By Trevor Coltham

Most formal professions such as engineering, medicine and accounting have a standard, extensive vocabulary which enables them to streamline communication and understand each other faster.

This comprehensive language is common in other contexts too.

Wealthy people have more words and understanding of wealth-related topics. It turns out that due to this extended set of knowledge, these people perceive more opportunities for generating money than less wealthy people.

The question I’ve been pondering is, does this hold for success in sales?

If so, where does this common lexicon come from?

There are no formal tertiary qualifications in sales. Most salespeople I’ve worked with don’t enjoy reading or listening to books/podcasts on sales. Apart from a few instructor-led workshops, most often, sales methodology is learned on the job and passed from sales manager to salesperson. There is no professional body, no internal reference manual and what is modeled to others is often understood only at a surface level.

“Did you qualify that lead?”

That sounds like a question you would all ask a team member, but without structure, what does this question even mean?

Does limited vocabulary put constraints on your results and the individuals in your sales teams?

The following experience serves as an example:

I was working with a keen, ambitious yet inexperienced BDM.

During a sales coaching conversation, we were talking about a particular influential language concept when she said, “after I first learned this in the online module, I realised my boss use that language pattern all the time. I don’t understand why I’ve never noticed it before”.

People assume it should be easy to learn from others demonstrating best practice.

It’s often not true. The BDM was astonished that she had been in the room many times and never picked up the learning.

What we know from the neurosciences is that if our mind doesn’t have the necessary base framework or lexicon to arrange ideas, certain concepts might as well be in a foreign language.

Our brain simply ignores the distinctions. The sad thing is, your team member doesn’t even know they have missed out on something.

Consider another example from the language spoken by the Pormpuraaw people of Cape York Peninsula, Queensland.

Rather than using terms like left and right, their language, Thayore uses directions (north, south, east, west). One might say, go and speak to John, who is standing north-east of Julie.

Because of the way their language wires their brains, it turns out the Pormpuraaw are remarkably good at keeping track of exactly where they are always are even in unfamiliar buildings or places. Contrast that someone has grown up only using GPS to navigate from place to place.

When talking to other sales leaders about this, nearly all of them make assumptions about what their team members should know as a baseline.

They assume their team know what they mean with common sales terminology, feel they don’t need to teach it or document it because it seems self-evident to them.

I’m concluding that this challenge is more acute when a company doesn’t have have a common sales lexicon to rely on.

Communication is more difficult internally and with clients. Frustration creeps in and much time and effort are lost when trying to build on skills, coach and mentor others.

Can you quantify how much revenue is lost because your growth team is limited by what they don’t know or understand?

Many savvy sales organisations have understood this.

If you want to train and coach to create this standard sales and sales leadership language/framework for yourself, contact us here.