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.