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

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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.