In a virtual call, what is the maximum number of people who should be joining on the buyer side, to make the meeting effective?  There is a correlation between the number in the group and the number who will contribute during the meeting.  The more people on the call, the greater tendency for people to become less engaged.  Research by the Rain Group says that with up to four people on the call, the level of engagement can be quite good.  Once we get over five buyers, it becomes much more difficult. 

The virtual world revolves around both camera and audio based communication.  If there are multiple attendees on the buyer side, there is also a strong chance that not all will turn their cameras on.  This is a downer because you now have no chance of reading their body language, fraught as that might have been anyway. 

This is not so different to the face to face world though, when there are many on the Japanese buying side in the room.  The most senior people are either actually sleeping or are sitting there with their eyes closed, doing a spectacular job of pretending to be sleeping.  Usually, there will only be around three people who will even speak up.  Everyone is there because they have to protect their turf and want to influence the outcome of the meeting.  They are expecting you to make your pitch. Their shotgun breeches are duly snapped shut and then they drill your pitch full of holes, exposing what a travesty it is.

The online world will be the same and with the exposure to all of the multi-tasking going on in the background, because their cameras are turned off.  Normally, it is extremely hard to get Japanese buyers to do anything for you in a sales meeting.  They think they are there to listen, then critique everything you just said.  Online it is even worse. We have to go beyond using the communication platform as a tool to speak to each other and must use it to facilitate an experience.  If we were having a face to face meeting and the buyer was highly engaged, asking questions, seeking more detail, then there would be a pretty good chance they would buy.  We need that same level of engagement in the online world.

How do we get them to participate online?  Remember, the buyers all see themselves as God and we are just pesky, unwashed salespeople.  We need to direct the buyers and guide them to take certain actions, which will allow us to engage with them.  We need to tell them what we want them to do and then tell them how to do it.  We next ask for a response, using a follow up question.

This is where the preparation is critical.  For example, if with a flourish, we magically pull up a whiteboard on screen and expect a bunch of Japanese buyers to grab the text tool or the arrow tool and start interacting with us, their complete lack of response will be debilitating.  If it was just a one to one online meeting, they might feel some pressure to take some action, but as a collective, they will just sit there and completely and shamelessly ignore us.  They are totally happy to let hell freeze over, before they make a move for any tool.  They will blank you and force you back to giving your pitch. If you have already given it, they will rip into your pitch, telling you why it is crap.

We need to be super well organised and anticipate their resistance.  For example, we have slides that have options numbered on screen. We need to set up the participation.  “There are many of us on the call today, so we really appreciate everyone joining us.  To make this meeting as effective as possible would you please give me some feedback on these four options.  The best way to do that is go to the chat box, under the participant panel and write in the number of the option you think would generate the most value for your part of the business?”.  Their names will appear in the chat showing the number chosen. We just refer to them by name and thank them for selecting their option.  This is a way of encouraging the remainder to follow suit.  For those who don’t participate, the “I am not here to do anything” brigade, we need to draw them out by name.  “Tanaka san, would you mind sharing your selection with everyone please, because we really value your insights?.  I would really appreciate it”. 

We can then ask individuals to share their thinking behind their selection.  “Murayama san, I see you chose option three.  Thank you for doing that. Would you please come off mute and help me to understand why this is important to you. That will really help me to better understand how we can serve you best, so please share your thoughts with us.  Thank you Maruyama san”.  We try and do this with a number of the participants on the call, but it must be done in a deferential, “we are really trying to help you” way or resistance will be major and unmerciful.

Following this we might ask a further expansion question to the group.  “Could I ask everyone else to give me a green check please if they think we have sufficiently understood your situation. If you think we have missed something important, please choose the red cross.  The green check and the red cross are located in the little panel, just below the participant list in the right hand panel on your screen.  Please choose green check or red cross”.

Don’t expect to get everyone involved.  You wouldn’t get that in a face to meeting either, so it is an even more outlandish idea for the virtual world. But you will get engagement if you are properly prepared.  Anticipate you will draw God’s wrath and prepare accordingly. Make it super easy to get engagement with you in the sales call.  If you can do that, then your chances of making a sale go up dramatically.  Your rivals won’t have a clue about any of this and will be drowning in their own blood as the buyers cut their pitch to ribbons, as usual.

One of the sad things about salespeople is they mostly have no idea what they are doing.  So we transfer that poor understanding of the basics to the online world and then wonder why they are not succeeding.  Kata is a Japanese word to describe a set way of doing things.  In Karate we learn kata and they must be done in the exact same way, every time.  These are best practice modes and the idea is to perfect them.  Sales also has kata, but few salespeople learn them, let alone try to perfect them.  The online world requires new kata built on top of the old kata. You can’t move to the second level, until you have mastered the first level.

For those in the minority in sales, who actually enquired about what the client needs, this is only the start.  Again, sadly for many, this is the end of their approach and they don’t know how to go further.  They enquire about what the client needs and then they spend the rest of the meeting time with the buyer, trying to convince them to buy their solution.  They hammer the buyer with slides brimming with information.  The problem with this approach, although much better than the pitchfest quicksand most other salespeople wallow in, is that you become a transactional element in the buyer’s world.

Farming should be 80% of the effort and the other 20% spent on hunting for new clients.  Let’s be clear, we are not looking for a sale.  This is a critical point that many salespeople miss.  We are not looking for a sale, because we are looking for a resale. As much as we love our clients and take super good care of them, there will be reasons why they drop out and so must be replaced.  This is why we need to hunt.  In Japan, there are few salespeople who can be successful hunters.  In the online world this problem is really exacerbated. The upshot is you don’t have a big supply of talent to do hunting and this will make it difficult to grow your business. Better to have lots of farmers, who are in good supply and only depend on hunters for 20% of your revenue.  Talking to existing clients online is relatively comfortable for most salespeople.

Sounds great but how do you get to 80% of your business coming from existing customers who are repeat buyers?  Running around trying to fill needs will not get your there.  It is a bit like today’s cars.  When there is a problem the mechanic doesn’t even bother fixing the part.  They just get a new one and replace the whole unit.  Look under the hood sometime and what you see is a bewildering array of units, which are switched in and out.  Forget trying your luck fixing it by yourself.  When we are only satisfying needs, we become one of those replaceable units. The buyer switches us out and replaces us with a competitor.

The way to stay in the game is to become a trusted advisor.  Sounds easier than it is.  To achieve that aim we need to elevate the dialogue with the buyer. At the bottom of the ladder are wants and needs.  Fulfilling those can become a commoditised effort.  We don’t want to be a commodity because then we are chosen on the basis of price.  We want to be chosen on the basis of value instead.

We need to engage the buyer beyond wants and needs to have a discussion about their challenges and goals.  We are now entering the strategic partner zone, where we don’t just fix immediate needs, we start to get to the “design in” stage.  In manufacturing certain products, the way to make the sale is to be involved in the design stage and get your widget “in” to the specifications. When we are clear about their goals and their barriers to achieving those goals, we are having a much richer conversation than our pitchfest or tactical needs fulfilment only competitors.

Asking about their strategy, their positioning in the market and where they want to be in the industry is where the trusted advisor magic starts to happen.  This requires a lot more intelligent digging in the questioning stage and the development of quite different questions for the buyer.  For example, “If we can supply the solution to this issue, how will this accelerate your strategy?”.  If we want to go up the scale we can ask, “You have spent a lot of time, effort and money on brand building and marketing, so if we can  solve this issue, how will it reinforce or improve the positioning you have desired in the market?”.  At the top of the ladder we ask, “If we can solve this issue, how will this ensure you continue to be a leader in this industry?”.

This is a long way from just asking, “If we can supply it in blue, would you be able to make a decision today?”.  This is the transactional kata.  Rather, we want the trusted advisor kata using more sophisticated questioning and focusing on conversations about bigger picture issues than things like the colour range.

When you understand their problem, start digging in for the more strategic ramifications of solving their issue.  To become a trusted advisor, you have to be able to solver bigger problems for the client.  Elevate the dialogue and the zeros on your invoice will start to increase.

In Part One, we looked at the difficulties the modern communication platforms throw up because of the limitations of the technology, in particular, the poor audio quality.  Now we move forward to how we ask the questions and what we should ask.  Our client has various needs and we have to uncover them and the way to do that is ask questions.  This would seem the most obvious thing in the world. Yet there are legions of the great unwashed, hapless salespeople wandering around, spending all of their time pitching to clients.  There are in tell mode to sell, as opposed to using questions to sell.

The client has some top of mind needs that revolve around them achieving the outcomes they desire.  We need to understand what results the client is looking for.  In the classic example, clients don’t buy drills.  They buy results - holes.  They want to hit targets, gain market share, increase revenues, manage costs, improve their systems, etc.

There will be some buying criteria involved.  Budget is often what we think of here.  We want to know how much budget they have and then we can cut our cloth to match.  We should never forget that time and quality are also going to be key components here as well.  We need to find out more on these fronts.  A client assured me they had no budget for our training.  Digging in, I found they did have budget if we spread the payment over two financial years.  It wasn’t money, it was time, in this case.

Practical details need to be found.  These are often the spec components of design, shape, colour, size, weight, durability, etc.  Do we actually have what they need or not?  If we don’t, then stop trying to slam the square peg into the round hole baby and move on. Find that client whose needs profile better matches what we do best.

Although we are dealing with company representatives, they also have personal needs.  What is their WHY?  It could be to keep their boss happy, to rise through  the ranks, to get a big bonus, to snag a promotion, to be appreciated, etc.  We need to know that, because if we can frame our solution in terms of their WHY, then that is a very powerful differentiator from our rivals.

We go through question phases to uncover these pieces of information.  We can start by getting them focused on the gap between where they are now and where they need to be.  We can ask, “where would you like to be in six to twelve months from now?”.  The focus here is on outcomes.  To gauge the gap, our next question will be, “given those goals, where are you today?”.  Now we can find out if there is an opening here for us or not.

I had been chasing a buyer for seven straight years with no results.  It was a highly profitable business.  The President wouldn’t even agree to meet with me and then he suddenly retired. I thought “bingo” – time to try again with the new guy.  While I was sitting there in the meeting going through this discovery process, the most unpleasant idea occurred to me.  “He thinks they can close the gap between where they are now and where they want to be by themselves through their internal resources”.  I call that an extremely bad meeting. There was no way into that company for me, because I didn’t have a solution they needed. 

Trust me, I tried to make that gap between where they are now and where they want be seem like the Grand Canyon.  Ultimately I failed to do that and so no deal and sayonara.  What we are trying to do in this step is flesh out the negative implications for the company, if they don’t buy our solution.  Company representatives often mistakenly think that taking no action has no cost.  That is not true.  There are the opportunity costs associated with no action.  Markets move, business is fluid, nothing stays the same. They are also not operating in a vacuum, where their competitors are in some form of cryogenic suspended animation.

Once we know where they are today and where they want to be, we need to understand what is the change they need to make to close the gap.  If they think they can make that change by themselves, it is curtains for us.  If we are able to find a reason to supply the change methodology they need, then we need to go for gold.  We need to find out that invididual’s personal WHY. 

This is very difficult with Japanese buyers.  Even at the conceptual level, this is not something they easily grasp.  When your career progression is based on age and stage, unrelated to the outcomes you produce and you get a set bonus the same as everyone else, the personal payoff is bit opaque.  In Japan it will usually be personal recognition by their team or their peers, as someone doing their job well.  So we need to ask things like, “If we can achieve the outcomes you have mentioned, how will that make your team members feel?”, “If this works, will your team appreciate the results it brings, making their job easier?”, “If this is a success, will your colleagues be appreciative?”.

In Part Three, we will explore how to engage decision makers with more interactive selling techniques.  We will look at how to engage buyers when they are trapped in a little screen online, in a way that builds trust and breaks through the barriers the client and the technology have put in place.

Salespeople’s bad habits just migrate right across to the online world.  If you were just pitching your product before, hoping to snag a deal, you will be doing the same thing when staring at the client on screen.  It didn't work well then and it doesn’t improve in the new environment.  For the more professional salespeople, who actually understand sales and the key role that questioning skills play, the game has changed.  We have to change the way we do things too.

One of the biggest problems associated with asking questions is getting the answer.  In the meeting room location, we have perfect audio quality.  Okay, we will get clients who are hard to follow, because their own communication skills are so poor, but at least we can hear them.   All of these modern virtual meeting platforms have poor audio, so just catching the answer can be a struggle.  This is particularly so, if you are dealing in foreign languages.  When they speak English or when I speak Japanese, we have to both expect that there is another level of complexity associated with actually hearing what is being said.

The virtual world is nirvana for multi-taskers.  Don’t become one of them when speaking with the client.  Watch the buyer like a hawk, wear a head set, remove all distractions, shift forward in your seat, lean in toward the client on screen. 

It is tough to discern it on screen, but check their body language for incongruent messages.  This is when they are saying one thing, but doing another thing that negates what they are saying.  Tatemae statements or superficial truths are a classic example of this incongruency.

The other tricky part with the audio is if two people speak at the same time, no one can hear clearly what is being said.  Salespeople are rabid interrupters and jumper-inners. They talk over the top of the client when something the buyer said, sparks a thought in their minds. The Japanese language has the verb at the end, so we have to wait until the speaker tells us whether this is present, past or future tense, positive or negative.  That helps when speaking in Japanese, because it forces us to refrain for jumping in.  In English though, the gloves are off and it becomes a shambles, when we speak over the top of the buyer.

The other salesperson bad habit is leaping ahead of the buyer, anticipating what they are going to say, formulating a response while they are still speaking and then jumping in with your two bits worth.  The issue here is that the formulation process tends to be internal and we cease listening to what the buyer is actually saying in detail.  By that, I mean not just hearing the words in the background, but really studying their choice of words, the tone of voice, the emphasis points, noticing what they are not saying, etc.

Because of the difficulty of the audio on these platforms, we really have to spend a lot more time clarifying what the buyer is saying.  Normally, if we do this once or twice, no one gets upset.  However, with a heavy repetition, we may find the buyer gets annoyed.  Instead we need to tell them that, because of the importance of what they are saying and the fact there are audio issues around clarity, you will be asking them for clarification a lot more than normal.  You will also note that you will be doing a lot more paraphrasing of what they have said, to make sure we have a perfect understanding of what their needs are.  Do this up front and therefore head off client irritation with your attempts to make sure of the messages.

Also, if dealing with Japanese buyers, absolutely ask for permission to ask questions.  Getting questioned by a salesperson is a first for most buyers, trained over many years by dud salespeople who just gave their pitch.  Expect resistance, unless you get their permission first.  This is how hard it is, say: “Maybe we can help you, I am not sure, but in order for me to understand if that is possible, would you mind if I asked a few questions?”.  Doing this will save a lot of unnecessary cultural faux pas with buyers.

Work on the assumption the audio is going to be a big problem and then prepare countermeasures to eliminate that issue.   Your competitors will just be blundering away making it hard for themselves.  Here is a chance to steal a march on your rivals.

We now sell in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism.  When the client is talking to us online, they can be so easily distracted and can be secretly multi-tasking in the background, not paying any great attention to what we are saying.  There has always been a lot of client scepticism about salespeople claims, but with the “fake news” catch phrase being tossed around with wild abandon, buyer cynicism is being added to, rather than diminished.  So for our first impression, when we come online to meet the client for the first time, it is critical to grab, keep and deepen their attention.  How do we do that?

When the meeting starts, I will assume you have the proper logistics in place. The camera lens on your laptop is slightly above eye line height, that the lighting is such that you are easy to see and that you are wearing a headset, with a microphone attachment, to compensate for the poor quality audio these online platforms provide.  Naturally you are sitting up straight, leaning in about 15 degrees, rather than slumped back in your chair.

Please, please, please do not open with “how are you today”.  This type of fake interest in the buyer’s well being has zero impact and makes you sound like those sleazy telephone sales dogs calling buyers at weird hours, trying to sell them weird stuff. Start with some appreciation instead and say something intelligent and meaningful like, “Covid-19 has really added a lot of stress to everyone’s workloads, so let me begin by thanking you for making time to speak with me today”.  That is a highly credible opening statement that shows we are all in this together, you understand their world and you are appreciative of them.  You continue by adding value, “The object of my call today is to understand whether the results we have been able to achieve for other clients are also possible for your firm.  I have no idea if that will be the case or not, but I am very keen to see if we can be of some meaningful assistance to you”.  We are telling them that we have a track record of getting results, we are not going to a pushy, pushy salesperson and we are focused on helping them, rather than ourselves.

We then bridge into the agenda for the call.  Depending on the situation we may have sent the agenda ahead of the meeting or we may be pulling it up on screen at the start of the meeting.  You don’t ask for a “yes” or a “no” and as you are doing it, you just say “please allow me to bring up the agenda for our call today so that we can make the most efficient use of our time together”.  We are being assumptive about using an agenda and we are telling them we are not here to waste their valuable time.

The first item on the agenda should crystalise the strategic value of the meeting, establishing why this call is going to helpful and not a waste of their time.  “The purpose of our meeting is to discuss your goal for building revenues as quickly as possible, given the disruptions to the market because of Covid-19”.  We next go into an overview of the agenda.  “Things are changing fast, so let’s start with a review of the current situation, then discuss your goals and how this fits into your overall strategy and then together look at some next steps, if that in fact makes sense”.  We are referencing change is taking place, hinting that whatever they were doing before may not be what they need to be doing now and here we are to help them make that adjustment.  We want to understand their needs in the context of the direction for the firm, so that we can tailor what we have in our solution to match that direction. 

Finally, we mention the solution creation will be a joint effort , where they will have some ownership of the crafting. Again we underline we are not going to be pushing any square pegs into round holes here.  To show this is a joint effort we then ask, “What else would you like to add to the agenda?”.  This is a very critical step, because they will probably have something very specific in mind, which will take us quickly beyond the generalities we have been mentioning.

Once they have added to or accepted the existing agenda, we have tacit approval to dive into asking them about their current situation. “Thank you, so let me begin by asking you for an update on where are the problem areas and barriers you are facing at the moment?”.   We are now off to the races with our questions. 

If we have a Japanese buyer in front of us, we should add an extra step and get permission to ask questions. “Thank you for helping with the agenda.  I am not sure if we have what you need, but in order for me to understand if that is the case or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”.  In Japan, this is important because every buyer has been trained to receive a pitch from the salesperson, so being asked questions by lowly salespeople, can seem a bit uppity and rude to buyers.

How we start has a huge impact on how we finish, so mastering the first impression in the online sale, is a make it or break it deciding point.  We have to handle this initial part of the meeting smoothly and professionally.  Remember, we have never met and they are scanning the screen constantly trying to understand if they can trust us or not.  That answer has to be a “yes” and that is only the case because we made it happen that way, through a properly planed first engagement with the buyer.