You’re an expert. You’ve spent years, maybe decades, developing a level of mastery in your field that most people will never come close to. You know your product or service inside and out. You know exactly why it’s valuable. You know exactly who needs it.
And yet.
Your proposals aren’t converting. Your website isn’t generating inquiries. You’re getting on calls with qualified prospects and watching their eyes glaze over somewhere in the middle of your explanation. You know something is off…you just can’t put your finger on what.
Here’s what I’ve learned after years of working with specialized companies across industries: the problem almost never lives where they think it does. It’s not the product. It’s not the price. It’s not even the marketing.
It’s the language.
What is the Jargon Gap?
The Jargon Gap is the distance between the language your company uses to describe what you do and the language your potential customer uses to understand why they need it.
It shows up in every specialized industry: security, healthcare, legal, clinical services, technical SaaS, financial advisory. Any field where the people doing the work are also writing the marketing. Any company where deep expertise is the product, and the people selling it have been immersed in that expertise for so long that they’ve forgotten what it was like not to know.
Here’s the thing about expertise: it changes how you hear language. Terms that feel completely ordinary to you, words you use every day without thinking, land very differently on someone who doesn’t share your background. And when your potential customer encounters language they don’t fully understand, something quiet but devastating happens: they don’t ask for clarification. They just move on.
Not because they don’t need what you offer. Because they couldn’t see themselves in your description of it.
The listener problem
When I was working as a speech-language pathologist doing early intervention evaluations, I used to tell parents something that has stayed with me ever since: spoken speech isn’t for the speaker. The child knows exactly what they want. But the listener is trained to hear words, and when there are no words, or the wrong words, the message gets lost. Not because the child isn’t communicating. Because nobody taught the adult to listen differently.
I see the same dynamic in business every single day.
The company knows exactly what they do. They know exactly why it’s valuable. But somewhere between what they mean and what their market actually hears, something gets lost. And they’ve usually been calling it a marketing problem.
Most of the time, it isn’t. It’s a communication problem. And that’s a different diagnosis, with a different fix.
What the Jargon Gap looks like in practice
It looks like a security consultancy whose proposals are full of terms like “threat vector mitigation” and “protective intelligence protocols”: language that is completely accurate and completely incomprehensible to the executive who needs to sign off on the engagement.
It looks like a SaaS company whose website explains exactly what their software does, technically, but never once tells the reader what problem it solves for them personally.
It looks like a healthcare practice whose marketing speaks fluently to other clinicians but leaves actual patients wondering whether this is the right place for them.
In every case, the expertise is real. The offer is solid. The value is genuine. The translation is missing.
How to tell if you have a Jargon Gap
Ask yourself these questions honestly:
- When you explain what you do to someone outside your industry, do they nod politely but ask follow-up questions that tell you they didn’t quite get it?
- Does your website or marketing read like it was written for your colleagues rather than your customers?
- Have you ever been on a sales call where you felt like you were speaking two different languages, even when you knew the prospect needed exactly what you offer?
- Do your proposals or pitches focus heavily on what you do and how you do it, rather than what the client will experience or gain?
If you answered yes to any of these, you have a Jargon Gap. And here’s the genuinely good news: it’s one of the most fixable problems in business, once you can see it.
Closing the gap
The fix isn’t dumbing down your expertise. It’s translating it.
There’s a meaningful difference between the two. Dumbing down means removing substance. Translating means taking everything that makes your offer exceptional and rendering it in the language your customer actually uses: the words they reach for when they describe their problem, their goal, their fear, their hope.
When you close the Jargon Gap, something shifts. Your proposals start converting. Your website starts generating inquiries. You get on calls with prospects and instead of watching their eyes glaze over, you watch them lean in. You hear them say: that’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.
That’s not a marketing win. That’s a communication win. And it starts with learning to listen to your customer the way they actually speak, not the way you wish they would.
Think you might have a Jargon Gap? I’ve built a specific offer around diagnosing and closing it called The Translation Workshop. Or if you want to go deeper, The Communication Diagnostic Intensive is where we look at the full picture. Either way, the first step is the same:
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