Adults have worse memory than children, and that can actually be an advantage 🤯

In psychology, there is a theory called Fuzzy Trace Theory, developed by Valerie F. Reyna and Charles J. Brainerd.

It shows something quite uncomfortable for those of us who work in sales.

Adults don’t make decisions based on exact facts,
but on simplified “gist meanings” of what the information represents.

In a well-known experiment, children and adults were given exactly the same list of 15 words, for example:
bed – rest – tired – pillow – dream – night – nap.

Then they were asked:
“Was the word sleep on the list?”

The result:
❌ Adults often answered incorrectly: “yes.”
✅ Children more often answered correctly: “no.”

In other words: adults were wrong more often, precisely because they remembered the meaning, not the details.

Children remembered what was actually said.
Adults remembered what it was about.

And this is exactly the same mechanism that happens in business.

You can give a customer 30 slides full of facts.
But the only thing that sticks is something like:
“This feels safe.”
or
“This feels risky.”

And that’s the level on which the decision is made.

Salespeople often talk in details.
Customers make decisions based on meaning.

The salesperson says:
“Our solution has 99.9% uptime and 42 features.”
The customer remembers:
“This feels complex.”

But if the salesperson says:
“Our solution removes manual work.”
Then the customer remembers:
“This makes my life easier.”

So the question is:
Are we talking to the customer’s brain, or to their real decision engine?

The smarter and more experienced your customer is, the less they care about your arguments,
and the more they care about what your solution means for them.

Here you can read about how top salespeople interpret signals from their customers.