The Night Corporate Speak Came To Dinner

I got an email party invite the other day from an old friend in what I am sure was his email marketing software. Like myself, he’s long been in corporate, but unfortunately, I fear corporate is now in him. When I opened the invite to his dinner party, there it was staring me in the face. A closing line that made me hesitate reserving my place at the table:

“Kindly RSVP by Friday so we can finalize headcount to optimize resource allocation”

“Optimize resource allocation,” I read it out loud and slowly, as if it would dampen how it landed. What does that mean exactly?

Had previous dinner parties failed because eleven guests were forced to share one bottle of wine while six untouched jars of mustard sat idle in the refrigerator? Was someone appointed to monitor tortilla chip consumption and redistribute guacamole away from high-volume users like myself? Would the host discover halfway through dinner that all available forks had been deployed during the salad course, leaving dessert critically under-forked?

I then imagined the horrors of a late arrival, me typically, discovering that the dessert budget had already been exhausted by early adopters. Now I understood the urgency to RSVP by Friday lest the host not have time to optimize procurement of said dessert resources.

Since no one wants to go to a dessert desert, I put my hesitation aside and responded: 

“Happy to RSVP ‘yes.’ Feel free to circle back if you need to supplement your internal resources during this critical social activation.”

I did, of course, attend the ultimately fun dinner party where the other guests and I had an appetizer course intervention about how maybe he should take some of that PTO he never uses because we can’t tell where the line is between Mr. Corporate Professional and our friend anymore.

The dinner invitation was funny because he just needed to know how many people were coming so he could make enough food. Instead, somehow sending those invites from ActiveCampaign triggered his corporate-jargon brain, and we ended up with the punchline of every joke that evening: “Optimize resource allocation.”

The corporate jargon definitely stood out on a dinner party reservation, but it also stands out when businesses rely on it to explain their offers. We constantly see businesses bury their useful offer under “strategic solutions” and “integrated capabilities,” which leave buyers wondering what they even do. 

Corporate jargon is not enticing for dinner party guests or B2B buyers. 

If you want to ditch the jargon, Borrowed Pen helps companies pull the useful, interesting parts of their offer out from under the corporate language that has accumulated around them. We help you define your positioning, develop messaging, and write content that explains what you do in terms that entice B2B buyers to make an RSVP with your sales teams. 

Book a call with our messaging masters, because buyers should not need an appetizer-course jargon intervention to figure out why they should choose your business.