Clients don’t need to do anything. We discover this unfortunate fact very quickly in sales. We also discover they are never on our timetable of what needs to happen. They can stay with the same supplier or they can make no changes to their current situation. Neither of those are helpful for a salesperson. There must be some driver for the buyer to take action and take action right now. There has to be a gap between where they are now and where they want to be. This gap can be quite clear to the buyer, but even that doesn’t mean they will take any action.
If they think they can get to where they need to be to bridge that gap, using their own resources, they will not pay for anyone to help them. Often, when we meet the buyer, they have super strong self belief they can do it all by themselves. It is the salesperson’s job to really test that self belief.
This comes down to our communication skills. Can we show some different view of the problem? Can we offer some insight that the buyer hasn’t considered as yet? Can we show that they are a lot further away from where they need to be and that they can’t get there by themselves? Of course we are going to use logic to get them to move but that may not be enough. Can we get them emotionally involved in a better solution to the problem using us, rather than launching their own DIY campaign internally?
This intervention requires a great deal of subtlety and diplomacy, because no buyer likes to be told they are wrong or made to look insufficient in their capability to run their business successfully. Leaders have a lot of self-belief in their own capacities, so we are treading on dangerous ground here, so we have to be careful with the words we use and how we use them.
Energetically pointing out some major gap in their analysis of the situation may make us feel good, but the buyer won’t necessarily appreciate it or want to believe it. It all depends on how we frame the conversation and how we point out what they are missing. The best form of persuasion is if they self-persuade. We ask some very intelligently constructed questions which lead them to the conclusion they cannot do this completely by themselves.
If we can make the argument for change now, then we have a chance of making the sale.
The client may agree that the gap is there. They may agree that they can’t bridge that gap themselves. None of this necessarily means they are going to take any action though and involve us in solving the problem. They may feel they will get to it, at some unspecified and vague point in the future. Or they feel they will get around to it when they are good and ready, because there is no hurry. We can never have complete knowledge of what is going on in their organisation, how the investment monies are being allocated and what help they can expect from headquarters or which big deals are coming down the pike. We cannot be fazed by these thoughts though and we have to push hard for action now.
The gap has to have pain attached to it by us. We know that we are all more motivated by reducing pain, than increasing gain. We have to paint a word picture of how much their non-action is really costing them. We have to show them that now is the time to act and further delays will be very detrimental. This is not that easy because we are talking in terms of supposition. When we talk about the opportunity cost of no action that can be a very theoretical idea and not necessarily something that is going to inspire the buyer to leap into action and hire us to solve their problem.
We need to bring hard evidence to the argument when we talk about the losses associated with the opportunity cost of taking no action. Unless we can paint a picture with concrete numbers, then the urgency isn’t going to be felt. We may not have all of the numbers, but we can at least start asking the right questions to get the numbers we need or have the client start to consider the numbers for themselves.
When we are doing the questioning phase of the sale’s call we need to be threading in the implications of not fixing their problems immediately. These implication questions are key and have to be delivered in the right format. This is not easy, but that is the skill of the salesperson. We must be up to the task or go and find another profession, because this skill set is central to whether we will be successful or not in this art of selling.
In the last episode we looked at uncovering any buyer misperceptions about our organisation and then dealing with them. How did that go? Today we will work on one of the most critical phases in the buying cycle – uncovering buyer needs. Depending on where the client sits in the buyer organisation, they can have different needs. In broad brush terms, we can assume that the CEOs are strategy focused, CFOs are bottom line focused, the user buyers are interested in ease of use and the technical buyers are checking up on the spec, to make sure it matches up with what they need.
It doesn’t always fall out so neatly, but experience tells us that directionally these framings are usually true. We do need however, to use our communication skills, in particular our questioning skills, to better understand the buyer and what is most important to them. Even inside the same firm, we recognise that depending on who we are talking to, these buyer needs could be quite different. I was talking to a President recently and he was pushing me for some sort of added value or a discount. When I asked him “why”, he said that his headquarters had a form he had to fill out indicating where they improved on the supplier’s offer. I was glad I asked, before I made a small accommodation to help him out. Otherwise I might have gotten ahead of myself and offered too much to drive the deal forward. The lesson is always ask ”why” when you get an objection or a hesitation.
We can analyse the buyer needs through four categories, to better help us uncover their most important needs. This step in the sales cycle precedes our direct questioning techniques, which we will handle in a forthcoming episode. To design good questions, we have to know what we are looking for and this is a vital step in our sales process.
The client is mainly interested in the outcome of the buying decision and not so much interested in the tool which delivers the outcome. It might be more revenues, enhanced effectiveness, improved efficiency, better safety, increased comfort, greater flexibility, higher quality or an increasing ROI. Spending all of our time talking about the tool rather than the outcome the tool will furnish, rather misses the point. We are going to face many needs, however we need to zero in on the most high priority need and focus right there.
There are the “must haves” which cover the basics of the solution. These will include budget, features, internal approvals, after sales support, location requirements, quantity, quality, etc. These are often related to the application of the solution and how it will play out in reality for the buyer and the internal company divisions it will impact.
In Japan, the safest decision by the buyer is to stick with the current supplier or the current system and buy nothing. This makes life tough for salespeople, so we need to be ready for this inertia preference on the part of the buyers. In this case, the decision we want them to consider is the opportunity cost of no action. Initially, taking no action looks like there is no cost attached to it. In fact, there is an opportunity cost of the lost opportunity. This lost opportunity may favour a competitor’s position vis-à-vis this buyer or it may lead to missing a turning point in the market.
The purchase is designed to improve the situation of the buyer. Their question however is to what extent does the return justify the cost of the investment? How much will the buyer get back for every dollar they spend? We have to be pouring on the value for the buyer in order to make that buying decision much easier. If we don’t come with concreate numbers, we will have a hard time to convince them.
We all have compelling emotional reasons for buying. It might have to do with strengthening our relationships within the company, gaining recognition for our good work, getting a big bonus, keeping our job or maybe being promoted. We may feel a sense of self-fulfillment that we made a contribution. We may be worried about internal rivals and need a quick win. It could be something which increases our power within the organization.
Human nature is such that we are all primarily focused on our own needs first and the company’s needs second. As salespeople, we know that about our buyers and we need to adjust our communication accordingly.
Just turning up and pitching to the client is essentially dumb. How do we know what they need? Well we don’t, which is why we need this analytical process to be completed before we show any materials to the buyer or talk about any products or services. You would think this process was the most obvious thing in the world, yet so many salespeople are skipping this step and then wondering why selling is so tough!
Business is brutal and sometimes clients have received incorrect information about our companies from competitors or the media. When I was selling on behalf of Australian exporters in Nagoya, I remember a client telling me that our competitors had said the Aussie company was verging on bankruptcy and was about to go under. You can easily imagine what effect that had on business for that exporter. There was a very famous case of national brand damage, through linguistic imperfection.
In 1985, the national broadcaster NHK’s announcer said in a nightly news programme that Australian winemakers were involved in a scandal, adding diethylene glycol to their wines, to make them sweeter and give them more body. In Japanese, the pronunciation of the names for Australia and Austria are very similar. Each Embassy regular receives phone calls for the other country by mistake. That wine scandal actually happened in Austria, not Australia. The Australian wine industry was immediately wiped out in Japan and it took twenty years for it to recover. So nasty stuff happens folks and we have to be ready for these types of dirty tricks and negative fake news.
There is no point explaining all the attributes of your wonderful offer, if the client doubts your company in the first place. The most worrying thing is that there may be misperceptions, but they are hidden. That Nagoya client happened to share what was being said behind our backs with me, because the trust was there. When the relationship hasn’t been solidified, perhaps they hear this type of damaging talk from rivals, but never mention it to us. We blithely traipse along, totally unaware of what is really going on.
We shouldn’t assume the client has a positive view of us, as we begin the business meeting. That would be way too optimistic and too ambitious. We should ask very sweetly, “so what are your perceptions about our organisation?”. After asking this question we shouldn’t say another word. We have to sit there in silence without adding, clarifying or explaining what we just said. If this question uncovers some incorrect information or a degree of bias, we need to deal with that.
Jumping in and arguing the point with the client however, isn’t the way to move the discussion forward. Our defensive counter actions can lead to the mouth outpacing the brain and we say the wrong thing. Instead, we need to insert a cushion. A neutral statement which doesn’t agree or disagree with whatever negative comment the client has made. The cushion is a device to give us some thinking time. It helps to break the habit of immediately wanting to argue with the client and tell them why they are wrong. Don’t do that. There are better alternatives available to us.
Depending on what they have said, we immediately may go one of three ways.
Agree: We may agree with them to a certain extent, but we clarify the new situation in a way which they may not be aware of. For example, “Yes, that has been said about our company in the past, but we have been able to eliminate that concern since we upgraded our systems”.
Dissociate: We make the point that many companies have been working with us and we have been able to gain great results for them. The inference is that whatever has been worrying this buyer, hasn’t worried other clients. They have been able to get the results they needed by working with us.
Correct: If the information is factually incorrect, then we need to supply hard evidence to get rid of that concern.
The next stage takes us into positive territory, using two techniques.
We should not be naïve about the rough and tumble of business in Japan and we should be ready to handle any negativity. Rather than the client thinking it, but not saying anything,we are better to draw it out, face it head on and then deal with it.
This week we will look at improving our questioning skills and setting up the meeting agenda. There are a variety of qualifying questions we need to design before we meet with the client, be that meeting online or in person. What we don’t want is to be trying to work it out on the spur of the moment. It is always better to have a basic structure and then adjust to suit the situation, than trying to come up with brilliance on the fly. Yes, we have to be flexible and adaptable、 but planning is also an integral component in sales success. I am not a great fan of pre-cooked scripts, but I do like structures. We can set up the parameters and then fill in the details as we require, based on where the conversation is going and the needs of the moment. Let’s take a look at some of the questions we need to design and I will use our business as the model.
The Permission Question: If we are meeting the client for the first time, then we need to remind them that we have helped others in a similar business to theirs and we may be able to help them too, but in order to know that or not we need to ask them a few questions. This is a simple structure and easy to ask. Remember, we are going to be asking them everything about their secret company business, especially about their weaknesses, and we are a stranger to the client. Would you tell a stranger all the things that are going wrong with your marriage or your kids? No, yet we expect the client to open up about their failings in their firm. We have to get their agreement to share with us, otherwise we cannot help them.
The Need Questions: Harsh as it is to contemplate, we may not be a match for this client. We need to know that as quickly as possible, so that we are not wasting anyone’s time. We can ask, “What are some key issues for your business at the moment?”. If they are not forthcoming because the question is too broad, then we can try to dig down and spark some feedback. For example, we could say, “Many of our clients would like to see improved performances from their salespeople in this virtual environment. Is that the case for you or are you fully satisfied with the progress your sales team are making?”. Whatever they tell us, we should also ask about what other issues are a priority for them. The first answer may not be the main issue of highest importance to them, so we have to uncover the other key problems, before we know where to zero in with our information.
The Quantity Question: To get some sense of the scale of the issue we need to gather some basic data. For example, in our case we would ask, “How may salespeople do you have who could benefit from training for virtual selling?”. This tells me how big a solution they need, so I can adjust my presentation accordingly.
The Budget Question: We can get down to it and ask directly, “How much have you allocated for training the sales team?”. Sometimes however, when you ask about their budget they don’t want to share that information, because they are wary of nosy, pushy salespeople. When we ask a tangential question, such as the size of the sales team, we can gauge the approximate size of the solution and then work out roughly how much that will cost them.
The Authority Question: Today many people are involved in the buying decision. We should try and find out who are the other players with the strongest vested interest in the decision. We ask, “In order for me to help you, may I ask, apart from you, who would have the most interest and input into the buying decision?
The Agenda Statement: The Agenda Statement helps us to control the flow of the meeting with the client. We begin by reminding them of the need for this meeting and the benefit of meeting together. We then outline the items to discuss:
Once we have the agenda agreed, then we move to item number one on the agenda and then start working our way through our pre-determined questions. Do things go in order? Usually no, but that doesn’t matter, as long as we cover the key questions during the meeting. We won’t get so many opportunities to ask these questions, so we have to make every post a winner.
In sales, we definitely need a Credibility Statement. Buyers are always worried about buying what they don’t need or paying too much for what they do buy. The subterranean vibe is one of distrust toward salespeople. So we have to work hard to overcome that fundamental doubt. Salespeople without a solid sales process won’t have this valuable persuasion tool at their disposal. In fact, they will be like lemmings leaping off a cliff, running headlong into the explanation of the features of their solution. We need to create an atmosphere of trust, before we start asking questions to understand buyer needs.
We may love our solution, we may know about it in-depth and we may know we are a great company, but the buyer doesn’t have a clue about any of this. They are sceptical, uncertain, doubtful, cautious and basically afraid of being conned. Early in the sales conversation, we need to put all of that to rest and set up for permission to ask questions.
The Credibility Statement is needed when we make the first contact with the client and this may be in person, by email, phone call, Zoom call etc. It is sometimes called our Elevator Pitch because it has to be concise, clear and attractive.
How do you start when you introduce yourself? What can you say about your company in one sentence, so that the buyer is very clear what you do? Do you have a set formula for this to build trust with the client or are you winging it every time? When you have a well thought through structure, it takes a lot of stress off the sales process. How does this work in reality?
In my case, I would say, “Hi my name is Greg Story. I am the President of Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo. We are global soft skills training experts and masters of delivery and sustainment. Do you have a moment to talk”.
This tells the client who I am and gives them some insight into the intention of the call by telling them what I do. Next we need a strong hook to grab their interest. We need something that will strike a nerve with them, something that will grab their attention and tell them it is worthwhile continuing this conversation with us.
“We have heard from our clients that salespeople are really struggling with virtual selling and getting through to their buyers. Have you found the same thing?”. This is currently a very common problem for sales teams, so the listener can immediately relate to this being an issue. Because the solution is so difficult, there is also a strong probability they have not been able to solve this issue by themselves, so they will be curious to hear how to fix the problem.
Now we need some evidence of what we have done for other clients which is relevant for this buyer. Ideally, the other client referred to should be as similar as possible to the client we are now discussing business with. “Recently, we worked with a large service provider like yourself and focused on helping their salespeople make the adjustment to selling online. They reported that their appointment rate went up by 25% after the training and their closing rate tripled”. When we quote these numbers and we should quote numbers, they have to real and provable. If the client asks for proof and it becomes obvious we are using spurious data, then the whole trust comes apart and the relationship is dead.
We need to suggest we can help and we do that in a special way. We say, “maybe, we can do the same for you. I am not sure, but if you will allow me to ask a few questions, I will know if we are in a position to help you or not?”. This is a very important bridge, because we want to receive permission before we start digging into all of their problems and strife. As human beings, we normally would never share our troubles with a stranger, so this is a critical step. If they have the time during the call, we will begin asking our quailifying questions right there and then. If not we will ask for the appointment, which could be face to face or it might be a Zoom call. We ask for the appointment in a simple but effective way by offering an alternative of choice.
I would say, “Shall we get together? Is this week fine or how about next week? I see ‘next week’, then how about Wednesday or Friday. I see ‘Thursday is better’. How are you suited at 10.00am in the morning? Great, thank you, I look forward to speaking with you then”.
Salespeople who miss this vital step of the Credibility Statement make life hard for themselves unnecessarily. It is simple and effective. We should all be drawing on its power to set us up for the questioning stage of the salesnmeeting. If you are not asking any questions and just jumping into the features explanation, then we need to talk!!
What is your pre-approach regimen before you meet the buyer? We cannot do everything and our time is finite. We should be trying to save our valuable time for meetings with the most qualified clients who can buy. This might be new clients or existing clients who have more capacity to buy from us. It is always disheartening when you analyse the existing buyer activity and realise we are only selling a small amount, compared to what we could be selling. It is even worse when you discover, they are buying something you do, but they are now getting it from your competitor.
We can research the company, looking at their recent business activity. Are they expanding, are they doing well financially, have they bought any other companies or have they been bought by someone else? We can check the company annual report and see what the President has to say about the future direction of the company. Annual reports are a gold mine really, because they have the direction the company is taking plus a breakdown of the financials. Unlisted companies are more difficult of course, because we cannot get access to this type of information.
We can look for champions within the company. Perhaps we know someone who has moved to this company recently who can supply us with some insights. We can check their press releases and see what journalists have to say about the company. We can use social media to check out buyers within the company. Maybe we have some things in common. Maybe we went to the same university or studied the same subject or have lived in the same location. It is amazing what we can do today with a few mouse clicks.
The person we are selling to has something going on inside their head. Can we anticipate what the conversation is which is going on in the mind of the prospect? We may have talked with other companies in the same industry and the chances are high that this company will also share some of the same challenges. When we are thinking about those possible challenges, what solutions do we have to meet them? What do we have in our line-up of products and services which be of most interest to this buyer? What would be some massive interest hooks we could snag the attention of the buyer with?
One great source of information is an existing client. We can ask them some key questions which may help us to better position our meeting with the prospect client.
For example:
Why did our existing customer buy from us?
What do they like about our solutions?
How have they used them and what have been the results?
Can they identify the ROI from using our solutions?
If we could do more for them, what would that look like?
Where does our buyer sit? Are they the CEO, who is worried about the future and concentrating on strategic issues? Are they the CFO, who is worried about cash flow and investing in the business? Are they the Technical Buyer, who is worried about the spec? Are they the User Buyer, who is worried about ease of use, after sales service, warranties, etc.?
Depending on who we are talking to, the area of deepest interest will vary. We need to anticipate their interest and come prepared to cast our solution in terms which will resonate the most strongly with them. For example, it is no good talking about the spec to the President. They are big picture focused and want to know how your widget will help deliver their strategy. How can we show the CFO that the profits from our solution will build additional income they can stack away as a fund for emergencies. How can we show the technical buyer that our spec and what they want are a match made in heaven and we have everything they need. The user buyer has to be assured they won’t be on their own after purchase. For example, I own an iMac computer and I really appreciate the online help I get when things go wrong. There is just no way I could ever work out the solutions by myself.
There is no point turning up to present the solution, if you don’t know what is uppermost in the mind of the person you are speaking with. If it is a buying group, then you have to cover off all of the different interests of the people in the room. They all need assurance you have the thing of most importance to them. The preparation phase is the mark of the professional. The days of winging it as a salesperson are well and truly gone. That will not work in modern business. You are winging it and your competitor has thoroughly researched the company and prepared in detail for who they are going to present to. They will get the business and you will get nothing. Frankly you deserve to get nothing too. So let’s be professional and work on our anticipatory skills and WOW the buyer when we get in front of them.
In this episode we will look at KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. These are activities which when carried out effectively lead to revenue results. There are also behavioural aspects to KPIs which are important and shouldn’t be neglected. Everyone has their own business area, so the construct of the KPIs will vary across industries and sectors. What are they for you?
Has your company already defined them for you and you were given them when you came on board? If we haven’t been given KPIs already, then we can create them for ourselves. They provide good markers to know what we are doing and what we should be doing.
First of all, we have to recognize that we cannot do everything, but we can do the most important things in our sales activity. So let’s start thinking about what are the highest priority items we need to be doing, to boost our sales.
These could include things like the following:
How many qualified leads do I have to work with each week?
How many calls to clients do I need to make each week?
How many of these calls are leading to appointments?
How many of these appointments lead directly to agreed deals?
How much am I selling on average per appointment gained?
How many of my buyers become repeat buyers?
We can be setting our own targets for the ratios between each step. It is a good practice to break big revenue targets down to activities, which upon completion will get us to the target. For example, if I have 100 leads to follow up, how many calls do I actually need to get through to the buyer? We can have a long list of numbers to call, but they are not answering, we get a message service, the gate keeper faithfully promises they will pass on the message so that they will call back, as they gracefully slide it straight into the bin. Of the small number of calls which get through to the buyer, how many leads do I need to get an appointment? Talking to the buyer and getting a meeting are planets apart. We have to be persuasive and spark their interest to allow us to take things to the next stage. What is my target for success in this area? What is the closing ratio I want for deals coming from meetings with buyers?
These are very specific targets we are setting and often we will fail. Over time, however we will start to build up some reliable statistics, which tell how strong we are in various stages of the sales process. We will begin to see that there are some areas of weakness, which we need to work on.
Our goals can have a range. We might have a number range that we can achieve comfortably. We might have a higher number which is more difficult but realistic and then we might have stretch targets. So, let’s set some targets for ourselves and once we establish some ratios, we will know how much activity is needed to reach our revenue targets. For example: 100 calls leads to 80 calls making contact with the buyer. Of these contacts, we meet 50 buyers. From these 50 buyers, we close 20 deals. The deals achieved from these 100 calls attempted add up to one million yen. If our revenue target is two million yen, then we know we have to make 200 calls and so on.
Having specific targets for our activity activates our time management skills. We know we have to schedule calls throughout the day, in order to get to the number of people we need to make our target. It is no good just calling everyone from 9.00am to 12.00pm, because some can be reached, but others will be better to call during lunch break, others after 6.00pm, when the gate keepers have gone home, others from 8.30am in the morning. The point is to keep calling and keep trying different times of the day until we can make contact.
Starting the day with targets for activity and starting with no targets, are such completely different approaches. Sales is a diabolical art, where mostly you fail, so you need supreme discipline to do what needs to be done. We have to force ourselves to do the activities or we will never make enough activity effort to be able to hit the revenue targets. Once we know the ratios, we have a guide on how much we need to be doing. As we keep analysing where we are struggling, we can work on our weakness and improve on them, thus advancing the overall ratio of success.
We know that our attitude determines everything. Henry Ford is often quoted for saying, “if you think you can or your think you can’t, your right”. In the 1920s, psychologists understood that we can change our futures by changing how we think. Up until that time, everyone talked about God’s will or fate and as individuals we had no options. Today we understand the power of our mind to drive our behaviour in ways which will help us to realise the goals we have set for ourselves or which have been set for us by our boss.
We all have sales targets to achieve, so our sales attitude is key. We have to find ways to remain positive in the face of failure and setbacks. Sales is a roller coaster of elation and despair. You make your presentation to one client, with the same conditions of price, terms, etc., and they buy. The next client presentation is a disaster and they don’t buy. What happened to us between these two extremes? Often we have no clear idea but we have to pick ourselves up and call the next client. How do we pick ourselves up though?
I love these Winston Churchill quotes, “when you are going through hell, keep going” and “Never, never, never give up”. But in sales, we do want to give up, because rejection and our feelings of failure are brutal. Everyone faces negativity and we all suffer from different degrees of imposter syndrome, even if we have some degree of success. Dale Carnegie has another useful quote, “It isn’t what you have, who you are, where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you are doing about it.” So what are you doing about it?
Let’s find ways of occupying our minds with positivity. I was fired from my sales job once upon a time and it was doubly depressing, because I had been working so hard, I thought the big boss was going to give me a raise. It was a cold Friday evening at 5.00pm, when he called me to his office. I had read somewhere that a lot of job related suicides result from being fired on a Friday. The next morning I got up early and went straight down to the biggest bookstore in town and bought a couple of hundred dollars worth of books. I had just lost my source of income, but here I was spending money like a drunken sailor. Why? I knew I had to push out every self doubt, and nagging, negative thought that would otherwise occupy my mind and replace those “bad” thoughts with positive, “I can do it” information.
Misery loves company we say, but in the sales business, absolutely avoid negative people. When failing sales colleagues invite you to a “whine” party, don’t accept the invitation. Keep your mind pure and undiluted by any negative people and their toxic talk. In the classic sales movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, Al Pacino plays Ricky Roma who is in a bar closing a buyer, while the rest of the salespeople are in the office, whining about they don’t have any worthwhile leads. Ricky Roma keeps his eye on the prize and doesn’t spend time with failing salespeople colleagues.
Design pep talks for yourself. As a karate athlete, I remember getting to the final bouts, everyone was watching me and that nasty old imposter syndrome would start telling me, “You shouldn’t be here in the finals. You should have been eliminated out in the earlier rounds”. It happens in sales too. You have an unexpected good quarter or half year and the doubt sets in, that this isn’t you and then you sabotage yourself to get back to where you see your mediocre self. One formula I use is very simple. Whenever I am doubting myself, I keep repeating “you can do this, you can do this, you can do this”. Another one I use is “I feel strong, I feel sharp, I feel terrific”. Find your word or your set of trigger words which set off positive thought processes in your mind.
Our self image flows across to how we present ourselves and how we interact with buyers. Buyers judge us on our first impression with them. Until they get to know us, they simply look at how well we dress. If you have given up on yourself it will show immediately from how you carry yourself to how you present yourself. In that same legendary movie referred to earlier, Alec Baldwin plays the part of hot shot salesguy, sent down from the Mitch and Murray headquarters to motivate these failed salespeople. He is very well dressed, wears a heavy gold watch and drives a expensive BMW. He oozes the part of sales success. What are we oozing when we turn up in front of the prospect?
Once we open our mouth, clients start to evaluate how smart and consistent we are. They do that by noting by how well we can communicate. Clients subconsciously fear being conned by smooth talking salespeople. We have to be highly fluent, without coming across as slimy. The client will throw up objections to see how we deal with them. If we seem reliable, they may start us with a small deal to test us. When problems arise, they are looking for how we handle tough situations, how strong is our self-control and do we have persistence. They are looking for how well we can relate to different people and how professionally competent we really are. Clients will partner with us, if they see we are genuinely doing our best for them to succeed.
We have to get our mindset correct, our personal presentation on point and deliver value and outcomes for the client. It isn’t a multi-choice selection – all three are required for sales success.
Usually gaining access to the big company President is a real coup. We now have the ear of the decision maker and if we can convert the Prez, then we are going to get the sale. In Japan, unless the President is also the owner, then gaining access and then a sale is usually a mirage. There is a particular species of President in Japan called a wan man shacho or the dictatorial President who decides everything. Convert them and you will get the sale. If we are talking to a larger company or a listed company though, then our sale’s life gets hard very quickly.
I painfully recall attending a French Chamber of Commerce “Back from Summer” party in the Ginza shopping area in Tokyo. Quite a crush of people and I happened to start talking with this senior Japanese gentleman. After we exchanged business cards, I recognised he was the President of a very large lumber business. We were chatting about his staff issues and I asked if I could pay a business call and he agreed. Naturally, I was thinking, “this is very good. I have the top decision-maker agreeing to meet with me to discuss business”.
Direct Reports Rebel
I arranged the meeting day and time and was soon ushered into his large Presidential office overlooking Tokyo Bay. I was using my well crafted consultative sales methodology, especially tailored for Japan. The meeting was going very well. So well in fact, that he got on the phone and ordered his two HR heads to join us in the office. He then instructed them, in front of me, to follow up the discussion about buying our training services. I am getting very enthusiastic by this point, anticipating a sale is coming. I dutifully follow up with these HR heads. Nothing. I call, they never call back. I write, they never write back. How could this be? I heard the President instruct them to meet with me. How could they ignore the President’s command? They did so without compunction.
This is just one example of my many experiences trying to do “top sales” or President to President sales in Japan. It does work for wan man shacho style companies and I have made sales. But the scale and complexity correlates with the increase in the size of the enterprise.
The Decision-Making System Is Not Your Friend
What is going on here? Why wouldn’t you get a sale, once you have had a business discussion with the President? The structure of corporate decision making in Japan is quite different from the West. I chuckle when American sales gurus explain how to get around the client when they say, “we will think about it and get back to you”. There is usually a lot of aggressive pushing going on, trying to get a decision. In Japan, they really do need to think about it.
Here is what happens after you have had your meeting with the big company President and have been escorted to the elevator. The President says to one of the direct reports to take a look at the possibility of doing business with your company. There is no top down “make this happen” conversation going on. This is important, because the President’s role has now finished.
One Piece Of Paper Determines All
The command is conveyed down the organisation. A very young person in the relevant Division, at the bottom of the hierarchy, is given the task to do the due diligence. Any sales materials are passed to them and they begin to research you, the company and the offer. They next pass their research results to their section head boss for consideration. If the section head boss doesn’t think much of you, your firm or your offer, then the deal dies a quiet ignominious death right there. If the section head thinks this might be useful, they attach their personal hanko or seal to a piece paper called a ringisho, which is attached to the materials. This signifies they have read the content and are okay for the process to move to the next stage.
If it gets to the Division Head level and there is no interest, then your deal is silently taken out the back and garrotted. If it looks useful, then all the other Division Heads who may be affected by the buying decision are circulated the ringisho and the materials. They in turn hand it to a very junior person in their team, for the due diligence check. Each Division does this independently. If all of the Division Heads attach their seals, then the lead Division will be in touch with you to arrange the next meeting. Every subsequent change requires a repeat of this process and fresh ringisho will be circulated around again.
All of this takes time, a lot of time. We never get to influence any of the process and we have no idea who are the main players. We are still labouring under the mistaken belief that the President is personally involved in shepherding our deal through the system, because we had our meeting together. The busy President has completely forgotten who we are by this time.
Once you understand the system, you realise there is not point in trying to battle “we will think about it” or imagine the meeting with the President is still meaningful. Patience is a virtue anywhere, but absolutely essential when doing business with big Japanese corporates.
Every minute, there is more and more competition for the same clients, so we need to differentiate ourselves very clearly. I see new competitors entering the market all of the time, even during Covid. You would think at least during Covid, things would quieten down a bit on the competitor front, but no. Existing competitors are getting more and more desperate, so they start giving everything away and this puts tremendous pressure on pricing. What we absolutely don’t want is for the buyer to think they can just swap another company’s solution in to replace us. The price fight is the path to oblivion. We have to change the competition battlefield to value, instead of pricing.
We need our USPs to be crisp and sharp to make sure the buyer knows we are different and better than the competition. We need to point out what we are offering that they are not. One of the dangers of selling the same line up of products over a number of years is we become numb to their special characteristics. When we first start out studying the product range we are excited, we are desperate to get a clear understanding of the lineup, so we can explain its features and benefits to the buyer. Over time that freshness decays. We also get lured into a price discussion with the client.
When crafting our Unique Selling Proposition we need to look at things from the buyer’s perspective. It is no help talking about what we sell. That is tremendously interesting to us, but more importantly what is of interest to the buyer? We can get bogged down in the nitty gritty of the spec, the detail, the data. More importantly, we want to know what are they trying to buy? What problems do they need help solving? Where do they need more value? When do they need it?
For example, in our own case, we may think we sell sales training, but what company buyers want is to receive greater per head sales revenue outcomes from their salespeople. We sell outcomes and the training service is the tool to achieve that. We can easily get confused about that though. Do our USPs address the typical objections which arise when explaining our solution?
Let’s make us the case study, to make the key points a bit clearer. For you own product or service, do a similar analysis and see what you come up with. For Dale Carnegie Training we have been in operation since 1912. The client doesn’t care a fig about that. What they do care about is risk reduction for themselves. A track record of 109 years provides the client with the sense that this company has a solid track record, so therefore, they are more trustworthy as a result. “I won’t get fired or rebuked for recommending this company with such a substantial, safe, track record” is what they are thinking.
We teach 90% of the Fortune 500 companies. Again, “so what” from the buyer’s point of view. The essence of the USP here has to be that these Fortune 500 companies are the richest and most powerful companies and they can choose whoever they want to provide training services. The fact that they choose Dale Carnegie is an indication that the biggest organisations have done their due diligence and like what we do, so we are a safe choice. In Japan everyone wants to know about precedent, because no one wants to be the early adopter. They don’t want to be the test case. They want to be mainstream, which is the safest position with the least risk.
We have offices in 100 countries. This is another “so what” potential reaction from clients.
We need to point out that because of our global network, we can deliver training where ever the client is located and we can do it in the language and cultural context of that society, ensuring the best reception of the training content. We have to work out where is the relevancy for this client? Maybe it is just irrelevant. In that case we don’t waste valuable client facing time and we find another USP which is more relevant.
Our trainers are required to complete 250 hours of train-the-trainer content before they can be certified by Dale Carnegie and be allowed to instruct. The point is to mention that this whole process takes about a year and a half and only the most motivated and dedicated people are willing to put themselves through this rigorous process. This is why our trainers are the “best of the best”.
The client has no idea about our internal processes and standards, so we need to place these in a context which is meaningful for them. For example, we might talk about this tough internal standards arrangement being a cure for the common training company issue of some instructors are really good and others are not so good. In these companies, there is no consistency and therefore no certainty as to what service level you will receive.
The point of the USPs is to differentiate what we are doing from our competitors and give the client the comfort that they are making a wise decision in choosing us to provide the solution to their problems. So, blow some dust off your own USPs and get the salespeople doing some drills on USPs in their morning role play practices, before they talk to or see any clients.
We have so many things pulling us in different directions at the same time, we can get a bit overwhelmed by all the sales work we have to do. We can get caught up in the weeds of our daily work and lose sight of the big picture. We are being beaten up over the numbers or lack thereof, the revenue budget daily, weekly, monthly status. How can we get the right focus on what we should be doing and make our efforts more effective? There is a simple method we can use which is very quick and straightforward. Firstly, we need to take a brief moment and draw a focus map of what we need to be working on.
Why a focus map? We need to eliminate everything that is distracting us from reaching our goals. How do we draw a focus map? In the center of a piece of paper put a small circle around the one or two words which make up the key area of focus. Now add separate related words which come to mind that fit this category and then circle those words to make sub categories.
On the page, these circled words will be arranged around that original central circle like planets around the sun. For example, we might think of key topics like Better Time Management, or Better Client Follow up, or Better Planning, or Better Communicator, etc. Taking one of these topics, in a few minutes, the list of related words will soon come forth. This is because we have all of these thoughts inside our mind and we just need the chance to release them.
If we take a concrete case and make the key focus in the central circle Better Time Management for example, some related sub category words to surround that idea might include words like: prioritisation, block time, procrastination, Quadrant Two focus, to do list, weekly goals, daily goals, etc. In a short period of time we have developed sub categories for us to work on, in order to improve our time management. By physically arranging these words around the central idea, we engage our mind through visual stimulation. Having done that, we now apply a template to help us decide just what we are going to do about each of these sub categories.
There are Six Steps.
A completed version might look like this:
We could repeat the same process for the other words we thought of like: block time, procrastination, Quadrant Two focus, to do list, weekly goals, daily goals etc. The beauty of this focus map is we can go both deep and broad very quickly. Time poor salespeople need to maximise the time spent on thinking rather than just doing.
Over Parts One and Two we have been exploring how to apply some human relations principles when we are working with our buyers. Buyers don’t buy products or services. They buy us first and the solution comes with us, as a package. If they don’t buy us, then the package can be the best one on the planet on paper, but they won’t bother to buy it because it doesn’t feel right because the trust is not there. Let’s look at three more powerful time tested universal principles to help us build buyer trust.
“Some buyers are boring when they talk about themselves and I tune out, because I only want to hear stuff that will help me make this sale”. That doesn’t sound like a good approach to the buyer and using such selective listening skills can mean we miss important signals and information from the buyer. What are they saying with their eyes and body language? What are they not saying? We need our attentive and empathetic listening skills on full deployment when we talk with our buyers.
Remember we need to develop a genuine interest in the buyer as a person. How can we do that? Let’s find out what are some key areas of importance to them. We will discover things and experiences in common and that really helps to build our bonds together. Let’s use a memory linking technique - Nameplate, House, Family, Briefcase, Airplane, Tennis Racket, Ideas. This technique by the way works for everyone you meet not just buyers, by the way. So how does this technique work?
Imagine the following: A huge silver nameplate is crashing into the roof of a completely pink house. Inside the pink house in the living room is a giant baby, like a sumo wrestler size in a diaper. The giant baby is playing with a work briefcase. Out of the briefcase the giant baby pulls out a model old style aircraft. The wings have propellers, except these are special propellers, because they are huge black tennis racquets. Threaded through the strings of the black tennis racquets are the rolled up pages of a newspaper. All we need to do is remember these connectors: Nameplate, House, Family, Briefcase, Airplane, Tennis Racquet, Newspaper
So now we can ask buyers we are meeting for the first time where they live, how many people in their family, what has been their occupational experiences, do they travel much for work or pleasure, what are their hobbies and what is the latest news from their industry. We don’t necessarily ask these questions in this order or ask all of these questions. We certainly don’t make it sound like we are interrogating them or prying into their private affairs. We use tact and diplomacy when we engage them about their private interests.
Using some of these questions we will never be stuck on how to make small talk with our buyers. We can build trust with buyers through getting to know them by showing genuine interest in them. Ask the buyer questions using the Who, What, Where, When, Why, How formula. Who have they worked for previously, what was it like, where was their office, when did they start here, why did they choose this company they work for now and what do they like most about it?
People love to talk about themselves, so become a good listener: What excites them? What are their interests? Make finding out all about the buyer your mission and you are sure to find the buying conversation more effective. Remember we are trying to become their trusted business advisor, so the personal connection is critical.
8: Talk in terms of the other person’s interests.
What if you don’t know about the other person’s interests? No problem. Ask more questions – remember what we learned in Principle Seven about being a good listener. We may not be told immediately by the buyer what they are interested in, because they are still checking us out, to see if they can trust us. We need to gain their trust to allow us to dig in, to find out how we can help them.
By asking questions we have the chance to know more about them and that allows us to highlight similarities and things we have in common. This makes the trust building easier. By applying Principle Seven – listening – and Principle Eight – talking in terms of their interests, we will naturally make the other person feel heard, which makes them feel important:
Notice how words like “honesty”, ”sincerity”, and being “genuine” run through these first nine Human Relations Principles. Without these, the principles are simply tools for manipulation. Buyers are not stupid and they see through manipulation. It is definitely not the way to win friends or positively influence them or make any sales. Most people go through their work days with very little praise, appreciation or recognition for what they are doing. If we can find some things to recognise and we do it in an honest, non-manipulative fashion, then we will build a strong connection of trust with the buyer.
How can you use the nine human relations principles we have covered so far, to develop friendships and relationships with buyers and have a positive influence on your business?
In the last episode we looked at the first three of the human relations principles we can apply when interacting with our buyers. Sales is all about trust. Trust is built up through what we say and what we do. It is also a function of our behavior with buyers. We face a tricky equation of getting on with all types of buyers with different outlooks, communication and personality styles. There are some universal aspects of our control over what we say and how we say it, which will serve us well in order to serve the largest scope of buyers possible. We know all of these things. The only problem is we don’t do them!
We are all severely time poor and focused on what we need to do. We have little mental bandwidth for what other people are thinking or need. It is very hard to build up trusting buyer relationships with a time poor, highly transactional approach.
If we don’t build trust, then what sort of relationship will we have with the buyer? The way to build trust is to get to know people and get them to get to know us. The more things we share in common, the easier it is to get on with each other. This is not manipulation, trying to get to know others, so that we can use them. People are not stupid and they pick up on this immediately.
What we are talking about here is genuine interest. Each one of us has areas or experience or interests which others would genuinely find interesting. It is often amazing to learn things about buyers you have worked with over many years, that you had no idea about. It makes for a richer happier interaction. With new clients, it breaks the ice and makes the relationship building go so much smoother.
You might be thinking: “but even if I start to be genuinely interested in them, it’s difficult to start a conversation about things other than the products”.
The first step is to use Principle number 5. Smile.
As we smile, we start to develop a relationship with the buyer. It sounds so simple – smile, how hard can that be? Well take a good look at people’s faces at work and in business. Most are looking stressed, concerned, pressured and very, very serious. Not too many smiles being shared around. That is the way of the modern world. We are supposed to be getting more time thanks to technology, but in fact, it is making us busier and more stressed as a result.
So keep this in mind, that every time you face a buyer to speak, crack a big smile first before you say anything. They will feel better about you and much more likely to cooperate with you and be pleased to see you every time you turn up. They will feel it is easier to speak with you and you can bridge into conversations beyond just the lineup in the products catalogue.
It is unthinkable that we would forget the name of our buyer. However, we might be dealing with a number of people on the buying side and we may not meet all of them each time. If we meet them again or pass them on the way to the meeting room or meet them at a networking event, we had better be able to remember their name.
They may not be able to remember ours by the way, so we should eliminate any potential embarrassment. Here is an iron rule. Whenever we meet anyone, always start with offering our name first. For example, “Hi, Greg Story, good to meet you again”.
If we start packing the conversation with the buyer’s name every few minutes it sounds weird and will have the opposite effect than that which we desire. It has to have a natural cadence. We need to get the personalisation balance right and common sense should be determining when to use their name.
How well can we apply these three simple, yet effective, principles with buyers? None of these ideas are new, complex or difficult. The secret is having the discipline to change how we currently communicate with our buyers. We get into ruts, get stuck in fixed patterns of interaction. Try to break out of those confines and make the buyer, the human being, the center of the conversation. Our competitors won’t be doing this, so it is an excellent and simple way to differentiate ourselves from the competition.
If we want to succeed in sales, we want to build a strong relationship with our buyers. Having to run around and create a new buyer every single time is seriously hard work. Yes we must hunt, but we also want to farm. However, nowever, nHoot all buyers are easy to deal with. We might think they should change, so that they are easier to deal with. They should make it easier for us to sell them our solutions. Unfortunately, we can’t change others. We can only change how we think and behave. Doing so can in turn, have a positive impact on others. That’s the whole thinking behind Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People – it’s not about manipulation. It is not about us waiting for them to change. It’s about changing ourselves first and how we approach buyers.
If we approach buyers in the same way every time, we will always get the same counter reaction. This is Newtonian physics which we learnt at High School, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. In sales, if we change the angle of our approach to the buyer by just three degrees, then we will get a different counter reaction.
The point is we have to make that decision to change those three degrees on our side first, rather than expecting the buyer to change themselves to suit how we like things. There are some excellent, proven, time tested Human Relations Principles we can draw on to help us with this.
Human Relations Principles 1-3
How many times have you criticised someone and had them admit they were wrong and tell you that you are completely right? It almost never happens because people rush to defend themselves and want to justify whatever it is they are doing. If we do criticise them knowing this, then all we are doing is setting ourselves up to fail to change them and even worse, create bad feelings between us. We might be tempted to criticize the buyers company for forcing us to have 120 day payment terms. Or by suddenly changing the order at the last moment. Or by leading us down the garden path and then buying from our competitor, because we were used to provided the compliance department with their required multiple bids. We need to deal with such negative buyer actions in a different way.
This sounds so simple, except that we don’t do it. It is not that we give fake or dishonest appreciation, because we don’t give any appreciation period. We expect everyone to be doing what they should be doing, but we show no appreciation of that. Then we wonder why it is hard to get people to cooperate with us? The consequence is that everyone is starved of appreciation.
They are also quite sensitive to any attempts at flattery and will dismiss it as dishonest words, somehow trying to trick them into doing something they don’t want to do. So, we have to identify something concrete and provable that they did and then praise that. For example, with a buyer, “Suzuki san, I appreciated the fact you got back to me on time with the information I requested, it really helped me meet the deadline. Thank you for your cooperation”. The praise is specific and true and Suzuki san is more likely to accept the praise as being honest.
We all want lots of things. In fact, we spend almost 100% of our day focused on what we want. The issue though is when we need the cooperation of others. They are focusing on what they want too and are not interested in our needs or requirements. We need to switch our communication to focus on things which are also important to them.
What does the buyer as an individual, not the company representative, want? Do we know what that is and do we know it in detail? When we frame things in this way, they feel there is something positive for them and they are more motivated to agree to our ideas.
How do you need to change your communication style and content, to get the type of buyer cooperation you need, where the other person thinks this is in their buyer interests too?
Which principles are you going to use with your buyer today?
You would think that if your business has survived Covid, then the pandemic will have cut a swathe through your competitors. Therefore, we would all be granted a temporary reprieve from the usual rigorous competition for client business. Counterintuitively, there seems to be more and more competition for the same clients, so we need to differentiate ourselves very clearly. What we absolutely don’t want is for the buyer to think they can just swap another company’s solution in to replace us, like a modular part in the modern car engine.
We need our Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) to be crisp and sharp to make sure the buyer knows we are different and better than the competition. We need to point out what we are offering, that they are not. However with all of this focus on bare bones survival have we looked at our USPs lately? Are they a bit dusty and the sheen gone off from lack of attention?
Some things to think about when crafting our Unique Selling Proposition is to look at things from the buyer’s perspective. This seems completely obvious but often we are operating in our own little bubble and we see the world through the limited prism of our own value system.
It is no help talking about what we sell in our USP. That is tremendously interesting to us, but not as important as what is of interest to the buyer. Do we really know what they are interested in now? Have their interests shifted since Covid shook up the business world? What are they trying to buy today? What new problems do they need help solving? In today’s commercial environment where do they need to receive more value?
Let’s use Dale Carnegie as the example. We may think we sell sales training. However, what company buyers want is to receive greater per head sales revenue outcomes from their salespeople. In fact, we need to sell outcomes and our training services are the tool to achieve that.
Let’s see some examples of our USPs
We think that is terrific and important, but the client doesn’t care about that. In Japan, in particular, what they do care about is risk reduction. We need to emphasise that our track record of 109 years provides the Japanese buyer with the sense that our company has a solid track record, so therefore, we are more trustworthy as a result. “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM” was a fantastic ad tag line in the 1970s and this is the real USP for us not the 109 years. If you have longevity as a business in Japan, what is your real USP in your case?
Again, “so what” from the buyer’s point of view. The essence of the USP is that these Fortune 500 companies are the richest and most powerful companies and they can choose whoever they want to provide training services. The fact that they choose Dale Carnegie is an indication that the biggest organisations have done their due diligence and like what we do, so we are a safe choice. Remember, nobody wants to be first to try something in Japan, so this precedent idea is a winner here. Can you marshal your biggest clients as proof that there is a safe precedent to buy from you?
This is another “so what” potential reaction from clients. We need to point out that because of our global network, we can deliver training wherever the client is located. Further, we can do it in the language and cultural context of that society, ensuring the best reception of the training content. Do you have global capacity, so that buyers can have a global one-stop shop solution when using you? How are you framing your USP around this point?
The point is to mention that this whole process takes about a year and a half and only the most motivated and dedicated people are willing to put themselves through this rigorous process. This is why we can claim our trainers are the “best of the best”. The hours are not the key – the selection process is the key.
What processes do you have in place to assure the client that the people serving them are extremely well selected and well trained. You may be doing both right now, but not thinking to mention it to the client as a USP differentiator in the market.
The point of the USPs is to differentiate what we are doing from our competitors and give the client the comfort that they are making a wise decision in choosing us to provide the solution to their problems. Have your USPs changed since Covid started? Are they polished, shiny and sparkling, ready to impress the buyer? It is time to revisit and rework them as we move glacially toward a post-Covid business world.
At the center of everything we do is the customer relationship. Additionally, like planets revolving around the sun, there are five stages of the sales cycle revolving around the customer relationship, which we must pass through in order to make the sale. In a way, this is our roadmap for when we are talking to the buyer. If we want to make a sale and get the re-order, we must control the sales conversation with the buyer, not the other way around. When we are talking to the buyer we are never stuck, because we know where we are in the cycle and what needs to come next. Let’s take a walk through the galaxy and visit each of these stages of the sales cycle.
We need a plan for the conversation, so we have prepared an agenda statement. We invite the buyer to add any items they think necessary to get the right buy in, to progress the meeting using this agenda.
They don’t know us and this is an important point. We need to find out what they do know about us from their research or what they have heard in the market. Definitely we need to immediately correct any misperceptions or wrong information.
What is their current situation?
Where do they want to be in the next few years?
What things do they need to change to get where they want to be?
If this is a successful project helping them with their solutions, what will it mean for them personally?
After hearing them out we need to tell them if we can in fact help them or not. If we can’t then we need to get moving and find someone we can help. If we can help them, we give a quick summary of what we heard. Then we add our declaration that we do in fact have the right solutions for their issues.
Importantly we need to provide the benefits of the features we are describing – tell them how to apply this in their business. We also must provide evidence of where this has worked before – we need to provide proof of what we are saying. Finally we should check for understanding or any concerns at this point, by using a trial close to test the waters.
Once we get agreement, then we have to flesh out the details of how the solution will be delivered. We need to maintain contact with the client to make sure all is well after we have delivered the solution and see if they need any other help. A very happy client is perfectly poised to refer us to others who could also make valuable use of our solution.
The five steps in the sales cycle are our roadmap and all we need to do is work our way through them. Probably steps three to five will be at the second meeting. Do you have a road map? Do you have your credibility statement, agenda statement, qualifying questions? Do you have the right strategy for dealing with objections and for gently asking for the order? If you don’t, then “Japan Sales Mastery” will become a Sales Bible for you in Japan.
We all know that without trust there will be no sale and much worse than that, no ongoing sales. So how do we build trust with our buyers? It is a critical salesperson facility, because research shows that 63% of buyers would rather buy from someone they completely trust, than from someone who gives them a better price. Think about that – trust trumps price. What is the cost of creating trust versus having to resort to discount pricing to get deals done?
Our mindset is the key. We have to be thinking “relationship” and “partnership” with the buyer, rather than a single transaction, a fleeting encounter, a “one and done”. We always want the reorder, don’t we? Of course we do. Because our thinking is “long term relationship”, our communication will also reflect this approach. Once our communication changes, the buyer will relax and will be more open to building a long-term relationship. Buyers are experts at sensing danger and duplicity. They can smell a rat from a long way away and they are permanently on guard against being ripped off. How happy they are to find a salesperson they can genuinely trust. We say, “a good man is hard to find” and we can also say “a good salesperson is hard to find”. When you are the buyer and you find one you are relieved.
What is our salesperson mindset about winning in business? Is it “in the buyer’s success lies our success” and so the business must benefit both parties? If we are thinking like this then we don’t want: Win-Lose or Lose-Lose or Lose-Win outcomes. We want Win-Win between the buyer and seller. This sounds simple, but desperate salespeople have trained buyers to be very wary about whose interests this transaction is really designed to serve.
Buyers can feel our salesperson intention and if it is “we win- they lose”, they can feel that too. We have all made purchasing mistakes which we have come to regret and have have had a harsh internal conversation with ourselves pledging “that will never happen again”. Therefore we salespeople need to be projecting we are honestly searching for a win-win outcome. We are seeking the reorder.
Now buyer repeat business is a simple equation: Trust + Relationship = Buyer Loyalty
Buyer loyalty is an emotional and behavioral commitment to keep using us. Buyer trust reflects the buyer’s belief that the salesperson will focus on the buyer’s interest and that the salesperson is reliable. There is a horizontal scale to represent the buyer/seller relationship.
On the left horizontal extreme, we have the product pusher who is focused on getting the highest price and then moving on to the next buyer. On the right horizontal extreme, we have the trusted advisor salesperson who is focused on mutual benefit and a continuing relationship with the buyer. Where do you currently sit on that scale?
Let’s drop the rhetoric, shall we. We all know brands that say one thing publicly, but internally, their messaging about how to treat the customer is entirely different. What is the real message you are getting from your bosses about how to think about the buyer? If we want a long career in sales, then we all need to be moving ourselves to the right on that scale. Now it may not be with the current employer, if you find they have the wrong mindset. We need to find a solution and a company that really serves the buyer. As professionals we will be very happy to work in that environment.
How do we build trust? There are Five Drivers of Trust:
Trust is the most expensive thing a salesperson can lose. The cost of building trust with the client is much cheaper by comparison. Let’s never be like those bad egg salespeople who constantly mix this calculation up. We know the right path of the professional in sales and so let’s commit to treading that straight and narrow path every day.
I listen to a lot of sales gurus because I am a permanent student. I have noticed there is a consistent theme which comes up. Because being a guru is quite competitive, they have to draw a line between themselves and the rest. The way they do this is to make the point that “sales has changed”. They then go through introducing their version of the new sales methods for the new era. I was reflecting on this and thinking about sales in Japan. SPIN Selling, Consultative Selling, Challenger Selling etc., reflect waves of change in the West. I haven’t seen any waves of change much in Japan. So what is going on here?
The Japan model reflects some specialties in selling here. The core difference with the West is the decision making system in Japan. There are tons of books in English on “overcoming objections” and the “100 closes you need to succeed” type of thing. Generally they come across as quite aggressive and they try to force the buyer into buying. Tricky closing tactics won’t work here in Japan for the vast majority of sales. Of course, if the person we are talking to is the owner of the business, then “yes” they can make the buying decision. More likely we are talking to a salaried employee of the organisation. They are not the sole decision maker in most cases and in fact are more like an influencer.
Wrangling them to the ground and extracting a “yes” out of them just won’t happen. There are bound to be a number of Division or Section Heads in the company, who need to give their agreement. This is a bottom up system. It is frustrating to meet the President and think you have the golden entry point to a buying decision, only to find out that is not the case. The President will push the proposal down the ranks to the person at the bottom, whose job is to do the due diligence on you and your offer.
That person will consult with all of those leaders whose sections will be impacted by the buying decision and whom we will never meet and may never even know they exist. Western sales tends to be hand to hand, one on one combat between buyer and seller. In Japan it is you against a whole team of invisible ‘ninja” decision makers.
We have similar phenomenon in the West too. Sometimes we realise the person we are talking to has to become our champion inside the buying organization. In this case we can’t wait for the objections to arise from invisible stakeholders. We need to be proactive with our champion and help them with answers for all of the possible hesitations and objections which may come up. This is the case almost every time in Japan.
The other speciality here is that this is the Land Of The Pitch. When I first started selling in Japan, I was trying my best consultative sales methodology on buyers and getting nowhere. They wanted my pitch and just ignored my best efforts to ask them questions about pain points, needs, future desired situations, barriers, payouts, current situations etc. I was quite shocked. What I didn’t realise at that time was that before me had swept in an entire army of salespeople talking features and pricing. I don’t know if the salespeople trained the buyers to expect a pitch or whether it was the other way around, but that is where we are still, even in 2021.
Fundamentally, don’t you think pitching your features at a buyer is just crazy? If you don’t know the buyer’s needs, how on earth do you know which features will be the most relevant, even ignoring the importance of describing benefits, applied benefits and evidence, for the moment. Dale Carnegie introduced the first ever public sales training back in 1939. Back then it was all about asking questions to understand buyer needs. Here we are 82 years later in Japan and most salespeople are still giving the pitch and asking zero questions.
All of these Western guru variations on variations and fine tuning the semantics of selling have just swept by Japan, which is still back in the dark ages of pitching. It doesn't have to be like that. Here is what we need to do to update the sales process in Japan: ask permission to ask questions; ask the questions; decide what is the best solution; present that solution; deal with any hesitations or objections and then ask for the order. If your salespeople are not doing this, then you have to ask the question “why?”. Also when are we going to do something about bringing Japan into this century? What are you doing about it?
New clients are so demanding. They want to hear what we have to offer and quickly find out how trustworthy we are. They don’t want to be wasting their valuable time either. This can trigger some bad choices though for salespeople. Remember that the client playbook is not our playbook. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of tracking along their preferred path. We have our job and they have their job and both are highly specific, so we had better master ours, if we want to really help our clients.
There is a transition zone in sales, which is a make or break moment for salespeople. The new client doesn’t know us and we don’t know them. Online or in person, there will always be some degree of small talk. By the way, Western versions of this “small talk” can be microscopic. I was reminded of this in a meeting with the Western president of an international company here. I had barely gotten out a few words of small talk, when he hit me with the directive – “okay, let’s get straight down to business”. After working here for so many years and adjusting to the Japanese style, I was a bit shocked. I was thinking to myself, “oh yeah, that’s how things are in sales in the West”.
What is going through the mind of the buyer? In most cases it will be “how much is this going to cost me?”. They are fixated on price. In sales, we are thinking about the value trade for the price impost. From the outset we are speaking two different languages. We need to address that gap right at the start and set the tone for our salesperson playbook version of how the meeting should run.
After the initial pleasantries, we should outline the meeting agenda. We will mention why we are meeting, just to confirm we are both clear about how our time is going to be used. It might be, “ I appreciate Suzuki san introducing us. She thought there might be some mutual benefit to meeting, so let’s use our time together to explore what that might be. I thought we could look at what we do and how this may help you. I would like to better understand what types of solution you may need and see if there is a match between what we have and what you need. Are there any other items you would like to discuss today?”. This is a nice start which gives them a basic direction for the meeting and also the chance to specify the direction, so that they don’t feel we are hustling them in any way.
We should be careful with how we explain what we do. It should be well structured, but sound unstructured. Using my company as an example, I would begin, “We are global soft skills training experts, who have been here since 1963 and we specialise in sales training in Japan”. This brief sentence has four clear USPs (unique selling propositions) efficiently loaded into the opening. One, we are delivering our training all around the world, so that means we are successful as a training company and have both scope and scale. Two, unlike our domestic competitors, we are bringing world best practice to Japan. Three, we have been here nearly 60 years in Japan, so that means we have stood the test of time and have a solid track record. Four, it also subtly says we have localised what we do for the Japanese market, so you can be comfortable it works here and everywhere else around the world.
Next I would say, “Recently we delivered some sales training for a company in your industry and had outstanding results. We measured salesperson confidence and it went up on average by 40% and they told us their sales revenues increased by 18% in the first six months after the training”. Here, as salespeople, we must bring strong proof that what we do works. We are noting a company similar to them, so the results are relevant for the client. The confidence increase and the revenue numbers are real numbers, which they can believe are true. By the way, if you are inclined to manufacture these types of results out of thin air, don’t do it. Your credibility will go to zero. Think about it. What are the chances of a long term relationship being built on a lie? Remember and this is key, you are not here for a sale. You are here for the re-order.
Now we deliver the piece de resistance, “I don’t know if we could get the same results for you or not, but in order for me to understand if it is possible, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”. This is no pressure sales at its best, which is what works well in Japan. We have remained in control. We have been following our defined structure from our salesperson playbook. First, we explain what we do, who we have done it for, what were the results and then we deliver the request to ask questions. None of this is in the client playbook by the way, which is all about “is this too expensive?”.
I absolutely cannot understand how you can talk price, if you don’t know what they need? We just can’t do it. We need to get permission to gently interrogate them about all the defects in their people and their company, all of the shortcomings, all of the dirty laundry they do their best to hide from the market.
This transition from pleasantries to pleasantly grilling the client on their horror show is a critical phase and it is our salesperson job to do this in a masterful way. If after all of this, we discover we actually can’t help them, then don’t ty and force the square peg into the round hole. Gently tell them “this isn’t a match” and go and find someone you can help.
No sale this time, but no damage to your personal brand either. In fact, your honestly has further burnished your reputation in the market. By finding a new client who is a match, you are now spending your valuable time where there is a higher likelihood of a positive outcome. If we want to succeed, we must be in control of the sales conversation and be operating from our playbook.
We are all hungry for Covid to end so that we can get back to normal. It looks like it will be all good by September. Then it looks like October, then November and this goes on and on as some fresh piece of diabolical news filters out. Will a bell ring or an alarm go off announcing “Covid is done”? Unfortunately that isn’t going to happen. It will ebb and wane and then probably resurface intermittently over the next couple of years. So when do we start moving out of the orbit of our existing customer base? Are we just digging deeper into the fox hole, waiting for the all clear announcement or do we get up and head back into the fray?
New clients have been sparse. Companies are holding their money in a vice like grip concerned about the economic damage from Covid. Others are almost impossible to contact. Buyers and decision makers were always protected by an iron wall of nobodies who were preventing us from making contact in the good times. Now the buyers are not even in the building. Do we wait for them re-emerge from their hibernation, slip out of their cocoon? We could be waiting a long time.
We were having discussions with clients when Covid slammed into our businesses and scared the living daylights out of everyone. First in the batting order would be renewing those discussions. Should we just pick up the threads of that last conversation and continue? Take a good look at your own business? Has Covid created new dimensions, new concerns, new problems that weren’t there before? The answer would be “yes” and so that will be the same for the clients we were happily chatting with, before the virus wall came down to end all discussions.
Two good starter questions would be:
Obviously we will tailor these two broad question to our particular business.
The first question is a good one, because like a lot of us, our clients may not have had much bandwidth to start thinking about the future, given we have all been struggling to survive. We are leading them with our question to consider the future and by inference we see ourselves as being a partner with them working together as we go into the future. In manufacturing, getting into the “design in” phase is critical, because once your component is part of the design process, then you are a fixed supplier to the manufacturer and very hard to dislodge. We want to be part of the buyer’s design in process for the future and now is the time to have that discussion.
The second question is where the immediate money is located. We cannot survive on future income, when we are being battered senseless at the moment. Covid will have revealed a lot of problems for companies. What are they? We want to know that because we may be the solution. They may not have any money to invest in that solution right now, but that position will change. As Covid subsides, they will suddenly get religion and be ready to get back out there. We want to make sure we are uppermost in their minds when that happens. The only way we can do that is to be contacting them now while Covid is going the craziest it has ever been and as the vaccination rate starts to climb vertiginously. We may be meeting online but we have to be meeting nonetheless.
For new clients, the difficulties never get old. Only knowing the title and not knowing the person’s name is a big buffer to getting in contact. Companies in Japan are not very interested in business, which is why they make sure we cannot contact buyers. A friend of mine who had worked in Japan for many years went to Hong Kong to work. I was asking what was the major difference. He said, “when you go to a networking event in Japan, no one wants to meet anyone they don’t already know. In Hong Kong everyone wants to meet you to see if there is some way you can do business together. The mentality was door open rather than door slammed shut as it is in Japan”.
Nevertheless, we have to try again. Send a bulky package to the person. Make sure it doesn’t look like a flat sales document. Underlings are likely to just place it on the boss’s desk, rather than have the temerity to open the boss’s mail. This happens to me all the time. A package turns up whose contents actually aren’t for me, but there it is, carefully placed on my desk. Inside that package, include something that will really pique their interest enough that they will contact you. Is this impossible? Maybe. But what else are you going to do? You will have zero chance of getting through their KGB designed phone message system, specifically designed to screen you out. Try the “package technique” and keep experimenting to see what a successful “pique” looks like to a potential buyer.
At the age of sixteen, I was wandering around the streets of a lower working class area in the suburbs of Brisbane, working my first job, trying to sell expensive Encyclopedia Britannica to the punters who lived there. Despite my callow youth, I had a tremendous gift as a salesman. I could tell by looking at the house from the outside whether they were interested or not in buying Encyclopedia Britannica and so could determine whether I should knock on their door or not. I was saying “no” for the client. Obviously, I had no clue what I was doing.
The only training we received was to memorise, word for word, a twenty five minute pitch for the buyer, synchronised with showing the flash looking pages inside the encyclopedia. I am sure though there are many much older and wiser salespeople out there, still making that fundamental error I was making. Eventually, I discovered I didn’t have any x-ray vision gift. I was just an idiot.
There will be plenty of opportunity for the buyer to say “no”, so we shouldn’t be joining in to support them on that quest. Even before the call, we will have anticipated some potential pushback and we are fully armed and ready to go when it emerges.
I was reminded of this x-ray vision into the buyer problem recently. The top salesperson of an organisation I know, said “no” for the buyer. He was an intermediary for me with the client and didn’t like one of the conditions of the sale I was proposing. This was an important source of his commissions for him and they had been a big buyer over a number of years. He had them wrapped up in cotton wool and was extremely nervous about maintaining the relationship.
I have learnt the hard way and so I don’t believe in saying “no” for the buyer, so I pushed it. I rejected his rejection and told him to put my request to the client. We got into an elongated email wrangle over this, but not only am I dim most of the time, I am also supremely stubborn, especially when it comes to sales. Stubborn and dim is a lethal combination. He didn’t like it at all, but he held his nose and put my proposition to the client. Guess what? They went for it. As we say in Japan, “even the monkeys fall from the trees” and even Mr. Number One sales guy can get it wrong. I refrained from mentioning that Japanese proverb of course or being a smarty pants and just thanked him for his cooperation.
One common case of saying “no” for the client is when the prices are raised for the product or service. Salespeople invariably will start whinging to the boss, that the client will never agree to buy at that higher price. Effectively, they are saying “no” for the buyers. There are many ways to dilute the pain of raising the price. The terms of payment can be elongated. The guarantees and warranties can be expanded. The rise can be counterbalanced by discounts for volume purchases. The proposition can be ramped up on the value equation scale. Additional incentives can be packed together with the original offer to justify the price rise. Services can be thrown into the product purchase process to make it more palatable and vice versa. Interestingly, salespeople complaining about the price increase, spend zero time thinking about how to sell the value increase to the client.
Price increases are one thing, but defending existing prices against discounting is another case of having to say “no” to the customer. In Japan, salespeople are very weak in front of the customer. The buyer here isn’t King but GOD and GOD doesn’t brook hearing “no” from salespeople. The constant complaint from our clients is that their firm’s salespeople identify too closely with the client and don’t defend the company’s policies well enough, including pricing.
I had the same problem with one of my salespeople. He was happy to discount and take a lower commission, even though the firm made very little profit. He got his base salary and some commission, so he was happy. I wasn’t so happy. I get it - the logic is simple. The salesperson heavily invests in the relationship with the buyer and works hard to defend that relationship, even against their own employer. This sounds crazy, but they know the value of an existing customer, compared to the pain and effort to find a new buyer.
This is where the value element has to be worked on more, so that salespeople can justify the existing pricing, without resorting to discounts to get the business. The basic sales skills of the team have to be improved, especially their communication skills. This don’t say “no” for the client arena, shows the real capabilities of the salesperson. Sadly, there is a major population decline underway here and salespeople are in increasingly short supply. The quality of the people we can hire isn’t going to improve, so our sales training mechanisms and our sales leadership mechanisms, become even more important than any time in the past. Are you ready for this and are your people ready to say “yes” for the buyer?
It is seriously sad to be dumb. Nothing annoys me more than when I finally realise something that was so obvious and yet I didn’t see what was there, right in front of my nose. We talk a lot about value creation in relation to pricing, trying to persuade clients that what we are selling is a sensible tradeoff between the value they seek and the revenue that we seek. We want the value we offer to be both perceived and acknowledged value by the buyer. Often however, we get into a rut in our sales mindset. We carve a neuron groove once in our brain and keep ploughing that same row. Outside stimulation is needed. I realised that fact when I recently did some formal online training. My previous companies had sent me to the Harvard, Stanford and Insead business schools in the past, which of course, were all amazing. However, when I was doing my recent studies, I recalled that it has been some time since I did something formal like that. During the coursework, I realised many things we could do around value provision, which we have not been doing or not doing sufficiently well enough. I am an avid reader, but I also found that the mantra of both “formal” and “informal” lifetime learning is a good one to follow.
I found we have had a lot of assets lying around, which we have not fully utilised, hence the “I hate how dumb I am” statement. We need an omnichannel approach. Often, we may have videos hanging around, explaining the benefits and the details of a service or a product. Now the video has an audio track, which we can strip out of the video. This allows us to turn it into a different medium, allowing clients to access the information in that format. So many people are now processing information through audio, thanks to the recent proliferation of podcasts and audiobooks. Buyers are busy, busy and so many are multi-tasking while listening. Having audio alternatives may help to save them valuable time, compared to them having to sit down and watch our video. Depending on the content, the audio might also become a training tool for our own staff.
Now if that video is sitting there on YouTube for free, then once people have watched it, suddenly, a whole world of YouTube’s other groovy offerings appears on your client’s screen. They are being tempted to look at our competitor’s videos. That is not a great result for us. We want to keep the client on our website for as long as possible. There are companies like Wistia, for example, which will host the videos for a monthly fee. These videos are no longer mashed into YouTube’s offerings, but sit independently, such that the client cannot stray into competitor territory. We want to build a moat to keep the client in our ecosystem, so that after watching the video on Wistia, they have to come back to us. Are you able to free your clients from the YouTube loop and make sure they escape your rival’s charms?
The audio track can also be run through AI programmes like Descript, which will turn sound into text. Once the text emerges, we need to edit the content, because the AI is good, but it is not perfect. Once we have the corrected information in text, it can go into our newsletters, get it on to our website and we can send it out to clients. When we have text in English, we can translate it into Japanese and use that for clients. We can use this text information to supplement other information we are going to send to clients or include it in our after sales service programmes. Do you have any opportunities to create text, which didn’t exist as text before and find ways to employ this to add more value for clients?
Often we have multiple solutions for clients, which we could bundle together. As salespeople though, we tend to be stuck in that Johnny One Note neuron groove and only sell clients one solution. An ideal bundle would be so attractive that the client would be willing to enter into a subscription format to pay something upfront for a whole year or each month or each quarter. The point is to get them to sign up for more than an episodic transaction that always has a formal completion date. We want repeat business and this subscription model is one way to weld the relationship between buyer and seller closer together. Once we become part of their ongoing business plans, it reduces the buying friction. Importantly, it also increases their internal friction to turn the buying process off. It is always easier to keep something going, than to start it in the first place. This builds a moat around our client, denying our rivals an option to steal our business. So, what could you bundle together to create a no-brainer, totally stupendous offer for the buyer?
There might be some administration associated with using our type of product or service. The buying entity inside the client’s company is always time poor. Perhaps we can offer a system which supplies the service or product, but in such a way that we reduce the friction involved on their side. A famous example is the Kanban system at Toyota. It works well for Toyota as the buyer of the auto parts, as their warehousing costs are substantially reduced. The suppliers have revolutionised their logistics ability and can time their deliveries to fit in with Toyota’s production schedule. The suppliers are selling their products but also reducing Toyota’s friction. What can we do to sell our products and services and also reduce the friction in the buyer’s internal systems?
When I finally got religion about maximising the assets we already have for increasing our value to clients, I was amazed at how much latent opportunity we had there all along. I was asking myself, “why has it taken me so long to work out this simple idea?”. I was just dumb but now I have wised up at long last. What items are available for you to recognise the latent value you possess and package them up as assets transformed into new formats for your clients?
When we think of team selling, we imagine a room with the buyers on one side of the table and we are lined up on the other. There is another type of team selling and that is taking place before we get anywhere near the client. It might be working together as a Sales Mastermind panel to brainstorm potential clients to target or strategising campaigns or plotting the approach to adopt with a buyer. Salespeople earn their remuneration through a combination of base salary and commission or bonus in Japan. There are very few jobs here in sales, which are 100% commission, simply because salespeople don’t have to accept that model. There is always a demand here for salespeople and in fact the declining population is keeping a lot of dud salespeople afloat.
Given there is not much 100% commission selling going on, there is also not so much salesperson competition going on with each other. There is competition, but the losers usually don’t get fired, as they might in some Western business environments. So the opportunity is there to collaborate more on approaches to the client and generating more business. What often happens though is, salespeople tend to operate from within their own little castles. They have their moat around their existing clients, which they serve and they spend their time trying to find new clients by themselves. They may have sales managers, but in these modern times, sales managers are expected to produce revenues as well. That means there isn't a lot of coaching going on.
If we have one person looking at the client through the prism of their own experience, things get a bit thin quickly, if that person doesn’t have such a wealth of experience. It would be more logical to gather a team of salespeople together and look at the best approach for that client, rather than relying on the best efforts of a single person. But we don’t do this very often. This tends to be because of a territorial concept, where each salesperson has their clients and they should take care of them, without wasting anyone’s time, especially when they are getting paid a commission or a bonus, for the sale.
This does make sense at one level, but we are missing out on the sum of the parts being able to exceed the whole here. This is often a culture issue within sales teams. If you run things with tight individual accountability, it is hard to get other salespeople to assist a colleague. As leaders we need to establish a framework for teamwork even in a commission based world of focused individual benefit. The money getting paid out doesn’t change, but the time becomes the sticking point. How do we get salespeople to spend time to help others be more successful?
One way to do this it to treat a particular client as a project and pull in other salespeople to work on the best approach. Once the salesperson in question has spoken with the client, then we need to gather the Sales Mastermind together again and brainstorm what would be the ideal solution. This should be one of the tasks for the sales manager, but often they are swamped with their own clients and trying to keep the whole sales team coordinated and moving forward. Breaking out time for one-on-one discussions may simply not be happening and the salespeople are often left to their own devices.
When we approach this on the project level, the time required becomes contained and less oppressive for the other salespeople. It is also a case of quid pro quo too, because it will be their turn to benefit next time, from having more heads than one tackling client problems and helping match the best solutionS. This is where the sales manager can play a role in setting up the project teams and monitoring progress.
It is good for the salespeople because one day they will become sales managers and will need to introduce similar systems into their own teams. Funnily enough, we often have the experience of learning a lot ourselves, when we are working on someone else’s problem. We can be too close to our own issues and be blind to aspects which could have an important bearing, but we cannot see the wood for the trees. Somehow looking at another’s problem brings clarity for us about our own contemplations.
There are many benefits to using Sales Masterminds from within the team, working together for the best outcomes for the client. There is an education process going on both up and down the scale of experience, as we all come away from the process that little better educated in our craft.
I was studying an online learning programme from Professor Scott Galloway, where he talked about Appealing To Human Instincts. His take was from the strategy angle, but I realised that this same framework would be useful for sales too. In sales we do our best to engage the client. We try to develop sophisticated questions to help us unearth the stated and unstated needs of the buyer. Professor Galloway's pedagogical construct can give us another perspective on buyer dynamics.
The first Human Instinct nominated was the brain. This is our logos, our rational, logical, analytical mode. What are the unanswered questions and key internal conversations occupying the minds of our buyers. If we can meet the buyer in their thought process, then we are more likely to be able to understand their needs and then be in a position to meet those needs.
We know that some buyers will be analytical types, for whom three decimal places is unremarkable when considering data. Often though salespeople are big picture. Macro types who shun this level of detail because they feel it is boring. They love the sale and abhor the paperwork which goes along with it. I had two insurance salesmen in my home trying to get me to buy various policies. What astounded me was they were middle aged, well experienced gentlemen and yet they couldn’t fill out the paperwork correctly, so we had to do it again. They loved the conversation with me but not the conversation with the fine print in the contract.
The next instinct was the heart. Our emotions are there for all to see, if the right stimulation is provided. We laugh, cry, get angry, become determined and give up, based around our emotional configuration at any point in the day. Salespeople walk into a mine field of buyer emotions, with no way of knowing which particular configuration we have bumped into today. Our job is to gauge as quickly as possible where the buyer is emotionally and how they prefer to communicate at that moment. We know our tempers once frayed, tend to trigger a supreme impatience with everything. Woe be tied a salesperson who cannot “kuki wo yomu” or read the air, as we say in Japanese, to understand this client needs another visit on a better day for them.
Instinct number three was the gut. This reminded me of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where survival was at the bottom and became the prism through which information and ideas were judged. Company buyers are always bound firmly by risk reduction, budget stringencies, cash flow imperatives and fears for the future. Everyone loves a bargain except salespeople, especially those salespeople who have commissions attached to the sale price. Value is the only antidote for this price discount swamp fever infecting buyers. Babbling on about features won’t cut it. Yet amazingly this is the step where many salespeople check out. They never even attempt to consider scaling the summit. We had better migrate up the value scale and talk about the application of the benefits. We need to lock in the evidence where this has worked magnificently somewhere else, for this buyer to feel safe that there are precedents.
The fourth instinct was sex appeal. Buyers want to attract attention to themselves as capable, highly promotable, sexy beasts attracting a lot of favourable accord. Our role is to make them look like heroes, legends, masters of the universe. They want to elevate their worth, status and value within the organisation. “Look at me, I am clever” they want to say. We become their instrument to promote that message by giving them our product or service, which becomes a game changer inside the client company.
Salespeople have to be master jugglers, elevating many balls in the air at the same time. We need to see our buyers in a holistic manner, to fully appreciate the tack we need to take buyer by buyer, because they are all different. This takes a change in the sales mindset because most salespeople are focused on themselves, their commission, their Beemer upgrade and a thousand other things, which the buyer couldn’t care less about.
So next time we sit down with a buyer, we need to make sure we are engaging all of their human instincts and appealing to them from many angles.
Group crowdsourcing has been around since cave dweller days. Gathering a crowd of prospects and getting them to buy your stuff is a standard method of making more sales or starting conversations which hopefully will lead to sales. Trade shows provide booths but also speaking events, if you pay more dough to attend. These days the event will most likely be online rather than in person, but the basics are common. “We all love to buy but we don’t want to be sold”, should be a mantra all salespeople embrace, especially with selling from the stage.
The common approach at events is to provide a lot of information, generally the features of the product and then trot out the sales pitch at the end. As an audience, we brace ourselves because we see the switch from value to pitch coming. Mentally, we get our sceptic hat out and put it on ready for the sales blurb. When you think about it this is a pretty dumb approach.
The giving value first idea is a good one, but why separate the value from the pitch at the end? Why not integrate the two together, so there is no audience bracing required? It all comes back to design. We have all grown up with the explanation, then pitch model, so we tend to just accept that is how it is done. This is even though on other occasions as audience members ourselves, we are experiencing that “brace yourself” mental switch. It is a bit strange isn’t it, so why not learn from our own experience and make a change for the better.
The talk will be broken down into chapters. Chapter One is the opening. This is where we have to say something that snaps a distracted, sceptical audience member out of their social media induced coma and gets them to listen to us. We may share a really surprising piece of high value data or information. We might tell a gripping story that attracts the audience. We might ask a devilish question that completely consumes the attention of the audience.
Next we start to move into some features of the solution we are proffering and critically, we must link these to the applied benefits. We do this by using examples of what other buyers have done with our solution so that the audience can draw a direct line between the purchase and the benefit. These claims have to be backed up with solid evidence or it comes across as salesperson hot air.
At this point we need to ask a question which gets the audience thinking about their situation. It must be subtle, rather than bold outbursts like “You should have this shouldn’t you?”. Rather we can say, “can you see an area of your business where this widget would increase revenues or reduce costs?”. We then say nothing and let that question hang in the air, to allow the audience to focus on it and make a mental evaluation for themselves.
We will keep repeating this formula in each chapter – feature, benefit, application of the benefit, evidence and then a subtle question. We can't keep repeating the exact same question every time, because that sounds ridiculous, so we need a stock of these. Others could be, “Thinking about some of your strategies for your business, can you see where having this widget would help advance the business for you?”, or “Even incremental advances are welcome, so can you see where you could gain a five, ten or fifteen percent improvement in results through applying this widget to your business?”, or “Business is super competitive today so stealing a march on your rivals is always a challenge. Can you see an avenue through using this widget which will differentiate you from your competitors in the minds of your buyers?”.
By the time we get to the end of our presentation, we will have used a variety of questions which will resonate differently with each of our potential clients, because not all of their situations are identical. We need to use this insight when we are designing our questions, hoping at least one will hit the bullseye for a particular client.
We finish off with inviting members of the audience to stay back and chat, if they found some solutions to their business issues from our talk. At no point could the audience members “brace for impact” from our sales pitch. We have eliminated resistance to what we are saying. We have also come across as a company who focuses on value for clients and are not a collection of rabid shysters, spivs, hucksters and dodgy carnival barkers. Even if they don’t buy from us today, our reputation will have been enhanced and they are more likely to look favourably on us in the future.