Zane is blinking through a haze of surfactant-induced misery, trying to make sense of the third paragraph on his new employer’s internal portal. My own eyes are currently a vibrant, pulsating shade of crimson because I managed to dump a handful of eucalyptus shampoo directly into my face this morning. It is a blinding, chemical betrayal. But even through this watery, stinging veil, the words on the screen are more painful than the soap. The company-a firm that apparently manufactures industrial cooling valves-describes itself as a ‘pioneer in thermal equilibrium optimization through leveraged synergistic hardware-software integration.’ Zane has read this 19 times. He is 29 minutes into his first day. He still doesn’t know if he’s supposed to sell the valves, fix them, or pray to them.

The Human Element in B2B

I spent an afternoon with Priya S., an industrial color matcher who has spent 29 years perfecting the science of pigment. Her world is tangible. It is messy. She deals with the 9 basic elements of light reflection and the 89 subtle variations of ‘Safety Orange’ that keep people from getting crushed by forklifts. Priya S. is the ultimate end-user of B2B products. When she looks for a new spectrophotometer, she doesn’t want to hear about ‘unlocking the potential of visual data paradigms.’ She wants to know if the damn thing will tell her why the 9th batch of resin is turning out slightly more mauve than the 8th.

But the marketing she receives is written by someone who has likely never stepped foot in a factory. It’s written by someone who thinks that using the word ‘efficiency’ is a substitute for actually understanding how a color matcher’s back hurts after 9 hours on a concrete floor. This is the great disconnect. We use jargon as a shield because we are terrified of the vulnerability required to say: ‘We make a tool that keeps your colors from looking like garbage so you don’t get fired.’

Jargon is the camouflage of the incompetent and the armor of the afraid.

When we hide behind ‘enterprise-grade solutions,’ we are signaling that we belong to the club of Serious People. It’s a 19-digit secret code that tells the board of directors we aren’t taking risks. But the risk is actually in the silence that follows. When every company in a niche sounds like a generative AI having a nervous breakdown, the one that speaks like a person becomes a revolutionary. I once saw a white paper that used the word ‘utilize’ 59 times. Not once did it explain what was actually being utilized. It was a 49-page ghost story where the ghost was the product itself, invisible and whispering in a language no one speaks.

This isn’t just a stylistic preference; it’s a failure of empathy. To market to another business is to market to a collection of stressed individuals who are worried about their 9 AM meetings and whether they’ll be home in time for dinner. They are looking for a lifeline, not a vocabulary test. If you can’t tell a prospect how you solve their 49-cent problem without using a five-syllable word, you don’t actually understand their problem. You are just wearing a suit made of syllables.

Websites as Ego Monuments

We see this manifest in the way websites are structured. Most B2B sites are built as monuments to the company’s ego. They list the 19 awards they won in 2019 and the 99 years of ‘combined experience’ their leadership team possesses. But experience is a hollow metric if it leads to a total lack of clarity. A buyer arrives at a site with a stinging sensation in their gut-not unlike my shampoo incident-and they are met with a wall of text that does nothing to rinse the pain away. They want a solution, but they get a ‘value-added framework.’

In the trenches of this communication war, a marketing agency ends up doing the heavy lifting of translating CEO-fever-dreams back into English. They are the ones who have to point out that the emperor has no clothes, and furthermore, the emperor is using ‘optimized’ as a verb when he really means ‘cheaper.’ The goal of a sales-ready website isn’t to sound like a textbook; it’s to sound like the smartest person in the room who also happens to be your friend. It’s about building a bridge between Priya S. and the complex machinery she needs to do her job.

I remember a specific instance where a client insisted on describing their shipping software as a ‘logistical orchestration suite for global commerce entities.’ I asked them if they’d ever said that out loud to a human being. They hadn’t. We changed it to ‘We help you ship stuff overseas without the paperwork headache.’ Their lead conversion jumped by 39 percent in the first month. Why? Because for the first time in 9 years, their customers actually knew what they were buying. They didn’t have to squint at the screen until their eyes watered.

There is a 99 percent chance that right now, somewhere in a glass-walled office, a marketing manager is deleting the word ‘simple’ and replacing it with ‘streamlined.’ They think they are adding value. They are actually adding friction. Every time we choose a complex word over a simple one, we are asking the reader to do 9 extra units of cognitive work. In a world where we are all bombarded by 599 notifications a day, asking for extra cognitive work is a polite way of asking to be ignored.

Authenticity is the only currency that doesn’t devalue when the market gets crowded.

The Emotion of Relief

Let’s go back to Priya S. for a moment. She doesn’t care about your ‘synergistic paradigms.’ She cares about the 9th of every month when she has to submit her waste report. If your software makes that report take 9 minutes instead of 49 minutes, tell her that. Don’t tell her you ‘enhance data reporting throughput.’ Tell her she gets her afternoon back. That is the emotion of B2B. It’s not the weeping, heart-tugging emotion of a soda commercial; it’s the quiet, profound relief of a problem solved. It’s the feeling of finally getting the shampoo out of your eyes and seeing the world clearly again.

We have a 19-word rule in some of my circles: if a sentence takes more than 19 seconds to digest, it’s a failure of hospitality. Being clear is a form of kindness. When you write copy that Zane can understand on his first day, you are being a good host. When you write copy that respects Priya’s time, you are building trust. Trust is the only thing that actually closes a 9-figure deal. Not ‘leverage,’ not ‘optimization,’ and certainly not ‘paradigm shifts.’

I once made the mistake of trying to sound smarter than I was during a pitch for a $9,999 contract. I used the word ‘interconnectivity’ 9 times. I lost the deal. The CEO told me later that he didn’t hire me because he felt like I was trying to sell him a mystery box. He hired the guy who told him, ‘I’ll fix your broken links so people can actually buy your stuff.’ That guy didn’t have a ‘synergistic approach.’ He had a wrench. He had clarity. He had the job.

The Master vs. the Fog

The corporate fear of vulnerability is ultimately a fear of being judged for being simple. We think if the solution is easy to explain, it must be easy to do. That’s a lie. It takes 109 percent more effort to be simple than it does to be complex. Anyone can hide in the fog of jargon. It takes a master to stand in the sunlight and point at a valve. We need more valve-pointers and fewer paradigm-shifters. We need more people who realize that even in a business-to-business transaction, there is a human on both sides of the screen. One of them might even have soap in their eyes.

If we want to fix B2B marketing, we have to start by admitting that we are bored. We are bored of reading the same 9 buzzwords on every landing page. We are bored of the 49-slide decks that could have been an email. We are bored of being treated like ‘decision-makers’ instead of people. The moment we stop writing for the ‘enterprise’ and start writing for Zane and Priya S., the fog starts to lift. The stinging stops. We can finally see the product for what it is, rather than what the thesaurus says it should be. It’s a 9-out-of-10 improvement that starts with the very next sentence you write. Just say what it does. Then stop talking.