needs to speak to
In most Microsoft ISV purchases, there are at least three people involved in the decision — and rarely is it just one of them is reading your content.
There’s the end user champion: the person who has the problem your product solves and is motivated to find a fix. They’re not just evaluating features. They’re looking for evidence that you understand their world and that your solution will make their working life measurably better.
There’s the technical evaluator: the person whose job it is to assess whether the product actually does what it claims, integrates cleanly with the existing stack, meets the organisation’s security requirements, and won’t create more work than it saves. They want proof, not promises — and they’re asking themselves whether your company will still be maintaining this product in three years time.
There’s the economic buyer: the person releasing the budget. They’re not interested in the roadmap. They want to know what this costs, what it saves, and how long before it pays for itself. If your content can’t answer that with real numbers from real customers, the budget conversation stalls before it starts.
The specific job titles will vary enormously depending on your product and the sector you’re selling into. But the dynamic is consistent. Three or more different perspectives. Three or more different sets of questions. Most ISV content addresses none of them — because it was written by someone whose frame of reference is the product, not the people buying it.
We saw this pattern clearly when we began working with a fast-growing Finnish SharePoint intranet company back in 2019. It had a strong product and content that spoke almost exclusively to SharePoint developers. Their actual buyers, the people who would champion the purchase internally, were arriving at the website and finding nothing that addressed their situation. The content aimed at entirely the wrong people. Shifting the focus from product to problem changed everything.
Why technical founders struggle to write effective ISV marketing content
There’s a well-documented reason why experts consistently fail to communicate with non-experts. Stanford professor Chip Heath and his brother Dan Heath — authors of the bestselling Made to Stick — called it the curse of knowledge: once you understand something deeply, you lose the ability to remember what it felt like not to understand it. You can no longer see your product through the eyes of someone encountering it for the first time — someone who doesn’t know the terminology, doesn’t share your assumptions, and isn’t yet convinced they need what you’re selling.
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a cognitive reality. And it’s why the founder who built the product, the CPO who shaped the roadmap, and the developer who wrote the code are structurally the wrong people to write copy for buyers who are still at the beginning of their journey.
We see it play out in a specific way in the Microsoft ISV world. Suggest to a technical founder that their content needs to be written in plainer language — focused on problems rather than features, on outcomes rather than capabilities — and a version of the same conversation tends to happen. The instinct is to resist. Simplifying the language feels like diminishing the work. Like somehow making it accessible makes it less.
But there’s a principle in journalism that applies directly here. Journalists are trained in the art of writing. The simpler the language, the wider the reach. Tabloids write for the broadest possible audience. Broadsheets write for a more educated one. Both are writing far below the level of the experts who produce them. That’s not dumbing down. That’s craft.
Simplicity isn’t the absence of intelligence. It’s the result of it.
How poor ISV content kills trial sign-ups, conversions and renewals
The consequences of getting this wrong are specific and measurable even if most ISVs aren’t measuring them directly.
- Low trial sign-up rates.
- Poor conversion from trial to paid.
- Renewal numbers that fall short of projections.
These aren’t sales problems or product problems. They’re content problems. Buyers who don’t feel understood at the awareness stage don’t convert at the consideration stage. And customers who were never properly shown the value of the product during the buying process are the first to question it at renewal.
We saw the inverse of this with Finnish intranet company. Shifting the focus from product to problem didn’t just improve the content. It improved the pipeline.
How to write Microsoft ISV content that speaks to buyers not builders
Start with the buyer, not the product. Before a word is written, ask: who is this for? What are they struggling with right now? What does their working life look like before they find you — and what’s different after?
Interview your customers. Not to gather testimonials — to understand the language they use to describe their own problems. The words a customer uses to articulate what was wrong before they found you are precisely the words their peers are typing into search engines right now.
Separate expertise from execution. Your product team’s knowledge is the essential raw material — but it’s not the right voice for a first draft. The people who built the product cannot un-know what they know. They need someone alongside them who can hold the buyer’s perspective without being pulled back into the product mindset. Someone trained to find the story that matters to the audience, not the story that matters to the builder.
That’s a journalism skill as much as a marketing one. It’s the ability to walk into a room full of experts, ask the questions a non-expert would ask, and write the answers in language that makes the reader feel: these people understand my world.
That’s the content that gets you onto the shortlist before the buyer picks up the phone. Thatconverts trials and protects renewals. That’s the content your product team, for all their brilliance, is not best placed to write.
Bright Star works exclusively with Microsoft Partner ISVs and MSPs who need content that speaks to the right people, in the right language, at the right moment. We work with a small number of clients on an ongoing basis each year, but we also take on scoped project work — a content audit, a messaging review, demand gen content packages — delivered in weeks. Get in touch to talk about what that could look like for your business.
