Words Matter, But Buzzwords Don’t
Nearly every B2B technology company uses the same buzzwords. In the 2026 Narrative Coherence Benchmark, the companies that score higher and grow faster argue what the buyer can't do today and what it costs. The companies that score lower and grow slower use the buzzwords alone.
I’ve probably said “words matter” 10,000 times in my career. When I do, I’m almost certainly being pedantic, condescending or just a dick. Mostly because it’s true, words do matter. Now, anyone who has read a post with “buzzwords” in the title knows the drill. Buzzwords are the problem. Cut them, swap in better ones, done.
Alas, not today.
We scored 150 technology company narratives and collected precisely 18,501 passages and 450,787 words to do so. Of those 150 companies, 94% use “scalable”, 85% use “enable” and 71% use “transform”. Look at what kind of words those are. Scalable grades a product, it doesn’t describe it. Enable says something’s now possible, it doesn’t say why it wasn’t before. Transform claims a before and an after, it doesn’t describe either. Each communicates a quality and tries to convince a buyer of something they may or may not even think they need.
Nearly every company uses these words. Those with high and low narrative coherence scores and those that grew fast or slow. Words matter, but it turns out buzzwords don’t.
Because something interesting happens when we compare common words used by companies in different Narrative Coherence score and 12-month headcount growth buckets (headcount growth is the imperfect, public proxy for revenue growth).
Sixty percent of companies scoring 3.0 or below use “comprehensive” while only thirty-six percent of companies at 3.5 or better do. “Innovative”, “streamline” and “maximize” aren’t far behind. The same gaps appear when split by growth.
Words used more by lower-scoring, slower-growing companies
| Word | Score 3.5+ | Score ≤3.0 | Grew 20%+ | Grew ≤20% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| comprehensive | 36% | 60% | 31% | 54% |
| innovative | 24% | 47% | 56% | 79% |
| streamline | 43% | 59% | 38% | 59% |
| maximize | 27% | 45% | 25% | 40% |
These represent three word types (shout out to the grammar nerds out there). Nouns and adjectives turned into verbs ending in -ize and -line, like “optimize”, “streamline”, “maximize” and “standardize” that assert something got better. Evaluative adjectives like “comprehensive”, “innovative”, “holistic”, “seamless”, “best-in-class” and “turnkey” that grade a thing instead of describing it. Nominalizations like “efficiency”, “clarity” and “agility” that turn a quality into a thing. None describe anything someone could check. Streamline by how much? Comprehensive compared to what? Agility at what, exactly?
Anyone can write all three types without knowing a single thing about the buyer and their actual reality. Two anonymized, verbatim examples from low-scoring companies: “comprehensive solution to streamline operations and enhance efficiency.” And “ensure user privacy while maximizing accuracy and reliability.” One adjective that grades, three assertion verbs and four nouns with nobody doing anything. Ouch. Not because it’s jargon, but because any other company could say those exact words and likely does.
Now, high-scoring and high-growth companies do something different. They use words like “instead”, “can’t”, “doesn’t” and “zero”. Those words don’t grade anything, they say the buyer’s current state is wrong and why.
Seventy-one percent of companies scoring 3.5 or better use “instead”, against 37% of companies at 3.0 or below.
Words used more by higher-scoring, faster-growing companies
| Word | Score 3.5+ | Score ≤3.0 | Grew 20%+ | Grew ≤20% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| instead | 71% | 37% | 67% | 50% |
| can’t | 47% | 17% | 65% | 47% |
| doesn’t | 47% | 23% | 62% | 41% |
| zero | 49% | 17% | 54% | 29% |
| static | 45% | 20% | 44% | 26% |
High-scoring, high-growth companies use different word types than low-scoring companies. Negations like “can’t”, “doesn’t” and “isn’t” explicitly say what a buyer is stuck without. Contrastive adverbs like “instead” and “actually” set up a before and after state. Count nouns with units, such as “minutes”, “seconds” and “hundreds”, provide specificity. Past tense terms such as “knew” mean a specific thing happened to a specific person. Present-tense verbs with real objects, such as “runs” and “handles” say what a product does to a named thing. And nouns like “failure”, “friction” and “bottleneck” name something going wrong in the buyer’s world.
Low-scoring companies name categories and qualities. High-scoring companies name quantities, durations and things that happened. They argue. Two anonymized, verbatim examples from high-scoring companies: “can’t afford to spend half the day just hunting down the right numbers.” And “making decisions you can’t see, accessing data you don’t track.” Three negations, one duration and four things a person does at a desk. No company writes those without committing to a position on what the buyer can and can’t do, what stays static and then fails if they don’t change and where the bottleneck is at 4pm on a Friday.
High-scoring, faster growing companies have decided something specific in the buyer’s world is wrong and it can be better. Low-scoring, slower growing companies haven’t decided what specific thing is wrong, but know how to solve it. Unfortunately, low-scoring companies can’t simply ⌘+Shift+H and replace these words because the words aren’t the actual problem, they represent the lack of an argument.
Every company is in a fight for revenue against their competitors, their buyer’s hundred other priorities and buying committees who struggle to agree. That’s reality. And nearly all of them walk in with “scalable”, “enable” and “transform”. The difference is some surround them with “shared acceleration” or “resilient and agile optimization”, while others go with “billions of records” and “from day one without a ramp-up period.”
See, words do matter. But not buzzwords, argument words. They tell buyers what can’t work today, what stays static if nothing changes and what the fix is worth in minutes and dollars. These aren’t word or vocabulary choices, they are a choice to understand the buyer well enough to make specific claims and risk being wrong.