TFT: Authority Earns Respect. Memorability Earns the Call.

They nodded through the whole call. They agreed with every pain point you named. Then they hired the person they remembered.

The idea behind this article came from Pinkie — check out more of her work at AI Meets Girlboss. She's the one who helped me understand what memorability is really about. I ran ENG Sales through her Visual Brand Distinctiveness Test, which scores a brand across six dimensions from Made to Stick. Simple, Credible, and Concrete all came back at 4 out of 5. Unexpected, Emotional, and Story each came back at 2. I even wrote a full article on optimizing for authority over memorability. People remembered the advice. They didn't remember who gave it.

It took me a while to connect the dots, but the same lesson applies to your revenue system. You can be the most credible person a buyer talks to all week and still be forgettable. Three other people named the same pain that week. Credibility gets you the meeting. The outcome they can picture is what they walk away remembering. Today we'll walk through where authority runs out, what actually makes you stick, and how memorability shows up in every driver of your revenue flywheel.

Authority gets you the nod

Authority is where you prove you know the problem. This is the "become an evangelist for the problem" phase every founder goes through. What's always stood out to me is how often a founder has lived the problem — they evangelize because they know the pain, and that pain fired them up to fix it. Customers can hear that. They can feel it.

But evangelizing the problem only describes where they are today. It's a great way to start the meeting and get them nodding, and nodding isn't buying. Memorability starts when you describe where they'll be once the problem is gone.

Think about fitness. "I've got a great ab workout for you." You've heard that line a hundred times and remembered none of them. "5-minute abs." That one sticks. Same promise — a flat stomach. One describes the solution; the other paints a picture of your future after just five minutes.

Authority says I understand your pain. Memorability says here's your life after it.

Specific beats impressive every time

What makes "5-minute abs" stick is the 5. Everybody has five minutes, so the number kills the excuse before the buyer can say it out loud. It also feels achievable. The biggest thing I took from Pinkie's audit was that Unexpected was one of my lowest scores — and an unexpected moment is what leads to a memorable one. Those moments catch people slightly off guard. They land just outside what they expected to hear.

Here's mine. When I start working with a founder, I'm building a sales system that creates momentum without them in every conversation. For most technical founders and small business owners, that sounds close to impossible. They've been in every deal since day one and have never seen a version of their business where the system runs and they get to step back. That disbelief is the moment. The claim they almost can't believe is the one they bring up later.

Specific outcomes drive their desire to make a change themselves.

So here's the question I'd put to you: what's one outcome you've delivered that would make your next client stop and rethink what's possible? That could become a case study, a number in your sales copy, or a timeline you can deliver repeatably. What's your version of "5-minute abs"?

Your flywheel needs a memorable moment

Building momentum in your revenue system doesn't happen without memorable moments — and there's an opportunity in every driver of the Revenue Flywheel.

Customer Engagement. You still open by evangelizing the problem, because the problem confirms there's a need to change. That's why they agree to the first conversation. Then you help them see the future — and that's where they agree to work with you instead of someone else. When I started with the CEO of a VA company, the future we agreed to build was her out of every discovery call, with a sales process that runs without her in the room. With a local HVAC company, it was steady growth in their commercial sector, driven by the process and no longer riding on one salesperson.

Improvement. Once you're in, make the improvements visible and make it obvious you drove them. Memorability fades fast when results go quiet. This is the execution stage where you show them you don't just know the problem — you're delivering the change you sold. This is your chance to build the moments you want them to remember and talk about.

Upsell. By now you've built trust. Upsell and re-engagement are about using that trust to expand. The outcomes you've already delivered become proof of your ability to solve the next problem. Help them picture life after you solve that one, and the one after it. That's where momentum compounds.

Action step

• Before Friday, write your memorable moment in one sentence. It needs a number, a timeline, or a result someone could repeat. If it sounds like everyone else's pitch, keep cutting.
• Use it on your next discovery call and listen for what they repeat back to you. That's your signal.
• Turn one past client win into a before/after story you can tell in under a minute. Skip this and you stay the credible option they forget by Thursday.

Not sure which driver is costing you the most momentum? The Revenue Flywheel Diagnostic will show you in under 10 minutes.

Recommended reading

• TFT: Engage With Insight — the engagement driver in depth.
• TFT: Make Customers Better Every Quarter — how to make improvements visible.
• The Positioning Leak You Won't See Until a Customer Churns — where message drift costs you the renewal.

Sales is just problem solving with another human.

This article was originally published on the ENG Sales newsletter. Idea sparked by Pinkie at AI Meets Girlboss.