MoneyWatch

How Biz Blab Can Scuttle a Deal

By Geoffrey James

Updated on: September 23, 2008 / 10:12 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

A News Report on Biz Blab

In the post "Vote: The World's Worst Biz-Blab", I ran a poll to identify the world's worst business buzzword. You can check out the post to see the winners, but I wanted you all to know that there's a reason that I'm posting about biz-blab in a sales-oriented blog.

It's because biz blab can create major problem for sales teams. Here's why:

Biz Blab Demotivates the Sales Team. While it's possible to tune out some of the biz blab, if it's of the wrong kind or sets the wrong tone, it can cause morale problems. For example, my mother, who was in wholesale-to-retail at Bristol Myers, had a sales manager who was enamored with military-style biz-blab. (e.g "nuke the competition.") One Monday, he ended his weekly pep talk with: "Let's rape and pillage, and leave no wounded!" Now, my mother found the statement so offensive that she decided to leave the company -- and the company lost a very talented sales rep. "It wasn't so much that he used that kind of language as much that the language showed what a complete idiot he was," she later told me.
Biz Blab Confuses the Dimwitted. Marketing biz blab, in particular, tends to generates unproductive behavior. For example, at one company where I worked, every marketing presentation was mandated to be "customer-focused." I sat in on one presentation chockablock with the term "customers", but what was meant by "customers" were the bureaucrats who funded his group. Another time, an exec told me her marketing campaign was going to have a "worldwide focus." She didn't realize that the concepts of "worldwide" and "focus" were mutually exclusive. The kind of fuzzy thinking that emerges from biz-blab keeps marketing teams from focusing on what they're supposed to be doing: generating leads and reducing sales costs.
Biz Blab Makes Your Team Sound Stupid. The wrong biz blab at the wrong time can easily screw up a major business deal. About fifteen years ago, I was part of the team trying to negotiate a friendly acquisition of Lotus by the erstwhile minicomputer vendor Digital. (Lotus was shortly after bought by IBM). To move the deal forward, we set up a meeting between a DEC exec named Bud Enright and a couple of Lotus execs. (Bud had already earned the nickname "Bud Light" inside DEC, so maybe this wasn't the swiftest move.) Bud talked fluent biz blab during the meeting. I could actually see the Lotus execs exchanging glances and rolling their eyes. The acquisition team was forced to do triage, delaying first steps long enough that political changes at DEC scuttled the deal.

In short, biz blab represents a challenge to sales pros. Not only should they avoid it themselves, but they need to act as watchdogs to ensure that it doesn't slip into customer meetings or end up inside anything (like marketing materials) that customers might end up reading.

Not that I think biz blab will ever go away. It will continue to fester inside the corporate world, simply because it's part of human nature, a fact pointed out way back in 1841, in Charles Mackay's classic work, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds.

Anyway, enjoy the video. It nice to know that the British are just as dopey as we Americans when it comes this stuff.