The knowledge curse isn’t the only reason mature, complex B2B SaaS companies can benefit from external support. The more I work with messaging, the clearer it becomes that internal politics often override product, user, and market realities.

Not to blame anyone. Internal politics are a natural result of many people working together. But this dynamic can be dangerous to messaging and communication.

I’ll give you an example.

A few months ago, I audited the website messaging of a B2B SaaS company. During this process, I discovered they had positioned themselves in a category completely unrelated to what the product does. The category itself is very strong in the B2B SaaS market.

People know exactly what they’re looking for when searching for solutions under that category. The company’s product, though, had nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, their website messaging was a failed attempt to force the product truth to fit that category.

You can imagine how confusing the website messaging was.

One internal politics-driven decision (in this case related to positioning) may affect every single communication asset and messaging across teams and stages.

And although it might seem justified internally, when an outsider looks at it without any political context, they may see how the implementation of that decision leads to chaos. And how, subsequently, this chaos slows growth.

And that’s just one example among countless realities B2B SaaS companies grow into.

Teams are trapped by history.

• The product manager who pushed for the current taxonomy has long left. But no one wants to touch it because it’s “how things have always been.”
• A senior stakeholder is attached to a naming convention from 5 years ago, and now every new feature is awkwardly forced to fit it.
• An early sales deck coined a term that never quite made sense. But marketing keeps using it because it’s baked into dozens of campaigns and assets.
• Teams build layers of workarounds on top of unclear taxonomy, instead of fixing the root. Because fixing it would mean reopening years of decisions. And it might offend people …

An outsider is immune to these dynamics. A fractional lead who owns the messaging problem and fixes it won’t walk on eggshell.

They ask questions others stopped asking. They challenge decisions that were made under outdated assumptions. They’re not trying to protect legacy structures based on internal politics. There’s no emotional attachment.

They’re focused on revealing what’s true, what’s useful, and what’s holding the company back. They’re not entangled in team dynamics. Their only skin in the game is to fix the root cause of messaging and make it work across assets, stages, and teams.

And that’s what I do.