2020 Ushers In New Deals – Are We Ready To Get Our Share?
Greek myths don’t have too many happy endings or uplifting messages. Mostly they are cautionary tales about the Gods treating us like playthings, usually with unhappy consequences. The patron Greek myth for salespeople is the one about Sisyphus. The son of Aeolus, the God of the Winds, he was sent down to Hades to be punished by fulfilling the eternal task of rolling a large stone to the top of a hill, just to watch it roll to the bottom and then start again, and again, and again forever. That is what we do.
We roll that big stone of the annual budget to the top of the sales year, when the revenue results are announced, to watch it roll back to zero as we start the whole process again, year after year. “Don’t tell me about your last deal, tell me about the next deal” is the driving sales manager philosophy. It has been thus ever since they created sales managers. It doesn’t matter when your firm arbitrarily decides that the sales year kicks off, the phenomenon is the same. 2020 is here – are you ready to roll or keep rolling that big stone?
The tension, pressure, uncertainty, fear and foreboding are unrelenting in sales. You had a good year last year. You won an award at the sales convention, you were on stage getting your medal, you got your big bonus, you made some good money. So what? That was last year, what about this year? Alternatively this last year was dismal, you hardly made any money at all and you were a hair’s breadth away from being axed. So what? That was last year, what about this year? Good year or bad year, the rock rolling awaits you.
There are deals to be done in every year, so there is business out there. How much of it will come to you? If you are sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, the email to hit the inbox, the buyer to walk in then you are too stupid to be in sales. Harsh! Yes, but true, because that type of approach is what idiots do and why they are not successful. We need to do better than that.
Grant Cardone is a sales trainer in the US and he has a book called “The 10 X Rule”. The basic proposition is a good one. We have taken Grant’s idea and have a big signboard on the wall of our office that says “10 X Your Thoughts and Actions”. The issue we all face is we get into a rhythm with rock rolling. We look for incremental gains. The 10X idea is to look for big gains, how to leapfrog our rivals all focused on kaizen scale improvements. To get anywhere we need to change our thinking. The same thinking that got you last year’s result will only get you to roughly the same point. We need to get to a much higher point. By challenging our thinking, we start to operate at a different level. The next step is to put those thoughts into action. Genius thoughts unapplied are not much help.
Is applying a 10X philosophy easy? Obviously super easy for the first thirty seconds, but it gets a bit tougher after that. This is where we need discipline and the sales manager to be driving this thinking everyday. It means we have t look at every angle on rolling that rock up the hill. Who has bought from us recently? Are there other firms who likely have the same need but don’t know about us. Are we shy about cold calling them, because we fear rejection and that the effort will be wasted because the success rate is so low? Is sitting around waiting for lightening to strike a better use of our time?
Remember always that in sales we have the cure for cancer and we need to get it to as many sufferers as possible. Each of our firms provide a great solution for companies. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t still be in business. We can’t cure an individual’s cancer, with our solutions, but we can cure corporate cancers that afflict our clients. When we understand this idea, we have no fear to contact companies who don't know us and inform them we have the cure.
If we 10X our thinking on this point and we take massive 10X action, then we will get the meetings we need with buyers and we will get deals one. The new year is a great time to readjust our thinking about how to roll our stone up the hill. How can we 10X this activity from start to end. It has to rolled. Let’s look for 10X ways to do it this year.
Reflecting On Your Learnings In Sales
You are as only as good as your last sale is harsh but true as a synopsis of our sales life. Bosses are not interested in what you did last year, because that is history, done and dusted. They are focused on this year’s numbers. They got their big commissions, bonuses, promotions, their five star holiday with the family. They are looking at you for a bigger number this year. You might be thinking just how you are going to pony up that bigger number, when getting last year’s number was a herculean effort.
We tend to be like sales locusts. We swarm in, eat everything we can find and then move on to find the next meal. The reflective salesperson is a rare bird because the pressure is always forward facing. “Don’t tell me about yesterday. Show me what you can do for me today” is the driving philosophy and we tend to get sucked into that vortex. This translates into forward momentum without allowing us time to ruminate and reflect on lessons learnt throughout the year.
Take some time for yourself and go back and visit the deals. This means the ones won and those lost. The records on those lost can often be scanty, because we tend to lick our wounds on the move, as we are off to secure the next deal. You may have a strong regime of record keeping within your Content Management System (CMS) or you may be like a lot of salespeople and hate the CMS. You see entering a bunch of stuff in the CMS as a massive waste of your valuable time, when you could be talking to clients.
Hopefully, you at least kept some notes of your meeting discussions with the clients? Whether you were a good boy or girl and kept the CMS up to date or you were a rebel and just kept you own notes, you will have a record to consult. If you are reading this and you have nothing, then what the hell are you thinking? Start keeping detailed notes of all sale’s meetings, so that you can be sure you are clear what the client wants and what is the next step.
Assuming you are not totally crazy and have some records, make some time to go back and consult them. This should not be some casual review of Caesar’s triumphs. Make it more specific than that. Analyse the notes by looking for some things that went well and areas where improvements could be made. The better organised among us will have ensured that immediately after the meeting, they could review their notes, make the writing legible, flesh out some key things they didn’t have a chance to write down and add their thoughts. Those thoughts should also include an analysis of what went well and what needs to be worked on to do better next time. This is the best time to do that. Everything is fresh in our mind and it allows us to grab the gains immediately and apply them to the next meeting, which might be in the next thirty minutes.
If you are reviewing your sales calls over the year, with this type of insight, then the whole exercise becomes that much more pointed and valuable. This would be ideal but even if your were not so well prepared, then make a commitment to change your ways and become better organised in the next year. Take the notes you do have and look for patterns.
Where did the client originate from? Did you identify the client or did your organisation generate the client as a lead for you? What was the client’s problem? Is there a commonality in play here, where this problem may be a trend or is it just contained within this particular company? What was the reaction to your pricing. Did they think it was expensive or reasonable. Did you supply more than one solution? Was there a chance to spider out into other parts of the organisation and help them with their problems? Did the person you were dealing with get moved and the replacement prove to be a pain and not helpful? Did you make a note to wait for their replacement to reconnect with that company and try again or did it just fade out and disappear from your mind?
There is so much rich material in the review process, but we miss it, because we are so busy and constantly moving. We need to organise time to review each month what happened and then gather it all up and take an annual view of the what happened. Time spent in this activity will set us up well for the new year.
Leading An Intentional Sales Professional Life In 2020
The targets for the year are already set or will be set shortly, no matter when your financial year begins. These numbers are irrelevant. What is more important is what you are going to do to improve yourself this year to make hitting those targets more certain and easier to do. We tend to roll one year into the next without any interventions to recalibrate what we are doing and why we are doing it. Habits are good and bad and bad habits are the enemy of progress. Let’s ditch those in 2020. Here are some things to work on for the new year coming up.
Study about sales and communication. If you can’t read, then listen to audio or watch videos – there is so much free content marketing pieces available out there today it is unbelievable. Get yourself on a sales training course and even if you have to borrow money to go on that course, do it, because the investment will repay you a hundred fold and more. Naturally I recommend a Dale Carnegie sales course for you, but at least get training. The difference is night and day and so is the money flow which comes back to you as a result.
This only happens when the salesperson is inadequate and untrained. Instead we need to ask questions of the buyer to find our A. do we have what they need and B. if we do have it, then present the solution in a way that the client thinks, “fantastic – this is just what we need”.
In Japan we will be dragged into the mud and the blood of giving our pitch by the buyer unless we get their permission to ask them questions. Japanese salespeople are pitchpeople not salespeople. How on earth do you know what the client needs unless you ask them questions first? Well you don’t, but in this culture the buyer is God and God demands the pitch, unless the salesperson intervenes and redirects the conversation. Once you have permission to ask questions, life gets good and you will get sales. Pitching is a very tenuous way of striking it lucky and happen to chance upon what the buyer wants. This is basically the stupid way of doing things, so don’t do it.
There are many things to work on in selling in 2020, but if you can only concentrate on these three things then you will become a much more professional and skilful salesperson. Attitude and skill are the basic building blocks on top of which we pour on the product knowledge.
Why “Okay, Send Me Your Proposal” Is A Bad Idea In Japan
Getting to the request for a proposal stage is usually thought of as significant progress in Japan. This means there is an interest. Or may be not. Japan is a very polite society so a direct “no” is difficult to deal with. Over centuries, the society has found all sorts of clever ways of saying “no” indirectly. When you get this request you have to know if this is “no” or not. We are all super busy people, so slaving away to craft a proposal is a big waste of our very precious resource – our time – if it is just a polite means of giving us the bum’s rush out the door.
To understand if this is real or fake we can answer “yes, I can send you a proposal and in fact I can help you with determining if there is a match for your budget by explaining our pricing while we are here together”. This relies on the assumption you can offer a price on the spot. Generally we know what will be involved in the solution for the client, so we should be able to talk about pricing or a major part of the pricing required at that point. If there is a budget issue this will help to flush that out.
Being Japan, we can’t expect any agreement whether we talk pricing at that point or not, because the person we are dealing with will need to gain a consensus in support of the offer from their colleagues who are unseen, sitting behind the meeting room wall in the office. We can however gain some insight into whether we are going to be a contender or not for the business. Their body language is a key indicator we should be studying when we start talking price.
They may still want to see a proposal because they need to show something in writing to the other members of the team. Or they may prefer to say “no” in your physical absence because that is less stressful and embarrassing. We can always rely on Japanese buyers to take the path of least resistance.
I was listening to Victor Antonio’s podcast The Sales Influence on how he does it for American buyers. In his case, he tries to inject some sense of guilt with the buyer around him having to spend hours on making the proposal. The idea is that he wants them to clearly say no they are not able to go ahead right there and then or say they are interested, but not sure.
This wouldn’t help much in Japan, because the buyer is going to avoid any possible confrontation over a “no” answer and will always go for the interested but not sure possibility regardless of the reality. The Japanese concepts of tatemae and honne are fundamental to polite society here. Tatemae means the public truth and honne the real truth. Often Western businesspeople encountering tatemae for the first time will feel like they have been lied to.
We shouldn’t get too moralistic about this because we do it too in our own societies. We dress it up as a “little white lie” which is actually tatamae under a different flag.
If your family member or friend has been trying to lose weight and actually look like they have gained even more weight and ask you how they look, we don’t go for honne and say “Man, you are even fatter than before”. We bald faced lie and say they look like they have lost weight and look better, because we don’t want to hurt their feelings or discourage them. Japan is the same but on a grander scale and it is more institutionalised here.
So in Japan, we do have to give them a proposal but we should never “send” it. By this I mean we should always present it in person whenever possible. If we send off our proposal by email the document arrives alone and undefended. We need to be there to explain what it means so that there is no mistake. I can’t count the number of times I have been presenting a proposal and the client has misunderstood what I was trying to say. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. The key is to be there to clear up the issue. Whenever we get a proposal where do we look first? Straight to the numbers – how much is this going to cost? All the value explanation is in the front part of the document, but their view has been tainted by that big number at the back.
We need to control the physical document and walk them through the value explanation, checking all the while that we have successfully understood what they need. We can answer questions, make clarifications and shepherd the buyer through the value detail to the number section, which should by now have a tremendous amount of context wrapped around it. So make a proposal but always take it, never send it in Japan. If you do that, you will have much more success, by taking it with you.
Selling Yourself Before You Meet The Client
I have been recruiting new staff over these last few months. One of the younger candidates breezily told me during the interview, “I checked you out on social media”. This is the modern age, where everything about us is available only a few mouse clicks away. This “checking you out” phenomenon has been around for some time and the frequency only increases. My LinkedIn profile tells me that twenty three thousand people are following me, around a thousand people are looking at my profile and that around two thousand people are searching for me. That is a lot of scrutiny and unthinkable ten years ago. As salespeople we are being “checked out” before we even meet the client, but what will they find?
I was not active on social media until I heard sales training guru Jeffrey Gitomer speak at our Dale Carnegie International Convention in San Diego in 2011. He was speaking about his 40,000 followers on Twitter, challenging us about how many followers we had and stressing the importance of social media. I had been cautious about this social media thing and had avoided opening accounts. After the Convention I opened up accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. From the very start I only posted business related content. You won’t find photos of me in straw hat, with an exotic drink in my hand, as I sit around the pool, basking under a friendly sun in some tropical clime. It is all business and there are over one thousand eight hundred blogs on my social media. This is no accident.
Coming late to the party proved to be fortuitous, as I found many of my American friends who got on to Facebook while they were at college, had content on there they didn’t want to share with potential clients. This is the point. Clients look at our social media to “check us out” before we have that first business meeting. We may have connected at a networking event, followed up with them and wrangled a date and time to meet. Before we do that they are looking at our social media to get an idea about who we are. So in your case what are they going to find?
When they Google you, what comes up? Is it random stuff or is it content within your control? I suggest it should be content in your control. What would that be? Content marketing is a broad based term for putting your wares up for free on social media, to demonstrate you provide value. As salespeople we should be clinical in looking at what we put out there.
We can write articles, now known by what I think is a most unattractive term “blogs”. We can write about issues in the industry or the market and how to fix those. We absolutely should steer clear of anything that sounds like propaganda for our company, product or service. The first blatant hint of gross self-promotion and you have lost your audience. These blogs may be suitable for publication in industry or business related magazines. The editors are always looking for high quality, free content.
Those blogs can be read into a microphone, recorded, spiced up with some music, edited and turned into podcasts like this one. Some people prefer to multi task and walk the dog, run around the streets or go to the gym and simultaneously educate themselves by taking in good podcast content. These same blogs can be delivered in front of a camera and now you have video content for YouTube. It might be a simple affair on your phone live streaming, or recorded for later editing to spruce it up or you might have some high quality gear involved, including teleprompters.
Gary Vaynerchuk is a total legend of self promotion, but is verging on illiteracy. He knows he cannot write, he hardly reads anything except for social media posts, so he uses video as his main means of message delivery. He strips out the audio for podcasts and the content for transcripts to become text posts. If you don’t like writing and you can talk and most salespeople can certainly talk, then this may be a way to create content that will impress potential clients.
The point is to control what clients will see by getting your best foot forward. Provide credibility through the value of your knowledge, relevant for buyers. I release five podcasts a week now and have two television shows on YouTube. On August 8th this year Google announced they are using AI to enable them to do voice search, in addition to text search. If you haven’t created voice assets like podcasts or video sound tracks, you will be missing out on the opportunity to be found by clients.
You will be looked at and checked out, that is a certainty. What is less certain is what the client will find. Choose to impress potential clients by cramming your social media full of content that make you look like a legitimate expert in your field. Build credibility before the sales meeting. We all understand the client mantra of ‘know, like and trust” can be amplified so powerfully through social media. Make it happen.
How To Sell To A Buying Team
Selling to companies in Japan usually means sitting in a meeting room with a single buyer or perhaps two people. There are occasions though where we may need to present to a larger number of buyers in a more formal setting. It may be a pitch to secure the business or it may be a means of getting the buying team more easily coordinated on their side.
Before we know how to present to a team, we have to analyse the people in the team. That means we need to know ahead of time, who will be in the room from their side. A team comprises multiple layers of responsibility. We might have some functional interests represented such as the Executive Buyer, Financial Buyer, User Buyer, Technical Buyer and Our Champion. Each one has a different driver for making buying decisions.
The Executive Buyer will have a strategic vision for the organization so they are interested in opportunities and growth. We need to include the big picture here of what our solution will do to position the company into the future, as well as today. The Financial Buyer is always interested in cash flow, no matter the size of the organisation. They focus on the cost, the terms of the transaction and how much flexibility it can provide for them. The User Buyer wants to know about the features, how easy is the solution to use, how reliable will it be? The Technical Buyer is concerned about efficiency, practicality and capacity. Usually we are in that room because of our Champion. They are concerned about their relationships within the company, with having influence over the buying situation and gaining recognition for their efforts.
Just to make it more complicated, there are also the buyer personality styles to contend with
The Amiable who is focused on relationships and is never in a hurry to make a decision. The
Driver is the exact opposite. They are dynamic, fast movers who just want the facts so they can make a decision and move on. The Analtyicals want data and lots of it. Three decimal places is fine for them. The Expressives are bored with the nitty gritty detail, preferring the big picture.
It is possible to focus on just one group but not very wise. The presentation should have a little something for everyone.
There are also going to be attitudinal differences. Some will Hostile, Resistant, Discontent, Ambivalent, Favourable, Supportive and Enthusiastic. We need to get our body language meter on full throttle to read the audience and we need our Champion to give us the who’s who of who is in the room, so we can anticipate where we might hit trouble.
There are different levels of expertise in a team. There will be varying levels of Experiences, Education, Biases, Problem/Positive issues, Goals, Expertise and Culture. Before we present we need to know who is going to be in the meeting and try to understand what will be driving their reaction to what we are going to say. We may not know this completely beforehand but we will certainly start locating people into different sectors once we get into the meeting room.
We need a presenting structure which will be well regarded by the majority of people in the room. We need an opening to grab attention, a statement of need for change, an example of the need for change and to suggest three possible solutions. For solution one, we outline the advantages and disadvantages. We repeat this balanced formula for solutions two and three. We then suggest the best solution of the three, with evidence as to why it is best. In our closing remarks we repeat the final recommendation.
Selling to a buying group is fraught with difficulty, because of the massive variations in the room, as to perspectives, needs and interest. Nevertheless we can use this structure to cover off as many of the needs in the room as possible. We rely on our champion to brief us on who is in the room beforehand and to go around drumming up support following our presentation. We win or lose though the quality of our preparation and our structure. If they are both in good working order, then the chances of winning the business go up dramatically. We won’t get so many chances to present to a buying group but we need to be well prepared when we do.
Nine Major Mistakes By Japanese Salespeople
We see Japan as a modern, high tech country very advanced in so many sectors. Sales is not one of them. Consultative selling is very passé in the West, yet it has hardly swum ashore here as yet. There are some cultural traits in Japan that work against sales success, such as not initiating a conversation with strangers. Makes networking a bit tricky to say the least. We train salespeople here in Japan and the following list is made up of the most common complaints companies have about their salespeople’s failings.
Japanese people are risk averse and everyone here prefers the devil they know to the angel they don’t know. Staying in the comfort zone of the known customer is preferred to trying to create a new relationship with a buyer they don’t know. Measurements systems and incentive schemes definitely need to include the number of new clients achieved as well as the overall revenues, if you want to grow the business.
Diving straight into the company brochure or the product catalogue, the nitty gritty details is favourite here. The trouble is they want blue, we don’t know that because we haven’t asked what they want and we keep showing them yellow.
Why don’t Japanese salespeople ask the buyer questions, to find out what they need, like the rest of the universe? It is considered rude by the buyer. That is a cultural aspect that can be overcome if permission to ask questions is asked for first. Why don't they do that? Because they are trained by their seniors who never asked questions and just went straight into the detail of the spec. The salespeople need training to learn how to craft the permission request.
In Japan the buyer is not a lowly King but an almighty GOD, whose penchant is to destroy pesky salespeople’s presentations. Salespeople here don’t know how to control the sales conversation, because they don’t know how to get permission to ask questions and control the direction of the conversation.
It is almost impossible to hit a target you cannot ascertain. If the questions to ask need are not there, it is impossible to work out whether you have what the client needs or not.
When salespeople dive into the detail, they get stuck there. We don’t buy the spec. We buy the things the spec does for us. We need to draw out what are the benefits the spec delivers but much more than that. Few Japanese salespeople even get to the benefit explanations stage. We need to show how the benefit when applied in their business will improve their business and we back that up with evidence of where this has worked before.
Japanese salespeople suffer the same objections as everyone else, “your price is too high” etc., but they have no way of dealing with them. On the job training taps out pretty quickly when we get down to the finer points of sales ability. The simple answer is professional training because this the difference between the pro and the mug.
It is shocking to think how much money is being left on the table by salespeople when they get price objections. Just dropping the price by 20% is common and it doesn’t have to be like this. If you know how to handle these types of pushback, then you can do a deal and either defend your value or reduce the amount of discounting.
So many meetings end with a big fat nothing. The salesperson left the client “buy or won’t buy” bit quite vague and not clarified. Always ask for the order. The worst that can happen is you are told “no” or “we will think about it” but always ask. Don’t make the client do all the hard work, ask for the business.
Sales is not complex. It is a serious of basics that need to be performed professionally. Take a good look at what your Japanese colleagues are doing and see how many of these nine you uncover.
My Clients Never Call Me Back
Today in business, reaching anyone by telephone is nothing less than a miracle. Japan is particularly good at making sure you can never catch clients. The lowest ranked staff on the totem pole are designated as the “first impression” bearers for the company. They are invariably doing a pretty poor job of it because they are not properly trained. They think their job is to be brisk, business like and protect their colleagues and bosses from everyone who calls in, especially salespeople.
Japan’s risk aversion ensures that you have no idea who you are talking to when they answer the call. This is because they are careful not to divulge their name. They ensure there won’t be any repercussions from the call, should it ever become a problem. They are not thinking “great, you called, we are so happy that you want to do business with us”. No, they are guarded, suspicious, fearful of people they don’t know and so their tone is negative, protective and doubtful of the caller’s intentions. Did I mention they were the designated company’s first impression’s holders? Call into your own shop and I bet you will find the same. It might be time to rethink what first impressions you want to portray to the wider world.
Usually, when the person you wish to reach is not there, they rarely volunteer a return call option. They just say, “they are not at their desk”, expecting you will desist and duly disappear. I have found that if you remain on the line but silent, they quickly get confused. In their bafflement, they may inadvertently blurt out “can I take a message?”. Great, you can leave a message now and get the person you seek to call you back. However, later you begin to wonder if that message ever got delivered, because there is never a call back.
We all live in the Age of Distraction and there are so many things competing for the mind space of our clients. Technology is supposed to be helping us by giving us instant connectivity 24 hours a day, but all it has done is make sure we fill up the entire day with “stuff”. Meeting frequency has become crazier and busy people can spend their entire day gracefully wafting from one meeting to another.
You see these digital nomads, with their one fifth open oyster shell laptops, breezily migrating from one room to another. When they do get back to their desk, the in-basket in their email has become overloaded and they have to spend hours sorting through it. Perhaps there is a piece of notepaper, that looks like litter, lost somewhere on their desk. It has your name and phone number on it, left there by the person who took your call.
This is all very disheartening, frustrating and annoying. However, never take the lack of a call back personally. Do not try to psychoanalyse the lack of response from the person you are trying to contact. You do not know why they are not returning your call, but you need to keep calling to find out why they won’t call back. When you call them again and get their voice mail service, always leave a message. If you get Mr. or Ms. Lowest On The Totem Pole answering the call again, leave another message to call you back. You should keep trying to find out why they are not returning your call by sending emails, snail mail, and dropping by, that is, if you can access their building without a prearranged entry pass.
If you do finally get hold of them, be professional, don’t complain about the fact they were so hard to contact or that they don’t respond to any of your calls. Rise above the personal insult you may be feeling. Yes, you are fiercely frustrated by their lack of common courtesy, but this call back courtesy is no longer common. We have to realise we are in a different age. One of my friends who runs a big foreign multinational operation here tells me that his younger Japanese staff absolutely avoid the phone at all cost. They simply don’t want to answer it. This is the new age we live in. Remember, you are the salesperson and it is your job to make contact with clients. It is not their job to do anything helpful or useful.
Now what if the client complains about the fact that you keep calling them and leaving messages? You should just ignore it completely. Remember, this is part of your job, not theirs. They may be feeling guilty that they never got back to you and want to switch the blame to you. Don’t get emotional, defensive or aggressive. Apologise in a light hearted manner like this, “You know…you are probably right, I have been calling a lot lately haven’t I”. Then immediately explain that, “The reason I have been calling is because what we have is so good, I consider it my duty as a sales professional, to at least make sure you are aware of it. Whether you do something about it or not, is entirely your business decision and responsibility on behalf of your company. My role in business is to help you as much as possible to expand your business, if it makes sense”.
Go on to explain that you are here to help them do just that. And you would be letting them down if you didn’t introduce the opportunity for their consideration. Also gently mention that you are absolutely certain that they encourage their own sales force to be equally motivated to help their own buyers.
They will know that their own sales force could do a much better job and in fact should be doing more tenacious follow-up like you are doing. Deep down they will respect your dedication to your company and your efforts to help them make the best decisions in business they can, armed with the best information. So be brave, be persistent and be patient.
The One Minute Pitch
If you have been following me for a while, you know how down I am on pitching. This is the standard modus operandi in japan. Turn up to the meeting with the buyer and bludgeon them with detail and data on your solution. Ask no questions but keep throwing a ton of mud up against the wall hoping some will stick.
I always stress you need to get permission to ask questions in Japan and then you need to have a good questioning formula which will allow you to uncover the buyer’s needs. Once you have achieved that you make a judgment on whether you can actually help them or not. There are occasions though where we don’t have that window to the client. This is where the one minute pitch can help.
This will typically be when there is very little face to face time with the buyer. I go to a lot of networking events and the time available to chat can vary. Often it is very short, because you are filtering the people you meet, to see if there is an opportunity to have a longer, more valuable conversation back at their office. We don’t want to get caught up in a riveting conversation, that sees us manage to meet just one person at the event. Like in the fairy tales, one of these frogs will turn into the beautiful princess, once they are kissed by the handsome prince. We just don’t know which frog to kiss, so we need to kiss them all.
As we apply our filter, we realise we have a beautiful princess here and we need to grab their attention to smooth the path to a follow up meeting later in the week in their office. This is where we need a brief pitch to grab interest and apply the hook for the next meeting.
Numbers are always good for grabbing attention. While chatting they may look at your business card or meishi and ask what your company does. This is very common in Japan. Instead of going into a spellbinding recitation of the incredible history of the firm, the triumphs, the awards, the accolades, try throwing out some mysterious numbers. They are mysterious because they are in isolation and therefore it is impossible to have any idea what they represent. This piques the client’s interest and curiosity.
So, as an example, when asked what we do, I might say something like this, “Let me give you four key numbers to explain what we do – 108, 64, 100 and 95. 108 is how long the company has been going since Dale Carnegie launched his soft skills training firm in New York. 64 refers to the number of years Dale Carnegie Training has been teaching in Japan. 100 counts the number of countries where we have offices on the ground to help clients with global businesses and 95 refers to fact we conduct 95% of our soft skills training here in Japanese language”.
In this power packed short burst I have pointed to the fact we teach soft skills, the robustness and reliability of the business in the USA and in Japan, sustained over many decades, our capacity to match the breadth of their coverage across the globe and the fact most of training is in Japanese, when most people think we only teach in English. At a reasonable clip I can get through those numbers and their explanation in 30 seconds, which means I have plenty of opportunity to take my time, use pauses for effect and let some of those numbers sink in. Following this, my immediate question to the client would be , “what do you do for helping the team with their soft skills at the moment?”. This will lead into a conversation to gauge whether there is any point in having a further chat. If there was, I would just say, “Sounds like we might have something to help you grow the business. I will reach out to you after this event and please allow me to swing by and show you what is available to help your business”.
I wouldn't add anything or explain anything further, because I want to have that face to face meeting in their office, in order to get down to the details of their business needs. The one minute pitch is just an entry point to getting them to accept my email outlining some times for us to get together. Think of some numbers which would work for you and three or four are enough, so give it a try!
Add Some BANTER To Your Next Sales Call
I am a permanent student of sales. I study the books and tapes from the greats – J. Douglas Edwards, Charlie Cullen, Tom Hopkins, Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar. I follow this generation of sale’s trainers such as Grant Cardone, Jeffrey Gitomer and Victor Antonio. Now Victor Antonio is someone I like, because I can see that his methods will work here in Japan, unlike a lot of other sales training which is more suitable for an American environment.
Victor mentioned something in his recent Sales Influence podcast that I thought was a great insight. He was talking about how to measure if a sales call was successful or not. He came up with the acronym BANTER and I wondered how we could apply this to Japan. Victor reckons you should be getting six out of six. Let’s try it and see how Japan stacks up
He nominated a simple scoring system of one point or zero depending on whether the elements of BANTER had been successfully gathered during the sale’s call or not. Acronyms like BANTER are difficult to apply in Japan because they are based entirely on the English language, so they don’t translate well. Nevertheless the idea is a good one. To score perfectly would give you six points and so you can gauge how well the call went, based on how close to six you got.
The B in BANTER stands for budget. We need to know this from our sale’s call don’t we. Does the client have budget for the good or service you are going to provide? Do you know what the budget is, has it been fixed, are there limitations on size or timing of expenditure? Japan is a difficult place to find out specifically about the budget. Often the answers given are vague because the buyer doesn’t want to release that information. They worry if they tell you too much, they will be lured into overspending the money. We will probably score zero for B.
The A stands for authority and this relates to were the people in the meeting authorised to make a decision? In Japan’s case, we will definitely score a zero here too. It is usually the case that the consensus decision making system requires people sitting a few meters away, hidden behind the meeting room wall, to have some say in the final decision. They do not ever attend the meetings, but they can veto the decision. We may have our supporters in the meeting with us but they rarely have final say over the expenditure for the budget. We score another zero.
The N relates to need. Does the buyer have a strong need for our solution. We must get permission first in Japan in order to ask questions to uncover need. Here the usual methodology though is to pummel the buyers with details of the solution prior to uncovering what the need may be. Japan would get a zero score in this category.
The T is for timing. When does the client need the solution by? This is a critical factor because we might have a supply problem if the need is strong but the logistics cannot match the required timetable. Japan is a country where decision making is glacial but the execution expectation default is yesterday. Usually we can find out the required timing in Japan, so we score a one.
The E is for engagement. Was the buyer showing interest, were they engaged in the details of the solution. Were they asking the types of questions that tell you the interest level is very high. There is both a quality aspect and quantity aspect involved here. Japanese buyers all have strapped on their laser beam for determining potential trouble so they definitely want to ask a lot of questions and really wrestle down the detail. It is like the issue of objections. Getting no objections is a worrying sign of no interest whatsoever. We should prefer to get an objection than to get no interest. Japan scores a point in this category.
Finally R – was there a request for a proposal or a trial or a second meeting. Was there some interest in advancing the sale to the next level? In Japan often the meeting end is left very vague. “We will think about it” being the most common result and they do need to think about it, because there are decisions makers not in the room, who need to be consulted. So Japan would score a zero.
Adding up the scores, we have reached two out of six for judging meeting success in Japan. That is about right I would say. If you can make here in sales, then you can make it anywhere, because it is so difficult here!
Success Negotiating – Part Two
In Part One we covered the four steps involved in negotiating: Analysis, Presentation, Bargaining and Agreement. Today we are going to go a bit deeper. Before getting to the negotiations stage though we need to determine our position and that of the other side. Which items are negotiable and which are not? What would an ideal outcome look like? What would be a realistic outcome? What is our fallback position? We need to do the same thing from the client’s perspective. Looking at it from their point of view, what do we think the client fallback position would be? What do we think they would consider a realistic outcome. What would be an ideal outcome from their point of view?
In the majority of B2B situations, we are not looking to master tricky negotiating techniques, because we are looking for an on-going relationship with the other side. However we need to consider some pertinent elements and also recognise when negotiating tactics are being used on us.
Establish your BATNA - Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement.
We need to decide at what point we will leave the negotiating table, if the client is unreasonable. We need to have established this walk away point very clearly before we start negotiating, so that we know where are the limits of patience.
The pressure of silence can cause people to make concessions or offer up valuable information we can use in the negotiation. Japanese people are much more relaxed about having silence in the gaps of the conversation that most other nationalities. Western business people feel pressure to fill up the empty spaces in the conversation, because it makes them feel uncomfortable. Resist the urge and just sit there patiently.
We mention we need to refer the offer to a higher authority in the company.
This can buy time or let things cool down if they get heated. This can be true in Japanese companies where a lot of the decision makers are never in the room. Ultimately, they have to apply their hanko or seal to the internal document recommending the course of action, so they need to be worked on internally by those who want the deal to go through.
This is a deal/no deal decision point, similar to the walk away. The deal may be very close to agreement, but there are usually a couple of conditions which are hard to be flexible about and these become deal breakers. The point is to know what these are in advance and try to come up with alternatives which will defang these barriers to getting to a “yes”
We add value to sweeten the deal to get them to agree. There may be things on our side which are not overly expensive for us which we can tie into the deal, but which are perceived as having high value by the other side. We should have considered what these might be during the preparation stage. As the negotiations ebb and flow, we can see if one of these sweeteners are needed to be brought forth or not.
We deliberately shorten the decision-making period to force an answer. Having an “opportunity goes away” option is good for getting everyone to concentrate on doing the deal. When we know we will miss out if we don’t act, we are more motivated to make the deal happen. It is rare that there is only one buyer or one seller in the market at a point in time, so if action isn’t taken, someone else will grab the deal.
We slow things down. We don’t respond as quickly to their communication. This is similar to the “silence” tactic. By extending the time, pressure may start building for a decision. We never know what pressures the other side are on and slowing things down may force them to act quickly.
These are the additional concessions which are offered to close the deal. Research shows that 80% of the concessions are made in the final stages of the negotiation. We might have something which has value to the client but which is not a big cost to us, in order to make easier for them to say ‘yes”. It is often easier to add some additional condition, once the decision has already been taken. Having to go through all the internal approvals and gaining consensus may seem too much work relative to agreeing to this extra condition.
So there we have Success Negotiations Part One and Part Two. Go out there and be superbly prepared for your next negotiation.
Success Negotiating: Part One
Our image of negotiating tends to be highly influenced by the winner takes all model. This is the transactional process where one side outwits the other and receives the majority of the value. Think about your own business? How many business partners do you have where this would apply? For the vast majority of cases we are not after a single sale. We are thinking about LTV – the life time value of the customer. We are focused on the proportion of our time spent hunting for new business as opposed to farming the existing business. Where do you think the trust barometer would be located, if we started “outwitting” our clients in our negotiations? Especially in Japan, where trust is such a crucial element and everyone is focused on long term relationships. So success in negotiating in Japan will be very different and it will definitely be a win-win approach.
Fine, but do you have a consistent process to apply to your negotiations? Often we do it the hard way without a roadmap or we forget parts of the process. We are all rank amateurs anyway, because the amount of negotiating we do is limited and the size of the deals are usually modest. Have we got the basics covered? Here are four steps we need to cover:
We begin by clarifying our own position. What is it we want to achieve and then we identify alternatives we can live with, if we can’t achieve all that we wish. We also look for ways to add value in areas other than price. Price is only one lever in a negotiation although most people get stuck on the idea it is the only lever. We want to understand the client’s positions and interests and the background reasons driving their approach. This is especially useful when looking for alternative solutions, as we might have something that is valuable to them, but not a great impost to us. We also should look to reframe the conversation to avoid confrontation. There are trigger words which can rapidly inject emotion into a logical discussion and we need to know what those words are for the opposite party. We can then phrase things in ways which is not incendiary.
When we do public speaking we know that if we rehearse what we are going to say, it will go much better. When the American political leaders have their famous televised debates, they practice taking difficult questions so that they will appear unruffled and credible in their answers. Doing the same thing before a negotiation makes sense doesn’t it. Have well prepared what you are going to say and how you will say it. Have a colleague hit you with “toughies” – questions you would rather not have to face thank you very much. “More sweat in rehearsal, less blood in negotiating” should be the mantra. Like lawyers do when getting ready to go to court, we should also prepare the opposite sides case, the client’s case, as though it were our own. This gives us an insight into the likely approach they will take and we are then much better prepared to deal with it. Price isn’t the only thing so we should be ready to present added value alternatives to simple numbers. Because we have rehearsed their position, we can more effectively link our solution to the client’s positions and interests.
At some point there will be a gap between offer and acceptance and this is when we start trading things we want, for things they want. Bargaining down at the bazaar, in the souk, at the local flea market and in the B2B business world are entirely different. Our object is a sale with a nice regular, perpetual re-order attached to it, rather than “a one and done” outcome. So at the start we decide our ideal, realistic and fallback positions. We do this through the prism of our current demand, local and global business conditions, future business trends, price point profitability and our cash burn through rate. Negotiating tactics will be applied to us but the key is to respond logically rather than react emotionally. Easier said than done! However if we did our preparation well then we should be rock solid. We should be looking for win-win so we are trying to make it easy to agree with us and hard to disagree.
Japan isn't much for legal contracts compared to the West. Most of our business is done without any contracts, as we agree verbally and then carry out our word and they carry out theirs. If we are talking about huge amounts of money however, then absolutely contacts will be needed. So even if a formal contract is not involved, we need some specification of all points of agreement. Put every key item in writing, be it the form of a quotation, invoice or just an email capturing the joint understanding of what is going to happen going forward and how much money is involved.
To make it very clear, create a checklist and schedule for fulfillment.
These four steps are not rocket science, but remember we are mostly amateurs in the field of negotiating and are you using this simple methodology or just winging it? Probably the latter, so these four things are there to work on, before your next negotiation, to become a more professional business person.
How to Present To A Diverse Buying Team
This is very tricky in Japan. Because of the convoluted decision making process here, there will be many voices involved in the final decision. What makes it even harder is that some of those key influencers may not even be present in the meeting. Those proposing the change have to go around to each one of them and get their chop on the piece of paper authorizing the buy decision. In the case of Western companies the decision tends to be taken in the meeting after everyone has had their say. In Japan there is a lot of groundwork needed so that the final decision is a rubber stamp exercise, because the actual decision has already been taken.
Nevertheless, we turn up for the meeting and the buyer side has a number of representatives sitting in the room. Often it will be me facing across the table to five to ten buyers. Where do we start? Well the meishi or business card exchange is a critical step. We can quickly understand exactly who is in the room. We can determine their function and rank immediately and this is very helpful. Before we know how to present to their team, we have to analyse the people in their team. A buyer team will often comprises multiple layers. We might have some functional interests represented such as:
Each one has different drivers for making buying decisions. We can mentally list them in order from those with a long range vision to those with shorter range views.
In the case of the Executive Buyers they are thinking about their strategic vision, the opportunity and growth potential. For the Financial Buyers their attention will be turned to items such as cost, terms and flexibility. User Buyers will be interested in the features, ease of use and reliability. Technical Buyers are looking at efficiency, practicality and capacity. Our Champion, the person driving the decision on the buyer side, will be concerned about relationships, influence and recognition.
This sounds daunting enough but just to spice things up a bit, there are also the buyer personality styles. The Amiables take their time, don’t rush into things and are concerned about the impact on the people from the decision. The Drivers (often the CEO) are the “time is money” types who are always in a hurry, can make an immediate decision and solely focus on the outcomes. The Analtyicals (often the CFO or the Technical Buyer) are comfortable with numbers to three decimal places, are keen on the micro detail and want tonnes of data to support their decision. The Expressives (often the Head of sales and Marketing) want the big picture, do not want to get immersed in the weeds and want to have a big party to celebrate the success, at the end.
So their role within the company and their individual personality styles will be key factors to understand when we present. Just when you thought we were getting a handle on the complexity of the task, there are also going to be attitudinal differences. It will vary according to the individual and even their mood on that day at that time. Different people will be hostile, resistant, discontent, ambivalent, favourable, supportive, enthusiastic. We are not finished yet with the complexity. There will also be different levels of expertise in a team. Different experiences, education, biases, problems, positive issues, goals, expertise and culture.
Before we present we need to know who is going to be in the meeting and try to understand what will be driving their reaction to what we are going to say. We need to work on our Champion beforehand where possible and yet we may not know this completely beforehand. We will have to start placing people into different sectors once we get into the meeting room.
Have I talked you out of presenting to buyer teams yet? It is a bit overwhelming when you break it all down into its component parts but harden up, you have to move forward anyway.
Your Champion will have fed you the problems they are facing, you will have analysed them and this meeting is to present the solution phase of the sale. We need a presenting structure which will be well regarded by the majority of people in the room. We need an opening to grab their attention. They will various things buzzing around in their brains competing with your message, so you need to blast a way in to get everyone to listen to you. A startling piece of news or data is always good to grab attention. Next we need a statement of need for change. You can list up the enterprises which have gone to the wall because they couldn’t make the changes needed to adjust to the demands of the market. Suggesting this is a fate awaiting many more is a good step to get people thinking about their own longevity. Very few firms are invulnerable and everyone is always worried about what comes next, in particular things they may not be properly prepared for. Japanese buyers are always very interested in what their competitors are doing and so if possible, give an example from their industry, where there was a similar business with a similar need for change.
Next suggest three possible solutions. You will be very balanced, going through the advantages and disadvantages of each of the three solutions. You will present their pros and cons, including practical and emotional reasons, why they are excellent alternatives. Finally you suggest the best solution for them with evidence as to why it is the best choice. Now you go into your first close, where you repeat the final recommendation and ask for any questions. Following the questions from the buying team, you repeat your close again so that this is the last thing ringing in their ears as the meeting ends.
Buying teams are formidable and that means we have to cast a broad net to capture each person’s interest and need for our solution. There is no shortcut for this process and the key is in the design at the start. Take into account all the complexities I have listed and design an approach for that level of diversity.
The 80/20 Rule Of Selling
We are all familiar with the 80/20 Pareto Principle, where 20% of buyers account for 80% of the sales and 20% of the salespeople, account for 80% of the revenue. There is another 80/20 split which we need to adhere to. This refers to the amount of time we are speaking relative to the buyer. Salespeople love to talk. They love to dominate the airwaves and through strength of will and determination subdue the client and make them buy. This is total nonsense.
Okay you may not be that bad, but if we taped your sales call and did an analysis of how much time you spoke compared to the buyer what would we find? I will guess that it will be getting close the 80% number. There are a couple of reasons for this. In Japan, the buyer’s expectation is that buyer and seller have clear and specific roles. The salesperson’s job is to give their pitch and the buyer’s job is to rip it to shreds. This requires that the salesperson launch straight into describing their widget and all the things that are great about it. The buyer then trounces all those arguments with why it isn’t suitable or is too expensive or is out of doubtful quality.
So the pitchpeople do all the talking and then get torn to bits by the buyer. The salespeople only describe their solution, when they know what the buyer needs. Prior to that they are very circumspect about what they say. Yes, they will indulge in some small talk at the beginning to build the trust with the buyer. After that though they will go rather quiet. They will ask questions about the business and how it is going. Or they may start with asking the buyer where they would like the business to be in a few years time. The intention is to discover the gap in results. This is where the listening part becomes very important, especially listening with the eyes. Matching words with body language must be a developed skill in salespeople and in the ability to read the buyer.
Unsurprisingly, not every buyer wants to trot out all the dirty laundry on the firms failing to someone who just walked in off the street and who they hardly know. So what we will be told is often just the top of the iceberg and the real problems are hidden below the waterline. Our job is to find out what are the real problems and then mentally confirm whether we have a solution for their problem. To do this we have to dig a bit deeper into the issues with simple questions that will get us to heart of the matter.
We may have to add in some explanation of why we want to know. This type of assurance that they can trust us doesn’t have to be a retelling of our life story or of the firm glorious history. We may just simply and concisely state, “We have a broad range of solutions which have worked for our clients. Maybe, one of these solutions will also work for your firm. I have no idea, however if you will allow me to better understand the core issues facing your business, I will be able to tell you if we can help or not”. This is a very disarming conversation. The key is to once having run through this reasoning, to sit there and SHUT UP. Don’t explain further, don’t add, don’t comment, don’t say a word. We must allow time for the buyer to digest what we have just said and allow them to make the decision they are prepared to trust us enough, to tell us what is really going wrong.
Even when we get to the solution provision point of the conversation we have to be careful we don’t start letting our mouth run off without control. As we explain certain elements of the features, benefits, application of the benefits and provide the evidence where this has worked before, we need to be careful. We have to stop at various points and check for buyer understanding and agreement that this is a viable solution. The tendency is to get lost in the detail and spend a huge amount of time thereafter dealing with objections and pushback. It is much better to flush these out along the way. In order to do that we have to learn to let the buyer make some comments on what we have said and switch the balance back to 80/20.
We are all guilty of talking too much, me included. Whenever I hear I am doing all the talking, I realise I have flipped the 80/20 balance and I need to ask a question to get them talking again. It is time for me to be silent and regroup. If we keep an ear open during the conversation and if we hear too much of our mellifluous voice we know something is wrong. Stop what we are doing and have that 80/20 rule at the forefront of our focus. We will definitely make more sales and have happier customers when we do that.
How To Disagree But Still Keep Your Customer
The Customer is King. How do you say “no” to the King? In ancient times, if you said “no” to the King, you would lose your head. Keep your head - learn how to say “no” to the King in the modern era. It is even worse in Japan because the customer isn’t King, the customer here is God! However, the customer is not always right. Sometimes they are being unreasonable or they are requesting things which are beyond our scope to fulfill. There are times when we have to say “no” to the customer and not accept their demands. How do we disagree with the customer and still maintain our good relationship?
We need to practice some self-awareness first. Are there certain words or phrases, that cause a strong negative reaction within us? If we know that when we hear words like “that is impossible” or “that is nonsense” and it triggers a strong defensive attitude inside us, we need to recognize that fact so we can control our reaction. We need to stop the release of fight or flight chemicals and allow the brain to take over.
When we hear something from the customer we know is going to be a problem or trouble, we must stop ourselves from wanting to respond immediately. We need to firstly consider why we believe the opposite of what they say to be true. We have a different opinion, but why is that? What do we think, why do we think that, what is the evidence to support our viewpoint? We have to accept that we might be wrong and the customer is correct, rather than just disregarding the customer’s opinion, because we haven’t thought of that possibility before or we haven’t done that procedure before.
Here are 6 rules for disagreeing agreeably with customers:
Give the customer the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are right and we are wrong? Don’t just reject what they say out if hand.
Listen and really try and understand why they hold that opinion. We also want to feedback that we have heard what they have said and that we are genuinely trying to see things from their point of view.
We have to commit to react unemotionally. We need to stay very calm, no matter how upset or angry the customer becomes.
We use a cushion to give ourselves thinking time.
We eliminate words like “but”, “however’ from our responses and we replace them with the word “and”.
We respond by telling a short story that delivers the context of why we believe what we believe. We don’t go into providing the evidence of our beliefs without first providing the context.
We need to use a story to tell the background that led us to the belief that we hold to be true or which we consider to be the best option. Only after delivering the context as a story, do we state our opinion. If we state our opinion immediately, the customer will reject it because they don’t have any context against which to judge whether what we are saying is reasonable or not.
For example, if the customer was very unhappy about the delivery time not being the next day, we need to give them some context as to why we can’t do it the next day.
Context
We might say something like this, as we tell the story:
“I was talking to Suzuki san in our HR division the other day at our headquarters.
He told me that delivery issues have become quite a topic in Japan. He said the number of young people has halved in the last twenty years and that the projections are that they will halve again over the next forty years.
This is going to have a big impact on all industries in Japan. He said, it means that young people are going to be in short supply.
We see it already because jobs like delivery drivers are becoming harder to fill. He told me it now taken us three times as long as it used to, to hire people for these jobs.
He said it is a nightmare if they leave because it takes many months to replace them.
Every industry will start to suffer these same problems but the delivery sector is feeling the problem right now. Amazon has created a lot of pressure on the delivery sector.
They are being forced to move away from same day or next day delivery as a result, because the delivery teams can’t take the pressure due to understaffing”.
Having told that short story, we have provided context as to why we also can’t maintain the same delivery systems as in the past and the customer is more likely to understand our situation and accept what we are proposing.
Recommendation
At this point, we would say,
“We really want to maintain the same delivery timings as before, but frankly the change in Japan’s demographics is now making all of us accept we need to factor in longer delivery times. Please be understanding of our position, we have no choice any more”.
If we just said we can’t do it, we could easily get into an argument with the customer about how they believe we are going to have to do it, whether we like it or not.
We can avoid that type of response if we follow the six steps. So thinking about the likely situations that come up in your business, how will you apply what your learnt today in your daily work? Thinking back was there any situation where you provided context through a story for explaining why you couldn’t do what the customer wanted? How did it go? If it went well, then what were the success factors that you can apply to other situations? If it didn’t go well, what can you do to improve your delivery?
Action Steps
Survival Tips For Stressed Out Salespeople?
When we are under stress our concentration and productivity levels are much lower than normal. Sales has to be one of the most stressful occupations on the planet. It is an emotional roller coaster, where we go from one meeting feeling elated, to being totally depressed after the next meeting. We are swinging in the breeze between making our target and missing our target. Our boss is giving us a hard time when we are behind on the numbers. If we are on commission then we are not making enough money to live. These realities add to our stress levels. We have to know how to manage our stress, because we know that too much stress can affect our health and our work.
One place to start is with our self-talk. We need to switch our language away from the negative to the positive.
For example,the negative view would sound like this: “I feel hopeless at persuading customers”. We have to switch our language to a positive view, so we say,
“I can better prepare for my customer meetings”. The action step attached to this would be to
write down the likely objections from the customer, before you go into the meeting and have your response properly prepared. The act of preparing better for the client meeting will help you to relieve your stress.
There are also some handy stress management principles we can employ.
We put pressure on ourselves by allowing sales disasters in the past drag us down. We also add additional pressure by projecting what could go wrong in the future. We imagine we can’t make enough sales, so we don’t have enough money, our partner leaves us as a result. Actually none of this has happened, but we worry about it nevertheless. Instead of that, don’t allow the past worries or future worries into your today. Just focus on what we have in front of us. We can plan for the future, but we don’t have to worry about it.
Often we are feeling stressed but have no clear one thing to concentrate on. Call out the big problem facing us, by identifying it. When we do that, our mind gets clarity and we can start working on solutions. For example, we may not be making enough appointments with clients. We have isolated the core issue so we now get to work on fixing it. In this case, we can increase the call rate or contact rate with clients we haven’t contacted in a while and drum up some business that way.
This is so simple but it really works. We get great clarity around where we need to concentrate our energy.
We can accept that the thing we fear is going to happen. Rather than continuing to worry about it, we accept that it will be the case and instead we can now concentrate on what we can do to mitigate it or reduce it. This gets us out of victim mode and into action mode and that pivot is critical to moving ourselves forward.
Our expectations can lead us into stress when things we expected to happen don’t happen. If we don’t expect anything from other people, when they let us down, we don’t feel any stress. This is because we had already discounted receiving anything from them. The client with whom we have a great relationship, buys from a competitor or doesn’t choose your solution in the pitch contest. We don’t take this rejection personally. We know it is never “no”. Only no to the offer at this time, in its current construct. We get busy serving the next client and don’t get depressed about losing one sale.
These stress management principles are very practical. The key is to change our thinking about the thing that is causing us stress. We know one thing for sure, the amounts of stress we are all going to be facing in the future are not going to get smaller. Controlling our stress is a key skill set for success in sales and one we must master.
So how will you apply what your learnt today in your daily sales work? Why not start by taking some other typical negative self-talk content and start creating positive versions, like“I am too busy to do all the followup” and change it to “When I plan my day, I can get the highest priority items completed”
Which of these stress management principles can you practice each day, to relieve the amount of stress you are feeling? Remember, either we control our stress or it controls us.
We will only face increasing levels of stress in sales, so we must master our stress management.
In Sales We Need To Create Super Re-Order Customers
Here is an important mantra: We don’t want a sale, we want the re-orders.
That task however is getting harder and harder. Customers today are more educated, better prepared and have more alternatives than ever before. Satisfying a customer is not enough – we have to exceed their expectations and provide exceptional customer service. Customer service has only one truth – how the customer perceives the quality of the service. Forget what we think is good customer service. We have to be really clear about what is the customer’s perception of good customer service. This is a totally subjective idea on the part of the customer, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have influence on that perception.
Here is a quick audit on your understanding of the customer. How well do you know the customer’s perception of high quality customer service? When was the last time you asked about how well you were doing with serving that customer? Are you assuming that because there are no claims, that the customer is fully satisfied? Do you have a clear idea of the level of service your competitor is providing in terms of customer service?
The building of a strong fan base amongst your clients is a key step to becoming more successful. We all know the acquisition cost of finding a new customer is many times more expensive than deepening the scope of the relationship with an existing customer. That is fine but we need to also expand our numbers of customers. We always need more good customers, but how can we create new fans? How do we do that when there are so many rivals? Here are four approaches to consider.
Whenever we ask a salesperson a question and they cannot answer it immediately, we doubt their value to us. Often however, we salespeople can become concentrated on just a few products and lose touch with the broader perspective. We need to keep studying our total product line-up, so that we have broad knowledge to show we are professionals in our business. Prove that we can be trusted to serve the customer. So ask yourself, how well do you know your own product line-up?
So many times, as customers, we are told “no” by salespeople. Are we ever happy about that response? Buyers are looking for salespeople who they feel are really motivated to serve. The way to prove that is to show your strong desire to serve at every customer face to face meeting, on every phone call and in every response. Great in theory but are you really doing that now?
We have targets to achieve, pressure to perform and so often we can become totally focused on our own situation. By the way, here is a newsflash - the client only cares about their own situation and how dedicated you are to helping them. Are you really sincere about helping the customer or are you focused on yourself, your numbers, your deadlines? Don’t be in any doubt - customers can feel the difference.
Customer expectations change, but often salespeople are not changing with them. Business moves and what was enough some months ago, may not be suitable enough now. We have to really monitor the customer’s situation to see what has changed. That means we have to keep asking them about their expectations of service from us. Are we serving them in the way they want to be served. Most salespeople never want to ask this type of question because they are scared of the answer. We have to be brave and ask and if we do, we will be delivering exactly the type of service the customer wants and expects. When we do that, we differentiate ourselves from our competitors
So what percentage of your customers would you count as your loyal fans? What are you currently doing to drive that percentage score much higher? Customers will become someone’s loyal fan. We have to make sure that is us and not our competitor. Assume that the customer’s expectations and perceptions of what they consider outstanding service will keep changing. We have to keep up with the change but are we doing it?
Sales Bad News Travels In Threes
Our financial year ends in August and we are up over 20% on last year’s revenue results. I should be ebullient, chipper, sanguine, fired up for the new year, but I am not. Is it because we are back to zero again, as we all face the prospect of the new financial year? That sinking feeling of , “last year was hard and here we go again, but this time with an even higher target”. Maybe that is it, but it is hard to tell. There are three other things which are gnawing away at me, regarding incidents which happened this last week. Sales is an emotional roller coaster, we all know that. Well knowing that and being able to deal with the emotional downers is another thing altogether. I am a positive, upbeat person, for whom the glass is always half full. My glass got severely drained and it is still bugging me.
I had a pitch for a client’s business to help their sale’s effort. Actually they said they wanted a “transformation programme”. I had met the CEO previously and had understood what he was after. I came back to him with a comprehensive proposal. In the interim, a new HR person was recruited and I was informed we are now going to have a five entrant beauty parade.
They had various needs. They wanted transformation for their senior leaders, middle level sales managers and also wanted an internal trainer-the-trainer functionality, because the size of their sale force. That cost would preclude an externally delivered vendor solution.
I gave them that transformation formula. I even brought all of the training materials to the pitch, so they could see the professionalism we offer. I went through in detail what each group would need if they wanted to transform the business. This week the HR guy wrote to me and said we didn’t get the business.
I have no idea why, but I do know I won’t find out the real reason by talking to the HR guy. All I will get will be vagary. I will seek out the CEO directly and get some feedback. We rarely ever lose pitches, so I was a bit perplexed. To be honest, my ego was bruised, hurting and I found this news depressing. The point here is that although I know intellectually, that sales is an emotional rollercoaster, it doesn’t make much difference in the moment when you don’t get the deal.
The second piece of bad news was a delay in commencing a project. I had done a similar project for their company and they asked me to come back and do another one. That last project was a real nightmare. I was dealing with a young staff member who proved to be very demanding and sucked up a lot more of my time than was expected. Frequent changes were de rigueur and often without much actual requirement, except for whim.
Frankly, I was a bit gun shy to go again. However, it was a different member of staff this time, again quite young, but I agreed. Deja vu. Very demanding, very picky, but despite recurring nightmares about last time, I decided I wouldn’t throw in the towel and would tough it out. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger type of thing.
Then I get the email telling me to put the project on hold. I am guessing they are shopping the project around and are putting me on ice. I was wondering what was the issue? Was this a generational thing? Both individuals are quite young in business. You have to have some degree of experience, to have perspective and to know how to judge what you are looking at. Is this why there is a gap between what we are both looking at?
Another deeper thought occurred to me. Am I secretly blowing it up, because I actually I don’t want to do it? I know how much time it required last time and it looks like we are going down the exact same path again? I was wondering, what is my psychology here? Am I trying to get out of doing it? Or am I too old and inflexible to deal with these demanding young whippersnapper pups? That is a depressing prospect.
The third one was a case of sports negotiating. This is an ego trip for buyers, who like to see who is the sheik of the souk, the biggest wheeler and dealer, the cleverest negotiator, the bargain hunter extraordinaire. They like to play a little game of “beat down the supplier” to show how tough they are. Okay, you do run into that from time to time, but on this occasion it came from an unexpected source.
You meet people in business who are attractive, charismatic, your type of person. This buyer was like that. We have a lot in common and I like the cut of his jib. He asked for some training previously and I sent him my proposal. He came back with a counter offer that was at a steep discount. I like the guy and reluctantly agreed, because it was the first business with his company. I thought , “well once he experiences our quality, he will pay the right price”. My big mistake right there.
So I delivered the training and then find out that the next round will be done by someone I know who used to work with us as a contract trainer. This guy has a full time job in HR and does some training on the side. That was another red flag. There is no comparison in the quality of what is being delivered here, but I started to see where the client’s negotiation pricing benchmark was coming from.
So this week he asks me for some one-on-one coaching for presentations. I send him my proposal and he comes back with what he thinks the price should be. The language he used in the email was the same as the last email and so another red flag appears. I ask myself, why is this guy nickel and diming me? The quality of the training he got from me last time was at the top of the tree. So I felt his haggling was insulting and saying our quality isn’t appreciated. I also thought we had a better relationship that that. This time, I stood my ground, defended my quality, our brand. I answered him that if he wanted the best, then this is the number. As far as I am concerned, this time, there will be no discounting of even one yen. Subsequent silence on his part.
So what do we take away from this.
Despite the many years we have all been in sales we need to prepare for cyclical depression. I should have known that there is going to be an inevitable downer associated with the start of the new year. I have to remind myself that my team will be feeling the same way, so I need to work on boosting all of our emotions to move to positive ground. Just kicking off “as usual” in the new financial year won’t cut it. I need to make an intervention.
I tell my team, “no” isn’t “no”. It is just “no” to this offer in this format, in this budget cycle, in this economic situation. I need to tell myself that too. I need to separate my ego from the non-acceptance of our offer. There may be a number of reasons why the pitch failed and I need to find out what was the mismatch between what I thought they needed and what they actually chose.
I have discovered my new found buddy is actually no buddy. Where possible, I like to make my clients my friends. I thought he would be in that category. By the way, in his industry, his firm’s fees are very stiff and they don’t discount them at all. What I realised was his value system substantially differs from mine. He wants to “win” the negotiation. I am focused on building partnerships that concentrate on the re-order, not the one off discounted deal. We have a strong brand to defend and the way to do that is to draw a line in the sand on what you believe your value is worth. So he will now be moved into the acquaintance basket.
Why No Omotenashi From Some Chinese Retail Services In Tokyo?
This is a controversial piece today, because I am singling out one race, one group in isolation. It is also a total generalisation and there will be exceptions where what I am saying is absolute rubbish. There will be other races and groups, who are equally guilty as well, who I am not singling out or covering, so I am demonstrating a blatant and singular bias. I know all that, but let the hellfire rain down on my head, I am just sick of some of this lousy service here in Tokyo.
It is a mystery to me how the service in some Chinese restaurants here can be so oblivious to Japanese standards of omotenashi. Omotenashi is that sublime combination of anticipating and exceeding client’s expectations, that has made Japanese service so famous. I love Chinese cuisine and I enjoy the high quality standard of Chinese food in Japan. They have the best, most expensive quality, very safe ingredients and really great Chinese chefs here. When I go to places in Tokyo like Akasaka Shisen Hanten in Hirakawacho or Heichinro in Chinatown in Yokohama, the service is very, very good. My observation is that is probably the case because the serving staff are Japanese or Chinese who have grown up here.
Whenever I go to some “all Chinese” affairs, with only Chinese staff, I find the service is disappointing. I had this experience again recently in the Azabu Juban. It was a first and last time to go to this particular restaurant. The food taste wasn’t the issue, in fact some dishes were delicious. It was the total disinterest on the part of the serving staff and their manager. You don’t feel any particular need to go back there, when there are a hundred other restaurants within a five minute walk.
This makes no sense to me, because when I am Singapore, Hong Kong or Taiwan, the restaurant service is usually very good. Obviously, the more expensive the restaurant, the better the service of course. So there is nothing inherently missing in the service mentality and capability, that couldn’t be applied in Japan. Why then is it so lacking in omotenashi?
I remember reading a purported Chinese saying that, “A man who cannot smile, should not open a shop”. Obviously, some of the Chinese staff working in these establishments I am complaining about, have never heard of that piece of ancient Chinese wisdom. Smiling, making you feel welcome, treating you well are a big fat zero in my experience. The way of serving is very perfunctory, even rough, in some cases. Japanese style restaurant table service is generally very much more refined. What is driving this difference and what does it mean for the rest of us in the service business?
Perhaps some of the Chinese staff we are seeing serving in Japan are students. According to the media reports, many are actually working almost full time. They are not professionally trained service staff, in the sense that this is their career. Coming from certain parts of China and from different socio-economic backgrounds, they may have had no exposure to what good levels of service looks like.
I went to China for the first time in January 1976 and have been back a number of times over the years. I studied Chinese language, history and politics at Griffith University’s Modern Asian studies faculty. I like many aspects of Chinese culture and studied Tai Qi Quan for about ten years with my excellent teacher, Cordia Chu in Brisbane, before I moved back to Japan. I haven’t been back to China for a while, but I don’t recall the service being particularly bad when I was there last. Perhaps some of these local serving staff living here in Japan only ever eat Chinese food, so they are never exposed to how Japanese restaurants serve their clients. I find that hard to believe though.
The thing that puzzles me most is that despite the fact these Chinese staff are working in Japan and are floating in a deep ocean of omotenashi, some don’t seem to picking up any ideas on how to treat their clients. Why would that be? The managers are also Chinese, so they are responsible for leading their staff in the restaurants. Are they oblivious to the service market in Japan and how it functions? Are they just poor managers, who cannot place their operation in a broader context of local service standards. Are they inflexible and incapable of understanding the lifetime value of a repeater client?
This is a very competitive restaurant scene here, has more Michelin starred restaurants than Paris, so you would expect that everyone, including some of these Chinese run establishments, would be doing everything they can to build a loyal, repeater client base.
This challenges me to consider what we are doing in our own case, with our customer facing service. If I am going to bag some of the Chinese restaurant’s service here in Tokyo, then I had better consider our own standards at the same time.
We are a gaishikei or foreign run establishment here. I am not Japanese, but I am the boss. Am I operating the company service provision in terms of what I am used to in Australia, my home country? Am I doing an Australian version of what some of these Chinese restaurants are doing here in Tokyo in their service business? Are we in fact, providing enough omotenashi service to our own clients? Could we do better in this regard?
I find a lot of Japanese service very polite, but also rather impersonal and almost robotic sometimes. Compared to the poorer versions of some of these Chinese restaurant service offerings however, I will take the Japanese polite, impersonal, robotic option every time. How can we see our service businesses in a different light? How can we make sure we are not only providing omotenashi levels of service, but are going beyond that, to offer a more personalised experience? Maybe we need to audit what we are doing, to see if we are missing some vital areas for improvement.
I really like Elios Locanda Italian restaurant in Hanzomon, because I am treated like one of the family. This is the feeling transmitted through their Japanese staff. Elio himself, is not always there, all the time, but that authentic Italian family style service is there. He is setting the service standard and the Japanese staff are following it. I see this example and I think to myself, “it is possible to have a more personal level of service here, transmitted through your Japanese staff”. My family and I have been regulars at Elios since we returned to Tokyo from Osaka in 2001. Talk about the repeater, life time value of the customer. They have seen my son grow from a baby, to a young man in that time. We are part of the family and this is the key - we were made to feel like that from Day One.
How about your service provision standards? Are you making your clients feel like part of the family? What is your repeater rate? How many people continue to buy from you, year after year? Are you tracking this? Do you know what the average buying continuity rate is with your customers? When we see bad service, it is always a good reminder to make sure that what we are doing ourselves is at the required omotenashi level.
If you are not sure what I am talking about with this omotenashi thing, here is my recommendation. Go to a very upscale Japanese kaiseki restaurant preferably in Kyoto or a Toraiya traditional sweets coffee shop and remind yourself what excellent service looks like. Then reflect on what you are offering in service terms. Break down your every touch point with your customers and clients and see if there isn't a lot more omotenashi that can be introduced in each case. We can always learn from our own mistakes and from the mistakes of others when it comes to providing better service. The point is to observe carefully, change quickly and commit to massive improvement.
Why We Mess Up Customer Service
Poor customer service really irritates us. When we bump into it, we feel betrayed by the fIrm. We have paid our money over and we expect excellent customer service to come with the good or service attached to it. We don’t see the processes as separate. In this Age of Distraction, people’s time has become compressed. They are on the internet through their hand held devices pretty much permanently. We all seem to have less time thaN before so we become cross if things from the internet don’t load or load too slowly. If we have to wait we don’t like it, regardless of what the circumstance. We are perpetually impatient. Here is a deadly breeding ground for customer dissatisfaction.
There are five elements usually driving customer unhappiness with us.
We need processes to run our organisations on a daily basis. This includes how we communicate and align the features and value of the offering with the customer’s expectations. In constant drives for great efficiencies, we tend to mould the processes to suit the organisation’s needs, in prefer to the customers. Japan is a classic in having staff run the business based on what is in the manual. If a decision requires any flexibility, this is usually dismissed because the staff only do what the manual says. As the customer, we often want things at the odds with the manual or we want something that diverges from what the manual says.
Take a look at your own procedures. Are there areas where you can allow the staff to exercise their own judgment? Can you empower them to solve the customer’s problem, regardless of what is in the manual. Our processes often become covered in barnacles over the years and from tine to time we need to scrape them off and re-examine why we insist things can only be done in this way.
Who does what in the organisation. This includes agreement on tasks and responsibilities and holding people accountable to these. Japanese staff, in my experience, want their accountabilities very precisely specified and preferably to be made as tiny as possible. They are scared of making a mistake and being held accountable if things go wrong. They have learnt that the best way of doing that is to become as small a target as possible.
The usual role split works well, but what happens when people leave, are off sick or away on holiday? This is when things go awry. Covering absent colleagues requires flexibility and this is not a well developed muscle in Japan. What usually happens is everything is held in abeyance until the responsible person turns up again. Customers don’t respect those timelines and they imagine that everyone working for the firm is responsible for the service rather than only the absent colleague. We need a strong culture of we pick up the fallen sword and go to battle to help our customer, if we are the only person around. This is particularly the case with temp staff. They are often answering phone calls or dealing with drop in visitors and they need to be trained on being flexible and fixing the customer issue.
How customer service personnel get along with each other and other departments is key. This includes such things as attitude, teamwork and loyalty. Sales overselling and over promising customers drives the back office team crazy. They have to fulfil the order and it is usually in a time frame that puts tons of pressure on the team. This is how we get the break down of trust and animosity reigning inside the machine. This leads to a lack of communication and delivery sequences can get derailed. When colleagues are angry, they tend not to answer the customer’s phone call as sweetly as we might hope. We need to be careful to balance out these contradictions and have protocols in place where we can minimise the damage. What are your protocols and does everyone know and adhere to them. Now would be a good time to check up on that situation.
How the organisation defines and communicates the overall and departmental vision, mission and values is key. This is the glue. We need this when things are not going according to plan. When we grant people the freedom to uphold all of these highfalutin words in the vision statement with their independent actions, then we introduce the needed flexibility to satisfy clients. Are your people able to take these guiding statements issued from on high and then turn them into solutions for clients?
The resources available to the customer service departments such as time and money become critical to solving customer issues. How much control do we give to the people on the front line to solve problems for our customers? Often we weight them down with rules, regulations and procedures, which make them inflexible. Check how much freedom you have granted to your team to fix a problem for a client? You may find that during the last recession you wound that whole process in very tight and forgot to loosen it off, after times got better.
We need to get under the waterline and check for a build up of barnacles impeding our customer service provision. Scrape them off wherever you find them and have a steady routine to always take a look and see what has built up over time. Invariably you will find something that can be removed or streamlined, that the customer will appreciate. Remember, if you can do this and your rivals can’t or don’t, that is a big advantage in the customer satisfaction stakes.
Typical Japanese Salespeople’s Objection Handling Issues
Getting pushback, rejection, disinterest when you present your solution to the client’s problems is the natural state of things. Getting a sale is an exception. That is why the best salespeople are exceptional. There are so many ways to fail in sales, it is no wonder that getting to a ‘”yes” answer is so hard. One of the common questions or issues we get in our sales training classes from Japanese salespeople, are about how to handle the client’s objections. There are some key techniques we need to be applying at this point in the sales conversation.
Obviously, we should always question the objection. The words we hear are an abbreviation, a headline for a much longer reason or more elaborate reason for them not to proceed with us. We want to hear the full thinking behind their rejection of our offer. We also know that we shouldn’t get busy answering the first objection they share. This may not be the real objection. Always have the tip of an iceberg picture in your mind’s eye and imagine there is a big chunk of reasoning as to why it is a “no”, hidden below the surface.
We need to keep pushing for other reasons not to go ahead, after they have told us each one, until we have exhausted their supply. We then ask them to rank them in order with the highest priority first. That is the one we attempt to answer. When we get to this point we have to make a couple of judgement calls. Is this a real objection? Is it a legitimate reason? If it isn’t, then we have not uncovered the real culprit yet, as to why they can’t proceed with us. We need to keep digging for their actual issue with our proposal.
If it is a legitimate reason not to proceed, we need to move on to the second judgement. Can we actually supply what they want, at the price and in the way they want it? Can we overcome the objection within our resources and within the bounds of our pricing and profit model.
Some clients love to play a game called “sport negotiating”. They have a big ego and want to see how hard they can push us on price. This isn’t as much about the economics of the deal, as about their need to win. We may conclude we don’t want to play that game and walk away. That is always my preference when I meet these types of buyers. You can usually tell from their attitude what they are doing. I would rather find a client who will become a repeat buyer and with whom I can cement a long term, rather than transactional relationship with a bully.
If you conclude that you can deal with their price issue, then it is a matter of judgment on how low you need to drop your price. In Japan, once you drop it, then that becomes the ceiling and they want to push you even lower. Never go in with your best price, unless you want to get massacred. Always have some margin in there, so that if you are forced the drop the price, then you can still make the deal worthwhile from your own financial point of view.
Another common objection is that they are satisfied with their current supplier and don’t want to change. This objection is much harder to deal with than price.
The risk averse nature of business here drives everyone to find someone they can trust and then to keep using them. It makes sense in a society which doesn’t tolerate errors or failure. You may disagree with that philosophy, but nobody cares what you think.
There must be some clear differentiation to what you are offering, compared to what the incumbent provides. This may be speed, quality, reliability or cost. Proving this through salesperson hot air and bluster is impossible. You need to ask for a trial or a test or a period of engagement to demonstrate why you are the superior choice. Japanese companies are always very focused on what their competitors are doing. This means that the idea that what you have is really good and will certainly be going to their competitor, to make them an even more formidable rival, if they don’t buy from you now, will get people’s attention.
When we talk about a test or trial, expect it will be an elongated affair. No one gets rewarded in Japan for making a quick decision, but plenty of people are made to suffer if they make a wrong decision. They will want to test and observe, test and observe at their leisure, rather than addressing your preferred timing. I would rather take part in a long test maturation process with the client, than get locked into some disadvantageous pricing.
We recently had that case with a global automotive company. Their foreign headquarters decided that our Japan pricing didn’t fit into their global model and we should reduce it. This particular class they wanted to do, always has a long waiting list. This is at the current pricing and there is a limit on how many can take part in each class. I had no hesitation in telling them we couldn’t match their expectations.
I tried to educate them on different cost frameworks, country by country. I asked them if they were willing to reduce their Japan HR team’s personal salaries, to match those in equivalent jobs in the foreign headquarters? Their answer was no they would be able to do that. Of course not, so why expect me to match that foreign regimen with my Japan pricing? Sometimes we are dealing with uninformed, parochial idiots.
I would rather forego the business, than comply with an uninformed opinion about our relative cost, against our quality. If you believe in what you are selling, then you should be brave in the face of objections. Remember, in 99% of cases there are usually plenty of buyers in an industry. There will be other buyers who will appreciate your quality at that cost. Let’s all go find those companies.
Generating Your Own Leads In Sales
Marketing plays a key role in generating leads. They are trying to maximise the accuracy of the segmentation of the data base, to make offers that resonate specifically with different segments. They are producing content marketing pieces that will spark leads through the SEO route. Buying ad words to get pay per click activation from buyers, searching for your specific good or service is another channel. Potential buyers raise their hand when they download a white paper or an eBook from the website or leave an inquiry. However this is never enough from a sales point of view.
Salespeople want to fill the top of their funnel of leads. They know they have certain ratios which will unveil the KAIs or Key Activity Indicators. If we try to email or phone a certain number of prospects, then we will get a certain amount of replies or contacts. By tracking how many we make contact with we can get a ratio of our activity relative to our success. The next stage is converting those contacts into face to face meetings. In Japan, for the vast majority of B2B sales, this is required, especially if you are a potential new supplier. There will be a ratio of success here counting appointments achieved against attempts to get a meeting. Then obviously we can count how many of those meeting led to a deal being done. That is another key ration.
We can calculate the value of all the deals we did against the number of deals and work out our average sale value. If our average deal size is 1 million yen and our annual sales target is 30 million yen then we can work backwards and nominate how many original contact we need to be making to generate our target number. The problem is very few sales people have any clue what their KAI is and they just ramble thorough the year.
When we know our KAI we know we need to put aside what marketing is doing because we can’t control that process. We can control though, how many networking events we go to, how many cold calls we make, how many reactivation calls to orphan clients we need to make. We have a clear idea of what an ideal client looks like.
We have clients in an industry who have rivals in the same business. The chances are high that the problems and issues facing one five star hotel in Tokyo will probably be shared with other similar hotels. Our insights derived from dealing with one can provide us with a battering ram to break into the other hotels.
Commonly, cold calls fall on stony ground in Japan unless you know the exact name of the person you need to talk to. The lowest placed young woman on the totem pole is always designated to pick up the phone. Despite her tender years she has become a hardened, ego demolishing, expert at keeping her bosses protected against pesky salespeople. “Who are you”, “Why are you calling, “We will call you back”, then crickets is usually how it goes.
Most salespeople just ask to speak with the sales manager, false promises are made to get rid of them and deafening silence on the return call front is all they ever experience. The Sales Manager never contacts you and you are never ever confident that young Ms. Call Killer even passed your message on to the boss in the first place.
Based on our insights gained from working with similar companies in the same industry, we can try a different angle. “Hello, this is Greg Story from Dale Carnegie Training Japan, we are global soft skills training experts. We have been working with your direct competitors here in Japan. What you will find interesting is we have been having great success helping their sales teams to win new business for their Hotels. These rival sales managers have loved seeing their teams going after new business, succeeding and so substantially expanding their sales. Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure. Please allow me to discuss this possibility with your sales manager, to see if we can help you achieve similar success. Would you please transfer me to the sales manager?”.
Invariably the Sales Manager “isn’t there”, even if they actually are there. At this point Ms. Call Killer often goes stone motherless silent. She will not offer to take a message, as she is hoping you will crack and say “I will call back later”. That makes her feel good about getting rid of you, because experience has taught her that most salespeople don’t try again. She will not tell you the name of the sales manager if you ask. If you don’t give up so easily and you ask to leave a message, she will take down your name and number - maybe. You have to rely on her tender mercies for your message to be passed across. Here is a key tactic. You should keep calling back every few hours, until you get to talk to the sales manager. You have to be that persistent to break through the wall.
Making these cold calls needs discipline, guts, a thick hide and time. Everyday you need to make a key appointment. That is the one with yourself, to hive off time to get on the phone and hit these walls. Think about it. You will always defend the time to meet with a client and you have to apply the same rigour to the time you need to make these calls. Get it into your schedule and BLOCK that time out.
This is one way we can take control of our own destiny and make our own leads. It is tough, but persistence and conviction that what you have is what they need and the time to do it, are the prerequisites. Block out the time and get on the phone. Take command.
Stop Slamming The Square Peg Into The Round Hole When Selling
One of the most dangerous people on the planet is the salesperson who doesn't listen well enough to the client’s needs. They miss the key cues, misunderstand the problem, can’t override their fixation on what they want and do most of the talking during the sales call. They wonder why getting an agreement to buy is so hard.
One of my sales coaching students was relating how he took the client meeting into negative territory from the very kick off of the sales conversation and then proceeded to dig the hole deeper and deeper for himself. Small talk at the start is needed to set the foundation for building the trust, as buyer and seller get to know each other. In this case, the small talk conversation went into a death spiral. This is when the redirect button is pushed to make it more meaningful for the buyer.
In this case, he just lent harder on the shovel and dug faster. If we find things are not going well, then stop talking and start asking questions. This allows the buyer to feel in more control to direct things the way they want them and for you to regroup and prepare to take back the reins of the conversation. Usually we have the selling plan, but the buyer doesn’t have the buying plan. They are wandering around with no direction in mind, because they expect to hear what they need from us. We need to keep that conversation on track.
When we hear what the client is trying to achieve, the solutions we suggest have to be in line with delivering that. You would think that is the most logical thing in the world, but salespeople do the most surprising things. They try to redirect the client’s needs, to match their own needs. If there is a higher commission being paid on one product, over the others, then they want to stress that product, regardless of whether that is the best one for the client or otherwise.
They may be under pressure from their boss to push a solution that benefits the company the most. This is where you start getting into hole digging territory. The client may be following our advice because we did such a very good job of establishing rapport and building trust at the outset. When we FOIST the wrong solution on the client, we are haemorrhaging that trust immediately. The ROI we should be focused on is the client’s ROI not ours.
Our intrepid hero was sadly successful in convincing the client to buy the thing which would have zero return. When we had our coaching session together, I was drilling down into what would the client get in return for their hard earned money, based on the conversation that had covered what the client was trying to achieve. It was obviously zero value for the client but good for the seller, who was having trouble moving this product. Great, but this destroys your reputation in the market. You do get the sale and usually the size of the sale is a peanut, as it is the first sale. You blow all your credibility at the start and then the client tells everyone in town you are radioactive and to be careful of dealing with you. The lifetime value of the client means that the loss is enormous, when measured that way. That peanut will also be expensive, given the way it will shred your reputation.
We worked on a more custom solution for the client and took the solution in a completely different direction. This customisation process is always the best idea. We tend to have ready to go, off the shelf solutions, which are cost and time effective, but these won’t always match the needs of the client. The more customised the solution, the better in terms of client satisfaction, ROI and perceived value. Make the solution fit the client’s needs, rather than make the client fit in with the seller’s needs. No more square peg solutions please.
Really Understand Your Expectations Of Your Sales Team
We hire people and they don’t perform as we expected. The time passes and the numbers are not rolling in. We thought they would be more proactive and more skilled at getting new business. We fire them and start over again. Except that in Japan, you can fire them, but replacing them is a different and difficult matter these days. Recruiting salespeople is horrendous, so the retain component is the mirror piece we have to master as well. Turning the tap on in the sink, with the plug removed, isn’t getting us anywhere and this revolving salesperson door is just that issue. We are wasting a lot of resources.
We are often the problem though. I have a start-up founder client who is a nightmare. I have interviewed all of his direct reports and finally the big man himself. Actually, I don’t want to work with his company. They can keep the money. He is the issue as to why they are having such significant staff turnover. He has a “plug and play” mentality with people. When you find a problem, you just hire someone in to fix it and then go back to running around like a headless chicken as before. In this case, the leader is the problem.
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His expectations are unrealistic with the current state of the market. He thinks we are still back in the old days, when there wasn’t the same amount of job mobility and where people tended to stick around, because it was hard to get another job. He had key people jump and rather than try and fix the problem, starting with himself, he just wants to throw another body at it.
There are three areas where we need to audit ourselves and our expectations. Are we sure of what we are looking for in our salespeople when we hire them? If we hire a farmer and they don’t hunt, we fire them. Whose fault was that? Ours not theirs. We need to know at the very start are we bringing in another farmer here or a hunter? In Japan, farmers are much more numerous and so the chances of getting a farmer on board are statistically higher.
How can we tell which is which, in the interview process? Ask the candidate about their current client base. Where did those buyers come from? If they say through the marketing team’s efforts generating leads, the pool of “orphan clients”, their boss or from departed colleagues, then that tells you they are farmers. If they talk about how they recruited new clients, by beating the bushes and finding them then, you have a hunter there. This is not to say one is better than the other, but that in Japan you are more likely to wind up with a farmer than a hunter. Once you know that, you adjust your expectations and know you need to get busy feeding them.
Another case is how fast we expect people to get up to speed. When the months roll buy and the numbers don’t role in, we get frustrated. We need revenues and we need them now. The costs in salary, insurances and expenses flow out like a flood and the revenues from new salespeople comes in like a trickle. Where do we get our expectations from? Are they rooted in numbers, experience or hope. Often it is the hope component, followed by our personal experience and rarely are any comparative numbers involved. It is always dangerous to judge others through the lens of ourselves. “I did it, so they can do it too”, makes sense at one level, except when you uncover that very few other salespeople are like you. A better analytical tool is performance.
Take every salesperson who has worked for your organisation over the last five to ten years and trace them all back to Day One when they started. Track their revenue production monthly. In this way you can compare like for like. There will be some averages you can apply to give you a measuring stick, against which to gauge their output. If you have a sufficient number of people to look at, you can take out the worst and the best performer and form an average from those left. If you don’t have enough people, then a straight average is enough. This gives you quarter by quarter, what, on average, you should expect from your people after they join. This has nothing to do with what you did and so is a more objective means of defining performance and tempering your expectations.
The third thing to look at is your sales incentive scheme. American style 100% commission systems are not much in evidence in Japan, except in very dubious occupations, closely associated with skulduggery. Usually salespeople are on fixed salaries with bonuses. This is not a great system and so try to change it. A better case is where the base salary will be lower and a percentage of sales as commission is paid.
If your scheme is mainly to benefit your pocket, then don’t be surprised if people don’t get excited about it. I have a friend who is mean, when it comes to paying salespeople and has tremendous turnover, wondering why. I keep telling him why, but he is too greedy about getting the money and not spreading it around with his team, so he refuses to change. I just sit back and observe the regular carnage.
Foreign company leaders often complain to me that they brought in this really spiffy incentive scheme, but none of the salespeople seem the least bit motivated by it. I ask about whether there is a component that recognises bringing in new business? If you want hunters, but you pay everyone a straight commission, regardless of how they got there, then you will usually encourage farming. I also ask about the base pay? Usually these are very high, so in risk averse Japan, everyone is happy to keep doing what they have always done, rather than try something new. Those high base pays need to be reduced, so that there is more at risk for the salesperson, if they don’t hit their numbers.
The “number” or target is also important. If we make it too high, then people just roll over and give up. Our expectations can outstrip their own self-assessment of their individual capability. They start to suffer from imposter syndrome, where they don’t believe they can operate at that level, so they underperform to get themselves back to an equilibrium they are more confortable with. Getting the number right is an art more than a science, but getting it wrong becomes expensive.
Our expectations are often the source of our woes. We need to take a cold hard look at why we have our expectations, are they realistic and do we need to alter them?
Action Steps
Presenting Manufactured Products
Industrial products are rarely sexy. They tend to be very technical, specification heavy and chunky. They are normally being presented in a catalogue of products. The pricing, quality and the after sales service tends to be the differentiator with the rival suppliers. The salespeople presenting these often boring, utilitarian products, are also usually do so in a boring, functional manner. Not much pizzazz going on.
This flies in the face of what we know though about buyers buying us, buying our confidence and being injected with our belief in the product. We don’t have to present these types of products in a dull way. The features of the product are usually a mass of measurements. This can be dry as a subject for getting buyers excited. However what about the benefits of the product? This is where we should be able to shine in our presentations. Intellectually, we all know we don’t buy the product. We buy what the product will do for us. Describing that part of the occasion is where we can stand apart from our competitors. The problem is we forget about this bit and we just drone on and on about the spec.
Talking about the benefits of the product purchase are absolutely fundamental in sales. However, rather than just talking about the benefits of the product, we need to be outlining how the benefit can be applied in their company. Having a benefit and doing something with it are not the same thing. We need to be drawing out word pictures of how our product can help them in their business. Usually it is through better efficiencies around life of the product or better quality, leading to fewer maintenance issues. It might be the ease of use of our product when compared to others or the ease of instillation. Whatever it is, this is where we need to capture the attention of the buyer. By taking the discussion beyond the spec, to the integration into the customer’s systems, their staff’s daily interactions with the product, the their customers happiness with the finished item, then we can bring a dry subject alive.
Numbers lend themselves to comparisons very easily, so we can contrast our product with the alternatives. We can break the cost down, amortised over a long period of time. The lifetime of a lot of industrial products can be quite long, so long range number crunching works well. It has to be related back however, to today though. We need to provide context about how this long term saving will translate into financial benefits today. There may be some speed of delivery elements creating savings on inventory or storage costs. Improved quality deliverables may create benefits for the customer, which allow them to pass on savings and gain market share. Tax savings and investment costs amortization allowances may in fact save money. The key is to find things which can be applied to today’s bottom line. If there are less maintenance issues, then we can calculate the labour costs and down time savings that it brings. If it is easier to install, then we can talk about the diminished disruption to overall operations, the lesser need for technical specialists or the speed of installment leading to cost savings.
Finding creative ways to express these differences is one part of the equation and the other part is the way we present the information. Charts and graphs are basic but good visual clues for our buyer to see the difference for themselves. These days we can have video delivered via our iPads, which can tell the story of how great this will be for the buyer. Seeing is believing and it doesn’t have to be all spreadsheets, still photos and matrices. This is particularly so around marshaling evidence to prove what we are saying. Seeing the product installed and operating gives a better sense of reality to the buyer. Interviews with happy customers and them talking about the advantages is very compelling.
The humble blender became a viral social media sensation in the hands of some creativity. Blendtec, like many manufacturers, producers blenders. To demonstrate the toughness of their blender they hit upon the genius idea of shooting a video called “Will It Blend”. Twelve years ago they started blending mobile phones, iPads, glow sticks, hockey pucks and other unlikely items. The one on glow sticks got 12 million views on YouTube and the iPad video got 18 million views. Tom Dickson, the President, is dressed up in a lab coat, has the industrial glasses on and away he goes. Today they are still getting hundreds of thousand of views of their videos. Everyone else is just making blenders.
My point is industrial products don’t have to be boring in the hands of a skilled salesperson. Yes going through the spec is critical, but that is not enough. By the way, is that all that your salespeople are capable of doing? Are they fully boned up on describing the benefits to the buyer. Can they then take those benefits and integrate them into the client’s business and show how when applied they bring tremendous benefit to the client. Do they have visual evidence like Blentec has been using to create resonance with the buyer? If they don’t and your competitors salespeople are doing all of those things, then buckle up for a rocky ride.