Salespeople are constantly talking to clients, but if you think about it, clients don’t have that many conversations in a year with salespeople, so there is a massive power imbalance in play. That imbalance is in favour of the salesperson, if they know what they are doing. Humans have survived on the basis of many factors, physical and mental and certainly pattern recognition is one of those crucial skills we have accumulated. When we encounter any situation we search our memory for our experiences of a similar situation, as a guide to what are some of the possibilities available to us. This applies to sales as well.
When the client says a certain thing, we have a huge database of other sales conversations and outcomes to draw upon, to filter what we are hearing and to also prompt us to do what we did last time, which worked out well and we got the deal done. We are searching for patterns to recognise to assist us with marshalling our response.
The problem though is a lot of this is just left to memory and as we know, the faintest ink is more reliable and superior to the best memory. In other words, we need to capture this information, so that we can remind ourselves of the patterns we have encountered. We work in teams and across the sales team, there is a tremendous resource base of patterns and experiences, but it is rare that sales teams will capture these gems. Every salesperson is an island and this is especially the case if there is an individual sales commission remuneration system in place.
The better approach would be to get everyone together and share their experiences and patterns. For example, Japanese buyers think they are GOD and they don’t brook insolent salespeople asking them questions. All they want is to hear the pitch, so that they can tear it limb from limb. How can we sell anything if we don’t ask questions to find out if what we have is what they need? So we need to seek permission to ask questions first. There will be certain patterns around asking for this permission which have proven more successful than others. We should all work on using the more successful approaches, rather than trial and error or just trying to work it out ourselves. And we should capture the best practice patterns.
When we get to presenting the solution we go through a five phase structure. We talk about the details of the solution – weight, cost, size, colour, delivery timings, etc. Next we draw out the general benefits of our solution. This is a great topic to gather the total possibilities available and we should make a record of these for future reference when we speak with clients about the widget they need. In phase three, we go deeper and we talk about the specifics benefits for this particular firm if they use our solution. Most salespeople never get to this phase, so what a great opportunity for the professionals to burn off their competitors by using this technique.
This is also where the pattern prediction comes in. Across the sales team there will be people who have dealt with this same industry sector and with similar clients. We ourselves may be encountering this type of business for the first time, so we have few reference points to talk about the successes of our widget with this prospective client. Where have others in the team seen this particular application of the general benefit in this type of business with this type of firm? We need to capture this and store away the information for when we need it. By pulling on the total power of the team we can best position ourselves with the client. When we meet the client we have no idea what they need and we spend a considerable amount of time trying to understand their business, their situation and trying to fix upon the best solution for them. In Japan, this solution provision usually comes at the second meeting and so there is time to work on plumbing the database of similar cases before the next meeting. We are looking for predictive success patterns to help us assure the client that what we have will deliver what they want.
Assuring the client that this solution works is vital, but they may not be inclined to take our word for it, so we need to present some evidence – this is phase four. The best evidence is a similar firm’s experiences especially one coming from a similar industry sector. This is where we need to be capturing this type of information across the firm, from all of the salespeople. One salesperson may not be able to build up a big enough pool of similar cases, but collectively, the chances are high that the firm has covered off a lot of possibilities which can be used as evidence. Over time, we can build up a strong library of patterns where our solution has worked well and we can convince the client it will work for them too. In phase five we test for resistance and use a trial close asking “how does that sound so far?”.
The secret is to tap the entire salesforce for their predictive patterns, capture them and get them into a format which is searchable and easy to find. The search modes might be by industry sector, problems or solutions. These are all predictive patterns and we can make the most of them to be successful in sales.
I was chatting with a prospective client about a proposal I had submitted and he offered this feedback from one of his colleagues from the senior management team, “we don’t need to bring in trainers, we can use LinkedIn Learning instead”. I was shocked to hear that from the lips of a senior leader. Is this guy really a leader? I have used LinkedIn Learning myself and is cheap, but I found the quality is also quite various. Individuals can shoot some training video content and LinkedIn Learning uploads it on to their platform. The main problem is that self-paced online courses have a tremendously low completion rate of only 3%. This leader may sign people up for online courses, be they LinkedIn Learning or from other online providers, but the outcomes won’t be there. This is magnified in the case of sales training, because of the nature of the beast.
We teach Leadership, Communication, Presentations, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Sales. Sales is by far the hardest subject to teach. The content isn’t the issue, it is the attitude of the people in the class. It seems to me very few people in sales have ever had any formal training or even read a book on the subject. They are in sales and have cobbled together a sales methodology from their bosses or colleagues or through trial and error and they are fixed on their way of doing things.
This results in a patchwork of sorts, where they get certain parts of the sales process to work for them but there are big gaps still, because they are doing things in a hit and miss fashion. In Japan, we find there are key parts of the sales process skill set, which are severely underdone.
Having said that, generally speaking, building rapport is well executed because that is a component of the culture. There is also a strong tendency to use referrals, which is good. However, there is a bad tendency to rely on the brand too much to do the selling for you. Japan is a risk averse nation and dealing with big brands is considered a safe option. That isn't so great if you are selling for a company which isn't a big brand though.
Let’s explore some of the areas we have noticed are weaknesses for Japanese salespeople entering our classes. Asking questions of the buyer is a major flaw in the sales technique of most Japanese salespeople. Part of the issue is cultural and part is ignorance about how to ask. Culturally, the buyer is seen as GOD and you are just there to tell GOD all the details about your widget and GOD will decide what happens next. In this format, the buyer controls the sales call not the seller. That is a bad idea if you want to make any sales. The salesperson’s job is to guide the buyer to a “yes” decision, if that is the best outcome for the buyer’s business. The problem is neither the buyer nor the seller have any idea whether that is possible or not, until some basic questions have been covered off. We need permission to ask GOD a few questions.
Here is the five part “Permission From GOD Formula” salespeople need:
1. Explain who you are
2. Explain what you do
3. Explain who else you have done this for and what were the results
4. Suggest “maybe” you can do the same for them
5. Ask, “in order to know if that is possible or not may I ask a few questions?”.
Once we have received permission from GOD, we can explore what they want to achieve with their business and why they are not where they need to be.
This is a four part formula:
1. As is – where are you now?
2. Should be – where do you want to be in three to five years?
3. Barrier – what is stopping you from getting there fast enough?
4. What will success mean for you personally?
Asking these questions will tell us if what we have will be what they need. If we don’t have it, then we should stop wasting everyone’s time and go find someone who does need our solution.
Getting pushback in Japan often triggers an automatic twenty percent discount, which is an extremely bad idea from every perspective. Why is there pushback in the first place? This comes from a poor effort explaining what difference your solution will make to their business. A proper explanation formula has five elements:
1. Explain the facts, details, spec, etc., of the solution
2. Link these to the benefits your solution provides to the buyer
3. Extrapolate these benefits into how it will make their organisation more effective
4. Reference a similar client and the results they achieved using your solution
5. Do a trial close (“How does that sound so far?”) to flush out any questions or resistance.
When getting resistance, we don’t argue the toss with the buyer and use our magnificent force of will to overcome them. The first thing out of our mouth has to be, “may I ask you why you say that?”. Now the locus of accountability has swung back to the buyer, who has to justify why they are saying the price is too high etc. We are no longer on the backfoot trying to argue the point. We immediately get more insight and information on why and how this objection is a problem for them and this helps us in framing our answer.
Asking for the order is avoided by many salespeople, because it allows them to fail with their ego and dignity intact. A “no” is confronting and Japanese society has learnt to avoid that type of outcome, by leaving everything vague. It doesn’t have to be like that! This is a how hard it is to ask for the order - “shall we go ahead?”.
Proper sales coaching and training refines all of these steps and turns the salesperson into a competent professional. What we know is that a small percentage increase in sales outcomes immediately pays for the investment and keeps producing substantial revenue growth into the future. Investing in real sales training for the team is a no brainer!
How could we lose track of buyers? Unfortunately it is very easy. That nice person we have been dealing with inside the company, the one with whom we have built a solid relationship, where the trust is brimming and the bonhomie is pumping, is transferred to another section or they leave the company for another job. Suddenly we are left with nothing. If it is an internal transfer, we may find there is a new person who decides they will put their own stamp on things. They bring in their own suppliers who are their favourites. They have a competing established relationship or maybe they don’t like the cut of our jib. If a new person is being hired in to replace the incumbent, then there will be a break in the traffic for a couple of months and before you know it, things have begun to drift and we have trouble making the connection with the new person.
Maybe there is a global pandemic and everything shuts down for a couple of years. The company has stopped spending on what we offer and when we go back to rekindle the relationship quite a lot has changed. The people may be gone, the budgets may be gone, the strategy may be new and different. Basically, we have to start again. We know the history with the client, but often the new people we are dealing with have no idea who we are and we are basically doing a cold call to this company. Some are working in the office and some are still at home. Getting hold of people puts us in quandary.
That iron wall of disinterest on the part of those answering the phone is there in all its confronting glory. In Japan, if you don’t know the actual name of the person, you are almost guaranteed to never get through to the function you need to be speaking with. “We will take a message and let them know” in my experience never translates into getting a call back, no matter how many times you call. The junior person answering the phone fully believes their duty is to keep you as far away from their company as possible and they are incredibly diligent in that endeavour. If you ask them the name of the person performing that functional role they won’t tell you, as if this information was a major corporate secret and you are an industrial spy.
I remember there was a change of President in an international luxury firm here we had been dealing with and I tried to speak with the new President. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the name of the replacement and no matter how many times I called, the young woman answering the phone would block me and was most unhelpful. Frustrating doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling. I never did meet the new President
What can we do? If there is going to be an internal transfer, these usually take place every April in Japan, as that is the start of the new financial year. It is a good practice to check with our champion that they are not getting transferred to a new section and we shouldn’t assume they will be staying put. Every year we should get it into our calendar to check in on any likely staff movements which might effect them.
If they flag a move, then we need to ask them to sprinkle the sacred water on our brow and anoint us into the bosom of their colleague who is taking over. Being introduced by our champion is very powerful because it helps us to overcome any likelihood their replacement may go crazy and introduce our competitor. There is an implicit obligation to honour what their predecessor was doing, otherwise it looks like an oblique criticism of their work. When we meet the new person we have to start again and build the trust. What personality style are they? Highly analytical, time is money, have a cup of tea together or a big picture person? What communication stye do they prefer? We need to rejig everything.
If there is a new person being recruited from outside then the whole effort becomes more difficult. Our existing champion has left the building, so they have no influence any more on what happens. How will we know when they have recruited the new person? This is not very easy because when we call, we get that junior person who is highly motivated to tell us absolutely nothing about what is going inside the firm. We can try and ask our champion to nominate someone in the same section or in a related section, who will take our call and who will share the name of the new person.
Another tack is to ask the junior person who usually answers the phone to help us meet the new person. We can explain that Suzuki san is leaving and we know that it will take a few months for the replacement to arrive and that we would like to call them every now and then and get an update, so that we can meet the new person. Given we have a relationship with Suzuki san, there is a super slim chance they will agree to help us.
Sometimes our champion is the President of the organisation. As we know, corporate life can be brutal and suddenly your President champion is out of the organisation. This has happened to me a couple of times recently. One was through a merger and the conquering acquirer ditched my guy, to put in their own guy. In another case, I happened to see a LinkedIn post where a mutual friend was congratulating my champion on his new venture. New venture? What new venture? I discovered he had quit the company and was now doing his own thing. That happened very fast. A third President, who had been very, very effective in his role and a great client, was suddenly gone. I still don’t know why, but my champion has been pushed out. We need to keep a close eye on our champions!
All of this presupposes we are well organised. We need to keep checking on the internal transfer plans for our champion and also to take action immediately we know they are leaving to be able to track the arrival of their replacement and find out the new name. We need to keep up a regular contact with our President champion, because there are no guarantees of corporate loyalty or longevity anymore. None of this guarantees anything, but it is a lot better than trying to batter down the iron wall keeping us out. Sales is hard anywhere but Japan just adds that patina of difficulty which makes everything much harder here. Yes, it should be better, it should be different but it isn't. We have to adapt and be both agile and nimble.
The front row of sales training courses will often have the best salesperson sitting there trying to get even better. The salesperson who is failing or is a mediocre performer is nowhere to be found or is there, but is solidly resisting the content and approach. I read this many years ago and decided I would attend all sales training I could get and that I would be in that front row because I wanted to meet the top performers. I walk the talk and recently I attended a webinar on sales for a Chamber of Commerce being run by my competitor. I wasn’t there to spy but there to learn. In the same vein, I read books on sales and listen to podcasts of the subject. I was listening to one recently where the guest being interviewed mentioned four excellent attributes in salespeople. He noted Coachability, Urgency, Resilience and Curiosity.
You would say that is pretty obvious and fair enough, but still these are not always present in salespeople. Coachability is an interesting one. At the superficial level people say they are ready to learn, to improve but the rubber meets the road when it comes to changing habits and shaping behaviours. In fact, they are not really coachable because they resist change, even though they are not doing well in sales and have in fact never done especially well in sales. You would think their numbers would inform them that they need to try a new approach, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. They are in their Comfort Zone and they don’t want to emerge from there, to do what is needed to improve.
Sales has a big accountability aspect to it. Sales leaders only take a certain amount of responsibility for their salespeople, because they see the individual has to be accountable for their inputs and effort and really, it is up to them to do the work themselves. There isn’t a lot of hand holding going on in the world of sales management, because the exit door is the preferred mechanism to solve problematic salespeople who won’t change or can’t improve. There is no great appetite to rescue them. For Japan, this won’t work anymore though and the rescue part or the amelioration part is becoming more needed. Declining population, in particular declining youth population, means there is a shortage of staff and especially salespeople. We can’t expect even competent people anymore and have to take what we can get. That also means we have to pump more energy into getting them to be effective in sales.
Urgency is about speed of taking action and having excellent time management methods in place. There is a lot to do in sales. As we get deals we get busier and when there aren’t any deals, we get busy trying to get clients – it doesn’t stop. Disorganised people get into sales and they stay disorganised making it hard to be successful. I will bet that if you peel back the factors behind why a salesperson is struggling, their poor time management skills will be a prominent factor. This is not complex though. The Time Management Quadrant Two – Not Urgent but Important is where the planning has to get done and the Urgent and Important is where we live for the rest of the time. Planning means setting out our goals and then matching our priority schedule against the time required to get them completed. The key is to plan first and then follow the plan, which seems to defeat the vast majority of salespeople. We have to work with a sense of time poor urgency to make sure we can get everything done, which needs to get done and we need to know what is the order in which it should be done.
Resilience is all about self-belief in the face of rejection and failure. I have to keep in mind they are not rejecting Greg Story. They are rejecting my offer in this business cycle, at this point in the financial year, at this point in their internal planning, in this offer’s current format, at this particular price point, with their sense of relative value, etc. Winston Churchill’s great quote is needed for salespeople about “going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm?”.
Most of the time we fail in sales. Most of the time the client doesn’t make a decision or goes with a competitor or rejects our offer. There is a fine line between learning from failure and being overwhelmed with self-doubt. Of course, we have to reflect on what we could have done better without beating ourselves up, such that we can’t get back in the saddle after having been thrown. It is easy to spiral down further when things are not going well, but we have to dust ourselves off and keep going. We need to do more study of the industry, the firm, the techniques of sales, do more role play practice, make a bigger effort to find prospects, make more calls and see more buyers.
Curiosity is about really trying to understand the buyer’s needs. If all you are doing is blabbing on endlessly about the features of your widget, then this idea has no meaning for you. If we have a genuine desire to fully understand what is driving the buyer’s problems, we are on the right track to find a solution. Or we will quickly discover they are not a buyer, because we don’t have what they need. We don’t waste any further time and we move on and find a real buyer. There is no point in manufacturing a “fake” desire to understand the client’s problems. If you are going to go to the effort at all, you may as well go deep and be sincere. The point is we are looking to solve their problems and to do that we need to be driven to analyse what is going on in the client’s world. We are not looking for a sale - we are looking for the re-order, because we bring such value to the buyer, that we become their trusted partner.
Each of these aspects of coachability, urgency, resilience and curiosity are obvious, but like many things in sales, obvious but not adopted and not actually applied in our everyday work. Tugging our forelock and genuflecting in the general direction of these truths is meaningless, unless we do something about mastering each aspect. How do you measure up on all four fronts and where can you do better? This is the mindset of the top performer sitting in the front row – how can I do more, better, easier, faster? If you are not the top performer, then here is a four point roadmap to employ and you can start right now – no signups needed and no waiting required.