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The Key to Memorable Conversations with Prospects and Customers [Insights from Dr. Carmen Simon]

Jan 10th, 2017

 

Repetition is critical to ensuring your message sticks.

Repetition is critical to ensuring your message sticks.

Repetition is critical to ensuring your message sticks.

Several sales and marketing experts discuss the intersection of sales efficiency and effectiveness. As we focus on having more valuable conversations with prospects and customers, are we sure they remember what we want them to remember?

As Dr. Carmen Simon, author of Impossible to Ignore shares below, we may want to be more repetitive.

How can sales and marketing professionals have more memorable conversations with buyers?

CS: Conversations are different than presentations, in the sense that they may appear easier to carry through. However, some people may hide under the term “conversations” and use them as a pretext not to prepare. This is dangerous because a conversation may feel good to the brain in the moment (both sender and receiver) because neither party has to spend a lot of cognitive energy, especially when a conversation “flows” and you move smoothly from one segment to another.

But a conversation does not guarantee taking charge of what we want others to remember.

A conversation may lead to gist memory – the familiarity with your topic, versus verbatim memory, which means remembering specific details.

Gist memory is advantageous because it is longer-lasting. Think for your own situation: you may remember having a great time on a recent vacation, and even the hotel where you stayed, but you likely don’t remember the room number. It’s the same for people you talk to: they may remember enjoying the conversation they had with you, but do they remember details that you want them to remember?

This is important to ask and answer because, if they don’t remember precise details that you consider important and they speak to your competition, after a few days, they won’t know who said what. And they may give credit to the other source.

So even if you carry on a conversation, consider returning to a main message you want people to remember.

And return to it more than once. This way, you will enable others to say, “I remember exactly what you told me,” versus “I sort of remember what you told me.”

Precise memory means business because people act on what they remember, not on what they forget.

If you missed the last posts in this series, read:

The next post in this blog series with Dr. Simon will discuss how seasoned salespeople and marketers can utilize their experience to be more memorable.

Get a copy of Impossible to Ignore and find more information about Dr. Simon’s work at Memzy.com.