International Sales Best Practice – Make Them Laugh

International Sales Best Practices

It can be difficult to use a sense of humor in international environments. Most people advise you not to use humor in cross-cultural settings.

International Sales Success

Yet many good international salespeople have a sense of humor that translates easily across cultures. They also know when to use it and when not to use it.

Quote From Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Red Book Of Selling

8th Principle of Sales Greatness If you can make them laugh, you can make them buy!

Last Month’s Cross-Cultural Communication Tip 27

Our own cultural perceptions can improve or hinder effective cross-cultural communication.

The Right Humor

The best advice I can offer you is to watch a seasoned international salesperson in action.  Here are some words that I would use to describe the right humor for most international settings:

• Gentle
• Healthy
• Good-humored
• Short
• In small doses

Humor At The Right Time

There are many occasions when you should avoid humor in cross-cultural settings:

• In all written correspondence and emails
• During business discussions to avoid any misinterpretations

The best opportunities for humor are during the “get to know each other stage”.

• Before or after meetings
• At non-meeting events
• During meals

In many cultures this is best well after the initial more formal “greeting” stage.

For The Right Effect

Above I mentioned that humor should be in small doses. You need to adapt this to the cultures involved.  Remember, just because someone laughs does not mean they are laughing with you.

I have noticed that the people with the strongest international skills use humor sparingly and the laughs they engender are never loud and long.  Just enough to make them likable and never enough to offend anyone.

Humor does make them much more likable and approachable.

So…

You can debate how much humor to use, you can debate when humor is most affectively inserted, you can even debate the type of humor that should be used. But you cannot deny the power of laughter as a universal bond from human to human, and from human to sales order form. – Jeffrey Gitomer

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