8 English Acronyms Every Business Professional Must Know

English acronyms are used in the office all the time.

This can make communicating at work confusing. Sometimes, it can seem like people no longer use words to exchange information. Rather, they are using a long stream of shorteners that everyone is expected to understand. The worst is when a company continuously builds its own list of acronyms. It can feel like you’re never really up to date or on the ball with what’s going on in your organization.

We’ll define 8 acronyms that pretty much everyone needs to know. Even if you don’t use them where you work, you’re bound to run into someone externally who does.

ASAP

In our fast paced world, managers want things now and customers want things yesterday.

ASAP stands for as soon as possible.

It’s meant to portray a feeling of urgency. In other words, that person needs something to be done immediately.

e.g. I need those reports on my desk ASAP. (hidden meaning, stop literally anything else that you’re doing and give me those reports NOW because it’s extremely important)

B2B/B2C

This acronym is used to differentiate the target market of a company.

B2B = business to business

B2C = business to consumer

A company that is in B2B serves only other business. For example, a distributor of widgets may decide that their strategy is not to sell anything to a final consumer. Instead, they might sell their products to a retailer (like Brico); Brico would sell the widgets to the end consumer. Marketing or branding firms are typical examples of B2B companies.

B2C companies sell to the final consumer. Companies like H&M or Zara target the general population and hence are operating in a B2C environment.

There are several differences between B2B and B2C strategies. Often the purchasing drivers, the buying cycles, and the general nature of marketing or sales efforts would be quite different between the two.

CX

CX is a simple acronym for a quite complex concept: Customer Experience.

Customer experience is a buzzing phrase in the corporate world at the moment. Companies have been realizing, over the last few years, that that the way a customer interacts with a company at every level of its organization has a significant impact on whether a business relationship is pursued. A firm’s CX strategy is generally composed of consistent behaviors that lead to the overall satisfaction of a customer, higher degrees of trust, and ultimately sales.

K

K = kilo =1,000
M= mega=1,000,000

Quite literally, K stands for the French version of the Greek word khilioi, which means a thousand.

For example, $256K is the equivalent of $256,000.

In French, 1,000 can sometimes be represented by M. However, considering that some people might interpret $256M as $256 million, it’s probably safer to double check before making any hasty investments.

MGMT

MGMT is an American rock group, but, it’s also short for management.

ROI

To have a high ROI is the aim of pretty much all financial decisions a company can make. When investing any resource into a project, it’s important to understand what the ROI, or return on investment, will be.

The formula to calculate ROI is:

earnings from investment (sales-cost)
cost of investment

Example:

A small retailer is considering renting a space in two trendy neighbourhoods. In the first, the rent would cost him an additional $2,000 per month, but, he is confident that he can increase his monthly sales by $3,000. Hence, the ROI for the first location is estimated to be 50%. (3K-2K = 1K/2K)

The second neighbourhood would cost an additional $2,500 per month and is expected to generate an extra $3,500 per month in revenue. ROI for the second location is thus 40%.

Evidently, the retailer will opt for the first choice.

YTD

Last but not least, we have YTD which is short for Year to Date.
For example, if you are reporting sales to your manager from January 1 to today’s date, you would write: YTD, sales are $2.4M.

So, here you have a few acronyms that you can use in your next business correspondence.

We’re curious to know what acronyms you typically hear where you work.

LFTYF!
(Looking forward to your feedback)

The LV Linguistics team loves writing about anything to do with business culture and enjoys finding ways to use this to help readers improve their English skills. In addition to articles related to the corporate world, entrepreneurship, work-life balance, and more, we’re working hard to create and share English vocabulary and grammar exercises that we hope can help you to excel in your language endeavors.

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