Client Need Clarity

Do we have a clear understanding of what the client’s needs are?  These can vary beyond the obvious of increased profitability.  It might be more important to gain market share, than drive profits.  Or, it may be that profits are not as much emphasised, as investing in further growth.  How do we seek to understand their needs and at the same time differentiate ourselves from every other salesperson, equally raring to go with their interrogation of the client’s needs?  What does intelligent client question design look like?

If we access the client’s website and they are a listed company, we can find out a lot of basic information about the firm’s business, strategy and direction, from the annual reports there. If they are an unlisted company, we can do a media search on their activities to get an understanding of how they are positioning themselves in the market.  Failing that we can use our industry knowledge to make some insightful comments about where the market is at the moment and ask them how they see it. Turning up at the client’s office and simply asking “what does your company do?” is pretty pathetic, but very common on the part of unprofessional salespeople.

We would be better off asking things like, “I see that your global CEO is calling for 15% profit growth in the annual report.  Is that also the number for Japan or have you been allocated a higher number?”. Hopefully the answer will be 15% or a higher number.  This will mean they are challenged to meet the targets and maybe, we can be of assistance. If they answered 15%, then we would ask, “So how realistic is that target in the current economic conditions in the market here?”.  We are trying to get a feel for their confidence to achieve these targets by themselves.

Of course, we want to know where they are now in their business and where do they want to be, so we can gauge the size of the gap and their appetite for change.  The worst sales conversations are with client’s who don’t see any big gap, that they can’t close on their own.  No matter how whiz bang our question design, if they feel they are close to where they want to be, they won’t be seeing us as adding any value beyond what they can do internally.  What do we do in this case?

We have two levers to pull – opportunity and fear.  There might be some opportunities they haven’t thought of.  In sales, we see many companies and what they do.  We have the ability to take a successful idea from industry “A” which could be applied to industry “Z”.  The people working in those distant industries never mix, but we do. We can see applications for ideas across industries and we should be playing a positive role to make these suggestions to help grow their business.

A recent example was when I was calling on a foreign manufacturer, who amongst other things, makes industrial drill bits.  I asked the President if he had ever seen Blendtec’s  “Will It Blend” videos on You Tube.  These are viral video sensations by an American company making food blenders aimed at consumers.  They are very strong blenders and to prove it, the President, wearing a white lab coat and protective goggles, blends iPads, mobile phones, hockey pucks, you name it, captures it on video and posts it up on YouTube. I told the Japan President, “what about a “Will It Drill” local version in Japanese, hosted by you because you speak Japanese, to highlight the strength of your product?”.  Blender companies and drill company’s representatives are unlikely to ever meet, but we salespeople can be great connectors. There will be many such opportunities where we can prove ourselves useful to the client and we should be constantly thinking of how to do that.  Even if nothing comes of “Will It Drill” as an idea, I have been able to differentiate myself from every other salesperson coming through his door.  This is what we all want.

Often, not taking action is thought to be a safe option by clients, but it also has a cost – an opportunity cost.  Our job is to open up the client’s thinking to taking the opportunity to aid their business in the future, by taking action now.  We might say, “You know we talk about saving up for a rainy day, don’t we. Well in business too, we know there are up and down cycles the economy passes through and the worst situation is to face a downturn and run out of cash.  You have mentioned you feel confident about the current situation of the business, but have you factored in dealing with a downturn in the next few years? We know it will come, we just don’t know exactly when.  What if we were able to take the opportunity now to position ourselves to deal with that eventuality, would that be helpful for your business?”.

We are trying to move the clients thinking from “I am okay and don’t need to do anything” to “maybe I am not okay and need to do something I haven’t planned for yet”. 

The other option is fear. We know our own situation and we have knowledge of our business, but we are not alone.  We have competitors who can take actions which impact our business. Because we are in sales, we deal with many different clients and so we pick up valuable commercial intelligence about what is happening.  We can try to open up the client’s mind to taking action now on the basis that they have competitors who can change the game.

We can say, ”You mentioned to me a minute ago, that you felt the situation in your business was stable and progressing on course.  Are there any actions which could be taken by one of your competitors which would force that situation to change?”.  By asking this type of question we are asking the client to think beyond what they can control, to a future business situation they cannot control.  There may need to be some actions taken, to counter activities by competitors and these actions need to be taken now.  We need to shake up their complacency about their business situation, by getting them to contemplate scenarios they may have neglected to consider.

Questioning skills are important to not only uncover the client’s existing needs, they are also critical to reveal needs the client hasn’t yet focused on sufficiently.  The salesperson who can ask these types of questions is soon considered a valuable partner to the business bringing in some external “Brains Trust” elements to assist their company.  This is how we can get business with clients and it is extremely low cost, in terms of client acquisition.  All it requires is some hard thinking and good communication skills about how we can help them.

“Never Forget A Customer; Never Let A Customer Forget You”

This is an old saying in sales and one we forget at our cost.  We might have made the sale and then we keep moving forward.  We get wrapped up in the intricacies of the getting other customers to commit and in the logistical details of delivering our previously sold service or product.  Our schedule fills up quickly and we have filled it with the present and future, not the past.  That customer we sold to gets forgotten in this busy life and they return the compliment and forget about us too.  We know that creating new customers is more expensive on an acquisition cost basis and that selling again or selling more to our existing customers is easier than making a new sale.  Why then don’t we do a better job of developing further business with our existing customers?

We usually do a good job in the immediate post sales service period, but the key word there is “immediate”.  We don’t schedule in the “just checking in “ contact, because we are too busy chasing down the new contacts.  Now that the customer has had the benefit of our product or service, we don’t call back and ask, “How has it been going? Are there any subsequent issues that have arisen that we can help with or fix?”.  A good rule to apply is always make the time to connect with the buyer.  They will either be happy and we can see if they know others, who would also benefit. If they are unhappy, we can fix the issue for them. Silent, unhappy customers are not what we want, because we are killing our brand and our reputation without even knowing it.

Clients may have cyclical needs when there is a certain cadence to their buying.  Upgrades or replacements require follow up.  When these are scheduled into our diaries, we can make sure to re-contact the client.  It may be that there is no sequence logic and so we have to create a schedule, so that they don’t forget us.  There are few things more disheartening then contacting an existing client to find they did have a need and they filled that need with our competitor’s solution. I really hate having that conversation. 

We can add the client to our email mailing lists and they get updates.  The problem is that they don’t read them or even notice them, so a “set and forget” idea is a bad idea.  We have to be able to cut through all the clutter and noise of daily life to reach out to them, so that we stay top of mind.  This is harder today, more so than it has ever been.  There are so many emails, so much social media, so many meetings, no wonder our buyers get swamped.  Trying to get anyone on the phone these days is mind numbingly hard and it is like a miracle if you succeed.  No one calls you back anymore either.

Japan has a set pattern of seasonal gifts which are sent to clients for the express purpose of reminding them that they have not been forgotten.  Depending on how many clients you have, this can become expensive and is probably easier for larger firms.  A hand written thank you note on the anniversary of the business conducted with the client is not expensive and because hardly anyone gets postal mail anymore, it will stand out.  Even though you can’t get people on the phone so easily, don’t just hang up.  Don’t expect to get called back either but always leave a voice message, so they hear your voice and understand you have been thinking of them.  Some of my business contacts here tell me that their millennial employees avoid the phone like the plague, much preferring to text.  It doesn’t matter, young or old, leave them a voice mail anyway.

Sending relevant White Papers, books, reports, media clippings are always good ideas, but you can’t leave this to chance. It is a good discipline to be looking for these items, with specific customers in mind.  When you see something that will resonate with them, this is when you have to be disciplined to send it.  This doesn’t have to be every month of course, but probably twice a year is a good practice, on top of the email blasts and newsletters that existing clients receive anyway. 

Making appointments with yourself, is one of the best ways to make sure we actually do the immediate and the sustained follow up.  Good intentions are terrific, but planned, disciplined contacts are better. Choosing electronic or analogue systems is not the issue, the real key is having a system that delivers the updating, reminding process to the buyer.  If we don’t have a system then we need to create one and the best time to start was yesterday.

Join The Conversation Going On In Your Prospect’s Mind

We have all had the experience of talking at cross purposes with someone.  We are both having a conversation that makes sense to ourselves, which is logical and congruent, but which baffles our interlocutor.  After a while we realise we were both talking about unrelated things.  This is not the type of conversation we want to be having with buyers.  We want to be on song, on topic, right on the button with what we are discussing.  There is no point in solving a non-issue or a minor issue for the buyer, because we had misunderstood what the real issue actually was.

Great and all good. However, how can we be sure we are understanding the critical issue for the buyer. Part of this is structural, in the sense of how we construct the conversation with the buyer.  Part of this is linguistic, our ability to parse the language being used.  Part is our communication skillset, to fathom the nuances, perceive the unstated pieces of the puzzle, read the body language.

Structural here means how good a job did we do in building the foundations for  the meeting.  What research did we do prior to meeting?  How much time did we allocate for thinking about how the conversation might flow.  How much effort did we put into designing the questions we would ask, in order to understand where they are now and where they want to be?

The buyer has two conversations going on in his or her mind.  We need to join both of those conversations.  One is the conscious conversation.  This is based on their present awareness of the issue, the scale and scope of the problem.  The other is the subconscious conversation that has been crushed by the weight of the world’s current dilemmas requiring immediate, total attention.  The issues are there, they are just mentally superseded by other dramas that are grabbing their more immediate attention at the minute.

They have something worrying them and we need to know what that is.  We do this by asking questions about the business.  If we have arrived at the meeting with a mental list of what questions we need to ask in order to find out what the key requirements of the buyer are, we will do much better.  What normally happens though, is the salesperson just turns up and gives a pitch or if they do manage to ask a question, it is too spontaneous and isolated to be really effective.

It is much better to have mentally worked out the flow chart of questions like those you often see in project planning diagrams.  If the answer is “yes”, then we go to this next question or action.  If it is “no”, then we to to this next  question or action.  It is our flow chart of the sales conversation, constructed before we get into the meeting.  Obviously, the client conversation never follows the exact path but our job as salespeople is to bring the discussion back on track, so that we can gain the answers to the questions we are asking.

The client has some self talk around the business.  There are things that are concerning them.  They are plagued with what has happened in the past, as they replay those events in their mind and are fearful of a repeat performance.  There are issues in the future they fear will unfold to their detriment.  They are hazy ideas at this point, but there are always dark clouds on the horizon in business.  There are a tonne of conversations going on in the conscious and unconscious minds of our buyers, so we don’t lack for opportunities to find a connection.  The point is we want to connect with those particular conversations around issues we can fix for them.

To increase the chance of that happening, we need to have planned out the conversation before we get there, looking for hooks and triggers to help us to connect.  We need to be designing well structured questions, which will get the client talking.  When they talk at length, we receive a lot of valuable information, and guideposts to help us to, in turn, help them.  We are not doing this is in a cold, hard, bright lights in their eyes, interrogation fashion.  We are doing it gently, with the highest of purposes in mind– to make their businesses thrive.  We need to be very circumspect on asking the questions.  It cannot be blunt or hard or harsh or too intrusive.  This is our advanced communication skill on display now. We have to be able to phase a question in a way which is easy and comfortable for the client to answer.

This is how we join them in the conversation they are having in their own mind and when we do that we will be on their wave length and on point.  This is how we can tailor our presentation to suit them.  To introduce our solution in a way that is totally relevant and makes sense to the buyer.  What we are offering is exactly what they are looking for and this is no accident.  It is the sum total of our efforts in planning and plan execution to hit the bulls-eye – that is to solve their biggest problem.

The Successful Salesman and Saleswoman Has A Plan

“We don’t plan to fail, we fail to plan”, is an old saw that is still true today.  Despite an avalanche of tools to help us plan well, we still manage to do a lousy job of it.  Another oldie goldie is “a good workman doesn’t blame his tools” and so this applies perfectly to the tech panoply we have at our fingertips. Having tools available and using them at all, much less effectively, is the bugbear of most sales organisations. The firm buys the tool or the monthly subscription, spends a lot of money on it, only to see the salespeople barely engaging with it.  The information stays in their head or on loose bits of paper, perhaps in a notebook or in an organiser.  Anywhere but where it needs to be, to be of any assistance to the marketing effort, to properly segment and go after specific, defined markets.

Salespeople like people and they like talking to clients.  This is relatively easy.  Keeping records of those conversations is another matter.  Getting those records into the Client Relationship Management (CRM) system is a different ask.

Setting up the meetings is a process which can be very poorly done in the hands of poor salespeople systems. The timing of meetings should be done with a mind to geography, so that you are not traipsing across town over long distances.  You need to be grouping the visits together, so the time lost travelling is kept to a minimum. 

There is a funny commercial you can see on the monitors in taxis in Tokyo about selling in Japan.  A new guy is being welcomed to the sales team and one of the tanned veteran sales guys enthusiastically shakes his hand, but then notices the newbies calf muscles are puny.  Mr. Suntan and the other veterans proudly show off their super muscular calves, built from going door to door to see clients and deride the new guy. The point of the commercial is that this is old style sales and you can use computer programmes much more effectively to reach clients today.

To make appointments needs a prospect list.  A prospect list comes from leads coming in through SEO, your website, pay per click ads on Google etc., also existing clients, prior clients who have gone cold, networking, referrals, inbound phone contacts or highly selective cold calls. There are new clients to be targeted and this requires real research and effort.  Today in Japan, you can’t easily buy client lists anymore.  There are so many restrictions now around privacy of information and getting permission to connect.  Getting simple information is much harder today than it was even five years ago, so we need to allocate sufficient time to do the research.

If you don’t know the name of the person you are calling, then the staff taking the call are all pros at getting rid of you.  They make sure you never get through to the person you seek, who is always in a meeting by the way and who never returns your call.  No one is thinking “let’s all make sure the wheels of industry are turning faster and faster and let’s grease the wheels to make sure that happens”. They are in full shield wall defensive posture of protection and denial to invaders from outside.  So you at least need the name of who you want to contact to get on the first rung of arranging a meeting.

Keeping track of how many people you are contacting, how many you are  actually reaching, how many appointments you are winning, how many deals you are concluding and the average size of those deals, is critical for the well organised salesperson.  This provides us with success ratios and norms around how much activity is required to generate new business. Yet how many salespeople know their one ratios, know how many calls they have to make to achieve their monthly budget?

When we do meet the client, how good are the notes we are taking?  Are we talking notes or leaving it all to our ironclad memories? Remember that the faintest ink is vastly superior to the best memory.  Write it all down.  If for some reason you can’t take notes during the meeting, get it all down immediately thereafter. The next step is to get the key bits into the system.  This way your notes are kept safe, can be accessed from anywhere and can easily be shared.  When you are looking for case studies of success these notes are goldmines. They usually describe the client’s problem in detail, the proposal you put together talks about the solution you provided and the P&L provides the results.

When we know how many contacts have to be made to meet budget, have the prospects identified to pour into our sales funnel, we can use our excellent time management skills to make sure we are doing our tasks in priority order and that we are doing the most productive thing at every given moment.  None of this happens by itself.  We have to plan our activities carefully and plan our days fully.  Record keeping is boring but for those salespeople who get it, they know that is where the gold is buried.  What are you doing about all of this?

Forensic Sales Questioning Skills

The idea of asking questions of buyers during sales calls is actually ancient.  For at least eighty years, we have known this is the most effective way of getting agreements to our offers.  If this key insight has been around for so long, how come there are so few salespeople who have discovered it yet?  Salespeople turn up to see clients and launch forth straight into their pitch. They do this without having asked even one question about what the buyer wants, needs or has some interest in.  “You can’t easily hit a target you are not aiming for” is obvious.  If the target is a sale, there must be a need the client has in place, in order to convince them to hand over their money. If you are not aiming your conversation with the buyer around their need, then you are not aiming for the target, which will trigger the buyer action. 

Conceptually the idea of asking buyers questions is not complex.  Japan throws up the curve ball that asking questions of buyers is considered rude here, so salespeople decline the chance and go straight into their pitch instead.  This is a religious difficulty here.  The buyer is GOD in Japan and GOD brooks no questions from mere mortals.  The buyer will answer them though and willingly, if we ask them the right way.

We simply use a four step approach: (1) tell them what we do in general terms. (2) note a specific case where we have provided value to a buyer, with concrete numbers attached. (3) suggest that perhaps we could do the same for them. (4) mention that in order for us to know if that was possible or not, would they mind if we asked them a few questions?  Yes, there may be some rare holdouts among Japanese buyer Gods who demand our pitch, but for the vast majority of cases the permission to ask questions will be granted.

Okay, so now we have been granted permission to ask questions, where do we start?  In fact, we start way before the actual meeting, when we are planning the call.  Planning the call?  Again, for some strange and mysterious reason, there are many salespeople who don’t plan their calls.  I guess if you are just presenting your canned pitch, then not much planning ahead is required.  If you are going to be successful in sales, then planning your call is a must.  You need to do some hard thinking about the client and their business before you turn up at their door.

Research the industry, if you are not that familiar with its details, first find out who are the major competitors and what do they offer.  Look at the on-line annual report if it is a listed company.  If it is unlisted, do a search on them to see what information is available from the public domain.  None of this should take massive amounts of time.  We are just trying to get an idea of what things we need to ask the buyer during our meeting.

For example, in the annual report there will usually be glossy photos of the President in the corner office. There is usually an accompanying article on the leadership’s strategy and vision for the enterprise.  This is useful because we can ask about how the global strategy is working out here in Japan, or what changes they had to make to the global strategy to fit the Japan reality?

In the case of an unlisted company, we may have trouble finding out any concrete information, but we can ask about their competitors.  They may be listed firms or maybe not.  It doesn’t matter.  We can ask how these rival companies are affecting the buyer’s business?  This is a nice oblique question to help us gain intelligence on what is going on with this company at this moment.

What we are trying to do is get the buyer to tell us key details about the current state of play in their company.  This is the “As Is” question to gauge their current reality.  We need to know this because we want to find out where they would like to be going forward, or what we call the “Should Be” question.  Unless there is a nice big gap between where they are now and where they want to be, we may have no hope of making a sale.  Small gaps are bad news. 

They may feel they have enough internal resources or time or manpower to get to where they want to be, without our help.  The way we find that out is by asking the “Barrier” question.  We ask what is stopping them from achieving their vision? Finally, we ask the “Payoff” question about what success would mean to them individually, so that we can personalize our solution presentation later in the conversation.

The key in the questioning process is to keep going and dig deep.  When we teach sales training to our class participants, I notice that many skim over the questions part.  They ask a question, get an answer and then simply move on to the next question.  They have often just passed up a golden opportunity to go much deeper. 

Asking a further “why” question when we are told things by the buyer is a great way to better understand what they are thinking.  By this I mean asking more than just one “why” here.  We need to keep going with asking why, why, why to get more forensic clarity around the situation. Now we have to do this in a way that is very soft and well constructed.  That is why our planning is so key.  Asking a series of why questions can feel intrusive and rude very quickly unless we ask them in a polite, gentle, curious way.  I

Asking deep why questions also has the added benefit, in many instances, of crystalising the buyer’s thinking on a topic.  We invite them to go further into their own analysis of the situation or to review the strategy or to reflect on a past decision.  Gaps, inconsistencies, possible future problems are often hidden from their daily view. 

This is because everyone is super busy putting out fires and beating off crocodiles with their oars, so that they can’t easily grapple with these problems.  By asking “why” so many times, we challenge the buyer to think again about what they are doing, why they are doing it and to go deeper in their approach to the problem.

This enables us to provide more comprehensive solutions to the buyer’s problems, surface greater needs and expose the opportunity costs of taking no action.  That sounds to me like a pretty good menu with which to make a sale, compared to the shotgun spray of just going into a canned pitch and blathering on at length about your widget’s spec.

Read The Air When Selling

There is a saying in Japan, Kuki wo Yomu, which means read the air or be aware of the atmosphere or subtexts in the meeting.  In sales, we need to be on high alert all the time for what is the atmosphere prevailing with the buyer at this moment. What are any changes we are noticing during the meeting and what sort of changes do we want to see.

I was talking to a salesman about a call he and a colleague had made on a buyer.  The buyer was an existing client and this was just a meet the new guy introduction meeting.  There was no need to pitch, as they were already a buyer.  My friend had briefed his colleague that no pitch was required, as it was a meet and greet occasion.  That didn’t stop the colleague though, as he ploughed in trying to sell the already sold buyer.  The reaction on the part of the client was surprise and a touch of incredulous confusion. The brand of the seller was not advanced on that occasion, as the buyer wondered, “what is wrong with these people?”.

Why didn’t the colleague get it? Why did he pitch, when there was no need? Is this issue something you can fix through training?  That is a good question and to some extent it is similar to the question “can you fix stupidity through training?”.  Probably not.  This same colleague has a track record with this type of behavior apparently, so he is obviously not learning as he flits along, from one disaster to another.  If you do not seem intelligent to the buyer then they don’t want to know more. Basically, they won’t buy from dumb people. 

There will always be a portion of any population who are dim.  Some of these dim people wind up in sales.  From the buyer’s point of view, we salespeople are all tarred with the same brush, until they can differentiate us from the dim people. There is not too much that can be done about dim people in the sales profession, except to try to keep them away from buyers as much as possible.  

The other issues however relate to ourselves.  We may be dim at times as well.  We may be missing signals during the meeting and also be barging in, with both barrels blazing, when we shouldn’t be.  How can we successfully read the air and better align ourselves with what the client is thinking?  This is especially tricky in Japan, because often the buyers are master poker players, hiding or minimizing their body language and facial expressions. They become very hard to read.  We have to be really watching them like a hawk and look for any telltale indications that they like or don’t like something we have said.  Easier said than done by the way.

We can get caught up in what we are doing, when we are in the moment of presenting our solution, we can miss these important signals.  If our brain is on fire with what we want to tell them, we may imagine we are listening to the buyer, but it may be self delusion.  We may only have what we want to say in our own mind at that moment and therefore may not be concentrating enough on the people in front of us.  Are we listening with our eyes as well as our ears? 

There are things called “tells” in poker games, where the opponents peg a certain behavior indicator with a line of decision making.  The idea is to work out the “tells” of your opponent, so that you can predict their actions. For example, they may have a habit of rubbing their left ear when they are bluffing.  They may not even be aware of it but you will want to know that if you want to call their bluff. There are “tells” in body language, breathing, eye line, posture, etc., that can give us a hint on how our buyers are reacting.  If you don’t know Japan well, at first, these signals may be lost. 

I am not talking about the obvious ones like sucking the air through the back teeth, which clearly indicates what you are proposing is a difficulty or an impossibility for them or drumming their fingers on the table with impatience to see you out the door. I am talking about more nuanced and subtle signs that can be simply missed.  Even if they are missed in the beginning, at least start practicing trying to link up what you see in front of you, with how things are going in the meeting. Over time, the connection between all of these “tells” and the results start to collide and you get a better idea of what you are actually witnessing.

The key point is everyone has certain habits, which are linked to how they are thinking or feeling.  When we are dealing with buyers, we need to be scouring their reactions to give us early warning signals of resistance or doubt. We need to read the air in the meeting, especially when we are dealing with a buying group.  There will be different stakeholders in that meeting, who will have different views on how attractive your offer is to their self interests.  You need to be watching very carefully for internal resistance, so that you can assist your champion inside the buyer company to prevail against any possible opposition.

None of this is a walk in the park in Japan, but we have to raise our sensitivity to our buyer’s reactions. We can’t get lost in that beautiful sound, which is our own voice and in the warm embrace of our own ideas.  We have to see everything that is in front of us, all the way through the meeting.  We need to find out how to hit any hot buttons that will generate enthusiasm for our solution.  We need to learn how to shut up, listen and watch instead, for clues on what is really going on.  Learn to read the air if you want to make sales in Japan.

Building Expert Authority With Buyers

“You are who Google says you are” is a quote from Timbo Reid, the host of the “Small Business Big Marketing” podcast which I follow.  His point is people check us out before they meet us, using search engines like Google.  In sales, buyers will also peruse our company website, search us out on Google and probably look us up on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.  What are they going to find there?  Are we in photos on Facebook, doing something stupid, fully fuelled by copious amounts of alcohol?  Are we conscious enough of how our personal brand is being perceived?  Have we got business enemies who are posting damming claims about how we didn’t pay them or how we ripped them off.

Our lives in sales today are open books.  We can’t miss the point that we need to control what gets written in the pages of that book.  If you have Facebook posts that are not consistent with the professional image you want to portray, then delete them all.  If it is really bad, delete the whole thing and start again.  When we look at the photos of you in your profile page, is it you with a straw hat and a cocktail in hand, in some sand and surf setting, rather than you in a suit?  Is your LinkedIn profile some pathetic job resume?  Are you raging against the other political party on Twitter, upsetting the other fifty percent of the population, including your buyers?

Personal branding in sales is gold.  Before we even get to have the meeting with the client, we want to create an image in their mind of someone who is serious, trustworthy, reliable, expert, credible, friendly and easy to work with.  This will create itself and morph into something we don’t want to project to clients, unless we step in and take control of our public image.  The rule in sales is to avoid subjects like politics and religion.  This is obvious, but we may have firm views on these things and our public record is there for our clients to see.  We may be losing business opportunities because of our very privately held but widely, publically broadcast ideas on these subjects.

Have you done an audit on yourself lately?  Do a search on your own name, using a number of popular search engines and see what it throws up.  Take a good look at your Facebook and LinkedIn pages and see what you are projecting to the world about you, as a potential business partner for buyers. 

It shouldn’t just be from a defensive posture.  What can you do to project expert authority to buyers, by what you present on social media etc.  Post blogs about your area of expertise, offering good insight and advice to buyers of your product or service.  It doesn't have to be hundreds of blogs, but it should also not be a barren wasteland of nothing.  Extended blogs can become articles which may be suitable for publication in magazines. These can get picked up in your Google search and they add to your personal brand as an authority in this area. You can push the articles out through your weekly newsletter to clients or through your social media.  If you produce enough blogs, these may become an eBook or a hard copy book.  Again your expert authority is being highlighted and you are going to be seen as an expert in your field.

You may not like to write or maybe you are not very good at it.  You can always record what you want to say, get a transcript of it and work on editing that.  If you need to, there are plenty of editors and ghost writers available to help you polish it up.  I remember seeing an article written by a fellow I know and it was very good. I was surprised because he never seemed that articulate.  I found out later I knew the guy who had ghost written it for him. It doesn't matter. People don’t care that much, they take what they see in front of them and it is either good or it isn’t.  You are still making these points and it all supports your personal branding.

You can also use audio for podcasting.  This is not for the faint hearted because once you start, you have to be committed to keep going.  You also have to release episodes with reliable regularity.  You can tell the client on one hand that you are a reliable supplier and then have show episodes released at crazy intervals, that show zero ability to be consistent. Not good. 

You may prefer video and that is cheap and easy today, compared to years ago, when you needed lots of equipment, a camera crew, a sound crew, video editors etc.  Today you can broadcast using Facebook Live and have no crew and no editing.  If you want to be a bit fancier, buy a device holder that screws into a tripod, buy an external microphone and set you phone or iPad and just hit record.  You may not even bother to edit out the bits of you pushing the start and stop button or get someone else to push them for you.

Video is good because it shows you in action and attracts more trust.  We can see your eyes and read your body language, to gauge if we can trust you or not, before we bother to meet you.  It allows us to demonstrate our expertise on a given subject and add value to others in the same industry.  If you know a bit about editing or have access to editing help, you can add an intro and an outro to brand yourself even better.  You can also inject slides into the video to show graphs or text to support what you are saying.

We are seizing control of our public image and we are stuffing it full of expert authority.  We know we are going to be found anyway, but we are proactively deciding just what will be found.  We are assembling content in various forms that appeal to buyers. Some like to read text, others like to listen to audio and others want to see us on video.  We marshal all of the social media available, our email list and enlist the cooperation of others who will share our content to get the greatest bang for the buck.  A little bit of planning goes a long way to setting up the sales meeting and selling the client before we even meet.

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.enjapan.dalecarnegie.com

and check out our 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

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

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", 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 Poor Performers

Are you failing in sales or do you have sales staff who are not making their numbers?  Sales is a brutal, metrics based activity where there are no hiding places or at least none that can be sustained.  Eventually, the numbers show if you are making it or you are not.  What happens then?  In the West the usual next step is you are fired and a replacement is found.  Japan is a bit different.  The social and legal bias is against firing people for poor performance.  In the case of large companies, the management is expected to move that failing salesperson into another job, where they can do better.

Smaller companies don't have that same pressure, because the courts know that survival can be impaired by underperformers.  The herd must unite together to survive, even if it means releasing one of the number. Nevertheless, internally, the other members of the team expect that the failing salesperson be given some sort of vague chance to right their ship of sales.  They don’t like seeing heads lopped off, because they always feel that “but for the grace of God there go I”.

Whether it is you who are failing or one of your staff, then what should you do?  The issue usually lies with the work style of that person. What they are doing today is the product of what they have been doing for a long time and so they expect that to work. The issue often arises that when you shift companies or even industries, what worked before is no longer working.  As human beings we are sometimes so programed to keep repeating what we know and what we think will work, that we become blind to the reality.

In smaller companies and in gaishikei(foreign multinationals) the whole age and stage hierarchy gets mixed up as well. Suddenly you find your boss is younger than you or oiks, a woman or both!  For older men, this requires a level of flexibility that they have never had to find in their previous work life.  If the old dog can’t learn some new tricks the gaishikei bosses will be quick to disappear them.

We have to develop higher levels of self awareness and understand that what we think is correct may not fit this situation and therefore need to find a new truth that works for us.  Smaller companies don’t have other spots to move failing salespeople around to, so usually it is one last chance or imminent departure.

In the current market, where it is very hard to hire salespeople, especially English speaking salespeople, then a degree of patience is required on the boss’s part.  Even if this person is not performing well enough, they are knowledgeable about the products and the clients and so have a base from which to improve.  Once the sale’s problem child is fired, then we have the difficulty of finding a replacement at all or finding one who is actually better than the last.  In a tight market you tend to take what you can get and hope you can train them to be better.  Do you actually have the means of doing that though?  Who will train them?  What amount of onboard training will they get.  In small firms everything is lean so the training component tends to be Spartan.

If there are age and gender issues then the salesperson has to realise they have to suck it up and get used to this brave new world of work, which is not how it was back in the day of their long departed youth.  So what. Either learn to fit it or it will be out on your ear.  From the boss’s side, at least giving people a chance to come back from the precipice fits in well with social values in Japan and the rest of the team will prefer that to casting them into oblivion.  The retention of your other performing team members is a key job of the boss in this 1.68 jobs for everyone looking world, in Japan.  People observe how you handle poor performance very minutely and forensically.

No easy answers anymore, to the poor performance conundrum in Japan.  The bad news is that is isn’t going to ever improve, so we all have to navigate our way around these issues in more creative ways than before.  The failing salesperson has to reinvent themselves and we bosses have to do the same.  The market punishes those who are not able to move with the times and find the flexibility needed to thrive and survive.

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.enjapan.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

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

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", 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.

We Give Added Value. No You Don’t!

The chocolate on the pillow, the fruit bowl or the wine bottle and glasses in your hotel room are often cited as examples of good service, adding extra value to the client. We may be doing something similar in our business, from our side for free, that we imagine is adding extra value to the buyer.  The idea is cute but the thinking is a bit fuzzy.  I am on a diet, so I don’t appreciate the chocolate. I don’t drink, so I can’t enjoy the wine. Perhaps I have an allergy to certain fruit, so I can’t eat the fruit provided.

Value is perceived value and also is only value when it corresponds with the interests and desires of the buyer.  There is the rub.  We need to know more about our buyer rather than just shotgun the possibilities.  We need to laser beam around their interests. In the hotel example, we have to book and often we do this on-line.  Our preferences could be plumbed right then.  Or we have to turn up and go through a check-in process. Our desires could be plumbed then and there.  Yes, it takes away the surprise factor, but an unhelpful surprise isn’t adding very much value is it?

The secret is how can we know our buyers better, so that we can surprise them or at least delight them? Today, there is so much information floating around about us on the internet.  I have a Facebook account (in fact I have two), a LinkedIn account, an Instagram account and a Twitter account.  If you take a look at my Instagram account, I often post photos of empty wine bottle’s labels and few short comments about what I thought of that particular wine.  So you could not only anticipate that I like wine, you could even provide me with one of my favourites. 

My LinkedIn account has my profile and also over 1460 blogs, each with a Bio that talks about what I have done in my career and a bit about my background.  You would know that I do traditional Shitoryu Karate, so I have an interest in martial arts.  The hotel may have some martial arts themed movies in their line up.  A small note in my room pointing this out would be a simple, but nice touch and may get me to buy the movie.  “Welcome Greg, there is a great Jackie Chan movie playing in our movie lineup, which you may enjoy to watch while you stay here with us.  If there is anything else we can do to make your stay a truly great one, please let me know.  Jan (ext. 4077)”.  Now that is not hard to do, but it only works if you bother to know something about me.

Now to be fair, it is always easier to point out the shortcomings of other suppliers than our own. Hotels do their thing and we have our own clients and customers to serve.  What can we do for them?  The great book “Moments Of Truth” by Jan Carlzon, describes how he went through all the touch point that SAS Airlines had with their customers.  He and his team looked for ways to make sure at each touch point the experience was excellent.  We all need to be doing the same.  

I have an open office plan layout, so I sit amongst the troops.  My desk is easy to find, it is the one with all the papers piled high upon it! Anyway, I can hear my team on the phone. Sometimes I can hear that the quality of the staff’s voice toward the client isn’t friendly enough.  They sound very “business like” but I want them to do better than that.  I want them to sound happy, upbeat and friendly, even if none of those things apply in reality on that day.  It doesn’t matter if you kicked your toe this morning, you have to come across to the client as a positive, helpful friendly person.  This is especially so if the client is not sounding like any of those things themselves.

Another pet peeve of mine is when I call companies.  The style in Japan is to only say the company name and not your own name. So I call the number, ask for Suzuki san and get “This is Suzuki”.  How do I feel?  Am I really happy I got Suzuki san on the first go?  No. I feel guilty and bad because I didn't recognize Suzuki san’s voice. I teach my staff to always answer the phone by stating the company name and then their own name and do it in a friendly voice.  This eliminates any potential embarrassment to the client of not remembering our voice when they call us and starts the conversation off on a positive note.  What is the cost of this?  Nothing. However, we have to be thinking about these things in the first place and in a busy life we can get stuck in doing things in a certain way without any time taken for reflection.

In a few days we will be having an internal systems audit.  We have many, many  systems in our company, but we have not really looked at them altogether in total, with a mind to making them more efficient or more client friendly.  I am sure when you look at your own business, you will realise “wow, we have a lot of procedures around here”.  Are they the best procedures, does technology now allow some of these to be automated, how is the client’s impression of your company as a result of being on the receiving end of these procedures?

So break down the touch points with your buyers and look at where can you make this interaction more efficient and more friendly.  We accumulate systems without thinking about them as a whole.  By the way, as the boss, it is always a good practice to call yourself and see how it feels to a client when they call.  How do your staff stack up on making that great first impression. By exploring the details, we can come up with improvements for certain.  Once we get to that point then we can start brainstorming how we can add additional value to the buyer and exceed their expectations.

“We Don’t Have Any Budget”. Yes You Do!

In the profession of sales, this is one of the most widespread pushbacks on our sterling offer. It also a false flag as well.  We should never believe it when we hear this, because they certainly have budget.  What they really mean is they are not prepared to allocate any of their budget for this product or service.  Why would they be that crazy and not make the allocation?

The issue is with us, we salespeople.  We have not provided enough value to warrant any change in the current allocations. This is me too, when I am the buyer. If I get hit up for some expenditure and I am not convinced that at that price point I am getting sufficient value, then I reject the offer.  I don’t say it directly though.  I try to be gentle and nice and just say “it is not in my budget”.  

Well that is crap actually. My budget, like everybody else’s budget is a set of random numbers in cells in spreadsheets.  On the left side is written some words describing the topic. Things like salary, rent, marketing. On the right side on that line, under the column for the current month there sits a figure attached to that topic. 

Where did that figure come from?  It was an assumption at the start of the year of where the money would be likely be spent in the next twelve months.  In reality, though we overspend in some areas and underspend in others.  If we are motivated enough, we can find the money. We just take it out of one cell and transfer to another.  So “I don’t have any budget for this” is simply buyer BS.

Fine, but what can we do about it?  The value failure is due to a number of factors.  We may not have fully understood their business or their needs, so we have been suggesting the wrong or a weak solution.  They don’t find this convincing enough.  Maybe our questioning component of the sales interview was insufficient in scope or maybe they didn’t open up to us and tell all. 

Remember that often this is the first or second meeting with a client and the first full sales call. We are a relative stranger to them. Yet here we are as bold as brass, interrogating them within an inch of their life, like one of those a hardened detectives on a rough beat, that you see in movies.  If the trust hasn’t been established then they may not want to expose all their firm’s dirty laundry to a new face.

Or maybe we did understand but the solution we presented didn’t grab them.  This can be the issue of the gap between where they are now and where they want to be, being too small.  I had this recently.  I went through the solution in detail but I could sense this wasn’t pushing any excitement buttons.  I failed to explain well enough how the solution I was proposing for the money sought, was going to improve their business results. 

Reflecting on that meeting later, I realised I hadn’t done a good enough job of drawing out word pictures of how things would be different inside the company once they had our solition. I didn’t describe in enough detail how the people would be changed and really firing.  I was operating at 30,000 feet and needed to get down on the deck more about the positive differences we would bring.  They felt they could get where they wanted to go under their own steam, without my invaluable help and assistance.  That failure to make the sale was on me.

In other cases, it might be a timing issue on budgets.  The person we are talking to has to justify the number to someone in the windowless basement room downstairs, who are wearing green eye shades, shirt arm bands and counting the money.  The sacred budget created at the start of the year doesn’t include this allocation and now we want to make a change.  This is where we have to get creative.  We need to look for payment timings that won’t trigger alarm bells in the accounting section.  Maybe we split the payments across months or financial years, to make it easier to get through the bean counters.  Maybe we deliver the service or product now and get paid later?  In many countries you wouldn’t dream of doing that but Japan is different in that regard because you are unlikely to get ripped off.

This timing issue came up recently.  I had made a full solution proposal and the local team liked it.  Headquarters in Europe however had a meltdown.  Well they would wouldn’t they!  Anytime you take that miserable EU peso and put it into yen, the currency calculations boggle their old world imaginations.  Never mind that this is a totally different economy. Or that their own local staff salary bill here in Japan is totally vast, compared to what they are facing in Europe for the same level positions.  They conveniently overlook these realities and can’t get their head around spending such a huge sum of money.

Fortunately, we were able to come up with some solutions that enabled the local Country Head to move one set of numbers from one cell to another and do the business.  This was worked into this year’s and next year’s budgets.  They had the money all along.  It was just a question of being able to pony up the value component sufficiently to get them to make the switch.  So sometimes “it is not in my budget” can be rejigged, so it is.

Regional Differences When Selling In Japan

Japan is a big small place. It is about the same size as the UK, but is covered in mountains, the latter making up 70% of the land area. We have very few of those horizon stretching field vistas like they have in England.  This mountainous aspect has led to quite strong sub-regional differences here, especially reflected in language, customs and cuisine.  England has these too, but I think Japan is more pronounced in this regard.  These differences pop up when you are selling here as well.  The following are my experiences having sold in all of these cites and having lived in Kobe/Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo and having made sale’s calls in other provincial centers.

If we go from south to north and start in Kyushu in Fukuoka, there is a local dialect and basically everyone went to school there and graduated from the local colleges and universities.  Foreigners are not calling on companies all that often down there, so there is something of a rarity factor at play here.  Back in the good old days, when companies had generous entertainment budgets, the local staff were really glad to meet you.  This was a grand occasion to use you as the excuse to have a big night out on the town on the firm’s dime.  My ego took a bruising when I finally worked out it wasn’t the Story charm, that was generating this great enthusiasm for a night out on the town. That big spending night out culture has gone by the wayside, but the rarity interest factor is still at play. Language is an issue though, because the English speaking capability is still underdeveloped in most of Japan. The local burghers are quite cautious and conservative too.  It will take a lot of patience to do business here, but it can be done.  It just normally requires a lot more time than your company’s leaders or shareholders are prepared to give you.

Kobe was opened as an international port in 1868, so it is one of the most open minded towns in Japan. They have had foreigners living in their midst for a very long time, so there is nothing special about us from a uniqueness point of view.  Trade has meant dealing with the outside world and being flexible about it in the process.  The denizens of Kobe often have a better level of English than other parts of Japan and they enjoy being seen as the most international.  I always found people there open to discussing business.

Osaka is an ancient merchant town with a merchant mentality.  It was the center of the great commodity markets in Japan for salt, rice and soy beans.  One of the great things I like about this city is they will give you a “yes” or a “no”. Often, the reluctance to tell you “no” in Japan, leaves the whole decision piece dangling, without any clear idea of where we are going with this.  Not in Osaka.  If they like it, they will explore if there is a deal to be done and some money to be made. They are proud of their local dialect and this is a big divider between insiders and outsiders.  As a foreigner, we are so completely outside of all consideration, that in a way, we are probably better accepted than their despised rivals from Tokyo.

Kyoto I always found very closed.  The aristocratic capital of Japan for centuries, it features a defined smallish city area hemmed in by mountains.  The interconnectivity of the local people is pronounced.  Their families have lived here for centuries, they know each other and they know who is a “blow in” and who isn’t.   Even for other Japanese salespeople from out of town, Kyoto is a hard market.  If you are from the outside, you are “out” for the most part.

The area around Nagoya has produced the three most famous warrior leaders in Japanese history, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Tokugawa family Shoguns, closed the country off from the rest of the world. When I say “closed”, this was upon pain of death for entry or exit.  This went on for hundreds of years.  Nagoya is still back there in a time warp – still closed off.  The local mentality is not open to foreign business and there isn’t much English going on around there either.  I said that in Osaka you get a “yes” or a “no” and that this knowing where you stood was attractive.  In Nagoya they do the same thing and the answer is always “no".  The pride of businesspeople in Nagoya is to have an exceptionally humble looking headquarters, with lousy office furniture, stained, aging carpets and everything very much down market, but to also have a huge pile of cash sitting in the bank.  They are extremely tight with their money too. 

It is the only place I have seen, where when a new shop opens and they put those decorative flower arrangements out front on the street, that passersby will shamelessly take handfuls of the flowers away with them.  They justify this on the basis that it is a waste to see them die and it is much better to have them home at their place.  It is a rough and tough market.  In a word to the wise, they have one little commercial idiosyncrasy that will kill you.  You meet, negotiate, agree the price and some time later the agreed goods turn up at the seaport or the airport.  This is when they like to renegotiate the price with you!! 

“Character building” is how I would describe doing business in Nagoya.  The locals are very aware of who they are and don’t open up to “foreign” Japanese from distant places like Tokyo.  So in one sense, they are very fair and they are closed minded to everyone, not just foreigners from overseas.

Tokyo is a really a first class international city and so different to when I got here forty years ago. The tallest structure here when I arrived was Tokyo Tower, which seems incredible today, when you take in the ever accumulating city skyline.  English is widespread, people are sophisticated, very international and everything works well.  Getting a decision though can be seriously painful. Because Tokyo is often the headquarters for companies, the scale of businesses being here is large.  As a consequence, there are many, many people who have to be consulted. Getting them to agree can take an age.

Sendai and Sapporo are a bit like Fukuoka to me, in the sense that they are not often visited by foreigners, seeking to do international business.  The capacity to speak English is sparse and the local businesspeople are rather conservative.  Sapporo at least, is an international destination during the ski season, so there are pockets of more international business there.  Expect to have to keep coming back many times to build the trust. Things will move slowly and in small test increments.

When I lived here in the suburbs in Kunitachi, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I always imagined that the rest of Japan was like Tokyo. It was only when I travelled around Japan selling in the late 1980s and then later lived in Nagoya in 1992 and in Kobe in 1996, that I realised that Tokyo was not Japan.  The regional differences are so important.  Of course, we can do business anywhere in Japan, and ultimately I did have success in regional centers.  The key success factor though is to know what is different locally and to have a defined, different strategy for each major center.

What Is Kokorogamae And Why Does It Matter In Sales In Japan?

Intention in life is key. Are we living an intentional life or are we a buffeted bystander of what is happening around us?  We have our personal vision, aspirations, goals, targets or maybe not.  Sales is one area of professional pursuit where intention is everything.  Assertion is key in sales, but it is assertion with a Smiley Face not a grimace.  Of course, salespeople need to have superb people and communication skills.  The point though is toward what end?  What is the intention behind everything that is being done?  Is it to make a lot of money, to be the big dog in the sales team, to own lots of luxury goods?

This is what kokorogamae is all about.  This is a compound word.  Kokoro itself has a number of meanings, one is heart, another is spirit.  Kamae undergoes a phonetic change when joined together and becomes Gamae in the compound word.  It means to take your stance and we use it in karate, when we talk about the different opening postures we use.  In the Dojo, when you hear the command kamae everyone knows to go into their fighting stance.

So all very interesting Greg, but what has any of this got to do with sales?  If I translate kokorogamae as true intention, then perhaps it makes more sense than “spirit stance”.  We have a starting point with our intention in sales.  The infamous Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort’s kokorogamae was to rip off as many people as possible and make himself super rich in the process.  Wikipedia lists him as “an American author, motivational speaker, and former stockbroker”.  They left out the “heinous criminal” descriptor.  After coming to an agreement with the prosecutors to rat out his partners, he spent only 22 months in prison for his fraud scheme.  He now does speeches and runs training clinics on sales. 

As an Aussie, I say to myself, “that is America isn’t it”, where the notorious can still make money regardless of how many people they cheated out of their life savings and how many families they destroyed.   But this is not what I am talking about.  Dale Carnegie talks about not being a good salesperson, but being a good person in sales.  There is a tremendous difference between the two. I hate people like Jordan Belfort, because they pollute and poison our sales profession with their toxic mentality. They should have left him in jail forever, rather than let him run around giving public talks on how to do sales. 

We all have an obligation in sales and that is to win the trust of the buyer and then honour that trust. These criminals like Belfort or Bernie Madoff, who ran a huge Ponzi investment scheme for years until he went to jail, where unlike Belfort he is serving a life sentence, make the skepticism nerve in buyers run on a ragged, raw edge.

The kokorogamae question is which one are you?  Are you in sales to serve the client and make the client successful or to make yourself successful at the client’s expense.  There is nothing in the middle.  There is no grey area involved here.  One of my sale’s heroes is Zig Ziglar.  He was a door to door pots and pans salesman, who became a highly successful trainer of salespeople.  He is also a Dale Carnegie graduate by the way.  One of his great quotes is, “you can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want”.  This is the correct kokorogamae in my book.

We have a job to do in sales and how we approach it makes all the difference.  If we want to have a long and successful career in sales, our kokorogamae will determine the degree of success and longevity.  There is a Japanese four character saying that I like, “shin shi kei shuu” which means to have integrity from start to finish.  If this is your north star, guiding light, beacon on the hill in sales then you are on the correct path.

Well, this all sounds good in theory.  The problems arise when salespeople become desperate and start ramping up the buyer, to get more revenue to make their targets and keep their jobs.  They are making decisions based on their own interests and not the interests of the client.  They recommend solutions that pay a higher commission or yield a bigger profit, regardless of whether that is the best solution for the client.  I was speaking with an American sales guy once who related how he could never make sales calls for his product in the same town twice in his territory.  This was because the consumers would have discovered after the purchase, just how poor the quality was of what he was selling them. 

Another example was from a friend of mine who was being interviewed for a job as a recruiter. The scenario was that your candidate had been offered another job which was perfect for them, but from a rival recruiting firm  What do you do?  My friend said she would advise the candidate to take the other firms job and not hers, because the other job was the perfect job. The interviewers replied, “No, your job is to make the candidate take the job you are offering”.  Where are the best interests of the client or the candidate in this little episode – both missing in action.

The antidote for this short-termism is study, effort, training, practice, self-awareness and reflection on what are your core values.  Become highly skilled and highly trustworthy.  Make a decision about what you as a human being actually stand for?  If it isn’t being honest, having integrity and doing the right thing by the client every time, then please get out of sales right now.

Sales is a process that requires an understanding of the sales cycle.  Plan the sales call and do prior research, build trust at the initial meeting, ask really well designed questions to understand the buyer’s needs, present the solution stressing the benefits to the buyer, deal with any push back, ask for the order and then do the follow-up perfectly.  Excellent communication skills, especially drawing out emotive word pictures, makes the end result become real for the buyer.

At the heart of all this though is our true intention.  We can use our sale’s cycle and communication skills for evil, like these low life, pond scum criminals in sales I have mentioned or we can vow to serve the client’s interests.  Make your mantra that “in the client’s success, I sow the seeds of my own success”.  Kokorogamae is a term that captures that idea of our true intention - our starting point.

What Is Different About Selling In Japan?

This is a pretty big subject, so I will pick up a few of the more noteworthy differences.  In the West, salespeople, for the most part, are involved in an occupation for which they have received no training.  They are thrown into sales, to sink or swim.  If they don’t sell, they don’t eat, because of the sales commission structures.  Total commission based remuneration is a normal thing in most countries or at least the pay structures will have a very high “at risk” component. In many cases, this drives desperation and salespeople saying anything to get a sale, in order to last another week in the job.  Cold calling potential clients is a big part of finding new buyers and a lot of attention is placed on prospecting and pipeline building activities. 

Japan is quite different. There are very few salespeople here in 100% commission sale jobs.  The simple reason is because they don’t have to.  Anyone on that type of pay scale is in a very low level job and are usually pretty young people who not very well educated.  The touts you see on the street outside clubs in Kabukicho in Shinjuku or in Roppongi or Akasaka will no doubt be on high commissions and very low base salaries.  The societal status attached to those in commission sales is also very low and so it is very hard to find anyone who wants to do it.  In Japan, you don’t want your daughter to marry one of them.

Like the West, most Japanese people have no training in sales apart from a perfunctory On The Job Training exposure.  I say exposure because it is rather more cosmetic than concrete.  Your boss or one of the more experienced salespeople, will take you with them to visit a few clients and then bingo, you are out there on your own.  Your boss and the others in the firm went through the same process, so no one thinks anything about it.  This is a brilliant system for reproducing mediocrity, generation after generation. In both cases of untrained Western and Japanese salespeople, they notoriously launch straight into their pitch without asking any questions of the buyer.  They immediately go into the dark pit of details, the facts, the spec, the brochure, the flyers, the powerpoint, etc.

In the West, commission based salespeople can have ultra short professional lives in sales.  Most people, with little or no training, have simply no idea what they are doing and so they just fail. In short order, they are sayonara out of sales.  The Darwinian penalty for failure is sales oblivion.  In Japan, sales people are usually on a salary and bonus arrangement or base salary and commission, with the base being fairly high.  For some of my followers living outside of Japan, it may be news to learn that because of the labour laws here, incompetence is not an acceptable reason to fire people in companies.  We are predominantly talking about the mid-sized and big companies now, because in smaller firms that bias is not so pronounced. 

Nevertheless, in Japan, the failing salesperson would get a good dose of verbal abuse from the boss, on a regular basis.  If they can’t take that, then they will quit or if they can take it and won’t quit, they will be transferred to another non-sales role elsewhere in the company. Fairly useless salespeople are tolerated here, much more than in the West.

Japanese larger companies are “generalist”, rather than “specialist” production machines.  Everyone is expected to migrate their way around the different parts of the company, picking up experience along the way over the course of their long career.  One of those rotations may be into the sales department.  Strangely, there is very limited activity applied to prospecting, especially cold calling.  Japanese salespeople rely on their firm’s brand to do the bulk of the selling for them.  If you aren’t very good at hunting, getting new clients, then no problem, you are assigned to become a farmer taking care of existing clients. Basically your job is to turn up and clip their ticket for the next regular order. 

For all Japanese salespeople, you must be totally subservient and uber obedient to the buyer. You must do whatever they say, be available 24 hours a day and put up with large amounts of crap to keep the buyer happy and loyal.  And trust me, Japanese buyers are incredibly picky and demanding.  If you make a mess of even this in the lesser demanding role of farmer, then you will get moved out and into another department.  You won’t get fired.

In the West, we are trained to persuade the buyer, to counter whatever they say, to have a comeback immediately.  We say the buyer is King, yet we need to get their royal agreement to buy.  There are lots of tactics used to get this “Yes”. Salespeople can be very aggressive and terrier like about this process.  They will argue with the buyer and try to convince them to reverse their opposition to purchasing.  For example, if the buyer says “I will think about it”, then the salespeople will ask them, “what in particular do you need to think about”, “who else will be involved in this decision” etc., and keep pushing hard to get a sale. 

In Japan, the end decision maker is very vague and unclear sometimes inside companies.  When they say “we” will think about it, they mean it, because the person you are sitting across the table from cannot make the decision on their own.  Everyone who will be impacted by the buying decision has to be consulted and a consensus reached, before moving forward. In Japan, this always seems to take a lot of time.

Now in Japan, the buyer is not King.  The buyer is God.  Salespeople must meekly obey whatever God says.  The buyer will solely direct the sales meeting conversation and will be looking for the salesperson’s pitch, so they can fillet it and then destroy it. This is a tried and true technique to reduce risk. 

By pulling the pitch apart limb from limb, they want the seller to now show them this is not a risky decision that will come back later to haunt their career.  Part of this pitch and then firestorm of buyer criticism routine is that there are no discovery questions being asked of the buyer.  The salesperson is scared to ask the buyer, that is to say God, any questions, so they remain ignorant of their needs. If they happen to have what the buyer needs and they have successfully dealt with the risk question, then they will get a sale.

The typical lack of sales training is similar in the West and Japan, but the degrees of aggression are quite different.  Pushy sales techniques just won’t work here.  If you don’t know how to get permission to ask questions, then be prepared to be like the grouse at a shooting afternoon in Scotland, as the well armed buyer gives you both barrels and blows your pitch out of the air. Decisions are always going to take time because of the group orientation of this society and the buyer is never on your nor your boss’s schedule.

“Send It To Me” – Uh Oh!

How I hate those four words – “send it to me”.  I get that heavy feeling in my stomach and around my shoulders.  I know we are now on the path to sale’s hell.  I particularly hate it when I hear that request after I have tried for the second time to secure a meeting to go through things face to face.  After you have requested the meeting and they push back, you can go back again and try for the meeting.  However, when they push back twice in a row you have nowhere to go, you have to send it or you come across in a bad light, as someone who is either stupid or socially tone deaf.  Neither are attractive to buyers so we best avoid plunging ourselves into those negative brackets.

The “send it to me” request usually refers to sending basic information such as brochures and flyers or it might be around content and pricing.  The latter is usually a quotation or a proposal.  The reason the buyer normally puts forward for not meeting you is that they are too busy to see you.  If you have had one meeting already and it is time to propose the deal, you can send the document by email and not meet.  The chances of them buying though are substantially reduced and you may as well post it to yourself for all the good it will do.  Those flyers and brochures you diligently sent in response to their request will soon be winging their way to the waste paper basket, to be forgotten immediately.

I struggle with this “send it to me “ request.  I know I have to do it, if I have exhausted my chances of a face to face meeting. However, I know this is a dead duck.  I often meet senior decision makers who will request I send the information so they can share it with the “team”.  What does that look like?  If it is a physical entity it will just be sent to the designated person with very little explanation. 

Now I may have spent an hour with the senior company representative going through chapter and verse of the innumerable benefits and marvelous advantages of our widget.  This gets compacted down to “take a look at this” when passed down the line.  The end receiver in Japan is often indignant that anyone is intruding on their turf and they have that “not invented here” histrionic approach.  If they didn’t know about it already or they didn't find it for themselves, then it can’t be any good. 

The people who need to get involved vote with their feet and end the process right there.  You are left high and dry with nowhere to go. You don’t get to meet them.  When you follow up, the big boss tells you the team has had a look at it and decided they are not going forward with the information.  Where do you go?  Basically you go and find another buyer because this is a train wreck. 

Next time though you should apply a different approach.  Ask the senior person to introduce you to the people down the line, who will do the actual work.  Now they may refuse to do that for whatever reason, but you should always ask.  And ask in a way that is hard for them to say no. For example, “Suzuki san, what we have found is that when we present our materials to people who often carry out the actual tasks, they see many more possibilities than we can imagine, because they are at the coal face.  Would it be beneficial for your company to be able to generate innovative ideas and new possibilities if I was able to take your team members through the details, rather than just passing on materials which by themselves, provide insufficient context?”.  Now that is a question carefully designed to elicit a “yes” response and this is the type of question we need to insert at this point.

When it is a proposal document, we are normally sending it to the senior person we met previously. Remember this a false dawn.  They are going to go straight to the back of the document and will see only costs and no value in the pages presented.  Without us there to explain the associated value of the investment, they cannot rationalise the two together, very easily. We know our product or service much better than they do, we have broad experience of where other buyers have benefited from it and we can answer any enquiries they may have right there on the spot. When we send it, we are sending the proposal out naked to the world, with no protection from the harsh glare of buyer skepticism.

The proposal is like the headline of a magazine article.  To really understand what is going on, we have to read the article itself, to get the proper perspective and context involved.  When we don’t get that chance we are sending our sales hopes into oblivion.  I had one of those “send it to me” requests last week and I sent the proposal with the numbers knowing full well, this was a guaranteed suicide mission. 

When the buyer decides to not make the time, then they haven’t been sold enough on the value.  I had one prior meeting, but obviously I didn’t do a good enough job on explaining the value of what we do.  The leadership team over there will look at the numbers and will say to themselves that it is out of their budget.  The reply I expect will be “thanks but no thanks”. Those numbers supplied are relative to the return they will bring and the real cost of our service is zero, because the costs will be paid for out from the additional growth. This genius conversation is unlikely to be had, because I won’t be able to get in front of them to make my points. 

“Send it to me” is the kiss of death in sales.  Sometimes we just can’t avoid it but we should always push hard for a face to face meeting.  Don’t push too hard though, because you will mark yourself out as an idiot and they will never deal with you again.  Today’s “no” is only no to the offer in it’s current form, in this part of the business cycle, within the limitations of this year’s budget.  It doesn’t mean no forever and one day the planets will align and we will go back in there and make the sale.  We have to be patient and keep plugging away with other buyers in the interim.

Busy Bosses You Need To Go With Your Salespeople To See Clients

Many of us are player/managers.  We run the sales team and we also do our own sales.  This means we are pretty busy bees, buzzing around trying to cook up some deals for ourselves, as well as keep the various sales team noses to their respective grindstones.  One of the dangers though is we start to leave the business of sales to the salespeople entirely.  Especially so when they are seasoned regulars and highly experienced.  We feel we don’t have to do much for them and we can concentrate on our own sales.  The folly of this approach was drawn to my attention recently when my boss visited town.

Because he is based in New York he is in no danger of wearing out his welcome in Tokyo.  We only see him every few years, as he tours his 100 plus country global empire.  He was in town recently to celebrate our 55thanniversary of being established in Japan, which is a pretty big deal.  In the course of his visit we took him to see some clients. This is when the penny dropped.

We were sitting there having green tea and chit chatting with this medium sized Japanese company, when one of the Japanese executives said something that really grabbed my attention.  We have been delivering training for this company for the last four years as regular as clockwork and have built a really strong relationship with their HR team though the efforts of one of our sales guys.  The thing is though, that we only deliver one solution for them and it is always the same solution.  You don’t have to be a genius to work out what is wrong with this picture.

At some point we will have worked our way through the entire staff with this solution and will run out of things to do for them.  This is when the money stops flowing in and life gets harder.  So there I was sitting next to my boss, safely sipping my green tea, when I heard the senior Japanese executive talk about the fact the company needed to make some major shifts around employee mindsets.  That is just what we do and we have an awesome solution for that problem.  This course is known as the Dale Carnegie Course:  Effective Communications and Human Relations. 

Here was one of the leaders of the company talking about an issue and we have been training them for years without ever managing to introduce this solution for them.  Well that is not quite true, because we recently had one of the HR team do the course with a view to having them test it, to see if we could roll it out throughout the rest of the company. Nothing had happened since then, even though the HR person was impressed with the programme.

This is where we get stuck. We are talking to the HR people and they don’t have the knowledge of what the senior ranks are thinking or they have no authority to bring these types of suggestions to the leaders.  The occasion of my boss visiting meant we had him, me and our sales guy there in the room with the top brass.  Usually our sales guy wouldn’t get past the HR team but this time we had leverage in the shape of the big shot visit.

I did a follow approach to one of the executives who made that remark about mindset change and it looks like we might get to start doing some testing of the programme next financial year.  I was reflecting on how the meeting unveiled with my boss and noted to myself that we didn't require him to fly out from New York, to be there, to get access to the top people.  I am the President in Japan and I can also get access to the higher ups.  But I don’t do that so often.  Why?  Because I am too busy doing my own sales calls to my own clients and leave the rest of the team to get on with it.

Japan is a place where we can get trapped in the lower echelons of the organisation, where the power is limited and leverage even less so.  As the boss, we have to use our vice-regal prestige, status and power to get in front of the senior executives and find out what is on their minds, about advancing their business.  When we do this, we can uncover some hidden gems and can make our potential sales solutions come to reality.  So bosses, let’s allocate some regular client visit time for our sales staff high potential clients and see if we can flush out some great additional business.

No Pain, No Gain In Sales Baby

When you contemplate this title you are probably thinking about heroic sales efforts, massive privations, sacrifice, striving, discipline, patience and forbearance.  Actually I am not talking about any of that mighty stuff. I am talking about your client. The really irritating thing about sales is trying to get someone to buy who doesn’t need what you are offering. You know they should have it, but they don’t know.  That makes it really hard to persuade the buyer to activate.

We know we should be running the sales conversation along the railway track progressing through the sales continuum.  Build the trust, get permission to ask questions, uncover needs, perfectly match solutions, deal with any push back and ask for the business.  When we get to the discovery part, there is nothing so painful as finding out they don’t have any significant pain.  The client is happy with their current supply arrangements. They can’t see the need to encompass dealing with the angel (you) they don’t know, when they are comfortable and safe and sound with the devil (your competitor) they do know.  We can try all manner of things to break in, such as suggesting some form of trial, or some other very low touch start to the relationship. We can try and introduce something better at a small scale to try and pry open the jaws to new business.

Japan is a place where once you get in, the client tends to want to stick with you, because you are a known factor and so the risk element has pretty much been homogenised and dealt with.  A new supplier is painful for the buyer because now they have to go through that whole risky process from the start.  They are super risk averse, so it is easier to say “no thank you”.

The other pain point is no perceived need.  We deal with a lot of large companies, particularly multi-national companies who have devolved their own internal solutions.  This is a big pain.  The local boss feels there is a solution that works already in play. So there is little pain requirement there to elicit any change or to introduce something additional. This is the point.  When they don’t feel any pain you can’t gain the new business. 

I was speaking to a potential client and knew they had an internal solution.  The reason I knew it is because I have been trying to break into their company for a number of years.  Every time I saw the boss, I would hit him up about doing something together.  I had a very steady response rate: no, no and no, for the last eight years.

Well that old boss just retired and bingo we have a new face running the show.  So of course, I am thinking here might lie some pain relief against this permanent rejection I have been suffering.  Valiant efforts to excite the new broom on the possibilities were made, but that spark of interest wasn’t burning in his eyes.  I am dangling tasty morsels in front of him, but he is not salivating in anticipation.  His eyes are dull and disinterested.  He is polite, which I like, but I can’t see any buying signals, which I don’t like.

Why?  I can see that what I am offering, in the way I am offering it, is not demonstrating a big enough pain gap between where they are now and where they want to be.  This is always an issue with industries which are booming.  The money is rolling in, so the idea of doing anything new or different isn’t a contention. Ironically when things go bad, they are trying to cut costs, so they are hell bent on reducing supply of various external solutions.  So when is the happy time to make the sale?

I was thinking about what could I have done better, to demonstrate the differences our solution could have brought.  I had tried a few well tested ideas that have sponsored some interest previously, in other similar situations, but the eyes were not shining.  I could see the passivity inside the mind.  I wasn’t hitting anything interesting enough to inspire a test or trial or any of the usual door openers.

Sometimes the gap is not big enough to squeeze through.  The amount of pain being experienced, is being dealt with sufficiently from within. They have invested in a solution already, it works, so “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it baby” reigns supreme as an ideology.

I think I didn’t do a good enough job on painting the word pictures of what the brave new world with us would look like.  Reflecting on the conversation, I was mightily aware of the sunny uplands of our solution, but I failed to get that image into words that inspired action.

So unless your client feels pain or is shown that pain is coming, there will be no gain for the salesperson.  We have to keep trying and we don’t always hit the ball out of the park but we have to keep swinging.

Pitch Request Recovery

Stony motherless silence unleavened by a stony face.  That was the reaction to my questions from this Japanese buyer and other subsequent buyers. I had studied the American sales guru’s sales techniques.  I was a devotee of “consultative sales” and here I was in Japan trying to sell stuff and failing.  In those days back in the early nineties, I was primed to ask my questions using the American guru sale’s models.  Find out if they are the decision maker, if they are ready to move right now, what they like about what they have now, what are the things that aren’t fully satisfying their needs, etc.

This is all well and good and today we are still doing consultative sales.  We sometimes call it solution selling or whatever, but essentially it is the same basic premise.  Find out what they are doing now, find out what they would like to be doing, discover why they are not doing it already and then provide the pain point relief.  This makes a lot of sense and should work in Japan too.  Like a lot of imports into Japan, that have been successful overseas, there is often an adjustment or two needed to be made to meet the needs of the local market.

When I met the buyers and went through a little bit of chit chat, I would move straightinto questioning mode.  To my chagrin, the buyer sat there motionless.  I would repeat the question, but nothing was coming out of their mouths at all.  They were as silent as the tomb.  Not being great with those long Japanese silences in conversation, this made me very uncomfortable.  I wasn’t sure what on earth I should do.  I had just asked the same question twice, about their current situation and was getting a very cold, unfriendly reaction.  Not a brilliant buying signal!!!

After what seemed an age, the buyer just requested I tell him about our product.  Well that was progress, I thought and went ahead with a glowing rendition of the finer points and wonderful attributes of this product, a crowning triumph in the modern era.  The buyer then filleted my presentation like he was going to work on a tuna fish in a sushi shop.  He was carving up my argument about my product’s suitability for Japan and for his business.  Well I gave it the old school try to win back some credence for what I was offering, but left that meeting with my tail firmly tucked beneath my legs.

This would happen all the time. I started to wonder why I kept getting this pitch request and wasn’t being allowed to be a consultative salesperson in Japan.  Gradually, I realised the problem was that I was launching into my questions, without receiving permission to ask questions first. I wanted this person, to whom I was a complete stranger, to fork over the most intimate details of all of the company’s failings, weak points, gaps, holes and shortcomings within three minutes of meeting him for the first time.  What could possibly be wrong with this picture! 

I also realised that the reason the buyers were tearing my presentation apart was for them to satisfy themselves that this decision to buy would be an extremely low risk idea, that would not feature any blowback on them in the future.  They were reveling in their risk averse natures and shooting my argument full of holes.  This was their way of getting a comprehensive view of the risks.  So I came up with the addition of the extra step in the process, to seek permission to ask questions first. 

All good and it works – most of the time.  Incredibly though, some buyers will wave that away and insist that you give your pitch regardless.  They have been so well trained by pitchpeople, masquerading as salespeople, that they can only comprehend a sales conversation as a pitch, critique then reject continuum.

Well then give your pitch but study their faces like a hawk.  As soon as you see them start to disconnect and lose interest, you need to jump back in there and try to get your questioning model going.  Say to them, “I wonder if what I am saying is of any interest?  I get the sense that I may not be highlighting the key things you are interested in.  May I ask what you would rather hear about?”. 

This allows us to get out of pitch mode and bridge across to questioning mode, so we can find out if we have what they need or not.  Once we get to this point, then sales will start to happen, as we better match their needs with our solutions.  If you get pushed into pitching, see if you can pivot back to the questioning model. After all, you have nothing to lose, because your pitch rarely results in a sale.

Follow Up In Business In Japan

There are two elements of follow up in Japan.  One is when you have concluded the deal and it is time to effect the delivery of the service or product.  Prior to that, there has usually been a long drawn out process going on, where the buyer side have “been thinking about it”.  Actually they have been thinking about it because they need to get consensus internally on whether they should do the deal or not.  They are trying to ensure they have minimized any risk, that they have all the checks and balances in place. So this can take a lot of time and it is very frustrating for the seller. 

However, when they have finally gotten everyone on board then they strike the deal and now they expect everything to be done by yesterday.  The demand for speed on the execution of the deal is always there in Japan. Now in the West we tend to be the polar opposites.  We are fast to strike a deal and slow to effect the delivery.  Be aware in Japan that once the gun goes off, then things have to be primed to spring into action.  That means we have to have the logistics side of our delivery ready to go and at speed.

The other art of follow up here is a bit trickier.  We have lots of meetings with clients, they are thinking about it and we keep seeking out new clients.  We can’t sit around waiting for a decision, we have to keep moving forward.  The problem arises that we lose touch with people we spoke to some time ago, because we have moved on.  We are looking for the next potential deal and we keep adding these potential deals to the list.  We need to have a good system of follow up.  They said they would think about it and we need to set a cadence for the follow up to see how they are tracking internally.  We need to work out the frequency of follow up.  That requires a good tracking system for clients we have met but who have not yet bought from us.

They also benefit from the follow up because they also drift.  After they have met us they get swept up in work as well, and trying to get people together internally to discuss the arrangements can take time and they also get distracted.  Remember it is very rare that the buyer will ever experience any urgency about buying anything.

As the volume builds the capacity for our memories to deal with all the complexity gets challenged. This is where client management systems and alert systems are needed.  We need to set this up to help us keep up with all the many things we are doing.  Someone you met six weeks ago may be a distant memory and you can barely remember what you talked about.  What is worse you have become totally distracted by clients you are talking to now and you have not been doing a good job keeping in touch with that buyer as they work their way through the deliberation process.

It happens pretty easily if you are busy working on leads.  As an example, in just a two day period this week, I had a lunchtime networking event, another one that evening, one at breakfast the next day and then another luncheon after that breakfast.  I collected a wad of meishi or business cards, some can just be filed into our CRM system, but others need to be contacted to arrange a meeting.  So you send off the email to get together.  The trick today though is that nobody answers your email and nobody is ever there to answer your follow-up call, so people go into the Bermuda Triangle of Sales Follow-up – they disappear.  Unless we have a good system of dealing with all of this we will be wasting a lot of energy and opportunities to do more business.

So follow-up in Japan has its own peculiarities and we have to be ready to deal with them.  Speed in response to a go decision and keeping in touch with potential buyers through the long journey to a “yes” is absolutely required for success here.

Closing Sales In Business In Japan

You would think that asking for the order would be the simplest thing in a sales job.  Not the case here in Japan.  Surprisingly a lot of salespeople here in Japan never ask directly for the order.  They get to the point where they should ask but they choose not to.  One of the reasons is they fear rejection, getting a “no”. They job of sales is an emotional rollercoaster all around the world, so preserving your self-esteem and self-belief is critical.  There is nothing like getting rejected in selling to knock your ego around. Japanese salespeople have found a way to avoid that regretful eventuality by not actually asking for the business.  It is left vague, sort of hanging there.

They usually lack skills in selling, so the steps which they should have completed in a professional manner, haven’t been done, so in fact they have no right to ask for the order.  If you have built the trust, have asked well designed questions to fully understand the client’s needs, presented the correct solution, dealt with any hesitations or objections, then you can confidently ask for the order.

The way of asking doesn’t have to aggressive or hard sell.  Actually, that won’t work in Japan, so let’s forget about that idea. We can simply ask , “shall we go ahead?”.  Or we might offer an alternative of choice, such as, “would you like to start in January or would February be better?”.  The selection of either of those months means that you are accepting the business and will go ahead with the deal.  Another soft variation that works well in Japan is using a minor point. We can ask, “Shall I send you a hard copy of the invoice or is an electronic copy okay?”.  Either answer means “yes”, we have an agreement.

Most often in Japan the answer is “we need to discuss it” or “we need to think about it”.  In American sales training they have a harder edge and go after that statement,  “What do you need to think about?’ or “How long will you take”.  That type of pushy sales technique just won’t work in Japan.

Here they do have to think about it and they do have to discuss it.  The person you are talking to is usually not the final or sole decision maker.  They have the ringi seidosystem here where all the stakeholders have to attach their chop or seal to the recommendation to show they have been informed and that they agree.  That means there is a lot of consultation required internally, so it is hard to make any commitments to the salesperson immediately.  No manner of bullying the buyer is going to change that situation.

We have to be thinking how can we help our champion sell the idea to the other colleagues.  We have to provide the arguments and show the value to make their persuasion job easier.  We also need to find out who are the primary people who need convincing inside the company and we need to find out what issues might be important to them. Knowing this, we can help our champion address any potential pushback that might occur behind the closed doors of the client company, on our behalf.

We need to ask for the order to flush out any objections we may not have dealt with well enough in the earlier part of the sales cycle.  Maybe we didn’t do a good enough job designing questions to fully understand the needs of the buyer.  Maybe our solution wasn’t a good enough match for what they needed.  Perhaps we didn't handle the objections which arose well enough. Sometimes the objections we were told were just a smokescreen and the real objections haven’t emerged yet.  We need to get these out in order to deal with them.  If we don’t ask for the order we won’t get the business and we won’t get to find out why we are not getting the business.

If they do bring up an issue, don’t fight it.  Say, “Yes I see and why is that a problem for you?”.  Any answer you start with words like “no”, “but” or “however”, will be guaranteed to have the buyer stop listening to you and go into combat mode to argue with you.  We need to ask them why this is an issue to get more detail on the table so we can deal with it.  Remember objections are like headlines in a newspaper and we need to get access to the full article explaining what the headline means.  So we must dig for more detail. If we can’t deal with the objection, then don’t waste any more time, get out there and find the next potential client.

When closing in Japan do not use aggression, force of will or tricky closing techniques – none of that will work.  Use soft sell here.  Expect they will need to think about it, so you are prepared to help them sell the idea internally.

Handling Buyer Objections In Business In Japan

You would expect that salespeople would hear a lot of objections from buyers, particularly the same objections and therefore would be pretty good at handling them?  Well that actually isn’t the case.  In some cases, the salespeople imagine they can drive the process by force of will and by pushing the buyer to change their mind. This is ridiculous anywhere, but especially so, here in Japan.  Or they want to argue with the buyer, outmaneuver them, outwit them, some how trick them into buying.  Again ridiculous. 

Japan is a very risk averse culture and the objections are important to the buyer, to get a surety of making a low risk buying decision.  The buyers are salaried employees who don’t want to see any decision they make, coming back to haunt them and negatively impacting their ride up through the ranks.   The easiest way to do that is to take no new decisions (like buying from you).

An objection is like the headline in a newspaper.  It is very concise, but there is a long article explaining what that headline is all about.  When we hear that objection headline, we need to get the full story in order to be able to successfully deal with that objection.  There is no point hearing the objection and then answering what you second guess the point may be.  It is a bit like at school, when you get the essay topic and you write your answer only to discover that is not what the teacher was after.  We have to be sure what the buyer is after before we attempt to answer the objection.  Don’t answer what you think might be the problem, ask them before you say anything.

I was at an event recently, sitting next to a Japanese Sales Director and I asked him how he handled objections. His answer nearly had me falling off my chair in shock.  He said whenever he meets an objection, he drops the price by 20%.  I was mentally calculating what that meant, because he had told me there were ten salespeople in the team.  So ten people, dropping the price by 20% every year, for 5 years amounts to a diabolically large number.  There is no need for that, I told him, which was a new concept in his case.

 He was dropping the price because he didn’t know what to do. What he should have been doing was questioning the objection.  He should have been asking the buyer why they held that view?  If they say the price is too high, we need to ask them why they think the price is too high.  Remember, the price is too high is only the headline – what is in the main body of the article?

In another example, I had that exact reaction from a client.  When I questioned why they thought the price was too high, they said because the amount exceeded their budget allocation for training for that quarter.  So I asked what if we could spread that investment over two quarters, would that help? They said yes, that would be fine. So the real objections was timing, not price, but if I had just dropped my price by 20%, I would never have known that.

Also when people give their objection, we have to be thinking, is this really the objection? It is like the iceberg metaphor. What they say is the bit above the waterline, but the real objection is out of sight, underwater.  We do this ourselves when we are out shopping.  We see a nice suit, check the price, then take a deep breath because it is too expensive for us.  When the clerk asks us about buying the suit we don’t say, “well I have been too unsuccessful so far in my career to be able to afford an expensive suit like this one”.   No, we talk about that bit above the waterline. We don't like the colour or the pattern or whatever, but not the real reason. 

So when we get an objection, we need to keep asking if there any other points and keep asking if there are any other points, until we have flushed out some of the issues.  We then ask them to rank these issues in priority order and the most pressing objection is the one we answer.  Often all the others disappear, once we handle the main one.

If the objection is a game breaker then that is it.  You can’t force the buyer by force of will and badgering them to buy.  Leave that sales call and go and spend time with someone you can properly serve, don’t waste your most valuable resource – time. 

Don’t argue with the buyer because they may not be a buyer today, but one day they may buy.  Leave the door open.  You may find that you can do a deal in the future, so don’t burn your bridges over one deal and don’t be remembered as a pushy pain.

Explaining The Application Of The Benefits To Buyers In Business In Japan

Japan loves data and detail. All good, but it can be a trap when you are here trying to make sales in Japan.  In a Western sales model there is a defined process to go through and the buyer is also trained on how that works as well.  In the Japanese case there is a love of detail bias.  This will take you down the  wrong path, if you let the buyer control the sales call.  Which is what happens to all the Japanese salespeople here, by the way.

The buyer loves the detail, the spec, the features of the product. They can’t get enough of that stuff. The problem is we don’t buy the features, we buy the outcomes, the benefits.  In sale’s training we often use the example of buying a hand drill at a DYI Center. There are tonnes of detail on the drill – weight, speed, power source, battery life etc.  We are not buying a drill, because what we are really after is a hole of a certain diameter in brick, metal, concrete or wood etc.  The drill‘s features are not what we are buying, but that is often all the salesperson talks about.

So here in Japan we have to be careful, because the buyer can drag us down into the morass of the detail and features of the product or service.  We have to control the sales call and redirect the conversation away from only the detail on the spec and move on to the outcomes, the benefits these features will provide for the buyer.  Generally speaking, most salespeople around the world get to the feature bit and only a tiny minority elevate the conversation to cover the consequent benefits from the features.  Japanese pitchpeople have trained the buyers here to focus on the spec, the detail, the data.

We need to get to a higher level of discussion.  We need to be drawing word pictures they can see in their mind’s eye.  We need to be describing all the future benefits they will get from this purchase. This requires telling stories, talking about outcomes and results.

Having done that we need to show some evidence that what we say works.  The series of statements coming out of the salesperson’s mouth is not counted as evidence by buyers.   Salespeople like to talk a lot.  We can do this, we can do that or we have this, we have that. So what?  We need to be referring to the cases where we have helped other companies.  We need to provide data to back up what we are saying.  We need to be showing the application of the benefits and where this has worked elsewhere. This makes the whole sales call more credible.

This has to be real – you cannot make this stuff up.  If you want to lie to the buyer, then get out of our profession, we don’t want you polluting the waters.  It has to be authentic, real, something that you can prove to the buyer if they want that level of detail.  Then you have to move into a trial close to see if there are any areas of concern. Is there anything we haven’t covered in sufficient detail.  Did we miss anything, are there any objections to what we have said?

The Japanese pitchperson doesn’t get to any of this level of sophistication.  They are bogged down in the detail of the features.  Remember, the buyer has been trained to only expect the pitch.  They will keep you there and keep asking detailed micro questions.   They do this because they are risk averse and they want to make sure there will no issues with your solution.  That is fine but we can’t stay there for the whole sale’s call. You have to move them out of the minutiae, up the ladder to the next sunny uplands of benefits, application of the benefits, evidence that this works and a trial close.  This is a structure and the Japanese pitchperson doesn’t have any structure.

We need to reeducate buyers on selling here.  We have to guide them along a different path to what they are used to.  It isn’t easy but if you want to make sales in Japan this is the requirement. 

Buyer Personality Styles In Business In Japan

We usually think in terms of cultural differences with the West when we are dealing with Japan.  In fact, personality style differences of the buyer are much more important.  Cultural factors form a base and on top of that are the idiosyncratic differences between Japanese buyers and ourselves.  This becomes very key in communication terms.  We won’t be changing our personality style or that of the buyer any time soon, but we can vary our communication style.

For example, imagine a horizontal axis.  On the far left are people we would understand are low in assertion terms. They do not state their opinion openly, they keep a low profile and they are spending much of their time watching others doing, rather than doing themselves.  The right side of the axis are people who are highly assertive.  They state their opinion and seem to have an opinion on everything.  They can be pushy, loud and aggressive.  When we meet someone for the first time we can pretty much pick where they fall on this horizontal axis.

Now picture a vertical axis cutting through the horizontal axis.  The top of the axis are individuals with a strong people focus. They are very much interested in helping other, they are concerned with how people feel.  They often refer to the importance of people issues.  At the other end, the bottom of that axis are people who are outcome, result, KPI focused.  They don’t care that much about the people as they care more for the results. They are totally focused on the numbers and getting the numbers is all that counts.

If the buyer is in the high end of assertion and outcome driven we call them a Driver personality type. This style transcends their Japanese cultural traits.  They are much more direct than other Japanese.  They are often the founder/owner of their own business. They are “time is money” types, who don’t care much about having as cup of tea with you and want to get straight down to business, because they are always time poor and super busy. 

When we are communicating with this type of person, we need to raise our voice loudness levels and pump up our energy levels in our body language.  We can get straight to the point with them, telling what they should do and the three good reasons that makes sense.  They are interested in how you can deliver results for them and little else. They don’t want a relationship with you, they want outcomes. They will make a decision on the spot without consulting anyone and will then want to move on.  This cuts through a lot of typical time wasting to get to a consensus so they can make a decision in Japan.  The down side is they will just say no and that is it, there is no going back to revisit the decision.

Their opposite number drives them nuts.  The low in assertion/people orientated style are called Amiables – a sort of everyman type. As the name suggests they want to have a cup of tea and get to know you before they will be happy to get into a business relationship with you.  They are people who speak quietly, display small amounts of energy or body language and who like to listen rather than do all the talking.  They are slow to make a decision, because they need to make sure everyone is happy with what is going to happen.  They are often the glue on the organization, going around to those who got sunburn from the Driver types in the meeting, to make sure they are okay. Drop your voice and energy when you speak with them and emphasise how people will feel really good about the decision you are asking them to take.

The other assertive personality style is the Expressive who is similar to the driver, but has a greater people orientation.  They tell jokes, smile a lot, have a lot of energy, like to party.  They are often salespeople, trainers, actors.  They like being around people and they love the macro, big picture.  They grab the marker pen and are brainstorming on the whiteboard in a flash. They are thinking about the future, the vision, the great things that are to come.  Increase your energy when with them and expect to be invited to parties, dinners and events.  They hate worrying about petty detail and just about all detail qualifies as petty for them.  The typical salesperson hates filling out the CRM after the sale’s call, even though the marketing department is tonguing for the detail and data.  Talk big picture with them and spare them the data and evidence – they don’t have much interest.

Their opposite number is the Analytical.  They are fine with three decimal places when dealing with numbers.  They love detail, clarity, precision, evidence, testimonials, data, statistics, numbers, proof etc.  They are often accountants, engineers, scientists, lawyers.  Come armed with detail for them.  They cannot get enough of it so don’t ever worry you will be maxing them out with data.  They don’t like unsupported statements by salespeople and all they believe is what they can see which can be proven.  They are not interested in all that fluffy vision stuff and projections based on no reality, what they consider to be just wishful thinking. Don’t be bombastic, loud or aggressive with them – they don’t respect or like that. They are not rapid decision makers. They really need to analyse all the possibilities before they come to a determination.

We can pretty much place people into one of these four personality styles.  When we do we need to start switching our usual communication style. If we just keep doing what we lie we will be a hit with one in four buyers and not such a hit with the other three. If we want to get four out of four, then we need to be able to speak four different personality style languages. If we can do that then we will be very successful in sales in Japan.

Asking Buyers Questions When Doing Business In Japan

In the West, we have all been trained in consultative selling for many decades. The buyers are used to salespeople turning up and asking a lot of questions to find out if there is some way they can help the buyer, through providing their solution to solve buyer problems.  The act of asking questions is never even thought about, because that is how it is done.

In Japan, they don’t really have professional salespeople, because here they have pitchpeople instead. They ask no questions, just turn up and give their pitch.  They roll out the flyers or the brochures and go straight into the nitty gritty of the detail and the spec.  They want to throw enough mud at the wall to see if any of it sticks. This is what the buyers have been trained to expect as well – no questions, just a pitchfest.

If you are coming out of the Western sales environment, you are going to be using consultative sales techniques and start asking the buyer a number of questions.  This is a problem.  In the West, we say the buyer is King.  In Japan, the buyer is not King, but God.  By the way, God doesn’t brook any questions from impertinent salespeople. They are insulted to be asked questions. God is used to getting the sales pitch and then destroying it, to make sure the risk factor has been fully minimized.

You can ask questions of the buyer in Japan, but you can’t just blunder your way in there and start blasting forth from the get go with probing questions.  Fully boned up on American style sales methods, I remember applying these questioning techniques in Japan, in my early sales career here. I was met with stone cold, motherless silence by the buyers.  In short order they were changing the subject and calling for my pitch.

To ask questions in Japan, you need to set it up first.  Here is how you do that.  You begin with a bit of chit chat to break the ice at the start of the meeting. Next you describe what it is that you do.  Then give an example of a similar company’s case where you have helped them improve their results.  Suggest that “maybe”, you could do the same for them.  Then say, in order for you to know if that is a possibility or not, could you ask a few questions? 

For example, “Dale Carnegie Training is a global specialist soft skills training company.  We help people to develop in their careers and develop businesses to get the outcomes they are after. An example of this would be XYZ company, where we trained all of their Hotel staff and they found the client feedback really got a lift and repeat bookings definitely improved. Maybe we could do the same for you.  I am not sure, but in order for me to know if this is possible or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”.  There is your request for permission to ask questions, as opposed to going straight into the questioning format.

You will notice we say “maybe” rather than we can “definitely” do that for you.  In the West, we might say “we can definitely do this for you” as a statement.  We say “maybe” in Japan and we do this to make it soft and less aggressive.  We only ask for permission to ask a few questions. If there is no match, well there won’t be many questions, but if it is a match and there is interest, there may be many questions – we won’t know that until we ask the first few questions of the buyer.

We ask well designed questions of the buyer and are simultaneously mentally running through our library of solutions, to see if we can help them.  If we can’t, we shouldn’t be wasting everyone’s time.  We should be off finding a buyer we can actually help. 

When it comes to the solution provision part, we know what they are after, so we can link our product or service to the solution provision they need.  In Japan, it doesn’t work like that.  The pitchperson here turns up and skips straight past the questioning stage, plunging headlong into the detail of the solution. They do this, not even knowing if it is the appropriate solution for the needs of the buyer or not. The buyer has been trained by these pitchpeople and are simply not able to encompass the concept of questions for God. 

You turn up with your professional Western sales approach and start asking questions.  Normally, what you will get then from the buyer is total silence.   They just don’t respond and it feels very awkward. This is because they can’t accept God getting questioned by a nobody.  As I mentioned, they will just change the subject and be asking for your pitch. Trust me, you don’t want to go there.

You have to set it up and get permission to ask questions.  If you do that you will be successful in Japan.  If you want to be pitchperson instead, let me know how that is working out for you. I don’t think it will go too well.  Much better to be a professional salesperson and ask well designed questions to uncover where you can be of service to the buyer. Remember, with questioning buyers in Japan, always get their permission first.