This was very frustrating. It became obvious from the client’s email response that there was a sizeable gap between what I thought was going on and the reality. How could that be? I am an experienced salesperson with a solid track record of sales; I have written two books on selling in Japan, one in English and one in Japanese, I have had a weekly blog on the subject for nearly seven years. I teach selling techniques as part of my job. What went wrong? In the email response, he clarified that he was only thinking of a very minimum role for us in the sales training process. Now that was not obvious to me when we met and had our discussion. This was perplexing. I have been replaying that sales call in my mind looking for what did I wrong. Where was the bread crumb trail that I missed?
The questioning phase of the sales call is crucial because if you don’t know what the buyer wants, how do you satisfy them, how do you fix their issues, solve their problems? We know many salespeople don’t ask questions because they are too busy going straight into the nitty gritty detail of explaining their solution. Let’s put it in simple terms. This is the problem of not asking what is the buyer’s favourite colour, which is blue and then just talking endlessly about your awesome range in pink. It just doesn’t work well to get the sale.
What if the buyer’s answer isn’t that clear? This can happen, of course. Not every buyer is articulate or well thought through or well considered or smart. Often, they don’t have a clear picture of what they need. Operating from a flawed central proposition can also complicate matters, because not every client is sophisticated in understanding their own core underlying issues.
As salespeople, we can make the problem worse too. We ask questions which get them thinking and considering the problem from fresh perspectives. Normally, this is a good thing because we want to rock them back on their heels and have them thinking, “We haven’t thought about that” or “We haven’t prepared for that”. This is where we establish ourselves as the trusted partner with the buyer, by bringing greater value and a fresh angle to the issue. However, we may also trigger some concerns they haven’t thought about as yet and raise issues which until now have lay quietly dormant.
Thinking back to that sales meeting, I realise I didn’t dig in deep enough on the issues they were facing. Our solution was a good fit for them and I fell in love with that idea. Unfortunately, that email showed me they hadn’t fallen in love with it. I should have stopped talking and should have looked for additional barriers, especially internal barriers within the company, which would prevent this deal from happening.
Sitting right in front of me, across the meeting room table, I could see the wheels of the Swiss watch inside his brain whizzing around as he was obviously processing a lot of information and possibilities. Instead of just noticing that he was just doing a lot of thinking, I should have asked him what he was thinking about. I needed to do this, to flesh out where he was in the internal conversation he was having with himself, which was going on silently in his mind. If I had said, “What is going through your mind at the moment?”, that would have been a very disarming way of tapping into his thought process at that point. He may have shared what was holding him back from accepting my proposition, instead of getting the rejection later in an email as part of the meeting follow-up. I could have dealt with it on the spot, while we were face-to-face.
I should also have dug in for areas where he had concerns about this solution I was offering. As I have noted, I fell in love with my solution for him, because I could see how this would really help him. I was convinced myself and that just led me down the path of more detail on how the solution would help him. He was sitting there thinking why this wouldn’t work in their situation, because he felt they could do it themselves, to a great enough extent. Grant Cardone, the well-known American sales trainer, is very good at this. He challenges the buyer to justify making the investment to buy Grant’s subscription video courses. He says things like, “How could you justify spending $10,000 to buy this subscription for your people?”.
It is quite clever, because now the buyer has to become an advocate for Grant’s business. They have to justify the rationale and the pricing. He is flushing out resistance on the spot, so that he can deal with it. Maybe this wouldn’t work in every case in Japan, but this buyer was quite Westernised and educated overseas, so he could have deal with this approach. Maybe a more local Japanese buyer would have been simply confused by the proposition.
I am still annoyed this one got away. Not for the size of the deal, but because I couldn’t read the buyer well enough during the meeting and I made too many assumptions about what was going on. I pushed him to do something about starting the training in my follow-up email and this generated his blunt assessment that they could do it themselves and didn’t need me. Ouch! I will be more observant from now on and will question my assumptions more closely, while I am sitting across the table from the buyers in future.
Victor Antonio is one of my favourite podcasters on sales and he recently had an episode on reducing friction in the sale. This got me thinking about how would that work in Japan? A big barrier to sales in Japan is the culture. I remember a business contact of mine, a long time Tokyo resident, who moved from Japan to Hong Kong a few years ago, pre-pandemic. I asked him what differed from doing business there compared to here. He noted a big difference in Hong Kong was businesspeople there were “interested in doing business”.
I asked him what he meant by that? He replied, “In Japan when you go to a networking event, people are not interested in meeting new people all that much. There is a lot of hesitancy in Japan and a fear of new people they don’t know. In Hong Kong, everyone is interested to find out if there is a way to do business together and build their businesses”. I thought about that statement and actually it is true. When I go to the Japanese language only business networking events, as opposed to the international Chamber of Commerce events conducted in English, there is a big difference.
At the Japanese only events, very few people will walk up to someone they don’t know and introduce themselves. I do it, but I am a gaijin and the same rules don’t apply to me as much as they do to Japanese businesspeople. I have had to train my Japanese sales team to walk up to people they don’t know and meet them, because left to their own devices, they would do what everyone else does, which is not all that much.
The accepted play here is to seek people you already know and talk with them and if they can introduce you to someone they know, then that is how you meet new people. I noticed with my team that they would meet someone new and then get stuck with that person all evening. They did this because that was a lot easier than bounding up to total strangers and meeting them. I always had a debrief with them on how many business cards they exchanged, to see how hard they “worked the room”. The latter, one of my favourite activities to find potential clients. In the early days it was pathetic, but after years of water on rock, they are now pretty good. The point is the way things work here, strangers are by definition radioactive and have to be treated with great caution. The other point is you can network here in a Japanese context and find new buyers, if you have the leadership guts to make sure it happens rather than hoping it will happen organically.
This fear of the unknown extends to decision-making being slow and tedious. No one gets fired for missing a business opportunity, failing to save money or not identifying new areas for growth. I was talking to a foreign business executive who worked as a CFO for a Japanese company in Europe. He had identified a way to reduce their expenses, but his Japanese Country Head boss would never agree to it, because it varied from what had been done in the past by his predecessors. In other words, there was the risk of a fresh approach being weighed against the additional benefit. Japanese business conservatism identified doing nothing as the safest decision on his watch while leading in that foreign clime.
Invariably, a change in supply represents a risk and if we are the one trying to break into the supply chain as a new entrant, we have to make sure we can reduce that conservatism as much as possible. The people we are talking to in the company are only a small section of the decision-making spider’s web inside the firm. We need to know what the other parts of the spider’s web are concerned about and try to address those worries,so that they can buy from us.
It is not always easy to pry that information out of the buyer, but we have to keep hammering away at it or we will never move the deal froward. We need to get on that first rung of the supply ladder, thus establishing our credibility and reliability as a trusted partner. This will require some creativity, far beyond what will be needed in other markets and we will have to convince our overseas HQ, that this is what we need to do to crack the Japanese market. Often, they are not supportive enough but they do a lot of complaining about the lack of results. We find ourselves caught in a dilemma without relief.
We might offer a results-based deal, where they pay nothing unless we deliver for them according to an agreed outcome. Getting agreement on how success will be measured is critical for this to work, which in some instances can be devilish to achieve. There may also be quite a delay between the start of the process and the results coming in, which can be hard to swallow, but swallow it we must.
We could offer a 100% money-back guarantee to make the decision easier. This won’t recover the time spent, but it will keep the investment safe in money terms and it won’t show up as a financial disaster if things don’t work out as expected.
Trial shipments are always good to test the system, quality and consistency of supply. The Just In Time system has spread to many industries. Clients are not holding expensive warehousing space anymore and they transfer that cost to us, the seller. The initial cost to the buyer of a trial shipment is quarantined and the scale is kept small to limit any blowback if things go wrong.
Therefore reliability is key, because if something does go wrong, the entire construct comes crashing down and people become very unhappy, very quickly. When I was in market entry, the first contracted delivery of a garden product literally sailed without the goods on board and the Japanese importer was livid. We had just burned his carefully hand-crafted, decades old supply chain and even worse, his trust component with his own buyers. It was a total disaster.
All of this free stuff costs money and adds time, but it helps reduce the friction. Remember, we need to be focused on the re-order rather than the sale. We need to get that first foot in the door in order to make it swing wide open for us. Look for ways in your industry where you can reduce the friction in the sale and make it a no-brainer for the buyer.
Listening to a young salesperson in his first sale’s role talking about being nervous to present to a high powered, senior company President, made me think about that. As we all get older, we forget about our younger “age and stage” evolutions in business. Somehow, we imagine that in those days, we were exactly as we are now. A conversation like that got me reflecting whether I was the same, when I was starting out in sales? I probably was, but it has all coalesced into the mists of time and I frankly can’t pinpoint any of the emotions I may have been experiencing. It raises the excellent question though, about how we in sales should regard the buyer?
Japan makes it very easy. The buyer is not King, but GOD and that is that. GOD knows it too and so likes to run the show when the salesperson turns up. Some enjoy pushing salespeople around as well, just to emphasise how sublime they are. None of this is likely to end in a sale, so why put yourself through this nonsense. We would all do better to find a kinder, gentler more cooperative GOD as buyer. In a word, someone “normal”.
In my view, there is absolutely no place in sales for the buyer to be running the sales call. That is our role. The seller’s job is to seize hold of the responsibility for the sales call and run that meeting along tried-and-true lines, which will result in a win-win outcome for everyone. In Japan, the first order of business is to build rapport with some initial small talk. Japan, as a culture, is brilliant at this, so for Japanese salespeople, this is like breathing – they don’t even think about it. If you are awkward in social contexts, shy or introverted, then this may present some substantial problems. The simple answer is it won’t fix itself, so this barrier requires communications training and practice and really, it doesn’t require that much complexity.
The point is to get them talking so that we can conclude which personality style they are and so better temper our approach to suit how they like to operate, rather than how we like to do things. A simple question such as, “How long have you been with the firm?” is enough to get them talking or, “How long has your office been in this location?”, are good enough starters. The point is, we want them doing the talking early, rather than us blathering away.
If they are a Driver type, they will be all “time is money”, be brief and want to get down to business. If they are Expressive types, they will talk about the big picture. Either way, they are bound to be assertive and confident. If they are Analyticals, then they will be into facts, statistics, evidence, proof, numbers, etc. If they are Amiables, they will want to get to know us better as human beings and they will check to see if they are comfortable with us. Those in the latter two categories are likely to be less assertive, rather quieter and more reflective than those in the former category. Once we know which basic style they prefer, we can switch our communication style to match theirs. Our basic personality remains the same, but we start speaking in a different language.
The next step is to seek GOD’s permission to ask questions. In Western business meetings, this step isn’t necessary and we can just wade in with questions. In Japan, that is often not the case. They have trained the Japanese buyer to expect a “pitch”, which they can then destroy, in order to eliminate any potential risk from this purchase decision. If we have our correct kokorogamae or true intention sorted out, then we should have no fear about asking questions. We always have in the forefront of our mind that we are not after a sale. The re-order is the goal, so the leaping off point is totally different. Is there a match between what they need and what we have? If there is no synergy, then we need to extract ourselves and go find a buyer who we can serve. Our kokorogamae informs us we are here to help the buyer succeed and in their success, will be located our success. This can sound rather trite, but so many salespeople are there for themselves and the buyer is just a glorified ATM, from whom they can extract money.
If we have the right intention of helping the buyer to succeed, then we should have no fear of the buyer, no matter how prestigious the firm, no matter how stratospheric their title, no matter how much dough is involved. We will quickly know from their response to our questions if we can help them or not and if we can, then we are “duty bound” to do all that we can, to see their business succeed. The metaphor I like is – in a business, not medical sense – we have the cure for corporate cancer. Like a medical doctor we are duty bound to make sure as many cancer patients as possible get the cure. This is the same in sales - our solutions are the cure for their corporate ills and we must do our best to help them. If that is your mentality, then rank, seniority, position power on the part of the buyer all become irrelevant.
In Japan we don’t have the custom of haggling when we go to shop. The price is the price is the price, in the consumer world and if you don’t like it, don’t buy it. In the B2B world though there is often a price negotiation. This can be related to volumes being purchased for tangible goods or it could be for services as well. Tangible products are somehow psychologically easier to price defend than intangibles like service provision. The item is right there in front of you, you can inspect it, weigh it, feel it. Services are rather a mystery when it comes to pricing.
I was coaching a sales team recently for a service offering and this service had a time bound element to it. Time bound can often drive the price up in the case of tangible goods, because it is the last item in the store or in inventory. In this instance, the opposite was the case. They were offering a discount to move the sale forward.
Whenever I hear salespeople are discounting their offer, the bristles stand up on the back of my neck. I don’t like to hear this type of talk. The service has a value and a price has been attached to it and that is what they should be selling. Untrained salespeople however, are very quick to start conditioning buyers to expect a discount by dropping the price immediately. I don’t like that unforced error type of sales behaviour either.
In this case the service price was four hundred thousand yen as the list price and they started their client contact with an offer of two hundred and fifty thousand yen. What a massive mistake. When the price gets dropped so dramatically by 37.5%, without any pushback on the four hundred thousand by the potential buyer, there is no floor established. Now the buyer is lost. They have no idea what this service is worth and the immediate inclination is to be like a shark tasting blood in the water and go for bigger bites out of the pricing.
If the seller can drop the price so quickly, then maybe they can drop it even further, so ridiculous counter offers start to spring up. This seller must be desperate is the idea and now let’s find out just how desperate they are, by driving the price right down to oblivion. Two hundred and fifty thousand yen becomes the ceiling and the buyer explores where the floor is and that means starting super low on the pricing and seeing how much they have to come up. In this example, if it was me on the end of that offer, I would say, “this is not in my budget, so there is no allocation for this service. The best I can do is ninety thousand”. There is no pressure on me and I can nominate any crazy number I like. Now the discount is at 77.5%. The reason I am doing this is because I have no clear idea of the value of the service because the salesperson is only talking price to me and telling me if I take the offer by “x” date, I can get it at this discount. Am I in a hurry – no. Do I care when the cut-off date is - no.
The better approach would be to sell the service at four hundred thousand yen and explain why that number is justified by detailing the value behind it. I wouldn’t even mention the cut-off date, because that is pressure on me and not for the buyer. You could argue that this effort has been previously made and hasn’t produced enough sales, so there is a need for a desperate last push to get some money in before the cut off date. The reason I don’t like this approach is we are training the buyer to slam us with demands for discounts, every time we contact them. When we call next time, all they remember is we are the salesperson with no floor on their pricing and we can push the seller around hard and get a big discount. We would be better to let the money walk away and allow the cut off date to pass. We should try again at another time, when there isn’t any time pressure being applied to us.
If we were going to discount, then where possible it should be in exchange for a volume purchase. The discount increments should be small and the floor price should be set high. We need our BATNA – best alternative to a negotiated agreement. In other words, we fix the minimum price we will sell at and we walk away from the buyer, rather than the other way around. In this example, I would have recommended a discount of only 12.5% which is not insignificant and set the price at three hundred and fifty thousand, only if the buyer pushed back on the price. I wouldn’t have mentioned any deadlines, because that information is giving the buyer more power relative to the seller,
If they still pushed on price after we offered the discount, then the next drop would be ten thousand yen, so the offer is now at three hundred and forty thousand yen. The bottom would be set at three hundred and thirty thousand yen, a 17.5% discount and that would be the end of the discussion. I do this to inform this is a hard floor and I will walk away, if you don’t take this offer, after you have beaten the hell out of me on price. The buyer has to have a sense of a win here and for that to happen, we have to tell them the floor, so that they can calculate the difference.
If we are dealing with a “sports negotiator”, that is someone who wants to make sport of us and use this negotiation to inflate their ego and sense of self-importance and power, then we should stop immediately and end the process. I was negotiating with a businessman here on some training and in the end we were twenty thousand yen apart and I walked away. I realised this was a game for him and there was no point in my playing it. If I hadn’t successfully communicated the value at that price point, then twenty thousand yet wasn’t going to do it. Even if I had accepted his lower price, I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it, because he would come back later for a bigger bite. I had to establish a floor and be prepared to walk away and find another buyer, if he didn’t accept it. If we ever deal again, then he knows I will defend my pricing and he cannot push me around.
Discounting is the sign of a weak value presentation to the buyer and telling them that you are under time pressure is the stupidest negotiating idea ever. Walk away and work on your value presentation skills. Package up your offer to make it more valuable to the buyer and don’t discount.
Role play is one of the keys to improving in sales. We are in a psychologically safe environment where we can experiment and learn. The majority of salespeople however are practicing on the client. That is an extremely bad idea, but they do it anyway. The main reason is the firm is not well organised or the salespeople are not well organised. Even if the firm isn’t helping, grab a colleague and agree to help each other by using role play practice before you see any clients. It doesn’t have to be for hours at a time, but fifteen to twenty minutes will be a big help in refining what you will say and how you will say it.
There has to be different version of the same talk. Some clients will be incredibly detail oriented, sceptical and wanting tons of proof, before they will consider buying anything from lowly salespeople. When we do this practice, we need to marshal all the proof we have to explain why this solution is a safe option. Another client will be the opposite. They are big picture people and don’t like getting tangled up in the weeds of all the detail. We need to go macro too and talk about the way this will elevate the firm’s status and success. Some clients are very focused on the relationship and will want to have a cup of tea and get to know us. That conversation is bound to be soft, non-pushy and allowing time to work its magic to get the deal – eventually!!! The “time is money” client will be driving the meeting, they are always in a hurry and want the key points so they can get back to what they were doing. What will be the outcomes they can expect, when can they get them and how much will it cost? Forget about the cup of tea.
Doing a single version of the role play the way we normally function, means we are missing the options to appeal to the other 75% of buyers who are not like us. We need to speak these four languages and we need to spend time practicing them. The other three styles are not natural for us, so they need refinement. This takes commitment and practice. If you are a “time is money” type yourself, slowing down and having a cup of tea is the last thing you would ever think to do. To drop the strength in your voice, slow down your speech and fit in with someone totally different to you, is a form of torture. It requires work and patience to make it happen.
Ideally, the practice would be geared up for the clients we will meet that day and we may need to work on a couple of versions in preparation. If we don't have anyone in particular that day, then we can work on all four types. The key is to make it as realistic as possible. Ask your partner to become an actor and play the role of the client, matching the way they conduct themselves in sales meetings. It won't be a perfect match, but if the client is time poor, we have to practice with that in mind and truncate a lot of explanation, get to the key points, make a very assertive recommendation and be prepared to be ushered out of the meeting in very short order.
We shouldn’t just do one repetition either. We should do at least three repetitions, with feedback, to get the practice cemented. The feedback is important too. Don’t expect your partner to be a genius of feedback and know how to do it properly. You can tell them what you are working on and ask for their feedback on that particular point. Ask them what you are doing well – the good – and what you can do to improve – the better. Left to their own devices, the majority of people will immediately start demolishing your confidence and telling you a million things you are doing which are hopeless or wrong.
As we get the feedback, we polish what we are doing and we can step it up in the next practice. Doing it once and doing it three times should be dramatically different and becoming much more persuasive. Often though, wd do it once and then move on to something else. Think about the rest of your experience. When did that ever happen? We had to repeat things at school in order to recall them. In sports, we did massive repetition practice. When we are down at the gym, we don’t do just one rep on a set of weights and leave it at that expecting to get stronger. Why would sales be something that gets a “once over lightly” touch and suddenly we are geniuses?
If the firm is well organised, we can do our three repetitions and then rotate partners after each set, to get a different feel. All of this requires the time to be allocated and the session to be led by the manager. You would think that was the most obvious thing in the world, but often this is not what happens and there isn’t the needed repetition or feedback in play. The manager just pushes for results, but doesn't invest any time or effort to help that occur. That isn’t very smart.
Role play is important and role play done professionally is a lot more important. How are things down at your shop?