You don’t have a sales problem. You have a findability problem. Joshua Altman shows how clear pricing, specs, and bios help AI tools and buyers find you
GROWTH PILLAR: Marketing & Branding
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners, solopreneurs, corporate escapees, and leaders building systems
WHAT THEY’LL GAIN: A simple way to see why deals go quiet, what “boring content” AI tools look for, and a review habit that keeps it accurate.
You are losing deals and nobody tells you why.
Joshua Altman is the managing director of Beltway Media, a firm of fractional chief communications officers. In this East Trade Winds session, he shares tactical communication that helps businesses stop losing deals they never knew about. Buyers now ask AI tools to compare companies. If your pricing, specs, bios, and reviews are not clear, the machines skip you, and people never get to choose you. Joshua calls this boring content, and he says it matters as much as bold brand messaging. He ties both to sales strategy through his story, narrative, and brand framework. He also says a communication team should own this content and review it often. This is for small business owners and leaders who want to be found.
Key topics covered
• Why buyers ask AI tools to compare companies before they ever call you
• What “boring” content is: pricing, specs, bios, return and cancellation terms, reviews
• What “bold” content is: ads, brand, email, creative campaigns
• The story, narrative, and brand framework
• Why a communications team should own and audit the boring content
Guest links
Hosts: Percy Barr and Wayne Pratt
PARTNERS ON THIS EPISODE
• East Trade Winds ~ free weekly networking. Bring one challenge, bring one introduction.
• Profit10™ ~ a free Profit Snapshot. Ten questions to show where your business leaks profit.
• Web Indexer ~ a quick-install chatbot that answers visitor questions 24/7.
Next Steps
• Join Canada Growth Network ~ $1 CAD first month, then $47 CAD/month. Real tools. Real people.
• Join East Trade Winds free every Tuesday, 8–9 AM EST
Joshua (00:05)
I'm Joshua Altman. I'm from Beltway.media, the managing director there, and we're fractional chief communications officers. Most people, most of you, are losing the deals and you don't even know what you're losing. And it's not because of what you're selling. It's all because of how you communicate it. Be bold and be boring.
At the same time, which probably feels like quite a bit of a contradiction. Here's how that happens. We're consumers too. I think a lot of us forget that when we're selling when we're in business. We are also buyers. We live in the same world as our buyers. Those buyers, they go, they ask an AI. That's how it works these days. ChatGPT, Google, whatever it is.
They ask to compare companies in whatever category they're looking, and your competitor has structured data. Their pricing is clear, it's findable, you have an old website, a PDF. There in the answer, you're not. You're not chosen. But they didn't choose someone over you. They never knew you existed, and that's because of the message and how you create that message, how you are delivering it.
Machines are the entities now that source information. They surface it. They bring it to us. But it's us, people, that make a decision. So if machines can't find you, people don't get the chance to choose you. So then what is the boring? What do we have to message so that people find us? And that's really j technical, boring stuff usually. It's accurate.
data, it's structured content that AI systems find, it's product specs and support documentation, its bios, its return and cancellation terms, it's reviews, it's pricing, it's all of those things that are how people find that information via computer today. It's not exciting. It's not flashy.
AI is thriving on that structure. What's bold? Bold is the opposite of that. It's where a lot of people put their resources because it's bold, it's interesting, it's emotionally resonant. It's the things people remember. It's the brand advertising, it's commercials, it's paid ads, it's creative campaigns, it's email marketing. Those are things that we can make flashy and look great. And people find it.
be exciting. They want to connect with it. It must make people feel something.
The boring is what helps machines find something. Both are equally important to how a buyer encounters you and how they make their decision. We look at things at our firm, we have kind of two main frameworks. The first one is what we're going to talk about a little bit today. It's the story, narrative, and brand framework. So story is what actually happened. Narrative is connecting the dots.
between the story and the brand and the brand is that third part. It's the swag, it's the identity, it's the things people carry with them. So that narrative, that middle component is what's often lost. And that's where we do a lot of our work. It's what connects the bold and the boring into one coherent thing people can trust. Trust being the key here. And when you have that story, it's the stuff you tell your friends at the bar. It's
Just beginning, middle, and present. Brand we all see all the time. It's flashy commercials, it's logos, it's websites. That structured data bridges that essential gap. So how do we bridge that gap? What's the actual way that we do it? We have to rethink the boring stuff. It's not extra. It's not stuff we put out because we have to, because
People need to see product specs. It's a core reputational asset. It is equal in every way to our advertisements, to our look, to our logo.
We can make it look good just because it is what we call the boring. It doesn't have to be black text on a white piece of paper that's structured for a plain website. It can still look good and be something that is engaging to people. That's what they will see once it's surfaced. But it still has to be structured and built in a way for those machines. We always talk about our audiences.
We always think about who we are messaging to. We like to message to people because that's what we are. It's what we know, it's what we understand. But we're also now more than ever messaging to machines. And we need to think about that when we're designing the look, the feel, and also very importantly, the web structure, the actual back end of how we are delivering our message.
Because if we don't do that in a structured way, people can't find it and sales and deals get lost and you never know about it.
What you're doing there is making it interesting, but also making it accessible. So who's really doing that? That's a communications team. People think of this stuff, the boring stuff, as an IT team. They think of it as a sales team. They might be writing it. But the communications team.
Is what's connecting all that information and is the publisher of all of this documentation. The same people doing the great creative ads are responsible for making sure the spec sheets are accessible and approachable and most importantly, findable. They're making sure that your pricing structures are clear and consistent, that people understand what your tiers of service are, that people know.
what they're getting and that what you're promising can live up to what you actually deliver. Because those reviews are structured. Those reviews will always turn up. We're consumers. We know that those Google reviews, those Yelp reviews come up. And we want to make sure when people find them, they represent what's also being sold on our website.
Or however people are finding us.
What we're gonna look at is how we're doing these things and how frequently we're actually assessing this. Because a lot of times, like many of our communications products, we make them. And then they go up, they go live, and they sit there and we don't really think about them again.
These need to be part of regular reviews. They need to be part of how you're telling that brand's narrative. So think about, you know, when did you audit these things? When did you audit all this boring content? The pricing, the cancellation page, the spec sheets, technical documentation, bios. And when you did it, if you ever did it, are you treating it the same?
As you view creative campaigns? Are you thinking about it the same way you do your elevator pitch, your introductions? Are you giving it that same amount of attention as you did all those bold things before it went live? Are you evaluating it after it goes live the same way you evaluate the bold stuff that you do? And if you haven't, and many of us don't because it's boring.
Who was really owning that content? Because that's what it is. It's content, just like your Instagram, just like the introductions you did here. And if no one's owning it, it will continue to be lost. People won't find your business. And then you will continue losing the deals without ever knowing that they existed.