Four years ago, my husband had major back surgery which left him with two rods and several screws in his back. Recently, one of the rods broke and we were talking to a surgeon about how to repair it. He kept talking about “belting and suspendering his spine.” 

I finally interrupted him and asked “What is belting and suspendering? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  He responded by saying, “I’m talking about repairing the rods and screws. That’s just the term we use.”

It led me to think how we all do that.

No matter what business we’re in, we all have industry jargon. And while it’s fine to speak that language with associates, it’s a bad idea to talk like that with clients.

We want to make things easy for our clients to understand. We don’t want to over complicate things or use confusing language. That’s because people are busy, and they want to get the information and move on. If you make them work too hard to understand what you’re saying they’ll move on to someone else.

By the way, this is not just true in conversations, but it also applies to your website, email marketing, blog posts, brochures, video, etc.