I admit it. I'm a pedant.
I care about what words mean.
Partly because I'm annoying like that, but mainly because I've seen a lack of shared meaning tear exec boards apart and stop sales teams from performing.
When we talk, our ability to understand each other depends on a shared language. Specific words carry a lot of meaning, allowing us to communicate complicated ideas quickly.
You notice this most when you are speaking across languages. Two people, both competent, both trying, working through a language only one of them grew up with.
Neither person is stupid. Neither is being difficult. But the conversation stop-starts because both sides are doing extra translation. Meaning gets lost, misunderstandings creep in and everything slows down while you work out what the other person thought you meant.
I was working with a client this week. Their directors lead highly competent salespeople, and the organisation has been successful because smart, autonomous people have known what to do.
But now they're trying to help the next generation of sellers reach the same level, and the cracks are showing.
The experienced people carry years of scar tissue in their heads. They can look at a deal, sense what's missing and make a decent judgement.
The less experienced sellers don't have that yet.
The team used all the normal enterprise sales language...
Compelling event.
Champion.
Business case.
Procurement.
...but the understanding behind these words was very different from person to person.
A sales leader would ask whether an opportunity had a compelling event. The salesperson would say yes, meaning that there was a general sense of urgency in the prospect.
Everyone would move on feeling slightly more confident about the deal.
But ask what makes an event genuinely compelling and the answer starts to wobble.
So I stepped in and defined it. A compelling event needs a milestone, a date, and a consequence for the buyer if that date is missed.
We talked it through for five minutes, and by the end the salesperson had a completely different understanding of the weight of a term they had used casually moments earlier.
Sales organisations get incredibly hung up on which methodology they follow. The bigger gap is usually the vocabulary underneath it.
In six and seven-figure sales, we're trying to describe complicated terrain. Multiple stakeholders, competing priorities, internal politics, financial scrutiny and an auditable route to approval.
Blunt language produces blunt thinking.
Sharper language gives less experienced sellers access to some of the judgement that currently lives only in the heads of your best people.
So try this before your next pipeline review.
Pick four terms your team uses every week. Here are four to start with.
Compelling event.
Champion.
Business case.
Procurement governance.
Ask three people to define each one, separately. Don't give them clues. Just listen.
If you get three different definitions, you have a problem.
Your team may be following the same methodology, but they are still selling from different dictionaries.