This is the second in a series on the fastest ways to kill a sale before it ever gets started.
Last week we listened to a rep spend four minutes of a first call reciting his company’s background before the CTO asked what the call was about. That was Rule #1.
Rule #1 Set up your pitch by listening and asking the right questions.
Today we’re on to Rule #2. And it starts with a question.
How many times have you read a sales email with the word “organization” in it?
“Here’s how our products can help your organization.” “Does your organization struggle with regulatory compliance?” Sound familiar?
Can you imagine someone saying that in real life?
Scene 1 · A Waffle House. 2 a.m. A customer at the counter.
Customer “We provide your organization with a canonical reference architecture for scalable enterprise innovation.”
Server “Ah… Ma’am, this is a Waffle House.”
Nobody talks like that. Not at a Waffle House, not at dinner with a friend, not to a coworker in the hallway. And yet here’s what showed up in my inbox on Tuesday:
“Hi Steve, I hope this message finds you well. How does your organization obtain access to qualified decision-makers? We enable organizations like yours to accelerate pipeline velocity through our proprietary intent-data platform. Would you be open to a brief discovery conversation?”
Picture the person who wrote that asking a friend, “How does your household obtain access to a reliable babysitter?” The friend would ask if they were feeling ok.
Rule #2 Don’t use a word in a sales communication that you wouldn’t say out loud to a friend.
When people talk to their peers, they use plain conversational language. For some reason, the moment they try to sell something, they shift into this weird marketing-speak that no human being has ever used in real life.
“Our solutions are super modular. We’ve got our own gold standard tech stack, but we’re also adaptable to the preferences of your team.”
Read that one out loud. It falls apart somewhere around “gold standard.”
Why does this happen?
Two reasons, and they come from different places.
Reps often find themselves across the table from a CTO with deep technical chops, or a founder with a PhD from somewhere intimidating. It’s easy to feel a little outgunned. So the temptation is to “sound smart.” And using big words feels like an obvious way to do that. But it doesn’t sound smart. It just sounds weird.
Marketing has a similar problem with a different root cause. Someone’s job is to put together a big integrated campaign across email, social, LinkedIn, Google, and banner ads. They’re going to present it to their SVP or CMO. They’ve got real budget behind it. And they don’t want it to sound dumb. Plain language feels beneath the occasion. So they start chopping up the word salad. Different motivation, same outcome.
Both paths lead to wasted budget and zero pipeline. Because any email that opens with “your organization,” “our solutions,” or “common industry hurdles” is hurdling straight into the trash.
So what actually works?
If Antimatter wrote about itself the way most companies do, it would sound like this:
“At Antimatter, we provide solutions to overcome your organization’s technology challenges by unlocking innovation, breaking down siloes, and achieving meaningful progress against your enterprise KPIs.”
We would never send that. We start by deleting every single one of those non-human words. They don’t belong in websites, collateral, emails, or ads. Then we think about how real people actually talk, and we rewrite everything on that one simple principle.
There’s nothing wrong with something like this:
“My company, CloudServe, works with a lot of startups after a funding round. We help them figure out things like security and reliability as they grow.”
Or this:
“I saw you just acquired TechSoft. Congrats! If you need a team to look at all their tools and apps and make some recommendations, we’d love to help.”
It sounds almost too simple. Like it can’t possibly be enough. Trust me, it is. It’s the only way to get taken seriously by someone who reads fifty sales emails a week.
Otherwise you’re ordering a canonical reference architecture at a Waffle House.
Do you want to remove all the annoying, unhelpful jargon from your organization? Let’s talk.
Next up in Sales Suicide Vol. 3: Selling HIPAA Compliance to a Plumber