Sale’s solutions are what make the business world thrive. The client has a problem and we fix it, our goods or services are delivered, outcomes are achieved and everybody wins. In a lot of cases however these are only partial wins. Problems and issues are a bit like icebergs – there is a lot more going on below the surface than can be spotted from the captain’s bridge. The salesperson’s role is to go after the whole iceberg and not just the obvious bit floating above the waterline.
The standard sales interview is based on two models comprising the outer circles surrounding a bull’s-eye. The extreme periphery is the “telling is selling” model. This ensures the salesperson does most of the talking. The client is subjected to a constant bombardment of features, until they either buy, die or retreat. The second model, the inner circle adjoining the bull’s-eye, is the solution model of providing outcomes that best serve the client, based on what the client has understood is their problem.
The latter is a much better tool and is in pristine condition because so few salespeople use it. The rapid fire of features at the client, rarely provides success because of the randomness of the proffering of alternatives. Welcome to the “toss enough mud at the wall and some is bound to stick” School of Sales. Aligning the fix with the client need in the solution model is the mark of the semi-professional. There is nothing wrong with this model but what are the rock star sales masters doing?
They are zipping up their wetsuits and diving into the icy water under the iceberg, inspecting things closely and really understanding the full scope of the situation. They are on a mission to try and find what nobody else is seeing. Their ability to deliver previously unseen, unconsidered insights is pure gold for clients.
Mentally picture our big red bull’s-eye at the center of a series of concentric circles. Stating the features of a product or service is the first level, the very outer circle. Our solutions constructed around what the client knows already is the next inner circle. The highest level is providing solutions for problems that the client isn’t even aware of yet.
A truly magical client statement would be: “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that or allowed for it!”. Think about your own experience. Anytime we have been a buyer and have uttered those words to ourselves, as a result of insight from the salesperson, we have experienced a major breakthrough in our world view. Now that is the bull’s-eye we want right there.
The salesperson who can provide that type of perspective, alerting clients to over-the-horizon issues, provides such value that they quickly become the client’s trusted business partner. Be it in archery or business, hitting the bull’s-eye is no easy matter. Insight can’t be plucked from the air at will. Plumbing one’s experiences, sorting and sifting for corresponding relevancies and then diving deeply into the client’s world looking for alignment are the skills required.
In a way, ignorance is an advantage. Paraphrasing Peter Drucker, our success can come by asking a lot of “stupid” questions. A salesperson has an outside perspective, untainted and pure. There is no inner veil obscuring the view, no preconceived notions or ironclad assumptions clouding judgment.
Counter intuitively, the fact that we don’t know, what we don’t know, becomes our strength. Ignorance allows us to question orthodoxy in a way that insiders can’t because of inertia, group think, company culture or the internal politics of the organization.
When salespeople serve numerous clients, be it in the same industry or across industries, they pick up vital strategic and tactical commercial intelligence. Researching various client’s problems, experiences, triumphs and disasters is valuable – but only if you know how to process the detail.
In all of our companies, we can only see clearly what we are doing ourselves. We all exemplify that Japanese saying: “the frog in the well does not know the ocean”. Everything is too familiar and so we don’t ever question everyday normality. We don’t have the opportunity to peak behind the curtain and look into what our competitors are doing.
It is also very rare for company personnel to do study tours of totally unrelated businesses. If we classified industries alphabetically, in a standard business setting, representatives from A and Z would rarely meet, let alone get to trade ideas and experiences. Salespeople however are floating around businesses and therefore able to know many wells and oceans. The ability to select and apply one particularly successful thing in a different context is a commercially valuable skill.
How can salespeople get that skill? Some ways salespeople can provide over-the-horizon value include being highly observant. Take what you have seen working elsewhere for one client, in a different company or industry and then apply it for your current client. Sounds rather easy doesn’t it. The reality is pressured salespeople miss much, record little, remember less and blag their way through most of their client meetings. Let’s all slow down, listen, think, and then innovate. The answers are often right there, but we miss out because we are too busy and not looking for them.
Another way to get that skill is to do practical research. Based on what you already know, build up a point of view on an industry, check it against what your clients are telling you (or conduct company surveys). Delve into nascent potential problems, arrive at your hypothesis and be the first mover. The real time insight garnered from this type of activity, allows salespeople to become rockstars in the business world. They are providing “take it to the bank” added value for the buyer.
We won’t always be able to conjure up a bull’s-eye. However, in trying to do so, our aspirations, general direction and thinking will be correct. Our kokorogamae (心構え) or true intention will be on track. By comparison, our competitors will lag well behind, still waffling on about features or playing detective interrogating clients. We have to move on to a higher dimension, where clients seek us out. They do so because they recognize the value of what we offer. In sales, the inner-most circle, the big red bull’s-eye, leads straight to the winner’s circle and that is where we must be. Let’s make “insight” our springboard to success.
Action Steps
He slid effortlessly into the chair and before I knew it, he had popped open the oyster shell of his laptop and was pointing his screen menacingly in my direction. Uh oh! Powerpoint slide after powerpoint slide bombarded me with detailed data, specs, diagrams and text information. After 20 minutes he stopped the torture. “Wow”, I thought, “he hasn’t managed to ask me even one teensy question during this session of our first meeting”. His business card announced he was the Sales Director – that seemed a definite worry if he was responsible for others.
The irony of this sales presentation was that I had requested it. I was in fact, a hot prospect. I had heard his President at a function talking about the new whizbang service their firm offered and I was intrigued. So intrigued, I approached the speaker and asked that he send one of his crew over to see me.
I should have suspected something was amiss though, by the reaction of the President when I made my “visit me” request. Did he become buoyant with anticipation of a sale and reassure me that this product was the best thing since sliced bred? Surprisingly aloof, I found him, in fact almost disinterested. Was this a Nordic thing, I wondered or just his personality? I will never know, but what I did think to myself was, how important it is in sales to be positive and upbeat about your product at all times.
So back at the meeting, after a death of a thousand powerpoints, I miraculously revived and questioned the Sales Director. Why? Well despite his incompetence, I still had a need. In the end though, I was not a buyer.
What could he have done with me? He could have asked me a few questions to ascertain what I was interested in. He could have holstered his weapon before drilling me with detail, dross and pap. Of the ten functionalities of the whizbang, there were only two or three that were of any match with what I needed. We could have dispensed with all the irrelevant detail and gone straight to the finish line with the “hotties”. We could have spent the bulk of our time talking about the aspects which were most likely to lead to a sale. We had limited time and he limited his own chances of gaining a new client by telling me everything, instead of only those things I needed to know, to make a buying decision.
Reading this little vignette, I hope you take immediate action and self-audit whether you are any better at questioning than this guy? Do you have a sales process in place. Are you spending the bulk of the client interface time, laser focused on where they have the greatest likelihood of success?
If you are a “teller”, then here is a simple questioning step formula that will help you get to the heart of the matter and uncover where you can be of the most assistance to the client. Start with either where the client is now or where they want to be – it doesn’t really matter which one you ask first. This is because what we are trying to understand is how big is the gap between “As Is” and “Should Be”. By the way, unless the sense of immediacy about closing that gap is there, then there will probably be “no sale” today. Clients are never on the our salesperson schedule and will take no action, unless they clearly understand there is a benefit to doing so.
Having plumbed the parameters of the current and ideal situation, next enquire about why they haven’t fixed the issue already. This is an excellent Barrier Question and depending on the answer, you might be the solution to fix what they cannot do by themselves.
Finally, check on how this would help them personally – what is the Payoff? They may need this fix to keep their job, hit their targets, get a bonus, get a promotion, feel job satisfaction, rally the troops – there are a myriad of potential motivators.
Why would that particular question be important? When we come to explain the solution to the problem, being able to address their closely held personal win, helps to make the solution conversation more real and relevant.
If my sales Powerpoint maestro had applied some of these basics, he may have had a sale that day. He was in his forties, so one can expect that he has probably been repeating this same flawed performance for decades. Adding it all up, the total amount of lost sales over that period would be mind boggling. Such a shame really and so unnecessary. If you want to see revenues go up, ask clients questions, before you mention one word about your magical widget. Do this one simple thing and watch the difference.
In 1936 an unknown author, despite many frustrating years of writing drafts and receiving publisher rejections, finally managed to get his manuscript taken up by a major publishing house. That book became a classic in the pantheon of self-help books – “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. Surprisingly, many people in sales have never read this work. Plato, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius etc., were all around substantially prior to 1936 and we still plumb their insights. Dale Carnegie has definitely joined that circle of established thinkers, offering wisdom and valuable ideas. His aim was to help all of us be better with each other, particularly in a business context. He did this by laying down some principles, which will make us more successful in dealing with others, especially those people not like us.
Salespeople should definitely be friendly. Ancient Chinese wisdom noted, “ a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”. What this is saying is there are some pretty basic things we must do to be successful with people. We know all of this, but we forget or even worse, we know but we don’t apply our knowledge. Here are nine principles for helping us all to become friendlier with our clients.
Become genuinely interested in other people
Our buyers are actually more interested in what we know about what they want, than in what we know about our product or service. It is a common mistake though to be wrapped up in the features of our offering and lose focus on the person buying it and what they want. At the extreme, transactional thinking means you don’t care about the individual, you only care about their money from the sale. That is the hyper short career in sales option.
For a long career, we better get busy really understanding our clients. The key word in this principle is ”genuine”. Having a correct kokorogamae or true intention, means we will be honestly focused on understanding the client so that we can really serve them and build a partnership. We must be fully focused on their success, because wrapped up inside that outcome is our own success.
Talk in terms of the other person’s interests
Salespeople have a self-defeating habit of selective listening and selective conversation around what they want to talk about. Their kokorogamae is centered around their interests and the buyer’s interests are secondary. Sales talk is a misnomer - there is no sales talk. There are well designed questions and there are carefully crafted explanations around solution delivery, which are tightly tied back to what the buyer is interested in. Questions uncover interests and with laser beam focus, that is the only thing we talk about.
Sounds simple, but salespeople love to talk, they love the sound of their own voice and they become deaf to the client, often without even realising it. Check yourself during your next client conversation – imagine we were to create a transcript of your words, would they be 100% addressed to the buyer’s interests. If not, then stop blathering and start talking in terms of their interests. By the way, Japanese buyers are rarely uncomfortable with silence, so don’t feel pressured to fill the conversation gaps with pap!
Be a good listener. Encourage the other person to talk about themselves
Good listening means listening for what is not being said, as well as what we are hearing. It means not pretending to be listening, while we secretly think of our soon to be unveiled brilliant response, witticism or repartee. It means not suddenly getting sidetracked by a single piece of key information, but taking in the whole of what is being conveyed. It means listening with your eyes – reading the body language and checking it against the words being offered.
Talkative salespeople miss so much key client information and then scratch their heads as to why they can’t be more successful in selling. The client doesn’t have the handy dandy sales handbook, where the questioning sequences are nicely aligned and arranged for maximum efficiency. Instead the client conversation wanders all over the place, lurching from one topic to another, without any compunction.
I am just like that as a buyer. I have so many interests and will happily digress on the digressions of the digressions! Well designed questions from the salesperson keeps the whole thing on track and allows the client to speak about themselves at length. In those offerings from the buyer we learn so much about their values, interests, absolute must haves, their desirables, their primary interests and their dominant buying motives.
Japanese buyers usually need a level of trust to be developed, before they may open up and talk about themselves. It is exceedingly rare to wrap up an agreement in Japan with just one meeting. So salespeople, play the long game here and don’t be in a rush. We are limbering up for a marathon, not a sprint in Japan.
Arouse in the other person an eager want
This is not huckster, carnival barker manipulation. This is becoming a great communicator, someone who can arouse passion and enthusiasm in others. Sales is the transfer of enthusiasm, based on the salesperson’s belief in the “righteousness” of doing good, through supplying offerings that really help the buyer and their business.
One of the biggest barriers to success in sales is client inertia. They keep doing what they have always done, in the same way and get the same results. Our job is to shake that equation up and help them to get a better result, through doing something new – buying our product or service.
We have to help them overcome their fears and persuade them to take action. In Japan there is a penalty for action if something fails and less of a penalty associated with inaction, so the bias here is to do nothing. Having a need and taking immediate action are not connected in the client’s mind, until we connect them. We have to fully explain the opportunity cost of no decision, no action or no response to our proposal.
We achieve all of this by using well thought out questions, which lead the buyer to draw the same conclusion that we have come to – that our offering is what they need and that they need it right now. This Socratic method of asking questions works because it helps to clarify the buyer’s own thinking. Most salespeople don’t ask any enough questions, because they are too busy talking about the features of their widget. We can arouse an eager want if we frame the questions well.
Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers
Telling is not selling. Ramming our proposal down the client’s throat is not selling. Being bombastic and dogged is not selling. Naturally, we will always have more information, data and knowledge about our solution than the client. Blabbing on about the fine detail won’t persuade the client to buy. Often Japanese buyers expect a sales “lecture” on the proposal, so they can slip into the role of the critic. Avoid that scenario at all costs. All you will get out of that type of meeting is the thin cheap green tea being served and little more. Instead, go and find some buyers who will accept your questions.
We all own the world we help to create. Our job is to help the client create a world we can share, that they feel deeply connected to and about which they feel some ownership. If I tell you some worthy insight I still own it. If I ask questions that spur your thinking and help you to garner some of those “lightbulb” moments, then you own that insight. We are always more likely to execute on our own ideas than other people’s.
Sales is about assisting client’s to see possibilities they haven’t considered. We have probably all had the experience of shopping for something and the store clerk’s explanation alerted us to something we hadn’t even considered, which immediately framed our subsequent approach to that purchase. This is the job of the salesperson – to help the client re-frame their worldview with rich and valuable insights that lead them to make the best buying decision – with us!
Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view
We have reached the age we are today, built on a firm foundation of mistakes, errors of judgment and ineptitude. None of us were born perfect, we had to fail in order to learn what not to do, as well as what to do. We were not brilliant from the start with new tasks. We had to spend time to master the new and unfamiliar. In the beginning, we were inept until we gained some solid skills.
In other words, we are all hauling around prejudices, biases, painful memories and firm views on the world, built on our foundation of hard won experiences. Salespeople trying to inject their views into this construct, will feel like they are trying penetrate a block of marble. “Education” in the original Greek and Latin meant “to draw out”, not “inject in” information and ideas. We should embrace the classics and like Michelangelo, draw the hidden David out of the marble.
In order to be successful in doing this our communication skills are required to have empathy, to really get deep with the client’s worldview and experiences. We need to understand their concept’s creation platforms which reveal who they are today. Let’s get to know them at a more substantial level so that we really get where they are coming from and more importantly, we need to understand their WHY. Most Japanese buyers are not as open to being frank about what they want. To get there, we need to build trust through multiple meetings, big dabs of patience and a correct kokorogamae or true intention.
This requires we stop concentrating on ourselves and what we want and focus on the buyer instead. We need to suspend our own surety of our concept’s creation platform and see things fresh, in an open, unbiased way. When we can get that clarity, the words coming out of our mouths will be perfectly aligned with what resonates most deeply with the client’s needs and they will buy our offerings.
Get the other person saying, “yes, yes” immediately
“Yes momentum” is an old idea in sales. It works on the psychological principle that a series of positive responses will lead to an acceptance of our offer. A simplistic understanding of this idea would see our hearty sales hero designing a long set of killer questions, the only logical answer to which must be expressed in the affirmative.
For example, asking a question such as, “if you were able to reduce costs, would this be of help to your business?”. Everyone wants to save costs in business, so the only answer is yes. The problem with this type of approach is it becomes manipulative, as the salesperson belts a whole series of these “can only be answered by yes” questions.
It reminds me on those nodding animals in the back of cars, that bob up and down with the ride. Expecting to fast track your way into a sale through this client head bobbing subterfuge is a misunderstanding of the principle. The latter is saying let’s get “yes, yes” responses immediately, but not exclusively. In the Japanese language Hai means “yes”, but this is the “yes” of I hear you, not the “yes” of I agree with you. We need to understand this and ask the question in a way that differentiates between the two responses.
We do want to design questions that help the buyer clarify their thinking about our proposition. We should start with one or two “yes” questions that narrow the focus down to a positive investigation of the value of our solution, when judged against all the alternatives. It should not become a “Yesfest” though.
After getting some positive responses we should begin asking the WHY behind the response. This helps us to dig deeper into the drivers of an affirmative decision. Clients, as mentioned, will wander all over the prairie once they get going, so we have to shepherd them back on topic. A good way to do that is to ask a closed question to which they can easily answer yes. Now we can keep the conversation moving in the right direction, without the whole process being manipulative. “Yes momentum” – yes, but in moderation is the better approach.
Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires
Understanding the dominant buying motive of the buyer is the Holy Grail of sales. Of course we need to know the primary buying motive – the WHAT, but to really serve the client we need to know the WHY. In particular, how will this buying decision advance their career or their business? Where can we fit in, to become a booster for their success?
Risk aversion is a strong emotion in all of us, especially among Japanese buyers, concerning the buying process. We have all been burnt at some stage through a purchase that failed to satisfy us and which we immediately regretted. We paid too much or it broke straight away and the sales person’s spiffy spiel wasn’t matched by the good’s performance. Some people may have an MBA, but we all have an MS - an advanced Master’s Degree in Skepticism. The Japanese buyers by the way all seem to have a PhD in Skepticism Of Sales People, especially foreign sales people.
As salespeople, we need to be mindful of the client’s emotions and find ways to legitimately prove our solution will not disappoint. The client’s desire is to improve or defend their situation – no one wishes to go backwards in business. They have their own ideas about how that is done best and our job is to find out WHAT they think and WHY they think it. We may have reached a different conclusion on the HOW, but by understanding what is driving them, we can more easily explain where our solution gels with what they want to achieve. Getting them to do most of the talking and by prompting new thoughts through great questions, we can make that happen.
Dramatise your ideas
When we pick up the phone to speak with our client or when we sit down in the meeting room with them, they are bursting at the seams with “stuff” in their heads. They are wrestling with what happened yesterday, what they have to get through today and worrying about what will happen tomorrow. These days, we are all having much more face-to-device time than face-to face time. There is no down time any more, as we slip out our phone to check everything we ever wanted to know and lot of things we don’t need to know. Salespeople are competing for client brain space with all of this internal “noise”.
We need to be primed to break through all the clutter and grab the client’s attention or we will never be able to sell our wares. We need to be working out how our client likes to be communicated with. Are they micro or macro focused? Are they interested in people or task outcomes? Once we have established the form of communication which best resonates with them, we should be looking for various ways to dramatise our recommendations.
Verbal word picture drawing is a great skill for a salesperson, as we choose evocative words that our listener can see in their minds eye. Collect “power words” that you can pepper your sales explanation with, in order to register the greatest reaction with the buyer. We need to become great story tellers with lots of “colour and movement” to grab their nanosecond attention spans. In regards to the delivery it may vary quit a bit. We may be very direct or we may be very thoughtful in our expression, according to the client’s preferred style of communication.
We are giving them the floor for the bulk of the meeting time, so we have only a limited window for our words, so we need to be very deliberate in what we are going to say. Salesperson blarney is a thing of the past – you simply don’t have enough air time to blab on anymore. We need word injection precision when we speak.
The words themselves and the vocal range we use to articulate them, are both important. We need to use speed – fast and slow for emphasis. We need to put the power in for some words and take the power out entirely for others. Word emphasis can completely change the meaning of a sentence. Try this sentence: “I didn’t say he hit his friend”. Repeat the sentence seven times but on each occasion, emphasise one word, much more that all of the others. By doing this the inference of the words also changes. This simple exercise underlines that we have a powerful tool at our disposal – our voice. We also need facial expressions and gestures which are congruent with what we are saying and which add strength to amplify the key message.
Dale Carnegie was a leader in thinking about being good with people. His principles are universal and timeless. All of us in sales can adopt these principles and become more effective in our dealing with our buyers.
Salespeople are carrying around a lot of baggage with them when they visit clients. The smooth talking, dodgy sales person trying to con us, is the folkloric villain of the piece. Reversing that doubt and hesitation is critical to gaining acceptance as a valuable business partner for the client. This entire problem is magnified when we meet the client for the first time.
Because the client’s don’t know us, their default position is one of caution and doubt. We have all grown up being rewarded for being risk averse and so we are resistant to change. The new salesperson represents “change” – because they are asking the client to buy something new or to change suppliers. So that we can properly serve them, we need to breakthrough that mental protective wall erected by the client and establish trust and credibility,.
Great – but how do we do that? Try crafting a Credibility Statement. This is a succinct summary that will grab the attention of the client and help to reduce their resistance to what we are offering.
It unfolds in four stages:
First we give an overview of the general benefits of what we do. For example, “Dale Carnegie Training helps to deliver the behavior change needed in the team that translates into improved results”. Next we need to quote some specific outcomes, as evidence that we are a credible supplier of services. So we now might say something like this, “An example of this was where we helped XYZ company, a very high end retailer with training their entire sales staff. They are now enjoying a 30% increase in sales”. Now, we introduce an important suggestion that makes this benefit and result summary relevant to the listener. “Maybe we could do the same for you?”
Finally, we need to create a “verbal bridge” so we can move on to questioning the client about what they need. In Japan, a lot of buyers expect to control proceedings, such that the seller turns up, gives their pitch and then the buyer happily shoots it full of holes. What Japanese buyers are doing is trying to ascertain the risk factor of what you are proposing, by disparaging everything you have just said. They now want you to provide answers that eliminate their fears. You are immediately on the back foot. The client, not you, is controlling the sales process. Good luck with that and let us know how that is working out for you?
To break this pattern (which has a very low success rate), we need to ask pertinent questions and find out what they really need. In order to do that, we need to get their permission to ask questions. This transition into the questioning part of the sales process is absolutely critical. Don’t miss this: in Japan the buyer is God. Hence, buyers here may feel our questions are impertinent, intrusive and unnecessary, so we must gain their permission to proceed.
Every single time I have been forced to just give my “pitch”, because the buyer has denied me the opportunity to ask questions, there has been no sale achieved. We need to better skilled, to get them to allow us to fully understand how we can best serve them. That is why we need to be asking questions and listening carefully to their answers.
So that we can make that transition, after saying “Maybe we could do the same for you?” , we softly mention, “In order to help me understand if we can do that or not, would you mind if I asked a few questions?”. We say this, almost as a throw away line. No big deal, nothing to see here.
When they agree, we are now free to explore in detail their current situation, what they aspire to, what is holding them back and what would success mean to them personally. If you don’t ask these questions you have little chance of convincing the client you can help them solve their problems.
Amazingly, the majority of sales people don’t ask any questions, but just blab on about the features of their product. I had a sales presentation given to me recently here in Tokyo by the Sales Director of a software vendor and after some initial pleasantries, he plunged straight into walking me through his powerpoint presentation of the functionality of his solution. Forty minutes later he finished. Not one question about my needs or about my difficulties – nothing. Amazing – he was an experienced guy who had always been in sales! Come on - as salespeople, we all have to do a lot better than that!
So putting it all together, the sequence flow would be like this: “Dale Carnegie Training helps to deliver the behavior change needed in the team that translates into improved results. An example of this was where we helped a very high-end retailer with training their entire sales staff and they are enjoying a 30% increase in sales. Maybe we could do the same for you. In order to help me understand if we can do that or not, would you mind if I asked a few questions?”.
This Credibility Statement should be short (under 30 seconds), delivered fluently and confidently (no Ums and Ahs). This takes a lot of preparation and practice because it is so short. Every word is vital in the design stage and we must deliver it perfectly. It can also be multi-purposed as an ideal “elevator pitch” for those occasions when we have to briefly explain what we do. This might be face-to-face or over the phone.
If it is over the phone, then we would drop the permission to ask questions part and instead ask, “Are you available next Tuesday or is Thursday better?”. Unless your product is specifically suited to being sold in that way, don’t sell solutions over the phone. Instead, secure a day and a time to meet. That is all we should be aiming for – the appointment.
I was talking to some clients in the pharma industry and recently hospitals here in Tokyo are restricting salespeople to just one day a week to see the doctor. See the doctor being the key word here because they only get one minute of the doctors time! I gave them some Credibility Statement strategies for dealing with that nanosecond window using our Dale Carnegie sales system. What is said in that brief encounter has to have a hook so sufficiently attractive, the doctor wants to hear more. Therefore the design is so important and so is the delivery in this extreme case. Regardless of the industry, turning up and blurting out your random whatever is a joke. Are you properly planning your sales conversations or are you constantly winging it? Stop winging it and get serious about sales.
The driving objective of sales is to solve client’s problems. We need to establish the client relationship based on a professional, competent first impression. The Credibility Statement does just that and opens the door to permission to find the issues, offer solutions and serve as a trusted business partner.
So key action items from today:
Apply these ideas and join the top 1% of professionals in sales.
The hardest sales job in the world is selling something you don’t believe in yourself. The acid test is would you sell this “whatever” to your grandmother? If the answer is no, then get out of there right now! It is rarely that clear cut though. The more important test is whether what you are selling solves the client’s problem or not. Selling clients on things that are not in their best interests is a formula for long-term failure and personal and professional brand suicide.
There are elements of the sales process which are so fundamental, you wonder why I would even bring them up. For example, believing in what you sell. There are lots of salespeople though, trapped in jobs where they don’t believe but keep selling. You don’t have to look far to find them. They are going through the motions but you never feel they have your best interests at heart. They usually don’t have any other sales process than blarney and BS. We may buy from these people, but we come to bitterly resent being conned and we don’t forgive or forget. Today with social media, your “crime” is soon broadcast far and wide, warning everyone to be very careful when dealing with the likes of you.
The more common problem is that they actually do believe in what they sell but they are not professional enough to be convincing in the sales conversation. They often have a sales personality deficiency, where they are not good with people or not good with different types of people. They get into sales by accident. They should have been screened out from the start but sadly the world is just not that logical.
When I joined Shinsei’s retail bank, I recognised immediately that 70% of the salespeople should never have been given a sales role. My brief was “we have 300 salespeople and we are not getting anywhere – come in and fix it”. The vast majority of people in the role of convincing wealthy Japanese customers to buy our financial products were really suffering. They lacked the communication skills, the people skills, the persuasion power, the warmth, the concern for the customer, etc., which they needed to be successful. Why on earth were they there then, you might ask?
Many of them had never been in a sales role, many had been in backroom jobs, never facing customers. When Shinsei moved all of the operations components out of the branches they gained tremendous efficiency. The operations part became centralised and worked like a charm, but the operations staff were still there and were given sales jobs. Disasterous for them! How about your sales team? Are all of your colleagues in the right role? Are you in the right role?
As Shinsei, we worked out who was best suited for a sales role and gave those people the proper training to equip them for success. The remainder were given a role elsewhere in the bank. What training did we give them? Before I arrived, mathematics was thought to be really important for bankers. It probably is for certain roles but the ability to ask good questions, to fully understand wealthy customer’s needs, was much more important. So was the understanding that first impressions should not be left to chance but need to be created. If I don’t like you or trust you, why would I want to buy anything from you?
At Dale Carnegie we do a lot of sales training and we see the same client issues come up continuously. Certainty around the thing being sold must be in evidence. Selling is the transfer of your enthusiasm for the product or service to the buyer. Your body language must naturally exude belief. Your face needs to be friendly. This sounds a bit ridiculous except that many people in sales roles don’t smile easily. They don’t exude warmth, coming across as cold, hard, clinical, mercenary and overly efficient. We all love to buy, but we hate being sold and “efficient” sales people make us nervous.
Fluency in communication is critical. Be it Japanese or English, a lot of “filler words” like Eeto, Anou , Um, Ah, etc., might help you to think of what you want to say next, but you come across as if you are not sure or convinced about what you are saying or proposing. We definitely don’t buy sales person uncertainty. Record your own sales conversations and check if what you are saying is coming out in a professional manner, bolstering the confidence of the buyer in what you are saying.
A totally canned sales speech is the opposite problem. I sold encyclopedias for Britannica as my first sales job and we had to pass a memory test, where we could recite the entire 20 minute presentation precisely. Having passed, we were then dropped off in a forlorn, working class outer suburb in my home town of Brisbane and turned loose on an unsuspecting public. There were no questions involved, but a lot of data dumping going on in that canned speech.
Astonishingly, despite all we know 40 years later, there are still people trying to make careers in sales while wading through minute after minute of the features of the “whatever”. Where are the client questions, the needs understanding, the explanation of the benefits, the application of the benefits, the evidence – the proper sales basics?
Success in sales is based on following a sales process. That process is based on three powerful foundations – your belief in what you are selling, your ability to fluently articulate back to the buyer what you heard they need and how your solution satisfies their need.
If you want to be successful in sales, make sure you introduce a proper sales process, get certainty, get fluency and get going!
It has always been astonishing to me how hopeless some salespeople are in Japan. Over the last 20 years, I have been through thousands of job interviews with salespeople. We teach sales for our clients and so as a training company we see the good, the bad and the ugly - a very broad gamut of salespeople. We also buy services and products ourselves and so are actively on the receiving end of the sales process. Well actually that is a blatant exaggeration. There are almost no salespeople operating in japan using a sales process. But there are millions of them just winging it (badly).
Why? On The Job Training (OJT) is the main training pedagogical system in Japan for training the new salesperson. This works well if your boss has a clue and knows about selling. Sadly, there are few sales leaders like that populating the Japan sales horizon. So what you get are hand-me-down “techniques” that are ineffective and then even worse, these techniques are poorly executed in the hands of the newbies.
We like to buy, but few of us want to be sold. We like to do business with people we like and trust. We will do business with people we don’t like and very, very rarely with people we don’t trust. Neither is our preference though. The million dollar question is, “what makes YOU likeable and trustworthy?’
Building rapport in the first meeting with a prospective client is a critical make or break for establishing likeability or trust. When you think about it, this is just the same as in a sales job interview. In both cases we enter an unfamiliar environment and greet strangers who are brimming over with preoccupation, doubt, uncertainty, reluctance and skepticism. If a sales person can’t handle a job interview and build rapport straight away, then it is unlikely they are doing much better out in the field, regardless of what is glowingly written down in the resume.
So what do we need to do? Strangely, we need to pay attention to our posture! Huh? It is common sense really - standing up straight communicates confidence. Also, bowing from a half leaning forward posture, especially while we are still on the move, makes us look weak and unconvincing. So walk in standing straight and tall, stop and then bow or shake hands depending on the circumstances. Smiling at the same time would also be good, depending on the situation..
If there is a handshake involved then, at least when dealing with foreigners, drop the dead fish (weak strength) grasp or the double hander (gripping the forearm with the other hand). The latter, is the classic insincere politician double hand grip.
Some Japanese businesspeople I have met, have become overly Westernised, in that they apply a bone crusher grip when shaking hands. Recently I have met a couple of Japanese businesswomen, who are trying to out man the men and are applying massive grip strength when shaking hands. It sounds very basic advice, but please teach your Japanese team how to shake hands properly. Too weak or too strong are unforced errors which impinge on building that all important first impression.
By the way, we probably only have a maximum of 7-10 seconds to get that first impression correct, so every second counts. We are all so quick to make snap judgments today, we just can’t leave anything to chance. When you first see the client, make eye contact. Don’t burn a hole in the recipient’s head, but hold eye contact at the start for around 6 seconds and SMILE. This conveys consideration, reliability, confidence – all attributes we are looking for in our business partners. We combine this with the greeting, the usual pleasantries – “Thank you for seeing me”, “Thank you for your time today”. Now, what comes next is very important.
We segue into establishing rapport through initial light conversation. Japan has some fairly unremarkable evergreens in this regard – usually talking about the weather or about the distance you have travelled to get here, etc., etc. Don’t go for these bromides. Try and differentiate yourself with something that is not anticipatory or standard.
Also be careful about complimenting a prominent feature of the lobby, office or the meeting room. I was in a brand new office the other day and they have a really impressive moss wall in the lobby. I will guarantee that my hosts have heard obvious comments about the moss wall from every visitor who has preceded me. “Wow, what an impressive moss wall ” or “Wow, that is a spectacular entry feature”. Boring!
Teach your salespeople to say something unexpected, intelligent and memorable. In this example, “Have you found that team motivation has lifted since you moved to this impressive new office?”, “Have you found your brand equity with your client’s has improved since moving here?”. This get’s the focus off you the salesperson and on to the client and their business. For example, if you are a training company like us, you definitely want to know how the team motivation is going, as you may have a solution for them.
Having a good stock of conversation starters should be basic for every salesperson. It might mean imparting some startling statistic that they may not have heard. For example, “I read recently that the number of young people aged 15-24 has halved over the last 20 years, are you concerned about future talent retention as demand exceeds supply?”.
We might educate the client with some industry information they may not be aware of but which would be deemed valuable. An example would be: “Dale Carnegie’s recent research into Engagement amongst employees found three critical factors impacting motivation. The relationship with the immediate supervisor, the team’s belief in the direction being set by senior management and the degree of pride in the organization – what are you seeing in your organisation around the area of engagement and motivation?”.
We face a lot of competition for the mindspace of our prospective clients. Busy people have a lot on their mind and we are an interruption in their day. Some of our prospective clients may be moving continuously from one meeting to another, so the attention span is shredded and the details begin to blur. They may have their eyes open but don’t imagine their mind is in the room and focused on you. To counteract that possible external pre-occupation and to get them back in the room with you, use a question.
If I suddenly asked you, “what month were you born in?”, I will guarantee I have your 100% attention. So questions are powerful disrupters of pre-occupation and we should have stock of little beauties we can wheel out when needed. For example, “most people I talk to say Abenomics is not having any significant impact on their business as yet. Have you seen any benefits yet?”.
Another might be, “My clients’ opinions seems to have changed – they are becoming more concerned about the possible future increase in consumption tax – is that an issue for your company?”. We want them talking about their business, because this is going to provide us with insights for a later line of questioning, as we try to uncover their performance gaps, needs, aspirations, etc.
The very first seconds of meeting someone are vital to building the right start to the business relationship. In modern commerce, we are all so judgmental and quick to make assumptions. Dressing the wrong way may even disqualify us before we get to open our mouths. Simple initial errors in posture, greetings and conversation can be our undoing. Let’s get the sales team’s basics right and make sure they totally nail that first impression.
So key action items from today:
This is the rapport building stage of the sales process and it is both a science and art we need to perfect.
Do you subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc? The following morsel popped into my inbox the other morning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care–Anonymous”. Wow! What a powerful reminder of the things that really matter in our interactions with others. This piece of sage advice should be metaphorically tattooed on to the brain of every single person involved in sales.
Don’t miss it – we all know selling stuff is a tough gig. Rejection is the normal response to our spiffy sales presentation and follow up offer. You have to be mentally tough to survive in a sales job. You need other things too. Product and technical knowledge is important. Total command of the detail is expected by clients. This has to be a given, so if you don’t know your stuff cold then get studying. However, we also need to be careful about what we focus on. Are we letting the product details and features confuse us about what selling is really all about?
I am a buyer too and am constantly amazed by what some people get up to. Some salespeople I have encountered remind me of an icy mammoth trapped in a time warp from the past, still trotting out the product brochure and seeing if I will go for one of their goodies? You don’t like that one, well then how about this one, or this one, or this one, ad nauseam? I want “blue” but they keep showing me 50 shades of “pink”. They are playing that pathetic, failed salesperson game named “process of elimination”. Why on earth are they doing this?
I want to buy, but are they really showing me they are focused on understanding me? Are they demonstrating to me that they foremost care about my benefit? Are they communicating to me that, “in your success Greg, is my success”? Or do they come across not with stars in their eyes, buy $$$$ signs?
I can recall seeing them sitting across the table from me, mentally salivating at the thought of the big fat commission this sales conversation is worth? I can sense they have already bought their new Beemer before the ink is dry on our agreement? Actually, there is no agreement, because I don’t buy from these types of amateur salespeople and that is the same reaction from most people.
The quote at the beginning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care” reminds me of a great Japanese word, which should be embraced by everyone in sales - kokorogamae (心構え).
It can be simply translated as “preparedness” but the Japanese nuance goes much deeper than that. Anyone studying a martial art or a traditional Japanese art (道) will immediately be on my wave length, when they hear this kokorogamae term. I would prefer to translate it as “getting your heart in order”.
This means to really hark back to your most basic principles of true intention. What we can call True North – the purity of our intention. What is the spark in our heart driving our behavior? Is it the money or is it the serving? Is it what we want or what the client wants? Is this going to be a long-term relationship or a fleeting transaction?
Salespeople need to start by searching their heart for their true intention. Huh? Does this sound a bit too “hug a tree” California emotional for you? Why do I recommend searching your heart? Because clients can sense your motivation isn’t centered on their best interests and therefore they won’t buy from you. The trust is never established.
Of course, there are the exceptions – the Hollywood image of the “smooth talking” salesperson who could sell you anything and will certainly try to. They are like skyrockets that initially blaze through the night and then explode! They are here for a good time not a long time and they give the profession of sales a bad brand.
The best Japanese salesperson I ever interviewed for a sales job was a criminal. The criminal part didn’t surface immediately, but came up later through some background checks (note to Sales Managers – do background checks!). He was absolutely brilliant in the first two interviews, polished, genius personified in the role play, and WOW, what a fantastic closer! I thought “Yes!” at last, I have found my perfect Japanese salesperson. Actually, he was a liar, a thief and a baddie. He had zero True North orientation and his kokorogamae was plain wrong. What a wake up and smell the coffee for me.
When you have the client’s best interests in mind, you do all the right things. You ask well designed questions to fully understand how best you can serve the buyer. You present your solution in such a way that the buyer feels this is exactly what I have been looking for. You calmly handle any hesitations or concerns from the client, reassuring them that what you have is exactly what they need. And you are confident to ask for the order. That is the sales professional in action
So let’s ignore the outliers, those riff raff of push sales and come back to the vast majority of salespeople who are not evil, just inept. Change your heart, focus on True North, purify your intentions, show you genuinely care about the buyer’s best interests before your own. If you do that every single time you meet a client, you will have get success in sales and build a power personal brand.
Action Steps
We have all seen it – the pendulum swings of organisational change. You can basically break out your stopwatch and get the timing down perfectly. The new CEO arrives and reverses whatever the predecessor was doing. If things had been centralised, now everything will be decentralised. Then here we are five years later, another CEO and we reverse course again. In the sales area, the goalposts keep moving. The raw numbers chase may now be leavened with big numbers, but from a better quality of client, as we move more up market. Or it may be that we spread the risks, by having a lot of middle level clients, rather than being too exposed and dependent on the big fish and our occasional whales. Or it may be profit, rather than market share, is the Holy Grail of the moment.
There is no doubt that these types of changes are distracting for salespeople. We get into a rhythm, and we are well organised and then next thing a big change swings through and we have to re-organise our lives and clients. We may have a campaign to get behind which alters how we have been working. It may impact the pricing, as we trade profitability for volume or the other way around. We may be on a mission to increase the number of new clients and bulk up the sales funnel.
One of the issues is that these distractions take our eye off the ball with our clients. We are suddenly wrapped up in admin activities and our time for prospecting is being diminished with endless meetings, new systems and more reporting requirements. Most salespeople are big picture expressive types. They hate the admin, the forms, the inputting, the detail focus. They feel they could be better off spending their time with buyers.
We may get a new Section or Division boss and the whole picture changes immediately as the new broom makes changes to territory or client allocation or commissions or whatever they feel like doing. These changes drive the entire team’s focus inwards and away from clients. We know this is bad, but we are swept up in the changes. We are desperately trying to navigate a fast flowing stream, which has just transitioned into deadly white water.
The answer to these externally generated woes is our time management discipline. If we think about it, time is all we have. Therefore, what we do with it determines our level of success. When we are under siege by these types of changes, we can lose control of our time and feel we are just being buffeted and beaten by the waves of the broiling white water, as we try to avoid the rocks and waterfalls. We know that Quadrant Two is where the gold is kept – Not Urgent but Important activities like planning.
We cannot do everything every day. That is just impossible in this modern business world, so we need to be focused on doing the most important things every day. The only way to get that done is to plan to do it and to stop all of the noise and distraction from taking us away from our most important goals for the day. The number of things we can get done during these distracting times may be less than normal, but at least if we are only doing one or two of the most key things, we will stay on track as the chaos unfolds around us. The important thing is that this is what we do every day and not just occasionally when the planets align. That regularity builds the discipline, because our time control is working to help us do better, with the time we have. Okay sometimes we are swept away by the chaos and our time is being wasted, but that loss needs to be sequestered to just that day. The very next day we get back into the discipline of regaining control over our time.
There are three groups of clients we face. Those who will never buy from us, those who will buy eventually and those who will buy right now. In times of chaotic organisational change, we need to be concentrated on those who will buy now and keep working on those who will buy at some point in the future. We need to be brutal with sorting out who is who and making some tough decisions about where we spend our time.
It may require us to fire some argumentative clients who take up a lot of our time, but don’t want to pay our fees and are basically a noisy pain. When we are short on time, we have to place a high value on how we spend our days and with whom we choose to spend them. Time is all we have so, we must invest it wisely and in chaos, that dictum become even more important. You can calculate the cost of your time – divide the income you want by the hours available to earn it and you come up with your effective hourly rate. It is always humbling to do this exercise. You quickly realise if you don’t keep a tight rein on your time, you can easily be working long hours for peanuts. Troublesome clients are expensive in this calculation. Fire them and concentrate your energy and time on wonderful clients, who will become lifetime business partners.
Pitching for the business is quite different to selling to a client representative we may be meeting in a meeting room. In the latter case, we have only one or sometimes two people to persuade, but in a pitch it could be department representatives from many parts of the firm. The worst possible pitch environment is when on this occasion you have had no chance to meet the client beforehand to understand their situation, aspirations, issues and problems. Hopefully the pitch would be after you have had a chance to consider all of their requirements and instead of just sending in a proposal, they ask you to deliver it to the key people in the firm. There should be no reason why you cannot meet with some members of their team beforehand, but let’s assume that worst case is the scenario.
Even though we may not be able to meet before the pitch, we can still do research. Often we have other clients in the same industry, so we will have some broad ideas about the current issues facing similar firms. Even if we don’t have such clients, we may know someone working in the industry or we can find access to someone to find out more about what is going on at the moment. Additionally, we can do a literature search on media reporting on the company in question and on the industry in general. There may be stock analysts who follow the industry, who for a fee, will provide us with their findings on what is going on. Through LinkedIn, we might be able to connect with a senior person who has left the firm recently, who may be willing to provide some broad insights. We shouldn’t expect to get all of the company’s dark and dirty secrets, but they may be happy to share in broad brush terms.
ChatGPT is a bit useless as a research tool for current information. For example, when I asked about the current state of the 5 Star Hotel industry in Tokyo, I get this answer: “I’m unable to provide real-time or the most up-to date information as my knowledge cut-off date is September 2021”. In Tokyo 5 Star Hotel terms, September 2021 is like a hundred years ago in terms of vacancies and losses in revenues thanks to the pandemic. Today they are doing a booming business, as foreign tourists flood in to enjoy a very cheap yen environment.
Anyway, back to the pitch question. We may not have been given direct access to company staff, but we can still try and do a matching process between what we offer and what we believe would be of most value to the firm. As we don’t exactly know what is ailing them at the moment, we need to offer up a few alternatives, on the basis that if we just burst into action on one and it isn't resonating, we will be out the door in short order. So we draft up a few scenarios which we think could be reasonable cases for seeking our help with finding solutions to their problems.
There is no point starting with the weakest case and moving to the strongest. Everyone has limited time, patience and availability to listen to us, so we have to go in hard with the best case we can come up with. When we are delivering this first case, we will be able to tell by the reactions whether we are on track or not. This is not a perfect angle though. There is also the issue that different departments have different interests and they may respond variously depending on what strikes a chord with them. If we are striking a chord with no one at all, then we better move on to case number two and keep going.
There will be senior people in the room and the rookie mistake is to only talk to them. Often the President is there, but he or she is not a sole decision-maker. The top executives may only look at the possibility of working with you, after those lower down the totem pole have worked on the due diligence.
I have made this mistake, imagining that if I could win over the President, then the orders to work with me would rain down on the rest of the crew. I remember sitting in the President’s office as he got very excited about all the wonderful things I was telling him about our training. He jumped on the phone and called the heads of the HR team to drop everything and come to his office immediately, to meet me and hear what I had to say. I was getting very positive about the direction this sales call was going. These two HR guys turned up and did a lot of nodding in front of the President. When I left I said I would contact them to have a further meeting to go through the detail. I am still waiting for a reply to all of my follow-up emails to these two guys. I presume they didn’t like him getting involved in their world and so did nothing, despite the President’s excitement.
So when we present our pitch, we should assume everyone will be involved at some point in the decision. This includes those junior people who will do the due diligence, to those who will shepherd the idea through the labyrinth inside the firm, up to the senior executives who will approve the consensus decision. That means we work on everyone in the room and don’t just look at the President the whole time and ignore everyone else. The other people we shouldn’t favour with our exclusive attention are the English speakers, if we are doing this pitch in English. Often they have no decision-maker power within the hierarchy and are treated like language technicians.
If we got close to the mark on what they are needing, we can hope that there will be some clarifying questions after our pitch, which will give us a better idea of what they need. We should also be looking to find key people in the room, with whom we can have a follow-up meeting, to try and get some feedback on whether we need to change the angle of our solution or whether our solution is relevant or not.
This type of pitching is clearly the most challenging, but if we do our research and if we bring multiple angles to the pitch, we may be able to break through the wall of silence they have thrown up. Not every company wants to open the kimono to total strangers, with whom they have no existing relationship or with whom they are yet to build any trust. If we keep that in mind, we will do a better job of pitching to the potential client.
Selling to idiot buyers sounds a bit harsh doesn’t it, but I am sure we have all had a version of this experience. It usually manifests itself in the pricing component of the transaction. We provide value, but the buyer is too inexperienced, uninformed, basically stupid, has a massive ego or is lacking in context to appreciate why they need to pay more than they suggest. We have to remember they are in the market for a service or product only a few times a year, but as salespeople, we are talking to companies constantly. We have a much better understanding of what the market will bear, than the buyer.
The problem with value is it isn’t known until the delivery of the solution. Because we are delivering solutions all of the time, we know the value. Our value is also confirmed by other buyers who become repeat customers, because they appreciate what we bring to their firm. They pay the fare, because they can see the value equation works in their favour. Most companies can probably solve their problems internally and save a lot of money. The time factor is often the difference. They don’t have a decade or even a year to get it right under their own steam. This is where we bring an instant solution and they can enjoy the benefits immediately, with no time loss or disadvantage in the market.
The other idiocy is imagining that all suppliers are the same and we are providing some generic solution that can be easily interchanged between similar suppliers. Because they may have not used any of us yet as a potential solution supplier, they have very little to go on apart from pricing. This is where the greed gland gets activated, and they imagine they are doing their firm a favour by going for the least expensive option. If the procurement department gets involved, then you know you are in for a rough time. They have their spreadsheet with the supplier’s names along the top side and on the left side, the names of the service or good and the cells in the middle are populated with pricing numbers. This is a very convenient method to delineate who is the cheapest supplier for a solution, but often has no nuance for the value equation comparison.
Our job as salespeople is to break through all of these obstacles and make sure the buyer is clear on the difference we provide and why our higher price is justified. It may be a quality comparison that our competitors cannot match. Quality means the good itself or the people who supply the service. This latter component can vary enormously. Speed is always a factor and this is where being more flexible and better organised than the opposition is an advantage. It might be a history of credibility and reliability as a supplier, which the rival operation doesn't have. After sales service is also has real value. Often organisations are often well sculptured for the buying component of the conversation, but are not so interested in dealing with the buyer’s problems after the cheque has been cashed. Having many decades in a market has a higher value than a rival who has only been operating for a few years. It might be a global scope that means the solution can be taken around the world for them, if they want to benefit at that scale. When we list up all the various aspects of value, we realise that price is just one component. Often in business, our time is the thing we are most interested in preserving and we will pay more to protect our time.
When the client is uninformed, it is our job to educate them. The dumb salesperson way of doing this is to blurt out the differentiation we have compared to the rivals. The issue with this approach is that buyers have been trained to doubt whatever they are told by people trying to sell them something. The better avenue is to draw out the differences by asking well designed, highly intelligent questions. If we want to highlight quality we could ask, “Would not having to do any rework after delivery of the solution save your firm time and money?”. If it was speed, we could ask, “If the speed of the delivery was able to exceed your expectations, would that provide positive knock-on benefits to your firm?”. If it was a global scope we could enquire, “Would being able to take something you have found works well in Japan to the entire global network of your firm, raise Japan’s stakes internally?”. You get the idea. If the proposition doesn't fly then, there is no point labouring the conversation with any more content in that vein and we need to move on to find something which will resonate with them.
The alternate option is to not do business with idiots and let the competition lose money when providing the solution. Idiots can be expensive for us to work with. I am dealing with this right now. I am providing basically the same service to two companies and one is paying six times as much for the same service compared to the other firm. As you can guess one buyer is an idiot. I am only doing it, because this person is temporarily involved and I have a long existing relationship with one of their key local people. Fundamentally, I am doing it as a favour to the person who I have been working with here in Japan. who is my champion, and who will remain my contact, long after the visiting idiot has returned to their foreign lair. Otherwise, I would just say “forget it” and not get involved, because the number is an insult.
Understanding client’s needs presumes we care about what they want. For many salespeople this isn’t even a topic in their mind. Their understanding is that they turn up and tell the client all about their widget in microscopic detail and somehow the client will buy once they have all of that data. Now this approach may work with certain analytic personality types and certain professions, but it is still a sporadic approach with a low success rate. How do we know that what we are showing them will resonate with what they need?
I was interested in a certain solution and asked the President to send someone to me to explain more about it, after hearing his presentation. The Sales Manager for the firm came to see me. He didn’t ask me a single question, but went straight into a prepared slide presentation with about sixty slides. Japanese all look so young, but I guess he was in his forties, so he was not some green kid. He had been doing this sales approach for his whole career, over the last twenty years, I would guess.
Here is the problem with the spray and pray angle in sales. There were two slides out of the sixty, which I judged were interesting. He had wasted his time showing me 58 that were useless because he didn’t ask me what I wanted. If he had known, he could have gone straight to those two and we could have spent all of our time digging into how they would help me grow my business. Instead, he got nothing and left empty-handed.
Presuming we are salespeople who are professionals and so ask questions, are we sure we are finding out what we need to know? Our primary task is to draw an early conclusion concerning whether or not we have what the buyer needs. If not, then we should waste no more time and we should go find someone we can serve. If we can help them, then we need more detail to work out exactly how we can assist. We ask questions about their current situation to get an idea of where they are in their business at the moment.
We next ask them where they need to be and we measure the gap between these two points. If the distance is relatively small, there is the danger they think they can get there by themselves without anyone’s help. That is why we also ask about the timeline they have set for the achievement of their goals. We try to draw out the point that the market and their rivals are always moving quickly and they need to do the same. We need to create a sense of urgency.
Now we ask, if they know where they need to be, why aren’t they there now? What is holding them back? In their answer, we may find our solution may be a possible antidote to what is ailing them at the moment. Finally, we ask them what success for this project would mean for them personally. We do this because when we are explaining the solution, we want to tie it back to what they told us was in it for them.
All this is very good, but do we actually get answers to our questions which are useful? We remember that the person we are talking to will have to navigate a “yes” decision through the different divisions and sections within the firm. These are people who we will never meet and will never be able to question. That means we have to anticipate there will be opposition to doing something different or new within this client. We need to get some early insight into what the internal opposition will look like.
I was speaking to the President to a small company who was very enthusiastic about buying our solution and it would have been perfect for them. Nothing happened. I kept following up and kept getting excuses. What I realise now is that the CFO comes from the parent company and the President doesn’t have that much power. Now he won’t tell me that because it is embarrassing to be the President but unable to approve such a modest investment.
This is the issue we have as salespeople. We cannot know everything which is going on behind the client’s closed doors and we operate on the most sparse diet of information fed to us by our contact. Japanese companies are paranoid about secrecy and so often we are not told much at all, as they try to keep all their dirty laundry hidden away. This is especially the case when it comes to individuals who may block us internally.
We should keep asking, though. For example, “Inside your firm, I am sure this buying decision will interest some key groups. Thinking ahead to dealing with any concerns they might have, so that we can address them in advance, can you think of where there might be pockets of resistance to this idea we are proposing?”. We are trying to work out what information we need to provide to our champion, so that they can pass this on to these hidden groups and deal with any pushback. If we don’t do this, we may find we hit a brick wall and the deal never materialises for us.
Imposter syndrome is a fact of this sale’s life. If we try to avoid that and strive for safety by staying in our lane and just repeat the same actions, we will probably master what we need to do to complete the job. The problem is organisations keep moving the goalposts every year and they want higher revenue productivity. The market also moves on us too and we cannot control that. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same things over and over again, in the same way, but expecting an improved result. When things don’t go as well as we need, we feel like imposters. Maybe that previous good result, that big deal was just a fluke, a bit of luck, rather than ability.
Having clients tell you they have gone with another provider really hurts. Getting them to tell you why is difficult. They don’t want to get into an argument, so they try and ghost you and give you no answer. When you persist with your follow-up, they send you some bromide message that doesn’t tell you anything. If you try to ferret out what they paid to your competitor, they just ignore you.
Losing deals sparks self-doubt. Am I not good enough? Are we way out of line with the market on our pricing? What if this snowballs or continues for lengthy periods? Where did I go wrong? Where was the breakdown point in my explanation of the benefits? What do I need to change? What information did I fail to supply to my champion with, to get a “yes” answer pushed through the organisation decision-making machine? Salespeople are always under pressure to perform, so none of this is helping our mental outlook. It is such a fragile self-belief system in sales, so it is so easy to spiral downwards into oblivion and ultimately, ejection from the company and possibly from the profession of sales itself.
What do we need to do? Pricing is always the elephant in the room for salespeople. “If we were cheaper, I could make more sales”, is the logic. That is true, but what does your brand stand for and what is your positioning in the market? How does getting in less money per deal get you to your revenue target? Price is not the main thing for a lot of successful sales. The buyer has to weight up price against value. A cheap but inferior solution can cost a lot of time and disruption, so it effectively becomes an expensive proposition.
Many years ago, I was on a temporary assignment in Australia. I bought a cheap blender from a retailer down there. The rubber seal ring was a problem and after a while what was being blended would go everywhere. I replaced that blender three times before I gave up and dispensed with the whole idea. The price was cheap, but the irritation and time loss traipsing back and forth to the store, was enormous.
I should have spent more money and ensured a better quality outcome. That is the message we need to get across to the buyer about our product or service here in Japan, to overcome price sensitivity. I have had a couple of potential sales fall over on price lately. This is excruciating, because I thought I had built good rapport with the buyer. The issue today though is there are more and more people coming into the circle of decision-making and your buyer has to navigate the sale through the turbulent waters of their organisation on your behalf. If they hit an internal reef and capsize, your deal drowns. I now reflect on did I do a good enough job providing the bullets for my champion to fire to get the deal done? Did I explain the value equation well enough? What was missing in that presentation of mine?
When deals fall over in sales, our self-doubt bubbles to the surface. Have I lost my mojo? Am I no longer able to persuade buyers to pay what we need for our solution? We cannot stop the process of these self-doubts arising, but we have to keep moving forward, regardless. The answer to deal loss is to have more irons in the fire, on the mathematical basis, that more deals come from having more conversations. If there is a deal flow issue, then we have to get busier talking to more buyers. We increase the chance of doing a deal in this situation.
Talking to more buyers needs more activity to generate those conversations. We have our pool of previous clients who are not active at the moment. They are a good place to start because they will at least know of us. We need to go back to our existing clients and see if we can cross sell them or upsell them. The client is never on our timetable, so we have to keep making the effort to get in touch regardless of how busy we become current servicing clients agreeing to deals. If we don’t, we run out of deals and then we have nothing – the Death Valley of Sales. Once we have exhausted all possible leads, we have to rev the whole process up again and that takes considerable time.
There are no free lunches or givens in this sales life. We recreate our realities every single day. No matter how hard we get bucked off the rodeo bull, we have to climb back up into the saddle and try again. If we can’t do that, then sales as an industry, has no place for us and we better try another occupation.
We have products and services to sell and there are key details about their features which we need to explain to the buyer. Clients need to know what they are getting for their money, so fair enough. In Japan, the client will lead you down the road of morbid detail about the ins-and-outs of the purchase, as they suck you dry for all the information you have. This is a defence mechanism to make sure they are not making a mistake. It is also tedious and over the top from the salesperson’s point of view. We know we should supply just enough information for them to make a buying decision without adding unnecessary data. Our mindless throw away comment can often lead to deal assassination, as we have triggered something that we shouldn’t have.
We nnow have to balance out the detail with explaining the benefits of the purchase. Buyers buy benefits notfeatures except in Japan they focus on the features and keep dragging more and more detail out of us. Japan is special. This is not a business-like culture. Companies are not interested in doing business. Japanese buyers attending a networking event are not thinking, “today, I might meet someone who will add a lot of value to our company and my job is to find as many people like that as possible, in the time I have available at this event”. They don’t want to meet people they don’t already know. Because unknown people are dangerous and there is risk involved. If their friend or acquaintance introduces someone new, that is acceptable because there has already been a filtering process in place to get to this point. The unfiltered person is to be feared.
Don’t believe me? Try walking up to Japanese businesspeople at an event and introduce yourself. Watch their face very carefully and you will see them react with shock and trepidation. They are not thinking “great, a potential business opportunity has just presented itself”. They are thinking, “I should be careful with this unknown person and anyone who just walks up and says hello can’t be trusted, because that isn’t how we do it in Japan. They should have had an introducer and followed the proper procedures”.
So we cannot rely on the buyer to do our job for us. We have to get to the benefits and the application of the benefits with the buyer, as soon as we can. Otherwise, they will squander all the time available for the meeting on the nuts and bolts of the purchase. They will never make a buying decision because we didn’t cover the benefits in our explanation. The buyer is happy to not decide because doing absolutely nothing or nothing new, is the safest path in business in Japan.
One benefit we can explain is about the reaction to the purchase. This could be by the users of the product or service and how they will react very well because it saves them time, money or effort. Buyers worry about the reaction of others to the buying decision and their biggest fear is getting criticised for making a poor decision. The reaction could be by their bosses or colleagues. Generally though, because of the buying process here, there will be many people involved in the buying decision. Nevertheless, everyone involved needs to react positively concerning the purchase. That means internally, the buyer has to shepherd the decision through many corporate layers and they have to appeal to various interested parties to make sure their interests are met and their reaction is positive.
If they are in the distribution process for purchase to on sell to another company, then the way the sale is made needs to consider how that buyer and their client will react. As we are making the original sale, we have to tell our buyer how the other buyers will react positively and why that will occur, in order to push our sale into the distribution funnel. We will never meet these buyers further down the funnel, but we have to create the bullets for our buyer to fire when they are doing the on sell.
We start with the end user in mind and work our way backwards, explaining why the reaction to the purchase will be positive. We need to draw on our word pictures here to describe the emotion of satisfaction in the post purchase phase. Just a dry retelling of the features of the widget won’t produce the reaction we want and it won’t travel across the many touch points toward the final user. We can talk about things like, “You will be very happy when you receive smiles of genuine thanks for making your end users work a lot easier thanks to this purchase. They will really appreciate you for helping them and you will have built an even closer relationship of trust with them”.
We know ourselves when we have made a good purchase as a consumer how we react. We feel that we have done something worthwhile and have done well. We have calculated the purchase decision against the benefits centered on time, money or effort. Our buyers are the same and we have to use our communication skills to flesh out the benefits and the positive reactions which will arise from everyone involved.
Nobody in sales likes it when buyers pushback and don’t make a purchase decision. There are varying degrees of pushback though. Sometimes it might be the buyer being the Devil’s advocate trying to better assure themselves that buying would be the right decision. Other times it is just the buyer being a pain and exerting their power and authority over the sales person. Most buyers have never been salespeople, so they are coming into decision-making positions through general management or technical areas like being an engineer, HR or through the CFO route. In some cases, they don’t respect the profession of sales and look down on salespeople, even including those in their own firm. They are seeing the profession as a bunch of shiftless liars and dodgy magicians trying to con the punters.
Salespeople, at least the professional salespeople, see themselves as playing a vital role in making the wheels of commerce turn. They connect buyer and seller to the mutual benefit of both parties. “Nothing happens in business until a sale is made” is an old saw and still true today. Japan is a tough place in many regards in business but at least salespeople are not looked down upon here. My Carnegie colleagues in Taiwan have their salespeople double hat as the training instructors. They do this because in Chinese culture, the salesperson isn’t respected but the teacher gets respect, so combining the two roles together makes it easier to sell in their culture. Japan doesn’t have that bias.
Buyers in Japan though are consumed with doubt and fear. There is no upside in Japan for doing a good job and a huge downside if something goes wrong and your name is attached to it. In most cases though in sales, the buying decision is spread broadly across many sections within the company. Everyone who will be impacted by the buying decision is included in the final decision and in a way this is a great mechanism for making sure that no individual gets the blame, if it turns out badly.
It also diffuses the pushback. There may be individuals in sections within the firm, who we will never meet, who are pushing back on the offer. That makes the sales process here extremely hard, as we will never get to meet with them and allay their fears and concerns. This is why our contact point person is so important to navigate the deal through the labyrinth.
The problem is the reward for being brave and doing the hard yards is zero. They don’t get any appreciation if it goes well, no bonus, no promotion – nothing because this is just seen as part of the job. However, the penalty for pushing this deal internally and then it doesn't work is very scary. This could impact their career progression within the firm and affect them later when decisions are being made about who to promote. That means that our person has to be made to become a believer. We have a huge task ahead of us to overcome their fear of failure, their terror of errors and their pain associated with past mistakes.
Free trials and small sample testing are good antidotes to overcoming fear of failure. In this way, the product or service can be experienced. All of those people behind the scenes who are involved in the final decision can get some concrete feedback on the value of the proposition. Seeing is believing and this helps our champion to push the decision forward. The testing phase can also yield valuable information on any modifications which may be needed before they adopt the whole shooting match. The fit for the company is highly important and can be of more concern than price. If they don’t believe the fit is there, then price doesn’t matter, because the deal will not progress.
Another good idea is guarantees and warranties if the purchase doesn’t live up to expectations. In our case, we deal a lot with HR people and they are terrified that the training they choose will get complaints later and they will be held accountable. In order to overcome those fears, we use sample training and also will give a 100% guarantee that the training will cost nothing, if they are not satisfied. It is possible that some evil person will decide to use this clause to their benefit and get the training for nothing. In the thirteen years we have been offering this clause, we have never had a case where we have had to do the training for nothing.
This is Japan and generally people here are honest and their main concern is that the purchase will perform as advertised and benefit the company. I am sure there are other markets where this clause will be an invitation to misuse and ripping you off, so you have to know the mentality of the buyers before making this offer.
If we have done a professional job in selling we will have understood what the buyer is attempting to achieve and we will have concluded if we have a solution that matchs or not. Following that we need to explain the solution to the buyer and convince them that this is what they need. Japan presents a danger at this point. There is a ravenous hunger in Japan for data and detail. Buyers are super risk averse in this country so the antidote for risk is information and the more the better. They will suck us dry of the detail at every opportunity.
If we the seller are not in control of the sales conversation, the solution presentation component of the sale cycle will descend into a very long winded expose on all the nitty gritty details about the product or service. What is wrong with that you might be asking? Doesn’t the buyer need all of that information so that they can make an informed decision? Yes and no. They need a certain amount of information, but they need other things as well.
They need to know what is the benefit related to the nitty gritty detail. The deep dive into the detail is the buyer’s attempt to short circuit the risk component, but that in itself won’t get the deal done. The most effective risk reduction strategy is to do nothing and that doesn’t help us. We need to balance out the risk reduction with the upside of purchasing our solution so the balance of the presentation has to include these aspects. What can easily happen though is the buyer keeps trying to extract more and more information out of us and there is no time left in the meeting to talk about the benefits of the solution. The buyer is happy because they dealt with the risk reduction part of the meeting. The seller is not happy because they never got to the why they should buy component of the talk.
There will be key components of the solution which will have the highest priority for the buyer and if we did a good job in the discovery phase, we are aware of what these are. The detail we bring up should be aligned to these high priority items. After we explain each element, we need to immediately bridge across to the benefit for the buyer. We don't know how much we can get through in the time for the sales call and so we want to start with the highest value parts of the solution and the highest value benefits to match the priority. Then we move on to the next highest priority and the benefits attached to that item and so on, as we go through the list.
We should only entertain the highest priority items because if we are not careful, we will miss the application of the benefit part of the sales call. In this part, we talk about how they can translate this solution benefit into their company’s operation. If we only talk about the benefit, then we are stuck at the theoretical stage of the discussion. We need to paint word pictures so that they can visualise how the solution will fit into their current situation and bring additional value.
Without this bridge from theory to reality, they will not be empowered enough to make a buying decision. This requires that we have enough knowledge of how their business works and that we can paint those word pictures such that they resonate with the buyer. The quality of our questioning skills in the early part of the discussion is vital. We need to be thinking about and planning for where the application of the benefit will come when we are asking our original questions. The visualisation part is key for the client, because seeing it in their mind’s eye is so powerful and positive to help them make a buying decision.
After explaining how the solution will make a high value impact on their business, we need to find time in the talk to reference evidence that what we are saying is true. Buyers have been trained to discount what salespeople tell them, so they are always putting up walls around what we say. By being able to talk about a similar buyer in the same industry sector we can talk about what happened when they introduced the solution and what were the outcomes they enjoyed. Now this has to be real and just making up a fairy story is a fatal idea. If they want to contact that other buyer to get more insight and you hesitate or the other buyer doesn’t confirm what you are saying, you lose the deal. You also lose all credibility in the market and your name is mud forever. This type of personal and professional brand suicide is permanent and there is no recovery in Japan. Never forget that bad news like this travels fast, especially in the internet age.
Finally we add in a trial close question. This can be as simple as “How does that sound so far?”. All we are doing here is smoking out any objections, hesitations, confusion, errors in understanding and anything which will get in the way of a “yes” decision. This simple question will bring any and all of these barriers to the fore and then we can deal with them using our objection handling techniques.
We cannot allow the buyer to control the sales call or we will never sell anything. There is an art and science to sales and there are also structures and gates we must pass through the get the outcome we want. Spending all of our time talking about the detail won’t get the sale done, regardless of how driven the buyer may be to demand that detail. Yes, give them the key detail, but do not miss the chance to talk about the benefits, the application of the benefits and the evidence from another buyer, before going into the trial close.
For most places in the world, and Japan in particular, when you find a good salesperson, you tend to stick with them. Why is that? There is a huge trust component to the idea that this person is someone you can rely on and who isn’t going to rob you blind, so that they get rich at your expense. There are so many unprofessional salespeople floating around on every continent and this is just base incompetence in action. Then there are evil salespeople who scam buyers, but this is a very small number of crooks and dirty dealers. The problem is that buyers are always thinking of the scammers in any sales transaction. They may not have personally suffered at the hands of these scoundrels, but the urban legends are powerful and the warning signals are always being scanned in the sales talk.
How do we build trust? The most basic requirement is to not lie to clients. Anotherbasic requirement is to have the buyer’s interests at the forefront of your mind rather than your interests. There are different profit margins for products and services. Sales Managers have opinions on what you should be selling, there are sale’s contests to push products etc., which can confuse salespeople as to what they are there for. Any time the equation surfaces that the sale should be more for the benefit of the firm, rather than the buyer, then we are destroying the basis for trust building with buyers.
Buyers follow salespeople they trust around and if your current firm is evil, then keep your customers and move somewhere else. What do the new firms look for in you – how many buyers have you got to bring to the company? Don’t put up with anyone in the company trying to get you to compromise your relationship with your buyers, for some short-term goal like a sale’s contest or a manufacturer bonus for sales over a certain number. These ideas are fine, as long as the filter of fit for the client is applied and you can honestly say that this is a good deal for the buyer, because it will deliver what they are seeking. That is the key consideration – will it give the buyer the outcomes they need or not?
When you operate like this you build up that key trust and your buyers recommend you to other buyers and your good name is out there in the marketplace as someone you can work with and who you can trust. What is the value of that reputation? It is gold! The issue though is you don’t get that prominence after one deal. It takes thousands of deals and many years to build up a following of current buyers and potential buyers, who will look at using you based on what they have heard about you.
From time-to-time things will go pear shaped and you have to do your best to repair the relationship, and that might have some financial elements attached to it, like giving them back their money. Often though, the firm hierarchy will not support you and this is where you can be compromised. That is why leaving for a more stable company who can see the long-term relationship as an asset, is a much better idea. Telling the buyer that you are unable to give them their money back, because of the firm’s policy and that as a direct consequence of their decision toward this client, you are leaving that company, leaves your trust element intact. Clients won’t be happy to not get their money back but you taking the high moral ground will be noted and appreciated. They won’t deal with your company again, but they will continue to deal with you and will speak highly of you to others.
We all know that gaining trust in sales is so difficult and that it takes a lot of time but that is how it is and we have to work within those boundaries. Walking away from a deal that isn’t in the best interests of the client, hurts at that moment, because the revenues associated with that deal won’t be arriving when you need them to get there. That is painful and financially can make things hard. Giving in to temptation to do the deal anyway is a sugar hit and you will suffer massive depression later, when the market hears you can’t be trusted, you are too expensive and because what you offer doesn’t work. Maybe you think you can skid from one client to another before the bad news catches up with you, but that is very optimistic in this internet world, where bad news travels at lightspeed.
The one-to-one personal recommendation from one buyer to a potential buyer is a much slower transition, but the value component of the stacked trust factor is enormous. We will question what we read in our social media feeds, but we will believe what our trusted friend or associate tells us about you. What would you pay to get that outcome? You would pay the price of doing the right deals that are in the buyer’s interests and sustaining that approach over many, many years. That is how you build a following – one trusting buyer at a time.
In Japan, we meet the client, build the rapport, seek permission to ask questions, ask the questions and then we set the date and time for the next meeting. Usually, in the first meeting this is where we expect to get to and we know we have to come back with a lot more detail for the second meeting. What level of detail do we need to go into in the proposal? Decision-making is done differently in Japan, so the proposal carries a lot of weight here, because so many eyes need to check it.
Consensus decision-making is favoured here in Japan, because if something goes wrong, no one gets landed with the blame. We are all responsible, so actually no one individual is responsible. This has proven to be a winner for Japanese companies, when it comes to decision-making. The due diligence on a purchase decision means that many different sections and divisions will need to take a look at it. The idea is that section by section, the approval document proceeds upwards, toward executive sanction.
The individuals meeting with the salesperson won’t be the only decision-makers. The proposal document has to take into consideration that most of the people making the decision will never meet the salesperson. The proposal document has to mend it way through the buyer organisation on its own. The level of detail needs to be appropriate to the task. Generally speaking Japanese buyers are information vultures and have an insatiable appetite for data. They are all operating on the basis that risk reduction is the key thing to be considered and the antidote to risk is data and information. So for a Japanese proposal we should go in much heavier than we may do normally.
One of the dangers though is that the key points get swamped by the detail and it becomes less clear what needs to happen. Having a lot of supporting information in the appendices is a good idea, as it allows the data vultures to feast. It frees the rest of the narrative up to be more readily absorbed by the readers.
The key to the document is that it answers all of the questions being asked by those different section representatives who are charged with doing the due diligence. This is where the people we as salespeople are speaking to become very important. They will know better than we will what are potential sticking points for the other sections or areas of the most intense interest. It is difficult for us to second guess what all of those areas will be. We should ask for their help when preparing the proposal, so that we can capture everything needed. This takes longer at the beginning, but is quicker in the end, because the answers are there. The readers will move straight through the content, without us having to make too many revisions.
The proposal section on the solution will need to be the most detailed. How will it work and more importantly, how will it work inside their organisation? If we have a similar firm in a similar sub-section of the industry, we can reference, that is ideal. Japan loves precedent and they love having someone else’s example to peruse, rather than being the guineapig themselves. We have to anticipate what some of the concerns will be and address these in the proposal before they are brought up from their side. This way the various section readers can move more quickly through the document and speed up its internal elevation toward the C-Suite.
There will be some detail which is more important than other content and these sections should be kept in the main body. The appendices are where we can layer more complexity into the argument. If there is a need for those doing the due diligence to cover this off, they will seek it out for themselves. For everyone else, the detail provided will be sufficient for them to move the approval process forward. We don’t want to dilute the key advantages of our solution by drowning in too much detail. This is a tricky line to navigate and we have to make some decisions about where to hold certain data. We should err on the side of more data than not enough though. The data vultures need to be fed.
Proposals are great communication vehicles for attacking the doubters sitting behind the wall of the client’s office, who we will never meet. We have to anticipate their requirements and produce a document which covers off their concerns and which can be easily absorbed by everyone else. If we can strike that balance, then the chances of us getting the deal done go up dramatically.
Content marketing has been around for many years now and is an accepted way of appealing to clients. Thought Leadership and Intellectual Property are given away for free to establish our credentials with the buyers. If we show how knowledgeable we are, prospective clients will choose us over our rivals. So for many years now, blogs, books, podcasts, magazine and newspaper articles, videos, Medium articles, social media posts, white papers, surveys and numerous other tools have been at the vanguard to prove we are experts in our fields. This has required a lot of hard earned experience and an ability to communicate that experience to others. Then ChatGPT turns up and opens up a floodgate of content for people who are vying with us for the client’s attention.
ChatGPT is a vast curator of knowledge from the entire world and it is unbelievably fast at churning it out. How can one person compete with that? Our rivals can go to ChatGPT, then tweek the content and pass it off as their own efforts. Our clients probably cannot tell the difference. In a lot of cases, perception is everything. If the buyer sees you are pumping out vast quantities of content, they will conclude that you are an expert in this area, even though the chances are strong that they will never even read the content or not very much of it. ChatGPT can become the great equaliser between competing firms in the content marketing department.
This is real for me. I have 6 books published, 1779 Podcasts and 652 Video show episodes released, over 3000 articles on LinkedIn, etc. I am sure others will also have substantial resources released out into the wild to prove expertise in certain areas. What can we do about all of this?
The answer is differentiation. ChatGPT and other similar engines are good at collecting and synthesising information. At this point, it is generated in a quite recognisable style and tends toward the generic. ChatGPTso far, is not great at distinguishing the quality of the content. It also makes things up and lies, which the industry has cleverly marketed as “hallucinations”. I quite like “bald faced lies” as the preferred descriptor. How can you trust a machine which cannot differentiate between fake and real content and can only collect and collate it?
Because it is synthesising vast amounts of content, the style tends to be a bit utilitarian and dull. This is where we have an advantage still. We have examples, stories, happenings we have witnessed first-hand from our specific component of the industry and we can include these in our content. The specificity means it is hard for ChatGPT to collect the information as this is personal to us and we have never published it anywhere as yet, to be swept up and homogenised by the machine. There is also a gap between when we publish it and when ChatGPT can get its hands on it.
There is also our style. A competitor telling ChapGPT to write something in the style of Dr. Greg Story is certainly possible, but all they are doing is reinforcing my content and my expertise. Dr. Greg Story also has 100% control over his style and he can vary it as well with no qualms or permissions. I try to write my content such that someone reading it will recognise the style as mine. I write in a very informal style, often using slang and I quite like idioms and alliteration. These are not complete moats which will deny people from copying me, but how many people in my industry are going to try and reproduce me? You have to be interested in Japan, leadership, sales, communication, presentations and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. That is an incredibly small circle of rivals. For most of us in business, this will be the case - we will have relatively few rivals in the content marketing world in our specific area of expertise.
Even for famous authors and influencers, there have always been copycats and people trying to rip their stuff off and yet they are still going. For all of us, we see so many attempts to fool us with social media spewing out constant phishing attacks, deep fakes, etc., but we want the real McCoy. We get upset when we are fooled into buying something that is not what it is supposed to be. If we get a ChatGPT fake version of a favourite writer or thought leader’s content, are we going to be happy? Are we going to be satisfied with an avatar or a deep fake trying to pass itself off as someone we admire in an attempt to fool us?
If you cannot write and have a limited intellect or parsimonious business experience, then ChapGPT will certainly be of help. The problem is after people meet you, they find you cannot write and that you have limited intellect or parsimonious business experience. You get the meeting through subterfuge of clever repackaging, but the reality is still the reality. Either you have the real goods or you don’t. If you have them, then you don’t bother with ChapGPT fakery and trying to pass yourself off as something you are not.
Will ChapGPT and all of the other machines out there get much better? Of course they will, but for most of us in business, this won’t detract from the hope I have offered in this article. We can be more confident about what we are doing in content marketing, because what we are doing is the real thing, in real time.
Usually in Japan, we meet more than one buyer. In Western meetings, it is more likely to be a one-on-one situation. Sometimes the buyer boss will bring others to the meeting and they are there to represent their functions and report back what has taken place. The danger is we just focus on the boss and ignore their henchmen. These hangers-on have important roles to play in the decision-making process about the purchase, so it very unwise to ignore them and spend all of your time just addressing the boss, assuming there is only one decision-maker present.
In bigger meetings, it becomes much harder to gauge who is who. It is not unheard of in Japan, for the most senior person to say very little during the meeting and they may even look like they are sleeping. The other tangent we can go off on, is focusing on the English speaker, imagining that they are a key decision-maker. In large companies, that is rarely the case. They are just considered a technician by their colleagues and they may have very little influence on the buying decision.
In larger meetings, it is always good to work the entire room and try and engage with everyone. If you are using an interpreter, this should make no difference. Address each person on a one-on-one basis in English and let the interrupter catch up with what you have been saying. It doesn’t matter about the time lag, if the interpreting is being done consecutively. The fact that you are looking at and speaking directly to that person will have the desired effect.
Most Japanese businesspeople understand a lot more English than they let on as well and for various reasons may choose to not speak in English, when in fact they can do it well. You might be asking why is that? Part of it is hierarchy and roles for the meeting. Usually, one of the better English speakers will be tasked with being the interlocutor for the buyer. The others are there to hear what is going on, as they represent their Divisions or Sections, but are not required to speak. They also may choose to use the interpreter when they get into some questions because that lag gives them a lot more thinking time.
Another reason is they either are a bit shy about their own proficiency and don’t want to embarrass themselves or the opposite. If they are very good, they don’t want to show everyone else up and embarrass others who are not so good, particularly if the latter are the more senior people. You often discover at the end of the meeting, as you are heading for the elevators, that many of them have perfect English. This is always a bit of a shock, because you were humming along thinking they couldn’t understand what was going on in English.
We know that there will be a consensus reached about the purchase and so every section has a part in the final decision and that is why we have to work the entire room. We don’t ignore the boss, but the leader is expecting others to do the due diligence and then make a recommendation, which by the time it gets to the inner circle at the top, it has been agreed upon across all affected areas and will become a fait accompli.
In smaller meeting, say three people, it is easy for us to concentrate on the most senior person, but again that is a mistake. The boss has brought these other people with them for a reason and they need to be included as well. Even the most junior person needs to be included, because often they are given the grunt to work to evaluate the offer. These more junior people will often ask the questions, because they know they will have to come up some type of report on the matter. We need to draw them into the discussion and find out what angles they are most interested in and then try and connect with them along those lines. Usually after the meeting, we will communicate with these people rather than the boss.
They have a reporting function, so it is very important to follow up with them and find out what type of information they need and then proceed to give it to them. They are often in more command of the details than the boss as well, so they are good source of information and a good destination for our information. They can become a strong internal champion in this process and we should work toward that outcome. They can also give us good guidance on what we present and how to present it, because they know their internal systems perfectly, which for us will mainly remain a mystery for the most part. Bosses can be moved around to a new post, but these more junior people tend to stay in one place longer and they can be a valuable ally across time. In a few years, they may in fact become the boss and we have built up a strong connection with them, where the trust has gradually been cemented.
When dealing with multiple buyers in a sales call, treat everyone as a decision-maker, because they are. Don’t ignore the boss of course, but don’t cosy up to the boss and ignore the others either. That will be a mistake and the whole room will recognise you are clueless about how things work in Japan. Not a great start for a salesperson here.
Every professional salesperson has a set script of how the sales call will run. Amateur salespeople just turn up and don’t try to direct the action. Having a set script means we know what will happen during the call, what the stages will be, what we will say at certain points, what we want to know from the client and how the call will conclude.
We have already worked out how to be charming in the small talk component of the call at the very start and how to get the client to do the talking, so we can gauge their personality style, allowing us to adjust our own style to better suit them. We know when to bridge into our credibility statement, so that the client will know they can trust us and that we are totally unlike all of the unprofessional salespeople they have dealt with thus far.
We will move on to the questioning phase to try and understand if we have what they need or not. If we do, then we introduce our solutions based around what they have told us and nothing more. We will ask for the order to test their reaction and if we get objections, then we know how to handle those calmly and smoothly, again asking for the order.
This is how it is supposed to run. Sometimes however the client doesn’t follow the script. In a few instances, the buyer has been so well conditioned by the salespeople they have met, that they directly ask for the pitch, so that they can evaluate the offer. This is bad. Pitching when you don’t know what they want is flying blind and very ineffective, but sometimes you have to just suck it up and get on with it.
In these cases, we have to use our experience and try and anticipate what similar companies like this one have needed. It may be that we have some all-weather solutions which will basically suit everyone and these would be good places to start. We shouldn’t show them too many solutions because we want to get them to tell us what they need. Actually if what we are pitching isn’t on the mark, then the obvious next step is to get them to tell us what would be on the mark. We can get to the same point we want to reach, but we have to take a time wasting detour.
Another variety is more problematic and this is when the buyer doesn’t know what they need. They may already have internal solutions and the firm is geared up for those, so they haven’t explored what is also available in the market. It may be that they are the intermediatory for the group, who will be the actual users of the solution, so they are not at the coal face themselves in this case. We have to throw a wide net to try and cover off their needs.
Again, we have to draw on our experience with what generally has been a common need in this industry. I had this case recently with a tech company. They had quite elaborate internal solutions of which they were profoundly proud and at first blush, it felt like they were fully sorted and didn’t need anything from me. The people I was talking to were the HR team and again their role is removed from the coal face of the divisions doing the actual work.
We have had other tech clients and there tends to be some consistent issues with tech teams where they need training and so I decided to just hone in on a couple of these, knowing full well they have their own internal solutions. The HQ sponsored solutions are always limited though, compared to what a specialist supplier like us can provide. There is always a gap. Also, often with multi-national companies, there is the fact that the centrally driven solutions are delivered in English, which is not ideal for Japan. We can bring that local cultural and language delivery piece which they need and which is always more effective.
I always have my product Flyers on the seat next to me, out of sight of the buyer and will only show them the content I think will resonate with them. I am curating their needs, based on what I know and will only add more content when I get a sense of a requirement. This keeps the conversation very focused and I don’t overwhelm them with solutions, such that they become immobilized. I know that I can always come back and add more content as we get a better picture of need and the whole shooting match doesn’t have to be rolled out in this first meeting.
It is still unfulfilling to do it this way, compared to hearing their specific needs but sometimes we have to be flexible and play the long game. I always say to myself they may not be a buyer today, based on my current solutions, in this market, at this stage of the economic cycle, given the internal machinations of the firm, but one day they could be a buyer. If all I can leave them with is a feeling that this guy can be trusted, then I have achieved quite a lot and perhaps one day I will get the chance to serve them.
Salespeople are always desperate to make a sale. There are targets, quotas, KPIs aplenty and the pressure is unrelenting. When you are in a downturn, a recession, a pandemic etc., which are driving down sales, the desperation becomes even more intense. Getting meetings at all is considered a win and we go for it, regardless of whether the buyer is qualified or not. Telling your Sales Manager you are seeing a potential buyer feels a lot better than telling them you are seeing no one and a five percent chance of a deal is more attractive than a zero percent chance. Self-delusion is like a balm in tough times.
Desperation tends to drive bad behaviour and deals are done which shouldn’t be attempted. Long-term reputations are sacrificed on the altar of short-term gains. We push clients into buying things they shouldn’t buy, knowing it won’t deliver the outcomes they seek. We celebrate in the short-term about getting some numbers on the board and we regret what we have done at leisure. Trust and reputation in sales are worth a fortune, but we can squander that fortune through bad choices. Once the word gets out that you cannot be trusted then the end is nigh for your sales career. The social media world has sped up the revelations about untrustworthy behaviour and bad news travels at internet light speed.
Badly behaved salespeople will move around from one firm to another, but the stench follows them and eventually they have to move again and again until they run out of runway and have to depart Dodge. These are the people who make the profession so difficult for the rest of us. When we meet clients they have that fear that we are a loser and we will dud them, so eager to part them from their company’s money. B2B buyers are worried about the long-term impact on their careers, rather than just the amount of money which has gone up in smoke and they are unforgiving and remain that way forever.
The other side of the coin here are clients who look for weaknesses and who can smell the salesperson’s desperation. They sense they can drive the price down to oblivion and they start playing that game of “sport negotiating”. This means that a sale gets done, a number goes up on the board, the Sales Manager is temporarily assuaged, but the brand and the salesperson’s reputation have taken a hammering. Now there is no real price for the solution and it becomes whatever the buyer wants it to be. Once you get into having special pricing for a buyer, there is little chance of going back to full pricing and you are now trapped in a funnel of death, where the profitability is close to zero or even negative. That buyer will just keep working you over because they enjoy torturing salespeople. It is a game for them.
I had a client who I liked, but he was a bad man. He was very handsome and charismatic and I really got on with him at our first meeting. Where possible, I try to make my clients my friends and I thought I had found a new friend here. He suddenly nominated what my solution would command and as this was the first time to work with him, I went with it. I immediately regretted what I had done. I subsequently realised that this was going to be the price for all subsequent engagements and there was no differentiation across the quality of what we were providing against our much cheaper competitors. I refused to work with that company anymore, because that pricing was very bad for the brand and frankly I considered it an insult. So much for my newfound friend. He subsequently left Tokyo and went overseas, probably never to return and I won’t be in any hurry to meet his acquaintance again. He was a non-client, but I couldn’t see it at the time.
Another client was a sports negotiator and we wound up haggling over pennies on the price. We got down to a substantial discount and very close on the number, but he pushed me to go even lower and I just said no, I wasn’t going to go any lower. That deal never happened because I realised he was another bad man and he was toying with me, for his egotistical gratification.
When you meet someone once in a sale call, it is hard to get a full sense of the individual you are dealing with and you assume the best in people. Which for the most part is the correct approach. It was a reasonably sized multi-national firm and looked promising as a client. As a firm they may be promising, but he was not the counterparty to work with. He was transferred out of the country to a new post and I doubt I will be seeing him again either and “good riddance” is how I feel about it. He was a non-client, I finally worked it out and I terminated him. Yes we lost the deal but we maintained the brand and the pricing and guess what – other clients were happy to pay full price, because they appreciated the value. There is always another potential client and you need to draw a line in the sand and not tolerate bad people masquerading as potential clients.
Did I tell either of these two characters that they were bad people and I was not going to take their crap anymore? No. That is not an option for the sales professional. We can think it, but we cannot articulate it. We have to suck it up, drop them off the client list and keep moving to find a better client. We are seeking to do better business with nicer people. We keep a permanent record in our minds though, to never deal with them ever again. We also refine our ability to spot non-clients in the future and we become better at testing which category they are in, from the early stages of the relationship.
Buyers don’t know us at first, so all they have to go on is the brand and our personality. If the brand is a powerful selling point, great, but for many smaller companies that is not something which is going to make the sale for you. A lot of Japanese salespeople rely on the brand. They never learn how to do sales as a professional and instead decide to transform themselves into glorified order-takers. If you ask them to go out and find a new client, they will recoil in fear and horror because they know they cannot do it and actually have no clue where to start. This is why salespeople need sales training and why not doing it is one of the most expensive decisions, a leader will ever make.
A senior business executive I met recently shared that when he was younger, his company’s policy in sales was to only approach buyers who they could be introduced to by a mutual acquaintance. What a tremendous waste. If they had invested in some sales training, they could have been able to target all companies in their area of the industry and make a lot more sales. Naturally, cold calling, approaching people you don’t know are all difficult, but that is the job of the salesperson. That is why you get training. An order taker is simply not a salesperson, in my view.
One of the dangers of trying to sell yourself to the buyer is we do too much talking. We are keen to show our expertise and the benefits of our solution and before you know it, we are doing all the talking. Naturally, when the buyer tells you their problem and you have a solution, you have to give them confidence that they are talking to someone who can help them. Often we are excited about the potential of our solutions to help the buyer and off we go, blah, blah, blah.
That happened to me the other day. I caught myself going blah, blah, blah and realised, “wait a minute buddy, you are doing all the talking here and you need to shut up right now and get them talking more”. It is so easy to have this happen, if we are not keeping a close leash on ourselves.
There is a difficult line to draw here around how much is enough. In the initial section of the sales meeting, there will be some small talk and this is where we can try to convince the buyer that we are the one to become their trusted partner. The trick though, is not to go on and on about ourselves, but to talk about the benefits our other clients have received from the service or product.
Talking about yourself positively without sounding arrogant and boastful is also a difficult line to tread. It is natural for the buyer to want to know if you are a serious person in this area and someone they can trust and rely on as a partner. It would be good if we were given rails to know where not to go, but the conversation is totally fluid so that is not possible. Overall, we say that the ratio should be 80% the client doing the talking and we the seller are at 20%, however that balance may be flipped at the start of the conversation. We may do most of the talking at the very initial exchange. As we get into the questioning phase, they will be doing most of the talking and we are just asking intelligent questions to draw out things, which are obvious to us, but which may not be obvious to them.
We have to be careful here too, otherwise it can sound condescending or manipulative. Talking down to buyers is pretty dumb, but that doesn’t stop salespeople from doing it, especially when the sellers are legitimate experts in an area and the client may be less so.
The questioning skill actually has a manipulative aspect to it, as we draw the buyer to a realisation about their need that we have identified. Of course, it cannot come across like that, so again the line is not clear and we have to traverse that tricky balance. Getting the client to self-discover is the best solution. Sounds straightforward, right? However, it takes a high level of communication ability to help the buyer get there without it coming across as a trap we have set for them. This is where very high-level questions come in.
The ideal reaction is the buyer is saying to themselves, “we haven’t thought of that” or “we haven’t prepared for that”. Either of those reactions are gold and will cement the seller’s place as a trusted advisor for the buyer, pointing out issues and problems, even before they arise.
We plan the sale around the questions we will use and the solution explanation we will employ. Do we do enough planning for the small talk at the start and how we will come across? Are we doing enough role play practice with our colleagues before we set off to see any clients to make sure we have the right balance? I doubt it and we could all do a lot more in this area and that includes me, too.
Recently, I was asked to do a hands-on session regarding post-Covid sales for a group of CEOs. What was interesting to me was the different idiosyncratic approaches many of them had come up with to make sales. It was immediately clear that none of them had ever had any sales training. This meant that they had been relying on trial and error and hope to make sales. Given the amount of information out there for free and the easy access to high-quality sales training, this choice set is a bit puzzling. What was also profound was how they were all so deeply invested in what they have been doing, even though it hasn’t really been having any significant success. I realised that there was an arrogance here about sales, as if it wasn’t an actual professional activity. The sense was that anyone could do it and do it anyway they wanted.
One of the leaders mentioned that his technique was to be helpful to the buyer and build up a sense of obligation, so that the buyer would purchase from him. He said he did this in the small talk at the beginning of the meeting, trying to make useful suggestions to the buyer, like which are the great restaurants in Tokyo. I had to restrain myself from bursting out laughing at this suggestion that today’s hard-nosed buyers would be swayed by something that trivial. The problem with this approach is we need to be helpful to the company when they use our solution and that is what will make the buy decision much easier. That buyer sitting in front of us has to sell the idea internally and telling others that he or she had received some genius restaurant recommendations won’t cut much ice with the other decision-makers.
Another CEO mentioned that getting referrals was the way to get business. His firm had a method where they would scout out people who knew the buyer and then get that person to recommend them to get a meeting. I asked what happens when you cannot get a referral and he just said in that case they don’t contact the buyer. “Wow, what a self-limiting approach that is”, I thought to myself. What he is really saying is that his company’s salespeople don’t know how to cold call buyers. They also don’t know how to use networking events to meet potential buyers and then follow-up with them.
Of course, cold-calling is hard and so is getting appointments with people you exchange business cards with at an event, but that is the bread and butter of the professional salesperson. We cannot be limited to scouring the earth for referrals and ignoring all other possibilities. Salespeople who are professional use all the tools at their disposal and they have a thick hide, so they can deal with rejection, being ghosted and having a low strike rate. They know they have to keep swinging if they want to get any business going.
Another CEO complained that he was not having much success in getting business. He had his own company, so he has to be the chief salesperson. What was quite obvious though, was that he had no sales methodology. He would just try something, see it fail and then get frustrated with the buyers and have no clue what to do about it. There is a professional progression on the sales journey with the buyer and all of us have to follow this path, if we want to get revenues rolling in.
We need to master the small talk at the beginning to tune into the personality style of the buyer, so that we can adjust our conversation style. We need to get permission to ask questions and then ask well designed questions to fully understand if our solution will be the best fit for the buyer or not. Then we need to present our solution in a way which makes sense to the buyer and becomes the obvious next step. If objections arise, then we don’t argue with the buyer, we ask why that is an issue for them and get more information before we try to deal with the pushback. Finally, we ask for the order and then organise the follow-up.
This is hardly a complex process and yes, there are sub-structures we need to master to make it all work. That mastery of the detail is the difference between the professional and the amateur. These CEOs had not framed sales as a profession and so they weren’t aware of the full set of options available. They were scrambling around in the dark trying to chance upon a methodology which would work for them. The obvious step is not to do it that way, but to get training and become a professional. They also clearly had no chance to do role-plays and get feedback and coaching on what they had been doing. Working it out by yourself when the sales profession is so well established is a curious choice from people who are accountable for their organisations. The salesperson in the field is getting this or should be getting this every day and that is how we polish the blade. The gap between the amateur and the professional was revealed yet again.
When we meet the buyer in Japan, it will be extremely rare that they are the final decision-maker. Usually, there are other people sitting behind the meeting room wall, who will have an interest in any changes or new initiatives. A collective decision will be reached about whether or not they will proceed with you. Japan likes this splitting of the authority because if things go bad, the blame gets spread far and wide and people feel better protected. “We are all responsible, so no one is responsible” type of logic. This means that our contact is going to be the messenger to the rest of the group and our job is to help them make a sterling effort promoting our idea.
Normally we are concentrating on extolling the benefits of our solution for the business and we focus in right there in our explanation. Of course we have to do this otherwise there will be little point in the buyer using us. We should also not neglect to find out what success would mean for the buyer individually. This is rather more complicated in Japan than in the West. Most expat multi-national executives will tell me “I will get a big bonus” or “I will get a big promotion” or something very specific about their own glorious career. Japanese executives don’t talk about themselves. They will say things like “the team will be happy” or “the company will benefit”. We shouldn’t take those types of answers verbatim. That is just typical Japanese modesty. We have to think about how we can help them advance in their career and to marshal a success for the firm.
The nenko joretsu (年功序列) escalator system of staged career progression, based on age and years in the company is starting to break down. Even the peak industry body the Keidanren has recognised that individuals should be promoted based on ability rather than age and stage. This means that where once upon a time the individual buyer had little prospect of being recognised for a successful initiative, that situation is changing. We can play a role here to make them look like a hero inside their organisation.
All the usual caveats apply. Hearing their issues, we have to decide about whether what we can offer in solution terms will genuinely improve their firm’s results. Just selling a deal, to sell a deal, is desperate activity. It means you are failing and now flailing at any hint of getting a deal done, regardless of the consequences for that firm, based on what you are suggesting. This type of salesperson is the one who ruins it for everyone else. We should only suggest solutions which will actually help the buyer and if we can’t do that, then we shouldn’t sell them anything. Now this is easier said than done, when the sales manager is breathing down you neck threatening you with termination unless you make your monthly or quarterly sales quota.
Maybe you shouldn’t be in sales? If you cannot become a professional, then please leave and go get another job and leave the sales industry to the rest of us who are committed to doing the right thing by our clients. When we personalise the buyer and try to make them the hero, we are taking on responsibility for their career now. That is a heavy weight and we have to make sure that we boost their career, as a result of us becoming a trusted partner. They are going to go to bat for us in the internal meetings as the decision is walked around throughout the impacted sections. We have to make sure we give them the watertight guarantees about the quality which we will deliver and that we are there to fix any issues which may arise. We cannot airily hand these off to the customer service people because we have made that strong personal commitment to the buyer and we have to back up our promises.
When we meet others in the company, we need to praise our buyer, especially to his or her superiors in the organisation. I don’t mean meaningless praise, which sounds like flattery. The key to giving anyone praise is that it must have a strong kernel of obvious truth in it and it must reference something which can be proven. Instead of saying, “Tanaka san is doing a good job”, we can say “Tanaka san’s coordination of this project has been very effective and we really appreciate the way he takes care of even the smallest details. It really helps us a lot”. This has to be true of course and that is where the line is drawn between flattery and praise.
When we make our buyer the hero we have to back them up from our side. We have to deliver what we said, on time, on budget and at the required quality. We are building a lifetime relationships with the people in this organisation and we have to make a key goal. Burning your contact inside the organisation is guaranteed that you can never work with this buyer ever again. Our buyer is going to bat for us and we support that buyer at every step along the way, especially when problems arise. Often our own internal systems will try and subvert this effort, but we have to prevail and protect our buyer’s position inside their own company. Make them the hero and protect them right through the sale and beyond.
There is nothing worse than meeting a buyer with no problems. Theoretically, we shouldn’t be meeting them at all because we should have qualified them first. After three years of Covid forcing us all on video, getting to meet a buyer face-to-face is a genuine thrill for salespeople. We are likely to meet every single buyer we can get in front of. There is also the point that a buyer may think they are “all good” and have no issues, but perhaps we can help them see that is not the case. The simplest illustration of that is the buyer thinks taking no action is free. It isn't free, for there is always a price to pay for inaction. Our job as salespeople is to point that fact out to the client.
Unprofessional salespeople in Japan get straight into the detail of their solution for the buyer and just bypass the questioning bit. How do they know if their solution fits the needs of the buyer and even worse, how do they convince the buyer who believes they already have enough solutions, that this isn’t the case? If the buyer thinks they are self-sufficient or are already well taken care of by another supplier, then getting the business is going to be extremely difficult. The only way to break through that wall of non-interest is to use questions to plant the seeds of doubt in their mind. Just repeating the “sales points” of the solution won’t go anywhere, because mentally they have dismissed us as irrelevant. All they are doing is thinking how they can shorten this meeting and get on to something more beneficial with their time.
Salespeople are talking to a lot of buyers and hear a lot of information about trends in the industry and about issues relevant now and also about issues which will surface soon. Buyers are often stuck inside the groupthink of their own companies. There is a single truth being observed internally and this can make them impervious to our solution. Our job is to shake up that belief in a single truth and point out how dangerous that idea is in a fluid and complex business world.
Let me give an example. Many companies are actively working on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) for their companies. The belief is that they can tap into greater innovation by involving women and younger people more in coming up with ideas. In traditional companies these two groups are excluded, because older men dominate the direction of the firm and they distil the single truth, which everyone must follow.
Talking to some clients who were early movers in the DEI arena, I found they had done a good job of the WHY component of DEI, but they hadn’t been able to get to any meaningful diversity stage. Therefore, the premise of gaining greater innovation wasn’t working, despite all the time and effort put into the DEI campaigns. I realised they hadn’t progressed from the WHY to the HOW. Knowing this, when I speak with potential clients about DEI, I don’t go into any detail about how it works or what is in specific modules, etc. I ask questions which inflame their thinking, strike fear deep into their hearts and scare the hell out of them.
Remember, they have come up with their own solutions or they are using my competitor’s solutions, so I have to blow all of that up with questions which challenge the accepted truths. For example, I would ask, “Change fatigue is a real thing inside companies and it accelerates when the benefits of the changes are not being seen by the team. Given you have been working in DEI for some time now, are you seeing concrete changes around innovation inside the company?”. The buyer has to nominate the benefits of the DEI programme and prove that it is working. If they cannot, then I need to push harder and say, “Could it be that you are very close to a breakthrough, but the missing piece is something beyond just explaining the WHY of DEI?”. I don’t volunteer the HOW part of the solution, because I want them to tell that to me, rather than it comes from my side. If they say it, then it is true. If I say it, I am a salesman and they might not believe it. If they supply the answer I want and say they haven’t been able to move from the WHY to the execution piece needed to get the changes leading to innovation, then I just ask them why that is and then shut up.
I am drawing them into my web, through questions which are designed to destroy their belief in what they are doing and force them to open their minds up to my solution. It is a hard thing for people to admit they are failing or that they made the wrong decision to use my competitor. Because of this, the answers must come from them and I cannot be proffering the solution. If I say, “Well, what you need is to do more work around the HOW piece and fortunately we have five out of eight of our modules which specifically address the HOW piece”. I will run straight into a wall of negativity to that statement, as they feel they have to defend what they are doing now and not admit the actual situation. I need to be asking questions which push them to internally admit they need the HOW piece and to ask me if we have it.
The temptation is to jump in a rescue them from themselves, but we have to be patient and let them come to the same conclusion we have reached. We do this through the use of well-designed questions which make it obvious they need us to help them.