1: It’s Wednesday. “You park your car at your home airport. You get on a plane for a business trip,” Erik Peterson and Tim Riesterer write in their book Conversations That Win the Complex Sale.
Two days later, you fly home. But what happens if you haven’t written down your parking space?
You can’t remember where you parked your car.
“Why not?” Erik and Tim ask. “You parked there not that long ago.”
Because they observe, if you are a frequent traveler, you’ve parked at that airport lots of times.
“Your mind can no longer keep your most recent parking spot separate from all the others,” the authors explain.
Scientists call it “interference.”
“It becomes very hard for your brain to find the precise memory that corresponds to that event,” they explain. “It gets jumbled up with similar memories.”
Let’s look at another travel story to illustrate the point. You fly in the night before a big meeting. You rent a car and park it at your hotel.
The next morning, you walk out into the parking lot. “What the heck did I drive here last night?” you wonder.
“Even though you just parked there the night before,” the authors write, “it’s still hard to remember what you drove, because you’ve had similar experiences so many times previously.”
2: Imagine a bucket of white marbles.
“Think of the next memory you add to that bucket as being a white pearl,” Erik and Tim suggest. “Once that white pearl gets dropped into that bucket of white marbles and swirled around, how hard is it going to be to find that white pearl?”
Difficult, right?
To stand out, a memory must be a black pearl among white marbles. It can’t blend in.
“No matter how much that bucket gets swirled around, it’s always going to be easy to find that black pearl,” the authors note.
That’s your job as a salesperson or as a marketer.
To succeed, your messaging must stand out clearly, like a black pearl among white marbles.
3: Yesterday, we explored the three parts of the brain, which are nested within each other.
The neocortex, the outer layer, is the brain’s computer. It loves to process data and happily does so all day.
Beneath that is the limbic system, which sits inside the neocortex, like a ball in a glove. “The limbic system,” they explain, “is where emotions reside—love, hate, and the varying shades of human feelings.”
Under the limbic system is the “Old Brain”: the brain stem and older structures, holding it all up like a stick and a Popsicle.
It cares about one thing: Survival. “Your Old Brain acts as a filter. It decides what gets noticed—and gets your attention,” Erik and Tim note. The Old Brain is constantly doing a “fight or flight” assessment.
It asks: How must I react? Does this help me live longer or threaten me?
If you want to catch the Old Brain’s attention, you must break the pattern. Do something unexpected. Change the script.
“The way to create that black pearl memory is to do something different,” they note.
Erik and Tim call it a “Grabber.” Because it creates a spike of attention.
“You can think of those spikes as being like a ‘bed of nails,'” they observe. “It’s really hard to fall asleep when you’re lying on a bed of nails, as opposed to lazily rocking in a hammock.”
And what should all of these spikes support?
“Your Power Messaging,” the authors explain. “That’s the part of your message that you want to get stick. That’s what you want your prospect to remember.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Does my message stand out—or does it blend in with everything else my prospect is hearing?
Action: Identify one way to break the pattern in your next conversation—something unexpected that will capture attention and make your message memorable.
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