Business English Phrases and Idioms Every Businessperson Should Know

Hi, I’m Savannah. Welcome to Oxford Online English! 

In this lesson, you can learn some  common vocabulary, phrases and  

idioms for office life. This class will  help you understand English speakers at  

work and use a wider range of English  vocabulary in your office conversations. 

Before we start, you should check out our website:  Oxford Online English dot com. You can find all  

our free English lessons. We also offer online  classes with professional teachers, where you  

can study speaking, prepare for IELTS, improve  your pronunciation, or whatever else you want!

So, how are things looking?

Not good, to be honest… We’re way  behind our forecasts. We missed our  

targets for Q1 and it’s not looking  positive for this quarter, either.

OK, so what’s going wrong?

We’re not really sure…

Right now, I’m afraid that’s not good enough.  

You’re the sales manager –  you need to have answers.

Well, one problem is that cold calling doesn’t  seem to be working as well as it did in the past.

So? You’re in charge. If it’s not working,  

change it. We may be a big company, but  we still need to be quick on our feet.

I take your point, but I can’t turn  everything around overnight. A case  

in point is our high staff turnover. Many of  our sales team are relatively inexperienced.

But we have a good product…

Of course, but inexperienced salespeople don’t  have that deep understanding of our USP that  

comes from working here for a while. And, in  B2B sales, buyers can smell that inexperience.

Either way, this is your domain. You  need to come up with some answers.

Here, you heard some words and  phrases to talk about sales.  

You’re going to see some  sentences from the dialogue, *but*  

the highlighted phrases all have a mistake.  Can you correct the mistakes? Let’s look. 

Think about your ideas. Can you  remember the correct phrases?  

Pause the video and find your answers now. Could you do it? Let’s see the correct phrases. 

How did you do? Did you get all the right answers?  

And, do you know what these  words and phrases mean? 

‘Cold calling’ is a sales technique. It means  calling someone you’ve never spoken to before  

and trying to convince them to  buy whatever you’re selling. 

‘Quick on your feet’ means flexible  – if you’re quick on your feet,  

you can adapt to new situations easily. 

‘Turnover’ in this dialogue means how  often staff arrive and leave. If staff  

often leave your company and need to be  replaced, then you have high turnover. If  

employees tend to stay at your company for  a long time, then you have low turnover.

‘Turnover’ also has other meanings. In particular,  

it can mean the total amount of money  that goes in and out of a business. 

Finally, what about USP? What does this stand for? 

USP stands for ‘unique selling proposition’,  or sometimes ‘unique selling point’.  

This is about what makes your product  or service different from competitors.  

Maybe your product is higher  quality, or maybe it’s cheaper,  

or maybe it has features that competing  products don’t. These could all be USPs.

USP is an *abbreviation.* You heard two other  abbreviations in the dialogue. Do you remember? 

You heard ‘Q1’ and ‘B2B’. The ‘Q’ in ‘Q1’ stands  for ‘quarter’, meaning a three-month period.  

Generally, Q1 means January to March. B2B stands for ‘business to business’.  

You can also talk about ‘B2C  sales’ – business to customer. 

Everything clear? Remember that you can  always review a section if you need to.  

Turn on subtitles or adjust the playback speed to  make it slower if you find it difficult to follow.

For now, let’s look at our next topic.

I don’t seem to have a copy of the agenda for  next week’s meeting. Has it not been sent out yet?

What? We’re not doing the meeting.  We’re having a conference call instead,  

so that the team in Singapore can be involved.

Really? No one told me.

I can forward you the details. Actually, do  you have any free time later? I’d  

like to touch base with you about  some of the proposals we’ll be making.

Er… What proposals? Seems like I’m really out  of the loop here. No one’s told me anything.

I mean the new product lines we’re  launching for the East Asian market.  

We talked about it at some  length in the last team meeting.  

You were there, right? Anyway, if you need to  refresh your memory, you can read the minutes.

I wasn’t there – I was in Paris for  the conference that week, remember?

Ah… Right…

In that case, let’s find a time later this  week. You can catch me up so that I’m ready.

Yes, agreed. I’d like your input  on a few things. I’ll send you  

the materials and we can fix a time by email.

In this dialogue, you heard some vocabulary  for talking about meetings and teamwork.

Let’s see if you can remember what you  heard. Can you complete the missing words?

If you’re stuck, you can always rewind  and listen to the dialogue again.  

Either pause now, or review, and get your  answers. You’ll see the answers in a few seconds. 

Ready? Let’s check together. 

How many did you get? Have you heard  these words and phrases before? 

‘Touch base’ means ‘talk’ or ‘have a discussion’.  It’s a conversational, idiomatic phrase. 

If you’re out of the loop, then you  don’t know what’s going on. For example,  

if go on vacation for two weeks and don’t check  your emails, when you get back to work, you  

might be a bit out of the loop – you won’t know  what’s happening and what people are working on.

You can also use the opposite phrase – ‘in  the loop’ – meaning that you’re speaking  

to your colleagues regularly and you know  everything that’s happening in your office. 

‘Catch up’ is a phrasal verb. If someone says  ‘You can catch me up’, this means that there  

are some things which I don’t know, and which  you can tell me about. It has the idea that I’ve  

missed something – there’s something I should  know, but I don’t, and you’re going to tell me.

From experience, ‘catch up’ can be  difficult to translate into other languages.  

If you’re confused about this, check  an online dictionary and look for more  

example sentences. Longman and Lexico  are good online dictionaries to use. 

Finally, what about ‘input’? If someone says  ‘I’d like your input’, it means that they want  

your ideas and opinions. Got it? Let’s move on.

Let me tell you about my vision. Instead of having  bricks-and-mortar offices in just a few countries,  

we move our sales infrastructure  100% online. This will not only…

Whoa, whoa, hold on a second. You’re talking  about your ‘vision’ and your ‘mission’,  

but your branch is still losing money every  month. Don’t you think you’re overreaching?

Well, I have a comprehensive business plan.  

We put together a road map for digitising our  national operations, as a first step, and…

How about you focus more on breaking even  on a month-to-month basis, and spend less  

time on these pie-in-the-sky ideas? Besides,  this is way beyond your pay grade. You need to  

deal with your own branch, your own team, and  your own KPIs. It’s not that you shouldn’t make  

suggestions for improving things, but  you should get the basics right first.

Yes, but…

No buts! The number one priority for you right now  is making sure your branch at least breaks even.  

You’re a young branch, so losing  money at the start is expected,  

but we need to see a path to profitability. Right  now, I’m not sure you’re on the right track.

But in the current business environment…

Look, I don’t want to hear it. You need to  get your house in order. Put your team first,  

and build a successful regional branch office.

This dialogue was about  business planning and strategy.  

Let’s start with one question: did  you notice the title of this section?  

It was ‘pie in the sky’? What could this mean?  You also heard it in the dialogue. Any idea? 

‘Pie in the sky’ means an impossible dream.  In the dialogue, you heard this sentence.

‘Pie-in-the-sky ideas’ are ideas which  sound nice, but which aren’t realistic.

Let’s look at some more language which you heard. 

Look at the highlighted words and phrases. Imagine  you want to explain them in English to someone who  

doesn’t know the meaning. How would you do it?  Pause the video and think about your answers. 

‘Overreaching’ means to go too  far, or to try to do too much.  

For example, if you agree to do a project which  you don’t have the skills or experience for,  

you could say that you overreached. 

A road map is a detailed plan, showing  exactly how you will achieve something.  

It’s often used for large,  complex projects and plans. 

‘Beyond your pay grade’ refers to  something which is not your job.  

If someone asks you to do something, and you say  

‘that’s beyond my pay grade’, you mean  that you aren’t responsible for this  

and you won’t do it. In the dialogue, the phrase  was used as a criticism. Telling someone else  

‘that’s beyond your pay grade’ is a way to say  that they’re trying to do something which isn’t 

part of their job; it suggests that the person  you’re talking to should stick to their own job. 

‘On the right track’ means ‘going in the right  direction’. If you’re working on a project,  

and you say ‘everything’s on the right track’,  you mean that things are going to plan. 

‘Get your house in order’ means to  sort out your own responsibilities.  

An alternative – with the same meaning  – is ‘put your house in order’.  

It’s most often used as a criticism. For  example, if someone who is weeks behind on  

their work criticises you for being slow or lazy,  you might tell them to get their house in order,  

meaning that they should do their own work  on time before they start criticising others. 

One more point: there is more language in  these dialogues that you might find useful.  

We suggest reviewing each dialogue at least once,  

and make notes of any words or  phrases you want to remember.

Now, let’s go to our last section.

So, what do you think?

About what? Is that everything?

Well, yeah… I worked all week on it.

It’s just two pages, with hardly any detail.  

What about the technical infrastructure?  What about cost estimates? Look, I won’t  

beat around the bush: I can’t do anything  with this. I’d get laughed out of the room.

Perhaps I have bitten off more than  I can chew… I’m not so familiar with  

the technical side of things. I thought we  could fill some of those details in later.

Doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid.  Either you bring me something I can use,  

or you go back to the drawing  board, or you give up.

I don’t suppose you could assign someone  to help me to work on the IT angle?

My hands are tied, I’m afraid. We’re under  a lot of pressure right now. You said that  

you could make this work; now you need to put  your money where your mouth is, to be blunt.

OK, I’ll have a think about it.  Back to square one, I guess…

In this dialogue, you heard several idioms.

Do you remember the idiom from the title of the  last section? It was ‘pie in the sky’. You heard  

more idioms like this here. Can you remember them? You heard idioms with these meanings. 

Can you remember the idioms which match  these meanings? For the third meaning – start  

something again from the very beginning  – you heard two idioms in the dialogue.

Pause the video, or review the dialogue and  try to find the idioms with these meanings!  

Try to find all six – remember  there are two answers for one point. 

Did you get all six? Let’s check.

‘Beat around the bush’ means  to speak in an indirect,  

unclear way. If someone’s beating around the  bush, they’re not saying what they really think.  

This is often used in the negative; for example,  if you tell someone ‘don’t beat around the bush’,  

you want to say ‘get to the point  and tell me what I need to know.’ 

‘Bite off more than you can chew’ means to  try to do something which is too difficult.  

The meaning here is more direct – imagine trying  to put too much food in your mouth at one time. 

For the third meaning, there were two phrases:  ‘go back to the drawing board’ and ‘back to  

square one’. You can use these phrases as  verbs, with ‘go’, or as a simple exclamation,  

without the verb ‘go’. So, you could say  ‘We need to go back to the drawing board,’  

or just ‘Back to the drawing board!’  The meaning is the same either way. 

‘My hands are tied’ means that I can’t help  you. If you say this, it suggests that you  

aren’t free to choose. You can use it to  mean ‘I want to help you, but I can’t.’

Finally, ‘put your money where your mouth  is’ means to back up your words with actions.  

If you tell someone ‘You need to  put your money where your mouth is’,  

you’re telling that person to stop  talking and do something instead.

Have you heard any of these idioms before? You  

can use them and hear them in many  situations, not just in the office.

That’s all for this class. Thanks for watching!

See you next time!