Understand Your Buyer > Selling Communication Basics > The Chinese Whisper Effect

What is it?

The quality and content of your sales message will change as it’s relayed from person to person. However strong or clear your messaging is, you can’t help the fact that people will forget and edit parts of your messaging.

Why does it work?

Chinese Whispers are human nature, you can’t stop it happening. It works because we are only paying so much attention to the things we come across and view the world from our own unique perspective. As such, our recollection of sales messaging reflects this diversity.

What can you do about it?

Using taglines, acrostics and other techniques you can ensure that your sales messaging is not only C.L.E.A.R and more memorable, but that it’s the same every time which is the real “secret” to having a Clear Sales Message.

Example:

Imagine you run a premium coffee subscription service.

Your intended message: “We deliver freshly roasted, ethically sourced coffee beans to your door every week.”
What a happy customer might say: “They send really nice coffee every month.”
What their friend hears: “It’s some coffee delivery thing.”

By the time the message is passed on, the specifics of “freshly roasted” and “ethically sourced” are lost.

How to prevent this:
If your tagline was “Fresh. Ethical. Weekly.”, the message is short, memorable, and hard to distort. Even if someone forgets the details, they’ll remember the key points.

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