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.
In our presentation training classes we ask the participants, “how long does it take for you to make a judgment about someone you are meeting for the first time?”. How about you? How long do you take to make a judgment about someone you are meeting for the first time? It used to be people in our classes would say 30 seconds, others would say up to a couple of minutes. Today, the answers are now down to three seconds!
What does that mean for us in sales? We have such a small window to make that good first impression but are we prepared? However are you really planning your first impression or are you leaving it to random chance?
Let’s work on a couple of areas to build that excellent first impression.
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(1) Dress for success because we make 100% of our assumptions about your professionalism, reliability and trustworthiness based on how you look, before we even talk with you. Dr. Albert Mehrabian’s research showed that we need what we say, to match up with how we are saying it, to grab people’s attention with our words. When people see us for the first time, all they have to go on is what they see in front of them.
What does that mean? Let’s use this check list of things not to do. It is hard to argue you are reliable around the quality of your solution, when your shoes are scuffed. They need to be polished to a mirror sheen. The same thing goes for food stains on your clothes that obviously have not been dry cleaned. You want to seem professional, but your hair is messy and your clothes don’t fit well anymore, because you have put on some weight.
For men, I often see an old looking pants belt that should be replaced or it is brown in colour, when they are wearing black shoes. Is this hard to get right? What about when the tie knot is loose and not tight against the collar. Are you really telling me you are great with your attention to detail, when you look like this?
(2) When we meet people, smile first and then bow. That smile says, I am not anxious, in a hurry or nervous, but instead I am confident and professional even before we have exchanged one word in conversation.
(3) Make initial eye contact when you first see the client but for no longer than six seconds. Japan has some distinct cultural perspectives on making eye contact. For a salesperson to make continual eye contact with the buyer may make them feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless make six seconds of eye contact at the very start to form a solid first impression of confidence.
Vocal
2) Use their name immediately but don’t go crazy and overdo it thereafter. We like the sound of our name and so dropping into the conversation, especially at the start, will be welcomed.
By the way, if there is something new in their office environment, don’t just say it is new, they know that. Ask if this new thing has had any impact on their business or their staff or their customers etc.
When we meet the buyer, the ratio should be 80% of the time the client is talking and we take up the rest. If you find yourself waffling on too much, then shut up and ask a question, to get the spotlight back on them. They have all the answers we need, so particularly at the initial meeting, we want them to tell us what their issues are, so that we can plumb the angle we will need to come back at in order to fix their problems.
These are some things to think about when first meeting buyers. Remember don’t just walk in off the street and simply leave first impressions to luck or chance. Plan them carefully, every time, for maximum effectiveness.