Japan’s image as a sophisticated country with a solid, unique traditional culture is well placed. For example, every year around 130,000 Shinkansen bullet trains run between Tokyo and Osaka, bolting through the countryside at speeds of up to 285 kilometers an hour and boast an average arrival delay of 24 seconds. Think about that average, sustained over a whole year! Such amazing efficiency here is combined with basically no guns, no drugs, no litter, no graffiti, very little crime and the people are so polite and considerate. If you step on their foot in the crowded subway cars, they apologise to you for getting their foot in the wrong place. If you drop your wallet there is a close to 100% chance of you getting it back, intact. Considering all of the above and with the biggest concentration of Michelin three star restaurants in the world, no wonder Tokyo is the best city in the world to live in. Once Covid is contained, put Japan on your bucket list folks, you won’t regret it. Yet sales professionalism is still so far behind, by Western standards.
I am going to make incredibly broad, general statements here, but actually they are true for most salespeople in Japan. How do I know this? We have been teaching sales training here since 1963 and these are the things companies consistently ask us to fix. Let’s highlight a few things which may surprise you about sales in Japan.
The first foreigners who lived in Japan in the late 19th Century often described Japan as a “topsy turvey” world, because so many things were opposite to what they were used to back in Europe and America. The differences are what makes it so fascinating and why I have been here for 36 years and am never leaving. These differences are also a big business opportunity too, as many companies have found, including ourselves. See you over here after Covid!
Selling to a buyer in-person and selling to the same Japanese buyer online are worlds apart. Yet how many salespeople are succeeding in making the transition? Are your clients seeking virtual sales training? Not enough. COVID has revealed a lot of salespeople weaknesses. which were hidden in the face-to-face sales call world. Wishing things get better is a plan, but not a very good plan because things don't appear like they are going to get better for quite some time.
There is also the fact that a lot of companies are not going to have staff in the office every day anymore. So selling online, isn't going to disappear as a part of our reality. Our skills have to include this piece of the puzzle, whether we like it or not. What do we need to do? Here are some ideas to apply with your sales team and get them better able to get the deals COVID or otherwise.
First impressions whether at the office venue or online are critical. Posture sounds like an unlikely choice for something to focus on, but think about the body language clues we pick up from people according to the way they hold themselves. Online, we need to be quite formal sitting up ram rod straight, or if we are standing, than standing tall. Our posture needs to convey confidence, competence, trust, and reliability.
Sit forward, Roman style toward the edge of the seat online just as you would do in a face-to-face meeting. Get the camera lens up to eye height and frame yourself on screen so that your upper half of your body is visible. This becomes important when we want to use our gestures. Many people I see in online meetings never use their gestures when explaining things. Gestures work online too, but you have to make some adjustment.
The corridor between your chest and your ear height is where to use gestures, because that way they will be easily seen. Also don't wave your hands around. These fake backgrounds can't take that type of movement. So it means we need to maintain our gestures longer than usual and move our hands very slowly.
You wouldn't slouch in the chair in front of a buyer. And you would look them in the eye when you talk to them. Looking at their faces on screen looks like you are looking down on them when you're talking and that cannot help build a good relationship. Instead, look straight at the lens and try to engage the buyer. We need to make greater use of our voice and lift the energy up at least 20% louder and stronger than usual to compensate for the power loss, which the camera extracts.
We need to hit key words and phrases much stronger in order to give them emphasis. We also need to slow our speaking speed down because the audio on these video platforms is universally poor. Pauses become more important to allow what we have said be captured, processed, and understood.
We should eliminate ums and ahs because we've rehearsed our sales call online before we make it. We want to sound assured, confident and convinced about what we are saying. Any vocal hesitations defeat that effect so we have to get rid of these verbal ticks.
We need to lead off with our credibility statement. This is a brief highlight of our USP or unique selling proposition. We should be using the screen share function to show any visuals supporting what we are saying. For example, one of our USP is longevity, having stood the test of time. For that purpose, we show the New York skyline as it looked in 1912, when the company was founded and the Tokyo skyline in 1963, when we opened in Japan.
This visually is much more powerful than just saying we started in 1912 and 1963. Next, we should put up a draft agenda for the call using the screen share function. In this agenda we specify why speaking with us is a good idea. We nominate that we are going to discuss their current situation and their desired future situation, as well as barriers, challenging them from reaching their targets. We ask them if they would like to add any points to the agenda so that they feel ownership of the plan for the call. If they have any additions, then we just type them straight into the document and put it all back up on screen.
As we work our way through the detail, it is important to check for understanding. One of the bad elements of online meetings is that buyers multitask while we are talking. In person, they can't do it. But online is the new wild west and there are few rules. This means we have to be insistent that they turn on their camera even though this may uncover some pushback or reluctance. We need to set this up. We both appreciate that mutual trust is very important in business. So let's both turn our cameras on today while we have this meeting. If they won't even turn their camera on, you have to ask yourself if this is really a prospect you should be spending any time.
After the meeting, we need to send a lot of data they can look at on their own time. Japan is the data vortex of the universe. And the basic rule is you can never give Japanese buyers too much information. If I asked for a quotation or a proposal, then we should make an appointment right there and then for the next meeting for you to take them through it. Never send the document ahead of the meeting. Arrange the next meeting and then use the screen share function to take them through it. Send the actual document after the meeting. This way you can control their understanding of the content and justify that big number on the last page, because you can explain the value it represents.
You manage to get the appointment, which at the moment is seriously job well done. Trying to get hold of clients, when everyone is working from home is currently a character building exercise. You ask permission to ask questions. Well done! You are now in the top 1% pf salespeople in Japan. You do ask your questions and quickly realise you have just what they need. Bingo! We are going to do a deal here today, so you are getting pumped. But you don’t do a deal, in fact you leave with nothing but your deflated ego and damaged confidence. The finish line was right there in front of you and you fell down short. Why?
This is one of the most frustrating things in sales. You do all of the right things or so you think and then you don’t get the deal. You start analysing what went wrong. Let me save you some time on that one. You didn’t ask your questions in the right way. Finding out things like: what they want, where they are now and where they want to be, are all brilliant questions. They won’t do the deal though, because you have missed one vital step.
That step is to ask the question about where they want to be, and ask it in a specific way. We can say, “so you have mentioned to me the current state of play in the business, can you now please allow me to understand where you want the business to be going forward?”. Good try, but no cigar. That question needs an addendum. We need to ask it this way, “so you have mentioned to me the current state of play in the business, can you now please allow me to understand where you want the business to be going forward and what are the implications, if you don’t get there fast enough?”.
This is a clever phrasing of the question, because it is no longer about whether they can get there or not, but can they get there fast enough. Often, the buyer is sitting there listening to us, but thinking to themselves, “that is all very true and we will work on all of that – BY OURSELVES”. That may be the case, but the world has not stopped, so that they can get their act together at their pace, when they are ready, in the fullness of time. No, they have competitors and are engaged in a life and death struggle for survival and in that fierce contest, speed to market is a big factor. This is where we come in.
The question is a good one because it challenges their ability to get it done themselves internally and done fast enough. They have to allocate scarce resources to this project and they are already quite busy with what is on their plate now. We can provide that high level of expertise immediately and make a big difference. The best plan in the world never executed is no help. Procrastination affects people and institutions. Getting stuff done inside companies can be excruciatingly slow. So many meetings required, so may sign offs, so much paperwork and bureaucracy to wade through.
Having a problem and doing anything about it are different things. As the salesperson, the first thing we learn is that the client is never on our timetable. You need that deal now but they don’t feel any sense of urgency. We have to make sure that sense of the size of the gap between where they are now and where they need to be is enormous. So vast that they just won’t be able to do it by themselves. Also, we have to create that sense of urgency that the cost of doing nothing is not zero.
We have to paint the picture of the opportunity cost of being too slow to get going and how their competitors are active and moving forward, while they are lagging behind. If we don’t do this well they will imagine they can do it by themselves at their leisure. The person we are talking to is thinking they can be a hero to their boss by fixing the problem with no need to hire external solution providers. We could say to them, “By applying our solution now, you will speed up the opportunity to gain increased revenues. These additional revenues will not only pay for our solution very quickly but will build a war chest for you to be more agile in taking on your competitors”.
That won’t work. Why? Because it is a statement from a salesperson, trying to sell something. Instead, we need to extinguish that false hope of doing it themselves at their leisure, by pointing out through asking well constructed questions, the folly of that approach. For example, “If by applying our solution now, would it be beneficial to you to speed up the opportunity to gain increased revenues?”. After they say, “yes”, we continue. “If these additional revenues allowed you to not only pay for our solution very quickly, but also build a war chest for you to be more agile in taking on your competitors, would that assist your business?”.
We need to be sensitive to the client becoming our competitor for the needed solutions. We can most easily attack that false flag by raising the issue of speed. Few companies can move as quickly as they need to and our agility becomes our competitive advantage, as a solution provider.
Salespeople have sales tools which often are not thoroughly thought through enough. These can be flyers, catalogues, slide decks, etc. They can also be proposals, quotations and invoices. Usually the salespeople are given the tools as they are and either don’t ask for improvements or don’t believe the marketing department has much interest in their ideas about the dark art of marketing. Consequently, there are some areas for improvement which go begging.
Flyers, catalogues and slide decks tend to be very evenly arranged. Every page is basically presented in the same way. Yet, as salespeople we know that there are going to be certain products which are more popular than others. These items and corresponding pages should be up the front. It might mean breaking away from the sectional approach, of all the bits and bobs being collected together in their respective places, separate and cordoned off.
Also, on important pages of these most important products or services, there are bound to be key words or key paragraphs that, over time, we have learnt are of the most relevancy to our clients. There will also be key data tables, diagrams or photos which should be drawn to the buyer’s attention. Why don’t we have marketing do something with this information. Maybe make the font larger, or add bold or highlight using colour. This is only a matter of adjusting the layout of the page and getting the next round of printing or soft copy to reflect these updates.
Generally speaking, we don’t want to be handing our materials over to the client, in the first instance. We want to spin the item around, so that they can easily read it. With our nice pen we draw their attention to the areas we want them to see. Not everything on that page has equal value. Some sections will be more important than others. They can read the whole thing later at their leisure, but while we are there with them, we want to go through the content and determine what they need to focus on. When we leave the materials with them the highlighted areas will draw their attention to where we need them to be looking for information.
If this is so easy, why are all the sales materials we see all look the same – flat, undifferentiated and no attempt to direct the eye of the reader? Everyone has their job. Marketing is there to produce the materials, but they don’t know which are the key sections for buyer purview. Salespeople are busy running around seeing clients and just take what they have been given. They never think to make requests to marketing to change the materials.
What if the buyers have different interests? That will be true, but it will also be true that 20% of the key information will suit 80% of the buyers, so we should concentrate on that content. If there are particular sections which are not highlighted, then we can deal with that problem when we are with the buyer.
The other areas for some marketing effort are around how we present quotations, invoices and proposals. We should be advertising our services or goods on the quotations and invoices. Key people in the buyer’s company will see these materials and here is a chance to get our information in front of them. If there are soft copies involved this allows us to add links to the website where more information can be found. QR codes are also good for taking information on a page to a website.
Proposals can be very florid or very flat. Something in the middle is a good idea. We don’t want the presentation of the information overwhelming the messages. We also don’t have to just rely on text. Visual stimulation is very powerful and photos of people are always attractive to us. This is where we salespeople need marketing’s help. We need someone who has great layout skills and knows how to assemble the look and feel of the pages.
Let’s rethink our sales materials and ask what more could we get from them?
I hear some people say translating terms like “nemawashi” into English is difficult. Really? I always thought it was one of the easier ones. Let's just call it “groundwork”. In fact, that is a very accurate description ,from a number of different angles. Japanese gardeners are superstars. There is limited flat space in this country, so over centuries gardeners have worked out you need to move the trees you want, to where you want them. They prefer this approach to just waiting thirty years for them to turn out the preferred way. It is not unusual today to see a huge tree on the back of a big truck ,being moved from one location to another and presto instant garden. The roots of that massive tree will be wrapped up in cloth to protect them. That wrapping process is called “nemawashi”. In business, it means being well prepared for the business meeting – doing the ground work beforehand.
In a Western context being well prepared for the meeting will mean assembling all the data and analysis in order to make an impassioned plea for your idea or suggestion, to be accepted by the big bosses. We all get to the meeting, listen to the different approaches and we make a decision in that meeting. What could be more time efficient and logical? They never do it that way in Japan.
Concepts of time efficiency differ for a start and throwing massive amounts of overtime at a problem is not problem in Japan. The meeting is also a ceremony, because the decision has already been arrived at beforehand and the gathering is just to formalise the outcome. This happens in the West too. Whenever you see global leaders delivering their joint statements or signing agreements, they didn’t arrive at the wording during the meeting. That was all worked out by their minions beforehand, over many hours of debate, negotiation and discussion. The TV cameras just capture the big guys and gals inking the document, after all the “groundwork” has been completed.
I was talking with a Western businessman recently and he was relating how hard it was to get the team behind his ideas. The issue was, he was trying to get it all agreed to, at the key meeting and hadn’t invested the time to do the groundwork. What he needed to do was go to see all the key people, the influencers, the stakeholders with a vested interest and explain the idea. Get their input and agreement and then rinse and repeat with the rest of them. By the time the meeting happens, everyone will recognise parts of their preferences and ideas in the submission. Agreement flows easily in these cases.
In sales, we will probably not have direct access to all of the decision makers, influencers and stakeholders. Our primary contact has to become our champion for sheparding the agreement through the internal nemawashi process. Asking them directly who are these hidden decision makers is insulting. It says, you are a nobody, but I still need your help. We need to be more considerate of their “face” and ask in a way that enhances their face.
Once we have established the trust, have uncovered their needs, shown we can help and have dealt with any hesitations they may have, we are ready to marshal our forces for the final push through to a “yes” to the sale. We explain, we understand that many people will be interested to know about this change in the delivery of product or services. We also know that they will be tasked to explain it to others who cannot join our meetings. We ask how can we help them? This is a rhetorical question because we want to get into the detail of who are the players. So we go straight into asking who do they think would have the most concern about the change and why they would be concerned? We keep repeating this process until we have fleshed out the people who will have the most interest in saying “no”. The next stage is to arm our champion with the tools to deal with the pushback. We try to understand the concerns and then arrive at creative ways of overcoming those concerns.
This is what we mean by nemawashi or ground work. Is it time consuming – yes! Do we have to invest the extra time – yes! There is an internal logic to the way decisions are made in Japan. There is no point railing about how the Japanese business decision making process should be Westernised, so it is more familiar for us. That is never going to happen, so we need to be better and more flexible to understand the system and then become a master of influence within it. We need to become the nemawashi maestro!