In BrainScript 17 we discussed message organization. We said there that we often present to people who might seem to be giving us their full attention but actually are giving us only the small portion of the attention they can muster at that moment.

You’re telling Frank how he’s going to save big money on his kid’s school supplies, and his brain is floating somewhere on Planet 89, worrying that his fresh-mouth son will get expelled yet again this school year. This is exactly where the power of repetition and redundancy comes to the rescue.

First, let’s define each word, since the two are easily confused. According to the dictionary, repetition is the act of saying or doing something again. By contrast, redundancy is the act of using a word or phrase that repeats something else and is therefore unnecessary.

In other words, if I tell you, “Please shut the window; I’m cold. Brrr! The window needs to be closed. Would you do it please? I’m freezing!” I’m being redundant because I have restated the same two things in two different ways. If I instead say, “Please shut the window, I’m cold. Please shut the window, I’m cold,” I’m being repetitious because I have repeated myself.

In sales, both repetition and redundancy are valuable tools that not only help get your point across but also increase understanding and encoding: the conversion of information into a form that’s readily recalled at a later time. Our goal, in the language of consumer psychologists, is to enhance our prospects’ processing opportunities. That’s the case because when your salient selling points are not processed sufficiently to be stored even in your prospects’ short-term memory, you’re not inking the deal because they’re not remembering what the heck you said.

It is not your customer’s job to remember you.
It is your obligation and responsibility to make sure
they don’t have the chance to forget you.

Patricia Fripp

In advertising, repetition is easy. You simply run the same ad over and over. Since this book concerns personal selling as opposed to advertising to the masses via an impersonal broadcast medium, we’re going to discuss redundancy rather than repetition.

If you’re always telling your teenage son, “Be careful driving,” you’re expecting him to process your words in a way that will alter his behind-the-wheel behavior. As we’ve already discussed, your first mistake was probably thinking that he heard you. Sure, the sound waves that emanated from your mouth impinged on his eardrums. He may have technically heard you, but whether he processed those sounds as a meaningful expression of your concern for his safety is another story.

Instead, your words got gobbled up—as if by a hungry white shark—by his more urgent thoughts about his hot date, whether his new haircut looked freaky, if he chose the right clothes, if she’ll like his new woodsy A&F Fierce cologne, and a veritable bottomless pit of testosterone-driven, self-questioning cerebral quicksand.

Not only does redundancy help break through the clutter of whatever else is going in your potential buyer’s head, but according to the researchers Feustel, Shiffrin, and Salasoo (1983), it also increases the speed and accuracy with which he or she will recognize your points during future presentations.

Back to selling your son on the concept of safe driving. Redundancy entails creating a script containing multiple instances of “Be careful driving,” variously worded and bolstered by supporting facts and hard-hitting emotional content. Here’s an example.

“Scott, please be careful driving when you go out later tonight. I just read an article online that said that car crashes are the number one killer of kids your age. Most killer-crash accidents happen on Saturdays, most kill the driver, and most happen because of drunk driving and speeding. Makes me sick to think about it, but you’ll want to be especially careful tonight. I know that you’re a good, safe driver like me, but you need to watch out for other drivers who don’t care if their crappy driving puts you in the hospital with a fractured skull, busted jaw, broken teeth, and 400 stitches across your face. Or kills you. You have to drive carefully and constantly be checking your mirrors and expect that the nut case next to you is going to do something stupid. Did you ever look at photos of car crash victims? Some of them look like Frankenstein: permanently disfigured, their faces scrambled like a bloody omelet. Look at your watch. Every 5 to 30 seconds, BOOM! Someone just crashed and died. BOOM! Someone else just slammed into a tree and was instantly paralyzed. BOOM! Someone else just had a head-on, and tomorrow his parents will be picking out his coffin in a funeral home. That’s 6 million accidents every year, so please, Scott, please watch out for the wackos and drive carefully tonight.”

We all know that each script needs to be tailored for the person you’re talking to, the time available, the other person’s current mindset, and other factors. The key is to craft the script with redundant, emotionally charged messages to give you a measurably better chance of hitting the one hot button that flips on the light of understanding, the aha! moment that snips the last defensive wire that’s preventing that person from signing your contract or pulling out his or her cash.

Not only does redundancy help drive your point home, help your prospect recall the most important points of your presentation with greater speed and accuracy, and help consumers better understand your overall presentation (Maclnnis, 1988), not just the redundant parts, it also works to imprint your presentation more powerfully in your prospects’ minds, which helps increase the likelihood that it will be more readily retrieved at a later date (Kieras, 1978). This is especially useful for presentations that require more than just one meeting from your first handshake to the time you actually ink the deal.

My advice? Get busy being redundant! Do some sales script surgery. Record one of your live presentations. Transcribe it. Get it out of your head and into a script form that you can more easily see, edit, and judge outside the context of your own brain. Highlight the most important points. Then write several variations of each of those points. Bring in an audience for a meta-perspective, as we discussed in BrainScript 16: “The Psychology of Examples Versus Statistics.” This allows you to be interestingly redundant and present multiple variations of each of your key points while keeping your pitch fresh and interesting. In the process, you’ll be amazed how you’ll craft dramatically more powerful ways to deliver your most important points. I guarantee you’ll toss your old script. You can follow the advice in this section or continue using a weaker script that probably will end up in the trash.

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