How to Make Every Line of Your Messaging Pass the “So What?” Test

In a capital environment defined by noise, sameness, and shrinking attention spans, the fastest way to lose a buyer, investor, or strategic partner is to make them work to understand why you matter. The “So What?” Test is a simple question, but for a B Corporation, Seed, or Series A CEO it is increasingly a survival filter for every claim, slide, and sentence that leaves the company. McKinsey’s B2B research shows that decision makers now use more than ten channels along their buying journey, and more than half will abandon a purchase if the experience is poor, which includes unclear or generic messaging. In this context, Rich Laster’s twenty‑seven years in B2B sales is not a biography detail but an operating system for how to make every word earn its place.

His experience across cycles, sectors, and deal sizes reveals a consistent pattern: companies rarely lose interest because the product is weak; they lose it because the narrative never clears the threshold of “Why should this matter to me, right now, versus the other twelve priorities on my desk?” The “So What?” Test is the discipline that forces an answer before the market asks the question.

The Cost of Failing the “So What?” Test

Information overload is not a metaphor for your buyers but their daily operating environment. Columbia Business School faculty describes information overload as a structural risk that impairs decisions and erodes the perceived value of even strong offerings when communication is not customized and focused. When a CEO’s message is vague or feature‑heavy, it does not simply underperform; it becomes one more cognitive burden that sophisticated buyers will discard.

McKinsey’s global B2B Pulse data reinforces this point. B2B buyers now expect a personalized, context‑aware experience across channels, and more than half of them report that they will walk away or switch suppliers if that experience falls short. Messaging that fails the “So What?” Test is, almost by definition, an experience that falls short. It demands effort from the buyer, instead of creating clarity. In early-stage ventures where brand equity and track record are still thin, this lost clarity directly translates into longer sales cycles, lower conversion, and reduced leverage with investors.

Why This Agitates Founders and CEOs

For B Corp and venture‑backed CEOs, this communication failure creates a specific kind of frustration. Internally, the team sees the product road map, the impact story, the technical depth. Externally, buyers and investors respond with guarded interest, deferrals, or non‑committal praise. The gap between internal conviction and external traction feels personal. It often triggers unproductive responses like more features added, more slides in the deck, more jargon, more campaigns.

Behavioral research on framing from Wharton highlights how decision makers respond far more strongly to messages that connect directly to outcomes they value, framed in terms they already use, rather than to abstract claims about superiority. When messaging is not framed in this way, founders experience a repeating loop: pitch, polite feedback, no decision. Over time, this erodes confidence, masks product‑market issues, and consumes leadership bandwidth that should be invested in building the business, not explaining it.

Defining the “So What?” Test in Practice

The “So What?” Test is a simple principle: after any statement about the business, the intended audience should be able to immediately answer, in their own language, “So what?” in a way that connects to a material outcome. If they cannot, the message fails the test. While the phrase appears in multiple business communication contexts, its real power is in how rigorously a leadership team is willing to operationalize it.

Passing the test requires more than translating features into benefits. Harvard Business Review’s work on the “elements of value” shows that customers and stakeholders assess offerings on a stack of functional, emotional, life‑changing, and social impact values. A statement passes the “So What?” Test only when it ties directly into one or more of those elements for a specific audience segment. For a B Corp CEO, this might mean articulating how a product improves unit economics while simultaneously advancing a measurable impact outcome that matters to institutional investors.

The GrowExpand “So What?” Ladder: A Practical Framework

To turn the principle into an operating tool, Laster uses what can be called the “So What?” Ladder: a four‑step process that any leadership team can apply to product, fundraising, and impact messaging.

Step 1: State the Fact
This is the raw, unfiltered claim. For example: “Our platform automates compliance reporting for mid‑market manufacturers.” Facts are necessary, but they are not yet ‘value.’

Step 2: Translate to Direct Outcome
Ask “So what?” once and answer in concrete, measurable terms: “So our clients cut reporting time by 60 percent, reducing audit risk.” This begins to connect the feature to an operational outcome.

Step 3: Connect to Strategic Stakes
Ask “So what?” again, now from the perspective of the buyer, investor, or stakeholder: “So COOs reallocate scarce operations staff to expansion projects, and CFOs can sign off on audits with less risk to the next funding round.” This is the level where Wharton’s customer‑centric strategy research shows messages begin to influence resource allocation decisions, because they speak directly to the trade‑offs leaders face.

Step 4: Anchor in Context and Timing
Ask “So what?” a third time, focused on why this matters right now: “So in a labor‑constrained environment, the company can expand into two new regions without adding headcount, while staying aligned with ESG reporting requirements.” This step aligns with Columbia’s emphasis on customized communication that reduces overload by filtering for what is situationally relevant.

Only when a message reaches Step 4 does it reliably pass the “So What?” Test for sophisticated buyers and investors. Anything lower on the ladder is vulnerable to being ignored, misinterpreted, or copied by competitors.

A Message Discipline for B Corps and Impact Narratives

B Corporations face a distinct communication challenge: they must articulate both financial and social value without sounding missionary, naïve, or diffuse. HBR’s work on customer value suggests that social impact is a real, monetizable value element, but only when it is clearly linked to stakeholders’ priorities such as risk mitigation, brand equity, or talent retention. An impact statement that cannot clear “So what?” in those terms will be treated as nice‑to‑have, not investable.

For B Corp CEOs, applying the “So What?” Ladder means translating impact metrics into business levers. “We reduced waste by 30 percent” becomes “our clients reduce input costs, improve margin resilience, and meet regulatory expectations, which in turn supports valuation multiples in line with ESG‑focused comps.” This is neither spin nor greenwashing; it is disciplined articulation of how impact shows up in cash flow and risk profiles.

Operationalizing the Test: A Simple Scoring System

To embed the “So What?” Test into daily operations, Laster advocates a lightweight scoring system that any executive team can apply in under thirty minutes:

1. Audience clarity score (0–3).
   • 0: No clear audience segment is named.
   • 1: Audience is named, but not their specific role or stakes.
   • 2: Role is named and stakes implied.
   • 3: Role and stakes explicitly articulated in the message.
2. Outcome specificity score (0–3).
   • 0: Feature statement only.
   • 1: Vague benefit (“saves time,” “improves collaboration”).
   • 2: Quantified or clearly described operational outcome.
   • 3: Outcome tied to a financial or strategic metric (margin, churn, valuation, runway).
3. Timing and context score (0–3).
   • 0: Message could have been written five years ago.
   • 1: References current trends without tying to the audience.
   • 2: Ties trend to the audience’s environment.
   • 3: Makes a clear, time‑sensitive case for action that aligns with current constraints or opportunities.
4. Differentiation score (0–3).
   • 0: Any competitor could say this.
   • 1: Language is generic, with one or two specifics.
   • 2: Includes a concrete mechanism or asset others lack.
   • 3: Makes a distinct, credible claim that would be risky for a competitor to copy.

A message that scores under 8 out of 12 should be treated as failing the “So What?” Test and revised before it is deployed in decks, sites, or outbound campaigns. This type of rubric aligns with evidence from Columbia’s work on using data to customize communications to reduce overload and guide better decisions.

Where Founders Get This Wrong

Founders and CEOs commonly fall into three traps that keep their messaging from passing the test, even when the product is real and the traction is emerging.

First, they confuse internal language with external clarity. Product and engineering teams accumulate a dense vocabulary of features, architecture, and road map items. Wharton research on mediums and message framing indicates that the channel and context of communication change how the same words are perceived; internal shorthand seldom lands with external decision makers in the way leaders expect.

Second, they assume that volume will compensate for vagueness. More slides, more proof points, more case studies. In reality, as Columbia’s work on customization highlights, unfiltered volume accelerates overload and weakens the perceived signal. Decision makers who feel flooded will default to familiar vendors or defer decisions, both of which hurt young companies disproportionately.

Third, they underinvest in message testing with real buyers. Laster’s field experience shows that teams are often more diligent in A/B testing pricing pages than in A/B testing core narratives in live conversations. The result is a message architecture built on internal consensus instead of external evidence.

A Practical Cadence for CEOs and Boards

For the “So What?” Test to become a strategic asset rather than a one‑time exercise, it needs a clear operating rhythm at the leadership level. A practical cadence might include:

• Quarterly narrative review. The CEO and leadership team audit the top ten externally visible messages (homepage hero, product one‑liners, fundraise narrative, impact statement, top outbound sequence) using the scoring system above. Anything below threshold is rewritten.
• Pipeline and investor feedback loop. Sales and investor relations teams systematically capture the “first objection” or “first confusion” from buyers and investors each quarter. Repeated patterns trigger revisions to the narrative at the ladder’s Step 3 and Step 4, not just more enablement.
• Board‑level oversight. Boards and lead investors can add the “So What?” Test to their standard questions: “If a buyer from your ICP skimmed this in thirty seconds, would they know why this matters more than their other four strategic initiatives?” This elevates messaging from marketing tactic to board‑governed asset, aligned with Wharton’s view of customer centricity as a driver of firm valuation.

For CEOs seeking a more structured outside view on how well their current narrative supports scalability, an efficient way to begin is with a focused revenue scalability assessment, such as the diagnostic offered at GrowExpand.com, which evaluates how clearly messaging aligns with the company’s real growth levers.

Conclusion: Making “So What?” Your Default Filter

The venture environment is not short of capital, technology, or ideas. It is short of time and trust. The “So What?” Test, rigorously applied, is a practical tool for converting product truth and impact ambition into concise, high‑signal messages that earn both. Grounded in behavioral research and two decades of field experience, Laster’s framework gives B Corp, Seed, and Series A CEOs a repeatable way to ensure that every line of messaging answers the only question that matters in a noisy market: why this, why now, for this specific decision maker.

In a world where B2B decision makers will abandon a purchase, or an investment conversation, when the experience feels generic or burdensome, message discipline is not a cosmetic exercise; it is core to strategy. CEOs who institutionalize the “So What?” Test across product, sales, and capital raising will not simply sound clearer. They will make better choices about what to build, whom to target, and how to allocate scarce time and resources in pursuit of durable, scalable growth.

---

Footnotes

1. McKinsey & Company, “These eight charts show how COVID‑19 has changed B2B sales forever” and “McKinsey & Company’s ninth global B2B Pulse survey,” accessed 2025.europeanbusinessmagazine+1​
2. Columbia Business School, Brand and Product Management research area overview and related work on customized communications and information overload, accessed 2025.business.columbia​
3. Peter Fader and Sarah Toms, “The Customer Centricity Playbook,” Wharton Executive Education excerpt, 2019, on customer‑centric strategy and resource allocation.executiveeducation.wharton.upenn​
4. Discussion of the “So What?” Test as a method for assessing the relevance of information in business communication, various practitioner sources, accessed 2025.
5. Eric Almquist, John Senior, and Nicolas Bloch, “The Elements of Value,” Harvard Business Review, 2016, and subsequent discussions of functional, emotional, life‑changing, and social impact value categories.
6. Jonah Berger and co‑authors, “How communication mediums shape the message,” Wharton School research on communication mediums and message framing, accessed 2025.faculty.wharton.upenn​
7. Revenue scalability and messaging diagnostics as described in publicly available materials for GrowExpand.com’s assessments, accessed 2025.
8. https://europeanbusinessmagazine.com/business/mckinsey-companys-ninth-global-b2b-pulse-survey/
9. https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/Marketing%20and%20Sales/Our%20Insights/These%20eight%20charts%20show%20how%20COVID%2019%20has%20changed%20B2B%20sales%20forever/These-eight-charts-show-how-COVID-19-has-changed-B2B-sales-forever.pdf
10. https://business.columbia.edu/faculty/areas-of-expertise/brand-product-mgmt?page=17
11. https://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Customer-Centricity-Playbook-Excerpt-2019.pdf
12. https://faculty.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Mediums.pdf
13. https://business.columbia.edu/faculty/research/automating-b2b-salesperson-pricing-decisions-human-machine-hybrid-approach