Got chewed out by a client for using too much jargon in a proposal

I was pitching a managed IT services package to a manufacturing company in Akron last month. The owner stopped me mid-sentence and said 'I don't know what half these words mean, just tell me if my servers won't crash.' So I rewrote the whole proposal at a 6th grade reading level with bullet points and cost breakdowns. He signed the contract two days later. Has anyone else had to dumb down their sales materials to close deals?

3 comments

3 Comments

samk771mo ago

Honestly, stripping out the fluff and just saying "this costs X and fixes Y" never fails.

phoenix_lewis1mo ago

My buddy runs a HVAC company in Cleveland and he had almost the same thing happen with a commercial landlord. He was talking about load calculations and BTUs and the guy just stared at him until he drew a picture of a furnace on a napkin and wrote the price under it. Sometimes you gotta strip out all the fancy talk and get down to brass tacks, people just want to know what it costs and if it works.

logan56117d ago

Honestly, I've been that landlord before. My plumber started explaining expansion tank calculations and I just nodded until he finally said "look, your pipes are gonna bang and this fixes it" and wrote $300 on a sticky note. Took me years of being the clueless customer to realize sometimes the smartest thing you can do is just shut up and write the number down.