- Are you confusing your customers with the alphabet soup of acronyms and industry speak? Listen to this episode and find out. 

Hi, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. If you've never seen the movie "Renaissance Man" with Danny DeVito, I encourage you to see it. It's probably from the 90s, I want to say, or, yeah I think it was from the 90s. And the premise of the movie is he was in advertising, he lost his job and he gets a temp job working on an army base teaching recruits who are not passing their minimum English requirement test. And this is not English as a second language, but it's more of a reading and writing kind of a thing. And when he first gets onto the army base, he's driving his car and he stops and he asks someone directions, and they give him directions in all of these acronyms of just letters. You know, you go to the X, Y, Z and turn to the A, B, C, and then you go to the W, I, whatever and he has no idea what they're talking about. Fast forward to the end of the movie, and he has now done his stint there, signs up to do another one, because what started out poorly ended up going well. And now he's on the base, somebody's coming on stops to ask him directions, you know, how do you get to something? And he does exactly the same thing, 'cause now he knows what all those things are and now he's just confusing the other person. 

And I was thinking about this in all of our businesses, in all of our industries, there are all of these acronyms, and there's all this industry speak. And industry speak is just things that we talk about, like, if you're a caterer or a venue and you talk about eight tops and 10 tops. You know, if you've never been in the restaurant and hospitality business, you may not know what I'm talking about. The number of people that can sit at a table. So if you go to a restaurant and it's a small table and it's just the two of you, that's a two top, and there's four of you is a four top, six tops and so forth. But if you've never heard that, and I remember the first time I heard that, it was like, "I don't know what they're talking about." It was another funny story when I was selling wedding advertising in our wedding magazines way, way back. There was someone who worked for one of the venues that was our client, and he was thinking about coming to work for us. 

So one day I took him out and we went on calls together. We were in Newark, New Jersey, and we're going to a caterer who was in a refurbished firehouse. An old firehouse, very cool building. And we go walking in, and he sees this caterer, this caterer sees him. Now, I've never been there before. And the two of 'em look at each other and one of them goes, "CIA?" And the other one goes, "Yeah." And I'm looking around thinking all of a sudden, like, the Central Intelligence Agency is going to pop out of the walls here, not realizing that the CIA was the Culinary Institute of America, right. They knew it, I didn't know. Now I know it and I cannot know it. I'm a member of the National Speakers Association. We're also the NSA, but we're not the National Security Agency. We're the National Speakers Association. And as I like to say, we're the ones that speak, not the ones that listen, but that's our little joke. But think about all the other acronyms, right. I'm a CSP, Certified Speaking Professional. I'm a Global Speaking Fellow. I've seen CMPs, I've seen CPAEs. I've seen all these different things. And then the organizations, Eylea, NACE, WPPI what else do we have? We, we have WIPA and we have NAWP and you know all of these different groups. 

And I was talking to somebody just yesterday I was having a consultation with this company and they're a floral company in New Jersey and they were talking about networking. And I said, "You know, why don't you go to the, you know local Eylea chapter or NACE?" She goes, "I don't know what that is." She's been in her business for 10 years. She doesn't know what that is. So we can't make assumptions that first of all people know what we're talking about with those initials. And second, that they mean anything to our clients at all, right. If they don't know what it is then it may not mean anything. And you know, I know caterers, meeting planners decor design, photographers, you know, certified professional certified, what is it? Certified professional photographers, CPP or I forget now what the acronym is. There's so many of them, but you know what it means, but doesn't mean something to them. And does it really mean something? My CSP, my certified speaking professional, it took a lot to get that. It took a lot of speaking. 

I think it was the time I got mine, I had to document 250 paid speeches, a hundred paying customers and then all so mu bunch of other things there and it took a lot to get it; and that's because it has to mean something. There's about 17, 18% of professional speakers in the world have their CSP or equivalent. My Global speaking fellow, I'm one of 38 in the world. Now, I know that there's a lot of people that I know that could qualify for it, but they just don't do it and maybe they don't care and that's fine. Maybe it doesn't mean anything to them, to me it does. I have a bachelor's degree I don't have an a master's degree or a PhD. My CSP and my Global speaking fellow, or how I extended my education in a way that meant something to me. You know, getting an MBA, I could have done it, but it doesn't mean anything to my current, to what I do and to my career. 

So I didn't go for that, but I did go for these. And if you're not explaining to your customers what it means then you have to be careful that you're making assumptions that that gives you an edge over somebody else, otherwise it's just alphabet soup after your name. That's why on my website, on my speaking page on my website, I have this thing that says what do my certified speaking professional and global speaking fellow mean to you? And that's what it says on the page, what do they mean to you? And if you want to read it, great. It's a little, what we call a toggle. You click the little plus sign and it opens up that section. You can read more. And if you don't carry, you'll go right by it and that's okay too. 

But then there's also the internal lingo the things that we talk about, you know, revenue minimums. I have a many of my venues and caterer. We'll talk about revenue minimums; that's not a phrase that your customers use, right, and you have to use the language that they use so that they can understand you. And it's not that you're dumbing it down, they're not in your world. You have to go into their world and explain it in a way that makes sense to them and doesn't mean anything to them. So revenue minimum doesn't mean anything to them, you know and that's why, again, I hate starting prices because a starting price is the least that you're going to charge. And that's like a revenue minimum. You're not trying to get somebody to hit your revenue minimum. You're trying to get somebody to go way over that, that's how we become profitable. 

But I realized that there are times of the year, days of the week and certain times where you're not going to accept something that's lower than X and your pricing should reflect that. And that's perfectly fine. Just don't say we have a revenue minimum of, right. Or you ask a somebody who's planning a keen sign to fill out an RFP, request for proposal; no, that's a corporate speak. And if you're dealing with a professional planner they understand what an RFP is. But I've seen this on websites that people that do weddings and social events and it's, you know, request for proposal. They don't want that; they want a quote. They want a price that's what they want. They're not looking for the investment on your website, they're looking for prices. 

So if you're going to have a page that's called with attach prices, call it pricing or packages and on that page you can talk about how, you know, investing in the right, you know, DJ band, photographer, Flores, officiant, whatever is it's an investment in the success of your wedding or event. I get that, but they don't want to click on investment. Think about other industry speak. If you're a DJ or you do lighting and you can project a monogram, right. W call it a gobo, which is a go-between that's what it stands for, But they're not looking for a gobo, they want their monogram on the wall. They want their monogram on the dance floor. That's what they want. So think about a lot of the industry speak, look at your websites, look for those words and phrases. A good thing to do is to ask someone that that doesn't know your industry to go and look through and say, 'Hey, what does that mean?" What does that phrase? I don't know what that means. I don't know what you're talking about with that." We have the curse of knowledge, once you know something, you can't unknow it. 

Like I can't unknow what a 10 top is. I know what that is, right, or a cafe round, I know what that is. Or non-linear editing, I know what that is, or botes or declotosh, I know what that is. There was a time when I didn't. So are you using industry speak on your website in your marketing materials and with your customers when you could explain it to them, but just in a different way. You could use different wording and phrasing that would make it easier for them to know that. But you know, start looking through and look at all you know if you have acronyms after your name, don't assume they know what they mean and then don't assume that they care even if they do know what they mean. And we know that unfortunately there are, you know, some people in every industry, not just the wedding and event industry, every industry that make it easy for you to get certifications and things like that and it can dilute what the ones that took more to get. 

Remember my son who's a financial analyst. You know, there's a CFA, right, Certified Financial Analyst, right. And there's a CFP, Certified Financial Planner. And the CFA is the one that's really hard to get it; it's like, you know, 80, 90% of people failed the test the first time. It's just one of those things, that means something when you see someone who has it. But only again, if you know what that means, if you know what it took to get it, right that's when it means something. I remember someone, it was someone was complaining that they were calling someone doctor, but they had a PhD, not an MD. And it's like, yeah, but they are they have their doctorate. They are a doctor, right. You're complaining that someone is calling them Dr.So-and-so, or that they wanted to be called Dr. So-and-so, but they had to go through a lot to get that. I don't know if you know the process to get a PhD and that to defend your dissertation and all that kind of stuff, but it's a big deal. 

And yeah, if they want to be called doctor let 'em be called doctor, it's okay, right. It's all right. If you don't have one, fine, but if they do, it's okay to call them that. So watch the industry speak, really take a good look at your website, your marketing materials and when you're speaking to couples. But it might be easier to have somebody who's not in your industry to look through or listen in and say, you know what? Oh, I, wow, I don't know what that is. I don't know. And you're like, oh, you don't? No, I don't, and why should they, if they're not in your industry and most of your customers, couples, clients, customers of any kind, probably don't know your industry lingo. And occasionally they might, maybe they worked in hospitality or a waiter or a waitress or something. Maybe they do, but chances are they don't and they will feel more included if you use language that it doesn't add friction then because they know what you're talking about as opposed to language where they don't and they might feel embarrassed to ask you what that stuff is. 

So watch the alphabet soup of acronyms and things like that. Explain what it means to them and then watch the industry lingo. I hope you take a look at this and let me know how it goes, thanks.