EP225 Ricochet Your Way to Sales Success – The Power of Humor
In this episode, the guys explore the art of ricocheting your way to sales success. Chris Beall and Corey Frank are joined by Richard Rabins, the CEO of Alpha Software, to discuss the power of humor in disarming prospects and humanizing interactions. As Richard shares his personal anecdotes about leveraging laughter to close deals, the group delves into the age-old question: can humor be taught, or is it an innate skill? While confidence plays a crucial role, the ability to notice and connect seemingly unrelated things emerges as a key aspect of effective humor in sales. So, whether you’re a golden retriever enthusiast or just looking to add some lighthearted surprise to your sales arsenal, join us as we explore the art of the ricochet and learn how to turn dead leads into living, laughing, and buying customers. Join us for this episode, “Ricochet Your Way to Sales Success: The Power of Humor.”
Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, accelerating global growth and scaling the organization. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master’s degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and master’s degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.
Links from this episode:
Richard Rabins on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-rabins/
Company website: https://www.alphasoftware.com/
Branch49
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
ConnectAndSell
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
[00:01:04] Corey Frank: One, two, three. Welcome to another episode of the Market Dominance Guys. A Branch 49 home-based mothership version with Corey Frank.
[00:01:13] Corey Frank: And of course the Sage of Sales, the Hawking of Hawking. and the Elvis of [00:01:20] EBIT. What do you think about that? The Elvis of EBIT? No? All right, we’re still working on that one. And in the studio, all the way from Boston we have Richard Rabins, the CEO of Alpha Software. Richard, thanks for coming all the way to Branch 49 to have a little fun with the Market Dominance [00:01:40] guys.
[00:01:40] Richard Rabins: Fantastic. Great to be here. Thanks.
[00:01:45] Corey Frank: As is per custom, when Chris arrives here at the Branch 49 mothership, he gets the regalia, the full regalia of my office and as I sit here on the sales floor. So as we were talking about last night at [00:02:00] at dinner and a little bit today, that bled over.
[00:02:03] Corey Frank: One of the things that came up in the GoToMarket and the Sales Market Dominance Guide Strategy Richard, with you and, , and Chris, is we were talking about different techniques in GoToMarket and the subject of, of humor came up in the subject , of Chris, I guess what we’re calling [00:02:20] ricochet opportunities.
[00:02:23] Corey Frank: Opportunities that I once thought were dormant, were dead. My marketing expenses has probably already been flushed. And what’s some techniques I can, I can resurrect these things, maybe recoup some of the [00:02:40] costs of acquisition that I had that are creative, that certainly can be leveraged with a good message and, and a powerful weapon like ConnectAndSell.
[00:02:48] Chris Beall: Well, I’ll, I’ll speak to this. I’ll tell a story about yesterday being on the airplane. So I was coming back from Nashville. To Phoenix in order to attend the event that we were all at [00:03:00] yesterday evening, Josh Wagner of InRevenue Capital invited us to a tremendous event and there were LimitedPartners, and PortfolioCompany, now called PortCos.
[00:03:13] Chris Beall: Eventually they’re going to be called PCOS, but I don’t know if that’s really going to work so well. And we just have to keep shortening things. Finally, just [00:03:20] call them COS. But anyway, we were all going to get together there. I came back a little early, sat next to a nice, quiet woman on the airplane.
[00:03:29] Chris Beall: She was writing a screenplay. And just because the pilot inadvertently said we were going to Las Vegas instead of Phoenix, which created a [00:03:40] moment of surprise, then a whole bunch of humor, as everybody told jokes about or made fun of going to Las Vegas instead of Phoenix. That broke the ice.
[00:03:47] Chris Beall: She and I started talking, and at the end of that conversation, one thing led to another, and she said, Oh, now I have to be careful not to introduce you to my boss, the owner of the company, because they’ll be so [00:04:00] successful with ConnectAndSell that they’ll sell the company within two years and I’ll lose my job.
[00:04:04] Chris Beall: That’s an example of a ricochet that bounced all over the place, starting with the pilot saying, Phoenix. That would be a ricochet right there because you still got to get to Phoenix, but it caused a conversation to take place with somebody [00:04:20] that otherwise would not have taken place. And I think there’s a lot of examples that are available.
[00:04:25] Chris Beall: I had one this morning. I was cold called by somebody. I couldn’t quite recognize his name. I picked it up because it was a 206 number. And I’m waiting for a call from the Social Security Administration to tell me when I can [00:04:40] actually speak with them about something. This has been a four month process waiting to Get an appointment for a 10 minute conversation, and I knew it would be a Seattle number.
[00:04:52] Chris Beall: Well, it turns out it’s somebody from another company, I think Paylocity, and I encouraged him to speak with our CFO. But [00:05:00] I pointed out to them that he could do his job much more easily, possibly, by using ConnectAndSell, pushing a button and talking to people. Again, that’s why we call that a boomerang, which is a kind of ricochet.
[00:05:10] Chris Beall: But there’s so many indirect ways, and I think in sales, we often think, Everything has to be direct, direct, direct, right to [00:05:20] I, like, why would I make a list of companies that hire people who do the job that I help with unless I’m going to talk to those people? Well, because you might want to talk to their boss.
[00:05:30] Chris Beall: But to get to their boss, you might have to talk to other people. So that’s another sort of a more of an IED approach to ricochets, [00:05:40] put the weapon somewhere near, and if it flips the Humvee over, then at least you can have a conversation with the scattered former inhabitants of it. So we’ll talk later about how that fits in with humor.
[00:05:52] Chris Beall: But to me, humor is the kind of the ultimate, always available [00:06:00] ricochet mechanism that can be used in sales if you have enough confidence. So that was kind of long, but it’s a setup for what I think is kind of an unusual episode with Richard Rabins here, who is. He can introduce himself, but I’ll introduce him.
[00:06:14] Chris Beall: He’s the CEO founder of a company that’s called Alpha Software, and Alpha [00:06:20] Software is going after something you gotta ricochet for. There’s a lot of paper forms out there. They turn those paper forms into mobile capable forms that even work offline and are smart enough to keep you from making the stupid mistakes.
[00:06:35] Chris Beall: I have never correctly filled out a form in my life. They’re probably going to ask me for the Social [00:06:40] Security Administration and fill one out. I will make a number of errors and I will wish they had Richard’s software making that form because then I could do it on mobile and I wouldn’t tear my head off and nail it to a coffee table, frankly.
[00:06:54] Chris Beall: So that’s my intro to you, Richard. What do you think?
[00:06:56] Richard Rabins: Yeah, no, I think that’s great. I’ll dive in on, [00:07:00] on the humor, item and, we’re talking offline and humor is a very powerful weapon. Obviously the person on the other side has to have a sense of humor. Otherwise the weapon’s not going to work.
[00:07:18] Richard Rabins: But you know, [00:07:20] what it does is when you’re in sales and it’s a cold call there’s this natural distance that the other person’s on the other side of the table, he’s not on the same side of the table, and what HUMOR does is it [00:07:40] warms things up in my case. I’m a big, I love dogs.
[00:07:45] Richard Rabins: So if I can, if I’m on a call with someone zoom and they’re working at home and I see their dog, I’m golden because not pun intended, even if it’s not a golden retriever,
[00:07:58] Chris Beall: I was going to say that was a good one. [00:08:00] [00:08:00] Richard Rabins: Because that’s a way of humanizing. And putting us kind of on the same level, because otherwise, if you’re trying to sell to something intrinsically, your target has more power than you.
(COMMERCIAL)
[00:08:16] Richard Rabins: Talking about dogs is certainly one thing, but [00:08:20] using humor is, can be powerful. And I was telling you and Chris last night about one case that happened to me. That, but humor ended up being a game changer . Early on in my career, I was working for a [00:08:40] market research company and they did some very innovative stuff.
[00:08:44] Richard Rabins: So if you could get an appointment with the prospect, you had enough data and evidence. That you will, you were almost guaranteed to close business, but getting the appointment in the first place was not, was non [00:09:00] trivial. And I’d started, this was not younger. And I’d started in some sort of analyst role, but was promoted to a project manager, which sounded pretty cool until I found out you actually had to, [00:09:20] kill what you wanted to eat.
[00:09:21] Richard Rabins: And I knew nothing about sales. So I went to my boss at the time and told him I went. There was a popular course, maybe still around Xerox professional selling skills, which Xerox had used internally and had [00:09:40] productized. And I’d heard about this course. And I went to my boss and I said, please, can you send me to this course because I need to learn how to sell.
[00:09:50] Richard Rabins: And it was a lot of money, and he was reluctant and I just nagged him. So finally, he said, if you promise [00:10:00] to get out of my office, you go to the course. I went to the course and yeah, it was useful. You learned, you should probably listen more than you should talk about a bunch of course setting stuff.
[00:10:13] Richard Rabins: So my first. Sales opportunity after the course [00:10:20] got hold of a prospect and I went through the whole routine of why he should give me the meeting and all the objections handled it, perfectly, except he wouldn’t give me the meeting. So at that point, I’m toast. Failure. [00:10:40] Failure. There’s nothing to lose.
[00:10:42] Richard Rabins: So I said to the fellow, I forgot his name, Bill, Hey Bill, I got on a level with you. So that was already caught him off guard. I’ve got a level with you? And he said, well, what? I said, well, and I told him the story that I’d just gone to this, [00:11:00] professional selling course. My boss didn’t believe in it.
[00:11:04] Richard Rabins: And, and I said, now I’ve got a dilemma. My dilemma is I have to get off this call, go into my boss’s office and tell him that the course does not work, doesn’t work. [00:11:20] And he thought that was funny. And I got the meeting and we closed the business. Because at that point, humor can really humanize it made him empathize with, with me, my situation, and versus if I had just pleaded with him and said please give [00:11:40] me the meeting, whatever, probably wouldn’t have got the meeting, but humor was, it allowed me to be at the same level, and, fortunately, he thought it was funny and so that’s just one example, but there’s Tons and tons of examples of human Well, [00:12:00] let me ask
[00:12:00] Corey Frank: Richard and Chris, I would think that a classically trained MIT schooled engineer from South Africa.
[00:12:10] Corey Frank: That’s not a bastion of influences that blossom into humor. So when you have it or your [00:12:20] sales reps have it, and Chris, to the larger question, is it something that’s taught or is it something that. That just is, right? A lot of last borns have this irreverency gene, right? This humor gene. But Richard, if we were to come in to take your sales organization [00:12:40] and upskill them on many things, their CRM, their automation, their list strategy, their, their, their sales methodologies.
[00:12:50] Corey Frank: Where would humor fit in? And Chris, how do you teach, train, where does it come from this confidence to use humor? And [00:13:00] let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s start right right there.
[00:13:04] Chris Beall: Well, I’ve never been able to teach it, so I’ve given up. I am the last born, as you well know. And I also think everything’s pretty damn funny, which helps if.
[00:13:13] Chris Beall: You’re looking at humor. I mean there’s an agility of mind that’s required to be [00:13:20] funny at the moment. And then there’s the ability to learn a bunch of funny things and trot them out. And the former, I think, is extremely hard to teach. That agility of mind to find something funny in the moment.
[00:13:33] Chris Beall: Because our minds go where our minds go. Mine happens to go mostly to puns. I reason, as I’ve said [00:13:40] before in this podcast, I actually reason in a solution sense by following the sounds of words rather than their meanings, because it gets me out of whatever box I’m in, because a word that sounds like another word is Very rarely gonna mean the same thing.
[00:13:56] Chris Beall: And so it takes me outta my rut and I’m like everybody else. I’m in a rut and I don’t [00:14:00] like being in a rut. So I like the sounds of words. In fact I won’t tell you what company it is, but with Helen, folks on the podcast know I’m married to this brilliant MIT trained. Mechanical engineer who happens to have written a wonderfully famous [00:14:20] book.
[00:14:20] Chris Beall: Everybody should read this book, by the way, love your team, because there’s nothing funny in it, except one thing in one of the forwards. And if you can find that and send it to me, I will either send you a dollar or I won’t. So anyway, we were talking about a company that’s names she couldn’t remember [00:14:40] just for whatever reason.
[00:14:42] Chris Beall: And I finally said, well, it rhymes with what’s on her face. And suddenly she could think of the person that she knows who’s running that involved with that company and go, Oh, it rhymes with what’s her face. And she’s gotten the name right ever since. Part of which is because that’s a funny thing to say.
[00:14:59] Chris Beall: It rhymes with [00:15:00] what’s her face. And it’s very easy to remember things that surprised you, which is the essence of humor is humorous surprise, followed by relief. You’re surprised, which is a negative. All surprises are considered a threat. Every surprise, good, bad, or indifferent, they’re all a threat. [00:15:20] So as you talk about the croc brain, the crocodile brain, Corey, the crocodile brain always responds to a surprise.
[00:15:27] Chris Beall: as a threat. Now the question is, what comes next? So if what comes next is relief, it’s not a threat, that’s funny. And how do we advertise that relief to the people [00:15:40] around us so that they can relax because now they’re no longer threatened by the surprise? We laugh. So laughter is a way of saying it’s okay.
[00:15:50] Chris Beall: And that’s why people like to go to catch great comedians because they get to laugh a whole bunch, which is a way of taking a pill that says it’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. Oh, it’s [00:16:00] okay when they know damn well very few things in their life are okay, and they’re going to die relatively soon compared to what they would prefer, but laughter is the best medicine.
[00:16:10] Chris Beall: Well, it’s also the best kind of dodge, right? But it’s always a surprise. And the problem with surprise, it’s hard to teach people to be surprised because they would [00:16:20] prefer not to be a threat. So you have to be, this is why humor raises your status. Because you’re willing to be surprised. And it actually fulfills the same role as, I know I’m an interruption, which is another way of dealing with being a threat.
[00:16:36] Chris Beall: And nobody wants to be a threat, so very few people want to be funny. [00:16:40] It’s just kind of fun, but if you can learn to overcome that, I don’t know how to teach it, then you can be a
[00:16:46] Corey Frank: confidence thing? I mean, Richard and Chris, is it a confidence thing? If I’m a new sales rep and I’m listening to this and I say, I have, the chairman of the board of a very, very [00:17:00] successful software company, who knows the left brain, who knows how things work, classically trained MIT, and the CEO, holder of 24, maybe 25, he’s not sure, patents.
[00:17:12] Corey Frank: And these aren’t the exact old Abbott and Costello I want to learn from to say you should incorporate humor. But [00:17:20] after I get past that, I want to say, Should I, how do I learn it? How do I adopt it? Is, is is there, is it a confidence thing that I have to be bold enough to try things as you did, Richard, when you, when you talked about the Xerox training example with the prospector, or where should I start?
[00:17:38] Corey Frank: I think I think [00:17:40] [00:17:40] Richard Rabins: it does require a good chunk of self confidence. I don’t know if you can teach self confidence. I think there probably are certain techniques that can help boost your self confidence. And you also, [00:18:00] in a fundamental way, you as a human being have to realize there’s some really serious things in life.
[00:18:08] Richard Rabins: And most of the, most everything else is not that serious. It’s not a life or death matter. And at the end of the day, we’re born, [00:18:20] we live, we die. And at the end of the day, you look back at all these things that you thought was so important and so critical, and you, and you look at them and you, you, you put them in a, I think probably proper perspective.
[00:18:38] Richard Rabins: So I think [00:18:40] if you go into, let’s say a sales situation and you, if you are self confident and you do have, I think humor is an intrinsic capability. If you do have that capability, at least the self confidence will prevent you from suppressing it. [00:19:00] I, I gave you guys another example last night, so when I was in that same company, pitching, getting meetings, I got a meeting with J& J, big company, it was the Tylenol group.
[00:19:19] Richard Rabins: And [00:19:20] I was presenting, this was actually, we’d closed a deal and this was the findings and the company I was working for at the time, they would run these simulated test markets. So they would advise. consumer product companies on whether they should [00:19:40] launch a new product, a new cat food, a new shampoo, a new form of, in this case, Tylenol.
[00:19:47] Richard Rabins: And, I was pretty young, 25, and I’m presenting in this amphitheater in J& J’s headquarters, probably 60 or 70 people [00:20:00] there. And the first slide comes up and there’s a typo. And these guys have just spent 250, 000 on a market research project, and this 25 year old twit comes up with a typo. Again I don’t know if you can teach this.[00:20:20] [00:20:21] Richard Rabins: I had to think quickly, do I pretend that the typo is not there and assume nobody’s going to see it? It’s like people will see it out of 60 or 70 people, they’re going to see it. And so you’ve got to acknowledge it. You know what I did, [00:20:40] I said, we’re going to start this with a test.
[00:20:42] Richard Rabins: How many of you guys have spotted the typo? Now, why is that funny? I don’t know why it’s funny, but it’s funny. And it basically took a negative, which is on a 250, 000 consulting project. There shouldn’t have been a [00:21:00] typo, right? But yeah, there was a typo. And rather than let that tear you down. So again, there’s a confidence issue.
[00:21:10] Richard Rabins: And it’s also somebody, I mean, a lot of people have said, you’ve got to remember everybody, when they put their clothes on, it’s one leg at a [00:21:20] time. There’s no getting around it. At the end of the day, we’re all human beings. And if you can somehow, it, again, it’s, it’s no reason to accept a lower status, when it’s in a sales situation, you want to keep your status [00:21:40] as much as possible on the same level.
[00:21:44] Corey Frank: Interesting. I, I, I love that. I love that story. I think we were talking about the ability to notice. And, Conan and Brian, Conan O’Brien was had a podcast and he had [00:22:00] Stephen Wright, one of your favorites, Richard, on the podcast and, and what the advice that Conan O’Brien, was, was giving to other young comedians that were listening to this podcast is that you have to train your mind to notice.
[00:22:18] Corey Frank: When you notice the [00:22:20] typo, you notice something that was unusual. And he, he suggests to hone in, to develop your comedic skills, is hone in and be aware of your noticing abilities. It’s all about scanning, scanning, scanning. And you, ultimately the best comedians [00:22:40] Chris, I think we’ve talked about this, the best comedians connect things that should be connected.
[00:22:45] Corey Frank: And Conan O’Brien’s father made the observation as Conan was coming up into the business, father was a scientist. And he says, you’re making a living in essence off of something. that [00:23:00] should probably be treated. In other words, the synopses aren’t supposed to cross like that. They’re not supposed to touch, but things are wrong in a beautiful way.
[00:23:12] Corey Frank: And somehow you see a connection. So if you can do that and in a modest way or in a [00:23:20] humorous way, like you did about identifying the tempo, I think things are on the track to identifying humor.
[00:23:27] Richard Rabins: Just talking about comedians. Some people love him, some people hate him. I happen to think Larry David is very funny.
[00:23:36] Richard Rabins: And if you look at his episodes, [00:23:40] they’re quite complex, the script. There’s three or four things woven in together, and he ties them in together. But one thing about what he does, it’s back to the notice. He picks up on just little things that people do that you notice, but you ignore. [00:24:00] And he turns them into a big deal and it’s funny, but it’s all based on real world observation of humans and because we’re very strange creatures, very complex, very strange and intrinsically we are funny.
[00:24:18] Richard Rabins: We don’t necessarily mean [00:24:20] to be funny, but any observer I think the bottom line is people take themselves way too seriously. And on the other hand, if in the sales thing, if the salesperson can disarm you through humor humor [00:24:40] is generally enjoyable. And it also, as you’ve said, it relaxes you and it allows you then maybe to focus on or at least the conversation to focus on, hey, maybe this person has a Called me and has [00:25:00] something to offer that is valuable because there’s this natural shield that goes up.
[00:25:07] Richard Rabins: If you’re speaking to an unknown person and it’s not coming from a recommendation, the shield automatically goes up. Mm-Hmm. . So you have to use whatever weapon you can. And, [00:25:20] whether it’s commenting on the guy’s golden retriever, which I, I find it works every time. You can take the stiffest, coldest call for someone, very formal, and if you’re lucky enough that he’s working, well, maybe even in the [00:25:40] office, and he has a dog or a cat, but generally a dog.
[00:25:43] Richard Rabins: You ask him it’s like asking mothers about their babies. What mother doesn’t want to talk about their baby,
OUTRO:
In this episode, Richard and Chris explored the delicate art of wielding humor in sales. But as Chris hinted, there’s a balance to strike – you can’t take the funny too far.
Join us next time as Corey, Richard, and Chris dive deeper into this comedic conundrum. They’ll discuss the risks of overdoing it with humor and share tips for harnessing wit without alienating prospects.
Until then, keep sharpening your comedic chops and ricocheting your way to sales success!
