For example, the words direct selling. To me, the term means when something that we manufacture is sold directly to the end-user. In other words, we bypass distributors or resellers and go directly to the customer. Some people in my company who work with distributors consider direct selling to mean bypassing a distributor and selling directly to a reseller.

Several years ago, I was part of meeting that was delayed by almost two hours because of disagreements on selling and organization strategies. Once it was figured out that the term direct selling was being interpreted differently by the meeting participants we were able move on.