by Gail Z. Martin
Do you make it hard for people to do business with you?
Are your prospects easily able to figure out what you do and how it would help them solve their problems?
In my experience, businesses often lose sales because prospects aren’t entirely sure what services the business provides and how those services can make a direct impact on the customer’s bottom line. If your customers don’t see immediately how they can see a big positive impact, they won’t buy.
One of the ways businesses often unintentionally turn off interested prospects is with industry jargon and buzzwords. Buzzwords are buzzkill. They make people’s eyes glaze over if they do know what the words mean, and they’re just blah-blah-blah to people who don’t know them. Not only that, but buzzwords have been so overused that they become meaningless.
Compare this “We help you prioritize management objectives to optimize your metrics with impactful outcomes” to this: “We help you create an action list to get big, measurable results.”
Which one makes you more willing to buy?
Don’t make your customers, your Facebook friends, your YouTube watchers have to look up what you say in the dictionary or skip over unfamiliar words. In other words…..don’t use jargon.
Now I know sometimes you’re not even aware when you start talking in buzz words. After all, everyone you work with probably uses the same secret language. Abbreviations, acronyms, industry-speak words… those are great when you’re talking to your colleagues, but they leave customers confused.
Confused customers don’t buy.
Not only that, but when people are confused, they’ve lost track of what you can do for them, what problem you solve, what benefit you provide. They don’t know what you do…so they walk away.
