There's a new game in our family. It's called "Talk Boston" (or "Taak Baahstan"). It's the brainchild of my daughter, Lee, and my 5 ½ year-old granddaughter, Maria (pictured at right in full fall splendor).

Living in El Paso, they get lonely for Boston and their extended family. And when they do, they don a very accentuated Boston accent and have a fun time replicating (some — not all!) Baahstonian-speak.

The other day Maria called and said, "Nana, I'm goin' to a pahh-ty and I'm gonna eat lobstah." "And, Maria, are you going to drink tonic with your lobstah? ," I asked.

Unfortunately, Maria didn't know what I was talking about. Tonic is not a word that's used in El Paso (unless you're one of those guys who uses it on his hair!). In Texas, as in most of the country, the term used for a sweet, fizzy drink is soda or pop.

There's a world of words that are used interchangeably. In Boston, a "bubbler" is a water fountain. In Great Britain, a bathroom is a "loo." (I especially like that one!) And in Dublin, beer is "a pint," no matter what the actual size.

Colloquialisms can be fun, can't they? But they also can be misleading and confusing.


Sales OR Business Development

In business there are two phrases that ARE often used interchangeably but really DON'T mean the same thing. Those phrases are "sales" and "business development."

It can be a costly mistake to think that the functions of a salesperson are the same as those of a business development person. Over the years, I have seen a number of instances where a company has hired one, when what they really needed was the other.

To be sure you don't confuse the two, here are the very important differences:

SALES — Sales people are:

• Tactical in nature. They are happy and comfortable when territories and quotas are assigned and monitored by a manager on a regular basis. Failure or success is black and white to them. When they meet or exceed quota, they make or exceed their earnings expectations. When they don't, they beef up their performance or they start looking for another job!

• Not expected to perform nor comfortable with marketing tasks. To be sure they get the sales results needed, there is usually marketing support in the form of product marketing, lead generation, presentation materials, acceptance in the market of the product, etc.

• Strategic in nature. Developing business takes more time to come to fruition (i.e. finding new markets, looking for new channel partners, identifying larger opportunities for revenue). Here, job functions can be varied and many.
  
  (As an aside, because the functions of developing business take longer, business development people are usually not compensated the same way as salespeople. Business development compensations have a higher base and lower upside than sales compensation. This structure reflects the longer sales cycle, channel management and marketing responsibilities of their job.)

• Not comfortable with short-term, quota-driven sales models. While there certainly have to be financial metrics around developing business, a classic business development person is working on larger deals that have longer time-frames. Ask them if that big deal is going to close by the end of the month so they can "hit the numbers" and you're probably going to get pushback!

We got lots of e-mails about my last newsletter on Too Many Choices.

Richard Tubman of Circle Furniture in Boston wrote to tell me about a book he likes on the topic, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, by Barry Schwartz. I also recommend, on the same topic, Stumbling on Happiness, by Dan Gilbert.

Thanks for your recommendation, Richard!