SNL Alum Fred Armisen released a Netflix comedy Special called “Stand-Up for Drummers”.
Can you guess who his audience is? Your chance of answering correctly should be 4/4.
Drummers and other musicians reading this will get that joke.
It will fly over everyone else’s heads – and that’s ok.
Drummers are a unique audience. They have a very specific set of duties within a music ensemble. They need to keep time, stay in rhythm, and occasionally even lead the band through tempo changes. As such, they have objectives, experiences, delights, frustrations and pains (wrist and elbow joints mainly).
Your buyers are no different (except their pains are mainly in the butt – *RIMSHOT*!!!).
Check Fred explaining the special, his audience and trying some of the jokes on Conan O’Brien’s live in-studio audience at the bottom of this article – but only after reading.
I play music (badly), and appreciate niche comedy so I was curious about this special. On the one hand, I abandoned it 30 minutes in. On the other, it was great research for this post.
Jokes (aka “short-form humor”) can be written to make any kind of point you want to any kind of audience – including your target persona – and can be used to:
🐶 Grab attention
🖼 Paint pictures between for your audience/buyers
🗳 Be connecting tissue between buyer and seller
We can’t make any audience – let alone our buyers – laugh, without understanding what makes them tick.
Step into your buyers’ shoes. Get intimate with their:
1) Duties objectives/desired end-state
2) How their measured
3) Key stakeholders
4) Challenges, and frustrations (and how each of these impacts their emotions),
5) How the challenge your solution eliminates impacts their ability to reach their objectives.
6) Jargon (but don’t overuse it)
Prospects don’t need to laugh as much as they need to be understood. Sure, a good zinger that bakes in all of the above will help you better connect, but if you can master all of the above, you won’t even need one. That’s a dirty little secret that I’m hoping you’ll keep quiet.
Now, shuffle off and “snare” some prospects & deals. Don’t share that killer with Fred.
Oddly enough, my “funny” recommendation for this week isn’t Fred’s special. I’m suggesting this week’s episode of “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” where his guest is John Mulaney. I laughed pret-tay hard.
Let me know if you enjoyed…any of this.
Most sales messaging is more templated than a CEO’s mass layoff explanation. If you or your team want to stand out with humor that highlights what sucks about the specific problems your company solves and don’t know how to get started, please check out my live class aka “The Writers’ Room“. Team up with a few smart, creative colleagues to “roast your prospects’ pain”, and learn how to deploy the jokes you create over cold outreach (emails, cold calls, LinkedIn, video messaging), discovery, and demos.
