Ms. Marketing: Laughter Opens Wallets
Ms. Marketing: Laughter Opens Wallets
Dear Ms. Marketing: I have heard that in sales, “If you can make them laugh you can make them buy.” I have had salespeople who come in and they can’t tell a joke which is not good for a sale. What can I do to be better at telling a joke or funny story that might help to make a sale?
Just like with any other sales skill you have to master the art of joke/story telling.
Start today by hanging around funny people. You will be amazed at how your humor will increase when you hang around funny people. You will also feel better because you will be laughing and smiling all the time.
Humor is not always the way to go. It is easy to learn about your product and the art of selling but it is a lot harder to place humor into your sales presentation and make it work.
You know you have finally developed that relationship between you and your customer when you can tell a funny story or a joke and they laugh.
You will be able to tell who you can tell your jokes to and who you can not. If you have a customer who never smiles or laugh you are not going to win them over with a joke.
In my experience they will almost always be about price. If you can be friendly and funny at the same time you will almost always make a sale. Once again people like to do business with people they like.
Never retell a joke. Most sales people retell jokes that were not funny to begin with and then to retell the joke is worst. Most jokes are offense to someone and you never know what will work and what won’t. If you start telling funny stories it will make your prospect and or customer think of a story to tell you and now you are engaged in a real conversation. Once again you are able to switch back to your client and make the sales call about them.
If you want to improve you story telling take a joke writer to lunch. Learn from the masters. Watch funny programs and stand up comedian, good ones and the bad ones.
You can learn from both.
You can take acting classes. If you shy this will help you to learn to talk in front of people and learn to tell your stories.
Watch children and animals. You can almost always get good a funny story out of both kids and animals.
When we study sales we don’t always talk about humor. I think that it is something you have to develop into your sales calls. I believe you can study and become funny and tell funny stories. We all have funny stories that need to be told. I do know that we like to laugh and to smile. After all isn’t that what we do, we recreate smiles and if we can make them smile, we can make them laugh.
If you could choose one thing in life to get you through, I would choose a sense of humor.
Humor is what keeps us alive.
