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.