How to Remove Jargon From Sales Calls Without Oversimplifying

TL;DR: Removing jargon from sales calls is not the same as banning a list of words, and the banned-words posts that own this search are solving the wrong problem. In an experiment with 650 participants published in Public Understanding of Science, replacing jargon with plain synonyms made the same information measurably easier to process, and that ease is what reduced resistance to persuasion, which in turn reduced perceived risk and raised support for the idea being pitched. The finding that should change how you coach is the control condition. Half the participants could hover over every jargon term and read its plain definition on demand, and those definitions made no significant difference to how hard the information felt. Defining the acronym does not buy back what using it cost you; replacing it does. A later experiment with 393 participants found the jargon penalty vanished on the one high-urgency topic, which maps to a rule you can actually run a floor on: jargon is cheapest when the buyer already has a fire burning and most expensive in cold outbound and early discovery, where nothing but your sentence is doing the persuading. The working process is to pull one call recording, list every acronym and internal label, replace each one with what the buyer would do differently on Monday, tie the explanation to the workflow the buyer already described, keep the technical terms that carry real meaning for that specific buyer, and score reps on unexplained acronyms and comprehension checks instead of on forbidden words. The other half of the job is refusing to overcorrect. The federal plain language guide is blunt about it: you do not have to dumb down your content, and you should not write for an eighth-grade class unless your audience is an eighth-grade class.

Search this topic and you get lists. Seventeen things to quit saying. Fifteen phrases to remove from your vocabulary immediately. Five that quietly kill your deals.

Fine. Now watch a rep scrub every one of them out of the script, run a clean call with no forbidden phrase anywhere in it, and lose the buyer anyway in the first four minutes.

The banned-words list treats jargon as a vocabulary problem. It is a processing problem, and the two have different fixes. The buyer is not offended by your word choice. The buyer is spending effort decoding your sentence that should be going into evaluating your offer, and that effort has a price you can measure. Knowing how to remove jargon from sales calls starts with understanding what it actually costs, because that is what tells you which terms to cut and which ones to keep.

What Counts as Jargon on a Sales Call

Jargon is specialized vocabulary tied to a particular context and a particular group of people, used routinely inside that group and rarely understood outside it. That definition is more useful than a blacklist for one reason. It is relative. The same term is jargon on one call and precision on the next, and the variable is who picked up the phone.

It shows up in five recognizable forms:

• Internal terminology. Names for your teams, your stages, your product tiers, or your sales methodology.
• Unexplained acronyms. SLA, ICP, API, MQL, dropped in without context.
• Misapplied technical terminology. Language that is exactly right for the engineer on the call and useless to the CFO sitting next to them.
• Vague business phrases. Drive alignment, create value, optimize workflows. None of them names an action.
• Feature-heavy language. Product descriptions that say what a capability is called without saying what the buyer could do with it.

Jargon is not filler. Um, like, and you know can clutter delivery, but they come from nerves and habit rather than from vocabulary, which makes them a different coaching problem with a different fix and a different thing to rehearse. A rep can cut every filler word out of a call, sound polished from open to close, and still deliver an acronym-dense explanation that nobody on the other end can act on. Coach them separately.

What Jargon Actually Costs You on a Sales Call

Researchers at Ohio State ran 650 people through a controlled experiment. Each participant read three short paragraphs about self-driving cars, surgical robots, and three-dimensional bioprinting. One group got versions carrying ten jargon terms per paragraph. The other got the same paragraphs with the jargon swapped for short plain explanations and every acronym spelled out. Word count was held constant across conditions, so the only thing that changed was the language.

The jargon group reported significantly more difficulty processing what they read, which is the result everyone expects and the entire reason the banned-words genre exists. The part that matters on a sales call is what that difficulty predicted next.

Harder processing predicted greater motivated resistance to persuasion. That resistance predicted higher perceived risk and lower support for adopting the technology. So the chain runs from your wording, through how hard the buyer has to work, to whether they believe you and whether they want what you are selling.

Now read the actual items on that resistance scale. One is that the messages tried to pressure the reader to think a certain way. Another is that the messages were not very credible. A rep hears those same sentences in a different accent. They sound like I need to think about it, and let me run this by the team.

Scope matters and the authors flag it themselves. These were lay readers evaluating emerging science technology in an online survey with a non-representative sample, not buyers on a live call, and the messages carried no images, source cues, or context. What transfers to your floor is the mechanism. Effort spent decoding is effort not spent evaluating, and the buyer charges you for it somewhere.

Why Defining the Term Does Not Buy Back What It Cost

Almost every piece of sales advice about jargon ends in the same place. Just define your terms. That same experiment tested the instruction directly, under conditions far more generous than any live call will ever give you, and it did not survive the test.

The design crossed two variables. Jargon or no jargon, and definitions or no definitions. Participants in the definitions condition could hover over any underlined jargon term and read the identical plain-language wording the no-jargon group received. Meaning was available on demand, for free, at the moment of confusion.

It changed nothing. There was no significant main effect of definitions on how hard the information felt to process, and no interaction with the jargon condition either. The people who could look up the meaning of every unfamiliar term at the exact second they hit it reported the same difficulty as the people who had no definitions available at all.

So what do you do with that? Two things. Stop treating a definition as a finished job, because the definition restores the meaning to the buyer and leaves the work of decoding exactly where it was. Then keep the define-once move for the short list of terms you genuinely cannot replace, and replace everything else outright, because replacing the term is the only move in that study that changed anything.

One caveat worth stating plainly, because the authors state it. They did not measure comprehension directly. They held it constant by design, which is why the definitions were there in the first place. The result is about felt difficulty, not proof that definitions fail to convey meaning. On a live call, felt difficulty is the thing that produces the polite deflection, so the operational conclusion holds.

When the Buyer’s Urgency Changes the Answer

Jargon is not equally expensive in every conversation, and advice that pretends otherwise gets quietly dropped on the floor inside a week, because reps can feel the difference between a call where the terminology cost them something and a call where it plainly did not.

Two of the same researchers ran a follow-up with 393 participants, this time varying urgency. Three topics: COVID during the pandemic as the high-urgency case, flood risk as the low-urgency case, and federal emergency policy as a control. On both lower-urgency topics, jargon did what it did before. Processing got harder and persuasion dropped. On the high-urgency topic there was no jargon effect at all.

Translate that to the floor. An inbound lead whose system went down this morning will push through your acronyms, because the problem is already doing the persuading and they need an answer more than they need clean prose. An outbound prospect who is perfectly fine with how things work today has no such motive, and every term they have to decode is one more reason to get off the call.

So qualify the advice by lead temperature. Cold outbound and early discovery conversations are where jargon costs the most, because your language is the only thing carrying the argument. A live escalation is where it costs the least. That does not make it free, and it is not a license to talk like a datasheet once the deal gets urgent.

How to Remove Jargon From Sales Calls

Pull One Sales Call Recording and Listen for the Terms

Pick one representative call. Do not work from memory, because reps do not remember which terms they used and managers do not remember which ones landed. Where your organization permits call recording and review under its own policies and applicable requirements, work from the actual recording rather than a recap.

Mark every acronym, product label, methodology name, and broad claim. Then mark the other signal, the one most reviews miss. Note where the buyer asked what that means, and note where the buyer went quiet or gave a three-word answer right after a long explanation. A buyer who goes quiet right after a long explanation is telling you something, and a call review that only counts objections will never record it.

List Every Sales Call Acronym and Insider Term

Write every one of those terms down in a single list, in the order the rep said them, so you can see how many arrived before anyone explained anything. For each one, four questions:

• Would this buyer use this term unprompted?
• Could it mean something different inside their company?
• Did the rep define it before using the short form?
• Is there an everyday phrase that carries the same idea?

If a term survives all four questions, it earns its place on the call and belongs in the rep’s vocabulary. Most do not survive the first one.

Replace Feature Jargon With What the Buyer Would Do Differently

Feature-heavy statements stack a product label on an abstract benefit and leave the buyer to assemble the meaning. Our platform enables automated workflow optimization. What is automated? Which workflow changes, and who touches it today? What is that person doing by hand right now that they would stop doing?

Rewrite the claim around one specific action the buyer’s team would take differently on Monday morning. Your team can set rules that route follow-up tasks automatically instead of assigning each one by hand. That version is longer. Longer is not the problem. Vague is the problem.

Use the Words the Buyer Already Gave You

The buyer hands you vocabulary in the first ten minutes. Use it. If a prospect says reps waste time switching between systems, talk about switching between systems. Do not translate their description into your category label, because the translation is work you are charging them for and the label is the part they did not ask about.

A structure that holds up: current task, proposed change, practical relevance. Today managers copy call notes into another system. The proposed process removes that second entry, so the team spends less time moving the same information twice. Treat the final effect as a possibility until it is validated for that specific account.

Deliver One Idea per Sentence, Then Stop Talking

Long sentences let a rep stack qualifications, features, and terminology into a single breath, and the buyer has to hold all of it open at once while working out which part of it was the actual point. The federal plain language guidance is direct about the fix. Shorter words, short sections, active voice, present tense. Active voice makes it clear who does what, and it removes the ambiguity about who is responsible for which step.

Deliver one idea. Then pause. The pause does two jobs: it gives the buyer room to ask, and it gives the rep a second to pick a concrete explanation instead of falling back on a familiar phrase. There is no correct pause length. The target is a conversation, not a recital.

Define the Term Once When You Cannot Replace It

Sometimes the technical term is genuinely the clearest option available, especially with a specialist who uses it every day and would find the plain-English version condescending. When that is true, introduce the full term, define it in one line, and say why it matters to the decision actually on the table right now.

When I say API, I mean the connection that lets two systems exchange specific information automatically. Which systems would need to exchange data in your setup?

Notice what that does. It defines the term and immediately converts it into a question about their workflow, which is the part a hover definition cannot do. Define, then apply. A definition that just sits there is the condition the research already tested.

Let the Buyer Describe the Workflow First

Ask the buyer to walk through their current process in their own words before you explain anything at all, and resist the urge to correct the parts they get wrong about your category. You get two things out of it: the real sequence of steps, and the vocabulary that account uses when nobody is selling to them.

Do not parrot every phrase back. Use their language where it genuinely describes the problem, and when a term they use is ambiguous, ask what it means inside their company. Same acronym, different definition, two floors of the same building. That happens constantly.

Jargon Replacements for Each Stage of the Sales Call

Remove Jargon From the Sales Call Opening

Instead of: I want to align on our value proposition and explore potential synergies.

Try: I want to understand how your team handles this today, tell you where we might help, and figure out together whether a second conversation is worth your time.

Remove Jargon During Sales Discovery

Instead of: What are your key pain points?

Try: Which part of the current process eats the most time or creates the most rework?

Explain the Product Without Sales Jargon

Instead of: This creates a scalable, end-to-end workflow.

Try: The same process works for the whole team, from the first call through follow-up. Which steps would need to differ by group?

Handle Objections Without Sales Jargon

Instead of: Let me unpack that objection.

Try: It sounds like the implementation effort is the real concern. Which part of it looks hardest?

Discuss Pricing Without Sales Jargon

Instead of: The investment reflects our differentiated value.

Try: Let us put the cost next to the process you described and find which assumptions still need checking.

Set Next Steps Without Sales Jargon

Instead of: We will circle back and operationalize the action items.

Try: I send the security documentation Thursday. You confirm who should join the technical review. We meet again Tuesday.

Check Understanding Without Asking Does That Make Sense

Does that make sense produces a reflexive yes. It asks the buyer to grade their own comprehension out loud, in front of a stranger who is trying to sell them something, and most people say yes simply to end the moment. You learn nothing.

Ask something the buyer can answer without admitting confusion:

• What questions does that raise?
• How does that compare to how you handle it now?
• Which part of that is most relevant to your team?
• Where would this need to change to fit your process?
• Is this the right level of detail, or do you want the technical version?

Every one of those invites the buyer to participate instead of testing whether they were paying attention. They also hand the rep a decision, because the answer tells you whether to clarify the point, bring evidence, or drop it and move on.

A Jargon Scorecard for Sales Call Coaching

Use less jargon is not a coachable instruction. Nobody knows what to practice on Monday. Score a short call segment on observable behavior instead, the same way you would score any other call quality review:

• Unexplained acronyms. How many appeared before anyone defined them?
• Internal terms. Did the rep use a name or label the buyer would not recognize?
• Vague claims. Could each broad statement be tied to a specific task or problem?
• Feature-to-outcome translations. Did the rep say what the buyer would do differently?
• Sentence clarity. Did each explanation carry one main idea?
• Comprehension checks. Did the rep invite questions or ask how the idea fits the buyer’s process?
• Audience fit. Was the level of detail right for that buyer’s role and stated familiarity?

Then pick one line. One. A rep works on defining acronyms this week and on rewriting vague benefit statements next week, and both are things they can actually rehearse. Scoring seven items and assigning seven fixes produces zero changed behavior. This is the same reason reviewing calls at scale only helps when the review ends in one specific assignment.

When Jargon Belongs on a Technical Sales Call

Here is where most jargon advice overcorrects, and where the reps who actually carry a number stop listening to it, because they know that the plain-English version of a technical answer can lose a technical evaluator in one sentence.

The federal plain language guide, written for agencies that are legally required to communicate clearly, says it directly. One of the most common plain language myths is that you have to dumb down your content so that everyone can read it. That is not true. Use language your audience understands and feels comfortable with, and take their current level of knowledge, expertise, and interest into account. The guide goes further: do not write for an eighth-grade class unless your readers are, in fact, an eighth-grade class.

The first rule is to write for your audience. On a sales call that means the audience changes mid-meeting. Technical terms earn their place when they are standard for that buyer, when they distinguish between two things that genuinely differ, or when the conversation has moved to implementation and precision is the whole point.

So adapt the level, and ask rather than assume. An executive wants the business consequence and will tune out the implementation detail. A technical evaluator wants the architecture and will distrust an answer that skips it. Both of them are on the same call. Handle that by asking which one you are talking to right now, not by splitting the difference and boring both.

Sales Call Jargon FAQs

What is an example of jargon in sales

Our solution drives cross-functional alignment through a scalable workflow. That sentence names no user, no action, and no change, which means the buyer cannot evaluate it, agree with it, or argue with it. A clear version says which teams share information, what step goes away, and why that matters to the person hearing it.

How is jargon different from filler words

Jargon is specialized, internal, or vague terminology that carries meaning inside your company and not outside it. Filler is the sounds and phrases that pad delivery while the speaker thinks, like um and you know. Both show up in a call review and both are worth fixing, but they need different coaching, and cutting filler does nothing about an acronym-dense explanation.

Should sales reps avoid all technical terms

No. Technical terms are the right call when they improve precision and match the buyer’s expertise. The rule is narrower than avoid jargon: replace the terms you can, define the ones you cannot, never use an acronym before defining it, and ask whether the buyer wants more detail or less.

How can managers coach reps to use plain language

Review one specific call segment, mark the phrases that would be unclear to that particular buyer, and have the rep rewrite each one as a concrete action rather than a better-sounding abstraction. Track two or three observable measures, such as unexplained acronyms and comprehension checks. Then rehearse the revised language out loud before the next call block, because a scorecard the rep reads and never practices changes nothing about what comes out of their mouth under pressure.

Removing jargon is not about making every conversation simple. It is about making every important idea cheap enough to evaluate. Pull one recording this week. Count the acronyms that went undefined, replace the three worst offenders with what the buyer would do differently, and check whether the next call produces questions instead of silence.

Sources

How this article was built: the effect of jargon on processing, the null result for definitions, and the urgency condition come from two peer-reviewed experiments read directly on the review date, and the plain language guidance and its explicit rejection of dumbing content down come from the current federal plain language guide and the statute behind it.

• Jargon as a barrier to effective science communication: Evidence from metacognition, Olivia M. Bullock, Daniel Colón Amill, Hillary C. Shulman and Graham N. Dixon, Public Understanding of Science, 2019, primary peer-reviewed experiment, for the design in which 650 participants were randomly assigned in a two-by-two between-subjects experiment crossing jargon against no-jargon with definitions against no-definitions, with ten jargon terms per paragraph in the jargon condition, jargon replaced by short explanations using simpler synonyms and acronyms replaced with their full form in the no-jargon condition, and word count held constant across topic and condition; for the significant main effect of jargon on processing fluency, F(1, 636) = 76.03, p < .001, with the jargon condition reporting lower fluency (M = 4.57, SD = 1.11) than the no-jargon condition (M = 5.27, SD = 0.90); for the absence of a significant main effect of the definition condition, F(1, 636) = 0.37, p = .543, and the absence of a significant interaction, F(1, 636) = 0.17, p = .678; for the serial mediation from jargon through processing fluency to motivated resistance to persuasion and then to risk perceptions and support; and for the authors’ own limitations, namely a non-representative online sample, messages free of images, source cues, and context, and the fact that comprehension was held constant rather than directly measured.
• Don’t dumb it down: The effects of jargon in COVID-19 crisis communication, Hillary C. Shulman and Olivia M. Bullock, PLOS ONE, 2020, primary peer-reviewed experiment, for the online survey experiment with 393 participants examining jargon across three topics that varied in situational urgency, namely COVID-19 as the high-urgency topic, flood risk as the low-urgency topic, and federal emergency policy as the control, and for the finding that although jargon led to more difficult processing and reduced persuasion for the two less-urgent topics, there was no effect of jargon in the COVID-19 condition.
• Principles of plain language, U.S. General Services Administration, Digital.gov Plain Language Guide Series, primary federal guidance, for the statement that the first rule of plain language is to write for your audience, for the guidance to use language your audience understands and feels comfortable with and to take your audience’s current level of knowledge, expertise, and interest into account, and for the explicit rejection of the most common plain language myth, that you have to dumb down your content so that everyone can read it, together with the instruction not to write for an eighth-grade class unless the audience is in fact an eighth-grade class.
• Writing for understanding, U.S. General Services Administration, Digital.gov Plain Language Guide Series, primary federal guidance, for the statement that research shows content is easier to understand when the language uses shorter words, short sections, active voice, and present tense, and for the guidance that active voice makes it clear who should do what and eliminates ambiguity about responsibilities while passive voice obscures who handles what.
• Plain Writing Act of 2010, Public Law 111-274, enacted October 13, 2010, primary statutory text via GovInfo, for the statutory definition of plain writing as writing that is clear, concise, well-organized, and follows other best practices appropriate to the subject or field and intended audience, and for the Act’s stated purpose of improving the effectiveness and accountability of Federal agencies to the public by promoting clear Government communication that the public can understand and use.

Sources verified and content reviewed by the Kixie Research Team on September 27, 2026. All source links checked on September 27, 2026.