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.