A short instructional sales-training monologue explaining why common rapport-building questions lower a salesperson's status and offering a playful alternative opening to disarm prospects and elicit laughter during sales calls. The speaker contrasts predictable small-talk (e.g., 'Where do you live?') with a playful self-deprecating line that aims to trigger dopamine and laughter to lower defenses.
Here's how you never want to start a sales call unless you want to lose a ton of deals. Hey, Sally. How are you doing today? Yeah, great. And where do you live? Oh, we live in Atlanta. I love Atlanta. Atlanta is so cool. How's the weather over there? Most salespeople have been taught to build rapport like this, but what you're not understanding is that these are predictable questions that every salesperson has tried to sell them. Anything always starts the conversation with. So what that does is it lowers your status in their mind, where they just view you as a salesperson trying to sell them something. You don't want to sound like everybody else. So let's say the prospect talks first. When you get on Zoom and they say, hey, how you doing today? Instead of you saying, I'm doing good, which doesn't really do anything for you, you want to make them laugh. So I don't want to be the class clown, but I might say, oh, you know, just being the boring guy over here. What about you? What's going on in your neck of the woods? Now, notice I said that with a playful tone. It releases dopamine in your prospect's brain, which triggers the prospect to laugh. This is how you disarm the prospect. It's just a disarming technique.
