Jargon is where good tech goes to hide

Tech companies love complicated language.

Not because they are trying to confuse people. Usually the opposite. The thinking goes: if the product is complex, the language should sound complex too. If the platform is clever, the copy should prove it. If the engineering is serious, the website should arrive wearing a lab coat and carrying a clipboard.

But that is where B2B tech often trips over its ethernet cables.

The more technical the offer, the more important clarity becomes. Not less. Because your buyer is not sitting there hoping to decode a feature list. They are trying to work out whether you can help them solve a problem, reduce a risk, improve performance, save money, make their team’s life easier or help them move faster without breaking anything important. And they are doing a lot of that thinking before they ever speak to sales.

Gartner’s 2026 research found that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience, with 45% saying they used AI during a recent purchase. Gartner also notes that buyers are now searching, vetting suppliers and shaping their needs with fewer early seller interactions. In other words, your words have to work hard when you are not in the room.

That makes unclear messaging a very expensive habit.

The buyer is already halfway down the road

B2B buyers are not waiting patiently for your sales team to explain everything. They are searching. Comparing. Asking peers. Skimming your website. Reading reviews. Looking at your LinkedIn posts. Asking AI tools to summarise the market while they drink lukewarm coffee between meetings.

A Google and National Research Group study found that B2B buyers now use AI tools, Google Search, social platforms and peer recommendations to compare vendors and understand product value. The same research says around three in four B2B buyers finish their journey in 12 weeks or less, and that every claim is scrutinised across multiple touchpoints.

So if your message relies on someone carefully joining the dots between your “integrated orchestration layer”, your “modular architecture” and the actual business outcome, you are asking too much.

Not because buyers are stupid; because buyers are busy. There is a difference.

Simple language does not make you look less expert

This is the big fear. Technical businesses often worry that simple language will make them sound lightweight. But clarity is not dumbing down. It is sharpening up.

Anyone can hide behind a fog machine of terminology. It takes more discipline to explain a complex idea in a way that a CFO, CTO, procurement lead, operations manager and end user can all understand without needing a lie down.

That matters because B2B buying rarely belongs to one person. LinkedIn describes buying committees as groups that often include finance, IT, management and operations, with different priorities around cost, value, quality, implementation and long-term fit. Those committees are usually around 6 to 10 people, and can go up to 20.

Your technical buyer may care about integration, security and performance.

Your financial buyer wants the commercial case.

Your users want to know whether it will make their day better or worse.

Your senior decision-maker wants confidence, momentum and fewer unpleasant surprises.

One message has to flex across all of them. That does not happen by accident. It happens when the core value is clear enough to travel.

Feature lists are not value

A feature list tells people what something has. A value proposition tells people why it matters. There is an abyss between the two, and a lot of B2B tech brands have built their websites on the wrong side of it.

A product page might say:

“AI-enabled workflow automation with real-time data integration and predictive analytics.”

Fine. But what does that mean for the buyer?

Does it reduce manual admin? Help teams spot issues earlier? Improve decision-making? Cut reporting time? Make compliance easier? Improve service quality? Help the business scale without hiring another small village?

The feature is the machine but the value is what changes because the machine exists.

That distinction is not cosmetic. Research into processing fluency shows that the ease with which people process information can affect attitudes, trust and choice. Clearer information is not just nicer to read. It is easier to believe, remember and act on.

The message has to survive the meeting you are not in

This is where consistency becomes gold.

If marketing says one thing, sales says another, product uses a third language and customer success quietly invents its own version, the buyer feels the wobble.

They may not call it a messaging problem. They may say things like:

“I’m still not totally sure what they do.”

“I don’t know if this is for us.”

“It feels a bit complicated.”

“Can we look at a few other options?”

That is the sound of uncertainty doing its little tap dance on your pipeline.

A clear message gives everyone the same centre of gravity. Sales can sell it. Marketing can build demand around it. Product can explain the roadmap through it. Customer teams can reinforce it after the deal is done.

Not a script. Not a slogan taped to a wall. A shared way of explaining the value of the business, clearly and consistently.

AI makes clarity even more important

AI has added a new twist. Buyers are increasingly using AI-powered search and summaries to compare suppliers. TrustRadius found that 72% of buyers reported encountering Google AI Overviews in search, and 90% of buyers click through to sources featured in those AI Overviews.

That means vague copy is not just bad for humans. It is bad for machines trying to understand, summarise and surface your business.

If your website is full of broad claims, duplicated language and unclear value, AI has less to work with. If your message is specific, structured and useful, you stand a better chance of being understood in the places buyers are already looking.

The future is not just “write for algorithms” or “write for people”.

It is simpler than that. Write clearly enough to be useful.

The Maven view

Great B2B tech brands do not make people work harder than they need to.

They explain complicated things without sanding off the intelligence. They connect product features to human and commercial outcomes. They give every team the same story to tell. They make the buyer feel, very quickly, “Yes, this is for us.”

That is the real power of simple language. It does not make the technology smaller. It makes the value bigger.