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!