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.