Regardless of your means of communicating (whether face-to-face, in a blog or email, or on a podcast) you will receive one or more of the following reactions from your audience:

1. They will pretend they know what you mean so that they don’t appear stupid, but you will have lost them as a customer. After all, if they don’t understand what they are paying for, why would they give you money or listen to your recommendations?
2. They will stop listening to you, reading your blog, or subscribing to your podcast. They will delete your emails unread or partially read, and eventually unsubscribe, because they feel more confused than enriched by what you’ve said. You have lost any future chance of communicating with them and turning them into a customer.
   
3. They will never recommend you to their friends and acquaintances…or worse, will dissuade others in having dealings with you

But doesn’t using the right lingo (language) establish you as an expert in prospects’ eyes?

Yes, you will win over some people by showing yourself to be the expert and knowing all the right buzz words, but without creating clarity for them it’s unlikely to last for long.

Whatever your business, the best way to convert prospects to customers, and customers to lifelong clients, is to build a good relationship with them. You can start by making yourself understood.

Last year I created some videos on how to use free tools available on the Internet to learn the language of your prospective market and find the keywords they are using online. If you are interested in those videos and the podcasts I recorded at the time, please click on the “free stuff” tab at the top of my blog. I think you’ll find them extremely useful for making yourself crystal clear in all your communications.

This isn’t a post about using English (good or bad), Spanish, Japanese etc. Nor is it necessarily related to the spoken word.

What I’m really asking is whether you are speaking to your prospects, customers and clients in a way they understand? Or are you confusing them with jargon and phrases that leaves them befuddled and bewildered?

I went out for a drink with a colleague and friend last week – it was the first time we have had a chance to chat properly in ages, even though he is in the next office to mine every day.

He was telling me that he was so busy that he was creating some new factsheets to be pdf downloads from his website (or sent by email), with an aim to cut down on the time he spends on the phone or email trying to answer the same basic questions. This would leave him able to become involved only when a prospective customer knows that

(a) they definitely want to proceed further with a project and

(b) they have a basic understanding of the time, financial and practical aspects of what is involved.

He has also taken on a part-time admin assistant and was showing these factsheets to the assistant. He was fascinated to discover that even words and phrases he thought were clear left his assistant confused and that his assistant threw up a whole load of new questions that needed answering in order to create really useful factsheets.

It happens in all businesses, especially when you become more and more experienced in your specialty. Suddenly you are talking a language that feels so natural to you but makes no sense to others.
 

And to most new internet marketers that is literally what they hear – “blah blah blah”
 

Come back tomorow for Part Two of ‘What language are you using with your prospects?’….