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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

This is a terrific deck (and thank you guys for open sourcing it, even in redacted form - an excellent compromise that's totally fair.)

Take note of a few things:

* They don't use BS "corporate speak" -- no synergies of optimizing user solution metric analysis.

* There's no fluff. Just, none. Problem. Solution. How We're Doing. Why We're Better. What We Want To Do. The Landscape.

And it worked. This should be the baseline for every pitch deck.

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> They don't use BS "corporate speak"

I don't know: "penetrate organisations", "sales enablement", "widen our lead flow to lower cost per acq. long-term". I'm not sure I'd call that plain language.

You might say 'but I know what they all mean, they're not BS', but then a MBA might say that he knows what 'synergies of optimizing user solution metric analysis' and it's not BS to him.

One person's rational and precise technical language is another person's BS corporate speak.

Not saying it's not a good slideshow - sorry! I mean 'deck'!

That's not corporate speak - that's very precise language in different domains. For example, anyone in sales knows exactly what that means.

Yes that's exactly my point. To some people 'synergies of optimizing user solution metric analysis' sounds like BS, but I'm sure to the people who use it it's actually very precise language with a specific meaning. And to them 'penetrate organisations' probably sounds like corporate BS.

Perhaps, but there are definitely people who just stick in a string of verbized/adjectivized nouns in order to sound sophisticated or intelligent. In reality they just sound like they are full of hot air.

It's one of the many reasons people are so put off by salesmen.

Totally agree. A lot of technical people miss this. Sales people often (but not always) do this because they don't understand the product - they tend not to have a deep technical background. They compensate by picking up the language - most sales people spend a lot of time in conversations with other customers, product managers and technical people where a range of words are used. It lets them pick up the words, and get a shallow understanding of the concepts.

So most commonly you should just assume the sales guy is confused rather than being a tricky genius!

Very fair point. Perhaps my example wasn't the best of "fluff" -- but my point is still that the language of this deck is still (relatively) plain and to the point, and that should be a common goal.

In general, I've found that people use Fluff Language generally out of insecurity. They either hope they're going to sound more sophisticated or hope to mask the relative lack of substance.

It happens a lot in pitch decks but it's even more prevalent in the non-business world (See: Almost every cop ever..."We pursued the perpetrator inasmuch as our pursuit could be ascertained until we had determined...")

I wonder if their use of "BS" within the pitchdeck gives the impression of plain speak.

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