February 24, 2012

You can deliver a flawless presentation, not missing a single point, with only five minutes to prepare. Really.

Most scenarios involving five minutes of prep are disaster-ville. Imagine going into a major sales appointment and having only five minutes to prepare the entire pitch. You stumble through it or read clumsy cue cards. Or, you quickly assemble a slideshow that is more of a distraction than anything.

I suspect you already know that you make sales when you connect with people. When you're prepared and knows your stuff inside out. When you make a flawless presentation.

I have great news. I came across a memory tool years back called mnemonic memory and have used it ever since. It truly takes five minutes (or less) to memorize the bullet points of any presentation or sales pitch. It comes in handy in other areas, too. Here's how it works.

Your mind work best with pictures and associations, not with repetition as you were taught in school. So, the first step to achieving perfect recall is to create an association of pictures. Start by memorizing an easy rhyming list of pictures for each number (rhymes are easy to remember too), one through 10. This is your anchor picture list.

Here’s what I use, and I suggest you use the same.

1. Gun
2. Shoe
3. Tree
4. Floor
5. Bee hive
6. Sticks
7. Heaven
8. Skate
9. Slime
10. Hen

Now, let’s pretend that you're selling accounting services. You want to explain in your sales pitch the 10 things that make your company the best choice for your clients. And of course, you share all the things that make you stand out from the competition. You have five minutes to prepare, and here are the 10 points you need to be ready to present.

1. Your company always answers the phone on the first ring.
2. Your accountants all went to Ivy League schools.
3. Your accountants all have Masters degrees.
4. Your team is versed in tax law for all 50 states.
5. Your team speaks 12 languages.
6. The office is open 24 hours, seven days a week.
7. You provide clients with an accounting system that works on mobile devices.
8. Your accountant-to-client ratio is the lowest in the industry.
9. You turn around projects super fast.
10. Your accountants offer free initial consultations.

Using mnemonic memory, you convert all of these talking points into easy-to-remember pictures. Here’s how you may do each one:

1. A ringing phone
2. An ivy-covered college building
3. A framed Masters Degree
4. A map of the 50 states
5. Twelve books with a different language title on each (French, English, Spanish, etc.)
6. A neon sign saying "Open 24/7"
7. An iPhone
8. One of your accountants with his arm over your client's shoulder.
9. A stopwatch.
10. An empty cash register.

Now, when you look at the first item on the sales-pitch list (a ringing phone), associate it with the first word from the anchor list (gun). For example, picture a gun shooting a ringing telephone. Picture it in detail, your arm holding out a gun, smoke rising from the gun and the telephone blown to smithereens.

The more details, the better. The more color to your mental picture, the better. Add more sensory details, the sound of the shooting gun and shattering plastic. The smell of the smoke. You want to “feel” in every way you can.

Close your eyes and take 15 seconds to really imprint it on your mind. It's critical to take that time.

Visualize a connection between the second item (ivy-covered college building) and the corresponding word on your anchor list (shoe). Picture your shoe covered with ivy as the ivy creeps from shoes to an old college building also covered with ivy. Hear a professor speaking in a classroom on a historical subject. Smell the fall air and catch a whiff of beer (it’s a college campus. after all). Add any details you think of to connect the shoe with the Ivy League colleges. The more detail, and oddly enough, the stranger those details are, the easier it is to remember.

Before you move on to the third item on your sales pitch, recap the first two. What was the gun shooting? The ringing telephone. How about the shoe? What was going on there? Right, ivy covering the shoe and covering the ivy league college building it's next to. Now, start on the next item. Keep doing this for all 10 items in your sales pitch.

Use this mnemonic visual trick to remember two or three things at a time, then go back in your mind and recap the list you have completed. After three or four recaps, you've completed the entire list.

That’s it! You’re done! You now have the ability to perfectly recall every bullet point of your entire sales pitch points without that slide show. Don’t believe me? Let’s test it out.

Use your anchor list to guide you. I don’t expect you to have the rhyming down just yet, so go ahead and look at the anchor list of above if you need to. Let’s start with, No. 2: shoe. OK, what is happening with the shoe? Ivy is climbing over the shoe and the building. And that means, for your sales pitch, that your accountants are all Ivy League-educated.

OK, No. 8: skate. What was going on with the skate? Low accountant-to-client ratio. Excellent. Now, No 1. The anchor for 1 was the gun. Right: The ringing telephone. We answer on the first ring.

Try it for No. 5. How about No. 7? Try No. 3 and then No. 9. What about No. 4? Oh, you’re good. No, no. You are really good.

You can now memorize even your most complex sales pitches in five minutes flat. How about them apples?

How do you plan to use this tool to your advantage? Share your ideas in the comments.

Photo credit: Jiri Hodan

Related Topics

• Innovation

Related keywords

Mike Michalowicz, Article, sales, increasing sales, sales pitch

Join the conversation ( 2 )

• Drewry News Network 3 months ago

  

  okay dokay now. talk about the ultimate sales tool and perfect recall. This is definitely a lot of jargon comprehend "speaking on my behalf for now". I may potentially double back to this article in the future and read it completely. For now, I'll just leave my humble footprint and let you know I was here :-)http://www.drewrynewsnetwork.com/f13/buffets-businesswire-communicating-effectively-u-s-spanish-language-media-2689.html

  • Mike Michalowicz 3 months ago

    

    Is your perfect sales tool back links? LOL.