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.