The sales process has a number of stages we must pass through. One big one is gaining trust. We need to explain who we are, what it is we do, where we have had success before and suggest we could do the same for the buyer’s firm. Permission to ask questions is another key step. When you think about it salespeople are incredibly rude. We hardly know them and yet we start asking questions about corporate secrets around our failures, lack of progress and barriers to success. Salespeople are looking for a match between their solution and what we need. Nevertheless the process can be confronting and that can be why it is sometimes very hard to get any useful information from the buyer. Salespeople need to ask permission first “to ask a few questions” , in order to delve into the depths of corporate despair and failure and thereby learn if they have the solution this company needs.
One part of that questioning process can get very personal. We start by trying to get a fix on what the firm is doing now, where they want to be and why they are not there yet. Next we ask about their self-interest. This is a sensitive subject in Japan. Sales is all about what we say and how we say it. The semantics of language is important and this is one area where it is critical we get that equation right. We need to know this self-interest information for later when we present the solution. Of course, we are looking at the interests of the firm and how what we are doing is going to help the business. We are dealing with people though and we all have our own individual motivations. We want to connect the solution we are providing with the buyer’s direct personal interests and this is the highest level of appeal we can aim toward as the seller.
In Western companies, this isn’t such a big deal. If we ask, “If this solution is successful, what will it mean for you personally?”, then we will get a very straight answer. They will tell us, “I will get a big bonus”, “I will get promoted”, ”My boss won’t fire me”, etc. The Western ladder of corporate success is up to you to climb and consequently people are very focused on themselves and “what is in it for me”. So being asked a direct question about the correlation between this solution success for the firm and the link to their personal self-interest is nothing to be shy or squeamish about.
Japan is quite different. When we ask, “If this solution is successful, what will it mean for you personally?”, it can be greeted by some degree of confusion. Generally, Japan has a weaker linkage between personal performance and promotion. In larger firms, it is usually a case where you move up the career ladder based on age and years of service to the firm. The summer and winter bonuses are actually deferred salary payments rather than recognition of outstanding work, so any focus on getting a big bonus is a non-starter.
I have found that when I ask this question, I have to repeat it because the buyer’s brain is not thinking of any connection between their individual work and a direct reward. When they finally get my drift they demure. I don’t ever recall any Japanese buyer saying things like, “I will get a big bonus”, “I will get promoted”, “my boss won’t fire me”, etc. Instead they will say “The team will be happy”, “the company will benefit”, “everyone will feel satisfied”.
Actually, it doesn’t matter what they say. We don’t care whether they are connecting at an individual level or at the group level. All we want is them to make a connection and we need to store that away in our mind for later, when we present the solution.
One important thing to remember is after you have asked the question, SHUT UP. This type of question creates a certain amount of tension. You actually want that tension to be there because that is how you get the answers you seek. If you are with another person from your team, brief them beforehand to keep them their mouth shut and do not say anything which will release the tension and allow the buyer to escape from our question. The first time that happened to me, my Japanese colleague couldn’t take the tension in the room and added something after my question. It was a disaster. fixin before my eyes, I saw all the tension drain from the room, the buyer just evaded giving me the answer I was seeking and we didn’t get the deal. I vowed that would never happen again and so I am always prepared now if I have to attend a meeting together with someone else.
After discovering what the buyer needs, we then present the solution. In Japan, that usually means we come back for a second meeting and take them through the proposal. We will go through specific stages of the sales process at this point. We will outline all the key features. We will then connect the benefits to those features and we will talk about the application of the benefits inside their firm. We will offer some evidence where the solution has worked before with a similar firm and which relates to their position in the firm as the executive, the financial, technical or user buyer.
Here is the important part. Just before we start all of this explanation of the nitty gritty of how our solution will work, we do the summary statement. We assure them that our solution will solve the specific problem they are having and we relate back to what they told us about their personal interest in seeing this process succeed. It doesn’t matter what they said. If it was “a big bonus” or “the team will feel good”, it doesn’t matter. We can say, “you mentioned that if this project was successful, you would get a nice bonus, well this solution will deliver the outcomes you want”, or “you mentioned that if this project was successful, the team will feel good, well this solution will deliver the outcomes you want”.
What we are doing is telling them that we have exactly what they need. It will deliver on the primary interest of the firm in fixing their key issues and it will satisfy the thing which they nominated was most important for them personally.
The point is we are trying to link the decision to purchase with what is in their mind as something which is Important to them, as well as being in the best interests of the firm. We could just stress how this helps the company, but it is more powerful to connect our solution to their personal motivations, however they have framed them. There is no incorrect answer in this case, because whatever they say we take it at face value. Maybe they just told us something pap to satisfy us. It doesn’t matter, because we are tying the bow on the previous conversation and telling them we are listening to you, we believe you, we are here to get you want you want, we are dedicated to helping you succeed in business, however you define it.
I do a lot of coaching for salespeople and there is a common theme which continuously arises, which reveals why they are not getting sales with their clients. They get very deep into the weeds of the solution for the buyer. The features of their widget monopolise their own minds and that is what they try to use to envelop the client with. It doesn't work for a simple reason. Clients buy the application of the benefits of the solution, not the features. You would think, “Greg, this is highly obvious buddy”, yet salespeople keep leaping to the features and forget about extolling the virtues of the benefits. Take a long, cold, hard look at your own sales materials. Are they a compilation of features, describing in detail how the widget works and substantially light on the benefits of employing the widget?
Salespeople are often engrossed with the execution piece of the sale. They want to explain how the widget will function for the buyer, going into depth on the intricacies of the how it works. This is important because the buyer needs to know they can integrate this solution into their existing business. But this not why they will buy.
I was accosted by a salesperson who battered me with the gritty detail for twenty five minutes. It was a slide driven sales presentation and it was very comprehensive and detailed in explaining how the widget worked. Now this was a totally non-customised presentation, so it had to cover off all manner of buyers, with their different situations, needs and motivations. In other words, it was shotgun spray hoping to hit a buyer or two. I noticed in that slide deck, that there were two cases where there were other companies, a little similar to my own firm.
A big opportunity was missed however, because the salesman didn’t bait the hook to catch me as a buyer. He launched straight into his pitch, which doubtless was something he had been doing for the last twenty years or so, judging by his age. So he has been failing now for over two decades and still hasn’t worked it out. If talking about the benefits was so obvious, such a default position, then how could this be happening in this day and age? By failing to ask me any questions, he didn’t know where to zoom in, where to focus his remarks.
By asking me where we are now and where we want to be, he could have pulled back the velvet curtain and revealed the scale of the gap between those two points. He could have hit gold, by asking me, if I know where we are now and where we want to be, then what is stopping us from getting there? That is such a wonderful, elegant question and absolutely has to be in the tacklebox of everyone in sales. If the gap is too close, then the buyer will reveal they don’t see any need for outside help, because they believe they can bridge the gap using their own internal resources. Or they may reveal they already have a supplier and they are entirely, even deliriously, happy with that provider.
If we know this information, then we can move to baiting our hook to lure them to not do it themselves or keep using that existing company. If we keep bleating on about our features, we will never know why they have no interest in buying from us. Knowing they don’t believe they need us, we can start asking intelligent questions which challenge their entrenched ideas. If they want to do it themselves we can bait the hook with the opportunity cost of that route.
We can ask, “Doing it yourself is a possibility and do you think that you can do it fast enough to steal a march on your competitors, who by the way, seem to be getting a lot more active recently?”. Japanese companies in particular, are usually quite paranoid about what their competitors are doing and they also know that getting things done internally is rarely ever achieved at speed. The key here is to not make this statement, such as “Doing it yourself will take too long and your rivals we eat your lunch while you are trying to DIY the process”. When we frame it as a question and they say “yes”, then the statement is true. If we as the salesperson say it, then as a statement it is just so much salesperson hot air and they can dismiss it as such.
Regarding the incumbent supplier we could say, “Well we are much better than them and you should use us instead”. This won’t fly because they are happy with their current arrangements and nobody in business in Japan likes change all that much. We need to bait the hook. We should say, “I understand you have been using this current firm for a number of years. Can I guess that you made a change at some point from the much earlier suppliers to this one, because you saw a benefit of doing so and wouldn’t you want to enjoy that benefit again today, given business has changed so much over the years?”. We are asking a question which is easy to say “yes” to and difficult to disagree with. We are also trying to get them to make that idea relevant and plausible, by their saying “yes” rather than us proffering the idea.
Asking questions to get more information allows us to work out the angle of approach to the clients and to find our where there may be some resistance. When we encounter that resistance, we bait our hook with questions to which the only answer can be a “yes” and in so doing, build the momentum to continue to the idea of using us as their trusted partner.
I was contacted by an international training organisation about facilitating training for their clients here in Japan. They solemnly announced they do “value based” selling. Well I think all good salespeople do value based selling, so I checked out their website to see what they meant when throwing this type of terminology around. As I suspected, it was another one of those persistent re-inventions of something old, but cunningly repacked to appear shiny and new. Basically, they find out what the client needs and then supply it. Wow, why didn’t I think of that?
It led me to think about values in selling, rather than value delivery in the sales process. When we meet salespeople, we are going to be impressed by a number of superficial elements. The way they dress and carry themselves are the first indicators we look at. It takes a while to get to know someone, but you can spot a slob very quickly and have severe doubts about any of their claims to be a quality organisation.
If they drive a luxury car and are well dressed, with the watch, pen, suit and shoes all obviously expensive, we take these as visual indicators of success. They must be good at what they do, because enough other people are giving them their business, that they can afford such high quality items. It is the same psychology of the crowd waiting to get into the restaurant. It is a clue that the food must be good, because experienced, in the know people are lined up trying to get in. We follow the crowd sourced feedback when making our decisions.
When we talk with these salespeople, they know their line-up of products. They can answer in depth and with accuracy. They don’t need to tell us “let me get back to you on that“, because they have the knowledge at their fingertips. They are articulate, concise and considered in what they say. They allow us to do most of the talking, rather than trying to railroad us into a buying decision or by trying to overpower us with their ambition to get the deal done.
They are calm and in control and are leading us to a buying decision by asking us very well crafted questions. They turn all of their statements into questions. For example, they could just say “this comes with a twelve month guarantee”. Now that is a statement from a salesperson and as the buyer, based on our previous experiences with salespeople, we may or may not believe that statement. But if we can have the buyer say the same thing then it is true and that is what the professional salespeople would have the client doing. In this same example, they would say instead, “If you were able to have a twelve month guarantee would that give you more confidence in agreeing to the offer?”. As soon as the buyer says “yes”, then they have validated the proposition that the twelve month guarantee has legitimate value.
The real “value” component however comes from a different angle and this goes to the heart of who they really are and what are the “values” they hold. I often talk about kokorogamae or true intention. What is in the heart of the salesperson about serving me as the buyer? Are their recommendations around the proffered solution to my problem in my best interests or their best interests? We can never know their entire line-up of products or services, so we depend on them to help us select the right outcome. They know what the margins and profitability tables are for each solution, so are they pushing one that we don’t need, but which earns them the bigger commission?
This comes back to who are they really? Are we being snowed by their suave manner and obvious competence? Is their kokorogamae about getting the sale or about getting the re-order. There is a world of difference between those two intentions. After we have bought the solution, we will start to understand whether what we have been told is correct or not. It is too late if we have been taken for a ride, because the monies have been paid and the solution delivered, but we will become very unhappy with the treatment we have received. The possibility of an upsell or the next sales are extinguished immediately. Their real values have been exposed and our trust is destroyed.
The smooth talking salesperson is the greatest fear of every buyer, because we don’t want to be revealed as idiots who fell for it. Once bitten twice shy of course and so that means for every sales interaction with buyers, we have to keep that thought uppermost in our minds. The buyer has plenty of fear already and our job is to be congruent with our values when we deal with the buyer. That would include walking away from the deal if it isn’t in the buyer’s best interests. This sounds easy, but requires a lot of integrity, because there is that constant pressure to get the revenues and meet the quotas. If you live your values and you have the right values, then that walk away decision becomes consistent with who you really are. That is the key to a long and successful career in sales.
A bloody war in the Ukraine, sanctions on Russia, global oil and gas prices surging, grains in short supply driving up food costs, rare metals shortages, inflation taking right off, increased spending on guns rather than butter – none of this looks good. By the way, did I mention we have a world Omicron virus variant pandemic raging still, while 25% of Americans are unvaccinated and 42% of the US population are obese. Even non-academic, totally amateur economic observers like me, can see the signs of a world about to tip into a recession. If you are in sales, this can’t be making you more sanguine about the future.
For many of us in Japan, the pandemic has torn through our industries like one of those mid-western American tornedos you see on the news. They lay waste to everything in their path, yet miraculously spare some houses in the same street, while totally obliterating the others. Some industries have sailed through Covid but most others are on the ropes, looking for an end to the bout, so that the pain will cease.
Buyers working remotely during the pandemic and emergency declarations have made networking almost impossible, as has been contacting them to start a business conversation. In my experience, the Japanese glass of water is always half-empty and any excuse to do nothing is seized upon, like a drowning man grabbing a life-preserver. “Doing nothing” means not buying from us. Any hint of trouble and the faucet for various areas of spending is immediately turned off. How do you sell in such a hostile environment?
“With great difficulty”, I would venture and it is likely to get worse over the course of the next year or so. The impact on our salesperson mindset is going to be extremely negative, unless we take steps now to bolster ourselves and prepare for “winter is coming”. Great advice, a wonderful homily, a passionate declamation or more hot air and by the way, so what?
Here are a couple of tools to use to steady our mindset before the economic recession hits us like an avalanche:
We concentrate 100% of our time and energy to make things happen today. We investigate past recessions of a similar nature and we look for industries or firms who have managed to continue buying regardless. We may even have to get out of our industry and get a job in another which looks better able to withstand the assault of economic rationalism. If we are going to lose our source of remuneration anyway, it is better to choose the timing and get a job somewhere else. Professional salespeople are always in demand.
We can begin by contacting our current clients and find out what they are thinking about the future. Are they preparing by reducing expenditures or are they thinking this is an opportunity to expand? Your recession induced meltdown is my buying opportunity, your jettisoning of staff is my hiring chance, etc. Not every company is affected the same way and we need to know who is who and we need to be doing that right now.
We also know that after the banks beat up companies by calling in their loans during the Lehmann shock, Japanese companies swore “never again” and they are well cashed up. There is a buffer there that didn’t exist during past oil shocks and recessions. What is the situation for your clients at the moment? Are they well protected by cash or are they nervous and about to start hacking into their investments and expenditures to shut things down? We need to know the lie of the land here, so we know who can continue to buy from us.
I hope I am totally wrong and we don’t sink into a global recession. However, rather than wait for the morning news broadcasts to tell you what is happening, let’s all seize the moment and work on our frame of mind. We can control 100% of what we put into our brain and if we decide to, we can replace negative thoughts with more positive ideas. Let’s get our mindset ready for whatever may come at us and be prepared for a possible Armageddon and let's start today.