Marketing Speak, Demystified

For Marketers Who Know the Struggle Behind the Jargon

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My biggest woe with corporate life was the maze of buzzwords. The pseudo-intellectual jargon overcomplicates basic concepts and elongates otherwise simple sentences, directions, and by extension, meetings.

The marketing day-to-day is less glamorous than it sounds.

Allow me to break it down for you with this honest marketing glossary. If you’ve worked in marketing for longer than five minutes, you’ll probably recognize (and cringe at) a few of these.

Pipeline

Definition: A fake number that keeps you employed.
Out of all the pipelines we should be worried about, the marketing one ranks closer to hell.

The pipeline is less about real opportunities and more about convincing everyone in the meeting that you’re busy. Sure, it’s great to show a “healthy” pipeline, but how many of those deals are actually going to close? Don’t worry; no one will ask too many follow-up questions… as long as the graph is going up.

Outbound

Definition: Adding {{first_name}} to a Clay table.
Ah, outbound marketing. Otherwise known as the art of cold emailing and cold calling strangers and pretending it’s…