To Jargon or not to Jargon

Earlier today, I sent an article to my mom by mistake. The article was about B2B SaaS pricing strategies. A while later I get a response from her: 'My dear, SaaS bhi kabhi bahu thi.' While I burst out laughing at her message, it also made me reflect how we as entrepreneurs, marketers & sales leaders, often get tangled in jargons so much so that we build our own little bubble full of jargon-air. While SaaS is a word that almost every person in business knows, that might not be true for a lot of other jargons thrown around today. I admit I end up using jargons in so many scenarios! Hence it made me reflect on why jargons are so popular, and how to use them in a balanced manner:

1. They help communicate faster: If you are someone working in the digital marketing space, and would like to talk to a colleague on what you handle in your current company, there are two ways you will typically respond:

• I handle Search Engine Marketing for my company and help generate customer leads
• Google, LinkedIn and other such platform companies enable B2B businesses to reach out to customers through paid promotions, when they are searching for topics that are aligned to what the business offers. I work to implement a plan to get through to the right prospects and help bring them to our website for a connect with our company.

While the second option does give a comprehensive understanding of what you do at work and how, that amount of detailing might have been unnecessary if you were talking to a friend who is also in marketing. Jargons, therefore, help you communicate to people in similar business, function or industry, in a succinct manner and leave you with enough time to exchange creative, unstructured ideas.

2. They help you feel 'belonged' : Imagine you walk into a product manager interview, and your interviewer wants to know more about how you managed the CAC of your product. It would take tremendous effort for you to clarify if they meant a 'Certified Addiction Counselor'. Jokes aside, while it is perfectly natural to clarify terminologies when we don't understand them, it is but natural human tendency to use and understand words that make you feel part of a tribe (in this case, the 'product management' tribe). Remember how as a teenager we had our own lingo to communicate with our gang of friends - this is a different flavor of the same feeling. It makes you (and the person you are communicating with) feel empowered in a way.

3. They help consolidate learnings: The fact that I was reading a SaaS pricing strategy article is testimony to this point. There are so many different businesses in so many different industries, but SaaS is the unified umbrella that helps consolidate the learning across these businesses. This is true even for specific technical terminologies. Imagine how difficult it would have been to search for terms on Google, and learn about them from experts across the world - if these common jargons didn't exist and were not wildly popular within the fraternity.

So jargons are great in many ways - but when are they too much? Where is that thin line? Here is how I work towards having a balanced use of jargons while pitching, and in customer conversations:

1. Knowing your audience: As a market-facing person, I would have had at least a few hundred first-meetings with potential customers, partners or stakeholders. Over a period of time, I have learnt to first spent some time analyzing the audience, and reflecting on the right amount of usage of technical jargons to help my pitch. Too much and you risk losing the customer in the conversation, too little and you risk the customer feeling she or he is being fed 'dumbed-down' information. Let me give you an example. For one of our products (at Myelin Foundry), Fovea Stream, we use a metric called VMAF (Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion- created by Netflix) to measure the visual quality. I have had conversations with customers who have absolutely no clue what VMAF is, and therefore need to be explained the context & utility of the metric (instead of using the jargon). On the other hand, there are customers who have deep expertise in implementing the metric in their internal set-up, and would want me to come straight to the point on how we are using VMAF to showcase our value proposition. How do I tackle this variability? By informing the customer upfront that we use this particular metric, and I can explain more about it, but happy to skip it if the customer is familiar with the term. A neutral, polite clarification generally helps figure out when to just rely on the jargon, and when to focus on the meaning & use.
2. Keeping the focus on story-telling: Jargon, or no jargon, the focus of any pitch, any conversation ALWAYS has to be the story. If there is anything more powerful than the belongingness created by jargons or lingos, it is the connect that people feel to a story. After-all, why are we using VMAF in the first place? Why did we even start looking at visual quality & try to improve? What was the problem in the first place? What had happened till now that couldn't solve it? What people take home is the story. Our brain is just wired that way. The story, ofcourse has to include how they - the customer, the partner, or the investor, fit into the picture. And the story has to be truthful - since fables can be ripped apart with one simple follow up question. Coming back to the context of jargons, where they are applicable to the story - they should be used. For example, a lot of our customers in Media & Entertainment, connect to the challenges of scaling to the next 500Mn users - or the 'Bharat' users in Tier 3 and rural (vs the 'India' users in Tier 1 and Tier 2). Therefore, using that term, sometimes makes the pitch more powerful in a conversation with a prospect. Therefore, when it helps make that connect to the story, and the customer, do go ahead and use those terms that connect. Just be careful about not over-doing it.

I would love to hear the thoughts from leaders on how they solve this conundrum of too many or too few technical words in a pitch, external conversation. Do drop in your comments on the same.