If your marketing feels like it isn't landing, the problem is rarely the technology, the team, or the budget. More often, it comes down to a gap between how your organisation talks about what it does and how your buyers actually make decisions.

In STEM sectors, that gap has a name. It's called commercial translation.

What is commercial translation in marketing?

Commercial translation is the process of taking deep technical expertise and reframing it in the language buyers, investors and partners respond to.

It doesn't mean dumbing things down. Technical buyers are sophisticated. They can handle complexity. The issue is relevance, not simplicity.

A technically accurate description of a product tells a prospect what it does. Commercial translation tells them why it matters to them, what problem it solves, and what it costs them to do nothing. That shift in framing is often the difference between interest and action.

Why do STEM businesses struggle with this?

STEM organisations are built by people with deep domain expertise. That's a genuine competitive advantage. But it also creates a structural challenge: the people who understand the technology best are rarely the people who have spent their careers translating it for commercial audiences.

Most marketing agencies don't help. They understand the marketing side but not the technology or the commercial realities of science, engineering and technology sectors. The result is messaging that's either too technical for decision-makers or too vague to be credible with technical buyers.

A few patterns come up consistently across STEM businesses:

• Messaging is built around capability rather than outcome. Prospects can see what a product does, but not why it matters to them specifically.

• Sales and marketing are pulling in different directions. Marketing generates awareness. Sales has entirely different conversations. Neither feeds the other.

• Differentiation is implied rather than stated. The business knows how it differs from competitors, but that difference never makes it clearly into the market.

• Communication is internally focused. The language reflects how the organisation thinks about itself, not how buyers frame their own problems.

None of these are signs of poor marketing. They're signs that commercial translation hasn't happened yet.

What does commercial translation look like in practice?

It starts with three questions.

1. Who is the ideal client, and what commercial pressure are they actually under? Not a broad sector or a job title, but a specific person facing a specific problem with real consequences attached to it.

2. How does what you do reduce that commercial pressure? Not in terms of features or methodology, but in terms of outcomes the buyer cares about.

3. Is that message consistent across sales, marketing and everything in between? Misalignment between sales and marketing is one of the most common reasons pipeline stalls. Research from Forrester suggests that 86% of B2B purchase processes break down somewhere along the way. Consistent commercial messaging reduces that friction.

When those three questions have clear answers, the rest of marketing becomes considerably easier to execute.

Why this matters more in STEM than in other sectors

In sectors where the buyer is also technically literate, vague claims don't work. Buyers can tell the difference between substance and noise.

But technical rigour alone doesn't close deals. A prospect who fully understands the technology still needs to justify the decision commercially. That justification needs to be built into how you communicate, not left to the sales call.

The STEM businesses that grow consistently tend to do both well. They're credible technically and compelling commercially. One without the other leaves gaps that are hard to close with tactics alone.

How to close the commercial translation gap

The fix rarely involves starting from scratch. Simpler messaging, better alignment between sales and marketing, clearer differentiation, more commercially focused communication: these are the things that move the needle. And the foundation for all of them is the same. Understand your ideal client's commercial reality well enough to speak to it directly.

The expertise is usually already there. It's the framing that needs work.

If your messaging isn't connecting the way it should, it's worth having a conversation with Su about where the gaps are.

Photo by ThisisEngineering on Unsplash