All’s Well that “Ends” Well

There’s a lot to be said for a good ending. We know this when it comes to books and movies, but the truth is, how almost any experience ends has a huge effect on our overall remembrance of it. Consider the family reunion that starts out with hugs and laughter but at the last dinner, ends with hurt feelings and someone storming out. How do we tend to remember the reunion? “Train wreck” and “nightmare” are two terms that come to mind.

Almost as much fun as a bad family reunion, colonoscopies were once the focus of a medical study on patient perception and memory. (There are so many jokes about “good endings” that I could make right now.) Patients saw the same doctors and underwent the exact same procedure. Bear in mind that this study took place years ago, at which time the procedure was much more painful and traumatic than it is today. (Because as we all know, getting a colonoscopy in this modern age is a real walk in the park.)

Some patients procedures lasted less than ten minutes while other people had to undergo over an hour of…well, you know. Doctors asked each patient how they felt after the procedure and surprisingly, the patients whose procedures had lasted significantly longer were not always the people who were the most traumatized. Often, it was people who had only undergone mere minutes who described the experience in agonizing terms. That makes no sense, right?

Wrong.

Here’s why: The reason some people were so much more affected was that the level of discomfort the patients were in at the moment the procedure ended directly related to how they each rated the entire experience. Colonoscopies back then not only varied significantly in length but also in the amount of pain patients felt. Some patients felt intense pain at the end of the procedure, whereas some only felt uncomfortable. The experts running the study were amazed that the length of the procedure had absolutely zero affect on people’s analysis of how bad the experience was. Time was simply not a variable. The ruling factor was how much pain each patient was in at the time it ended. Their perception of the ending defined their entire memory of the event.

As it turns out, this is the norm for people across the board. Subsequent studies of other procedures confirmed this phenomenon. A person’s assessment of how something ends is how they will later remember the entire experience.

Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman explored this even further. Kahneman’s hypothesis was that a person’s level of satisfaction at the end of any experience will strongly drive their overall opinion of the entire experience. Subsequent psychological studies have proven this premise to be consistent and true.

This fact begs some serious questions about how you end things with potential customers. Just how intentional is the conclusion of your sales conversation? Have you dedicated time to crafting various strong endings? Do you tend to focus on your introduction and the main body of your sales conversation? Doing so is understandable, but as the poor colonoscopy patients and the Nobel Prize winner have proven, how a sales conversation ends is a crucial part of a sales experience. However things end with you is how your customers will remember their entire encounter with you.

Put some time and effort into purposely creating a pleasant close to the sales experience and you will end strong. End strong and you will change your customer’s world.