We have come to the final stage of the sales process, getting people to agree to move forward and place their order. We have built the trust, understood the buyer’s needs, matched our solution to those needs, cleared up any hesitations, so now we can ask for their business. What could be easier than this after all that preparatory work? In Japan, as with many things, it is not that simple.
Salespeople here fear the buyer. They believe their job is to always say “Yes” to whatever the buyer wants. Buyers in Japan have been trained by errant salespeople, to expect a pitch. The idea is you turn up deliver your pitch and then the buyer will dissect it and tell you all the things wrong with it. They then expect you to deal with those issues, so that they can be assured this is a safe buying decision. Online or in person, the same expectation rules.
This sounds reasonable, except it is folly for salespeople to do things this way. I can never understand how a pitch could possibly be considered a good idea for the opening of your sales presentation? How do you know what to pitch? Most of us have multiple solutions, so which one should we start off with? When pitching, we can begin talking about something which is not central to their interests, thus wasting their time or something completely irrelevant and so totally waste their time.
This fear of the buyer spills over into not saying “No” to the buyer. Sometimes, it makes no sense to agree to the buyer’s requests or demands. Japanese salespeople will just take the command as an order and then twist the organisation up into knots to deliver the demand. Over the years, whenever I question my sales teams about these client demands, they reply that they agreed because that is what the buyer wanted. “Why didn’t you say no”?, is met with blank looks, staring at their shoes or puzzlement. The “say yes to everything” mentality is drilled into salespeople here, so that they cannot imagine a parallel universe, where you don’t agree to everything the buyer wants.
This fear is part of the reason most Japanese salespeople leave the order request in a vague state of greyness. It is actually a black or white decision – you either agree to buy or you don’t. How can there be any grey?
Japan loves living in the grey, that never never land where vagueness, circuitousness, indirectness and obfuscation rule supreme. A rejection in Japan represents an assault on the Wa (和), that societal harmony that has been built up over centuries, to allow Japanese people to live cheek by jowl, without killing each other. It is also an assault on one‘s own Kao (顔) or face, a humiliation best avoided at all costs, including the cost to the business of not asking for the sale.
Deal closing fear exists amongst salespeople everywhere, but Japan takes it to Olympic Games gold medal winning levels. It doesn’t have to be like this. Of course, closing the deal doesn't have to only reflect the typical American way of doing things. That style is very aggressive and pushy. There are books aplenty published on how to push and manipulate the client to do the deal. All of them totally worthless in this environment.
We need a softer approach in Japan, but still we must have an approach. We can’t dwell in the grey. Here are five “soft” closes entirely suitable for Japan:
None of these closes are difficult or divisive and won’t offend the buyer. We may get a rejection to our offer, but at least we have their decision. It is better to get a “no” than a “definite maybe” and spend excess time and energy imagining the deal is still alive.
In Japan rather than “no”, we are more likely to be told it will be muzukashii (難しい), which is often mistranslated as “difficult”. You tell some thrusting foreign salesperson it is “difficult” and they go straight into problem solving mode, as to why the difficulty can be overcome. The more accurate translation for businesspeople is “impossible”. Hearing that answer will sit you back down and get you thinking differently about where we have come to in this sales conversation.
We have moved along the continuum of the sales process, from making the cold call, getting the appointment, building trust, asking insightful questions to presenting our solution. This is when the wheels can fall off and the sale gets lost. Up until this point of the presentation we have been in control. We have imagined we understand what the client wants, have amassed the materials to explain what we can do and how it will work, but we may have been delusional.
One of the disappointing parts of being in sales is dealing with clients. If we didn’t have to deal with people everything would go so much smoother. We wouldn’t make any sales either so that isn't going to work. Some clients are a bit crafty. They sit there answering our questions – remember we asked their permission for us to ask questions – and yet they have been fooling us. They have been telling us about the tip of the iceberg of their problems, but hiding the real issues under the waterline. Why would they do that?
Trust is the answer. There isn’t sufficient trust yet for them to share with us all their dirty laundry, all the fail points inside their company, all the horrendous problems they are facing. Remember, we just walked in off the street or came down the line to their Zoom screen and they don’t know us from Adam. Why would they be inclined to share the gruesome details of their disaster, their living nightmare, with a complete stranger? Now we don't know that. We have imagined we have built up enough trust for them to tell us what they need.
When we get to the solution explanation point, they start to reveal their true colours. They start to point out all the shortcomings of this solution. The failing salespeople start to argue, begin to defend, to justify and to explain why the client is wrong. I hope this isn't you! If it is, salvation is at hand, so listen up. When we get this type of pushback, we must realise we haven't identified their true problem and our solution is perfectly designed to fix a non problem or a minor problem. There is no point trying to ram that inadequate solution down the client’s throat, through force of will.
We need to stop defending the solution provided and sweetly ask, “Thank you for your feedback. I feel that I have misunderstood what would help you the most. What would be something that would be the highest priority for you and your company?” And then we sit there and say absolutely nothing, until they speak. If time has to freeze over, then so be it. Do not elaborate or qualify or add – just sit there patiently. While this is going on, the client is having an internal struggle with themselves, to decide whether they want to share the real problems with you. Let them struggle and just wait.
If they won’t tell you, then thank them for their time and move on. There is no point wasting time on time wasters. Call someone else you can help and who is prepared to share their issues with you. If they do tell you the real issue, then you repeat the questioning formula again and really try to understand if you can help them or not. Thank them, make an appointment for the next meeting to present the solution and your proposal and away you go again.
If they play straight with you and just say something simple like “your price is too high”, then we use the objection handling process. Your brain at this point has to have the word “CUSHION” blinking on and off like a warning beacon. You need to train your brain to do this, so that you don’t jump in and start to argue, begin to defend, to justify and to explain why the client is wrong. Instead you say something to give you thinking time, like, “Well it is very important to consider the financial position of the company”. This is a neutral statement that will buy you four seconds of thinking time and you immediately recall, “that’s right, don’t argue, begin to defend, to justify and to explain why the client is wrong”. Instead you angelically ask, “May I ask you why you say that?”. Again you shut up and do not speak until they answer you.
Now you just listen to their reasoning. “Your price is too high” is like a five word headline in a newspaper. A few centimetres down there will be the accompanying article, which will go to great lengths to explain what that headline was referring to. So we need the article too, the reason why they say that, before we know how to answer it. They have to justify their position and in the process they will give us a better insight into the issue. Have they misunderstood us, is there some value perception we have not sufficiently met, is there a budget timing problem, etc?
So we either satisfy their price point or we walk away or we come up with another arrangement, that provides a volume purchase balance against a price discount, a quid pro quo, that works for both of us. Walking away is often the best option because you have spent a lot of effort positioning yourself in the market. Other clients will pay your price point so there is acceptance. This might be a try on or a genuine need to for lower price. Either way, we shouldn’t be in a hurry to allow them to reposition us in the market. This is especially the case in Japan, because as soon as you make the price cut, that now becomes your base price and clients will try to push you even further down from here.
In Part Six, we will look at getting the order and closing the sale. Should be simple right? Yet, so many salespeople in Japan never ask for the order. They are afraid of rejection, so they have learnt the best way to avoid that is to leave things incredibly vague. Well let’s not do that.
So far, we have dealt with making the cold call to get a meeting, building trust, getting permission to ask questions, using a four step structure to get information about what the client needs. Now we deal with how to present our solution.
In the face to face world, after asking all of these questions and deciding we can actually help this client, we would go back to the office and put together our proposal, outlining our solution for them and the price. Given how hard people are to catch these days, if we were well organised and smart, we will have already locked down the date and time for our next call, during this meeting.
In the next meeting, we can share our screen with the client. The client may want the proposal before hand. Do not do that. When they get it, what do they do? They go straight to the last page, idly skipping over all the bits where you have laboriously explained the value of your solution. They are now solely focused on price to the exclusion of the value you will bring to their business. No, no, no. We don’t want that, so resist sending it until after your online meeting. In a face to face meeting, we would be nuts to hand over the proposal document at the start, because they will go straight to the last page.
In person or online, we need to walk them through the document, so that we keep control of the navigation, the pace and the build of our argument, as to why they need our help.
If we were sitting in front of them, we would swivel the document around, so that we are holding it on the table facing them, so that they can easily read it. We take our expensive pen and we point to the bits where we want them to look, when we want them to look at them. This is vitally important, because we are doing a number of critical steps at this moment. If we are online, then we are showing our page and we have the onscreen pointer to show where they should be looking, as we control the page advancement.
We take them through the context. We check for understanding around whether we have fully grasped their situation and their needs. If we have this wrong, then we need a new proposal and we need to know that, before we proceed any further. Presuming we have understood them correctly, we now move on to explaining our solution.
Before we do that, we give them our capability statement, summarising that we have the capacity to meet their needs. This lets the buyer know that we have understood what they want and that we have the means and the capacity to meet their requirements. If that wasn’t the case, well we wouldn’t be holding this meeting in the first place. So at this point before we go into the detail of the solution, we need to make it explicit that we are confident in our ability to help them.
They told us where the gap was between where they are now and where they need to be and what is holding them back from bridging that gap by themselves. We explain in detail how we can bridge that gap for them.
When we do this, we start with the details of the solution – the data, the facts, etc. But clients don’t buy facts. They buy the application of the benefits of our solution. So before we get to that part of the explanation, we start going through the detail of the benefits and how these align with their needs. In particular, we connect back that question about what is in it for them personally. We might say, “you mentioned that the team will feel good if the outcome is achieved. With this solution, they will be able to hit their targets more quickly and easily. They will really appreciate that you helped them to do that”. We then go into the full detail on how the benefit will work inside their company when applied.
This explanation of the applied nature of the broad benefit is what they want to hear about. This is very, very important, because a benefit by itself, can seem rather abstract. We need to anchor it to the concrete actions to be taken and the specific outcomes to be achieved inside their workplace, so that they can mentally visualise the results. Having piled on the concrete benefits to their business, we now scroll down the screen to the pricing attached to enjoying these benefits. Which, by the way, is always referred to as the “investment” and never as the “price”, when we are talking with buyers. Because we have been controlling the flow of information, by the time they get to this page, they are fully aware of the value we will bring. The cost is now in context for them, rather than being a set of isolated figures on a page, cast off from the value we bring.
Now it is the time to go for the trial close. We want to flush out resistance, hesitations, further questions and objections at this point. It is always amazing that even after carefully walking buyers through this process, they sometimes ask questions that tell you, they haven’t properly grasped what you have been telling them. You could say to yourself, “boy, this buyer is really dumb”. However, you are better to question your own ability to clearly articulate the proposal to the client and whether it is you who is “dumb”?.
In the next instalment, we deal with objections and how to close the sale, while we have the client online with us.
The Cold Calling On Zoom Salesperson - Part Three
In Parts One and Two we looked at the early stages of the cold call, getting rapport established and then asking for permission to delve deep into the client’s situation. The initial questions we need answers to are either “what is your current situation?” or “where would you like to be with the business?”. We are searching for a floor and a ceiling. We want to know how things are travelling at the moment and what they aspire to achieve. Why do we need a floor and a ceiling? The perceived distance between the two tells a lot about our prospects of making a sale.
If the gap is felt by the client to be very close, sadly, they will imagine that they are fully capable, given time, of getting to where they want to be unaided. On the other hand, if the gap is large and they have realised they can’t bridge it by themselves, then they are possibly open to our help. Even if they believe they can do it by themselves, the salesperson’s job is to demonstrate that it will take longer, cost more or divert valuable resource to do it that way. Ergo, they are better off using our solutions.
Now the client presumes the cost of doing nothing, of taking no action, is zero. That is absolutely, inescapably, inextricably untrue. Never allow a buyer to harbour such a toxic lie in their mind. The salesperson has to point out the weighty and substantial opportunity costs of no action. They also need to emphasis the value they personally bring to the equation. They buy the company’s solution and the salesperson comes free, to support the buyer.
Often companies get to a point where they see the floor and ceiling gap and think they can do it themselves, but in fact they never get around to doing it at all. Different personnel changes interfere with the progress or the resources for this project are overwhelmed by the need to focus on another more pressing priority. In retrospect, if they had used us, it would have been done already and they would be enjoying the benefits right now, instead of constantly procrastinating about starting the project internally. This is the sort of practical insight the salesperson must be explaining to the over confident buyer, who imagines they don’t need to outsource this project.
Once we know the floor and the ceiling, next we need to know the construction of the mezzanine floor separating the two. This is the hideous barrier between floor and ceiling, separating top and bottom. If the client knows where they are now and they know where they want to go, then we need to ask them why they aren't there already? This is the millions of dollars in salesperson commissions question. Yet, incredibly salespeople are not even asking this question of the buyer!
We need to know about this barrier. What is the thing missing for them to get to where they want to go. Hopefully, we are the one to supply that missing solution to their problem. We could ask sweetly, “so far, you have mentioned to me where the business should be and where it is today. May I ask you, what has been stopping your company from bridging that gap as yet?”. Oh, excellent question. A veritable bonanza of a question. This is the entry point for us, from where we can inject our solution for them into their business.
Next we investigate the buyer’s own most fervently held desires, the thing that excites them the most, the major driver of all they ever do and think about. What is in it for them personally, if this solution works like a charm and delivers the goodies? Some may protest and claim this is too mercenary a view, but I think self interest drives us all. In a western company, the typical answers to this question would be, “I will keep my job”, “my boss will be happy”, “I will get a pay rise”, “I will receive a big bonus”. In Japan, the answers are more likely to be less about themselves personally and more indirect, “the team members will be happy”, “the company will succeed”, “we will be respected inside the organisation”.
We were able to get all of this key information in Japan for one simple reason. We asked for permission to ask questions first and then we asked structured questions to help us understand the problem and whether we had a matching solution or not. We told the buyer that “maybe” we could help them, that we “weren’t sure until we asked them a few questions”. This is a such a simple step missed by 99.99% of Japanese salespeople, because they are too busy pitching to ask questions and are terrified to question the buyer, aka “God”.
Now we are forced to make a very important decision. Should we work with this buyer? Are we actually able to help them solve their problem or not. Feverishly desperate, commission starved salespeople will quickly drive the square peg into the round hole. They will get one deal and blow up the brand and their own reputation in short order. The deal won’t deliver for the buyer, so there are no reorders and just lots of pain left lying around. If we can’t honestly help them grow their business, we should say so and move on and find someone we can help. The buyer will appreciate our honesty, our good name is protected and the client will speak highly of us to others.
If we can help them, then we need to explain the solution as part of our proposal and attach the pricing. How do we carry this off in this online Zoom Hell meeting world? Find out in Part Four.