Posts Tagged ‘technical terminology’

The words you choose to communicate your message matter. You need to pick the right words for your intended audience. You may have heard that you need to dumb down your language for a universal audience. Well maybe, but that is not what I am talking about here. It doesn’t matter if you speak like a Harvard professor or a first-grader, if you use words that your intended audience doesn’t relate to, you’re sunk.

Don’t Cuss at Church

Imagine you have a chance to give your message in front of a church audience. You go ahead and get up there and give your normal speech, which just happens to be laced with expletives and graphic imagery. How well do you think you will get your message across? Not very.

Adapt to Your Audience

You need to adapt what you say to your audience. In the case of your business, your audience is your ideal customer. Lets say that you sell technological solutions to small businesses. There is a pretty good chance that this set of customers, small business owners, is not all that well-versed in techno-speak. If you try to speak to them in your own language, the one you use when conversing with fellow geeks, you simply won’t make any sense to them. You need to change your words, use stories and examples, and perhaps talk real slow.

Its Your Fault

If you ever find yourself loosing patience with a customer for not keeping up or not understanding what you are saying, take a deep breath and consider that it may be you who is at fault. If you don’t take the time to change your words so that the customer can better understand you, then you should not expect them to be able to keep up.

Useless Information

There is a pervasive problem of businesses using their own key words and jargon in their marketing and sales pitches. Here’s a classic example, and forgive me if I get the technical terminology wrong. If you are selling a computer, you are likely to talk about the memory in technical terms. You might say that a computer has 3 gigs of memory. In the sales pitch, this will just roll off your tongue and you will think nothing of it. You know what it means. Its part of your every day speech. However, your customer doesn’t have a clue what it means. When you say it and move on, a customer who doesn’t understand is forced to file it the drawer in their mind which is labeled “useless information.”

If you recognize that what you are saying isn’t understandable to your customer, you can change the way you say it. Instead of talking about gigs, you can tell the family-man looking to buy a computer how many pictures and videos he could store on it. Likewise, you could tell the business-woman how many documents and Power Points she could store. Change your words so that they make sense to customers.

Learn to Relate

You want to be able to relate to your customers. You can be the most affable person in the world, but if you use words that don’t make sense, you will never achieve this. Instead, get to know your ideal customer and learn how they talk, what they think about on a daily basis, and what they are likely to understand.

I read a great article the other day called I Don’t Talk to Clients About Social Media Anymore, by Edward Boches. In this article, Edward talks about how people don’t relate to the terms that we relate to. Instead of talking about Twitter, social networking, and blogging, all terms that can scare away the uninitiated, he suggests talking about things that businesses already understand and then relating them to social media.

Make Them Comfortable

That is a great way to still get your point across. Just change your terminology and find ways to relate what you are saying with what your customers already know. People don’t tread far from their comfort zone. Your job as a small business is to find a way to make them comfortable buying from you. Using the right words can make all of the difference.

photo credit: dno1967

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com