Over the past few months, my consulting business has started to move in a new and interesting direction.

Many of the start-ups that approach me are looking for help with messaging to better articulate who they are and why potential customers would be interested in their products or services. It may seem like a straightforward proposition but, in reality, being able to clearly tell the world why they should care is a major challenge.

The biggest issue is a growing number of consumers are time-strapped and, at the same time, multi-tasking. And their attention spans are, at best, minimal. It means that if a company fails to capture their attention right away, you can kiss that potential customer goodbye. It’s not that your product or service isn’t interesting or worth a look; it’s more that we live in a world of instant-gratification and give it to me now.

This means that messaging quickly needs to resonate, captivate and engage. The mission statement, value proposition and feature benefits need to be crystal clear and basically grab people by their collars. There’s no time to be cute, subtle or a tease. Your messaging must make people immediately say “Yes, I get it.” It can’t make consumers do any work to figure things out because it will only encourage them to quickly move on.

The question is: if messaging is so important, why do so many companies struggle with it?

The answers are various and far from simple. In some cases, bad messaging has a lot to do with the skill-sets of people developing a product or service. They’re really good at building things but not good at telling other people what these things do and their benefits. It’s not a bad thing but the reality some people don’t have good marketing and communication skills, particularly when they have to do it in such a short period of time.

Another pitfall for many companies is they’re so close to the action, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get a fresh perspective on what they do and why anyone would care. When you spend so much time focused on a particular product or service, it’s hard not to get locked in about what it does. This is where a third-party perspective can be invaluable to shed new light or ideas that may be entirely different than what a company has been thinking.

A big part of this problem is companies are focused on talking about what their products or service do, the features and the benefits. Instead, they should be focused on how their products or services meet the needs of existing and potential customers. There may be a subtle difference in these two approaches but they can make make or break a company.

The first approach is “me, me, me”, while the second approach is “you, you, you”. Look at how many companies talk about how “We make this product…” or “Our technology is best of class…”, rather than “You can use our products to be more efficient” or “You need to be reduce costs…..”.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for companies is acknowledging they need help to improve or change their messaging. It can be difficult to admit that what they’ve been telling the world may be working or, for that matter, an accurate depiction of who they are and what they do.

Any company willing to take the next step by seeking outside help needs to be flexible and open to change. They need to embrace the possibility that their messaging may be completely overhauled or taken in a different direction. It’s the only way that messaging can improve or evolve, which, at the end of the day, can make a big difference.