How Your Humour Style Can Rub Up Against Your Selling

Festive downtime led to me reading we apparently have one of four key humour styles.

These scientifically identified styles of humour are suggested as; affiliative, self–enhancing, aggressive, & self–defeating.

Affiliative humour suggests you love cracking jokes and engaging in spontaneous witty banter.
Self–enhancing humour indicates you have a generally humorous outlook on life.
Aggressive humour relates to the use of sarcasm, teasing, and 'put–downs'.
Self–defeating humour involves excessively self–disparaging humour.

From the researchers it's not a stretch to infer these traits are extensions from our core mode of behaviour. What price they map onto our selling style?

Coming across as genuinely collaborative with and curious about our prospect for Affiliative.
Glass half-full persevering optimism of Self-enhancing.
Dominant, undermining and manipulatively Aggressive.
Knocking ourselves down too much as Self-defeating.

Those ol' B-school days couldn't help but come calling. How about a 4-box model? Where the 2x2 matrix for 'outlook' has axes from negative to positive and internal to external. Which in turn simply label the quadrants as above.

If you think there's something in this - and I kinda do - then it's another useful lens through which to judge your natural selling driving force.

You have likely heard someone selling through each of the above types.

'let's see how together we can make this work'
'I reckon we can sort this for you, yeah'
'our competitors are a joke, right?'
'if you're lucky, we'll deliver okay-ish'

It's safe to say prospects surely respond to the former pair there of the 'positive' space. Make sure you're there for them.