How do you make enterprise sound human?
I’ve spent a weird amount of my career trying to make boring things less boring.
Before Factorial, I worked for years in workplace safety, building and structuring training courses around OSHA requirements, onboarding, hazard communication and emergency procedures.
Very sexy stuff, I know.
The problem was that a lot of safety training existed because companies legally had to provide it. People completed the course, got the certificate and moved on. Whether they actually remembered what could keep them safe was another question.
So my work became about making that information easier to absorb: restructuring the courses, developing the learning experience on the website and turning dry orientation material into short animated videos people might actually remember.
That idea stayed with me.
A few years later, I joined Factorial.
Different industry. Strangely similar problem.
Factorial was growing up
Factorial had built a lot of its personality around making HR feel simpler, friendlier and less painful. The brand was colorful, direct and human.
Then Factorial started moving into larger companies, and the buying process became much more complicated.
HR might start the conversation, but then IT wanted integrations and security, Finance wanted a business case, Legal wanted precision around compliance, and Procurement had its own process.
Basically, the buying journey had acquired a cast.
The obvious response would have been to make Factorial sound more “enterprise”: more formal, more serious, maybe throw in transformation, efficiency and best-in-class somewhere.
But that would have solved the wrong problem.
How do we make Factorial credible enough for enterprise without making it sound like every other enterprise company?
The more we looked at real XL conversations, the clearer it became that enterprise credibility had surprisingly little to do with sounding important.
It had much more to do with being precise, knowing who needed what, and reducing risk before it appeared late in the process.
We made the buying committee visible.
The guide shows how the same HR technology decision is evaluated differently across HR, Finance, IT, Security, Legal, leadership, payroll, works councils and operations.
A tone-of-voice guide wasn’t enough
A normal brand guide might tell you to be human, clear and confident. Which sounds useful until five different teams need to decide what that actually means.
What does “credible” mean to a designer? What does “human” mean to an AE speaking with Finance? What does “consultative” look like in a LinkedIn DM?
So instead of treating the voice as a writing guide, I started thinking about it as an operating system. One voice translated into different decisions depending on who was using it.
The 4 pillars
1. Credible and evidence-led
No hype, no claims we couldn’t defend, and no pretending something was universally true when it depended on context.
Confidence is cute. Documentation is better.
The pack was designed to support early IT and Security validation with concrete controls, certifications and documentation instead of generic “your data is safe” claims.
2. Consultative and contextual
We stopped opening with Factorial. Which, for a company trying to sell Factorial, felt slightly counterintuitive.
Instead, the communication had to start with whatever headache the buyer was already dealing with: a compliance deadline, an audit, a multi-site workforce, an IT review. Once we’d proved we understood the mess, then we could talk about the product.
Turns out, people are much more interested in your solution after they’re convinced you understand their problem.
3. Human and peer-level
Factorial couldn’t lose its personality, but “human” meant something different in enterprise.
Less startup enthusiasm. More sounding like someone who had seen this before, knew what mattered, and wasn’t going to waste your time pretending everything was revolutionary.
Scale without anonymity.
The point wasn’t just to show a bigger office. It was to show that Factorial had grown without suddenly becoming a faceless enterprise machine.
4. Practical and action-oriented
Every interaction needed to move something forward.
Bring IT in before they become the plot twist. Give Finance something they can actually defend. And if the question gets technical, maybe don’t freestyle your way through it.
Sometimes the smartest next step was also realizing there wasn’t one.
One voice, different jobs
This was the part I cared about most.
The system couldn’t live in a Notion page that only copywriters understood.
And then there was Europe
XL covered Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Germany.
The core voice stayed the same, but the way trust was built didn’t always.
Based on the patterns we were seeing in call data, some markets leaned more relationship-first while others needed more proof upfront.
These were working hypotheses, not cultural laws.
Adjust the dial. Never adjust the voice.
What I took from it
At Reliance, I learned that information can technically exist, tick every legal box, and still be completely useless if nobody remembers it.
At Factorial, I learned the same thing about brand systems. You can write the most beautiful tone-of-voice guide in the world, but if everyone closes the Notion page and goes back to doing whatever they were doing before, congratulations, you made a very nice document.
The goal was never to make Factorial sound more corporate. Everyone and their grandma knows enterprise software has enough of that already.
It was to build a voice that could work across different teams, markets, stakeholders and levels of risk without losing the human part that made Factorial feel like Factorial.
Because defining a voice is the easy part.
Getting people to actually use it is where it becomes real.
