Lead or lean? The corporate language that divides marketing and sales

Are you sure the language you use means the same thing to your customers, and to the teams that make up your company?

Say lead in a marketing meeting, and everyone pictures a contact ready to buy.

Say it on the factory floor, and someone hears lean: the method that cuts waste from processes.

One letter apart. Two worlds that never meet.

The trouble is that nobody notices the gap. Each team leaves the meeting convinced it has been understood, and finds out otherwise only when the results come in.

The narrow lexicon of the group

Every working group develops its own jargon: acronyms, technical terms and buzzwords that shorten the concepts it handles every day. So does every stakeholder (the person or function with an interest at stake in a project).

That is fine. Inside the group, jargon works perfectly. It shortens sentences and makes people feel part of something.

The catch is that one group’s lexicon rarely matches another’s. Even a word everybody uses, such as ROI (return on investment), changes meaning from one desk to the next. The glossary entry gives a clear example:

The finance director of a company that manufactures mechanical components receives a request from marketing to renew the trade fair budget. Finance asks three questions in order. What does it cost: stand, travel and sales staff hours. What did it produce: the contacts collected at the stand, and how many became orders. What happens if we cut it: would those customers have ordered anyway through the sales agents?

Marketing reads ROI as contacts generated. Sales reads it as orders closed. Finance reads it as what would be lost without the spend. Same acronym, three different questions.

The problem starts right here. Because my team understands itself, we assume the other departments share our words. It is a bias (a systematic distortion of judgement) of the internal community: we mistake the familiarity of our own group for a language common to the whole company.

“Sales doesn’t get us”

You hear this sentence often, and it carries the wrong diagnosis.

Look closer, and it turns out that sales has not been given the tools to understand. And sales almost never says so. Who would admit in a meeting to not knowing an acronym that everyone else uses with confidence?

So the misunderstanding stays hidden. Marketing hands over contacts it considers “qualified”. Sales calls them back with different criteria. The argument about who got it wrong begins only when the quarter’s figures are already written.

The glossary entry on marketing and sales alignment was born from exactly this fracture.

The error, then, lies with the speaker. It is up to us to be understood, not just to explain ourselves. Explaining means repeating our own words. Being understood means choosing the words the other person already has.

What the research says

This mechanism has a name. In 1989 Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber called it the curse of knowledge: once you know something, you can no longer imagine how it looks to someone who does not.

In their experiments, published in the Journal of Political Economy, the better-informed participants could not set aside what they knew. Not even when doing so would have given them an advantage.

The most cited experiment on the subject came a year later. In her 1990 doctoral thesis at Stanford, Elizabeth Newton split participants into two roles. One group tapped out the rhythm of a famous song with their knuckles. The other had to name the song.

As Chip and Dan Heath report in Made to Stick (2007), the listeners recognised 3 songs out of 120, that is 2.5%. The tappers had predicted 50%.

The reason is simple. The tapper hears the melody in their head. The listener hears only knocks on a table.

Jargon has the same effect, and research has measured it even when definitions are provided:

• Hillary Shulman and colleagues (2020), in an experiment with 650 participants published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, found that technical terms reduce processing fluency (how easy a text feels to understand) even when the definition sits right next to them. Readers feel excluded and report less interest in the subject.
• Daniel Oppenheimer (2006), in Applied Cognitive Psychology, showed in five experiments that people who use needlessly complicated words are judged less intelligent than those who write simply. The work received an Ig Nobel (the satirical prize for research that first makes people laugh, then makes them think).
• John Sweller (1988), in Cognitive Science, laid the foundations of cognitive load theory: working memory can hold only a limited amount of new information at once. Every word that has to be decoded takes up part of that limit, leaving less room for the content.

Shulman’s result is the most uncomfortable. A glossary at the end of a document is not enough. The definition has to arrive at the exact moment it is needed, worded so that it reads without effort.

What it costs

Hard data on the cost of poor communication are scarce. Most figures come from commercial surveys, and should be read as such.

The most cited is Grammarly’s State of Business Communication, run with The Harris Poll in January 2022 among business leaders and knowledge workers in the United States. Its key estimates:

• teams lose 7.47 hours a week to ineffective communication, according to business leaders;
• US businesses lose up to 1.2 trillion dollars a year as a result.

These numbers come from a company that sells a writing tool, so they are estimates, not accounting. Still, they point in the same direction as the laboratory experiments above.

Why it matters more now

Work increasingly cuts across departments, and artificial intelligence will push this even further.

A generative AI tool (artificial intelligence that produces text, images or analysis from a written request) hands sales the analysis that used to belong to marketing. It hands marketing the data that used to belong to finance.

As a result, the words of one department land every day on the desk of another. Often the person receiving them has never been exposed to that jargon.

For this reason, a shared vocabulary stops being a good habit and becomes infrastructure.

I often explain my work with the image of an aqueduct. Every misunderstood word is a leaking joint: the water still arrives, but less than what set off, and nobody sees where it goes.

The revenue lexicon: the new resource that solves the problem

This is where The revenue lexicon comes from: the public glossary of my website, which today counts 277 entries. I designed it on the findings above, starting from one principle. A definition has to arrive when it is needed, and has to read without effort.

1. A short definition at the top, readable in a few seconds.
2. An in-depth definition and an applied example, set inside a company.
3. Terms in blog articles linked to their entry, so readers find the explanation exactly where they stumble.
4. Search for any term from a box at the top of the page.
5. Related entries and further-reading articles, to explore a concept beyond its definition.
6. A precise scope: artificial intelligence and marketing applied to business and productivity.

The ROI entry shows how this works. An acronym that sounds obvious in a meeting becomes a three-part question that marketing, sales and finance can ask in the same words.

Simplifying does not mean impoverishing.

It means doing the work on behalf of the listener. That is the hardest work of all, because nothing is harder than making something easy.

It is also a courtesy towards a customer or a colleague who may have a gap in their memory at that moment, and who deserves not to have to confess it.

If you mean lead, make sure nobody hears lean.