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.