Comedy Lessons

Hey, Scott from The Sales Mastermind here. Today’s edition only takes 2 minutes.

Whether you're a comic entertaining an audience from the stage or an elite seller pitching a prospective client, learning to guide your audience to the outcome you want is a skill.

Anyone can learn this skill by first becoming the character their audience needs.

My stand-up "career"

In 2018, while suffering the worst food poisoning of my life, I came across a Facebook ad for 8-weeks of stand-up comedy for free.

The idea was for a group of wannabe comics to get 8 weeks of professional training and, ultimately, perform a 5-minute set.

To pay for the training and venue, each comic was expected to sell 10 tickets to the performance.

As I had always wanted to try stand-up - it was a no-brainer.

And it was legit. During the 8 weeks, we learned from Mike Gunn - a London comedy club scene veteran.

Mike organised the set list (order of comics), and the performance was one of the best nights of my life.

Over 8 weeks and 5 minutes, I both had a blast and learned invaluable skills for my sales career.

I learned that as a comic, you don't control the audience; you can only control what you say, how you say it, and everything else about your delivery. The audience will either:

• Laugh, and you're funny, or
• Not laugh, and you aren't funny

No matter how well you prepare, how good your ideas are, or how many times that joke has worked in the past - if, during that set, they don't laugh, it's your fault.

You are the one who has to change.

And I especially learned that no one is a born comic, they start by creating their stage character.

Don't be yourself, create a character

The same ideas apply to selling. The only thing you can control is yourself.

Becoming an elite seller who makes it look effortless, who buyers want to buy from, and who always seems to know the right thing to do at the right time takes hundreds of sales pitches and years of practice.

So if you aren't closing enough deals, assuming you have enough high-quality leads, you can only change yourself, which is really, really hard.

Start by creating a semi-fictional character that you play when you go into a sales meeting.

This allows you to experiment with ideas on your journey to becoming an elite seller, and you can blame the character when it goes wrong.

What to do

Before your next sales call, spend 15 minutes starting on your character.

The best characters mirror and complement your ideal buyers.

Mirror their main traits while complementing the natural weaknesses of your buyers. For example:

• If your buyers are thoughtful, methodical, and slow to act - mirror their thoughtfulness while crafting a detailed business case that covers risks they didn't even know about and demonstrates how delays will be disastrous in the medium to long term.
• However, if your buyers are bombastic, loud, and quick to act - mirror their energy while making sure you take care of the detail, so they don't have to.

Once you have the beginnings of your character, pick one area to work on that doesn't come naturally to you:

• If you naturally speak too quickly, count to 3 before answering their questions.
• If you naturally want to solve every problem they have on the spot, force yourself to answer at least one buyer question with "I'm not sure, can I check and come back to you?"

Over time, it'll become easier and easier to step into character, and that's when you know you've joined the ranks of elite sellers.

What's one trait your character has that you're going to work on?

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