TIUOA - The Indiscriminate Use of Acronyms

People today really like to work with acronyms. I'd like to feel it's due to the fact we think so rapid we will need to condense our speech to compensate, so we use acronyms to speed items up; but I may be incorrect. stand for are particularly rampant in Chat Rooms. If you have been to 1, you understand how challenging it can be to understand what men and women are saying should you never know acronyms like LOL or BRB.

Fortunately--or unfortunately, because the case maybe--the technical professions are filled with them. Possibly it's mainly because they're easier to make use of or they are just plain more rapidly to say. Or, possibly it really is since they assistance the particular person utilizing them establish his or her mental superiority. What ever the explanation, our jobs are replete with them and they serve their purposes.

But technical acronyms possess a downside too. These on the organization side in the ledger never always know what they mean. A single corporation I worked for, had an unbelievable collection of acronyms, which staff employed freely, as well freely. They became so ingrained in the organization's culture; they in some cases interfered with consumer communications, costing the corporation business.

If you're in sales, you must be wary of acronyms. Although they've their upsides, they will price you, if you are not cautious when and how you use them.

Let's appear at a very simple instance. A sales engineer delivering a presentation explains how a specific protocol operates and how the company's gear functions with regard to it. He or she understands these acronyms and leverages them within the presentation to speed communication. That's excellent, if the sales engineer is speaking to the right men and women. If not, she or he can be cutting his or her own throat.

If your audience is composed of business enterprise decision-makers, odds are they may not know what the acronyms represent. Additional importantly, they may not care. Their most important concern throughout the presentation is finding out whether or not your solution or service solves their difficulty, whether they knew they had a single or not.

So what takes place when you use a strange acronym? They are either going to ask you what it means or they are going to try to decipher it. If they ask for its which means, you may sound smart telling them, but you have interrupted the presentation. If they choose to decipher it, they're going to stop paying consideration although their processors decipher "the code." Either way, it's not very good.

Here's another instance. Normally, consumers refrain from asking about an acronym for the reason that they're intimidated or embarrassed. They are not acquainted with it but considering that they did not ask about it and they're sitting in the presentation, you automatically assume they know what it means. Communication is blocked. That's also not superior either.

Then there's the question of ambiguity. In the event you use an acronym and never clarify its which means, your audience may not be clear about what you're saying.

Take the acronym "TLA." It could stand for Three-Letter Acronym or it could stand for Two-Letter Acronym. It could also stand for other items as well. A number of my favorites are

o Tax Lien Association

o Short-term Living Allowance

o Territorial Neighborhood Authority

o Texas Lawyers Association

o Tadpole Liberation Army (my individual preferred)

and lots of extra...

OK, I'm exaggerating. Odds are these terms will not come up inside a technical sales presentation. But I think you get the idea. So how do you manage acronyms if you are generating a technical sales presentation?

Listed here are my suggestions...

If you're delivering a handout, build a section for acronyms.
If you are carrying out a PowerPoint presentation, clarify the stand for after they come up.
Try gaging your audience's technical knowledge. (For those who think your audience features a high level of technical knowledge, stay away from explaining the acronym. You don't want to be seen as a babysitter explaining TCP/IP to a extra advanced audience.)
If it's a company-related acronym or it represents some obscure market normal, feel free to clarify its meaning when it comes up.
Acronyms are a fact of life. They're here to keep and we're going to become utilizing them until we start applying telepathy to communicate. Within the mean time, be careful with acronyms when giving a technical sales presentation. They will expense you.