Learning Sales Techniques from “Friends” (the show, not the people)

“Friends” has recently made a come-back from its 1990s fame with the show’s debut on Netflix. Upon my 14th rewatch of the episodes, I was taken aback to a particular scene where Joey (Matt LeBlanc) was home alone when a salesman knocks on the door. This sales guy meets all of our typical salesperson characteristics: he’s loud, he obviously reads from a script, unfashionable suit, and greasy hair. I took a look at the scene again in the viewpoint of a Sales student and found a few characteristics of this interaction that are actually sales techniques that can be effective or a waste of time. In the case of this episode, the salesman actually gets Joey to buy one encyclopedia.

1. Asking the Right Questions

Mr. Salesman asks the right question when he prompts Joey to think of a time when he was lost in conversation with his friends. As an avid Friend watcher knows, Joey is not that bright so he can think of a lot of times when he did not know what was going on in the conversation. This gets the salesman’s foot in the door, as if he did not barge into the apartment at the beginning of the scene. The salesman plays on the fact that Joey is pretty clueless majority of the time, and earns himself a seat at the patio table.

However, where Mr. Salesman slips up is not reading his environment. Once he seems to have “sealed the deal” he asks if Joey can afford $1,200 for the whole set of encyclopedias. To which Joey was quick to point on the fact that he was home in the middle of the day and had patio furniture in his living room. This immediately almost ended the sale. While the salesman kept Joey’s interest by asking the correct question, he lost the chance to negotiate when he did not use the environment to tell him what kind of deal Joey would agree to. Luckily for Mr. Salesman, Joey was wearing Chandler’s pants that day.

2. Confidence

This technique is a little tricky because in the case of Joey, it won the salesman a sale. In other cases, too much confidence can actually be considered obnoxious. For Mr. Salesman in “Friends”, he reasoned with Joey and found that he could initiate conversation through asking about his intelligence and knowledge of random facts. Because he barged into the apartment, he did not have the door slammed in his face. On top of that, he had the guts to state the price of the whole encyclopedia set, rather than opening the floor for negotiation.

While in the scene Mr. Salesman’s confidence was beneficial, I think in today’s age this interaction would have been a negative one. If Mr. Salesman had tried to walk in the apartment like he did with a female college student or an older man (let’s just say), the cops would be on their way in 3 minutes. Any person would be very on-guard with an individual who just walks into their home. On top of that, Mr. Salesman does come across as clingy and not-relatable. Questioning a person’s intelligence is probably not the best way to convince them of anything. Mr. Salesman could have taken a different angle by asking questions based on what Joey may need long-term, not just for daily conversation. Good news for Mr. Salesman is that Joey fell for the whole shebang.

3. Flexibility

To wrap up lesson 1 and 2, flexibility is highly important on a cold call sales trip, such as the one portrayed in “Friends”. Mr. Salesman went by a script, it is very obvious – “Hello, are you the head of the house?” Are we in the 1950s? Even in the 1990s that question was old fashioned. Poor Mr. Salesman is selling encyclopedias, I guess there is not much else he can do other than hope the same skit works every time. Like I mentioned in lesson 1, it is pretty straightforward that Joey cannot afford all 26 encyclopedias, but Mr. Salesman does not realize this until the very end. The sales pitch could have been completely different. When it comes to sales, inflexibility will result in $0 because no person is the same as the other. Honesty, transparency, and flexibility – we will be saying it in our sleep by the end of this course.

What can we take away from Mr. Salesman? Be confident, ask good questions, adapt. And maybe do not walk into people’s houses without permission.