“Smile! They can hear you.”
You’ve heard it a million times. Whether you’re answering an inbound call, or making an outbound sales call, you’ve been trained to bare your pearly whites.
I’ve seen cute little reminders written on the bottoms of mirrors designed to hang in a cubicle. “Remember to smile…it increases your face value,” they say.
OK, great. You get it. You’re supposed to smile. Does it matter? How does the other party truly know? I’ll bet if you asked any sales training “expert” on the planet, they couldn’t provide you with one ounce of proof. Good thing I’m not an “expert.” I’m a real-world sales guy and I’ve got the answer.
I discovered the truth (and the proof) about smiling while reading Fascinate, an amazing book by my good friend, Sally Hogshead. Alright, I didn’t exactly discover it…Sally wrote about it, Professor John J. Ohala at University of California-Berkeley discovered it, and I pretty much just had an Aha! moment when I read it. I literally jumped out of my airplane seat and shouted, “I’ve got to share this with everybody I know in sales.”
Sally explains that scientists themselves failed to understand why humans are the only animals on the planet that smile. In fact, a “smile” on any other species is described as “retracting the mouth corners and baring teeth to show aggression (as in a snarl), intended to display dominant intentions or even imminent attack.” Sounds like a heck of a sales call, huh?
After hundreds of years of scientific puzzlement, John J. Ohala divulged a counterintuitive explanation: humans smile because of the way it sounds, not the way it looks. Yep. Smiling changes the way your voice sounds.
There are several pages of discussion of which sounds are most threatening (deep, low sounds like a bear’s growl or a large dog’s bark) and which sounds are most approachable and loving (higher-pitches produced by smaller, cuter, animals or even the baby-talk we all use when we play with infants). The nail-in-the-coffin comes when Sally deciphers Professor Ohala’s 1980 paper, “The Acoustic Origin of the Smile,” when she writes,

“[W]hen we smile, we pull the cheek flesh back against our teeth, and make our mouth cavity smaller. A smiling mouth raises the pitch of our voice, which is instinctively perceived as less dominant, more approachable.”

So there you go. If you want to threaten a prospect, start your sales call by lowering your voice, tightening your lips, and demanding the order. If you want to actually make the sale, however, you can create a buying atmosphere simply by smiling on the telephone and using your more approachable timbre.
Think about the sirens of ancient Greek mythology. They lured their “customers” in with sweet, pleasing sounds and, I can imagine, smiles. Could you picture the seductive sirens accomplishing their mission with mean faces and deep-pitched singing? I’ll bet the sailors would steer their ship to another vendor.
You won’t make a sale just because you start the call with a smile. But I’ll bet you’ve worked on every other portion of your calling or answering strategy. You already know your warm-up, your probing questions, and your close. The trouble is – it’s just not working often enough for you.
Try this: for the next week, smile the entire time you are on the telephone. I want you to smile until your cheeks hurt and your teeth are dry. Change nothing else. Except, that is, for your closing ratio. Odds are, you won’t need a silly mirror or expression (but just in case, here’s a fun one: “Smile before you dial!”). Your increased commission checks will be enough of a reminder…and they’ll give you something to really smile about.
P.S. You owe it to yourself to buy a copy of Sally’s book Fascinate. There’s so much information and inspiration for sales people (and it’s not even close to a sales book) that I’m doing you a disservice to only share this one lesson.
Now get out there and show some teeth – and your customers will show you the money!