When you are in a role or have a job that uses words or terms that you didn’t know before going in, it’s a good idea not to try to explain your work using those terms.
Don’t be this guy:
It’s great that you’re up with the lingo and know how to use it, but to the average person, it probably isn’t going to make sense, or at the very least is going to make them work much harder than they should have to to understand.
In sales especially this astonishes me. So many sales reps making cold calls will use company-specific jargon that, while it is correct, confuses or bores the person you’re calling to an extreme level.
This is someone who already probably doesn’t think they want to talk to you. Throw in now that you’re explaining what your company does in the most complex way possible, and you’re all but guaranteed to get hung up on in the first 10 seconds.
If you were selling a pen, you wouldn’t say “this pen uses T27 midnight black ink with a density of .275. Manufactured in Chu Chang China in a Class A pen construction facility.” Wow. You’re really going to sell a lot of pens to people with that. That all may be true, but to your average consumer, they don’t care about all of that. At the end of the day, what’s in it for them/me or “WIIFM”?
They don’t want this pen because it was constructed in a good facility, they want this pen because it writes really well for a long time. That’s really pretty much all they care about. Sell them on that, and you’ll have a new customer
Don’t know your company well enough that you can explain it to an expert, know it so well that you can explain it to a 5-year-old. When the time comes to explain to the expert, believe me, you’ll have that too if you can explain to a toddler.