Improve You Sales Call Memory to Strengthen Your Sales Intuition

The average person only remembers about forty major events of their entire life. However, Jill Rose has a very unique talent. She can remember every detail about every day of her life. As a result, memory researchers at the University California at Irvine have been studying Jill's memory recall for the past eight years to understand how her memory works.

      

As salespeople, we spend most of our time trying to predict the behavior, intentions, attitudes, and feelings of our customers. In essence, the goal of every salesperson is to be able to anticipate the future. The "tool" you use to accomplish this is your "sales intuition." Memory plays a fundamental role in determining the strength of your sales intuition. Your ability to store more sales call experiences in your memory will actually strengthen your sales intuition. With this goal in mind, here are six principles to help improve your sales call memory:

      

Sensory information. During the sales call, consciously gather as much information as possible from your sight, sound, and touch senses. A vivid event is more likely to be memorized than a dull one, and the more sensory information that is incorporated into your memories, the higher your likelihood of recording it.

      

Association. Thoughts and experiences are more readily recalled when they are linked to a specific association. A very simple association would be the success or failure of the call. The association may be further defined by the customer's technical and business requirements or their objections to purchasing your product.

      

Specificity. The persistence of a memory is directly related to the precision of details that are input at the time of the experience. During a sales call, you may even want to tell yourself that some information is important and is not to be forgotten.

      

Unique events. Many sales calls are free-flowing events that lack a strict organization of facts. Therefore, it is easier to remember any unusual and unique aspects of a sales call that stand out from the ordinary and mundane.

    

First and last. Most salespeople are quick to remember how a sales call began (the big opening) and how it ended (the grand finale). This is a natural characteristic of memory, whereby we tend to remember the information that is presented first and last more than the details in between. This particularly applies to longer sales calls, more than an hour. One way to help remember all of the in-between information is to mentally break the sales call into smaller segments (or chunks) either by time, presenter, or topic of discussion.

    

The good, the bad, and the ugly. Be forewarned, your brain has been trained to block out unpleasant images. However, it is critical that all information during a sales call, both good and bad, be stored.

    

Never forget, how something is remembered will determine how much is remembered.

Comments

[_j@COREpage]

Steve-
Thanks for these great, simple and memorable tips.
My biggest takeaway is "how something is remembered will determine how much is remembered."

-j
community manager
CorePage | Know more. Sell faster.

[Peter (Sales Training)]

I have witnessed many sales meetings where I really want to just forget all of them. When we work with many sales people for the first tiem it is a reasonable goal to get them to concentrate on the begginning and end - and above all to make it memorable for the intended client.

There is a theory in self help and Nlp that nothing is ever forgotten. It is just how good we are at recall.

[Graeme Davidson]

I am delighted to have found your blog and will now promise to syndicate your feeds to me.

I am a business development executive for a digital agency and always love to read other people's blogs and sites to keep up-to-date with thoughts and ethos regarding new business and sales.

Thank you very much for this helpful insight

[Rob Towns]

Another suggestion to improve your sales intuition is by conducting sales affirmations. A sales affirmation means telling yourself over and over and over about a certain key to sales success. It becomes ingrained in your non-conscious memory after much repetition and it begins to become a part of your underlying sales abilities. See what I mean after reading some of this info The sales process is a window of opportunity to construct a viable strategy, and implement this strategy with the goal of achieving the sale. Steve and Jim, I appreciate your commentary and believe you are both absolutely correct. I think a big key to sales success starts with the fundamentals. Before you can construct a sales strategy, you need to be focussed on the most important characteristics of your position which lead to success - this means focusing on the "critical few" as opposed to the "trivial many." If you are scatter brained and multi-tasking up the wazooo, you work efficiency and productivity drops enormously. I'd suggest you guys take a look at John Assaraf's new book "The Answer"... very relevant to our conversation. Great commentary everybody. Everybody needs an inspiration in the form of a coach, or multiple coaches. By "coach" I mean somebody that you trust and are comfortable with that will give the positive and constructive feedback. Self-development comes through rewiring your brain to accomplish things that force you to "change" or exit your comfort zone.... www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2

[Rob Towns]

Another suggestion to improve your sales intuition is by conducting sales affirmations. A sales affirmation means telling yourself over and over and over about a certain key to sales success. It becomes ingrained in your non-conscious memory after much repetition and it begins to become a part of your underlying sales abilities. See what I mean after reading some of this info The sales process is a window of opportunity to construct a viable strategy, and implement this strategy with the goal of achieving the sale. Steve and Jim, I appreciate your commentary and believe you are both absolutely correct. I think a big key to sales success starts with the fundamentals. Before you can construct a sales strategy, you need to be focussed on the most important characteristics of your position which lead to success - this means focusing on the "critical few" as opposed to the "trivial many." If you are scatter brained and multi-tasking up the wazooo, you work efficiency and productivity drops enormously. I'd suggest you guys take a look at John Assaraf's new book "The Answer"... very relevant to our conversation. Great commentary everybody. Everybody needs an inspiration in the form of a coach, or multiple coaches. By "coach" I mean somebody that you trust and are comfortable with that will give the positive and constructive feedback. Self-development comes through rewiring your brain to accomplish things that force you to "change" or exit your comfort zone.... www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2

[Ian Brodie]

Some great pointers Steve.

On perhaps obvious point to improve your "memory" of sales calls is to write your notes as soon as you leave the call. Have a small pocketbook handy you can "whip out" straight away - and use a standard template for recordnign all the relevant facts.

Ian