Make It Stick: You Gave Them Six Benefits and They Walked Out With None
Topic: Make It Stick·4 principles
When nobody remembers, most people's fix is to say more, cover more, explain more clearly — all three point the wrong way.
What they forget isn't your product. It's your sentence. The thing that argues your case in front of the decision-maker is the line they repeat the next day — not the most complete version, the most repeatable one. "Story," one of the six SUCCESs principles, got its own treatment in the selling-with-stories topic; the other five come down to four moves: cut it to one line, leave a hole on purpose, make it visible and checkable, and make them feel it's about them and within reach.
PRINCIPLE 01
Say three things and you say nothing
Cutting comes before explaining
find the corecommander's intentworking memory
The principle in one line
The first move in making something stick isn't explaining better, it's cutting. One question decides it: if they walk away tonight with a single line, which line do you want it to be? Once that's fixed, everything else gets demoted to evidence for it. People who won't cut aren't greedy — they just can't bear to drop anything, so the listener cuts for them, at random.
In their words
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes (1939)
Six points in parallel equals none
Scene
Setup: you run corporate training. First meeting with the head of HR; she's given you ten minutes.
✗ Six points, all equally weighted
"Our curriculum is fairly complete, our trainers all come from operating roles, it's customisable, there's post-course follow-up, the pricing is competitive, and you get a learning report." —— All six are true and all six weigh the same, which means not one gets remembered. What she can tell her boss is "seemed pretty comprehensive" — and "pretty comprehensive" has never had a budget approved.
✓ One core line, everything else as evidence
"We solve exactly one thing: new managers not wrecking their team in the first three months. That's why it runs in three sittings, timed to the weeks they actually hit trouble; why every trainer has managed people rather than taught theory; and why you end up with a list of where yours are stuck." —— Every later sentence backs the first one. What she repeats is "there's a firm that does just the first three months of a new manager." That line survives the walk to the meeting room.
Why it works · mechanism & evidence
Why it works
Mechanism: working memory holds three to five "chunks" at a time, and what exceeds it isn't half-remembered — it's crowded out wholesale. Meanwhile every extra parallel claim dilutes the weight of all the others, so a listener who can't rank them ends up ranking none of them.
Cognitive psychology · capacity is small, and counted in chunks (hard evidence, routinely over-cited): Miller (1956, Psychological Review) proposed the famous 7±2; later work under stricter conditions — no rehearsal, no chunking — puts it closer to 4±1 (Cowan, 2001, Behavioral and Brain Sciences). What's solid is "the capacity is small and measured in meaningful chunks"; don't quote the number as a constant.
Consumer behaviour · too many options stall the decision (classic experiment, contested replication): Iyengar & Lepper (2000, JPSP) ran the jam-display study: 24 flavours drew more people over, but only about 3% of them bought, versus about 30% at the six-flavour table. Honest labelling: Scheibehenne, Greifeneder & Todd (2010, J. Consumer Research) meta-analysed around fifty studies and found a mean effect near zero — "choice overload" appears only under particular conditions (options hard to compare, no pre-existing preference). Fine as an intuition, not as a law.
Military practice · commander's intent (experience, not experiment): US Army orders require a line of Commander's Intent before the details — so that when the plan falls apart, everyone can still work out what to do. Its value is that it forces ranking; it isn't a validated psychological finding.
Boundary: cutting to one line doesn't mean withholding. On complex deals people need the full pack before they'll sign; the move is one line first, detail after, not detail never. The failure worth watching for is the reverse — using volume to hide the fact that you haven't decided what the core is.
Three questions that find the core
Write them down, don't do it in your head
· If they remember one line tonight, that line is ______.
· Delete that line. Does the rest still stand? If it does, it wasn't the core.
· Your second-most-important line: is it backing the first one, or competing with it? Move the competitor out.
English Insight
Idiomatic phrasing
"If you could keep only one line, which one?" — the question that finds the core.
"Here's the one thing: ______." — push the core to the front.
Say three things and you say nothing.
PRINCIPLE 02
Open a gap before you fill it
Curiosity peaks where one piece is missing
What keeps someone listening was never "I have something important to tell you" — it's "the thing you assume may be backwards." The key: curiosity doesn't peak when they know nothing, it peaks when they know a little and are missing one piece. So a hook is two moves — surface the belief they already hold, then poke it — and then you close the gap inside thirty seconds.
In their words
"The wick in the candle of learning."— title of Kang et al. (2009, Psychological Science); the metaphor is commonly attributed to William Arthur Ward
Where curiosity peaks
Scene
Setup: the opening of a talk, or the first line of a cold email.
✗ Straight to the answers
"Today I'll share three ways to improve signup conversion." —— Plenty of information, not one hole. Nothing is left hanging in their mind, so every following sentence becomes background noise they can take or leave.
✓ Poke the belief they already hold
"The best-converting signup flow we have went from three steps to five." (pause, and let "longer converts better?" surface on its own) "The extra two steps filter: people who finish were going to use it anyway. The rest used to drop out too — just later, at payment, after support had already spent half an hour with them." —— Gap opened, gap closed. That passage is repeatable to a colleague word for word.
Why it works · mechanism & evidence
Why it works
Mechanism: a violated expectation forcibly pulls attention back; and the state of "knowing which piece I'm missing" is itself rewarding — the drive the brain releases to close the gap also fixes whatever information arrives while it's open.
Psychology · information-gap theory (theory with experimental support): Loewenstein (1994, Psychological Bulletin) casts curiosity as deprivation caused by a gap in knowledge — which is why it peaks at intermediate knowledge, with neither total ignorance nor assumed mastery producing it. That's exactly why a hook has to surface an existing belief first.
Neuroscience · curiosity recruits reward circuitry and boosts memory (hard evidence): Kang et al. (2009, Psychological Science) scanned people answering trivia questions: high curiosity increased activity in the caudate and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, and predicted recall of the answers one to two weeks later; participants also paid a real cost — spending limited tokens, tolerating a wait — just to see the answer.
Neuroscience · curiosity opens the hippocampus (hard evidence): Gruber, Gelman & Ranganath (2014, Neuron) found that in high-curiosity states, activity in the hippocampus and the midbrain dopaminergic region (substantia nigra / VTA) — and the coupling between them — both increased; participants remembered not only the answers but also incidental faces slipped in while the gap was open. That's why the half-minute after a hook is worth so much. (cross-ref neuroscience on dopamine and memory)
Boundary: the gap has to be closed on the spot. The cost of clickbait isn't the conversion you missed this time, it's that they don't click next time — an open gap is borrowed attention, and leaving it open spends trust you haven't earned. Also, counterintuitive isn't contrarian: the belief you poke has to be one they genuinely hold, and your reversal has to be true. Bending a fact to manufacture surprise is the easiest slip in this whole move.
Four ways to open the gap
There has to be a question mark in the first line
· "Most people assume ______. Our numbers run the other way: ______."
· "The thing you should fix first is precisely not ______."
· "We tried ______ and it got worse — for a reason that surprised us."
· Self-check: after that line, does a "wait, why?" form in their head? If not, you haven't opened anything.
English Insight
Idiomatic phrasing
"Here's the part that surprised us." — the cheapest way to open a gap.
"Most people assume X. It's actually the other way round." — the standard counterintuitive hook.
Open a gap before you fill it.
PRINCIPLE 03
Concrete enough to picture, checkable enough to believe
Abstraction has nothing to hook onto
concreteness effecthuman scalefluency trap
The principle in one line
"Drive synergies," "boost collaboration," "industry-leading" aren't badly phrased — they have nothing to hook onto in the listener's head, so they evaporate where they land. And credibility doesn't come from bigger numbers or more adjectives; it comes from them being able to check it: a detail too specific to invent, a scale they can convert to their own situation, a person they can phone.
In their words
"If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere."— lyrics by Fred Ebb, Theme from New York, New York (1977); the Heath brothers named the "Sinatra test" — one example strong enough to prove the whole claim — after it
Walk down from abstract until it's visible
Scene
Setup: they ask the hardest question there is — "so what value do you actually bring?"
✗ Abstraction stacked on abstraction
"We help you cut costs, raise efficiency and deliver on your digital transformation." —— Every word is defensible; together they leave a blank. Worse, that sentence works verbatim in any industry, which tells them you haven't looked at theirs.
✓ A scene they can picture + a number in their units
"We did this last month for a thirty-person design studio: their quotes used to go back and forth between three people, two days per version, and in the busiest stretch a unit price went out wrong. Yesterday a request came in at 2pm and went out at 4. At your size that's about four hours per person per week — that four comes from their revision time logs, and I'll send you the method if you want it." —— A picture, a scale, and a source. Now they can judge for themselves whether the number holds.
Why it works · mechanism & evidence
Why it works
Mechanism: concrete nouns hook onto existing sensory memory — verbal and imagery codes fire together — while abstract words get only one code, and fewer hooks means both harder to store and harder to retrieve. Credibility runs on a different track: easily processed information gets misjudged as truer, which is the listener's vulnerability and the reason accuracy is more your responsibility, not less.
Cognitive psychology · the concreteness effect (hard evidence): Paivio, Yuille & Madigan (1968, JEP Monograph) rated 925 nouns for concreteness and found the rating reliably predicted recall; dual-coding theory (Paivio, 1971/1986) explains it as concrete words activating both verbal and imagery systems. One of the most reliably replicated effects in memory research.
Judgement psychology · easy to read reads as truer (hard evidence, and a trap): Reber & Schwarz (1999, Consciousness and Cognition) found the same statement was judged more likely true when printed in higher contrast; McGlone & Tofighbakhsh (2000, Psychological Science) found rhyming aphorisms were rated more accurate than non-rhyming paraphrases of the same claim. Processing fluency gets read as truth — so "it sounds right" is not evidence, including when the person it's fooling is you.
Pricing and negotiation · precise numbers anchor harder (moderate evidence): Janiszewski & Uy (2008, Psychological Science) found precise anchors (say 4,988) produced smaller adjustments than round ones (5,000). Honest labelling: effect sizes vary a good deal by context, so don't design your pricing around a fixed multiplier.
Boundary: a precise number is an asset only while it's checkable. Inventing a 37.4% is more persuasive today and fatal later — the moment they find one number whose origin you can't explain, they re-estimate every number you've ever given them. The rule is simple: for each one, you must be able to answer "how was that calculated?" on the spot.
Concreteness self-check
Can they play this sentence as a picture? If not, you're still in the abstract.
Is the number converted to their scale — their headcount, their week, their money?
Can I explain right now how that number was produced? If not, don't use it.
Is there one detail too specific to invent — a time, a place, something they said?
Would this passage work verbatim in another industry? If yes, you haven't studied theirs.
English Insight
Idiomatic phrasing
"Picture a Tuesday afternoon: …" — drags the abstract into one specific afternoon.
"Here's how we got that number." — handing over the method is worth more than the number.
Concrete enough to picture, checkable enough to believe.
PRINCIPLE 04
Make them care — fear on its own backfires
Threat without a way out produces avoidance
so-what ladderfear appealsefficacy
The principle in one line
The first three moves make it memorable; this one makes them act. Translate the feature into "what this means for you" and keep asking until you can't ask again. And amplifying pain has a hard edge: consequences with no way out don't produce action, they produce avoidance — they talk themselves into "it's not that bad," or they stop replying. The heavier the threat, the smaller, more concrete and more same-day the first step has to be.
In their words
"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."— widely circulated and usually attributed to Maya Angelou; close variants predate her, so treat it as folk wisdom rather than a citation
Threat × efficacy: only one square acts
Scene
Setup: you sell backup, insurance, security — anything nobody thinks about until it goes wrong.
✗ All pressure, no ladder
"Data that important, sitting on one machine? The day that drive dies the whole company stops, and by then it's too late." —— Threat maxed out, and the only exit is "buy mine." Their first reaction isn't action, it's "drives don't fail that often," followed by scrolling past your message.
✓ Concrete consequence + a step they can finish today
"A twenty-person design studio last month had everything on one old desktop; the drive died and the most recent backup was four months old — they refunded two final payments and lost a long-standing client. Which machine are your files on right now? Forget my product for a second: today, spend ten minutes copying the last three months onto a second drive. You can do that step yourself. When you want it to happen without anyone remembering to do it, we'll talk." —— They'll probably go and copy that folder. And you're now the person who fixed something, not one more person selling.
Why it works · mechanism & evidence
Why it works
Mechanism: emotion decides whether to care, reason decides which option to take. But fear converts into action only when they believe "I can do this, and doing it works"; otherwise it takes the other road — defensive avoidance: deny the severity, discredit the source, postpone indefinitely.
Health communication · fear appeals need efficacy (meta-analysis, hard evidence): Witte & Allen (2000, Health Education & Behavior) meta-analysed over a hundred studies and reached the core claim of the extended parallel process model: high threat + high efficacy → action; high threat + low efficacy → defensive avoidance. Tannenbaum et al. (2015, Psychological Bulletin) meta-analysed 248 experiments and found fear appeals do carry a positive average effect, stronger when efficacy information is included and when the target is a one-off behaviour; they found no general backfire from "too much fear," but consistently found effects near zero when no doable action is offered.
Neuroscience · emotion isn't noise in decision-making (direction solid, interpretation contested): Bechara, Damasio, Tranel & Damasio (1997, Science) showed with the Iowa Gambling Task that patients with ventromedial prefrontal damage kept choosing the bad decks even once they could state which decks were bad — absent emotional signals alongside persistently poor decisions. Honest labelling: the direction ("emotion participates in decisions") is solid, but the somatic-marker reading of this task has been challenged (Maia & McClelland, 2004, PNAS argue participants held far more explicit knowledge than originally estimated). (cross-ref neuroscience on emotion and decision-making)
Boundary: this is where the line between persuasion and manipulation is narrowest. Three sentences mark it: the pain you amplify has to be real; the way out has to actually solve it; and that way out doesn't have to be your product. In the example above, step one is "copy it yourself" — if your step one can only ever be "buy mine," what you're selling isn't a solution, it's the fear. Urgency works the same way: an invented deadline buys this deal and not the next one.
The so-what ladder: ask until you can't
Every "so what?" takes you one rung down
· Feature: what it is —— ______
· So what? → Benefit: what it does —— ______
· So what? → Outcome: what their situation becomes —— ______
· So what? → Meaning: what that means for them, their boss, their weekend —— ______
· Then add efficacy: "The first step is small — it's ______." Without that line, the rest was for nothing.
English Insight
Idiomatic phrasing
"So what does that mean for you on a Monday morning?" — the rung-by-rung push.
"The first step is small, and you don't need us for it." — efficacy and credibility in one line.
Make them care — then make it doable.
Your Day 14 Action
Take something you're certain to say this week — your self-introduction, your product pitch, a project update — and make four cuts.
Cut 1 · Trim: keep one core line and write it down. Ask of every other line: is it backing this one, or competing with it? Move the competitors out.
Cut 2 · Open: put a hook in front — "most people assume ______, actually ______" — and make sure you close that hole within thirty seconds.
Cut 3 · Land it: take your most abstract line and swap it for a scene they can picture, plus one number in their units (provided you can say how it was calculated).
Cut 4 · Add the ladder: end with "the first step is small — it's ______," and ideally that step shouldn't require buying anything from you.
Then tell it to someone with no background in your field and ask them 24 hours later what they remember. The line they repeat is your real value proposition; the part they get wrong is what you fix next.
Boundary reminder: sticky isn't the same as true, and it isn't the same as worth buying. These four cuts only guarantee the message gets in and stays in — if the thing itself is bad, sticky just spreads the bad news faster.
Think It Through
1. What I sell is genuinely complex and technical. Doesn't cutting it to one line make me look imprecise, even unprofessional?
Separate two things: you're cutting the entrance, not the delivery. The first thing anyone judges isn't "is this rigorous," it's "does this concern me" — and they have to clear that gate before they'll sit through the rigorous part. So the order is one line first, detail second: give them a handle to grab, then lay out everything when they ask "how exactly does it work?" What actually reads as unprofessional is dumping the full complexity at the start — that usually reveals not how much you know but that you haven't decided what matters most. And a counterintuitive fact: an expert's working memory isn't any bigger, their chunks are (the same sentence carries more for them). So you can use denser terminology with insiders and still give only one through-line. The test: could they repeat your one line to someone who missed the meeting? If yes, you haven't lost rigour — you've put it where it belongs.
2. I honestly don't have anything counterintuitive to say. Won't a forced hook just look like showing off?
It will, and the cost is concrete: a hole you can't fill takes trust straight out. But "nothing counterintuitive" is usually an illusion — the gap doesn't have to come from a startling fact, the information difference between you and them is enough. Three sources you already have: their default assumption ("most people's first move is to change tools, but nearly all of it goes wrong at the handover"); a hole you've fallen into and they haven't ("we tried giving everyone access and it got slower — nobody double-checked any more"); and a number they've never worked out ("have you ever added up how many people's hours one revision of a quote actually costs?"). That last kind is the most useful: the gap was already in their head, you just pointed at it. And when you genuinely have none of these, don't dig — go straight to the third principle and open with a scene concrete enough to see. Plain and true beats surprising and false.
3. Aren't these moves — surprise, concreteness, emotion — manipulation in themselves?
Look at what they act on: all four affect the accessibility of information — whether it gets noticed, understood, remembered, cared about. They don't change facts and shouldn't substitute for evidence. So the test isn't whether you used technique, it's three questions: is the line you made memorable true? is the pain you amplified real? does the way out you offered actually solve it? Three yeses and you've only given the truth a chance to be heard — truth doesn't travel on its own, and if nobody does this work the winner is usually whoever packages best. One no, and the problem isn't the technique: you're using memorability to carry a claim that can't stand. There's also a duty people miss: precisely because fluent, concrete, emotionally engaged delivery makes things easier to believe (the Reber & Schwarz finding), you carry more of the burden of proof than someone reciting dry terms, not less. So leave a checkable anchor behind every sticky line: how the number was derived, a reference they can phone, something they can trial.
4. They clearly understood in the room and nodded along. Why is there no response two days later?
Nodding means they understood. It doesn't mean they remembered, and it certainly doesn't mean they can repeat it — and whoever signs is usually not in the room, so your message has to travel through their mouth, losing something each time. Three fixes: (1) Give them a repeatable package: one core line + one number in their units + one concrete picture, assembled into sixty seconds of speech, sent to them verbatim after the meeting. (2) Repeat it in the same words instead of freshening the phrasing each time — repetition builds familiarity, and familiar statements get judged as truer (the illusory-truth effect, Hasher, Goldstein & Toppino, 1977, JVLVB; mere exposure, Zajonc, 1968). The other side of that coin: repetition also makes wrong things feel truer, so only repeat what you can stand behind. (3) Attach it to a date: turn "the first step is small" into a dated action ("copy the last three months before Thursday, and I'll check in Friday") — an intention with no date always loses to something more urgent within two days. That isn't chasing; it's moving the thing out of "sometime" and into a calendar.