Handling Sale's Meltdowns

Sales is a tough gig. Sometimes the whole sale's meeting turns out to be a disaster. I had one of those today. The majority of my personal sale’s leads come directly through networking. We get leads off our SEO, through ad words and our general marketing activities. These all go to my sales team for follow up. We also do cold calling but as the President of the company, this is basically out for me. If I cold call someone as the President it comes across as a bit desperate and creates some doubt in the mind of the recipient of the call. They wonder why does the President have to cold call potential clients, what is wrong with this company?   It just doesn’t set the right frame for establishing a relationship. Networking is far better for me and trust me, I do a lot of it, to create opportunities to meet new companies.

Recently I had met a representative from a foreign multi-national company, who was not actually the right person to sell to, but who I asked to introduce me to the buyer. I always do this, if I think there is some potential and sometimes they do help out and sometimes they don’t. This duly happened in this case, the appointment was made with the buyer and I turn up on time. I am sitting in the meeting room waiting, when the door opens. A solid wall of vast negativity hits me as the buyer comes in to the room. Was it a bad day, is every day a bad day for them, were they unhappy that I had extracted a meeting through my contact? Who knows what the issue was, but it was definitely a big issue.

I was reflecting later that it has been quite a while since I have had such a totally negative sales meeting. Of course many don't buy and many never answer your emails or return your phone calls, but that is part and parcel of selling. What do you do though when you realise from the body language and attitude that this is going to be hard or even impossible?

Well you need to do your best. Unsurprisingly, the buyer insisted that I do my pitch rather than go through any discovery process around potential needs. This is always a very, very bad way to start a sales presentation. Handing over your solutions when you don't know what the problems are is a methodology designed to fail. Almost every time this happens for me there is no sale. It wasn’t looking good.

Today's respondent was not cooperative in the answers, as I tried to dig down and find some potential needs. You can't control that, but you still need to ask. The meeting is going badly, you know it and so you need to start thinking about extracting yourself because you realise there is no value here and no possibility of this time and effort amounting to a sale.

One of the things you can do after the meeting though is get someone else in the company to be the contact point, given you found you were radioactive, as far as this buyer was concerned. In my case there was a narrow chance to do some follow up by sending some links with more information. I asked one of my Japanese salespeople to do that and took myself out of the picture. As it turned out, the response she received was “we have no interest”, written in a very negative tone. You still have to try regardless though. In sales, there is no such thing as “no”. It is only “no” at this moment, to this offer, while that person is there.

I also suggest that we all mark our calendars and do follow-up with the company in a few years time. The buyer told me they were two years into the job, so I probably expect that in around two years time they will have been replaced by someone a lot nicer and a lot less difficult to work with. Either they move on or the company will move them on. So keep them on your mailing list for updates from your newsletter, but also check to see if they opt out. I am fully expecting this will be the case in short order.

The other important thing is to keep your confidence intact. Having a really bad meeting like that can sap your belief in yourself. Sales is a rollercoaster of emotions. Elation with a sale and deep depression with a rejection. To keep ourselves intact we need to face rejection in a way that we can pick ourselves up again and go back out there and try again. In Japan, they have a saying, “shichi korobi, ya oki” or fall down seven times, get up eight. That is sales in a nutshell.

In my case, I always think that buyers who don't buy from me are idiots. It sounds harsh doesn’t it. But I know that what we offer is high value, has a proven track record and will get results for their organisation. I see this buyer as doing a very poor job for their company. In fact, I see them damaging their own firm.

Now, this is just a mental trick I use to keep myself positive in the face of failure. Of course we should all reflect on what we could do to improve our sales presentation, but if we did our best, it was professional and they were a pain, then don't hesitate to protect yourself emotionally. Without hesitation, lay the blame at the feet of the buyer. Then get back out there straight away and get the sale with the next client.

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

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

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", 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.

Growing Existing Account Sales

You call on your client at their downtown office and you are ushered into one of those typical Japanese meeting rooms. The client joins you and together you enjoy a coffee or green tea and chat about the business. The discussion is about the last sale and the possible next sale. It is usually a discussion about more of the same solution though, rather than a broad ranging talk about all the other possibilities available to the buyer.

We all know that it is much cheaper and more effective to sell to an existing client than to run around and find a new one. Knowing this and doing something about it though, are not the same thing. We make a big effort to grow our databases of people we know. The real issue is not so much who we know, as who wants to know us. Think about it. Who amongst your current clients wants to know you?

Existing clients know us, trust us, like us, and will do business with us. We are the problem though because we pigeonhole our clients into existing narrow bands of business and we never realize the full potential of the relationship. We only supply a small part of the range of solutions we have on offer. We only engage with our clients to a certain not complete extent. What can we do about changing that? Obviously whatever we have been doing isn't working particularly well in terms of broadening the sales relationship.

Using an Opportunity Chart we can map our existing business with our clients and we can also map potential business with non-clients. On the “y” axis of a chart we can list the solutions we provide to customers. Each separate line on the “y” axis nominates one of our solutions which we currently sell to buyers. One the “x” axis in each separate column we list up buyers or potential buyers for our range of solutions. Inside the matrix we have created, we can nominate the current state of the relationship. We use the codes A, B and C to differentiate the chance of a sale taking place. “A” indicates they are already buying from me now, “B” indicates there is a good opportunity here to make a sale and “C” indicates there is a marginal chance of making a sale.

This very simple exercise quickly points out a couple of things. It shows that there are new sales opportunities because we have the solution a potential buyer needs. Often they will be in the same industry facing the same problems of our existing clients. The experience we have already gained with that particular industry gives us insight into the key issues and usually the issues are very common. The starting point of our conversation can be very much better informed and more pointed.

If we are making a cold call for example, during the course of that call we might say, “We have been spending a lot of time with people in your industry and they tell us that retention of good staff is becoming more of an issue than it has been in the past. In fact, they are telling us that it is hurting their ability to grow their businesses. We have been able to help them with this issue and it really has made a big difference. If this is an issue in your company, maybe we could do something similar to help you. I am not sure if this is an issue or if we can help but what do you think? Shall we get together and explore if there are any best practices which will be of assistance to you in your company?”.

This Opportunity Chart is a very frustrating idea. It is very annoying to discover that you are only selling a one or two solutions to the existing buyer, when in fact you could be selling a lot more. Why don’t we sell all of the range of solutions we have now? Part of the reason is we get into a groove, where we are comfortable and the buyer is comfortable and we tend to stick with what we have always been doing. Once you start to branch out, more complexity is released. More people inside the company become involved in the decision making process, there will be additional sign-offs required, additional budgets needed, etc.

This same Opportunity Chart works well with “orphan clients”. These are buyers, who for whatever reason, have stopped buying. We are all busy and if a client doesn’t buy we tend to move on to find the next buyer. If there was a change in personnel on the buyer’s side, the existing relationship may have been compromised by the new staff member. Maybe we did it to ourselves when one of our team left and the client was either not followed up, not followed up well enough or the right chemistry wasn’t there between our substitute staff member and the buyer. The Opportunity Chart shows the logic of our ability to serve the client and we should try and reclaim the relationship. It may be that the trail has run cold and any existing rapport has been lost or diminished. That is too bad, but we should just treat the client as if they were a new buyer albeit one we know quite a lot about.

When we are dealing with existing clients we usually have one strong contact inside their company. This is our Champion. They like us, they support us and they continue to buy from us. This is dangerous though because often when they leave we have nothing. We need to be trying to get our Champion to introduce us to other key people in the company, so that we can bullet proof ourselves from being isolated if our Champion leaves.

This means we are asking them to introduce us to other executives or line managers inside the company and to other staff in their section. They can also help us to map the client company hierarchy as well, so that we get picture of the decision-making structure.

One of the frustrations of selling is that the client is like a black box, and apart from knowing our Champion, we have no clue how things are done over there. We need to get our Champion to help us understand the way things work inside their company. When we know this we can strategise which other key people we need to get to know.

As a simple reality check, get out a piece of paper and create the organizational chart of your existing client. It is scary how little we really know. We have been getting sales, we have been busy with the follow-up and we have moved into a relationship rut without knowing it. We have to “make hay while the sun shines” as the old wisdom suggests and have our Champion educate us now. This is much more preferable to finding ourselves in a stage where we have no one supporting us inside the company, once the Champion disappears.

We have so much untapped potential right there in front of us. We can find new business with non-clients, we can find additional business with existing clients, we can start relationships with multiple Champions within the client firm. We haven’t bothered to date doing any of that, because we didn’t have a formula to make it happen or the thought to do it. Now you have both, so go get it!

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

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

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", 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.

Extracting The Truth From Buyers

Sales as a profession requires the skills of the sleuth. There is no information, false information, incomplete information, low value information and actual stuff worth knowing to parse. The buyer has what we want and hopefully we have what they want. We need to go through a dance like phase first, as we shadow box around the subject, before we can start to go deep in search of the truth. The truth may be that we are not the solution for the buyer and a lot of valuable time gets wasted before we establish that reality. We need to be better at getting the real facts on the table faster.

The selection of a buyer is where the trouble starts. Salespeople are so desperate to get a conversation with a potential buyer, they are willing to overlook all the false flag indicators. In the modern business life, your phone calls made to absent buyers wither for a return. Those emails you have sent are like a fiction that never existed. Silence screams back at you as you wonder why you can’t get in contact with the prospect.

This creates a tension around skimpy sales funnels and looming deadlines. Getting an appointment is felt to be better than getting nothing. Somehow that gives the salesperson the hope they can wrestle the buyer to the ground and extract a sale out of them. Any buyer qualifying process applied may result in a non-starter. The potential deal is dead before we even get going and we can’t live with that thought, so better to meet and worry about the non-sale possibility later.

Which is better, seeing a bevy of non-buyers or one buyer? Obviously the one qualified buyer is going to be better use of our time, than hanging around wasting everyone’s day with a non fit between buyer and seller. We all have the one or two killer questions that indicate if a deeper conversation is either needed or not and we should be brave and ask. All we have is time, so the more efficiently we spend our time with well qualified buyers the better, no matter how desperate we may be feeling about needing to speak to buyers directly.

Having properly qualified the buyer, what do we do about the buyer not being forthcoming with information? In a Japanese context, just wading in asking very detailed questions about all the weak points, failings, flaws and shortcomings of their firm is guaranteed to be met with stony silence. We need to set up the questioning phase. As part of our credibility statement we mentioned what we do, what we have done to help other companies and suggested we could also do something for this buyer. We do this in a halting, uncertain way: “maybe we could so the same for you?”. The next sentence is vital. “In order for me to know whether that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”. Without getting that permission, we will get nothing.

Even when we do receive permission, it doesn’t signify that the floodgates of freely flowing information have opened up so that we can do our job. The issues we hear about may just be the tip of the tip of the iceberg. We are usually not being made privy to the whole scenario. We hear part of the story but not the whole thing. This is a pain. We are on a wild goose chase now for solutions which won’t fully match the need. We don’t know that of course, so we confidently push forward looking for gaps we can fill and issues we can solve.

It is always a good policy to assume that what the buyer is telling us isn’t everything and that we are potentially fooling ourselves if we think we have a clear picture of the problem. The temptation however is to go straight into “helpful” mode and start deriving solutions to the stated problem. Especially so when you have been struggling to get appointments with qualified buyers and are feeling a bit desperate.

Better to hold our fire until we have dug deeper and have double checked what we are being told. We should ask follow up questions about what we have been informed. We should also assemble a number of issues raised and then have the buyer tell us which ones have the higher priority for them. No point trying hard to solve something which is of marginal value to the buyer.

We have to accept that perhaps we need to spend more time building trust with the buyer, in order for them to feel safe and comfortable to release the type of data we need, so that we can be helpful. The idea of doing the deal on the first meeting is basically an illusion in Japan. It so rarely ever happens. There is always going to be a need for a number of meetings and we should be prepared for that and be happy about it. The more trust we can build, the more clarity we will receive about the issues the buyer is really facing.

We need to be harsh with ourselves when doing buyer qualification. We need to assume the buyer doesn’t trust us enough on the basis of one meeting, to share all the dirty laundry of their firm. We need to dig deep and double check our assumptions made on the basis of what we have been told. Being skeptical of what we are being told is always a sound policy. Take our time to build trust and get the real situation, because we are looking to construct a lifetime partnership with this buyer and our aim is not a sale – it is the re-order. Always eyes peeled for false prophets of the tips of icebergs!

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

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

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", 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.