Happy World Listening Day! This is your reminder to listen more than you talk on your calls today. Reps who listen more, sell more.

Now… hear us out 👂️ 

In today’s Follow Up:

• How being funny can help your sales career 🤣 

• Sales in the news 🗞️

• Sales weapon of the day 🛠️

• LinkedIn Influencers & Memes 🖼️ 

Sales Fact of The Day

Does Being Funny Help You in Sales?

Keith Hmieleski, a professor of entrepreneurship at TCU wanted to know…

How do startups deal with the pressure of being a startup?

Ping pong tables in the office? Cold brew on tap? Pizza party’s…? 🤔

To find out, Hmieleski emailed the CEOs of 2,000 privately held companies that were founded less than five years ago and asked them to rate the accuracy of a series of statements such as

• “Team members use amusing stories to defuse conflicts.”

• “The demand for our products/services is difficult to predict.”

Keith got back 179 responses and found a correlation:

Teams that use humor to ease pressure average $300K in sales per employee.

Teams that don’t use humor average just under $50K in sales per employee.

Every team faced uncertainty, but it was how they dealt with it that gave them such different results.

He’s not saying every team that uses humor will see the same financial results above, but he did say:

So… what does humor actually look like on the sales team?

Keith gives an example where a startup’s competitor releases a new product that is clearly better than theirs. This situation leaves most teams wondering what to do, or which direction to go in.

Most teams do one of two things:

1. Get stressed out, argue about what to do next, and create a hostile environment.

2. See the humor in the situation, and encourage every team member to give their ideas on what to do next.

If you’ve been following along, you know by now that option 2 is the one that will yield the best results. The study found that teams using humor not only closed more sales but were able to decrease serious conflict within the team.

TLDR:

• Humor wins. Teams that use humor will not only close more deals, but they’ll also create a better work environment.

• Using storytelling along with humor helps you build rapport with prospects, leading to more commission closed deals.

• Lighten up a lil bit. Sales ain’t life & death. Keep it light and loose. High-stress, high-pressure environments make employees more prone to error, poor work performance, and burnout.

• Have a good relationship with your team members so that when things do get bad, you can make light of the situation. After all, nothing’s usually as bad as we think it is.

A word from our LinkedIn Influencers:

#ItCouldaBeenAVideo 📹️ 

Sales Meme of the Day

And that’s a wrap!