What To Say When You Get A “No” In Sales

What are the chances of getting a “no” to your offer in sales?  Probably around 70% of the time, this is what we will get.  Given that type of frequency and hit rate, you would think that salespeople would be masters of dealing with this type of response. You would be wrong.   The chemicals kick in and sales people lose all reason. 

I was reminded of this recently when we were conducting sales training.  It is hard to create a new habit for salespeople.  They have egos and they are easily entrenched in less productive ways of doing things, because that is how they have always done it. Stupid, is what I would call that, unless you are really shooting the lights out with your results.

The issue is when we see the body language signaling a negative response the fight response starts and then we hear the words and we go into overdrive.  Our brain is on fire concerning the thousand good reasons that no should be a yes.  We are delving deep into why the client is wrong and we are right.  WE are rapidly processing our line of attack to counter the argument they have proffered.  What a complete waste of time.

Instead we need to get smart.  Stop the chemical reaction from getting out of control.  Throw the Breaker Switch, like we have with the electricity in our houses, if the power load gets too dangerous.  Shooting your mouth off in sales is even more dangerous.  That intervention comes in the form of a cushion. No, we don’t put a cushion over our mouth, so that no words come out.  We put it over our brain instead.  We offer a very neutral response to the buyer, that neither agrees with nor inflames the situation.

The point of this neutral statement is to give us critical thinking time.  Are we using this critical thinking time to dream up a killer response that will shut the buyer down in their tracks and turn that “no” into a “yes”?  Nope. We use it to stop the chemical rush and regroup.  We need to go into question mode. 

When we hear a “no” it is a headline, like we have in newspapers.  A short form of reply that gives the key details and no more.  We want to know what is in the article accompanying that headline.  Why is it “no”?  So we sweetly and gently ask, “May I ask you why you said “no”; or “your price is too high”; or “we are happy with our current supplier”; or “we have no budget for this”; or the thousand other dubious reasons buyers give us for declining our genius offer. Give me the article accompanying the headline, so I can understand how I am supposed to answer this rejection.

Now we have to be patient. We hear the reason and again we are sorely tempted to go into counter attack.  We know can tear that shabby reasoning apart and want to bombard the buyer with a million reasons why they should buy.  Hold your horses there pardner.  What if this isn’t the killer objection?  What if a more vicious version is lurking in the long grass, ready to bite us at the first opportunity?  We need to keep digging.

After we hear that reason, we sweetly and gently ask, “Apart from that are there any other concerns for you?”.  They will usually have another one.  Again we don’t go into rambunctious reply mode.  We ask why that is a problem for them, just like we did the first time. They tell us and again we must be patient.  We must keep our power dry, hold the line, keep our nerve.  Again, we venture forth on our seeker journey and sweetly and gently ask, “Are A and B your only concerns or do you have another? If they do, we still don’t rush in where angles fear to tread and blurt out our killer retort.

We sweetly and gently ask, “You have mentioned A, B and C.  Of these which one is the most pressing concern for you?”, and then we shut up and don’t even breath, let alone speak.  They make a choice and now we open up both barrels and answer that concern and ignore the other two.  Usually, if we successfully deal with the main concern, the lesser concerns fade away like the dew on a spring day.

When we were doing some role play practice in the training, it was interesting that the person playing the buyer gave a reason for not buying and the seller was starting to jump in. We tied them up and physically restrained them so they couldn’t answer right then and there.  Okay, that is an exaggeration.  Actually, we just asked them to keep digging, to follow this procedure and not answer yet, until they know what to answer.  Sure enough of the A, B and C reasons given, it turned out that it was C that was the concern of most import.  “A” was price by the way and “C” was quality in this case. 

We don’t know what to answer until we know what to rebuff.  Hold off on answering the pushback, until you know what is their key concern. Don’t be fooled by smokescreens, wild goose chases and other buyer subterfuges.  If we do this we will be a lot more successful closing the sale and building a strong relationship with the buyer.

When Is The Best Time To Call A Prospect In Japan?

Japan is merciless with salespeople.  When you call the client’s company everyone is doing their absolute best to make sure you don’t get to talk to the boss.  They won’t tell you their name, they don’t offer the take a message for you, the whole vibe is “get lost”.  If you don’t know the precise name of the person you want to speak with, then the wall of steel descends very quickly.  They will question you as to why you want to speak to the person in charge, tell you that that person will call you back.  They never will.

No one wants to take any responsibility in the Japanese system, so that is why they won’t share their name.  They don’t want to get scolded by the boss, so that is why they won’t put you through. The boss is a salaried employee and they won’t take calls from people they have never heard of.  They don’t think, “this might be a business opportunity that will help my company”.  They think, “I don’t want to have to deal with people I don’t know, especially foreigners, because it is risky”.  Risk aversion is a big thing here and the easiest way of never taking a risk is never doing anything new or different.  It has worked for thousands of years here.

So how do we break through the steel barrier.  Many companies have meetings on Monday mornings, so invariably no one is around to take the call, even presuming you know their name.  The last day of  the month is also a very busy day for many companies, so that is another hard one. Days with a five in the date called gotoobi(5th, 10th,15th, 25th)  are also busy days in Japan because they are cut off dates for invoice submissions, monthly invoice payments, salary payments, Government department submission dates, etc.

If we want to call a company and we don’t know the person’s name, then we should try and do it before the gate keepers arrive for work or after they have left for lunch or for after they have departed at the end of the day.  This is not fool proof, but the chances of talking with someone with a bit more authority goes up.

Those tasked with taking general calls to the company or section, are usually female, young and at the very, very bottom of the hierarchy with no authority, except to make your life a misery.  Companies don’t understand that these staff are the bearers of the brand to the outside world, so invariably they are not properly trained.  They think their job is to screen out all salespeople and all unknowns.

I called the new President of a major Italian brand here in Tokyo to say hello and thank him for his business, as we had been commissioned by his headquarters to provide training for them.  I didn’t know his name because he had just arrived and that information was not public at that point.  I could never get past the gatekeeper.  She would always tell me he wasn’t available and that he would call me back. That never happened.  I am the President of the company delivering training for his company, to develop his business, to help hit his targets.  You would expect he would want to talk with me.  No such luck.  In the end, I got so frustrated, I just gave up trying to talk to him and left the training delivery logistics to my staff.  I never did meet him in fact and he has probably been posted to a new country by now.

Here are some ideas. Even if you don’t know the name of the person send a package to their title within the company.  If you do even better. This package might contain your company brochure or a small gift, but whatever it is, preferably make it slightly bulky to excite curiosity. Then, when you call asking for them, mention to the gatekeeper that you want to follow up on the package you recently have sent to them. 

That package, by the way, will probably go straight into the waste paper bin sitting next to their desk, unread, possibly unopened, because they don’t know who you are.  This “send the package then call” technique will slightly increase your chances of getting put through. 

Try to make the call before 9.00am, after lunch at around 1.10pm and again after 6.00pm.  The junior people will usually arrive around 9.00am or 9.30am.  They will have to man the phones from 12.00pm while all the important people go to lunch. This means you have a slightly better chance of talking to the boss when they are back from lunch and the junior person is not there.  Companies are more concerned these days about junior, non-manager staff working overtime, so the junior people will be gone after 5.00pm or 5.30pm. The managers however are still there.  Obviously the same considerations apply if you know the person’s name. Your chances of connecting will go up.

If you have met them before, you can say that you are calling to follow on with them on that recent conversation you had.  Or you are calling to follow up on that email that you have sent them.  Or that you are calling to get an answer to your question in the email you sent to them.  More senior staff will generally recognize you have a business connection established and are more likely to put you through.

Why don’t they ever call you back?  They recognize you are trying to sell them something and that means making a change in the supply arrangements.  Change triggers a lot of requirement for internal harmonisation of a new supplier choice. They have to get the hankoseals stamped on the submission they will have to circulate to all those effected by the new decision.  It will also probably require individual meetings with certain key people to secure agreement.  It is a lot less work, trouble, time loss and risk to just ignore you in the first place.

Yes, you can get through but it is not easy. You need to try some tactics to make it possible.  Have these issues in mind before you reach for the phone.  This will save you a lot of frustration and lost time.

Sales Call Roadmap

Because the vast majority of people in sales have no idea what they are doing, they are making it up as they go along.  Wouldn’t it be better to have a roadmap to progress the making a sale?  This roadmap will keep us on track and not allow the buyer to take us off on a tangent that leads to nowhere. Foundering around with no central direction wastes a lot of key buyer facing time and we don’t want to do that.  We can’t expect unlimited access because of their busy schedules, so once we are in front of them we have to get it all done in usually around an hour.

The sale call roadmap starts even before the call.  These days with so much information readily available, we can’t turn up and ask basic questions about the company.  We need to have done some research beforehand on media reports, their website, annual report, social media and using LinkedIn where possible, to check on the individuals we will meet, before we meet them.

Having done all of that, we are well armed to get the conversation off to a great start.  We may have friends or contacts in common; or shared a similar working experience in the same company; or lived in the same town; or went to the same university.  When we have done our research we will have an opportunity to try and find these little connectors.  I was working with an American guy when I was at the Shinsei Bank.  He was an absolute master at this.  He had just joined and I was supposed to brief him on the work my division was doing.  We spent the whole time with him making connections between people we both knew.  He did this to break the ice and establish rapport.

This is important.  We know if we don’t get a good relationship going at the start of the conversation, then it is unlikely they will buy from us.  Even if we don’t have much in common, we can use other techniques like bring some interesting industry data or intelligence to them.  We might have seen something work somewhere else and we can introduce this idea to them.  In this initial meeting process, we need to make a very important intervention.  

We need to get permission from the buyer to ask questions. When they are happy to meet us and having established some rapport, they are more likely to say “yes” to our request to ask questions about the inner details of what the company is doing and all the problems they are encountering.  In other words, all the firm’s dirty laundry. If there was no rapport or trust created would you be keen to share that with strangers?  Now in a western business environment, asking questions is no big deal, but with  Japanese buyers it is crucial we do this.  They are used to being hit with sales pitches, so the concept of them being questioned by the seller is not something they are used to.

Having gotten that permission we should ask very intelligent questions, so that we can fully understand their needs.   Now buyers sometimes don’t want to tell us their precise situation.  We have to ask our questions in a way that gets around that reluctance.  We are searching for an entry point where we might become useful to them, to solve a problem they have.  If they don’t have a big enough problem or if they think they can fix it themselves, then we will have a lot of difficulty making the sale.  We have to show why this issue is best addressed now, rather than after. And why they should leave it to us to fix, rather than trying to do it themselves.  If we don’t deal with these issues up front, then no sale.

Once we understand their needs, we move along the roadmap to the part when we present the solution.  There will be a discussion about the technical pieces of what we will do, talking about how this solution will fit their company.   We can’t leave it there though, because that is still too abstract.  We need to talk about how they can project and apply these benefits inside their company, in order to get better results.  This is where word pictures are very powerful.  In most cases, we are selling a future that they can’t fully appreciate.  So we need to explain how we can add to their business through increasing revenues, reducing costs or grabbing greater market share.

If we have been able to uncover what the success of this project will mean for them personally, then we wrap that bit around the benefit too.  The client naturally doubts what sales people are telling them, so we need to show evidence for them that this has worked for other companies.  Once we have done that, then we can test the waters to see if what we have suggested is the right solution for them.  We do this by asking a simple trial closing question like, “How does that sound”.  We want to flush out any resistance to place an order.  If they don’t have any problems, then we just ask for the order, “Shall we go ahead?”.

If they have issues with what we are suggesting, then we need to confirm what these are?  They may have problems with our pricing, payment terms, quality, delivery or schedule.  It doesn’t matter what they mention, we shouldn’t answer it immediately.  I know the temptation is strong to jump in and correct their misunderstanding or their resistance but wait.

We are only getting the headline, at this point and we need more information before we are in a position to answer their objection.  Once we have heard the details of what they are thinking, we still wait, we don’t answer it.  We keep digging.  There may be other even more pressing concerns they haven’t mentioned yet and there is no point in answering a minor concern, if the big one is left unattended. Once we have gotten out their key concerns, we ask them about which one is the highest priority for them. And then we proceed to answer that item.  Often once we have answered that one, the other concerns fade away.  

Finally we ask for the order. They may say they have to think about it and because of the consensus decision making system in Japan, they actually have to get the rest of the organisation behind this yes. 

That is fine but make an appointment right then and there for a follow up meeting to put a firm schedule behind getting that consensus.  If you don’t, then it could drag on forever. You are better to push for a finite yes or no.  Thinking you have something in your pipeline when you don’t is false comfort.  A clear no is better because then you have a better picture of deal flow and revenue projections. You can devote your full energy on another buyer who can say yes and go ahead.  If we get a yes, next we do the follow up and deliver on what we promised.

This roadmap is how we run the sales meeting with the client as opposed to Japan where, typically, the buyer hijacks the process and usually runs the meeting.  We need to keep control and bring the buyer back to the roadmap to move along the rails or we will never get a sale.  Winging it may be more exciting and appealing to your free spirit, but you won’t make as many sales.  The path to the sale is clear and you have to keep it moving along that path, going through all the stages, to get to a yes.

Technical Salespeople Must Be Good Presenters Too

Knowledge of the specifications, functionality, inner workings are all fine and dandy but not enough anymore.  Increasingly technically specialised people are being asked to deal with people other than their normal counterparts.  Once upon a time, the engineers spoke with other engineers on the buyer side and that was about it.  A nerdy lovefest of specs. Today there are broader spectrum buying teams.  These “civilians” are often the key decision-makers and are not technical in the traditional sense.  This means the technical person has to be able to communicate and present to them in a way that they can understand.

Communication skills have always been low on the totem pole for technical people.  At High School they hated English and thrived on Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry etc.  At University the key focus and preference was on technical subjects.  In fact these technically oriented people were creating problems in the workforce to such an extent, that Universities had to create a new programme for them.  This was the basis for the origination of the Masters in Business Administration.  The aim was to teach technical folks the non-technical sides of running a company.

I was reminded of the big gap in fundamental presentation skills recently at a presentation I attended. It was a big crowd and the speaker had a star studded resume.  He had a Ph.D. in his technical field and was a Corporate Officer in his very, very large, global firm.  He was a big deal in that world and someone often called upon to give technical presentations, representing the firm.

When he started his presentation proper, I was shocked.  I couldn’t believe that someone in his position, with his experience, in that role, with that amount of responsibility for the brand, would be making such a basic, basic mistake.  The first slide went up and it was all densely packed with text.  I thought it was the typical compliance required disclaimer statement that usually goes up first.  No, no, no.  This was his first slide of the actual presentation. 

To make it really exciting, he had made the text in ten point sized font, so it was almost impossible to read.  To add insult to injury the bottom quarter of the page was blank, unused white space. He proceeded to basically read the slide to us.  The next slide was even worse.  Same ten point font, but this time about half of the bottom of the slide was tantalisng white space.  After that ordeal by tiny text, we got on to a series of line graphs.  This was a relief ,except that a lot of the graph text descriptors were impossible to read too.

I was sitting there thinking WOW.  In the 21stcentury, how could this be possible?  A High School student would do a better job than this gentlemen of presenting the information on screen.  The snapper is that he is in a role where he would be giving these types of presentations a lot.  He is highly technically trained and often graces the boardrooms of major companies, who are clients of his firm, giving this and similar presentations.  He has been doing this a long time.  He is one of the most well recognized public faces of the company, after the President and Chairman, because his role is to promote the technical expertise of the company to grow the stock price.

After the slide deck shock, I started zooming in on how he was delivering the presentation.  There were a lot of numbers involved, so it was a rather dense talk.  Pointedly, there were no stories to bring the ramifications of the numbers to life.  These were just dry, dull data points that were not thought to need any elaboration.  The audience however were a mixed industry bunch, so there were varying levels of technical expertise in the room.  Pulling out experiences with similar numbers in the past, would have been great pointers to what we might expect in the future.  Dry numbers can come to life when wrapped up in an interesting example.  Also, we are much better at remembering stories, than acres of data points.

He did look toward his audience, but somehow managed not to look at the people in his audience.  You have seen this one before too, I am sure. He moved his face from left to right and back again, sort of rapidly scanning the room, but not actually making any eye contact with anyone in particular.  This precluded his ability to make a stronger connection with the people in the room. In the time he had allotted, he could have connected with each one of us individually and directly, if he had tried.  We know that around 6 seconds of eye contact works very well.  It is not too intrusive, yet allows us to engage with individuals one at a time.

His voice was soft and even throughout.    It hung perilously close to a monotone. This habit is deadly for a presenter, because it robs us of some key tools to add luster and strength to our argument. When we give each word an equal emphasis in a sentence, then we miss the CHANCE to highlight particular key words for our audience.  In that last sentence, I hit the word CHANCE harder than the other words, so this gives it strength and prominence over the other words. 

I could also have made chancemuch softer than the words around it, almost like a conspiratorial whisper, to make it stand out.  Both are voice modulation variations which are at our disposal and we should be making good use of them.  A monotone delivery will kill the audience and put everyone to sleep. He could have also added to the variety, by speeding sentences up for effect or the opposite, s-l-o-w-i-n-g them down.  Both allow us to grab the attention of the audience. 

People today are deep in the age of disruption, from a technology point of view, but they are also deep in the age of distraction, thanks to that very same technology.  For presenters, the challenge has never been greater in the history of the species and we must rise to the occasion. Boring presenters lose their audiences to competition from mobile phones.  These are surreptitiously being held under tables, as people hit the internet and mentally flee the room and the speaker.

What is the point of being an expert, with tremendous reserve powers of technical expertise, if no one is listening,.  Who are you talking to?  Yourself? This is what happens when you have lost your audience.  Mastery of the slide deck presentation professional protocols are an absolute basic requirement.  I don’t even know why I have to mention this. 

Engaging the audience and telling memory capture stories is another basic skill.  Stories enlarge the impact of the numbers and stay with us, long after the data has been forgotten. Making eye contact to personalize the delivery is so powerful.  When combined with voice emphasis, by either adding or subtracting strength and speed, this becomes the mark of the true professional. 

Technical people can no longer hide from reality.  They can’t find refuge in their expertise area. They are required to convey their knowledge to others who are not part of their shared technical heaven.  Get the skills and most importantly of all, rehearse before you give your presentations.  The difference is infinite.