Episode 1066: Jargon Is A Hiding Place

TLDR: If your buyer doesn’t understand the words you’re using, they can’t buy from you.
Jargon feels good to use. It sounds clever, sounds confident, sounds like you know your industry inside out.
That’s the problem…

Jargon Is Often A Hiding Place

A lot of the time, jargon isn’t about being precise. It’s about feeling safe.

If you’re not fully confident in what you’re saying, complicated language gives you something to hide behind. It sounds impressive, so it feels like it’s doing the job, even when it isn’t.

But your buyer doesn’t experience it that way. They just hear words they don’t understand, and they quietly switch off. They won’t usually tell you they’re lost. They’ll just stop engaging, stop asking questions, and stop moving toward a decision.

Why This Costs You The Sale

Buyers can’t buy something they don’t understand. It sounds obvious, but it’s one of the most common ways deals quietly die.

Every piece of unexplained jargon is a small gap in understanding. One gap, your buyer might push through. Several gaps, and they start to disengage without ever telling you why. You lose the sale in the explanation, long before you get anywhere near a negotiation.

There’s also a confidence problem hiding underneath this. Using jargon to sound clever can actually make you look less trustworthy, not more. Buyers trust people who make things easy to understand. They’re wary of people who make things sound more complicated than they need to be.

The Simple Fix

You don’t have to remove jargon completely. Some industries need it, and some terms genuinely don’t have a simpler alternative.

The fix is one habit: say the term, then explain what it means. “It’s a widget, and what that means is…” Every acronym, every technical phrase, every piece of industry language gets followed by a plain explanation.

It might feel unnecessary, like you’re pointing out the obvious. Most of the time, your buyer needs exactly that. Explaining the obvious isn’t patronising. It’s what turns a feature into something your buyer can actually picture and want.

What This Means For Your Pitch

Look at the last pitch, email or call you gave. How much of it would make sense to someone completely outside your industry?

If the honest answer is not much, you’re probably relying on jargon to do work that plain explanation should be doing instead. The businesses that convert well aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated language. They’re the ones a buyer can understand in one pass, without having to ask what anything means.

Have you ever nodded along in a meeting when someone used a term you didn’t actually understand?

Take Action

Pick one piece of jargon or an acronym you use regularly with buyers. Write down, in plain language, exactly what it means and why it matters to them.
Use that explanation the next time it comes up in a real conversation.