Humor is a powerful tool! For some of us it comes naturally and for others, not so much. That’s ok because even those of us that don’t have a single funny bone in their body can still learn to use humor effectively. In today’s blog we have some tips to help you use humor to reduce tension.
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Before we discuss our tips, did you know that 70% of businesses will fail? We put together a FREE guide identifying the Top 6 reasons businesses fail and give you actionable steps you can take on every one of these to make sure it’s your competition failing and not you! It’s our free gift to you and you can access it right here.
We also recently interviewed Lorena Tomasini of MALM Life and Health Insurance Agency. Our conversation ranged from risk management to cultural differences in sales to humor. This helped to inspire todays blog. You can listen in to the replay of our conversation on our podcast here, or you can watch it on our Youtube channel!
Let’s face it. Business conversations can be tense. Often, even if we’re not talking about heavy topics like death we are still dealing with commitment and money. Both can be heavy triggers for a lot of people and the need for diffusing some of that tension is an absolute necessity in certain conversations. This is when humor can be an absolute life saver in your sales conversations.
Here are 3 hacks to use humor to reduce tension.
Hack 1
Humor can be used in almost ANY conversation. Truly. Talking about death? You can use humor. Hospital stays? Yup, humor. Cancer? Yeah, humor still works. Don’t be afraid to test humor in your conversations, especially when they are heavy. It will help ease some of the gravity of the conversation and allow you to focus on the solution and not the heavy topic at hand.
Hack 2
Know your audience and know your timing. I know this sounds basic, but it can be hard to read the people in front of you, especially if you’re virtual. While humor can almost always be effective, if you don’t know your audience or get the timing wrong, humor may hurt more than it helps. If someone is seriously grieving this might be a dangerous time to use humor about death. Knowing your audience will help you decide if it’s an appropriate time to use humor.
Hack 3
Learn what works and recycle it. For some people they don’t need to do this. They are naturally funny, able to be witty on their feet and probably are not even seriously reading this blog since they have such a comfort with humor. For many of the rest of us humor is difficult to capture. That’s why I’m a firm believer in finding some jokes that work well and implementing them, deliberately, into your conversations. Over time you’ll learn who to use them with, when to use them with and how to be most effective with your humor. Sales is a process and learning how to use humor to reduce tension is something you can absolutely build into your process.
If you want to learn how to use humor better, reach out to us and listen to our most recent podcast! We love providing you valuable content and answering your questions from the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. If you’d like to join us and other professionals that are striving to get better every day, you can access the group here!
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