There’s an ongoing debate in the startup ecosystem – particularly in the SaaS and B2B world – about what your website homepage content should focus on.
Should you highlight your features in detail, or focus entirely on the outcomes your product delivers? Founders, product teams, and marketers often find themselves stuck between these two poles, unsure of what the visitor really expects.
The result, more often than not, is a homepage that tries to do both poorly or ends up saying very little or a lot, but without clarity.
But the real issue isn’t whether features or outcomes are more important. The problem is that we’re asking the wrong question to begin with.
The Real Job of the Homepage: Clarity, Not Conversion
Your homepage doesn’t need to pick a side between features and outcomes. It needs to clearly answer the most essential questions your ideal buyer has when they first land on your site.
What is this product? What problem does it solve? Who is it for? How does it work? Why is it better than the others I’ve seen? And, if I’m interested, what’s the rough cost?
In that sense, the homepage is not a battleground between the product and marketing – it’s the one place where the messaging needs to be simple, comprehensive, and the most aligned. The job of the homepage isn’t to convince or convert. In fact, no buyers ever gets converted on the homepage.
But you can give immense clarity with the right volume and quality of details.
You need to tell the visitor: you’re in the right place, we understand your problem, and here’s how we solve it better than anyone else.
Why Most Homepages Miss the Mark
The challenge is that most homepages are either too vague or too cluttered. The vague ones lean too hard into “outcome” messaging, with taglines like “Transform the way you work” or “Reimagine your cloud security.”
They leave the visitor wondering what the company actually does.
The cluttered ones go in the other direction, overwhelming visitors with extremely technical details and a feature list that feels more like a product spec sheet than a story.
Neither works.
Because what the buyer wants is a mix of clarity and confidence. The outcome + feature approach does exactly that. They want to know what your product does, but also how it fits into their world, and why they should care now.
Product vs Marketing: A Misaligned Conversation
This is where most of the confusion comes from. Product teams are invested in how the engine works, because they built it.
Marketing teams are focused on how the user benefits, because they’re looking at conversions and market perception. But your buyer? Your buyer is trying to decide whether your product is worth more of their time.
Whether it’s relevant to them. Whether it can solve a problem they already feel. And they’re trying to make that decision in under 30 seconds.
B2B buyer journey and the outcome + feature approach.
The buyer journey in B2B is highly complex and non-linear. It is never the case that any buyer would come for the first time on the website and book a demo call or a consultation with your business.
When your visitors are exploring your solution for the first time, it’s important you let them know that you understand their problem, but also you can solve it with your product/services.
This approach requires not just a focus on product features and competitor comparison, but also the outcomes. In fact, always begin with the outcome.
A CRM which helps your team reduce follow-up time with leads and have 40% better conversion rate would have a much better appeal than one which is “AI enabled” or “automatically filters our leads based on intent signals”.
B2B buyers need more simplicity in messaging – combining both outcomes and features.
- What can you achieve for us?
- How do you do that?
- What is it going to cost us?
- How does your solution compare with the market?
- Who have you worked with before?
Why This Balance Is Even More Critical for Cybersecurity Startups
This becomes even more important in cybersecurity, where buyers are often overwhelmed with similar-sounding feature sets.
As we’ve written before, in cybersecurity the buyer is often not just the CISO, but also the CEO, COO, or business owner – people who are responsible for financial and operational outcomes, not just technical ones.
For them, your features don’t matter unless they can immediately see how those features will reduce risk, improve audit readiness, or lower the internal burden on their team.
In this context, your homepage needs to lead with the security promise, not the technical depth. It needs to say: this is what we protect, this is how we make your team faster, and this is why it matters to your bottom line.
The Role of Transparent Pricing and Use Case Narratives
Another nuance here is pricing and transparency. Many SaaS startups shy away from putting pricing on the homepage, fearing that it might turn people away or limit flexibility in sales conversations.
But for the right buyer, even a ballpark figure or a “starts at” signal helps build trust. It frames the product in a context the buyer understands: cost vs value.
When done right, transparent pricing (or even pricing tiers linked to features and outcomes) can actually increase conversions – because the visitor feels informed, not baited.
Then there’s the matter of use cases, which many homepages either bury in secondary pages or don’t include at all. Use cases are arguably the best way to connect features with outcomes. They demonstrate that you understand the specific pains of your audience and that your product has been applied to solve them.
A concise example – say, how your platform helped a fintech company reduce incident response time by 60% – does more than any abstract feature list or aspirational headline. It gives your message credibility, relevance, and depth.
So should your B2B website homepage be outcome or feature focused?
Well, both. Ideally, you should start with outcomes and then go on to showcase your features to educate your audience as to how your help them achieve those outcomes. This is the best way to hook your audience in to read more and talk to you!
If you want to revisit your website homepage content or just re-think your positioning, feel free to reach out to us.
