After receiving the results of my sons reading and writing tests I was introduced to the term “chunking”. Upon researching this term I found that there is psychology chunking, writing chunking, computing chunking, extended smtp chunking, computational linguistics chunking, division chunking, music chunking and I am sure many others. Who knew, right? After reading through these descriptions, however, I had an epiphany! Why not Sales Chunking?

Sales Chunking

Let’s face it, there is a lot to know to become a successful sales professional, sales engineer, and sales manager today. Our products and solutions are complicated. Our competitors products and solutions are complicated. Hard enough for us to grasp and remember, but what about the customer?

Organizing and grouping separate pieces of information together as to remember the information easier makes sense to me. I have not doubt if presented this way it will make sense to a potential customer as well. A win-win.

How I Sales Chunk

There are several ways to chunk information. Chunking techniques include grouping, finding patterns, and organizing. With some practice and insight it will be possible to determine which technique will work best for you. Maybe even a combination of techniques. Here are a few I use.

Grouping
We generally can only handle around 7 items in our short term memory at a time. Some of us a little more, some a little less. If asked to store more than this without some sort of technique most of us would fail. A telephone number is a good example of this. Breaking the number into three groups, 602-730-5734, is much easier to remember than memorizing the whole number of 6027305734.

Which presentation, email, website landing page do you remember? The one with a plethora of information presented on and on or the one that was organized into impactful groups of easy to understand information, single statistics?

And yet we feel compelled to cram as much information in an email, proposal, presentation as we can. Long paragraphs not easily scanned without any real regard to this short term memory issue. The irony is we also get irritated when the client doesn’t remember our advantages and buys from someone else with a less than product. Are they stupid or did we not present for long-term memory?

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein

Patterns
Finding patterns in the information is a technique that can be used in a variety of ways. The one I like and use most often is the first letter technique. For example I developed a holistic approach to technical sales training. Quite a mouthful and hard to remember. So instead I called it HATS. First letters Holistic Approach to Technical Sales in the title pattern technique. Each letter then triggered the memory for the word.

Organizing
Organizing information based on its meaning is how I start the sales process typically. After the initial meeting I always write a summary of what I learned. I ask for confirmation from the client. This information is not a presentation of random notes. It is presented to the potential customer in a grouped organized fashion. I do this for myself as well. I now have their needs chunked through this exercise. If they confirm what I have sent they too now have the information chunked and learned.

The Sales Chunking Advantage

What an advantage in the sales process if we can learn to use sales chunking in our emails, presentations and proposals. Getting the customer to keep the proposed solution in their memory is a technique and tool we should take serious. How do you sales chunk?

Chris Lott

Chris has over 15 year’s Sales Management experience including Business Ownership, Product Management and Web Design/Marketing. He’s a national sales team strategist and trainer. Chris is the designer of the popular totallysales™ sales playbook with thousands of copies downloaded. He’s a nationally syndicated author with his articles on SalesBlog! rated as a “top must-read” on consultative selling.