A cushion, in the sales world, isn’t that thing you bite into with frustration when your old client buys from your competitor rather than you. It is a ploy, a trick, a device, a subterfuge to stop us making a mess of the deal. Most salespeople have no idea what a cushion is or how to employ it, which is why they are losing sales on a regular basis. The hardest people to teach this technique to are seasoned salespeople. Actually, in my recall, teaching anything to experienced salespeople is fraught. They believe they know it all or they feel their own methodologies are the best and need no additions or alterations. “Cushion, smushion” is often the view, when we introduce this idea to salespeople.
Where do we use this cushion and what is it? After we have dug deep and found out where the client is now, where they want to be and why they are not there yet, we are in a position to offer some of our potential solutions to help them get there and for them to enjoy the kudos associated with it. At this point we will get pushback, hesitations and objections to our genius ideas to fix their problem. This is when we need to bring out the cushion.
Being emotional creatures, we don’t like pushback from buyers, because all we want to hear is “yes we will take it”, at our original non-discounted price and right away, pronto. If we get “your price is too high” we become agitated and we do dumb things like trying to justify the offer. This is typically what these so-called “seasoned” salespeople do and then they can’t work out why they have to drop the price all of the time, to land the deal. What if you could land the deal without any discounting? Sounds good doesn't it and let’s explore how to do that.
Chemicals from the brain are released the moment we hear “your price is too high and we go into fight mode with the client. Actually, we cannot control the release of the chemicals, but we can control what we do in terms of our reaction. The first reaction is to justify the price, by talking about the tremendous value our solution represents. We try to get the client to buy through force of will or by going on and on about how great our solution is and why it isn’t really that expensive, especially when you amortise the cost over a thousand years.
Clients become defensive in response to these assaults on their opinion and often get in their little bunker and hunker down to resist all that we say, until they hear those magic words, “I will drop the price”. So arguing with the client isn’t the smartest method, but still it is a favourite with some of these seasoned salespeople.
We have to get more information before we know what to say to the client’s attack on our pricing. Objections are also often smoke screens. What they say may not be what they are thinking. Even if we bite and do a brilliant job on answering their pushback, we still don’t get the deal done, because that wasn’t the core issue. We answered it brilliantly but to no avail. We need to test for the real objection before we try and answer anything and this is where the cushion comes to the rescue.
A cushion is a neutral statement which neither agrees nor disagrees with the client’s opinion. “Your price is too high” receives a cushion like this, “budgeting is certainly an important element of every business”. That short little offering is a breaker, like the circuit breaker in our homes, to stop an electrical surge burning down the house. It stops us from answering the client’s preposterous claim that our price is too high and reminds us we need to say only one thing in response.
We have created a breaker from the chemical reaction and have allowed the brain to start functioning properly again and we say, very, very sweetly, “May I ask you why you say that?” and then we shut up and do not speak. This is a genius question because now the client has to justify their claim and provide us with the reason. As we assemble more information, we get more possibilities available to us and more angles from which to approach our answer. We are going to give a very well considered response, as opposed to that first chemically induced, emotional response we would have given.
If we can manage that process directly, then we don’t need a cushion. The problem is “your price is too high” is the siren call to battle with the client and it is very hard to stop yourself from diving straight into the entrails of why the buyer is wrong.
Once we get an answer from the client we cannot stop there. We need to keep ferreting out the real objection. After hearing their answer, we say, in “in addition to “x” are there any other concerns” and we keep repeating this process until we have them all out on the table. Usually they have two or three and occasionally four, but rarely more than that. Next, we ask them to choose which is the most concerning for them and that is the one we answer.
The cushion is a key to a better conversation with the client, helping us to clear the emotional fog clouding our minds when we get an objection. The chances of us finding an answer, which doesn’t require us to drop the price, go right up when we use this method. I like that!
Most salespeople are very good on the detail of their solutions. The more technical the solution, in order to be able to explain it to the buyer, the more expert level of knowledge is needed. The only problem with this expertise concentration is that buyers don’t buy features. They have a problem which they need solved and the features are a necessary tool, but it is the outcome produced through the tool, which is what attracts the buyer’s attention. If we spend all of our time in the weeds of the features, we are missing the one thing which causes the buyer to purchase from us.
We don’t get unlimited time with the buyer and usually an hour is allocated to our meeting and we need to cover a lot of ground in that hour. In fact, the solution component of the sales call is often the second visit to the buyer. In the first visit, we did our best to understand what their issues were and to see if we have what they need to provide the necessary solution. During the second visit, we go into how what we have will fix their problem, how it works and we deal with any pushback and ask for the order. So the sales call is an exercise in two parts.
One of the problems may be that the buyer themselves don’t fully understand how this solution will impact their business. They are working in their own little section, but the solution may have ramifications across the whole business. We need to get other section representatives involved too, if possible, because otherwise they could become blockers behind the wall and we don’t even know what their issues are, let alone be in a position to help them too.
There may be a number of benefits which our solution delivers, but some will have more potency for the buyer than others and we need to zero in on these. Presumably we will have a reasonable idea which ones will resonate more strongly than others, if we did a good job in the questioning stage in the first meeting. There will be a Primary Interest on the buying side, the greatest thing of most urgency and our benefits need to strongly address that aspect.
While the benefit is important of course, what about how they can apply that benefit in their business. Many salespeople fail to talk about the benefits at all and get stuck in the features explanation part of the discussion and don’t move to the next stage. These are usually the people who fail to sell very much. Even if some salespeople do get to the benefits stage, they pull up there, expecting the buyer to do all the work and discover for themselves how to apply the benefit in their business. That is our job. We need to have some reasonable knowledge gained about how their company works and about their business, to know how to tell the story of where our solution will make the difference for the buyer.
For example, let’s take a simple case of the plastic bottle of coffee which you can buy at a convenience store. There are other varieties of course, including canned coffee with a ring pull access to the beverage. Usually the weight of the two varieties are not that different, so the transportation weight burden factor is similar, so there is no great differentiation there. To have the buyer choose our product, we need to know if they are likely to consume the coffee over a period of time and if they will be doing that in different locations, from where they made the purchase.
The ring pull coffee can once opened cannot be resealed and basically must be consumed shortly after purchase. The benefit of the plastic container is it has a screw cap arrangement, which means we can consume the coffee anywhere we like and can transport it with us, without the risk of spilling any of the contents. So the feature is the screw cap and the benefit is the time convenience of the access, anywhere, anytime to our beverage. The composition of the coffee is important because taste is a big factor preference, but that is not the only benefit we need to consider. It has to taste good and be portable if the latter point is important for the buyer.
The application part is where we suggest they can buy the product quickly and keep moving fast, as they carry the bottle with them as they move around town and have instant access to the coffee, whenever they want. We need to tell a story here to have them see the scene in their mind’s eye. For example, “After purchasing our coffee with the resealable screw cap function, you don’t have to stop what you are doing to consume it right there and then, instead you can immediately head off to your next meeting without delay. After the meeting finishes you have been working hard, so you may be feeling a bit thirsty, so again no time is lost, as you can simply reach into your bag and pull out the bottle and drink the coffee wherever and wherever you like”.
In the case of our own product or solution, at this point we should now move to the next stage of the sales process and tell the story of a similar company, in the same industry (if possible), who bought the solution and explain how they used it inside their company and the results they achieved as a result. In the next stage, we next ask our trial close of “how does that sound so far?” to try to flush out any objections, so that we can deal with those and close the deal.
Benefits are crucial to get the deal done, but they need to brought to life through how they will work inside their company and where they have worked inside other companies. If we can do this using effective storytelling, we can make is much easier for the buyer to see how the solution will work in reality and make it easier for them to say “yes’.
A very common complaint from foreign bosses here in Japan is that their sales staff are over-servicing the Japanese buyer. Sometimes they are left to wonder who their staff are really working for – their company or the client’s company. I am sure there are many sales bosses based outside Japan thinking, “that is the type of problem I would like to have with my sales crew”. When we travel out of Japan and we are exposed to service in Western countries, there is always such a negative contrast with Japan. For the most part we are interacting with the service industry in airports, hotels, restaurants and shops. We will have to draw on our memory of what the B2B service standards were like, before we got to Japan to recall what the proper comparison should be.
American B2C service is the outlier, because it is so strongly driven by their tipping culture, which doesn’t really apply that much in the rest of the world, where service industry staff are properly remunerated through their salaries. Australia is a better comparison, because we have a similar non-tipping culture to Japan. I was down there attending a funeral for my relative recently and staying at a city Hotel, when the valet parking young guy scratched my rental car. Interestingly he didn’t make a bee line for me to immediately apologise. In Japan that would be unthinkable. He did eventually apologise, but the timing was too slow from my Japan trained point of view. His manager took over and organised the insurance companies to get to work and he also eliminated the valet parking charges for my stay. That would be a basic response and if that had been Japan, there would no doubt have been additional things they would have done to compensate me for the inconvenience. Here is the difference. In the West we are trained to think in terms of minimums of service, but Japan is trained to think in terms of maximums.
A big part of the over-servicing culture here is driven by the buyer’s expectations of what they regard as appropriate service levels. So we have the foreign minimums boss dealing with maximums Japanese sales staff and the divide is large. The Japanese staff also have a long-term view. Foreign bosses come and go, but customers are based here and are not leaving Dodge for their next posting. I also found that when commissions are involved, staff are happy to get the deal and get paid, no matter how much overservicing is involved. The company may be the loser, but they are the winner and they are fine, because they are not seeing the total financial picture. The boss though is seeing all of this and isn’t happy with the productivity.
Bosses are also not happy with the amount of discounting that gets done to land the deal. It always seems the sale staff are too quick to drop the price and to give extras to get it all across the line. This is a tricky balance, because as the boss, you cannot be involved in the entrails of every deal and you have to trust your people to do their best to get the revenue in. Usually we are involved post-agreement remonstrating with sales staff on why they agreed to such over generous terms to get the business. By that time, it is way too late and you cannot go back to the client and renegotiate the deal if you want to keep the business.
So what is the answer here? Briefing staff on where the line of generosity is being breached is a good idea, but often they will just ignore that and go for the deal anyway. They know it is not a fire able offence. In a few years you will be gone anyway, so just hang in there and keep the relationship with the client, because that is way more valuable than the one with the current boss.
We can try and influence their behaviour by adjusting the commissions paid. You would think that salespeople who get paid by commission, would be really keen and highly motivated to defend the price as much as possible, to gain the highest commission but that is rarely the case in Japan. They prefer to keep the buyer happy and take the hit on their own remuneration. They see the long-term relationship as more beneficial for them and they prefer a deal, to no deal. Now this has a deleterious impact on the company revenues, but that isn’t their main concern.
If we are dealing with a chronic discounter, we may need a bit of shock therapy here. We can set a limit on how much they can discount the price and then adjust their commissions savagely, if they go beyond that red line. For example, say we said 15% was the red line and if they go above that, we will have them bear part of the pain. They are already down 15%, but we will also take another 15% off that lower figure, to further substantially reduce their commission.
Another approach would be to do more coaching on the value they provide, so that they can change the content of their communication with the buyer. Over time buyers beat up our salespeople on pricing and weaken their belief in the value of what they are providing. We need to resuscitate their clarity around the value they bring to the buyer and the way they convey that on the sales call. We presume they know the value they bring to the equation, but they can forget key components or not give them enough credence. We need to re-school them on the finer points of the value continuum.
The cultural predilection in Japan for over-servicing buyers isn’t going away anytime soon. We can try and reduce any negative impacts it may have, although we know we won’t be able to control it perfectly. There are a few levers we can exercise to limit the damage. We should look for where we can scale things back, rather than just resigning ourselves to this is the norm and we just have to accept it. Nothing is easy here and this is always going to be an ongoing challenge, so we have to be up to dealing with it.
Proprietary research findings, industry experience, thick product catalogues, detailed flyers were the currency of the salesperson, before the advent of the iPhone. The salesperson was an unknown quantity, so the only guarantee was their firm’s brand. The individual didn’t have a personal brand. Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007 and changed sales forever. That salesperson of old has been killed off by the technology. The client today has access to everything the salesperson has and they can access it from anywhere. In fact, they can know a lot about the salesperson before they ever meet and size them up accordingly.
Content marketing has flooded every field with knowledge, insight and experience. It is all free and literally within your grasp as you pick up your phone and plug into the internet. Someone I know here, picked up their phone, wrote this message and sent it out to their social media network – “Has anyone seen Mr. X, he owes me money?”. Mr. X had a business here in Tokyo and they were trying to sell us their services. Once upon a time the disgruntled businessperson could have told a few people about their issue with Mr. X. He could have easily evaded broad public scrutiny and kept going as before. Not now.
His name is mud and anytime someone checks him out, there will be a thick trail of brand destruction for all to see and so people will be wary of him. It is as easy as picking up your iPhone. The same thing can happen to any of us. If we are not doing the right thing by how we serve our clients, then public purview will be close behind. The well will be poisoned for other potential deals.
Another person I know here had a business dispute with the seller of a company they bought. The post deal elements became acrimonious and was waged in the Court of Public Opinion, courtesy of the internet as well as in the legal courts. They told me that subsequent to this issue going out to the internet, they had a lot of trouble attracting business partners, investors and buyers for their businesses. Research thanks to the mobile phone has become instant, cheap, easy and in some cases deadly.
On the flip side what positive things can clients learn about you before you meet? I was introduced to an executive of a major firm here in Japan over a lunch. The first thing the person said was ,”I checked you out on LinkedIn”. I was very cool, calm and collected when hearing that. This was because I have been making a constant effort that what he saw on LinkedIn would generate a specific reaction. What he said next was “it was very impressive” and that is what I wanted to make sure I heard. That praise from him was no accident, it was planned because anyone can check us our instantly with the minimum of effort thanks to Steve Jobs.
Knowing this, what are you doing about it? Your website can now house all of that information you used to have to carry around on client visits. You can access your own website and bring up information for the client using your phone and so don’t have to lug heavy items around anymore. That is very nice.
You can write articles on specialised subjects and blast them out through the internet to the world. Potential clients will be able to sample your fare before they buy it, to understand if you are trustworthy or not. If what you are writing is high quality, then the buyer will see you in the same way, before you meet.
The buyer can see if you are a cleanskin or not. If someone is complaining about your integrity or honesty and the service you provided them, that is going to be a deal breaker with potential new clients. I always talk about we don’t want a sale. We want the re-order, because the psychology behind that is totally different to going after a single sale. The way you think about the buyer is different. You are trying to become a trusted partner for the long term, with tremendous repeat business and lots of farming going on and not just running around hunting all of the time.
When potential clients grab their phone to do a search on you, what will they find? Do you know what they will find? If you don’t, you should be checking regularly to make sure you are happy with what is out there about you. And you should do the search on your phone, not your computer laptop, because that is most likely the medium the buyer is going to be using. Clients can also quickly fact check what you are telling them as well, so we have to make sure we are always being honest with the buyer. Lying to buyers is so far beyond stupid, I don’t even want to discuss it.
Steve Jobs has handed us all a powerful truth finder in sales. It isn’t going away and will only become more intense. We have to find ways of making this work for us when selling, to open up new opportunities and vistas.
Knowing where to find potential clients is one of the core skills of salespeople. Yes, marketing drives activity and we have our networks, but we need to keep that sales funnel full. That means we need a healthy flow of new prospects to talk to. Where will these new buyers come from? Often we have to create them out of thin air. Cold calling has become so much more difficult with remote work, as our buyers are hiding out at home. They are protected by a steel wall of blockers making it impossible to get to them. In this case, we need to re-group and re-think how we need to go about connecting with potential clients.
Identifying the perfect client is a good way to start because this will mean we are only focused on buyers with the highest potential, rather than spraying our efforts everywhere without any great focus. Let’s look at some markers we can use to locate these ideal clients.
Company size
This could be the number of people or the size of the revenue. Some operations may be too small to worry about and others may to big. A very large client can often be a problem, because they have so many resources they may not need our help, particularly with regard to our provision of services.
Age bracket
The staff of the company may be a target for us and this may vary depending on the age range. Are they newbies who have just started and are in their twenties? Or are they seasoned staff on their thirties and forties.
Gender
Are we focused on a particular gender for our product or service? Some industries are very heavily weighted toward one gender over the other. What is your situation?
Years in business
The maturity of the business can make a difference. Are they a start up, thrusting and growing or a mature company heading toward a gradual decline? Are they in peak condition and thriving with substantial volumes of business and substantial war chests available to be spent growing the business even further?
Our Champion’s profile
We need a champion inside the company to push for us, but who would they be? Are we after a C-suite executive, a middle manager or maybe a very specialized technician?
How we found them
Nikkei (Japanese domestic companies) and Gaishikei (foreign multi-nationals) are quite distinct categories, requiring separate approaches. Does your offer work better with one, more than the other. Do you need rapid decision-making, in which case Gaishikei companies will be a better focus.
Profitability
Being profitable is a great indicator of the capacity to invest in your solution. Companies losing money or just breaking even, may love to buy what you sell, but they honestly cannot do it.
Recession proof
We are about to leap out of the frypan of Covid into the fire of a global recession, so which industries and sectors look like they can withstand that likelihood?
Product or service fan
We will manufacture fans of our solution and they are great supporters inside the buying organisation. They may not even be our direct contact or in a related section, but behind the scenes they are supportive.
Going through organisational change
Change forces new options and new perspectives. When everything is smooth sailing, it may be hard to get buyers to make a change of supply arrangements. There is nothing like a good crisis to spark an interest in improving the current situation and being open to new possibilities.
So when you are thinking about where to find good clients cast your eye over this list and remind yourself where they are hidden away.
The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離. Shu is to protect the traditional techniques, the basics, the fundamentals. Ha is to detach and break away from the tradition, to innovate and depart from our attachments to what we are doing. Ri is to transcend to a level where there is no self-consciousness of what we are doing, we make it our own, because we have absorbed it all and it is now part of us. We have this same notion in the West, but I don’t think we have come up with three words to describe it as the Japanese have done.
In sales we can see the process at work. When we get sales training, there are so many moving parts, so much sophistication and subtlety, it can be a bit overwhelming at first. We have to make sure we know our USPs, our unique selling propositions to differentiate ourselves from the great unwashed who represent our competitors. We need to know how to build the trust needed with the buyer. How do we open the conversation, how to bridge from one conversation to the next? How do we set the agenda for the meeting? How do we handle the questioning discovery component, deal with the pushback and ask for the order. There are a lot of elements in a sales process.
Clients are not helpful in this process. They will try and drag the conversation all over the place, away from our well plotted little sales track. In the process, at the end of the sale’s call, we realise we didn’t get certain key information and we have to go back and get it which is both a waste for everyone’s time and rather embarrassing. We also realise that our questions were too perfunctory and too superficial and didn't yield any of the gold we needed to convince this client that urgent action is needed on their part to buy our offering.
In the Shu stage, we have to memorise the steps we need in the sales process and keep moving along the continuum to make sure we get to a deal at the other end. As we get more sales calls done, our sales talk improves and we also begin to realise we can handle sales talks for a variety of buyers with their different personality styes and their different needs.
At a certain point, we are comfortable with the process and we enter the Ha stage where we are looking for improvements and innovations, because the sales world is super competitive. We may start experimenting with new approaches to clients, to see if we can increase our success ratio or if we can speed up the deal flow process. We might start adding in techniques we have studied from sales gurus which are for more advanced salespeople. There are so many variables in the sales process, it means the opportunity for innovation is almost unlimited. This whole frame only works for those salespeople who are trained.
The untrained don’t have a solid base off which to work and to elevate through innovation. They are doing idiosyncratic sales which they have cobbled together through a process of trial and error. Of course we can all do it this way, except that it is very wasteful of good opportunities and it takes a lot longer to become excellent in sales. Trained salespeople benefit from a broader perspective available to them to start innovating and trialling new approaches off an established base of techniques which already work.
In the Ri stage we don’t even feel there are stages anymore. The whole sales process becomes a smooth and seamless flow from one aspect to another, as we move clients along the railway track to an agreement to buy. When we get pushback such as “your price is too high” we don’t even blink. We are not having any mental conversation with ourselves about how should deal with this objection, because we are already dealing with it, without any conscious thought. It is as if our sales reflexes just kick in automatically and all the while we are relaxed and confident and these feelings are being flooded to the buyer.
When 100 people have told you your price is too high, you are not fazed at all. When you are trained you have a process for handing these types of objections and you just unleash the system on the buyer and it does all the work. This doesn't mean we become too relaxed and arrogant about our own skills. Naturally, every buyer and every situation is different and we need to taper our remarks accordingly.
So where would you locate yourself on this Shu-Ha-Ri journey in sales? One thing we cannot do is let the grass grow under our feet and believe we have plenty of time to move through the these three stages. Sales is unforgiving and It is in a constant make over. We need to always be out in front or we will be left behind. Business moves at the pace of sales being made, so the pressure to speed up that process up is immense.
Many salespeople contemplating this title would be flummoxed. They don’t have really good questions for the client because they don’t ask any questions whatsoever. They are losers who go straight into the detail, the nitty gritty of their solution. How do they know this is the right solution? They don’t worry about that, because they are delving into the product catalogue or the flyers for the micro detail of the solution. I can call them losers because they irritate me. They pollute our profession because they never study about how to become better in sales. Also, I will never hurt their feelings because they will never access my content.
We know there is a sales cycle which is neither mysterious nor complicated. We establish some rapport, move into questioning the buyer, suggest our solution, deal with any objections and ask for the order. Simple right? Maybe not. The questioning part is absolutely key. If we get this wrong then our solution will be rejected. There are a couple of things we need to be doing to make this work. I was reminded of one of them the other day when I failed to get the deal.
Like many salespeople, I get into a rhythm with my sales calls and ask the questions needed. I hear the key points and my mind races toward the best solution for the buyer. I am confident, sure this is what they need but I have cut a corner. I have shaved off a piece of the process, because I am arrogant about my own abilities and are forgetting some of the basics. I thought I clearly understood what this client wanted and duly put together a proposal, but she rejected it. I was shocked because I thought I had correctly parsed what she needed for this training for her team. When I reviewed my activity, I realised that while had her on the Zoom call, I neglected one step which proved to be a deal breaker. I was too sure of myself, which is why I didn’t run the solution by her right then and there to check what I was proposing was the right thing for her team. I assumed too much.
There are some key things in the questioning process which we should all remember to ask especially the 5 whys. What I mean is we keep drilling down by asking why of the answer. For example, in my case, the client says we want leadership training, but that is a pretty broad church with many alcoves and vaults. I need to ask why (1)? They reply that there is a communication problem between the middle managers and their teams. Why is there a communication problem (2)? Because the leaders are not properly skilled at leading. Why aren’t they properly skilled (3)? Because we have never trained them. Why haven’t they been trained (4)? Because we never understood it was needed. Why? (5). We didn’t see the need, we thought they were capable enough. Do you see how this works?
Another brilliant question is “why now”? Whenever a client tells us they have a problem, we should always ask this timing question, because it will help us to understand what is driving the organisation to take action. They might say Covid revealed the leadership ability gap of their leaders, in the example I used. They might say there is a new President or HQ has issued a mandate about this and they are rolling out the solution country by country or the competitors are taking our market share , or we have surplus funds at the end of the year we don’t want to hand back, etc. Knowing this helps us to establish their sense of urgency and commitment to take some action to fix the problem. Having a problem and actually doing anything about it are worlds apart.
Another object on the sale call is to ask a question which they have not considered. We want to get them thinking one of two things: “we haven’t thought about that” or “we haven’t prepared for that”. This is not easy, but is the mark of the professional in sales. Anyone can ask about simple questions about their current situation and where they want to be and try and build a solution around that. Getting the client to project into the future and see trouble aplenty, is the ideal outcome. We now move from being the salesperson to becoming their trusted advisor, flagging key issues they haven’t considered.
In my example, I could ask, “if this communication problem between your staff and their managers continues, there is a strong chance the engagement levels of the staff will go down and they will be open to recruiters encouraging them to leave and go work for your competitors. Given the declining population and no major immigration on the horizon, there is going to be a continuing huge problem regarding recruiting new staff. There is also a major disruption to the business whenever people leave and new people have to be trained. Have you factored these occurrences into your calculations about achieving this year’s targets?
The client is thinking about a simple leadership problem but we are talking about a business disruption problem through lack of retention of key people. They haven’t considered this possibility and it ramps up the urgency of fixing this issue right now, before they start losing people. It make us look like a genius to be pointing out this brewing issue for them, so that they can take actions to prevent it occurring.
Questioning buyers is basic yet critical, but beyond that being able to ask brilliant questions which drive action and underline urgency are operating at a higher level of sales professionalism. Is that the level you are operating at right now?
Buyers can smell fear and desperation on salespeople. When the sales funnel is sad and prospects are few, we panic. The client picks up on this and unconsciously they hesitate to work with us, because for them something doesn't feel right. We are suffering. We are reminded of the Sales Manager’s mantra, “don’t tell me about what you have sold in the past, tell me what deals you are doing today”. Sales is a moving feast where we have to constantly recreate our results every week and the boss pressure to perform is unrelenting. In these circumstances our confidence can take a battering and we are pushed over the edge into a savage downward spiral, rocketing toward sales oblivion. Here are four strategies to boost our self-confidence to get back on the bucking bronco that is the sales life.
We need to stop beating ourselves up when sales are not going well – that is the Sale’s Manager’s joy. We have to realise we cannot control currency rates, market movements, interest rates, wars, supply chain fiascos, pandemics, etc. We need to look at what we can control. In fact, we have perfect control over the most powerful weapon in sales – our time and how we use it. Once we make that decision to exercise control over what we do every minute of the day, we can start moving our mindset from one of deal poverty, to one of deal abundance.
We know what we need to be doing, but are we actually spending our days doing that? If we don’t have clients we need to get busy contacting previous clients where the trail has gone cold and find new clients. Remote working styes has created new barriers to contacting buyers and so we need to adjust what we were doing, to what we need to be doing now. We need to be searching for potential contacts through data banks, LinkedIn, our contacts in the market, the media - anywhere we can locate a name and then we need to call that person. Yes, we will run into blockers who answer the phone, but we need to leave messages, send items using mail which don’t look like spam and even turn up there to meet the buyer. We know our buyer avatar, their profile and so we can target new buyers who are similar and then make a concerted effort to meet them.
We have had deal successes, we have served clients extremely well and so we know we can do this. Our confidence takes a hammering though when things are not moving forward and in the process, we can forget our track record and all of the things we have learnt along the way. We need to dig into our past successes for reminders of what we did to be successful. The sales process is made of microscopic elements and it is a game of millimetres in terms of driving sales forward.
By focusing on those building blocks, we can make sure we are not cutting corners and are completing the right steps to get to a sales. Did we actually follow-up with that client? Was the follow-up fast enough, comprehensive enough, exciting enough, attractive enough? Let’s break down the steps and remind ourselves of what we were doing when we were harvesting deals and being successful, making good commissions and gaining confidence in ourselves. Go back and analyse what made you a deal maker. You have done it before and you can do it again.
Certainly push the envelope, but not with your reputation. Taking risks with your reputation is a one way ticket out of the sales profession. I am not talking about that. I am thinking about challenging new ways of doing things and tackling new ways of analysing where the business might be had. We tend to get into ruts and we get stuck in our thinking. We need to do a reboot of our perspectives about where the business might be gained.
We might need to re-allocate our time and try something new. Maybe we haven’t been doing enough research on the industry or the market and so our sales call conversation is not getting us anywhere. Time management is full of risks, if you get it wrong and aren’t working on the right things. I mentioned before about dusting off some tobikomi eigyo (door to door) sales techniques, which because of the time involved could be considered a risky use of our time, but maybe it is worth giving it a crack and just see what happens. Your competitors certainly won’t be rolling up unannounced to the client’s office looking for the buyer.
Salespeople are often terrible self-talkers. We get down on ourselves when things are not going well and our self-talk turns toxic. This confidence death spiral must be avoided at all costs. Once your self-talk talks you out of your ability to succeed in sales, you are done. Sales is hard enough when things are going okay, let alone when times are rough and tough.
We need to change our diet of what we put into our minds. We need to ramp up the motivational material, the self-belief gurus, the whole gamut of positive mind control. We must switch the words which come into our minds for the negative to the positive. When we notice a nasty negative descriptor suddenly appearing, we have to smash it to pieces and replace it with a positive word. We need to do that immediately and every time.
These four tools can help us reconstruct our self-confidence and change our fortunes. The best time to start was yesterday and the second best time is right now.
The client is always right. No they aren’t. We usually have more information about our offering than the buyer and are across the breadth of our range of solution in a way they can never be. We are interacting with a variety of buyers in the industry and the sector and are constantly picking up intelligence on what is working and what isn’t. We are not being driven by internal politicking, as ambitious rivals jockey for position. We have the client’s best interests at the forefront and firmly in our mind, because we have one goal for our business and that is getting the re-order. Clients however will have partial information, wrong information and will lack information, none of which disqualifies them from telling us their view of the world as they see it.
This can become very frustrating for salespeople. We are often setting ourselves up for frustration because we forget that the buyer isn't the same as us in terms of scope. We are expecting too much of them and when we don’t get it we are upset. We know the buyer but they forget and ask another company to supply them. They met us a while ago and that memory has disappeared. They just went to our competitor because it suited them to, but we absolutely don’t like that. We feel betrayed. Add these frustrations to the pressure cooker that is sales and tempers can be short or fraying.
I divide clients into two bundles – those I like and would want to make a friend and those I just do business with. The chemistry won’t be there with every client and we still need to get business done, so if the stars don’t align, so what, make the sales anyway. If we can turn the client into a friend, then that is better because we all spend so much time at work it makes sense to find people you like in that environment. If you are in sales then you had better be spending your days with buyers, if you want to get anywhere. It stands to reason some number of the buyers will become friends.
For the others, it will be a strictly professional relationship of supply and demand. Inside this group will be people you just don’t like as human beings. There will clients who are arrogant, rude, have short tempers, are unrealistically demanding and are a hand full. There are variations of this idea – some more colourful than others - but there is the “no idiots” rule in sales, which says who not to do business with. We effectively “fire the client” because we don’t want to deal with them.
On the path to firing them we will be doing our best to squeeze a deal out of the process. When trying to serve them we may be biting our tongues, holding our breath, counting to 30 in order not to explode, but the tension is palpable. Our degree of perseverance will depend a great deal on the health of our sales funnel. If we have numerous buyers in the funnel and the new buyers are constantly being refreshed, then we can be relaxed about firing a nasty client.
The problems arise when we are desperate and are not seeing much revenue coming down the pike. We tend to have to suck it up a lot more and somehow these nasty clients sense that and can become even more demanding and unreasonable, simply because they can. Power doesn't always sit well in the hands of certain individuals and the buyers always feel they have power in the relationship.
Where is the line between making the point to the client that what they want or what they are saying is not going to fly with our values and our situation and the start of an argument? This is often a hard one, because few of us are trained for this type of conflict. We are usually working off a trial and error formula, which can be the hard way to do it. Proper training would give us the needed edge to work out how to help the client understand this arrangement is not attractive to our company and we don’t want to do it, without getting into a massive bun fight with the buyer.
Arguing with the buyer isn’t effective. We should be looking for points of agreement rather than zooming into the pain points. We should be carefully educating the buyer on what they don’t know about the current state of the market or about the intricacies of our solution. We also want to keep in mind that idea of “coming back to fight again another day”. We don’t want to destroy the relationship just because we might not be able to find a middle ground today to do business together. Things change inside companies and markets and a “no” today can become a “yes” tomorrow, if things change sufficiently.
Sometimes the client’s ideas are not very good and what they want us to do won’t fix their problem. We might be tempted by getting a deal, any deal, but the relief is short and the pain is long in these cases. Naturally, when it doesn’t work we get the blame and the brand collateral damage. I believe it is always better to walk away for those types of deals which have potential brand damage written all over them.
In modern economies, asking the buyer questions to understand their needs would be considered the most basic skills of a salesperson. This isn’t happening as much as you would expect in technologically advanced, well educated, sophisticated Japan, the world’s third largest economy. In Japan, busy bosses or more experienced salespeople, will take the new salesperson with them on a couple of sales calls. End of the training. Going straight into the detail of the features of the solution is the mainstream technique here.
Should you adopt the same sales approach when trying to sell to Japanese buyers? If this is how they roll, then isn’t that the obvious way forward? Let’s explore what we need to know about how to be successful in selling to Japanese buyers.
What is different in the Japanese sales equation?
To get the decision accepted by the relevant divisions within the company, requires the outcomes to be substantially worthwhile for them to agree. Features won’t be enough, so we have to know what the needs are first, in order to match our solution and make it convincing to the buyer side.
That means asking questions first to understand their needs. In the West, we never even think of the process of asking permission to ask questions, because consultative sales is the accepted way of doing things. When dealing with Japanese clients, because of the status imbalance between seller and buyer, we have to ask for permission first.
Remember, they don’t know us and they may be reluctant to start sharing all the problems (dirty laundry) their firm has with a salesperson they met just two minutes ago and especially from a foreign salesperson with whom they feel zero cultural and linguistic similarity.
The “slow” part is a pain for foreign suppliers, because everything in the West is about speed to profit. Quarterly share performance as a basis for making investment decisions is ridiculous anywhere and Japanese buyers feel absolutely no time pressure to do anything. We might think the concept of suffering an “opportunity cost” by being too slow to move, is going to be convincing to get them to buy now. Don’t worry, many of us have tried it, but without great success. This idea is always trumped by a preference for risk free or low risk decision making.
Using sample orders or small scale commitments are the way forward to establish that trust. Don’t expect anything to happen fast and at scale. It may take a while to become accepted. If you ask for a small piece of their business to demonstrate your reliability, that is an easier concept to get pushed through the many layers of Japanese buyer decision-making hierarchy. Japanese buyers definitely prefer the Devil they know (your established competitors) to the Angel they don’t (that would be you), because it is less risky. You have to become familiar, but that takes time.
If you don’t have a long enough time horizon for the Japanese buyer, you are better off selling your solutions elsewhere, because you are the only one in a hurry or facing time pressure for results. Let me give you an example. The Toyota Prius car was launched in 1997 and did not make a profit until 2001. Losses for five years in a row. However, by 2009 it became the top selling car in Japan. How many foreign Boards and shareholders would be able to match that patience and acceptance of years of losses? How long will your bosses support you to crack the Japanese market or to make a sale to Japanese buyers located outside Japan?
As an aside, Toyota is busy researching Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel source, while everyone else is concentrating on advances in battery power. My prediction is Toyota will dominate the global Hydrogen fuelled vehicle market for heavy load transport. Let’s see if I am right.
Adjusting our expectations and time frames are a starting point for winning business in Japan. When we get a new sale, I will ask my salesperson, “when did we start talking to this client?” and the answer will often be “three or four years ago”. That is not uncommon. What this means though is you need a full sales buyer funnel to survive those years of slow decision making. Trying to speed things up by pushing your sales though the layers of internal decision making won’t work, because you will never meet the people involved. When they say, “we will think about it”, they are being honest, because of the collaborative decision-making process.
Be patient, start small, be consistent and to win, just keep going.
When you are told that “hope is not a strategy” you get the point. You also know that actually there is a fair bit of hope built into your strategy. Every sales organisation comes up with targets and often these are based on hope more than science. There is imperfect information floating around and we use this as the basis of our assumptions. There is incomplete data and we have to extrapolate based on those numbers. Things can change quickly and the ramifications can be completely unexpected. January 15th, 2020 was the first case of Covid in Japan. February 23rd, 2022 was the start of the war in Ukraine. You couldn’t predict these events and there is a huge amount of hope that both situations will resolve themselves and we can all get back to some version of normality.
We say things like, “let’s focus on what we can control”. That is jolly heart warming but it isn’t much help. There are numbers which have to be generated and these have to be produced regardless of external factors, most of which we cannot control. This whole ensemble of difficulties can be very discombobulating in sales. If we are set targets too high, we mentally check out and give up. We don't make any declarations to the boss that we have given up, but our activities are such that we are not doing all we can to get the numbers, because we don’t believe in the fairness of the process.
If you are the boss, the management of the sales operation gets more and more difficult in the work from home or hybrid arrangement. Keeping track of what people are up to gets harder. Our expectations have to be tempered by the external environment, be that Covid or the global downturn. The numbers get harder to reach. If we push too hard, people will quit and they will have little issue with finding another job, if they decide they don’t like this one. The whole process becomes more delicate and complex at the same time.
If we take a long hard look at our strategy and we realise there is a fair bit of hope built in there what do we do about it? Not every industry or sector is affected by Covid, the war in the Ukraine or a global downturn. Are there pockets of opportunity in certain spheres where they can still spend? The timing of things may be faster in some sectors than others. If we can get deals happening faster, then that helps a lot with getting to the targets. Often we just run out of time, because the speed of the deal flow has ground to a halt or has really slowed down.
Can we re-organise the sales team? We can create smaller teams, apply more supervision and have more roundtables, to share information and insights. In good times the team can be allowed to run around at will, because the numbers are being achieved. When things get more desperate and the numbers are not coming, we need to do more coaching and more checking. Often circumstances can outstrip the experience of certain members in the sales team. The Lehman Shock was back in 2008 and there will be team members who have had no direct experience of doing business during that meltdown environment. Anyone in sales under the age of thirty-six hasn’t suffered through a major downturn since Lehman. This is where the more experienced people become important because they have seen a version of what we are going through now, at some stage in the past and have experience of what to do.
We all have dead pools of clients who have lapsed. They were active but situations changed and they are no longer a client. They are a good place to start because they at least have some record of buying from us. We may still be an accredited supplier for them and the paperwork is already there to make the buying process that bit easier. Often the people will have changed, but the underlying issues may not have been completely solved or new issues have arisen and we have the solution they need.
We may have served one client but there will be other similar clients we have not had the chance to do business with. If we come across an issue in one industry it is often going to be a common issue with other companies in the same industry. If we find a problem for one client we need to look around at which other firms may have the same issues. For example a five star Hotel may be having trouble with retention. There is a strong chance other five star hotels are having the same problem. That means we should start contacting all the major hotels and see if that is the case.
Gradually we can replace hope with action and try to stimulate the sales process in that way. The key is to get started and to not just become immobilised because the hope aspect of your strategy is not working out.
Inertia is a powerful retardant to getting deals done in Japan. Either they already have a regular supplier or this is a new solution with which they have no experience and they don’t want to risk anything. Buying from you represents a number of changes which must take place on their side. Change equals risk in the Japanese buyer’s mind rather than opportunity. Doing nothing with the new solution is an easy decision. Sticking with the existing supplier is an easy decision. When we are trying to create a new client we must have the right mindset. If we are focused on getting a deal done then we will have trouble, because the whole process can be so frustrating and take such a long time. We are more inclined to give up altogether. If we are focused on the re-order, we will be in a better place mentally to do what is needed to get the deal done.
Speed is usually seen as a positive but not always in sales in Japan. Rushing into something which might blow up in your face, doesn’t enthuse the buyer to move things along at a brisk pace. As I like to remind myself, “the buyer in Japan is never on your schedule”. To get things moving a bit faster than otherwise, requires us to understand what is slowing down the process. We are usually talking to one section in the company but the post buying decision flow-ons will affect many sections within the organisation. Some will be much more affected than others and our job is to try and find out who that would be and what would be worrying them.
This is not that easy because we may never have the opportunity to meet that section and hear directly their concerns. Nevertheless, we need to ask our contacts for the lay of the land regarding who is pro and who is anti the new buying initiative. We can say, “I really appreciate all of your guidance and I understand that buying from us would be a new thing inside the company. I am sure there are many sections which would be directly impacted by making this change and based on your expert knowledge of the organisation, who would you say would be those most affected?”. The key at this point is to not dilute the power of the question by adding anything or by speaking. Don’t say anything and let them answer you.
After they have given you some hints on who will be most affected then we need to ask what would their particular concerns be? We can ask, “It is natural for the key sections you have nominated to take this change seriously and for them to investigate all angles involved. Often I have found that we have information which may not be known to these sections, which would change their perception of the ease of making the change. What would you say would be the major concerns of the ABC section?”. Again, we shut up and do not speak after asking the question.
It is important to keep digging. They may tell us some information about ABC section’s concerns, but we need to get more information. We should say, “Thank you for mentioning that. Apart from this concern can you think of other major hesitations which we may need to work on solving for them?”. It is often surprising that the key information doesn’t emerge, until we have dug down two or three levels. This makes sense though. The longer we give them to consider the question, the deeper they can go with their thinking, rather than just giving the first answer that pops into their mind, when we first bridge the subject. We should do the same for the other key sections which are most likely to be impacted by the change we are proposing.
At this point, we have built up a picture of the obstacles facing us to get this deal across the line and also regarding what we need to do to turn this deal into constant re-orders. The process will have revealed points of friction on their side to make the necessary new arrangements. We have to think about what we can do to remove or reduce those friction points. Perhaps we have to slow the process down to allow them the required time to make the adjustments. Maybe we have to eliminate some aspects of the deal in the first run and see if we can add these back in later, once things settle down. Maybe we have to adjust the payments schedule to fit in with their budgeting cycle or their current cash flow situation. Maybe we need to run a pilot test to help them fully understand what they need to do to make this solution work best for them. This is a low risk formula and once the option is proven, then ramping up the delivery of the solution gets faster and easier.
We are all creatures of habit and we prefer the Devil we know to the Angel we don’t. In the sales context we are the Angel they don’t know and we have to work out how we can make the change we are proposing as friction free as possible by fully understanding what they need to go through to implement it. To do this we need to be full professionals and ask intelligent, carefully constructed questions to unearth the information we will need. There are no shortcuts, it takes time and it is necessary if we are going to create the opportunity to get the re-orders.
Depending on your industry, times have been tough in sales. We see the Japanese Government trying to resuscitate the inbound tourism industry to increase jobs and revenues to gather more tax income. They are about to open the economy right up to stimulate business. Domestic tourism is worth about three times as much as foreign tourism contributes to the economy. There is a big kick opportunity there once Covid allows us all to travel more freely within Japan. Capital expenditures have been put on hold, as companies worry about the future of the economy. The weak currency self-selects winners and losers, so consumer spending may be impinged by inflation concerns. The kick on effect is felt across a broad range of businesses and so this may be an impediment to them opening up their purses and spending. Worries about a pending global recession driven by the war in Ukraine, energy shortfalls and supply chain issues, may also have company leaders thinking they shouldn’t start spending again and just wait and see.
Very few salespeople have been super busy over the last couple of years and most have been living a hard scrabble to produce results. This impacts our positivity and mental state about what is possible. We have also seen the numbers of active clients decrease and the volume of business deteriorate. Covid has shrunk our world and our mentality – we are mostly living small these days.
How do we adjust to a post-Covid world? Let’s be clear, the future isn’t great, as we will be alternating between bouts of the flu and Covid every year. Just like the flu, Covid will be killing off older people every year and weeks of productive work will be lost as people have to recover. Our clients will be cautious about any emergence from Covid and will be expecting the worst to happen. They have been conditioned to live small too.
We can expect that there will be pockets of client spending available to us as salespeople and our key job is going to be to identity these areas and concentrate efforts there. If a particular firm is emerging from Covid, we can expect that other firms in that same industry are doing the same thing and we need to get busy contacting as many of them as possible. Some won’t be ready but some will be ready to buy. We won’t know until we contact them. We have to keep in mind that we want to be the one having the conversation with them rather than our competitors. We will need to keep in close touch with them because at a certain point, a bell will ring and they will be back in the game. We just won’t know when that decision has been made internally, so we have to keep in touch and keep gauging the timing.
Having had no end of trouble getting hold of buyers over Covid, as everyone moved home and being blunted by the gatekeepers to the decision makers, a lot of salespeople are now gun shy about calling firms. They are sick of rejection and being treated like a nuisance, an irritant. The point to keep in mind is that this is exactly how your rivals are feeling too. If you make the effort, gird your loins and pick up the phone and call, you will have a jump on the competition. That bell will ring and it is key that we are the one to hear it and get the business, when the client is ready to come out of their cave and reengage with the world.
The prospecting muscle has atrophied during Covid and now is the time to get working on strengthening it again. Better to go early than to go late.
There will be a lot of changes inside firms as well. No one goes through a global pandemic unscathed. Whatever was the reality before, there will be changes and we need to understand how the buyer sees the world going forward. What are the new problems they are facing? Has there been any changes in how decisions are made? Have certain key people left the firm, especially our previous champion? Where did they go and can we help them in their new company? What are the firm’s immediate priorities? Is there capital to invest in expansion or recovery? Do we have the right solutions for this new world or are we imagining we just go back to how it used to be?
A lot of our assumptions and corporate intelligence may now be irrelevant, so we have to go back to basic questioning of buyers about what they now need, almost like starting over again. Have we been able to work on strengthening the value line-up of what we provide. Our workload may have declined during Covid, thereby freeing up time to work on creating added value for when it was time to re-join the battle. Did you manage that? Is there still some time to allocate resources now before things heat up again? Perhaps your early interactions with previously inactive clients have recently yielded up some hints on things you should start working on to add to your line-up of solutions. Can you take some of the friction out of your processes for your buyers? Can you increase prices by adding some extras which have perceived value when judged by the clients?
If we approach things with no presumptions, an open mind and reinvigorated flexibility, we will be able to handle whatever the market throws at us. I personally will be very happy to be back in the mud and blood of chaos and battle duking it out with my rivals for the client’s business. Let me at them!
In modern economies, asking the buyer questions to understand their needs would be considered the most basic of the basic skills of a salesperson. This isn’t happening as much as you would expect in Japan, the world’s third largest economy. Most salespeople everywhere are untrained and are left to work it out for themselves. Japan has what they call OJT – On The Job Training - as the main teaching method. In this busy boss life, that is now reduced down to taking the new salesperson with them on a couple of sales calls and then the salesperson is on their own. If your boss is an ace salesperson, then this sounds reasonable. If only that were the case.
From our real world research across the classes we run reaching sales to Japanese employees and my own buyer experiences, it is obvious the skillset to ask the buyer questions hasn’t been well developed. Pitching the features is the mainstream technique. That lazy shotgun approach makes little sense though, so why aren’t Japanese salespeople asking the buyer questions, to be able to zero in on their needs?
Here are six reasons why Japanese salespeople prefer to pitch.
God doesn’t tolerate pesky salespeople asking questions, so the pitch seems safer. In Japan, relatively low ranking people in very large companies, are treated as superior by the Presidents of much smaller firms. Social hierarchy is very defined here by both the size of the company and the rank of the individual. That is why business cards are so predominant – you need to work out the stranger’s rank to know how to deal with them. The buyer always outranks the seller. The salesperson’s role is to pitch their offer. The buyer’s role is to shred it in order to eliminate all risk. No questions brooked by God in the sale. Therefore salespeople are in no social position to be asking anything of the buyer God.
There is the fear that the salesperson might ask a question which the buyer can’t answer and the buyer will lose face. Often senior people don’t have all the details and embarrassment may engender. This may ensure that the salesperson will never do any business with that company ever again.
I have directly experienced this myself. We deal with a lot of HR people who are looking for training on behalf of line managers. When I asked the HR team my very first needs based question, they clearly had no clue. An ominous silence followed and in Japan silences, unnervingly, can be very long. Then they suddenly said they wanted my “pitch”. Actually all they were doing was collecting the vendor prices. I innocently asked if I could talk directly to the line manager. I was bundled straight out the door. Goodbye to that sale.
Our sales questions are quite specific. What are your problems, what is not working, where are you failing, why aren’t you fixing it, etc. The whole culture here survives through vagueness. Being indirect is a form of polite intercourse. Ambiguous conversation is a well refined art in Japan. Asking direct, pointed questions upsets the social harmony, so this makes the pitch the better choice.
Asking a potentially dumb question creates fear. It indicates a lack of professionalism or a lesser intellect. You have to know the industry well to hone in on pertinent issues. Failure to ask smart questions says you are clueless and not to be taken seriously. Better to keep that dirty little secret to yourself, by pitching and not asking any questions.
Asking about the current results, the firm’s plans, strategies, pricing margins, delivery quantities, activities, average sales per head, etc., is highly confidential. They have only just met you and yet you want all of this sensitive information?
Salespeople think their job is to go through the catalogue or the flyers etc., explain all of the feature details and then the client will decide if they are interested. They are here to tell the client everything about the solution and answer any questions they may have. Therefore, according to this logic, there is no need to ask any questions.
Doing something different in Japan is greeted with suspicion. If all of your colleagues and bosses are pitchfest acolytes, you need to fit in. Each generation keeps shovelling poor approaches down the line to the next generation. Salespeople are never taught how to ask permission from the buyer to launch forth with their questions. Simply tell God about the results you have produced for other clients and say, “Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure, but in order for me to know if it is possible or not, may I ask you a few questions?”. So easy, just try it.
In Japan, there is a major imbalance in power between buyer and seller. That is not the way to think about it though. When you have the cure for cancer, who has the balance of power, the seller or the buyer? We have to think of our business in the same way. We have the business equivalent solution for the cancer impacting the buyer’s company. Our job is not to pitch, because that methodology is so inefficient. We are all time poor, so we have to get the solution to the buyer as fast as possible to help them.
I would guess there are a lot of pitchpeople around the world. We don’t have much time with buyers, so we all have to make the most of the opportunity and not waste it trialing hit and miss alternatives, hoping we hit gold. Hope is not a strategy. Be a professional, ask permission to ask questions, next find out what they need and then supply it. No pitching required.
Usually, we meet our contact in the company through a cold call, a referral or networking and we sit down and have a talk about the needs of the organisation. If we are doing a professional job, we will have explained what we do, mentioned a client we have done work for and the success they achieved as a result. We will then suggest that “maybe” we could do the same for this company too, but in order to know if that is possible or not, we ask if we can ask a few questions. Once we have received their permission to ask questions, we can go deep on the issues facing the company and they will tell us.
In the next stage, we will start suggesting solutions which are matched to their needs or we will say we are not a match and go and find a client who is. At this point it sometimes comes out that our contact in the company is all in favour of fixing the issue, but they are being hamstrung by others in the organisation. These could be line managers or senior executives further up the chain.
In Japanese organisations there will be multiple decision-makers. Each division which will be impacted by the buying decision will conduct their own due diligence to see what it will mean for them. As each Section Head clears the decision, they will put their seal on the proposal document and it will move up to the next level, to the Division Head. The Executive committee will review the Division Heads approval of the decision and then it becomes official and things can start happening.
That is a tremendous number of people involved in the decision and the person we are sitting across from is just one individual in the chain of command, who may or may not even have the ability to put their seal on the piece of paper. As salespeople, we may never meet anyone else inside the decision-making system and we rely on this person to help us steer agreement through the machine.
The trust build with our contact that we are sincere about helping them is critical. We have to make sure they are confident we are credible and reliable to do what we say we are going to do. If things go badly, it makes them look bad and may negatively impact their movement upwards within the organisation.
I was selling mobile telephone antennas steel towers in Japan, being sourced from Australia. We were able to install them for 30% of what the local suppliers were able to offer. It was a first for imported steel towers, so there was a lot of complication. The company I was selling to was a joint venture and the people came from various shareholding companies into the organisation. Some of them brought their preferred local suppliers with them, so it was a battle to get the Australia towers through the decision making process.
My champions fought hard and managed to get the deal done. This was even in the face of the local supplier dango or cartel group banding together to try to undercut the import pricing to destroy the deal. Their idea was to drive the Australian suppliers out of the market, so they could put the prices back up to what they were before. Fortunately, the buyer saw through this strategy and wanted to permanently change the supply chain to substantially reduce the cost.
The first few deliveries went well, until the Australian side thought they would switch production to Malaysia to save money. Then the quality problems started and in the end the business stopped completely and the Australian were out of the market forever.
It had a negative impact on my champions inside the company who had fought so hard for the deal. I saw that promising business end and my relationship with my champions was in tatters. It taught me a valuable lesson about mutual responsibilities and reputation. On our side, we had let everyone down and the trust was destroyed. My name was mud.
When we are dealing with the contact inside the company, who we are hoping to make our champion to help us navigate this deal through the buyer organisation to get an agreement, we have to keep in mind the risk we are bringing to them. My champion inside the buyer organisation got burnt when supply failed to meet expectations and the contract was torn up. I don’t know how they finally fared, because they wouldn’t talk to me anymore, which I took for a very, very bad sign.
It wasn’t my decision to use Malaysia for production but that is not how the champion looks at it. I am their guy and I failed them, so in their eyes, I bear all the responsibility for this deal and how it eventuates. I still feel bad about what happened, because we are talking about people’s careers here.
The point is we need to find our champion, protect them, take care of them and make this deal a winner for them within their own organisation. If we start with this in mind, we will make the right decisions and our personal brand will also be protected in the marketplace.
I am a big fan of Victor Antonio who is a sales coach in America. He has an excellent show called the Sales Influence Podcast. In a recent episode I listened to he had some very interesting statistics. According to US research, salespeople, on average, close about 40% of the deals they are seeking. That means they lost 60% but what happened to that group who didn’t buy? The shocking component of this research was the fact that only 20% went with a rival offer in preference to our genius effort. That leaves 40% who didn’t buy from us and didn’t buy from the competition, so what were they doing?
Victor mentioned that of that 40%, 10% didn't move because the price scared the hell out of them and they became immobile, frozen in the headlights. Okay, then we still have another 30%, which is a big group of buyers who didn’t take any action and the reason wasn’t related to the price we offered. So what was the issue?
Victor believes it was a matter of the value we were able to offer wasn’t attractive enough for them to move. Price and value, as we all know, are not the same thing. The buyer needed to feel the size of the gain they would receive was worth it, based on how they measured the gain. That gain could be measured in a number of ways. It could be reducing costs, speeding up delivery times for their solution, integrating with another solutions they already have, making themselves more attractive to their buyers, etc.
One of the problems with Japanese sales teams is that they have no clue about what the client values. How could that be? Simple. They don’t ask questions or if they do, they don’t ask the right questions. We teach sales to employees of Japanese companies who want to improve their sales results. When we get to the question design part, invariably, it is a new concept for most of them. They have been taught to get straight into the nitty gritty of the spec, the data, the features of their solution. They are throwing mud up against a wall and trying to work out which bits will stick.
It is so ridiculous, you wonder why on earth they would do it in such an ineffective way. Part of the reason is that professional sales is not well established in Japan and most of the instruction is done with OJT or On the Job training. That is the blind helpfully leading the blind.
For those who at least understand you need to be questioning the buyer to find out what they need, their questioning can be very shallow. They miss the hints, the flags, the arrows that points to “dig here” for the gold. They just skip on to the next question without finding out what the buyer needs at a deeper level. This is where the “what do you consider value” conversation is required.
Victor flagged another element, which was about the degree of perceived effort required to implement the solution we are recommending. I teach in a non-profit programme called the Japan Market Expansion Competition, where teams of young people from different companies work on a client’s business and come up with a business plan for them, as part of the competition. I was also a paying client of this JMEC programme but I threw the plan away. The reason was just this issue of the effort we would have needed to implement the plan, wasn’t proportionate to the gains we would have made.
Our counterparts in companies are the HR department and we notice that in most cases they seem overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to get through for the number of people allocated to do it. They are often very uninterested in doing things to help their companies do better, because they know the amount of work they will have to do, will go up dramatically.
Another friction point can be the amount of internal coordination needed to adapt to a new supplier. We know that the ringi seido system of all related divisions signing off before the change is made, requires a lot of agreement internally. It may be that our offering isn’t sufficiently compelling to overcome that internal friction stopping the deal from progressing.
When we are presenting the solution we can often get caught up in features, benefits, application of the benefits and evidence and forget about the issue of friction becalming the progress through the labyrinthian corridors of internal decision making. We need to ask, “if you are able to implement our solution, are there any likely friction points we need to consider, in order to reduce or remove potential issues?”. They may not be willing to share that amount of information in the first meeting, but we should keep asking the question on subsequent calls, in order to find out what we need to do to tweak our suggestion to get through the internal barriers.
If we can reflect on the deals that didn't happen, we may be able to better prepare ourselves for future sales calls. We can head off rejection possibilities before they arise, by presupposing what is required on their side to see this deal come to fruition.
I had been busy, so setting this appointment had been difficult. Eventually, we found the day and time to meet. I asked for the address and the text note mentioned the building and I knew it well, so all good to go. Except when I arrived there, the entry registration desk people said there was no company of that name in the building. I checked my text note and sure enough, it specified this building. I did a quick search of the company name and found the right building, but now I was late. I texted the person I was meeting to explain why I would be a bit late. The person I was meeting called me, apologised and ten minutes later we finally got to meet.
Now getting your own office building address wrong when meeting the client is quite strange and as the subject of this conversation was going to be investing my money, the trust factor has just taken a big blow. Being a flexible Aussie, these types of small things don’t bother me particularly. I have messed up meeting appointments too myself. Getting a call at lunch asking where you are for the lunch with them, is always unnerving. It doesn't happen very often, but you feel really bad when it does happen. I have been guilty of forgetting a meeting too, so I am not one who can run around saying I am perfect. Nevertheless, I was curious about how they were going to recover from this debacle and try to rebuild the trust.
We had met once on Zoom and he had wanted to meet me in his office face to face. I get that because as a salesperson I prefer that too. Having made a big deal out of meeting in his office, I was a bit surprised to find that this was one of those executive floors, run by a company who specialises in providing high end space to companies who don’t have their own offices. The trust goes down again. Is this company solid enough? If they are solid enough why don’t they have their own office space? How big is this company? In this case, he needed to explain why they were in that executive floor and not in their own premises but there was no thought to mention it. He could have said their company policy is that they prefer to give value back to the customers through the lower fees they charge, rather than making a building landlord rich, by spending money on expensive lodgings. That explanation would make a lot of sense, because I know I am making my landlord rich leasing the entire fifth floor in my building. I would be able to identify with that logic, but again another trust building opportunity missed.
The rest of the rebuild attempt was perfunctory at best I would say. Apologising is a good start, but we have to do better than that. Forgetting your own building is inexplicable, but you have to explain it anyway. There is no point in trying to move on in this situation, because unless that trust is restored, there won’t be any business flowing from this meeting ever. He needed to use storytelling to flesh out that his mind had been preoccupied with an important meeting, where he was closing a huge deal in the first building I went to and somehow that preoccupation was so strong, at the time of his text reply to me, that without realising it, he had just mentioned the building by mistake. This will only get you there partially though and you need to do more.
At the very end of the meeting, he handed over his corporate brochure and information on the firm, without explaining any of it to me and just suggesting I read it for myself. He should have segued from his initial apology straight into extolling the virtues of the firm in order to re-establish credibility for his company. He was in a hole and he had to get himself out of it. Spending time at the start with the firm’s USPs – the unique selling proposition of the company was the better move. But he didn’t do that though, so an opportunity lost right there. He needed to walk me through the highlights of that corporate brochure and rebuild the trust. If the trust isn’t re-kindled, I am even going to bother reading the corporate brochure or will I just bin it, when I get back to my office?
During the meeting he made a point of differentiating the fee structure from a well known competitor, making the point that certain charges they were applying were unfair to the buyer. The only problem with that construct is that he used to work for that competitor for many years and so what about all of the clients he took care of, who were getting unfair treatment? In this case, he needed to make the point that it was company policy, he never agreed with it and that is why he left that employ, because he didn’t feel the way the customers were being treated was correct. That is understandable and acceptable. However just dissing the rival, to make the point you are more trustworthy than them, isn’t enough, because the fact remains that he still worked there and the implication is that he was happily gulling customers at that time, so why should he be trusted now? In this case he really needed to draw a line between the activities of the previous employer and where he works now and explain the different philosophy which applies in this firm.
We all screw up from time to time, but we have to have a mindset established and some protocols designated to rebuild the trust. We cannot give the same canned presentation we have given a thousand times before in these cases. We need to think on our feet and concentrate on doing everything we can think of to rebuild the trust and get out of the hole we have dug for ourselves. If we don’t succeed, then we have missed the chance to do the deal. We will have missed it forever, because this client will have mentally removed us from the list of possible companies to do business with. “Forever” is a long time, so we have to really work hard on the recovery.
Many years ago, my job was to help Australian companies crack the Japanese market. One of the elements of that job was explaining the Japanese business psyche to the Australian businesspeople targeting Nippon. As you might imagine this wasn’t an easy task, as the mindsets are so different. White colonisation of Australia started in the late 1700s and the first convicts and settlers arrived into a vast continent, without one permanent structure, bridge, road or port. Aboriginal life was nomadic. Hunt everything you can in the area around you, then pack everything up and move to the next location. You didn’t need modern infrastructure for that lifestyle.
The consequence has been that the culture built up amongst the early English settlers was very much one of “can do” and optimism that they could tame the heat, droughts, fires, cyclones and floods that are part and parcel of life in Australia. Six generations ago, my ancestors hacked their way through the bush by hand, to create fields for agriculture and to feed the cattle and sheep. If you couldn’t take it, you could always go back to Mother England.
Japan is a also country with no shortage of natural calamities. Earthquakes trigger fires in cities and wooden houses burn quickly. They also trigger tsunami and these can wipe out entire towns, as we have seen in 2011. Typhoons and floods destroy crops and building. Floods and landslides are common. My super wealthy, famous Japanese friend was walking his dog after heavy rain and a wall suddenly collapsed and killed him. Japan has volcanos as well and recently the well known Sakurajima volcano has had a major eruption. This tough environment is part and parcel of Japan and there is no Mother England to retreat to – this is it for the Japanese population. The mindset of the Japanese in my experience is one of the glass is half-empty and life is difficult.
When I was trying to explain the different attitude between the Aussie glass half full and the Japanese glass half empty approach, I found a useful comparison. I discovered a graph showing the degrees of business optimism in Australia spread over many years. Fundamentally the Aussies were positive and optimistic. Japan has regular tankan surveys of business optimism and fundamentally the Japanese scores are usually negative or very low in terms of positivity. When you compare the graphs, the results are strikingly different.
Historically, when a person working the land in Australia needed to replace an implement, there would be a six month turn around, as the sailing ship went off to Merry Old England and then sailed back with the replacement. In the interim, people became innovative and flexible about finding a solution. It created a “can do” mindset, because there was no choice. So having these problem solving, positive, “can do” Aussies convincing Japanese buyers to start relying on them was a huge job. I would show them the graph of how basically for the Japanese the glass was always half-empty and so the Aussies should curb their enthusiasm and approach the sale in a different way.
This is a generalisation and it doesn’t make it any less true, but Australia is a country of creating things out of nothing and finding solutions and Japan is more one of caution. Once you understand that the Japanese are not expecting anything spectacular to happen and are more concerned about things going horribly wrong, then you focus on reducing risk, rather than trumpeting your capability and your successes. This is where track record, data and “smarts” about doing business in Japan come in.
Japan is a graveyard for MVP (Minimum Viable Product) launches. The product has to be working extremely well, with no defects or problems. If it has any of these issues, the situation becomes problematic very quickly. Similarly, early adopters in business are a small crowd here. Basically, in business, nobody wants to go first. “You trial it, we will watch very, very carefully and if it doesn't blow up, we may take a look at it” is the usual ethos. Note the word “may”, because even if it goes well, they may not take any action. You don’t get into trouble in a Japanese company for not being a path finder. Steady as she goes is preferred to anything smacking of risk taking.
When things go wrong in Australia, then the suppler gets to work to fix it and if some money needs to change hands as a result, then it gets done and everyone moves forward. In Japan, you have to fix it, but that isn’t where it ends. You have to head around there to apologise in person, bearing gifts and expect to be lambasted for your poor reliability and shoddy work. You also have to have forensic detail concerning why this problem occurred in the first place and a detailed, clear plan of making sure it never happens again. Even then you may be removed as a supplier, especially so if you are not genuinely contrite and authentic in your remorse, for having caused the buyer problems. Never forget, your buyer has their own buyers. If your problem got shared with their part of the food chain, then you have endangered their trust with their own clients. This is the most disgraceful and egregious error you can make for any Japanese company who values their reputation and they all value their reputation.
Approach the deal with a solid understanding the Japanese side isn’t going to get excited about your widget and that they are world champion sceptics. Emphasise the track record, safeguards, measurement systems, quality control and the worst case scenario plan of action. Expect to start small, in order to prove what you say is true. Keep in mind that apart from you, no one is in a hurry to do the deal and so adjust your expectations accordingly
“Out of the frying pan into the fire”, seems to be an appropriate descriptor for where we are now. We have been battered by Covid, or at least many of us have had that unpleasant experience, but now everyone, even those who sailed through Covid, are about to get swept up in to the next recession. Inflation, rising interest rates, supply chain turmoil, energy supplies being weaponised, the list is long and depressing. Japan relies on foreign markets and if the USA has a sniffle, Japan catches a cold is another old idea. So what happens in sales if we find ourselves getting daily cases of covid deaths and infections under control through vaccinations and herd immunity and yet are now in a global recession?
Here are some things to think about.
Covid may have wiped out some of your rivals. I couldn’t believe that the Heichinrou Chinese restaurant in Yokohama closed down in May. It has been serving customers since 1884 and now is gone. For the other Chinese restaurants who are still in operation in China Town they have seen a major competitor vanquished. The other businesses are still operating and so they have buying needs. In fact, they may have an uptake in customers who cannot go to Heichinrou anymore and so their sales may pick up. It is a sad day when legendary business names fall, particularly in Japan where corporate longevity is treasured, but that is the capitalist system. Maybe your rivals are not extinguished entirely but they may be wounded. They may have fired staff to reduce costs and so their scope of capacity has diminished. They cannot see as many potential clients as before, but maybe you can see them, because you toughed it out and kept your crew together.
Recessions are uneven phenomenon. Some industries are hit harder than others. Covid hit tourism, training and hospitality particularly hard, but other industries sailed through the pandemic with barely a flesh wound. The recession will impact certain industries more than others and so it is useful to identify which of those industries will still have the capability to buy. Unlike a global pandemic, most of us have seen recessions before, so we will have some idea which businesses we should concentrate on and which we should avoid worrying about. We will also have probably experienced inflation before too and the ramifications that has on your industry. Look back at what happened in the past for useful lessons on what to expect this time around.
In our sales training, we use a matrix which aligns your existing buyers with your products and services. It is always shocking to realise you are only supplying some clients with a very narrow band of offerings. It reminds you that they have multiple needs but you are not servicing them. Maybe you were unable to gain entry before, because the incumbent was so strongly positioned, however Covid may have changed that power balance and now is the time to suggest other solutions from your line-up. Existing clients know you well, they trust you, they will take your call, so you don’t have to navigate your way through the serried ferocious gatekeepers to get to the buyer.
Existing clients can become past clients quite easily. In our case, the HR Director changes and next thing you know, you are out on the street and they have replaced you with their favoured suppliers. During Covid perhaps some of the line managers have left the company or moved to other sections and maybe there is some nice new buyer who comes to the conversation with an open mind and no baggage. Perhaps the gate keeper is still being a barrier, but at least if you have dealt with that company before, they may be willing to take a message from you, even if they won’t transfer your call. You could try and bypass them altogether by sending some mail to the new person or at least to the position most relevant to your business. The beauty of this is that the same gatekeeper who won’t transfer the call, will diligently walk over to the manager’s desk and drop your parcel on their table. They will open it up at some point and they may decide that you have what they need and be open to talking about reactivating business with you.
It works in your favour sometimes too. That nice buyer you have built a strong relationship with, is now in a similar role in another company and they realise you have the solution they need. If you haven’t found where they went, now might be a good time to do so. LinkedIn only has about two million followers in Japan, so the chances you can track them on LinkedIn if they are working for a Japanese very domestic company are slim. Often if you call and ask for them, the person taking the call will tell you they have left. If you are lucky, they may be able to tell you where there have gone.
The Game of Thrones character Petyr Baelish noted that “chaos is a ladder” and pandemics and recessions are chaotic. It is usually more like snakes and ladders though and sometimes you are lifted up and at other times you are pushed down. Research past recessions and look for which ladders are likely to be pointing up. Get closer to existing clients and see if there are additional services or goods you can supply. For those in the “until recently existing clients” category see if you can rekindle some flame from the ashes of the fire.
A miraculous thing often happens when I am meeting clients for the first time. We have had our meeting, I am closing up my organiser where I have been taking my notes, I am getting ready to leave, when they will drop some major insight or important piece of information on me. It is always a bit fraught because the meeting has obviously ended, I am already packed up and I cannot easily unpack the organiser and start making additional notes. I have to wait until I am out of sight to then grab that vital titbit or garnish they have added and record it before I forget it.
I have come to realise that the way I run the meeting isn’t allowing for these opportunities. Naturally, I am running the meeting rather than the client. I have the navigation in mind. I know where we have to get to and how we will get there. It revolves around me directing the action, because that is my job in sales.
Asking intelligent questions and listening carefully for the answers is the sales life. Many salespeople reading this will have no idea what I am talking about. They think the job is to do all of the talking, batter the buyer with data and information and through force of will, wrestle the buyer to the ground and get them to sign the order form. They are pitch people not salespeople and there is a vast difference between the two.
In the course of asking questions, I am searching for opportunities to ask something in a way that stops the buyer in their tracks. I want them mentally reeling back and thinking, “I haven’t thought about that”, or “I haven’t prepared for that”. I want to bring them to a point of realisation that if they don’t buy my solution, life will be grim, the business will suffer, the future looks bad, etc. Now I could just tell them all of these things as a statement but that is not effective. If I make these statements, the buyer is thinking, “well of course he would say that, he is trying to sell me something”. Instead, I want to ask a question in such a way in which the buyer has to agree with the proposition. When the buyer accepts the idea, they are saying it and so it is true.
I might say something like, “If there was a way to make sure your key people are not going to be poached by the current horde of ravenous recruiters who are constantly scouring firms like yours for bodies to move to your competitors, to collect their 40% first year salary fee, would that help to keep your business from instability?”. Perhaps this client wasn’t aware that recruiters were getting paid so much for lifting people out of companies like theirs or that there was so much of this poaching going on. Maybe they were aware, but they hadn’t concentrated on the problem until I brought it up. I am purposely using highly evocative language, drawing word pictures of disaster, doom and destruction: “poached”, “horde”, “ravenous”, “scouring”, “competitors”, “40% fee”, “instability”. The question is also framed in a way in which the only logical answer is “Yes”.
As professional salespeople we go through the process of asking questions about where they are now and where they want to be, to gauge the distance between the two to see if there is a possibility of the client taking immediate action. If they think they can get from point A to point B under their own steam, then we have no urgency in play and we won’t do a deal today. We are looking for what changes need to happen to get from point A to Point B and what is possibly blocking the path. Usually, we have what they need to clear that blockage and help them make it to where they want to be and we can do it faster and cheaper than they can do on their own. Given a 100 years, anyone can get to the goal, which is why we always emphasise the time it takes to get there and the consequent opportunity cost of unnecessarily waiting. We also want to know what all of this means for them personally in career terms. If we solve the issue, how will this help them inside the company. Even if they don’t proffer an immediate answer, we get them thinking about their own self interest and subtly make the point we are here to help them in that endeavour.
In Japan, the chances are strong that we will need to come back to them with the details of the solution for them and there will be another meeting required. This is the point where we may be tempted to pack up and head out the door. Before we do that, we should just pause and wait a moment to see if they are going to add anything additional to the conversation about what they need.
Remember we are experts at this. We are doing this questioning gig all day long, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. They are not experts in this field. They will only be in the receiving end of this occasionally, because most of the time they will be getting smashed with a pitch by our competitors. Consequently, their brain will be slowly digesting the essence of our message and processing it. Further things will occur to them, especially toward the very end of the meeting and we should allow for that.
So once you finish talking, just sit there for a moment, don’t say anything and just look at them in silence. Fifteen seconds is a very long pause and at this point we ask, “Is there anything else I should know before I come back to you with our proposal” and then shut up - don’t add, garnish or expand on what you have said. You will be surprised at what comes out when you do this. I must say I always am.
Have you ever paid for something that you found was very good and which you used for many years. You will have forgotten perhaps the price you originally paid, but you have not forgotten the quality you received. You always maintain a positive mindset about that company and the product or service. On the other hand, if you paid for something that didn’t deliver what you expected, over time, you will forget the exact amount of money involved, but you will always recall that the quality was poor and not acceptable. This is where salespeople make the mistake of concentrating on price and don’t make the effort to bolster the quality aspects of what they are supplying.
Not only does the item or service suffer from a negative association with poor quality, the salesperson’s personal brand is also damaged and maybe irrecoverably. When you find a bad deal, you make the determination to never buy from that supplier again and by extension from that person again. Not only that, you will also make a point of warning others not to deal with that person, because they are not reliable or they lack integrity or they are a rip off. In the market our reputation is everything and we cannot afford to allow it to be stained with ill repute.
Sometimes even good quality firms have problems. Machines, supply chains, people are not perfect so there can be problems. How these problems are addressed says everything about the integrity of who you are dealing with. No one likes people who want to justify the unjustifiable and you would think that no one would be that stupid, but you would be wrong. Yes, there are people who will try to slip out of any and all accountability and who run from taking any responsibility. We can all accept that things can go wrong, but what we want is for it to be fixed and fixed pronto. We will forget the price we paid, but we will remember that the problem was sorted out fast and with integrity and no arguments.
Given all of this logical discussion about price versus quality, the expectation would be that when salespeople talk to clients they are concentrating on quality to justify the price. Instead what do we get? The pitch. The salesperson goes into great detail about the specs for the widget but doesn’t take the time to align what the widget does with what the buyer wants. The latter is the quality conversation, not the rattling off of data and details about the weight, size, colour, etc of the widget. Getting the requirement to be matched by what is going to be supplied is the key aspect of providing a quality service.
How do we know what is required? No mysteries there – we simply ask. In Japan, this is where things break down. You might be thinking “wait a minute, how hard can it be to ask what they buyer wants in Japan?”. Surprisingly, salespeople here usually don’t ask questions, because they are busy going headlong into their pitch. One cultural twist is that the buyer has been trained to expect a pitch and every Japanese person has been trained since childhood to do what everyone else is doing and don’t stand out and be different. As the sales leader you can talk to you are blue in the face about what they are supposed to do, but if you don’t actually go with them to make sure they are asking questions, they won’t take that route. Conformity is a crushing weight in Japan and few are willing or able to buck its oppressive limitations.
Once you have asked the first key question, life gets better immediately. What is that key question? It is so simple – “may I ask you a few questions”. We not quite that simple, because you have to set it up. You need to talk about what it is you do, then mention some results you have had for similar clients, proffer that “maybe” you could do the same for this client. At this point you then say, “in order for me to know if that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked a few questions?”. There is a very tiny number of buyers who will dismiss this approach and ask for the pitch anyway. That cannot be helped and that comment is a red flag anyway, which tells you it is better to hightail it out of there and find a better client. The vast majority of clients will agree and then you can start aligning what you have with what they want and the whole quality dimension possibly starts to go straight up.
If we keep in mind that quality lingers in the mind of the buyer, then we are always better off to be concentrating on that. Prices fluctuate based on the market, supply chain, energy disruptions and currency movements, but the fundamental quality doesn’t fluctuate, unless there has been an unforeseen event. If we can align the price to justify the quality, then over time the memory of the price paid fades, but the recollection of the quality never goes away. When it comes to the time to do more business with you, the buyer is open to that because the track record is there and the trust has been built.
“In our business, at our size, we have to be the speedboat, we cannot be the oil tanker”, is a key mantra for my Franchise company. Why is that the case? I am the only non-Japanese in the firm and I was frustrated at the slow pace of decision-making and action taken by the team. Growing up in Western business, speed of decision-making and taking action are requirements drummed into you from any early age. Other foreign leaders in Japan reading our speed mantra will be sagely nodding their heads at this point, because their multi-national firms may be much larger in scale, but the issue is the same. It doesn’t seem to make sense why things are so slow here.
Japan Seems Efficient But Is It?
Japan seems very, very efficient. The famous Bullet Train, the Shinkansen, has an unbelievable record of being on time. The average delay of Shinkansen trains is less than one minute per year and there are over 3000 trains annually whistling by at speeds of over 230 kilometers per hour. Train commuters based outside Japan will be astonished at these numbers. There is also hardly any litter here, graffiti, drugs, guns or crime – the usual reality for many people living in big Western cities. Everything works and works well, so it seems the pinnacle of efficiency.
Inside companies though the picture is quite different. In the West, ambitious, thrusting employees trying to make a name for themselves and get promoted, are rapid fire machines. They are constantly pushing the boundaries, taking calculated risks and quite aware they are being judged on how quickly and well they can get things done. In Japan, none of these things are particularly important. Sprinting off a cliff is thought to be a bad idea in Japan. It is much better to take some time, cross every “T” and dot every “I” before moving work along. Speed often leads to mistakes being made and in Japan that is unacceptable.
Measure Three Times, Cut Once In Japan
This fear of making mistakes and errors has everyone measuring three times, before cutting once. Western CFOs are clever. They have worked out that there is a ratio of defects to profitability. The thinking is “if we accept a three percent error rate, even taking into account having to replace defective goods, the firm will make more money that trying to achieve a 100% no defect outcome”. This would get CEOs salivating at the thought of making more profit and the CFO will get a big bonus, but not in Japan. That CFO suggestion wouldn’t see the light of day here, because it is unthinkable.
Supreme attention to detail, no defects, no errors are rock solid values in Japan. To achieve these vaunted outcomes a lot of triple checking is required and that takes time. Getting things out the door pronto is not valued here if there are any mistakes in the process. The MVP or minimum viable product idea is a difficult concept here because the product has to work well and reliably or no one wants to buy it. Of course there is a love of kaizen here around making further incremental improvements, but the original release cannot have problems or the product is dead in the water.
Few Marriages Of Corporate Convenience In Japan
This safety first idea in also a mantra in decision-making. Japan is not as litigious as some Western countries, so the legal ramifications are not necessarily the prime driver. There is another fundamental concern which slows down business deal making. Western firms enjoy marriages of convenience. Two firms come together to make more money collectively, than they could individually and there is the thought that this situation is only as good and lasting as the immediate benefits. When these run out, then we all move on. Japan sees business marriages as monogamous, life long and full of mutual obligations. If the business partnership is a lifelong arrangement then a lot of due diligence has to be carried out before any agreements are struck. This is all understood within Japan and companies here know that Western companies operate off a much more short-term framework, so there is an inherent risk associated with dealing with non-Japanese firms.
The President Isn’t Necessarily The Key Decision-Maker
Unless it is a founder led company, usually the President is not the key decision-maker. The more junior people will conduct the due diligence and then the results go up and get homogenised across the various Divisions within the firm which will be affected by the decision to do business with this other firm. This homogenisation works well for milk but it can be a painfully slow process within the company decision-making structure. Imagine everyone is worried about taking any responsibility for this decision in case something goes wrong, so the triple checking is being repeated at every level. No one gets rewarded for speed, but the downside of mistakes is vast. There is an internal decision document called a ringisho ( 稟議書 )which collects the personal seals of each decision-maker, before it can progress to the senior ranks, where the actual rubber stamp formal decision will be taken.
In the West, when the buyer says “we will think about it”, this is usually an invitation, even a challenge, for salespeople to push harder on who will be involved in the decision, what things will be of major concern to them, how long will this take and how can we speed that process up. In Japan, they really do need to think about it and they would rather make decisions slowly, than repent at leisure for a bad choice. It is not uncommon for us to gain a new client who we met three years ago. I always tell my salespeople, “The buyer is never on your timetable”. Companies prefer to move at a glacial pace because slow is safe. What about all of the opportunity costs, the missed chances, the deals gone begging? No one cares particularly, so focus on patience and perseverance when dealing with Japan.
The ferocity of competitors depends on a number of factors. Are we in a commodity market where price and supply capacity determine all and it is a race to the bottom? Are we in a narrow band market where there are few suppliers and market share is hard to expand? Is our business exposed to currency swings? Are technological breakthroughs by rivals either going to deeply wound us or even drive us to the wall? Would a regulatory change up end our business relative to our competitors? Are deep pockets the key to winning in the market? If our rival poached our key people, would it be a disaster from which we may not be able to recover?
In most cases in business, we have tons of competitors and we have to duke it out in the market. Usually in these cases though there are also tons of potential buyers too. Usually, we are limited in our ability to access those buyers, relative to our competitor’s capacities. Your sales team of twenty is dwarfed by the rival’s ranks of hundreds of people able to fan out and meet more clients. New competitors are also often happy to enter into price destruction to buy market share. You have diligently worked the price up over many years and suddenly all of that effort is out the window, because Deep Pockets is undercutting you.
It is all a zero sum game of winners and losers and not much grey in the middle. What can we do. We need to build moats around our castle to help us withstand attack from outside. Now here is the irony. We need to be doing this before we have a problem. This is problematic because mentally we are thinking everything is fine. We are making money and doing well. In fact, we are pretty busy just keeping up with the demands from buyers. No moat construction spare capacity available.
That situation well describes my business in 2018-2019. We were surging, money was coming in like never before and life was looking pretty peachy, until January 10th, 2020. Japan’s first case of Covid-19 triggered cancellation after cancellation of scheduled training by our clients and things were suddenly looking grim. No moat either.
They say to never waste a good crisis, so we did that. For the last two and half years we have been working on building that moat, because now we have the time. A lot of time. We looked at how can we get out of the apple to apple comparisons and create a situation where it is a musk melon to apple comparison. For everyone based outside of Japan, musk melons are prohibitively expensive here and considered high value, warranting the yen required to buy one.
Maybe you have suddenly found some excess capacity thanks to Covid trying to destroy your industry. Don’t worry if you missed making the most of a good crisis, there will plenty coming down the pike in the future for you to work on. Even better, if you can actually get some moat building going on even if things looking pretty good. Remember, the good times roll, but they don’t keep rolling and one day you will need that moat. We had been doing virtual training delivery in Dale Carnegie since 2010. We toyed with the idea for Japan but the big bug bears were the money to translate the curriculum and the time and effort to train instructors and producers to do it. Guess what? We found the money and time to rectify that situation pretty snappily once we released we had to switch across to delivery online to save the business. In retrospect we should have done that whole online thing before Covid but there was no pressing urgency, so we dawdled.
What do you make the moat out of? Value is the obvious answer. Often though, we think we are already giving sufficient value. What more could we do? Because the life and death urgency isn’t upon us, we may need to do dedicate the time and do some serious brainstorming to identify where we can bring impact to our buyers, beyond the current configurations. It may mean adding value which has a cost and you don’t get directly compensated for it. Moats are expensive and that is the point. If they were cheap, you wouldn’t have a moat, because it would be easy for your rival to replicate what you are doing. There are internal costs which you can bear, in order to pass on some economic advantage to your buyers. Find them.
Musk melons at apple prices or slightly higher than apple prices is a serious moat. What is the equivalent in your business? What extras can you bring to the party? What services can you attach to physical items and vice versa? Where can you save the buyer money and time sustained at a high quality point, because they are usually the key things they are concerned about. Start the search now and get busy building that moat, because you can guarantee you will need it and generally the correlation of need and urgency is at the worst possible timing too.
In the good old days we could have multiple public personas in sales. We could be the professional salesperson, but that image was entirely separate to our family life. We could enjoy boozy celebrations and getting off our face with relative anonymity. We could accumulate customer complaints and deal with them in private. We could rely on word of mouth from within a limited circle of acquaintances. When we met people for the first time, they basically knew almost nothing about us, except the name of our company and any reputation that brand name had in the market.
Times have changed haven’t they. I was reminded of this fact recently. I host a weekly podcast called Japan’s Top Business Interviews where I interview leaders about one topic – leading in Japan. Through a mutual contact, a young man about to graduate from Temple University sought my advice on his speech at the Commencement Ceremony as the student body representative. In the course of that conversation with him he told me he had already chosen a prominent American insurance company to work for, entirely based of the interview I did with the CEO. Separately, two other leaders here mentioned to me that when they were interviewing people to work at their companies, the candidates mentioned they had listened to their interviews with me before the job interview. Potential clients reach out to me, because I am producing a prodigious amount of content spread across the six podcasts and three TV shows I release each week.
My point is never before have salespeople had the opportunity or the risk of having everything out there in social media about them, quite easily discoverable, before meeting with the prospective client. Buyers do check us out, in the same way that we check them out. Naturally they are looking for red flags and we are looking for commonalities, so that we can create solid connections with them.
This means we need to carefully curate our social media information and image. There are plenty of occasions where I have been out on the booze with mates or clients, but you won’t find any of that on social media. Of course, I can control a great deal of what goes up on social media, but when someone else is taking and uploading the photos of the debacle, it gets a bit trickier. Nevertheless, when we are in sales, we need to be very much aware that these occurrences will be seen by potential buyers. I suggest you be the demure one in the photo, while your colleagues in the shot are completely off their faces.
If buyers do a search on you, what will they find? If you don’t know, then I suggest you get busy and start doing a forensic analysis of what they will find. Better you know before they know. If they find nothing, that is a problem in itself. If they do find content, what will they discover about you? Originally, I was scared and doubtful of social media. In 2011, I attended the Dale Carnegie International Convention in San Diego and well known sales instructor Jeffrey Gitomor was a guest speaker. He told us he has 30,000 followers on Twitter and asked how many we had. I had zero because I wasn’t on any social media.
After I got back to Japan, I took my first tentative steps to build a social media profile and a following. Today I have 26,000 followers on LinkedIn. The good thing about a late start was I could be very scrupulous about what I posted. I avoid politics and religion as topics and stick to business content. I had previously been writing articles for the different Chamber of Commerce magazines, so I started uploading these to the social media.
In 2012, I started podcasting and also loaded that content up to social media. LinkedIn tells me I have 2700 articles posted on LinkedIn. These will be around 800 words long and will have been multi-purposed into audio and in some cases video, to extend the reach. Around 2018 I started releasing my own TV shows on YouTube. There is no swearing or bad language in any of these posts or shows, despite how popular this has become. Am I a prude? No, I am a typical Aussie male with a fulsome vocabulary of colourful expressions, but I know there will be members of my audience who don’t appreciate that degree of authenticity, so I restrain myself. My rule is, if my mother was still alive, would she want to hear this type of language in public from me?
Today my weekly shows have grown. The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show which goes out as video, audio and text is up to 245 episodes, 8th year. Both the Presentations Japan Series and Sales Japan Series podcasts go out as audio and text and are up to 299 episodes, 6th year. The Leadership Japan Series podcast is both audio and text and we are up to 473 episodes, 10th year. The Japan Business Mastery Show is video, audio and text and we are up to episode number 145, 3rd year. The Japan’s Top Business Interviews show is video, audio and text and we are up to 112 episodes, 3rd year.
Okay, I am bragging, because who else do you know in sales who produces this much regular weekly, consistent free content? Nobody. This is part of my brand though and I am trying to catch as many potential clients in my social media web as possible. Over the years we have upped the production and editing values and now produce and release very professional work. Could we do more? Yes, we could, but there is a limit on time and money to be spent on free content.
When clients look for me on social media, or through Google or YouTube searches, they are hit with this carefully curated tsunami of content, all aimed at proving I am an expert in these areas and suggesting they should use us for their training. There is no propaganda though. I am avoiding this type of content because it is a turn off to buyers. Do you need to do this much content? No, but you need to be putting out some regular, current, high quality content. Avoid high jacking someone else’s content and putting your cameo intro to the post. Produce your own original work, because this has value and clients can gauge whether you are the real deal or not. Avoid shots of you smashed out of your mind at some boozer with your mates and make sure there are plenty of professional shots of you suited and booted for work. Buyers will judge you before they meet you, whether you agree with it or like it or not. Make sure they find what you determine they will find.
For the last two and a half years business networking has been dead. The usual suspects who hosted live networking events migrated everything online, so you become totally restricted in your ability to create any relationship with the people attending the event. The hosts kick it off, the speaker speaks, the Q&A gets underway, the hosts wrap it up and you are left hanging there, without any good means of connecting with possible clients on the call. The hosts these days, don’t release who is on the call, so you are left with the names shown on screen, which can often be single names, initials, even numbers and not much help to try and find them later on LinkedIn.
Lately, very tenuously, some face to face networking events have been taking place in Tokyo. Everyone is wearing masks, doing fist or elbow bumps and being careful, trying hard not to catch Covid from each other. It is a curious sales activity though, because you are literally weighing up the amount of new business you can find at the networking event, against how sick you will become if you catch Covid at the event. That is a hell of a thought for a salesperson. Nevertheless, that is where we are today and that is our reality. It feels like you are throwing the dice every time you go to one of these in-person events. Will I get the deal and not get Covid, is the equation in mind. Is it worth it? Are the risks warranted?
This is a scary prospect, because most people catch Covid from people who themselves may not even be aware they have it. The little temperature gauges being used at the door give the temperature reading, but the individual may be infected, but the fever hasn’t kicked in in yet. The best we can do is to make sure the host are checking people’s temperatures, have plenty of hand cleaners available, keep or mask on as much as possible and try to keep some distance from people. Eating and drinking is a problem, because off come the masks and then they don’t back on again. I was at the first networking function in a long time recently. Everyone was masked up until the food and booze emerged and then it was a free for all. Masks were off and conversations were in full throttle. I was thinking uh oh, have I now hit a super spreader event. I missed the bullet on that occasion, but that was good luck rather than good planning.
I suggest let’s make sure the temperature checks are being done properly at the venue, only eat and drink if everyone is seated at table, with sufficient distancing between guests and keep the masks on as much as possible. If it is a standup buffet arrangement, well we could all probably lose a couple of kilo anyway, so forgo the food and drink and keep your mask on the whole time. Keep washing your hands throughout the evening and avoid handshakes and go for fist and elbow bumps instead. If you have to shake hands, then discreetly wash your hands immediately afterwards.
We should have a brilliant ruler to run over prospective clients anyway, but if you don’t then start developing one. What we want is to know within one minute whether we are talking to a prospective client or not. Normally, back in the good old days of a big crowd and a hiving throng, we would try to meet as many people as possible. That meant we had to keep each interaction brief, in order to meet as many possible prospects in the room as we could in the time available. We were “working the room” at full pelt. We need to keep that mentality in the somewhat thinned out networking crowds today. I have one question, which immediately tells me if this is a possible client for me or not. I need to get that baby out early to decide if it is worth while spending any more than the minimum possible time with this potential Covid carrier.
The idea should be self preservation at all costs and to keep healthy, while trying to progress your business. This requires absolutely no apologies. We want to meet them, strike up a conversation, identify if they are a possible client and then lay the ground work for a follow-up contact later, from the safety of your home or office over Zoom. Yes, there will be people who will subsequently ghost you. That has certainly happened to me, but there are also others who will give you the time for the Zoom call and have a conversation, taking the initial conversation to a much greater depth.
There is a balancing act needed here between spending more time, so that they don’t ghost you and them giving you Covid. I would rather suffer the ignominy of being ghosted, than being out for a week with a Covid infection. If they ghosted you during your follow-up, were they really a prospective client after all? I would say the answer was no, so don’t worry about them and concentrate on finding people who need your solutions and need them now.
We are not out of Covid yet, in fact there is talk now of a 7th wave for Tokyo. Events are happening though and we can attend them, if we are super careful. Discretion is the better part of valour in these cases. Even if you are feeling young and bullet proof and you don’t pass it on to someone more vulnerable, you will still have to avoid others for a week and may not be feeling all that brilliant. That means a week has been lost at least. If you get long Covid, then we are talking a serious loss of productivity. Some people lose their sense of taste and smell and so they are relegated to a zombie like existence of eating to survive, but with no pleasure involved anymore. They are often feeling tired all of the time, so even working from home doesn’t work. Wear your mask all the time, stand apart when talking, make sure temperatures are being checked at the door, avoid shaking hands and keep washing your hands frequently will be a start to networking and staying healthy. How big a deal would it have to be before you would risk your health to find it through networking? No deal is worth getting sick for folks, so let's all stay healthy.