We all understand the importance of a brand.  Brands are a short form description of long term reliability and perceived trust, both based on solid evidence.  Every business has a brand. You might be thinking that your company is too small and insignificant to have a brand.  Yet you deal with your own staff and for them, the business is a brand because of their experience with you as their employer.  Suppliers serve you and for them you are a brand, based on how you treat them.  There will be buyers and they have already positioned your brand, based on the way you partner with them to serve their interests.

Our company brand does the selling for us, up to a certain point.  As salespeople though we have our own brands.  Clients buy us first, then they buy our widget.  They are putting their trust in our reliability to provide them with the right solutions to help their business.  Salespeople from our firms, past and present, collectively establish the brand in the market, based on their individual service capabilities for buyers.

Today, social media has given every salesperson an amplification opportunity never before available in commercial history.  This is a double edged sword.  If the service is poor or problematic, then bad news travels far and fast.  Once upon a time, if you didn’t do a good job for the client, maybe 10 people might know about it.  Today, thousands can know about it instantly.

Let me illustrate. A businessman in Tokyo, whom I had known for many years and would occasionally meet at networking events, had his personal brand trashed.  There was some dispute with the President of another company, who said they were not paid for a service they had provided to his company.  This information appeared on LinkedIn and was in my newsfeed.  At that moment, I realised how powerful social media was. I did a search on this guy and what a Pandora’s Box of woe and trouble that released.  Based on what I read, I would never do business with him. If anyone checks him out beforehand, I doubt they will proceed with him, based on what they find online.

As a salesperson, when a client does a search on you, what will they find? I don’t necessarily mean high crimes and misdemeanours.  Is what is being presented to the world, showing your personal brand in the best light?  There is no doubt that clients today will validate who we are on social media and proactively use internet searches.  Knowing this, are we taking a firm stance to control the narrative?  What photos of you are up there?

I took a look at my own photos, which Facebook has divined for my photo collection.  They are about 95% business oriented, with a couple of karate related photos there.  Nothing untoward or embarrassing.  Now this is by choice.  I know I must have control of my personal brand and so whatever goes up on social media from my side, has to be pre-approved by me, as a conscious decision every time I post.  When I do a search on Google on myself, again the results are almost exclusively business related content, with images and content congruent with the brand I have built.  Again, this is no accident and please take a look at it for yourself.

Buyers will check your social media and your search information.  Do we want them finding extraneous stuff that doesn’t add any value to our brand?  No. We want a full frontal assault, aiming for sensory overload, on what a tremendous professional we are.  Even better, we want to pack the medium with content marketing value.  Post your own articles on social media about aspects of the market or the product, that bolster your reputation for reliability and trust. Don’t just hijack someone else’s article and piggy back on their content, by writing some glib one liner and then reposting their content under your name as a curator of content.  Post you own content, that you own and which makes people aware that you are an expert in your field of expertise.  Remember, we have the tools for amplification ready to rumble. The more of your own content you pump into the system, the more prominent it becomes and the more likely that this will occupy the attention of the buyer, when they are making a cursory investigation of your social media presence.

We want the buyer to buy our brand.  We need to determine what that brand is and that means we need to exercise precise control over what is available about us out there in internet land.  When we are being checked out by the buyer, we need to know in advance what they are going to find. We want it to be powerfully positive.  Let’s control the sale with the buyer, from even before they have a chance to meet us.  We own our own story, but it only makes sense if we decide what that story is and where it appears.  Let’s get busy doing an audit on who we are in the social media and internet search world.  If we don’t like what we find, then we have to change that and change it pronto.  The internet, like rust, never sleeps, so let’s become intentional about our personal brand development.

In Part One, we talked about Jan Carlzon’s insights into the importance of consistent service  being provided to clients.  The buyer mantra is know, like and trust in sales. We also talked about the basics of sales – prospecting and closing. Now are we going to continue the errors, shortcomings and mistakes of last year into the new year or not?  Are we going to just continue doing what we have always done year in, year out or are we going to improve?  We tend to get into a groove in sales, which is perfectly fine, if it is the correct groove.  We start again this year, but are we adding years of sales experience or are we just duplicating the same dubious experience of last year?  We have to make the decision that we are going to become better in all aspects of the basics of selling and build a professional career.

As mentioned in Part One, a big element of sales success revolves around our communication skills. These days it is made even more difficult, because we are probably doing all of this, while selling remotely.  How do you like someone you have never met before in person and only interact with on a small screen during an online call?  In this environment, what we say and how we say it become vital.  Did you know that we lose about 20% of our pep when we are on screen. We have to lift our energy just to get back to parity, let alone start to impress the client with our energy and passion to serve them.

You will have noticed what dead dogs a lot of people are when on screen.  They are lifeless and low power. If you are the buyer, they are probably not the type of person you want taking care of your business.  You want a powerhouse who will run through brick walls for you, who will leap tall buildings in a single bound to do the best deal, someone who will take a bullet for you on the pricing. This means the same old, same old, year in, year out sales boogie doesn’t function properly and we will lose the customer and the sale.  We have to refine our onscreen communication skills further just to tread water, in order to stay where we are right now. These are the new basics of sales.  However, are salespeople leaping out of bed ready for the day and seeing it as a new day in sales, that requires a set of different skills from last year?  How are we doing with understanding and mastering the new basics for this coming year?

Understanding clients seems the most obvious basic skill, but that is a rarity.  You have to wonder how that could be the case?  In Japan, the reason is simple. The communication flow is one way.  The seller is trying to “convince” the buyer to buy.  To do that they trot out their widget catalogue and describe it in vast detail. The problem with this “no questions asked” approach is you don’t know enough information. Does the buyer need that widget in pink or blue?  Waxing lyrical about the bountiful aspects and many wonderful attributes of your blue widget is ridiculous and pointless because the buyer needs the widget in pink.  You need to know that and the way to find out is to ask the buyer questions, rather than blindly pitching into the dark.

The Japanese client is a problem too.  Over time, they have trained salespeople to offer up their pitch, so that they can cut it to shreds.  They do it this way in order to satisfy themselves this is a low risk purchase.  They prefer the “smash the walnut with a sledgehammer” approach. Risk aversion is fair enough and nobody wants to make an incorrect purchase or waste resources.  Pitching is a total waste, however salespeople and buyers haven’t woken up to that fact yet.  A Japanese salesman who came to see me promptly sat down and immediately went through his entire slide deck adding his commentary.  He didn’t ask me one teensy-weensy question about my business or what was the problem I was trying to fix.  I teach sales, so I was amazed and wondered how long it would be before he would ask me a question.  Well he didn’t.  He just pitched and pitched and pitched.  We wasted twenty five minutes of that meeting going through stuff of no value or interest to me the buyer.  I wanted pink but he kept talking about blue the whole time. If he had taken a few moments to ask me some questions, he could have zeroed in on the two slides that were pertinent to me, in that whole massive deck. We could have had a much more meaningful and fruitful conversation.  He didn’t get the sale and no wonder.

Whether we are selling online or selling when person to person, we need to ask questions.  Japan being Japan, we need that mezzanine step of first getting permission to ask questions and that is not difficult.  Are you or your colleagues asking for permission?  Salespeople in Japan need to start the new year with a new realisation that pitching is inefficient and basically self-defeating.  Let’s start the new year reflecting on the true basics of selling.  Then we can put those basics into practice, in order to get the results we need.  The equivalent of football blocking and tackling is what we need in sales.  If we salespeople don’t get it, then this will be another year of opportunity which has slipped by, eluding our grasp.  We simply cannot afford that year in, year out business anymore.

Journeymen salespeople are starting another year of selling.  Maybe their financial year is a calendar year or maybe the year wraps up in March.  It doesn’t matter, because there is a mental trick we play on ourselves that January 1st represents a new start, a new year.  Sales can be exhausting and 2020 will not go down as a bumper year for the vast majority of salespeople.  Yet, here we go again.  How do we get ourselves back up into the saddle on that bucking bronco that is the sales life? 

In Japan, very few salespeople are basing their livelihood on full commission sales.  Here we have either a base and bonus or a base and commission system.  That means that if we don’t sell much we can still eat.  So the economic pressure here is less intense than in other markets.  It is also tricky to get fired for poor performance in Japan.  The courts expect the employer to reassign the sales failures into other jobs more suited to their lack of talent.  So the downside of not selling is not that cut throat here.  Also, the vast majority of salespeople are amateurs, not properly trained in the profession.  Rank amateurs bumbling their way along is the norm here, so no need to feel any social pressure either.

In these circumstances it can be as if everyone in sales in Japan is sitting in a lukewarm bath – not too hot and not cold, but also not very exciting either.  “Blocking and tackling” was the basics of winning football games according to Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers.  So with sales, prospecting and closing are the basics of sales.  We have to be farmers and hunters.  Finding new buyers and treasuring our existing buyers, looking for the reorder sequence to kick in. 

Know, like and trust are the basics of sales.  The buyer has to know who we are.  If they have never heard of us or never met us, then they won’t be buying anything from us.  The internet is a godsend because buyers can find us to solve a problem they are having and we didn’t lift a finger.  All that finger lifting was done by the marketing department spending dough and presto, we get the leads. 

Okay, we get the lead but so what?  Will the buyer like a total stranger and even more importantly, trust a total stranger.  What did you parents tell you – don’t talk to strangers!  Therefore the initial touch with the buyer is critical.  It isn’t a one and done thing though, because there is bound to be numerous touches on the way through.  Jan Carlzon’s book “Moment of Truth” is a must read on the importance of every part of the organisation taking ownership and accountability for the customer.  This sounds simple enough.

In my experience, Japanese businesses don’t teach accountability to the entire team.  Salespeople are expected to be accountable and bend over backward to meet the buyer’s requests. The person picking up the phone though didn’t get the email about first impressions, accountability or ownership.  They got the email about if they transfer a salesperson through they will get severely scolded.  Because they don't know who is calling, they have found it is best to treat everyone as guilty until proven innocent and be as cautious as possible with strangers. 

If the buyer calls for you and you are not there, the person picking up the phone is not helpful.  They say stuff like “they are not at their desk now” and say nothing more.  This forms a negative impression about your company and its care for the buyer.  Your own team are killing the like and trust bit for you with the customer.  This was what Carlzon found.  You have to educate everyone to think differently about keeping the sense of ownership high and the like and trust part powerful.

Another part of the like and trust component are our communication skills.  If we sound like we don’t know what we are doing, then the client won’t like that.  If we say one thing but the truth proves to be something else, buyers definitely won’t like that either. I had a person I know here in Tokyo call me up about some animation sales tools.  I was interested and we had a conversation about it.  It turned out he was actually just fronting for the American firm and my next conversation was with someone from the headquarters.  What the local guy told me was different to what the American rep told me.  I immediately lost trust in both sides. I never went any further with the deal and I would never do business with the local guy ever again. This is another Carlzon nominated fail point.  As the conversation moves around through the organisation, there has to be integrity, consistency and truth. 

In Part Two we will continue to look at the other key basics, the blocking and tackling of the sales process.

Millions of people are being vaccinated for Covid-19.  Japan, being Japan, isn’t going to accept any old tests which were not performed on Japanese people.  That means that the vaccination programme in Japan is many months way from commencing and will take many more months after that to get to a 70% vaccination herd immunity stage.  Covid has driven people home to work there to avoid potential contact with carriers and superspreaders of the virus.  For a lot of tasks that probably works just fine and dandy, but sales isn’t one of them.

Salespeople in Japan, even at the best of times, with normal client availability in play, love their existing clients and are not so keen on prospecting.  Going to see a client, where the relationship has been created and the trust is abundant, is the preferred conversation.  Cold calling a potential new client is definitely not preferred.  Covid has effectively reduced salespeople to their base of existing clients, with almost no ability to add new clients into the mix.

Do we just reduce our business down to existing clients and hold our breath for the Suga san 4th cavalry to ride over the sandhill, waving a syringe in his hand to inoculate and save us?  Effectively, for many companies, this breath holding exercise is what they have been doing these last nine months or so.  Exhausting all of the existing client business leaves a big hole in the sale funnel and the prospects for a vaccine led sales recovery are still off in the dim, distant future.

Are we going into 2021 with more of the same?  There are really only four options. One is wait for the vaccine to become readily available to allow salespeople to get back into the field and visit clients for face to face meetings.  A type of back to the future approach.  A second one is to hunker down with the existing clients and try and squeeze out any residue demand, all the while praying for the vaccine arrival to come soon.  This is the “what the hell” approach. A third one is to flickpass the ball to marketing.  Pump more money into brand building and special offer generation, to drive inbound request contacts.  The people we want to speak with will call us, under this model.  This is the “deep pockets” approach.  The fourth one is the DDay approach of storming the beaches.  Have the salespeople run straight at the mounted machine guns of cold calling, risking evisceration and obliteration by the gatekeepers.

After nine months of calling existing clients and emptying that well of any new business, salespeople now have a lot of spare time on their hands.  We can’t send them into the jaws of sales death without some prep though.  In the new year, take some time to spend with the salespeople to strengthen their cold calling abilities.  Take the time to draw up the lists of target companies.  This could be the group who are doppelgangers for your existing clients from the same industry, but not yet a client.  Or they may be just successful companies, big enough to ride out Covid-19 and be ready to come roaring back, both guns blazing.  You can help them with the both guns blazing bit.

Have salespeople call companies and then closely track what they hear.  Do they get the brushoff immediately, being told “we are not entertaining the thought of any new suppliers at this time”.  Or, “we have no money to do anything new at this point”. These types of pushbacks need to be worked on to help salespeople get past that person and talk with a decision maker, someone with a broader, more strategic view of the business.  Are they getting the typical “they are not a their desk now” brush off?.  We need to work on responses from salespeople on how to handle these efforts to pitch us off the cliff and into the boiling sea and foamy waves of destruction.

Will these genius comebacks get us transferred through to the decision maker?  Will the gatekeeper cheerfully hand over the key person’s mobile number or email address?  Usually no.  That means two things.  We need to do better in designing and practicising our initial explanation of why the key decision maker needs to talk to us and talk to us right now.  It also requires us to keep calling back until they are in or they do call us back.