Part 2

Having built rapport, leveraged our credibility statement to receive permission to ask questions and having designed our questions with the buyers four key interests (Primary, Criteria, Other, Dominant) in mind, we are ready to apply the questioning technique.

Prior to that though, we still have two more filters to apply before we get into exploratory mode. We need to consider where the buyer sits. Where you sit impacts your perspective and influences your buying point of view. Here are some examples: if you are a User Buyer, you are thinking how reliable or easy is this to use. If you are a Technical Buyer, you are concerned that the spec be a perfect match for the requirements. If you are a Financial Buyer, the typical CFO, then you are worried about the cost relative to the budgeting. If you are an Executive Buyer, the CEO, you are looking at how this solution boosts your strategic objectives. As an astute salesperson, we will need to ask pertinent questions, based on the interest perspective of the buyer.

There is another layer which sits across the perspective filter. Often, we think that the cultural norms are an important consideration in approaching the buyer. Americans are like this, or Aussies are like that, in the case of the Japanese you need to do this and that, etc. Yes, there are certain cultural preferences which are important, the only problem with this type of cultural prism, is that it is pretty much irrelevant from a sales viewpoint. Why? There are vast differences among national groups, so compartmentalization is rather tricky. A typical New Yorker is not the same as someone from San Francisco, or Atlanta, or Houston. So we need to go a bit deeper and consider something more individual for our filter.

A good place to start is with personality styles. Myers Briggs, DISC, etc., there are numerous tools to help us analyse personal style preferences. What ever you use, it needs to be simple in a sales conversation situation. I am not great at holding multiple data points in suspension in my head so I can realize an analytical breakthrough.

I rely on two simple decisions. Decision one, on a scale of low to high, is this person low or high in assertion terms? Decision two, is this person more people or task oriented? With those two snapshots I can try and place the person into one of four preferred styles. Actually, at different times and in different roles, we exemplify all four styles, but we naturally gravitate to one more than the others.

For example, the high assertion/high task style is the Driver. Typical “one man shacho” types, who care more about the outcomes, than the people achieving them. Don’t waste their time with small talk and cups of tea – get straight down to it, offer three alternatives, make a recommendation, get a decision and move on.

The polar opposite it the low assertion/high people style of the Amiable. They worry about getting everyone behind the direction, by really carefully considering how they feel about things. They like consensus and don’t like risk. Cups of tea and “let’s get to know each other” is a basic approach with them.

The low assertion, high task orientation is the technical person – the Analytical. They want detail, data, statistics, proof, validation. So no big picture, macro analysis for them, they want the micro, so you better have your detail ready to go.

The direct opposite is the Expressive. They want to grab the whiteboard marker and draw out strategies, to create ideas off the cuff, to bounce concepts around. Don’t ask them for detailed paperwork because they are bored with the petty details of business paperwork.

More so than national stereotypes, understanding where the buyer is in this quadrant breakdown will go a long way to getting the sale, because you will be “speaking their language” and they will feel you are “just like them”.

Do you have to develop a schizoid personality to be successful in sales? No. All you need to do is switch your communication style for each group. You maintain your own personality, but recognize selling the way you like gets one in four people excited and selling the way the client likes to buy, gets four out of four clients excited.

With all of this preparation in hand (and it takes about a nanosecond to complete this, once you understand their role and their style), you are now ready to start asking the right questions.

A good place to start is to ask them where they would want to see the business. This helps to scope out the ideal outcome, so you need to be working on a solution for them that gets as close as possible to that mental picture they have in their mind. We call this the “Should Be”.

Next we ask them where they see the business right now, the “As Is”. Having established these two focal points we need to design questions which show that the gap between these two points is both huge and fatal. Why huge and fatal? If the gap between them is insignificant then why bother doing anything, why take on the risk of change? If the gap is big, but there is no opportunity cost or no downside to not taking action, then the client will persevere with the current situation, take no action and not buy your services or product.

We hold this part of the questioning until we uncover what is holding them back from closing the gap between the As Is and the Should Be.

Designing Your Sales Conversation (Part 1)

Salespeople who don’t have a framework for their sales conversation with their client, will wind up on the back foot following the buyer’s purchasing framework. If we know what we are doing, we have built some good rapport, used our credibility statement to receive permission from the client to ask questions and are now ready to go deeper with our sales conversation. For many salespeople who are “free spirits” and “artists” who don’t design the sales conversation, this means a chapter and verse meandering through the gritty detail of the product or service features. Blathering on about the 50 shades of grey available and offering expert, in-depth insights into the differences might be intriguing, but if the buyer is looking for things in the colour blue, the effort is completely wasted and pointless. Now this sounds primitive and obvious, except that the vast majority of salespeople are geared up for feature explanation, not needs exploration.

I was selling Australian furniture in Nagoya, and visiting a leading furniture retailer at his vast store, filled with beautiful pieces from all around the world, except Australia. I went into my presentation about the uniqueness of the Australia timbers, the special designs available, the opposite seasonality and numerous other worthy points. His first question back to me absolutely floored me. He asked, ”Do you make furniture in Australia?” Ouch !!!

I immediately realized my sales conversation had assumed too much. I needed to start with selling Australia first, the manufacturer second and the actual products last. As I discovered, poor sales conversation design leads to poor results.

We need to learn four key things from the client: what they want (Primary Interest); what they must have – absolutes (Buying Criteria); what they would like to have – desirable (Other Considerations) and most importantly, why they want it (Dominant Buying Motive). The way we learn these things is to ask intelligent, well thought out, pre-planned questions.

The accompanying piece with this idea is to listen proactively to the answers. This is where many salespeople lack discipline. They hear something the client says and jump right in without letting the buyer give us all the detail. Or they lose concentration on what the key messages are because they are so fixated on what they are going to say next because they fear losing that thought, so they block out the client’s conversation.

Salespeople are allowed to take notes! Just write down the thought bubble, so it doesn’t get missed and sit back, relax and keep listening to the buyer – it is that hard.

The Primary Interest of the buyer is not what we sell. What we sell is a tool, a conduit, an enabler to fix a problem the client has and that solution is what they buy. Salespeople however, miss this distinction, because they are focused on the features of the tool and wish to describe it in great detail. We don’t buy the functionality – we buy the outcome of the functionality. Some common Primary Interests amongst buyers would include: increased revenues, lower costs; speed; improved efficiency; effective employees; increased market share etc. These are all outcomes – benefits not features. The salesperson’s job is to uncover which of these types of things are what the buyer wants, keeping in the back of the mind, how your solution will deliver these.

Buying Criteria are fairly straightforward. These are the features – things like the colour, size, weight. The buyer wants to know about the quality, the specifications, the warranty, locations, delivery, support etc. If these criteria are not present then there is no relevant solution from the salesperson to attract the buyer’s attention and they mentally dump you and move on.

Other considerations may not be a hard edged requirement but they influence the buying decision. This might mean special features, added value, special packaging, delivery options, payment terms, creative solutions.

Selling up against the Japanese trading companies is a tough gig. You might have your bright shiny object, all ready to go for the Japanese market, but the Big Guys have a secret weapon. They have locked your buyers into payments terms that you can’t compete with. They may be giving 120 days to pay, so the importer can receive and sell the goods, before they even have to pay for them. You are looking for cash on delivery and wonder why you can’t make any headway with this buyer, especially when you have a strong price advantage.

The Dominant Buying Motive is a compelling emotional reason for the buyer to make the buying decision. This is a tough one to uncover in Japan. Normally, these motives would include recognition, rewards, self-preservation, self-fulfillment. Because of the team focus of Japanese buyers they are reluctant to tell you what your wonderful solution will do for their personal career, after it fixes all the issues for them. Instead they will mention vague things like “the team will be happy”.

Subtlety in question design, sensitivity in the question framing, body language observation – all become more important in Japan, because culturally things are not expressed so directly here.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcast “THE Leadership Japan Series”, he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Keep Your Shtick To Yourself Buddy

 Smoothly memorised shtick, elaborate glossy materials, sharp suits, large expensive watches, bleached teeth, the perfect coiffure are not important in sales. Yet, this is the image of the pro-salesperson. Most of us never meet many pro-salespeople, because the vast majority we run into are hopeless. We meet the great unwashed and untrained, the part-time and partially interested, usually in a local retail format. The slick sales dude is what we see in movies or is a received image from urban myths. Hollywood pumps out Wall Street, Glengarry Glen Ross, Boiler Room, The Wolf of Wall Street and we get sold an image of what high pressure salespeople look like.

Japan is fascinating, in that it throws up some doozies. Rotting blackened stumps for teeth, disheveled clothing, scuffed worn shoes, ancient food stains on ties – you encounter this low level of personal presentation here with salespeople. It is almost the opposite extreme of the American movie image.

Rat with a gold tooth or rat with a rotting tooth – neither appeal very much. What we buyers really want is someone on our side. We want help to solve issues slowing us down, holding us back or preventing us from growing as we would wish. There are 6 steps on the client journey with salespeople: know you, like you, trust you, buy from you, repeat buy from you and refer you because we are a believer. This sounds simple, but salespeople get confused about who they are working for. They think they are there to work for themselves and get their commission or bonus or promotion and the client is just a tool in that process. This is stupid.

Dumb Things Said

I coach salespeople but am amazed at the dumb things they say and do. Some want to jam the square peg in the round hole and then argue with the client about why it will fit when it clearly doesn’t. When they get pushback from the client they then try to overwhelm the objection by will or force of personality. This is stupid too.

The salesperson jumps into the slide presentation on the laptop from the get go. Or they are pulling out their shiny flyers or expensive brochures or whatever and are launching forth with their memorised shtick. My first sales job was early evening door to door Britannica encyclopedia sales in a poor working class suburb in Brisbane. Before we were unleashed on an unsuspecting semi-literate public, we had to memorise, word for word, the entire twenty-five minute presentation. It wasn’t great then, but it is unacceptable now. Some people are still back in the 1970s with their sales efforts. I get calls even today telling me “so and so” is in my area etc. I can hear the cadence of them reading it off a script!

No More Show & Tell

When I am coaching aspirant professional salespeople, I ask them how do they know which slides to show or which flyer they should offer to the client? This is usually greeted with a “Huh?” response. We all did “show and tell” in elementary school but some have not travelled very far since then and think this is how you do sales. When I arrived at the Shinsei Retail Bank the financial product sales team would whip out a flyer of one product and if the wealthy client didn’t go for it, then they would just whip out the next one. This went on until the client either got tired of it or bought something.

As salespeople, we don’t know what to show the client and we shouldn’t show the client anything, until we know what they want. So keep the laptop closed, the flyers in the briefcase, the widget under the table and ask questions instead. By the way, get permission to ask questions first, especially in Japan. Here the status of the buyer is sky high and it is a total impertinence for a lowly sales pond scum to be asking God questions about anything.

Get Permission

Nevertheless, get permission and ask. Find out if there is a match. Mentally scour the walls of your gigantic solutions library, floor to ceiling packed with possible antidotes to their business ailments and select the best one for the client.   If there is no solution in your library, then don’t try and force the square peg into the round hole. Just thank them for their time and go and find someone you can help.

If your solution doesn’t fit, then don’t waste the client’s time - keep your shtick to yourself.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, THE Sales Japan Series and THE Presentations Japan Series, he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Sales Understanding

Price is always a big issue. We salespeople are very happy to drop the price, because we see this as the easy route forward with the client. Whenever there is a price increase, we immediately whine about it, because we see this as making our revenue task more difficult. We are permanently happy to discount, to win the business, even when our commissions are tied to the size of the sale. The problem is we are totally focused on the wrong thing.

What should we be focused on is not the pricing. We need to do a better job of listening to our clients, to really, deeply understand what that business needs to succeed. Rather than carrying around a bunch of screaming monkeys in our heads, all fighting about price, commission size, boss anger, mortgage payments, personal status, which new car, etc., we should be 100% concentrated on the client’s problems, not our own.

Rather than going into a discussion about what price we can get the client to agree to, we would do much better to join the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer. The customer has goals and aspirations and our job is to help them achieve them. In their success is our own success. In fact, the cost of our product or service is free to the client. It is free because it is paid out of the additional growth we bring to the client’s business, rather than a subtraction from what they have today.

When you think in terms of paying for your contribution from the increase in the revenues or costs savings for the client, then your whole mental framework shifts and so does the conversation. A focus on repeat orders rather than this one transaction is also a powerful mindset shift for us when engaging with clients. There may be occasions where this transaction is a one shot wonder, but really we want to build relationships with clients which last. Lasting relationships are totally based around the amount of trust which has been created and thinking only about ourselves, isn’t going to make that trust engagement happen anytime soon.

Pricing is totally related to perceptions of value on the part of the buyer. If there is sufficient value from the exchange of the good or service, then the buyer is comfortable with the relationship between the two. Their perception is the key and this is the job of the salesperson to work on that buyer perception. In many cases, it is very hard to prove that the price is backed up with sufficient value to justify what the salesperson is asking. This is understandable in some cases where the thing being sold is intangible or where the outcomes take time. Talking about the historical results for other firms is fine, but the buyer always suspects that type of talk is baloney or irrelevant. They have their own situation in their company and they want to see the value proposition through that prism.

A test or sample is a good way to break through the skepticism. The results may or may not be immediately available, but at least the process is able to be confirmed. The buyers experience helps them to decide whether the outcomes suggested are reasonable or not, based on what they have seen.

So, how do we salespeople become better able to have the proper approach to clients? In lieu of no existing sales philosophy at all within the firm, salespeople will generally posit their own version and often this is a highly selfish one. The sales culture can quickly become self-defeating. So we need to take responsibility and set down what is our attitude to our clients and how we do business around here. We need to understand we are building lifetime client value, our brand, our reputation and we are playing the long game. Salespeople need to repeat this to themselves endlessly. As salespeople we may think a couple of self administered doses of this philosophy will do the trick - well it won’t. We have to hammer on about this all the time to ourselves, to drive the idea into our mind and our soul.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, THE Sales Japan Series and THE Presentations Japan Series, he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.