Small Biz: Plain talk makes sales
Fancy talk makes you sound lame
By Jeffrey Gitomer
How does your prospect perceive your words?
New? Engaging? Valuable? Exciting? Compelling? Or are they boring, time-worn clichés that have your prospect mentally yawning and turned off?
You may think your industry buzzwords, sales jargon, and catchy phrases make you look "hip," even smart. Wrong, paradigm breath. In fact, they put you in a deficit position. When you wax worn out words, your prospect is downsizing your order.
In her new book, The Voice of Authority, Dianna Booher covers 10 communication strategies every leader needs to know. These strategies are so transferable to salespeople it's scary.
Here's what Dianna has to say about the way you speak: "If a phrase starts to roll off your tongue, shut your mouth; consider it a cliché - probably a phrase so overused that the meaning has long since been lost."
Here's a list of bureaucratic buzzwords that muddy messages and mar your image as a clear communicator and straight shooter:
• No brainer (meaning if you don't see it as clearly as I do, you're off your rocker)
• Enhancement (an improvement too insignificant to charge for but worth touting; often confused with body parts)
• Value-added (anything you can't charge for because the client doesn't value it enough to pay for it)
• Incent (prodding people with money, freebies, coupons - whatever it takes to get them to do something they're not inclined to do on their own)
• Core competencies (as opposed to core incompetencies?)
• Initiatives (long, long ago, they were called goals and plans)
• Thought leaders (as opposed to those who lead the unthinking morons?)
• Optimization (the process of making things better and better - as in cooking, flying, making love, making stealth missiles, making movies, building skyscrapers, counting votes, applying makeup, charting sea turtles)
• Solution (solid dissolved in a liquid or a mathematical proof hidden inside all products and services now offered by all corporations around theworld)
• Alignment (identifying where the rubber doesn't meet the road in goals that are supposed to be running parallel to yours)
• Deliverables (paperboys and girls used to ride bikes and carry these)
• Rightsizing (Nordstrom does this free of charge if the clothes are pricey enough)
• Impactful (newly coined term meaning packed full of potential to be hard-hitting - in the mind, heart, pocketbook, gut, mouth)
• Robust (fat, wealthy, expensive, complex, healthy, meaningful, deep, feisty; can be applied to people, philosophy, technology, equipment,
training, strategy, food, religion, research, vegetation, medicine, light bulbs, laughter, beer)
• Branding (making livestock so it doesn't get lost or stolen; marking dead stock in inventory that hasn't sold in years with a new "look and feel" so that it finds its way to market again)
• Methodologies (in more primitive times, this was methods or the way you do something)
• Technologies (yet undiscovered wizardry from the netherworld)
• Bandwidth (refers to anything you want to limit, as in "that's outside our bandwidth")
• Seamless (meaning, I don't know where the heck my job ends and yours starts, so we can pass the buck if necessary)
• Platform (horizontal structure that supports all systems, people, brands, and philosophies)
And it's not just speaking. Stringing these terms together in paragraph after paragraph from document to document makes written communication as bland and meaningless as verbal communication.
Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Little Red Book of Selling and The Little Red Book of Sales Answers.
He can be reached at 704-333-1112 or salesman@gitomer.com.
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