Humor in sales helps when it is light, about the situation or about yourself, and comes once the buyer is at ease. It burns the call when it targets the buyer, a competitor or a group of people, or when it lands on a moment the buyer meant seriously.
Humor is the riskiest of the conversation moves in our guide to sales techniques, because it can't be taken back once it's said. This post covers what research says about humor, a scale from safe lines to the ones that cost deals, when a joke fits a B2B call, how it changes on cold calls, video and email, and what to do when one falls flat.
Does humor help in sales?
It can, and the research is clear that it cuts both ways. Two studies stand out. Both were run with business school students instead of real buyers, so treat them as a direction to test on your own calls.
| Study | What they tested | What they found |
|---|---|---|
| Kurtzberg, Naquin and Belkin, 2009 (122 executive MBA and 216 MBA students) | Email negotiations that opened with humor, against ones that didn't | More trust and satisfaction, higher joint gains, and higher gains for the person who opened with humor |
| Bitterly, Brooks and Schweitzer, 2017 (8 experiments) | How telling jokes changes the way others see you | Humor that lands raises status. Inappropriate or failed jokes lower it. |
The first study, published in the International Journal of Conflict Management, found that starting an email negotiation with humor raised trust and satisfaction and led to better deals for both sides. In a second test with a single price on the table, first offers were more realistic and the final split was more even when the exchange opened with humor. The authors note that a classroom setting limits how far the results apply.
The second, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explains why humor is risky. Across eight experiments, Bitterly, Brooks and Schweitzer found that attempting a joke signals confidence whether it works or not. A joke that lands also signals competence, and the teller gains status. An inappropriate joke signals low competence, and the mix of high confidence and low competence costs status.
For a seller, this means every joke is a small test of judgment, taken in front of everyone on the call. Buyers read judgment as competence, so a misjudged line costs more than the silence it was meant to fill.
What kind of humor works on a sales call?
The humor that works in B2B sales is small, kind and about something both sides can see. The further a line moves from the shared situation toward a person or a group, the more it risks. Here is the scale.
Works on most calls
- Laughing at the buyer's joke
- A light line about the shared situation
- Small self-deprecation about yourself
- A callback to something the buyer said
Depends on the room
- Self-deprecation about your company
- Jokes about the industry
- Sarcasm, even mild
- A prepared joke or a funny story
Burns the call
- Jokes about the buyer or their company
- Jokes about a competitor
- Politics, religion, gender, age, accents
- Humor about your product failing
What each level sounds like on a call:
| Type of humor | Example line | Risk |
|---|---|---|
| Laughing at theirs | Buyer jokes about their Monday. You laugh, and don't try to top it. | Low. The buyer set the tone. |
| The shared situation | "We're three minutes in and nobody's frozen yet. A good sign for video." | Low. Nobody is the target. |
| Small self-deprecation | "I promised myself I wouldn't share slides in the first five minutes. Two to go." | Low, if it's about you and not your competence. |
| Callback | Buyer mentioned "the Monday scramble" earlier. Later: "So this would make Mondays slightly less of a scramble." | Low. It shows you listened. |
| Self-deprecation about your company | "Our logo is the only thing we've redesigned three times." | Medium. Fine with a relaxed buyer, odd with a formal one. |
| Industry jokes | "Every sales tool promises to save five hours a week. That would be a 60-hour week back by now." | Medium. Some buyers love it, some hear cynicism. |
| Sarcasm | "Oh, I'm sure legal will review it in a day." | High. On video, and with people you just met, it often reads as contempt. |
| About the buyer | "So your team just ignores the CRM?" said with a laugh | Burns the call. It sounds like judgment, even as a joke. |
| About a competitor | Any joke at another vendor's expense | Burns the call. The buyer may have chosen that vendor, or be friends with them. |
| About your product failing | "It only crashes on Fridays." | Burns the call. The buyer remembers it at the security review. |
The two safest kinds, laughing at the buyer's joke and making a callback, both start from the buyer, so you don't need to be funny to use them. They also show you were listening, which is a skill the buyer values more than wit. If you've read our post on mirroring in sales, the callback is a cousin of the mirror: it repeats the buyer's own words back to them, this time with a smile.
When should you use humor on a sales call?
Timing matters more than the line itself. The same joke that relaxes the first two minutes can cost you the deal in the middle of a price discussion. A few rules hold on most calls.
- Follow the buyer's lead. If the buyer jokes first, you have permission to be light. If they start with "Let's get into it", get into it.
- Use it at the edges of the call. The opening small talk and the last minute before goodbye are the safest places. The middle of the call is for the buyer's problem.
- Never during the buyer's problem. When a buyer describes something that hurts ("we lost three people this quarter"), a joke tells them you didn't hear it.
- Not on price or objections. A joke after "it's too expensive" sounds like you're avoiding the question. Answer it first.
- One line, then move on. If it lands, don't try to top it. A second joke rarely does as well, and three in a call starts to feel like a routine.
- More careful with more people. On a call with five people, someone will take it the wrong way. With a committee, keep to laughing at their jokes and the shared situation.
Humor also helps with a hard moment, if it's aimed at the situation. After a buyer says "our CFO hates new tools", a line like "Then we'll make it the shortest meeting of her week" can ease the tension and set up a real next step. Compare it with a joke about the CFO herself, which the buyer would have to defend.
How does humor change on cold calls, video and email?
Each channel changes what the buyer can see and hear, and humor depends on both.
Cold calls. The buyer didn't ask for the call and is looking for a reason to hang up. Clever jokes rarely help. Honesty about the situation often does: "This is a cold call. Do you want to hang up, or can I take 30 seconds?" That line names what both people already know, and buyers often laugh. Watch the session FBI-inspired cold call opening line to hear it on real calls.
Video. On video, small squares make reactions hard to read, and a short delay can make a joke land a second too late. Keep humor to the shared situation (the frozen screen, the dog in the background, the fifth meeting of the day) and watch faces after you say it. Our guide to virtual selling covers how to read a buying team on video.
Email. Without your tone, a light line can read as sarcasm or as not taking the buyer seriously. The study above found humor at the start of an email negotiation helped, but those were peers negotiating, not a seller writing to a buyer they've never met. In sales email, keep it to one short line, after the point of the email, and never in a subject line to someone you don't know. The words carry more of the load in writing, which is why words that sell matter more in an email than any joke.
What humor burns the call?
Most humor that costs a deal fails the same test: someone on the call is the target, or could feel like one. In B2B, the people on the call talk to people who weren't, so a line that offends one person reaches the whole committee.
A softer version of the same mistake is humor used to steer the buyer: a laugh to rush past a concern or to make a deadline sound casual. Our post on NLP in sales has a simple test for when influence turns into manipulation, and it applies to humor too.
What should you do when a joke falls flat?
Recover fast and move on. The study above found that a failed joke costs status because it makes you look less competent. Explaining the joke or apologizing at length makes the moment bigger.
- Don't explain it. A joke that needs explaining has already failed, and the explanation adds a second awkward moment.
- Acknowledge it lightly, once. "That one was better in my head" is enough. It shows you noticed without asking the buyer to reassure you.
- Go back to the buyer. Ask a real question right away: "Back to your onboarding: how long does the first week take?" The call is about them again.
- If you offended someone, apologize plainly. "That was out of line, I'm sorry." One sentence, no "if anyone was offended". Then don't make another joke on that call.
After the call, listen back to the moment. Was the line about a person? Was it during a serious part of the call? Most flat jokes fail on one of those two, and both are easy to fix next time.
Can you learn to be funny in sales?
You don't need to be funny to sell. You need to be easy to talk to, and humor is only one way to get there. Many strong sellers rarely tell a joke. They laugh easily, notice things and let the buyer be the funny one.
If you want to get more comfortable with light humor, a few habits help:
- Notice before you speak. Most good lines on a call come from something that just happened: a comment the buyer made, a shared delay, the weather in both cities. Prepared jokes rarely fit.
- Tell stories, not jokes. A short, true story about a customer often has a funny moment in it, and it carries a point. Our guide to storytelling in sales shows how to build one.
- Try a few improv exercises. "Yes, and", the improv rule of building on what the other person just said, is good training for listening on a call, with or without the laughs.
- Listen to what lands. On your recorded calls, find the moments where the buyer laughed. You'll usually see that the laugh came from something they said first.
People who are quieter by nature often worry about this part of selling. They don't need to: listening and noticing do most of the work. Our guide to sales for introverts covers the strengths quieter sellers bring to a call. For whole calls with these moments in context, see our sales conversation examples and our selling examples by type of sale.
Where to start
On your next five calls, use only the safest humor on the scale: laugh at the buyer's jokes and make one callback to something they said. Then listen back to where the buyer laughed and where the call got quiet. For the other techniques that work at each stage of a deal, go back to our guide to sales techniques.