The Sales Japan Series

n the West, we often emphasise that inaction doesn't necessarily mean safety for the buyer, and there is a real cost to taking no action. We talk about the "opportunity cost" of doing nothing. A buyer's competitors aren't stagnant; they're actively seeking new advantages with something better or more advanced. The market is never still either, as it's always shifting, and companies need to be agile to keep pace. Economic conditions are equally unpredictable, with movements in currency, oil, gold, agribusiness etc., and other factors creating constant change. In this volatile environment, companies can't afford to stand still. Innovation, adaptation, and flexibility are essential. Any opportunity to strengthen an offer relative to competitors must be seized and maximised. The ideal outcome is one where our offer can't be easily compared to what salespeople know as the "Matrix from Hell." This matrix, favoured by procurement departments, lists items to be purchased down the vertical axis and supplier names across the top on the horizontal axis. Prices are then compared, and the cheapest option is chosen. We don't want our offer to fall into this pricing matrix. Instead, we aim to differentiate our offer so that it defies easy comparison. We need to add value beyond price alone. If our offer lacks the necessary depth, we need to think creatively about what we can provide to stand apart, avoiding price reductions or loss-leader tactics. Our goal is to create "apples to oranges" comparisons, making it impossible for price to be the only factor in the buying decision. As a result, we constantly highlight the downside of inaction to the buyer. In this VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous), how can any company feel confident doing things as they have always done them? The ground is shifting beneath our feet, and companies need to be capable of responding. As salespeople, we represent something new and different for the buyer, offering them a lifeline to navigate the daily VUCA challenges. Do Japanese buyers see it this way? Unfortunately, they don't. Change in Japan is a double-edged sword. Intellectually, it's acknowledged as necessary, but buyers instinctively resist it. They closely associate change with risk. Culturally, Japan emphasises group dynamics, partly to disperse any risk among all members, so no individual is held accountable if things go wrong. Japanese salespeople, for instance, prefer bonuses over individual commissions, as they feel more comfortable being rewarded as a group. Buyers share this perspective. They don't want to be singled out over a purchasing decision. Collective agreement to change suppliers or add a new supplier feels much safer. The ringi seido system of collective decision-making perfectly suits this desire to spread accountability. By obtaining the seals or hanko of all key decision-makers on a proposal, the potential blame is shared if something goes wrong. A salesperson parachuting in with their shiny idea about the opportunity cost of doing nothing quickly finds themselves in a thorny position in Japan. No one here is likely to get fired for missing an opportunity. Buyers fear mistakes far more than they fear a lack of urgency. With no pressure to act, talk of "missing out" seems quaint. Here, doing nothing isn't equated with loss; in fact, it's often praised, as it avoids risk and keeps the enterprise safe. This cultural inertia partly explains Japan's relatively small venture capital market, the lack of unicorns, and the many "zombie companies" that neither thrive nor disappear but manage to survive. Everyone involved seems determined to make no changes, ignore opportunity costs, and look away from change, hoping it will pass them by. If you're passionate about motivating buyers to embrace change or realise the consequences of opportunity cost, be prepared to feel like you're talking to yourself. Japanese buyers see no upside to making changes and plenty of downsides, so they tend to hold their ground. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but we should avoid making opportunity cost our primary "hail Mary" play to close the deal.

One of the worst combos in sales is a virtual meeting online and the buyer says, "send me your proposal" or even more insane, you volunteer to send it. Even if you managed to sit down face-to-face with a buyer, do not under any circumstances finish up the meeting with this sentence, "I will send you my proposal". Sale is hard enough as it is, so why do salespeople decide they are not living on the edge enough and make these types of ludicrous statements? We usually get one hour in the first meeting to go through the first part of the sales cycle: build rapport with small talk, get permission to ask questions, ask questions to understand 1. where they are now, 2. where they need to be, 3. why they aren't there already and 4. what will it mean for this individual if it all goes swimmingly? This requires that as the salesperson, we shut up and let the buyer do most of the talking and that we take very good notes. One handy note taking technique is to divide the note page into four quarters representing these four questions and then write the answers in the corresponding quarter of the page. If you have missed something, it becomes immediately obvious, because there are few or no notes in that quarter. In our proposal, we will outline what we have understood is their need. We will then outline what we suggest is the best solution to deliver on this need and then explain what it will cost. Of course we never ever use words like "price", "cost", etc and instead we only refer to the "investment". This sounds infinitely simple, but have we understood their need? Have they actually been totally forthcoming about the full gamut of their need? Are they holding back key information we need to know in order to provide the best solution for them? Why would they not share that critical information with us? We assume they want to buy something. Maybe they have a vague interest. We have managed to blag our way into a meeting with the buyer, but their motivation isn't high. They may have a mild dose of curiosity or they may be a psychopath who loves to torture poor, unsuspecting salespeople. Salespeople generally have poor listening skills. They are often not really listening completely, because they hear one piece of the puzzle and their brain inflames with an internal conversation about the clever next thing they are going to say. At this point, they actually stop listening to the buyer. Or they may hear an objection and the brain goes into overdrive with what they are going to say to destroy that objection. They stop listening to all the other vitals hints from the buyer about what they need, in order to concentrate on their sparkling riposte. Consequently, what they regurgitate in the proposal may have missed the mark or more likely, missed key bits which the buyer needs to hear about in order to organise the Purchase Order. Given this likelihood, imagine what a disaster it is to send the document off and allow the buyer to sit there and silently think, "I am dealing with an idiot who has not understood fully what we need". Here is Dr. Story's iron discipline sales requirement. When wrapping up the meeting, grab your schedule and make them open theirs and find a date and time for the next meeting. In that meeting, you will bring the proposal and go through it with them to make sure you have correctly and fully understood their needs. Get into their diary right there and then, because trying to do it later can be difficult and sometimes it never happens at all. If they say, 'just send it to me", under no circumstances accept that statement. Instead, say "I will need to show you something, so let's find a time for me to do that". Do not dilute the power of what you have just said by adding to it with more justifications. Keep the strength of that bold statement intact, break eye contact, hold your pen at the ready, look down at your diary, and suggest dates and times. We want to be sitting right across from them when we go through the details to read their body language reaction to what we are outlining. We want to make sure we have properly understood their needs and that our solution is attractive to them. We want to tease out any doubts so that we can deal with these spiky porcupines on the spot.

Hunting for new clients is difficult and expensive. Marketing tries to drive people who are seeking our solution to our door through the website, advertising, search words and SEO. That all costs a lot of money and the success ratio can be quite low. We attend networking events and these usually cost money too. Now our most fundamental sales goal is not a sale. We are desperately looking for the reorder. If we can get that, it means we don't have to spend any more money on getting this client on board. We can amortise the acquisition costs across a stream of orders which brings our per buyer acquisition costs down substantially. Another source of clients are clients. These people have bought from us in the past, but the trail has gone cold. Maybe they stopped and never resumed because of an internal crisis around money and they had to cut costs. Perhaps our champion got moved and their replacement has their preferred list of suppliers and we are not on their list. Maybe we screwed up an order and got cut. There are so many reasons to have lost touch with a buyer in Japan. It is made more difficult here because of the rotation of staff through different sections of the company, as they try to create an army of generalists. Trying to get back on the bronco after having been bucked off is extremely tough. The people there now may not remember us at all. In effect, this becomes a cold call and we have to start again. We need some powerful tools to get back on their buying list. Hopefully, we have a good record keeping system and we can pull up what we supplied previously, how long they were our client, who we were dealing with on their side etc. We will need to reference all of these details to gain credibility as a supplier. If they have never done any business with us, then there are many hoops to jump through, whereas being a previous supplier clears a lot of those hurdles. We may have introduced a new product or solution since we last communicated. Often, we may have numerous solutions and they only selected one, when in fact we can solve a broad range of issues for them. This is the time to introduce any new products and also the range of existing products to them. What wasn't required before may now be of interest. Perhaps a rival supplier isn't doing a great job and we turn up as an alternative. If we have something we can demonstrate or show as a solution that is helpful. In our case, as a training company, we can offer free refresher classes for their staff who are our graduates. The price is right, they know who did the training previously and in most cases those same people will still be working there. As we rerun what we previously supplied the people involved recall how good our solution was. They are possibly in more senior roles now and they may want this solution for their team. They may also be stimulated to look for what else we can do for them, as they recall their satisfaction with us a supplier. If it happened that we screwed up previously, there may be a chance that the people who recall those details are no longer there and we can start with a clean slate. Japan, however, is pretty good at record keeping and our beautiful name may be mud and still listed on their blacklist of people to never use again and the conversation will go nowhere. I called on the same company after a couple of years break. The people I met were new, but I was amazed when they consulted their records and perfectly quoted what had been discussed in the previous meeting. Don't underestimate Japanese record keeping prowess. If they have a good memory of us and we have developed something new, then that can often be the hook to get us the meeting. They may be curious about what we have come up with and be prepared to hear us out. It is not easy, but it is easier than trying to blag our way into a meeting with total strangers, who have no knowledge of us and what we do. We all have buyers who have fallen by the wayside and it is worth the effort to rekindle those relationships and try and restart the business. We could be leaving a lot of money on the table by not trying to reconnect. Chasing new buyers is expensive and hard so let's get out our records and go back and touch base again and try and get some deals going.

We know that there are a lot of salespeople who are totally untrained. They have cobbled together bits and pieces of the sales process but they don't have the whole picture in their brains. I remember when Dave Stearns, a Carnegie Master Trainer came to Tokyo to certify us a Sales Trainers. He started with the top right hand corner of the whiteboard and then he slowly outlined every single aspect of the sales process and the flow filled the whiteboard from top to bottom, from left to right. It was an amazing tour de force from someone who is a real master. At the time, was sitting there thinking that I could never do that. Well today I am using our sales process and doing the exact same thing in my head when I sit across from the client. The only difference is that in Japan it is rare to get through the whole process in one sitting. Here it is more likely we get up to the point of the questioning model and the explanation of the solution comes in the next meeting as we present our proposal. At this point we go into handling any objections and then closing the sale. Again in Japan, that closing of the sale part of the process may not trigger an agreement, but it will set off an internal process to look at what we are suggesting. The decision-making process here is complex and glacial with many actors involved. Most of the key decision makers we will never meet, and it is up to the people sitting in front of us to become our champions and push the deal though. This internal harmonisation process though takes a lot of time and we have almost no leverage. Telling our champions to "speed it up" is a like a sick joke, because they don't have any capacity to do that as they seek internal agreement to move forward. In the Ringi Seido decision-making system, the Section Leaders and Division Heads who will be impacted by the deal though the changes it will trigger attach their hanko or seal on the proposal document to signal agreement. When there are enough of these achieved the document gets elevated to the Directors level and usually they rubber stamp approve it because they know all the due diligence has been completed down below. To bridge between the questioning component and to be invited to propose our solution, we have to move into the suggestion phase. There is no great detail required at this point. What we are doing here is to try and make sure that what we are thinking will be a good fit for what they are after. We have heard their story, we know what they want to achieve and mentally we are rummaging around our magic solutions box to see if we have what they need. We explain in rough terms what would be involved and check to see if that sounds directionally correct. If we do get it right, then we talk in general terms about the outline of the possible solution and see if they think that is a match for what they want. If it is and they think that will work then we are invited to submit our proposal along with the other potential rival suppliers they are talking to. The Proposal will go into much greater depth and detail about what is involved and how it will work in practice. It may not be precise enough, but if we are most of the way there, we can still refine it further according to their feedback and we are not out of the running yet. Naturally pricing has to be attached and it we are higher than our rivals, which hopefully we are, because our quality is better, then we submit and see if they go for our ideas. This is important because at this point they are just ideas and until we get the business and can execute, the buyer has to take our word for it that we can do what we say we can do and at the quality level we say we can provide. There is a lot of trust included at this point. This is why the way we present has to be very well executed. We have to be making suggestions and constantly checking back to see if there is a match. If it isn't we need to know that information early and redirect to something else we think may. The level of confidence we have and the degree of detail we can provide off the top of our head, without referring to any materials is important. It sends a message to the buyers that we know what we are doing, we have done this before and we know they results we can deliver. Mentioning previous projects for other clients is important because it means we are not using them as the test bed. Japanese firms don't want to be the guinea pigs for anything. They want to know that it works already. We may not be able to drop the names but when we describe what we did and what happened they are relieved to hear there is a track record of successful implementation already. The way we describe it is so key. We have to do it with supreme confidence, belief and knowledge to demonstrate we know our stuff.

Basically, we know that a third of the potential buyers we meet will never buy from us, another third will buy, but not right now and the remaining third are ready to go, if they can be convinced to take action right now. The issue though is when we meet them for the first time, we don't know which bucket they fit into and we can waste a lot of time and energy thrashing around before we work it out. The knowledge gain process is not straightforward and there are a lot of traps and feints ahead of us, as we make our way forward into the impenetrable jungle. Is there a faster way? Perhaps if we can plumb the depths of our experience and identify some buying or non-buying signals this will help us speed things up. Being salespeople, buying signals are difficult for us because we don't take "no" for an answer. We will push for the meeting even in the face of resistance. Our sales exploits have informed us that the buyer who assures us he has absolutely no more than fifteen minutes to meet with us, will spend ninety minutes talking to us if we have what they need. We also know that "no" isn't a permanent feature and things can change, so we never give up hope. It also means we go up a lot of dead ends and have to extract ourselves for the waste of time, black, smelly, squelchy bog we have become trapped in. Let's look at some loser situations we will encounter, when meeting potential buyers, as warnings to weight up the investment of our valuable time with them. I had a great lunch with the ebullient foreign President of this firm, which had been bought by a very large Japanese enterprise a few years earlier. He was excited about bringing our training into the firm to strengthen the sales team and to deliver the sales numbers the headquarters wanted. His Japanese CFO had been sent in from the mothership. That snippet of information should have sounded a warning bell for me. The lunch went well, he was excited and I was excited to get things going, so I ignored that deadly little trip wire. That ebullience I should have realised was built on a foundation of sand within his own organisation and that the Japanese CFO actually pulled the strings not him. The lesson here is that when you know the firm has been purchased by a larger entity, or is a joint venture of some type, definitely check who has come across from the mothership and what positions they hold. Look at the President you are talking to through that lens and ask some subtle but important questions about how decisions are made. What I should have done was to ask about how he was going to get the people to whom he reported to okay the purchase of the training I was proposing and then settle back and very carefully analyse his answer. I needed to strip his ego and bold front out of the equation and take a good look behind the velvet curtain to try and get a sense of who had the real power. In the end, despite our conviviality at lunch, he just kept peppering my follow-up attempts with a string of excuses and stalls. The penny dropped eventually and I realised this deal was never going to happen, because he couldn't convince his CFO to okay the expenditure. His ego can't allow him to admit to me that he has little or no power within his own organisation, despite have the grand title "President" on his business card. Another President who I have been chasing after for a long time now, tells me he wants our training, but my follow-up emails and calls never get a response. When I collar him at an event, we are both attending, he pleads he is so busy with this or that and so couldn't get back to me, but he is still interested. Here it the conundrum. Yes, he is interested, but can he translate that interest into a deal with his firm? I know his industry is in turmoil and although the technical changes don't directly affect his business, the overall industry direction does. The chances of a deal happening seem slim, but the price of a regular follow-up email is not high. However, I shouldn't invest any emotional energy into him whatsoever because only pain is in that future. What I don't want though is he eventually gets religion about doing the training and wanders off with a competitor, because they were the last contact he had from a provider. That would really hurt if that happened. Things can change rapidly in business, but we just don't know enough about the buyer's internal situation to know when. Can you imagine if I finally corner him at some future event and he says, "Oh yeah, we did the training with XYZ company". Would that be grounds for justifiable homicide?

I am a great fan of Victor Antonio, who writes books, gives lectures and training on sales. I listen to his Sales Influence Podcast and he has a lot of solid, credible advice. In a recent episode he spoke about not using "weasel words" in sales and being more directive and certain with the buyer. Weasel words are defined as "words or statements that are intentionally ambiguous or misleading" and in sales would include words such as "perhaps", "maybe", "could", etc. I was thinking about how this would apply in Japan. The culture here of modesty, humility, not standing out, not being openingly directive is the exact opposite of the culture in the USA, where you have to be more aggressive. As a consequence, if I started being more assertive with my buyers, I believe they would dismiss what I was saying as American style push selling and reject both me and my solutions. I have lived here for 40 years in total now, so over those three sojourns, I have adapted my Aussie self to fit in with the way things work here. In sales, when I first started trying to convince buyers to buy, I was using consultative selling methodologies. That meant asking questions to understand the buyer needs. However, I am sure when I got to the solution explanation part, I was being very strong and forthright in my recommendation that they buy what I was offering. Having sold here for many years now, I have changed that method to be less strident in my recommendations and I do use a lot of what Victor calls weasel words in the sale. I have found that being too pushy with the buyer doesn't go down well. Being too assertive isn't viewed positively and the buyer feels they are being pressured to purchase. Deals don't get done as a consequence. If it was black and white, that would make things easier, but where is the line between strongly believing in your solution and being too pushy. I know I really believe in what we sell. We see the results from our training and how it changes people's lives, so we are all true believers. The problem is the buyers have to buy it, before the results are delivered and they have to take our word for it that what we are saying is true. We know for certain but they are not sure. We also know that confidence in the solution does sell. If we are too hesitant, too unsure, too circuitous in our explanation, then the buyer may not receive enough confidence from us, that what we are proposing will do the trick. How much is too much confidence and how much is too little? As I say – where is the line? I have found that the key is to be humble about what we say will happen after the sale, in terms of what they will receive in terms of results, and then pile on the evidence. We can be very sure, passionate and enthusiastic about what we have seen work for someone else. We can speak with total belief about what we have observed. We can speak with authority of one who has witnessed the changes and the improvements. In our explanation of the results from our training, the total certainty is there because we have seen it with our own eyes. When we speak about whether this will automatically transfer across to this particular buyer's situation, we have to be more conservative. Having perfect knowledge of the buyer's situation internally and externally, is unlikely for us. We cannot say, "well this worked for XYZ company, so it will definitely work the same for you and you will get equal or better results". This is where the weasel words are needed. If we are too strong in our recommendation we will be doubted. Every buyer is concerned that what they buy won't work as advised, and that internally they will be blamed and scolded for their selection of supplier. They like the passion we show for our belief in the solution, because this gives them more confidence in the possibility it will work. By not trying to push the sale through, we also show our respect for their position. We need to say something like, "this worked well for XYZ company, so given your situations are very similar, there is a strong probability it will work the same for you too". When we say it with these caveats, we sound more reliable to the buyer, because we are not giving any 100% guarantees, which may or may not be worth anything. We sound more honest too, because we are introducing the possibility it won't work for them, but that we will make a 100% effort to see that it does work. That small sense of doubt gives the buyer confidence that what we are saying isn't salesperson blarney and that we are honest and can be trusted as a partner. We are telling the buyer that we are not here for a sale. We are here for the repeat order and we will do everything we can do to make sure it works so that more orders flow and we build a solid trusted advisor partnership. What we say and how we say it matters in sales and semantics are crucial in getting the deal across the line.

The denizens of the upper floor, quiet, luxurious C-suites with expensive wall hangings and deep pile carpets, determine the changes the organisation needs to make to survive or to do even better. They expect everyone below to get behind their dispositions. Deep down in the engine room of the sales team, these changes are communicated by their boss. Usually, sales leaders become the boss because they lasted through two consecutive recessions and were the last one left standing or they were the star producer and were kicked up to management, many years ago. Invariably, they received no leadership training on the way through, so they are constantly making it up, using trial and error as they go along. They may just bluntly tell everyone how it is and expect the salespeople will snap into line and obey the new direction. Sales is an emotional rollercoaster of constant rejection, with hard sales targets and permanent instability. Somewhere in that firefight, the salespeople have carved out their own little world and cobbled together a construct, held together with string and adhesive tape, which allows them to survive or possibly thrive. Then the big bosses turn up and tear a hole in that neat little safe and sound world. Suddenly, the salespeople have to make changes to what has always worked and their sales leader is no help. What happens to their motivation? Salespeople are already world class, gold medal winning whiners. It is always someone else's fault as to why they can't make their targets. The system requiring them to make this latest change has just handed out the ultimate all-weather, all season excuse for missing the numbers. Finding the path of least resistance is how most people operate and salespeople in particular, because they are permanently time poor. They cut corners and shave off service quality to ensure maximum speed. Change means slowing everything down and recalibrating what needs to be done. These changes will often impact their clients and particularly in Japan, salespeople hate having to bring any changes to their buyers, which will affect their operations. How can salespeople adjust to change? Decision One is whether to continue with this company or not? In Japan, there is a dearth of salespeople, so job mobility is at world recording breaking highs. Taking your clients and moving is super easy today, so their response to the changes is "goodbye big bosses, I am leaving with all my business cards, to work for the opposition". What about for those who choose to stay? First order of duty is to not rely on the boss for how to make the adjustment. Expect they won't be much chop when it comes to this type of thing, as they are totally untrained for it. Salespeople have to work it out for themselves. Once that reality is accepted and the change is confronted directly, then some analysis is needed. In any change, there are pluses and minuses and salespeople must run the ruler over where these are located. Are there any advantages to the buyers with these changes? If this is the case, then that is always going to be a great conversation and one the salesperson can look forward to initiating. More likely, how can the negatives of these changes be minimised for the buyers? Ultimately, the salespeople have to be agnostic about what they think about the changes and be fully focused on what they mean for their clients. If the changes are a pain for the client, what can they do the reduce the amount of pain or what can they do to counterbalance the pain? Maybe they can't do anything and they consequently lose that client. Well salespeople lose clients all the time, so there in nothing unique in that. They also know how to find new clients, so they have to get busy with that activity and find clients for whom the changes are not an impediment to doing deals. Salespeople have to be resilient or they cannot survive in the rough and tumble of the sales life, so adjusting to the new is built into their DNA. They won't necessarily welcome or like the changes, but they can make them work because they are experts in adaption.

Salespeople turn up in Japan and expect things to be pretty much the same as where they have come from. After all, sales is sales right? Wrong. Japan, as usual, is quite different. If these newly arrived salespeople had received training on how to sell, then they are probably going to try a consultative sales approach. This is absolutely what they should be doing, except it doesn't work in Japan. The consultative approach at base has a very sensible and basic idea – ask the client what they want and then give it to them. Simple stuff. The issue in Japan is the client won't open up and tell you what they need. Buyers have been trained by crap salespeople here to expect a pitch of what you have to offer, so the buyer can lean back and shred it, trying to sort out the risk factor. If you come to the buyer and start asking questions about their firm's current situation, they don't see this as a means of better understanding their situation, so that you can provide the most relevant and effective assistance. They see it as prying, as exposing their dirty little, embarrassing secrets to strangers and therefore to the broader world, broadcasting all of their failure points and weaknesses. We may start with our consultative sales approach and hit a wall on our first question: "What is the current situation for your company?". This sounds innocuous enough, but that is not how the buyer interprets it. They feel, "I can't answer this salesperson's questions, because I don't know them well enough and the trust is not sufficiently built yet". That is a big gap from the get go. At this point they usually segue into "Tell me about what you do and about your products". This is bad. We are now throwing mud at the wall and praying something will stick, which is not much of a sales strategy. How can you get the pitch right if you have no idea what they need. Most of us come to client sales meetings with numerous products and solutions, but which one will hit the mark? In the West we are very logical. If what the salesperson is genuinely interested in what we need and if what they are saying seems to make sense, then we are prepared to look at buying. The Western buyer is not terrified of making a mistake. They are not fearful of sharing information with strangers. They are not dubious about foreigners selling them stuff. They are looking for ways to help their firm do better in the market, for methods to outfox their competitors and gain an unfair advantage in the hand-to-hand combat of business. The Japanese buyer is very conscious that if they introduce something new, like a new supplier and anything goes wrong, they will lose face and will suffer in the internal future promotion stakes. They are not focused on helping the firm to do better, because they are driven by their own personal self-interests. They have also discovered that the safest path is the one of doing nothing new. I was talking to the HR Manager of a car dealership about some sales training for their firm. They have had sales training before, but the results were not impressive. My angle was "try us as a new approach, bring in something fresh and differentiate your salespeople from all the competitors". I thought that was pretty conclusive and convincing. Weeks later I was told they went with another firm who specialises in sales training for dealerships. This is what they had been doing in the past and not getting the change they wanted, but the safest path forward is always to do what you have always done in Japan and take no risks with anything new. They will get the same results they have always gotten but everyone will feel safe and no one will lose their job. In Japan, we need to set up the consultative approach with getting permission to ask questions before we launch forth. In the West we never have to so this step because every gets it. Not Japan though. Here is the simple, quick formula: explain who you are; explain what you do; talk about who else you have done it for and the results; suggest you could possibly get similar results "but to know if that can happen or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?". In 95% of cases this works and I get permission to dig into their dirty laundry and find out their problems. There are still those buyers though, who just brush that effort aside and say "give me your pitch". I really want to cut my losses and leave right there, down my cheap, bitter, horrible green tea and depart, because I know that without understanding their needs, I have little chance of talking about the things of most value to them. I don't do a runner because that would be abrupt and considered rude in Japan. I soldier on, fully understanding every minute with this buyer is keeping me away from a buyer who will buy. Consultative sales can be done in Japan, but it needs some modifications to allow for the pitchfeast mentality on the part of the buyers. Once we understand where they are coming from we can work our way around t

"There are no excuses for failing in sales", is a common ideological position. However, is this really true? There is no doubt that sales is a very macho environment for men and women. There are set quotas, targets, numbers to be hit and if they are not hit, then that person is deemed to be failing. There are no hiding places in sales. You make your target or you don't. Now, if we fired every salesperson who failed to hit their target, we wouldn't have many people in sales. Japan makes this especially fraught because the declining population translates into a shortage of salespeople. This also means that the quality of salespeople in the market is only going to decline. Whether we like it or not, we will be looking for anyone with a pulse to hire because we need warm bodies. Targets smargets in this case. In sales anywhere, we know a couple of things. The majority of people in the business are untrained. Companies want off the shelf top earners who they can cut loose and let them go forth and bring in the dough. That is an epic delusion in this day and age in Japan. People who can sell are not moving because the company is doing its best to keep them. That means the ones who are mediocre, or worse, are mobile. Even this supply will dry up as companies become more and more desperate for salespeople and will keep their underperformers because they at least know something about the product lineup and have met a few customers. We also know that at any point in time, a third of people we meet who we hope will become clients will never buy from us. There may be many reasons for this, to do with budgets, decision-making, ideology around self-sufficiency, stupidity, etc. Another third will buy, but unfortunately not according to our monthly sales quota driven schedule. In Japan, especially, it is exceedingly rare to meet someone and then immediately get a sale. The dispersed decision-making process in business here ensures that there are many voices to be consulted about a new decision to buy from an unknown supplier. This internal harmonisation can take a long time to come to fruition. The best way to think about is like this: "the buyer is never on your schedule". The remaining third will buy, and the question becomes why will they buy from you? The "you" is important here because firms don't buy from other firms. They buy from the individual they meet, who is sitting across from them in the meeting room. They make their decision on that basis. Is the chemistry there between buyer and seller emanating from a solid foundation of trust? Where does this trust come from? The biggest part of the trust equation is from the seller's kokorogamae. This Japanese word can be variously translated, but in this context, "true intention" is the best version. True intention means what is really driving the salesperson? Is it desperation to keep their job by making their monthly sales target? Is it greed to score a big commission or a promotion? Is it to do the right thing which is best for the buyer? If it isn't the latter, then we have a problem. Correct kokorogamae is often defeated by the culture of the firm. Doing the best thing for the buyer is not a smash and grab activity designed to yield immediate returns. The focus of correct kokogamae is to get the repeat order, not a single sale. That mentality is very specific and the time frame is long. If the sales manager is pushing everyone for immediate sales revenues, then the needs of the buyer get tossed out the window and the salespeople will do and say anything to get the sale. In fact, everyone is working hard to dismantle the brand and destroy the client trust for short-term gains and this is driven by the leadership. Is it the fault of the salespeople that they are working for idiots? Companies have to do much better by their salespeople. Target expectations need to be realistic and have attached timelines which make sense. Training is an absolute requirement, in particular, how to ask questions in order to fully understand what the buyer is trying to achieve. Pitching a solution makes no sense if you have no idea what the buyer needs, and this activity has to be replaced by intelligent questioning skills. The aim has to become the repeat order, because farming is a lot less expensive and more efficient than hunting all the time. Just hiring people and then firing them is an option that is no longer able to be enjoyed by companies in Japan. Given that the quality of those recruited will just keep going down, these individuals have to be encouraged and developed. That requires time and treasure, but there is no alternative.

Most of the sales jobs in Japan require the ability to sell in Japanese. That usually means native speakers of Japanese or foreigners who can operate at a highly sophisticated language level. There will be exceptions, but they are not that numerous. Probably the bilingual recruitment industry is one of the main employers of foreigners who can't speak Japanese and English-language schools. One could argue that today neither requires any real sales skills. Recruitment, in particular, is at an inflection point where the demand definitely exceeds the supply, so anyone with a pulse can match a candidate from the database and invoice the firm looking to hire staff. Be they Japanese candidates for sales jobs or foreigners, what should we be looking for? Some might look for a track record of sales results. That is one indicator, but often not all that useful. Is the methodology in your shop teams doing sales and being rewarded as a team with salary and bonuses? Or are there individual targets and commissions attached to the sales? This is such a different construct, it depends on how you are configured. Japanese salespeople, in my experience, love a salary, bonuses and team accountability. They are reluctant to take individual responsibility for their sales results. The money is obviously better when operating as an individual, but most Japanese salespeople feel overly exposed to the harsh realities of the sales life in this situation and prefer the comfy team embrace. So expecting rocketing individual results from a salesperson who has been operating within a team is overly optimistic. Despite that, I always favour personal accountability for results and work on gluing the team together, even though they are focused on getting their own numbers. How have they been trained is also a strong indicator? Very few salespeople anywhere on the planet have been given formal sales training. In Japan, it is usually on-the-job training or OJT where they go with their boss or more likely, with their senior to client calls. Japanese salespeople turning up on their own is rare in Japan. Usually they travel in pairs, as one is the understudy to the other, until such time that they become the senior in their own pair. Ideally, we either want properly trained salespeople or we want to be able to train them formally, rather than rely on the Japanese system of intergenerational mediocrity. In some cases, the salesperson needs a degree of technical background for their work. Japan though has a weak connection between what they study at University and the jobs they wind up doing, so often there is no direct match. In many cases, the engineers may have the required technical training, but no formal sales training, so they are reliant on the OJT system for developing their sales abilities, which is at best a hit and miss affair. In general, broad skills are required and, in particular, communications and human relations skills are needed. Technical people can often be duds at both, so they need to be developed. In other cases, the person has these key skills but is weak technically. The Unicorn is always hard to net. When I first worked at the retail bank in Shinsei, the hiring criteria was maths skills for salespeople selling investment products to wealthy individuals. A rather dubious idea, I thought, so I changed it to put more emphasis on people and communication skills. Naturally, the results vastly improved immediately. The other element we need to think about is our brand. Does the person we are looking at hiring fit our brand or can we teach them how to fit. If I see a sales guy with some of the things we are looking for, but has scruffy, poorly shined shoes, I know that I can teach him how to fix that issue. If his haircut is a disaster, we can fix that too. The point, though, is the individual has to submit to the brand and fit in with the company's thinking. In today's environment where getting a sales job is super easy, maybe they don't want to change themselves to match the brand and expect things to flow the other direction. In my case, I would always think long-term and want to defend the brand, because it is bigger than one salesperson. There is no doubt that we are all facing a lot of difficulty finding suitable salespeople based on our preferred criteria. Whether we like it or not, we have to be flexible and the best idea is to train the people we hire to get them to the level we need. Expecting they will come fully outfitted from the get-go is now a fantasy. Times have changed and we need to move with the changes.

I have been coaching a founder client here for quite a while now and his emotional reaction to his clients not buying on his schedule always surprises me. I keep telling him, "it is business; it is not personal". We know that there are some customers who will just never buy, some who will buy now and some who will buy in the future. We just don't know which is which until we get rejected. When I get rejected in a deal, they are not rejecting Greg Story. They are rejecting my offer, in its current construction, at this point in their cash flow cycle, within the bounds of their strategic direction, in relation to what my competitors are offering and a whole bunch of other stuff I will never even know about. Does it still hurt? Yes, of course it does. I get super annoyed and upset like everyone else. The difference between me and my client, who I am coaching, is I never pass that emotional reaction on to the client, who said "no" to my stupendous offer. He does pass it on because he feels so upset and frustrated. I keep telling him to chill. Write the email if you must, to get your hurt feelings out, just never send it. My advice isn't working as yet, but I will continue to counsel him to not take it personally. I had my own rejection case the other day. I was doing an RFP for a client and they came back and said they went with a rival firm who specialises in sales in their industry. What was my initial thought? "They are idiots" was the first reaction. This was followed by "why are they just doing what all of their competitors are doing? Why not use another more differentiated approach with something more fresh?". What did I reply? I didn't mention any of that. By the time the decision has worked its way through their internal decision-making system, there is no going back. Telling them they are stupid may make me feel good, but it won't alter their course of action. I wrote what I always write, "thank you for letting me know" and that is that. I don't bother with appeals for consideration in the future. I just accept their idiotic decision and move on to find someone smarter, taller, better looking and who bathes and who can do a deal with us. Now I also put them on my follow up list, because not every deal works out. Their situation can change and maybe my competitor is useless and what they provide doesn't work. So I keep in touch and ask them if they have any needs that we can help them with, and I do this regularly. The initial interval is around six months. That is long enough for them to realise they made a huge mistake by using my competitor and that they got nothing from that ridiculous solution they chose instead of mine. After that, I follow up every three to four months, because business is fluid and what wasn't on the table is now in play. How long should you follow up for? Ryan Serhant, who I follow and who started his own successful real estate brokerage in the US, says "keep following up until they die". I am not that pushy, because I figure there are reputational costs to being too pushy and too insistent in Japan. Tokyo is big, but it is also a small village in many ways. We sell to Japanese domestic firms and foreign multi-national companies. Our reputation as Dale Carnegie, a business based on being able to get on well with all different types of people, has to be careful how we are perceived in the market. If we say one thing, but do another, then our brand consistency will suffer and so will our sales. Where is the line between persistence, which is admirable, and being too pushy, which is frowned upon here? It is not always clear, but if I feel that there is no interest, then after about four follow-ups with no reaction stretched over a twelve-month period, I will shelve that firm for a while. The people may change in the future and maybe someone smarter will be the person to talk to or maybe their business has changed and they are now more open to our solutions. Regardless of what the client does, we can control how we react and we must keep cool, calm and collected in the face of failure and rejection. Is that easy? No, but the choices are few. My client hasn't quite gotten to the point of handling the rejection in a calm, non-emotive manner yet, but I will keep working on him until he gets there. I am constantly working on myself, too. I have found that no one is a clear genius with this stuff and we are all a work in progress.

This is Part Three and is the conclusion of our series on how to provide superior customer service. 1. Go the extra mile Time is always short and we all tend to cut corners and look for anywhere we can save time. On the receiving end of the service though, we are looking for as much personalised attention as possible, so there is a natural tension between these two aspirations. Training staff to think beyond the natural limits of time challenged customer service is the start. We can all do more. If we think of things from the customer's point of view, we can extrapolate what would delight customers. I visited the café of a well-known business to enjoy a hot chocolate. This was a small outlet, which had one table for customers to sit down. There were no other clientele, so I decided to sit there and drink my brew, before heading off. There were two staff working at that time and when the beverage was ready, the male staff member brought it to the counter. He could just as easily have brought it to my seat, which was a metre away from the counter, but he chose not to. There was no time pressure on him, but his mind was in basic service mode and not in "go the extra distance" thinking. I am also guessing, given his age, that he was the manager of that small store, so you can see the problem with him in charge supervising others. 2. Using 3rd parties as proof points No one in Japan wants to be experimented upon or be the Guinea Pig. They want proven, established, reliable, repeatable, high quality service. Years ago, I was with my family in a Korean Barbecue restaurant in the Azabu Juban. I noticed on the wall they had a hand written list ranking the most requested dishes. I thought that was a smart idea for a Japanese audience, who want safety, rather than novelty or adventure. The next day, I brought this up at the Shinsei retail bank, where I worked and suggested we do the same and list our most popular financial products. We did that and it gave that third party seal of approval, making the purchasing decision that much easier. 3. Master first impressions We are all quick to judgement and often we base it on what we see, before what we hear. Just looking at how someone is dressed influences what we think about who they are. A lot of firms have uniforms for that reason, to standardise the image they want to project and to control the branding. The way we dress matters, so we have to work on that and make sure it is communicating the image we want. In the customer service sector, it might be voice first or it might be visual first. Either way, we have to be mindful of how we come across to the customer. The sound of our voice should always be friendly and helpful. I had some lower back issues recently and went to a clinic which specialises in that area. The first doctor I met welcomed me, looked at me, gave me his name and listened to my problems. I had to go back again after a week and this time, because of the day of the week, I got a different doctor. Same clinic, but this guy was well overweight, slumped down in his chair, staring at his computer screen. He didn't offer his name, look at me or seem happy to see me and my money. We are facing a major population decline here in Japan, so these doctors really need to hang on to their patients and the competition is only going to get more intense. Same firm and two entirely different impressions. Getting consistency is a matter of awareness and training. 4. Cross and upsell Selling should always be with the best interests of the customer. We need to have that in mind, rather than ramming more sales down the gullets of the buyers or selling them stuff they don't need. Cross selling is there to open up options for the customer, to give them more of what they need. Upselling is to upgrade the quality of what the client has already bought, to give them a better experience. Both have to be done in the customer's interests and the customer has to feel that is the case. I used to go to a dentist in Azabudaidai but I never felt my interests were upper most in his mind. I always felt he was seeing me sitting here in his dentist chair, visualizing his new Tuscan Villa, paid for by the additional dental work he was always suggesting. I stopped going to him because I didn't feel he was trustworthy. There is a massive over supply of dentists in Tokyo and there are plenty of choices, so his greed was a very shortsighted measure. 5. Able to deal with different personality types We have some people who are very detailed oriented called Analyticals, while others are the opposite and massively big picture, "don't bog me down in the weeds" types known as Expressors. Others are fast paced and hard driving as they push, push, push called Drivers. The opposite types are Amiables - quieter, considered and want to have a cup of tea and get to know us before they will do business. In customer service we have to know who we are dealing with, because that will change the form of commun

In Part One, we looked at some of the elements we need to be working on in providing excellent customer service, and so now let's continue. 1. Friendly This would seem to be a very basic requirement in customer service, but often the wrong people are placed in these roles and many of them don't like people. Even those who do like people can suffer brutal invective from irate customers and this can impinge on their joy for the work. In Japan, the land of the "customer is God", we now see legislation against harassment of workers by customers. Dogeza is where you get down on your knees and bow by putting your head on the floor and is the ultimate sign of apology in Japan. In Chinese culture, we know it as the 'kowtow". Angry customers have been known to force staff to do the dogeza to apologise for the unsatisfactory service they have provided. It would be very hard to be friendly after being put through that experience. Japan is catching up in this regard and these types of outbursts will reduce as the system stops tolerating unbridled rage by customers. 2. Develop loyal fans This is related to being friendly. The idea is to not just provide a great one-off service, but to enroll the customers as repeaters and make them loyal fans. All sales should have this as the goal. In Japan, though, we receive aloof, but polite service. Those serving see their role in the dimension of providing the good or service, and that is it. There are very few cases where the person serving is trying to establish a connection with the customer and encourage them to come back. Maybe they think that is the job of the marketing department and nothing to do with them. There are many instances where I frequent the same establishment, but the service is never personalised. It is efficient and polite, but impersonal. I am treated just like everyone else, and there is no recognition that you are a regular. Notable exceptions would be Ali Bab and Lindo near my office in Akasaka, Shinsen Hanten in Nagatocho and Elios Locanda in Hanzomon, but they are rare cases. How hard is it to recognise regulars? Not very. All the staff have to do is say "thank you for coming back, what can I do for your today". I love Princi from Milano in T-Site in Daikanyama, go there very regularly and five years later, I am still waiting for the day they recognise me as a loyal customer. Obviously, in most cases, there is no training or guidance for this, so it is always by the manual and we the customer are left feeling flat. 3. Immediately responsive Customers are all busy all the day long and they hate wasting their valuable time. Service provision, which is slow or late, is particularly a problem in this high-speed world we inhabit today. When there are problems, we want them fixed fast because we are losing time by not having the good or service work as we expected. I ordered some deodorant on Amazon and was contacted by Japan Post to tell me the package was wet, which meant there had been some interior damage. I went online and registered a problem and I was very happy to immediately hear from the supplier that they would refund my money and they told me to not accept the package. I was mentally bracing for trouble, prevarication, quibbling, and fudging, but their instant response was better than my low expectation. I was very happy, and that is the same with all of us – we want things fixed and fast. Staff need to be trained to provide it 4. Never combatative I hate one thing in particular and I have hated it my whole life, and that is being told "no". I am sure I am not the only customer who is like that. One of the great ways of telling a customer "no" is to reference third parties. When I was at the Shinsei Bank, sometimes the customers would want us to do something which was not possible. Banking, by the way, is a highly regulated industry with tomes of rules. If we said "no, we can't do that", then to someone like me, that is a red rag to a bull and I will tell you the thousand reasons why it has to be a "yes". Instead, we would firstly agree that we could do it. Then we would pause, reflect in an obvious way and then ask the customer what do we do about the Financial Services Agency (FSA) rule that prohibits that action. Now we have said "yes" at first, so they are relieved and their guard is down. Next, we have made it a problem between them and the FSA and not with us. Third-party direction works well if you can access it. 5. Seeking win-win outcomes Win-win is an obvious best solution, but many systems are not designed that way. This forces the staff into confrontation with the customer and it creates unnecessary tensions. Staff training will not easily overcome a structural problem. Take a good look at your internal rules and systems and see if they are designed in a way to be a "lose" to the customer and a "win" to the firm. Change them or improve them if possible. 6. No excuses Highly litigious cultures like the US are hard wired to never admit g

Elements Of Outstanding Customer Service In Japan (Part One) Customer service in Japan is pretty good by comparison with most other countries. To me, it is polite yet impersonal. The status gap between those serving and those being served is quite rigid. In my own country of Australia, those serving are quite happy to have a conversation with the customer. They don't see themselves as inferior in status and treat customers as equals. In Japan, there is no such equality. The language and the culture both reinforce the buyer as God, and those serving are mere mortals there to do God's bidding. Let's look at some elements of excellent customer service over a three-part series. The sad aspect here is that what I am going to describe is totally obvious and will garner a "so what" reaction. I urge you to go beyond that initial first blush and use this as a measuring rod to calibrate how your organisation deals with customer service problems and check if you are operating at the right level of service or not. 1. Totally professional This is fairly obvious, but that professionalism comes from a combination of attitude, experience and training. Even if you don't have much experience, if your attitude is that you want to provide the highest level of service, then good things will flow from that starting point and we gain experience over time. If properly trained, then the whole process gets sped up. 2. Knowledge Surprisingly, a lot of people in the service sector have very little knowledge of the inventory, systems, ethos and values. When you ask a clarifying question, their face fills with panic and they have to go seek the answer from someone else. This is a failure of leadership. If they were properly invested in, then they would know the answer without having to run off and find the answer. 3. Highly personalised service Manualised or formulistic service is the norm in Japan. Companies try to reduce all complexity down to one way of doing things and for the majority of clients, that will be fine. To lift above the great unwashed competitors, we need to be able to provide a more personalised service. I was reminded of this recently when I brought a pocket square online from Massimo Pirrone in Antwerp. The item arrived in a nice box and additionally, he included a short note and a very nice pen as well. It felt very personalised and I became an instant fan. 4. Take Ownership Japan is very good when order and harmony prevail. Chaos, the unexpected disasters – not so much. The nature of customer service is that there is always going to be a high frequency of the unexpected occurring. The key is how we react to the changing situation. When things go wrong, customers want the issue solved and solved instantly. They expect the person they are interacting with to make it happen, regardless of the degree of difficulty. Japan has a nasty edge to it when customers exploit their expectations too far and start bullying staff, because the customer is God. If the person serving the customer takes ownership of the problem, they will keep pursuing the solution until resolution. That is the mentality the supervision and training need to reinforce. 5. Anticipatory Omotenashi is the high point of Japanese service and a big element is the person serving the customer to anticipate what the customer needs before they voice that request. On a hot day, being served some iced water as you enter the business is a nice touch, completed without you have to place an order. This is an attitude of service that drives behaviour. With the right leadership, this can be taught. 6. Proactive This is similar to anticipatory, in the sense that we are not adopting a passive stance. We try to arrange things well before the need arises by being well prepared. We are always looking for faster and better ways of doing things. We are making suggestions for the client, for their best interests, rather than expecting them to have complete knowledge of what we can do for them. They will never know our business to the depths that we do and so we have to be thinking ahead and bringing up possibilities which wouldn't necessarily occur to them. We will keep going with our list of things to think about in terms of the service we currently supply and how we supply it in parts Two and Three. Do you need to sell more? Is your sales manager stressing you about making your monthly sales quota? Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources. There is a perfect solution for you- to LEARN MORE click here (https://bit.ly/43kQpsN ) To get your free guide "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training" click here ( https://bit.ly/4agbvLj ) To get your free "Goal Setting Blueprint 2.0" click here (https://bit.ly/43o5FVK) If you enjoy our content then head over to www.dale-carnegie.co.jp and check out our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules and our whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. About The Author Dr. Greg Story

Watching Joe Biden destroy himself during the debate with Donald Trump was painful. He was appealing to the American voting public, that is to say, around 68% of voters based on the 2020 numbers, a then record turnout. This type of debate is similar to closing the sale in business. We have to outline why what we are doing is good for the client and why they should choose us over the alternatives. Polling, surveys, focus groups etc., provide politicians with insight into the needs of the voters and they construct their close on that basis. We do the same, except that we do research on the firm, the industry sector, the individuals we are meeting to build up a picture of who we are dealing with. By the way, in today's world, they are doing the same to us. Are you satisfied with what they will find out about you? I digress. We then ask a series of questions to better illuminate what the buyer needs. Once we have zoomed in on what they require and have internally confirmed we have what they need, then we explain our proposition and go in for the close to get their agreement to make us their preferred solution provider. Joe Biden couldn't close the sale because of the way he communicated his message. His low energy didn't convey conviction or confidence. In sales, we have to be careful to not come across as a pushy salesperson, hell bent on getting the required revenues to make our monthly targets. We have to have conviction, energy, confidence without it being pushed too hard. Japanese buyers do not react well to being pushed. One reason is that they are rarely the sole decision maker and harassing them to buy is pointless. The decision will go through many people before it is resolved one way or another. What we can do though is to communicate the details of how the solution will work well inside their company and the benefits they will get which they are not enjoying today. There is a line between enthusiasm and pushy and we have to tread on the correct side of that line. Sales is the transfer of enthusiasm is an old saw and it is true. We need to convey the belief that what we are offering will be the best thing for this buyer. If we can fire up our interlocutor, they will be primed to sell our ideas inside the company and bring on board the other sections who will be impacted by this buying decision. We will probably never meet these people, so our champion has to be our communication mouthpiece to spread the good word about what we are proposing. One way to fire up our champion is to provide them with a lot of data, proof, statistics, testimonials, etc. Japanese buyers are, I would say, the most risk averse group on the planet, so we have to come packing evidence if we expect them to go to bat for us. I think Biden should have destroyed Trump in that debate, because he is the incumbent and has the numbers to support the policies he has introduced. When I see video of other politicians like California Governor Gavin Newsom or Senator Bernie Sanders in action, they are machines on the numbers and that is what Biden should have done as well. In our case, when we are talking to buyers, we have to come with numbers too. "Claims are easy, but where is the proof" is what the buyer is thinking and we have to provide that answer. Storytelling should be seated on top of the numbers. Buyers have trouble recalling stats, but we are all pretty good on recalling stories. Being able to assemble the numbers and then weave them into a convincing story is one the key skills in sales. That story should feature where the solution has created value for another client, very similar to this one. Being able to explain how the other client converted the solution we provided into tangible benefits is what the buyer wants to know in Japan, because no one wants to the be the guinea pig. They like to see others take the risk of the new and then they can safely follow in behind and get the value, without the fear of it turning out to be a dud. Biden blew the close and as salespeople, we have to make sure we are not replicating that meltdown. We need to understand how to communicate value in a way which is easily accessible to the Japanese buyer. My own failures as a salesperson can usually be traced back to poor ability to muster a compelling and convincing argument as to why they should stop just using their current suppliers and start using me as well, or preferably instead. We see a Biden failure replay, but do we reflect well enough on ourselves and our own communication abilities in sales? It is always a good practice to go back to the basics, back to the drawing board and rework what we say and how we say it for the buyers. Just doing the same old, same old, is what got Biden into trouble. He needed to rise to the occasion, but he couldn't. What about us? Let's make sure we are fully prepped and capable of delivering a powerful, convincing message to convert buyers into lifetime clients.

I belong to Dan Slater's Delphi Network and every week his newsletter contains unattributed quotes from CEO conversations he has heard at his recent events. One of them caught my eye about sales. The anonymous contributor was saying that selling in Japan has to be no selling, a bit like a zen approach – "the sales of no sales" type of approach. I found that interesting and was wondering what on earth this CEO was talking about? The inference was that in Japan you can't try to sell company representatives to buy your solution and you need a much more tangential angle of entry. I thought to myself, well that doesn't gel with what I have been doing here. I definitely sell companies on the idea of buying our training and have zero hesitation about doing so. What is the difference? I may be creating a straw man here to make my point and risk misinterpreting what this CEO said, but I think they know little about sales. They are probably imagining that sales is all hard sell. We enter the gladiatorial arena and we brow beat the buyer in submission. Relentless with our 50 closes, we never take no for an answer. We push and push and keep trying to jam the square peg into the round hole, regardless that it will not fit. That is not sales to me and it certainly is not an approach which will yield revenues in Japan. When I first got here doing sales in the late 1980s, I tried to use "consultative selling" techniques which I had studied from American sales gurus. It was very distressing to find that these techniques were not working at all here. I would get straight into the sales conversation and start asking them detailed questions about the condition and status of their business. To my confusion, they wouldn't answer my questions. Instead, they would ask me questions about myself and my company and they wouldn't buy. Looking back, I now realise that I was so naïve and an idiot. I turned up for a first meeting, they didn't know me or my company from a turnip and they got grilled on the inner sanctum questions about their business, from a total stranger, and even more exotically, a foreigner to boot. No wonder they wouldn't answer my slick well-honed consultative sales questions. I had built no trust and, worse, was in a hurry. Business trips are expensive and I had to justify the cost of getting me to swan around Japan for weeks at a time to my Aussie bosses back in Brisbane. The buyers in these cases were actually non-buyers, and trained me on what I needed to do. I realised I needed to spend more time talking about who I was, who my firm was, what we had done so far and establish a foundation of understanding and work toward building trust. I am a slow learner, so for many years the sales meeting was basically run by the buyers rather than me, the sales guy. I actually can't recall where this idea came from, but at a point in time, I realised I needed an entry point which would allow me to be able to ask my questions and to be able to follow the consultative sales approach. My formula was and is very simple. I describe who we are, what we do, who else we have done it for and the success they have had and suggest that MAYBE we could do the same for this buyer. I then say, "In order for me to know if that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?". The MAYBE bit is very important in Japan. In other parts of the world, salespeople will no doubt be very bolshie on the fact that they are the perfect partner, that their firm can do the whole shebang. Here we need to introduce some softness into the equation, some muted tones, indirect assertions which don't come across as pushy. Not every buyer here will accept this approach and some, a tiny minority, will insist on hearing my pitch. I do it, but what I want to do is stop the meeting right there, pack up my gear and leave. I have no idea what on earth they need, because I haven't been able to ask any questions, so what am I pitching against? I am flying blind and there is a zero possibility this conversation will lead to a client or a deal, so I should reduce my losses, leave and go find a client I can help. Obviously, that is too confrontational in Japan, so I give my pitch, trying to make it broad enough that it might jag some point of interest. It rarely succeeds. Getting permission to ask questions is the key to the door of getting deals in Japan and if this step is not achieved, then you are trapped in mindless pitch hell.

There are farmers and hunters in sales and both are needed in organisations. The hunters are energised by landing the deal and bored with the paperwork and administrivia required after the sale. The farmers are not much chop at landing new clients, but they are genius at taking care of existing clients and keeping them as repeater clients. I am a hunter. I realise about myself that I love finding new clients, discovering what they need and then helping them to achieve their goals and aims. There is the thrill of getting the deal, manufactured from nothing because you had to go out there and beat the bushes. Now, not every effort results in a deal. Sadly, a number escape, some go with a competitor (ouch), some ghost me and do nothing. I always take all three of these outcomes badly. It sounds trite to say it, but I really believe that what we have can help the buyer and if they don't take the offer, they are missing out. I believe that 100%. Now, the emotional roller-coaster of sales means we need to have a safety net when we stumble. We can't always land the deal, so there are going to be more failures than wins. How do we keep our confidence and certainty intact to allow us to get back up and try again? Part of this is how we rationalise failure. I always say to myself that the buyer made a mistake to not buy from me. I recognise I can always do better as a salesperson and that I am not perfect, but beyond that I don't blame myself. I analyse what I did and didn't do, but I don't allow any negativity into my brain. Sales is so emotional, I feel I have to isolate that side of me from the results. When I land the deal, I don't start leaping about the place in unbridled joy either. I feel a quiet pleasure that I can now help to transform this company's business. That is what we do, and we have seen it happen with our own eyes, so we know it is true and not just marketing pap. Those moments of success have to the leaven out all the failures. Recently, I spoke about having a very depressing week where one deal after another either fell over, was lost, or was postponed. That was hard and coming one after another, you begin to doubt yourself. In sales, it is never about the big deals you have done in the past, it is always about what are you doing right now. This is the reality of sales, which is why we have to insulate our minds from fears of inadequacy and failure. For hunters, the finding of the client and then transforming that relationship into a deal and a client is what keeps us going. I attend a lot of networking events and I have my pattern of behaviour. I always arrive early and stand at the table with all the name badges. The staff hand me my badge and then can't work out why I don't buzz off, get out of the way and go inside. I keep standing there and I carefully scan every name. I am looking for people I already know so that I can use their name when I see them, in case I may have forgotten it. I look for companies who could be prospects and I look for people I have wanted to meet, but have not managed it so far. When I finish that, I stand right in the doorway and start meeting people who come in. Often they mistake me for one of the hosts of the event but I don't mind that, I want to meet them. I exchange business cards with them and ask them about their business and how many people they have. That information is enough for me to make a judgment about how we can help them. If they have few people, then it is hard to organise training and our public classes are perfect for them. If they have over thirty people, then they can possibly do an in-house class. Following that, I work the room and try to meet as many people as possible. In sales, I have to kiss a lot of frogs before I can find the beautiful princess. I was doing just that at the New Year's party for the American Chamber. I had been there, standing around for hours already and had met a lot of people. I bumped into an older Japanese gentleman who I didn't know and exchanged cards. Next month we are delivering Leadership Training For Managers in-house, for all of his senior managers. That is creating a new client from nothing but my time and effort to attend the event and work the room. Obviously there were many meetings after that initial meeting but I got the deal and we will get paid for the training. These successes help to balance out the failures like that big Japanese Pharma company who recently told me they went with a competitor – did I mention ouch. The wins are important to keep us hunters going, because it is tough duking it out in the market. We need to be resilient and unemotional, both about the failing and in the winning. We are constantly living on the edge of winning and losing, and that is where the thrill of the chase is determined.

I had a meeting with a client I have been chasing for business for the last ten years. They have had the same President right throughout and we get on very well, but this has not resulted in any business coming my way. Over the years, I had been introduced by him to his various HR people, and that is where it has always floundered. Maybe they had their own internal solutions and didn't need us or the HR people didn't like me or didn't like the President trespassing on their turf. Actually, I have no idea why we have never been able to crack the code, but finally, I thought we were getting somewhere. I was to have yet another meeting with the President from last year and it kept getting postponed and postponed. Finally, we had our meeting in January and he said wait until June and we will continue the conversation. I was somewhat surprised when his assistant reached out to me to have that June follow-up meeting before I did the follow-up from my side. I expected he would be in the meeting with the new HR head he had recently hired, but he did not appear. They had three executives there for the meeting, including one based outside Japan who was visiting. Naturally, I had notes for the January meeting and I was working off the basis that this meeting was a continuation of the previous meeting direction with the President. So, I get straight into outlining the solution for them based on my understanding from my previous discussion with the President at our January meeting. That was a mistake. I assumed he had briefed them on our talk, but it gradually dawned on me that wasn't the case. My approach was wrong. What I should have done was to first ask them what they understood the situation to be around what the President wanted. I didn't do that and so wasted a lot of time and effort early in the meeting barking up various wrong trees. I could see this genius, transformational idea of mine, wasn't going anywhere. They kept asking me rather tactical questions. This totally confused me because the President had been operating at the strategic level. In the course of them getting frustrated with me not getting the picture, they explained the problem from their point of view. I was floored. The things they wanted were the most basic requirements. I couldn't initially get my head around what I was hearing, because it didn't correspond with the image I had in my mind. This firm has been around a long time and they have been very successful. They have many branches and, therefore, I assumed, they had all the basics well and truly nailed down. Their ducks were in a row, I thought, but not true. Being a 112-year-old training company and being here since 1963 in Japan, I have a huge curriculum resource at my command and can operate at the most basic or sophisticated levels. In other words, I could give them what they want once I understood it. I was reflecting on why this meeting was initially so hard. I see that I had a direction for them in my mind based on the meeting with the President and I forgot to do the sales basics with them. I assumed we were advancing on a previous conversation going on to the next level. I was operating above the fluffy white clouds and they were down a deep mine shaft. What I should have done was to expect that the busy President had not briefed them at all or not to a very distinct degree. I should have ignored what I thought was happening and should have dealt with what I had in front of me – three people I didn't know and should have assumed that I had no idea what they wanted. I wish I had been that smart. If I had started that way, it would have been obvious to me that I needed to focus down on the basics for them. This hand it over phenomenon from the President to the working level staff is a common enough thing in business for busy senior executives. I will make it my rule from now on to ignore what I think is happening and check to see what they think is going on and what they need to fix their issues. I promise to do better.

I don't like doing RFPs in Japan. We are translating concepts and intangibles into text in a document, which a lot of people we will never ever meet will be reading and making decisions about us. I prefer to work on my champion and have them marshal the approval through their byzantine internal processes to get the agreement to go ahead. It feels more in control than launching a bunch of words into space and hoping for the heavens to align. I had a case like that recently. I had met a person from the company at a networking event and when I followed up they directed me to the person who would become my champion. I met them, understood what they wanted and came back with some alternatives from which they could choose. They made a selection and asked for a simple proposal, with pricing, which I put together. Unbeknownst to me, someone higher up in the hierarchy didn't like what they had selected and said they should have a demonstration training first before committing to the delivery of the option they chose. I could tell my champion was annoyed by this, but we did the demonstration more as a fig leaf to get approval to move forward as planned. In the case of an RFP, the champion receives it, but it is a much more formal process, no doubt involving procurement, compliance and a host of other entities who will need to scrutinise the document. None of these people will have had a chance to get the necessary "passion" inoculation from me about how this will be so great for their company. It is a very dry affair all round. Because so many people we will never meet will be looking at the content we have to really lay on the detail. Anytime we write something down, there is the danger of misinterpretation or lack of understanding of what they are reading. We are experts in our business, but often the people behind the scenes are not experts and they don't know the lexicon or the content or the concepts. Often, what we are covering is quite complex as well, which makes it hard for them to gauge what they are reading to weight it up against rival submissions. There is the danger we produce something so complete, so water tight, that it is impenetrable for them and they go for a competitor application because it is much less sophisticated and less complex, allowing them to make a decision. Where do we strike the balance between full details and a lighter version with enough data to get a yes. We have a varied audience, so some will prefer a light version and others want every detail. Creating a version within a version could be the answer. We can have the executive summary bit and we can have the heavy details as well. In this way, the reader can choose to skim or do a deep dive. Japan always skews toward wanting more detail, so by definition a Japanese RFP will be relatively dense. Supporting documents are always a good idea. Often we have Flyers or catalogues or white papers or whatever, which we can attach to the submission. No one may have the time to read it all but it does show a depth of command of the subject and that your firm is well organised on this topic. We should never underestimate the Japanese preference for risk reduction, which usually translates into a desire for ALL the information they can get their hands on. Somehow, by collecting a lot of information, they feel immunised from making a mistake through a lack of knowledge or perspective. The RFP evaluation process results in a yes or a no and when you get the no, it is perplexing to understand why you were not selected. In Japan, there is no mechanism for sharing with you why you missed out because the system doesn't want to get into a debate about the decision. Therefore, it is very hard to learn from the process and it becomes a bit of a black box procedure. Was it the content, was it the money, was it the timing – what was it? Did our competitor offer something we don't have or didn't think about? You can lose a lot of sleep trying to parse what happened and it usually leads nowhere. If you can get together with your champion unofficially, it is worthwhile trying to get some insight. They may be reluctant though to do that because there is no upside for them and they don't want to compromise the organisation's decision or decision-making processes.

Recently, we had a negotiation with an existing buyer. They had severely cut back their purchasing quantities under direct orders from the European Headquarters. A new President had arrived and looking at the global training bill, decided he could save a lot of dough if they did it all themselves. The first salvo was to reduce the amount of previously scheduled training while they sorted it out. Actually, his local team just cannot do it from a time perspective and on the talent front. Anyway, they came back to us with a request to resurrect one of the cancelled classes. That was good. They also wanted some materials supplied which we had not previously supplied. The salesperson's job was to ask for payment for the production and supply of those new materials. I told him that when he puts forth the number, he should then shut up and not say another word. When we mention a big number or, in this case, a new number, we create tension in the room. For some salespeople, this tension is too much. They suffer from "imposter syndrome" and begin to doubt their worth, their solutions' worth, their company's worth and a myriad of other doubts crop up. They feel the overpowering need to lighten the mood. They want to reduce the tension by adding more explanation or by trying to pile on more value. This misses the point. You want the tension. The buyer feels the tension too and they now have the stress, not us. Now they have to justify why the thing you are asking for is not possible. Usually, they don't have a well thought out reason, so they are struggling internally with how to deal with our proposal. When we jump in and start babbling, we reduce the pressure on them to justify the number they want. This is their escape route. We have given them enough time to come up with why they can't accept our offer. We have just handed them to keys to the door to escape from the tension we have built up. Invariably, we don't get what we wanted because we sabotaged our own efforts, by speaking when we should have kept stony silence in play as our weapon. Asking for the order is another stressful crossover point in the conversation with the buyer. We were delivering a demonstration class recently for a very large insurance company. The original plan was for a suite of trainings for their managers. The HR team was well on the way to getting this going when someone in senior management questioned the content. The certain deal now became highly uncertain. HR asked us for a demonstration class to prove the content was suitable and so we naturally agreed to do that. To my delight, they said they would pay for the demonstration, rather than forcing us to do it for nothing. The money wasn't the issue. It was an open competition with other firms for the business and I recall the HR person commenting to me that he thought our fees were cheap. After hearing that, I think I should raise our fees! So we did the demonstration class and it went very well. We had the senior director in the class checking on the content, the actual direct boss of the HR person I had been dealing with. At this point, I could have asked for the business very directly by saying "so, are we approved to do the actual class for the managers now?". For many salespeople, especially in Japan, that is too direct. In fact, a lot of Japanese salespeople wouldn't have said anything and just left it to the buyer to tell them they had the business. The reason for this is simple. They abhor rejection and being told "no" and buyers too don't like it either. Japan is a very civil society and confrontation is frowned upon, so a direct and clear "no" is avoided. Rather than just leaving it up in the air, we can ask for the order in a very low stress way. In this case, I used a "minor point" close. The original intention was that if the demonstration class went well, we would do the real class with twenty managers in the following month. I simply asked, "So next month there will be twenty people in the class?". If there is to be no class, then this question is irrelevant. When they affirm that is the case and it will be twenty managers, they are indirectly saying we have the business and we proceed as planned. I could have used an "alternative of choice" close. Here I would say, "are we still thinking about the next month for the class or are we thinking in two months' time?". This is not a "yes" or a "no" answer. It is a "yes" answer across two distinct possibilities. I could have used the "next step" close. In this case, I would ask, "so the next step is to confirm the date we spoke about earlier for the class for the managers. Shall we lock that date in?". If they say, "yes, lock the date in", that means the class is going to go ahead, and they have accepted our proposal and we have a deal. All of these techniques are smooth, low or no pressure and easy to put forth. They don't create a lot of tension with the buyers, because the approach is tangential. If they were not going to

I am having a bad run in sales at the moment and it is depressing. I am a constant networker attending events to meet potential clients. The leads we get to our website go to my sales team and so I have to hustle and get out there and make it happen. I do that and I follow up with the prospects to try to get a meeting or at least an introduction to a decision-maker. Like everyone else, I get ghosted a lot of the time, but that doesn't prevent me from following up again and again until there is no more point. I actually cannot recall anyone ever criticising me for my following up activities. If they ever did, I have my riposte ready to go. Would you like to hear it? Here we go. "Yes, you are correct. I do keep following up with potential clients. Your organisation has salespeople too, and wouldn't you expect them to be following up with potential clients for your company's growth and development? Well, that is what we do and by the way we teach sales and equip you salespeople to be better at the follow-up to win more business. Isn't that something your organisation would value?". Amongst the clients I have been able to visit, there are the seeds of some potential training for them. This takes time and often they tell me to wait a little until they are ready to go. Naturally, I take note of that and I get back to them later to check in. I have had some clients on that cycle for over a year now. It is very depressing though when they get back to you after you have followed up and say, "we are doing nothing this year and we won't be spending anything on training until 2025". When you get one of these, it is bad, but lately I am getting a number of these one after another. It is also leavened with this refrain, "our headquarters has put a freeze on hiring and training for the foreseeable future". Ouch! What do we do when we get slammed with these rejections and delays? If they come at reasonable intervals, it is one thing to deal with them. However, when you are pushing hard on the follow-up, you are lifting rocks to find poisonous spiders, centipedes and scorpions and have to deal with the product of your tenacity. I have been getting failures day after day for over a week now and I am constantly tasting the bitter ashes of defeat. In this situation, we forget about our previous successes and abilities and focus on our current emasculation and inertia. This is dangerous because what we think determines our future success. We need to switch our mindset to the positive. It is a good idea to call past clients at this point, especially those happy clients, and ask how things are going. For a start, they are going to take your call and will be happy to speak with you because you have built the trust and have provided value. It also reminds them that you are there. We tend to make a sale and then move on to the next sale and forget about keeping in touch with satisfied clients. There is a slight chance that they have a new need and bingo, we call them and this triggers some action on their part. At the least, it changes our mood to something more positive than the depression we are feeling about getting no new sales. "Nana korobi, ya oki" is a Japanese saying I like, which means "fall down seven times, get up eight". It is a bit like that advice to the cowboy who gets thrown from a bucking bronco, to get back up in the saddle immediately. This is important because if we think about it too much about it, we will talk ourselves out of getting back in the sales saddle. So, get out there and attend networking events, call prospects and try to get a meeting. Call past clients and stir the embers of a possible deal. Dwelling on the failure component of what we do in sales will take us nowhere. We have to be positive and get on the front foot all the time, no matter how hard we are being driven down and pushed back. There is a success psychology in sales. It is based around self-belief. When that wall cracks, there is no going back and people drop out, never to return.

I started my first podcast "The Japan Leadership Series" on August 2nd, 2013. Shortly after that, I discovered Content Marketing and got better educated on the subject thanks to Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose's podcast "This Old Marketing", launched on November 20, 2013. The premise at the time was revolutionary. You put up your best stuff for free and don't protect your IP. This was a radical idea and few went for it. I didn't think of my podcast as "Content Marketing", but I soon realised that was what I was doing. I now release six podcasts and three TV shows every week and drive my Content Marketing hard. Content Marketing combines well with SEO as a mechanism for getting clients. I have 3300 articles each on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter, 2060 podcasts on Apple Podcasts, over 2500 videos on YouTube, have published seven books, so I am all in on Content Marketing. It is coming to a shuddering halt. AI is bypassing the content we are all putting out there and scraping our IP. Its search function homogenises what is globally and freely available on a subject and in thirty seconds provides the answers we are seeking. With Google search, you had to go to the links and my stuff would come up, with my name and my ownership of that content made quite clear. AI just bypasses all of that attribution. You get the answer, but it is not clear who it came from. We are becoming anonymous and even more invisible. I remember a long time ago when clever people made the point that we content producers were all media companies, even though we may not have thought of ourselves in that way. I have produced a massive amount of media on three subjects – Leadership, Sales and Presentations, because that is what we mainly teach. I want people to look at what I produce and conclude they need Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training to come and help them solve their problems. I don't write books to sell books. The market is too niche for me. You have to be interested in Leadership and Japan, Sales and Japan, Presentations and Japan. We could hold a meeting in a largish phone booth to accommodate the denizens of these niches. We do sell copies, but we mainly hand over our books to potential clients for free and use them as textbooks for our courses. If AI can get the answer without going through us, then how do we get to the client and get them to buy our solutions? This is the nub of the problem. What we had available to us through Content Marketing is going away rapidly, but I wonder how many people have twigged to the issue. What should we do? At one level, we can stop shovelling coal into the Content Marketing furnace, because the client will get the answers they want without us making the effort to stoke the fires. The number of people seeing our content will diminish, so why are we doing it? Credibility is still important though and I believe that personal branding will become the path forward. We are already doing that, but as Content Marketing drops out as a conduit from clients to us, then we need alternatives. Search will continue to work to find suppliers of specific solutions. With SEO, there are known means of enticing the spiders to find you, but what about AI? How can we spice up the AI search algorithms? That is certainly unclear at this point. Well, it is certainly unclear to me, so if you have a good idea on this point, then let me know! Through traditional SEO, or search where you pay to place your ads, clients will find you and then what? This is where Content Marketing may still have a role. Buyers will check us out before they make contact. Ask yourself, what are you putting out there to display legendary credibility, so that they select you for follow-up rather than your rival? Our company brand is important, but our personal brand is also going to be important. Japanese clients are notoriously risk averse and want to know who they are dealing with before they go too far. My LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads and TikTok posts are just full of content – endless and substantial and this is no accident. I want to influence the minds of the buyers, to see me as THE EXPERT in my core areas. I want them to taste what we have and know that we can solve their issues. The end of Content Marketing may mean that clients don't find us anymore when they are searching for an answer to their question about their problem. For example, if we ask AI "how can I get more innovation from my team?" we will get a lot of answers. What do you do with all of this theory which pops up, though? You get the answer and then have to apply the knowledge yourself. Not that many companies are capable of doing that at a high level. If they are looking for an expert to deliver the solution, they have to do a different type of search and there is a chance they will discover us. They will then want to evaluate who is the biggest, safest and best provider. This is where having a substantial body of specialist work on their area of interest will ho

Have you ever had this experience? You cannot get on the same wavelength as the client. I remember an HR Director at one of the major fashion brands and I was always confused during our conversations. I was never sure where she stood on any number of issues about us delivering training for them. Yes, she was very pleasant, but also very obtuse and hard to corral. I would leave the meetings unsure of where we stood with this deal, if in fact there was a deal in there at all. Because no one in Japan wants to give you a straight "no", they get tied up in Gordian knots of obfuscation and you are often left marooned. Sometimes for me it is a language issue. Japanese is so difficult and my level of understanding can really vary depending on who I am talking to. I can have one client meeting and I get everything they are saying and I am on top of the conversation. A few hours later, I am sitting in another meeting room across from a potential client and I am struggling to get what they are saying. Not every native speaker is a fluent commander of their own language. Not every native speaker is smart, succinct, clear and logical in their speech. When you are not a native speaker and you are getting this barrage of poor communication skills, it gets bewildering very fast. I have been having a series of back and forth emails with a potential client about arranging some training for them and the language is Japanese. It isn't necessarily the linguistic aspect which has been giving me trouble. These days, tools like Google Translate do a phenomenal job if I need help. The issue is the person writing the email is a very poor communicator. Basically, she doesn't have great skills in her own written language. This requires me to keep clarifying what she is trying to say, because it is not clear in the least. Expectations can be an issue. We find we are both operating with different expectations and often we haven't communicated what they are, because somehow we imagine the other party understands our position. Japanese people suffer from this amongst themselves. So much is left unsaid in Japan and the idea is that each party fills in the blanks and coalesces their understanding of what happens next. It doesn't always work though and they find they have completely misunderstood each other. Throw a foreigner into that mix and things can get very exciting, very quickly. As a training company, we have to be careful of the message getting confused or mistaken between the salesperson and the trainer who will deliver the class. As a rule, we really want the trainer to meet the person contracting us, so that they can get a direct download of what is expected. Of course, we can pass on our understanding of what they want, but getting it directly from the horse's mouth is a much better idea. Can you do something similar in your industry with your team who will execute the deal? It is always interesting too, to find out that what you are hearing in this meeting is different or additional to what you heard in your own meeting with the client. Uh oh. They may have moved their expectations in the interim or we just got it wrong, or we may have asked a different question this time and uncovered some hidden or previously uncommunicated needs. This happened to me recently when we met the CEO. In that conversation, new requirements emerged which were not revealed or discussed in my first meeting. Either these were not tapped well enough by me in the first instance or they had subsequently emerged or the CEO's own thinking had progressed since our original meeting. It is always humbling when this happens. You have to question your own competence with asking client's questions and taking notes in the meeting. It very important to catch these misunderstandings early, so that they can be corrected before the deal progresses too far down the track. Getting things in writing is good for clarity. However, in most cases in Japan, the contracts are not proscriptive and do not carry all the very detailed aspects, especially in the service sector. Usually, busy salespeople don't want to summarise their understanding of the meeting and send it to the buyer, because they want to move on to the next client and the next deal. Having a clarity meeting is part and parcel of the way things are done here and that is a good thing. We might want to skip that meeting and just get busy on the delivery, but Japan has found that such additional meetings to make sure we are all aligned work well in a country where communication is vague, parsimonious and confusing.

Japan loves detail. A lot more detail than we expect in the West. I remember a lecture I attended at an academic conference on Sino-Japanese relations here in Tokyo in the early 1980s. The Professor was making this point about the Japanese love of detail by relating how a Zen metaphor had been imported into Japan from China. In the Chinese telling, there was a bucket to draw water from the well and there was no great attention placed on the apparatus, but instead on the broader philosophical Zen point. This was the main objective of the telling of the story. In the Japanese version, there was a lot of minute detail about the circumference and depth of the well, how it was dug out and reinforced, the construction of the bucket and the rope and a host of other statistics, somewhat diluting or even obscuring the broader philosophical Zen point. The takeaway for us in sales is that the Japanese buyer has an insatiable need for details. This is cultural, but also a defensive posture to help them ensure they don't make a bad decision to entrust their company's fortunes to us. The idea is that the more information they can assemble, the greater the likelihood they won't get into any trouble in the future. Usually, we will have corporate brochures, flyers, catalogues etc., to show the client. We should make a point of emphasising how long we have been in operation and, in particular, how long we have been here in Japan. Longevity in Japan is its own proof of acceptance by the market and therefore validates risk reduction to take us on as a supplier. When we start outlining the scope of our services, we should be prepared to go into a lot more detail than we would normally need to bother with in a Western context. If you ever look at Japanese local websites, they are exploding stars of massive details and the screen is saturated in text. I don't think we need to go that far, but we do need a balance. There are some busy people who will just scan the content and be satisfied with that and others who will want all the detail. We can cater to both by using headlines and summaries and other pages or resource sections for packing in the gory details. We are all busy and social media is training us to have shorter and shorter concentration spans, so the first sentence in any paragraph has to be well constructed. We want to plant a hook in that opening volley which captures the curiosity and intrigue of the buyer to keep reading. Don't start with boring bumf and expect to have your content consumed by the reader. We need to keep repeating this hook idea every paragraph. Most Japanese companies do not want Minimum Viable Products tested on them or to be a pioneer in their industry. These things work in the West, but Japan expects the product or solution to work perfectly from the outset and to have no problems and no defects. Adjusting the solution based on buyer feedback isn't an option once you have sold the solution. It has to work from the get go. Testing something new is not attractive to the buyer, because the risk is felt to be too high. Therefore, it is always good to come armed with case studies about other clients who have benefited from your solution. This is not that easy in Japan, because clients often won't allow you to promulgate that they are even a client, let alone share what you did for them and what happened. Clients would tell me they couldn't allow us to mention they were a client because it wouldn't be fair to our competitors! Huh? But this is Japan, and this is how they see these things. Corporate secrets are well guarded here, so getting a case study together is no snap. Always make sure you have information about yourself and the company's history. The buyers want to know who they are dealing with. You will need to include basic details about the company like who are the executives, the headquarter address, your main bank, the amount of capital you hold, etc. In my case, I always refer to myself as "Dr. Story", because I have a Ph.D. and that is a big differentiator with my competitors in the corporate training market. Do you want to be taught by a guy with a Ph.D. or some bozo with no credentials? I will also sometimes mention I have a M.A. from Sophia University here in Tokyo, because that says "l am a local" to the Japanese buyer. I will often mention I am a 6th Dan in traditional Shitoryu karate, because that tells the buyer I am really serious about Japan and have deep knowledge of the culture and language. When I have the chance, I will also reference the 9 books, three in Japanese, I have published and the multitude of podcasts and videos I have released, because that is a massive form of credibility building. It says I am a serious expert in my field and you should use me rather than someone else who doesn't have any of these proof points. We need to think carefully about what we hand over to the buyer and what we put up on our website. With their distributed decision-making system, many pe

Usually in Japan, we are granted an audience with the buyer for an hour for the meeting. Sometimes with Western buyers, they want to restrict the time, so we only have thirty minutes, which makes things very difficult. We also know that if we can capture their interest, that thirty minutes can magically become much longer. We also know that there will be more than one meeting, so we don't have to try to squeeze everything into that initial conversation. One point though – in the case of a second meeting - always have your diary there and set it while you are with them in the same room. Don't leave it or you will get crushed in the competition for their time by other competing forces. That first hour should be concentrated on building rapport and trust with the buyer at the very start. We need to establish our credentials and our trustworthiness. In most cases, they don't know us at all and we turn up expecting them to share their deepest, darkest corporate secrets with a stranger. Remember your parents told you, "don't talk to strangers". This first meeting requires good communication skills, centered around our choice of the content and the way we express it. Stumbling, bumbling speech patterns are automatically assumed to show we are an incoherent idiot, unprofessional, unreliable and best stayed away from. Japanese buyers are trained to hear our pitch and then completely destroy it, as a defence mechanism against making a bad decision. We don't want that. Instead, we need to get their permission to ask questions during that first meeting, so that we can avoid pitching into the void. If we don't know what they need, how on earth do we know what to pitch? If they want A and we keep talking about B, we will not get the business. We have to know they are interested in A and not B. To find out what they want, we use a simple four-part structure: I. who we are 2. what we do 3. who we have done it for and what happened 4. suggest we could possibly do it for them too I say "possibly" because we still don't have enough information to know for sure. We are better to say we don't know if we are a match and make the point that, "if I can ask some questions,I will have a better idea if we can help or not". The temptation in Western sales techniques is to start enthusing about what a great help we can be and how we can do everything regardless of what they need. We are an omnidirectional wunderkind who can magically solve all of their corporate ills, because we are so awesome. This won't work in Japan because it comes across as boasting, sounds like a lot of salesperson hot air and we should be avoided. Once we get permission to ask questions, we can start with either where they are now or where they want to be. It doesn't matter where we start, but we need to know the answer to both. We need this so that we can gauge the distance between the two points. A client who is really close to solving their problem internally believes they don't need us, because they can do it themselves. We need to disabuse them of that idea if we can. Sometimes we can't do that. In that event, we have to pack up our stuff up, get out of there and find someone we can help. Once we know where they want to be, we need to find out what is preventing them from getting there. Hopefully, the reason we uncover will help us to position ourselves as the solution they cannot generate internally. The issue with knowing the blocker is that it is not enough. Most deals never happen because the buyer doesn't have enough urgency attached to benefiting from the solution. If we just respond by saying we have the solution, that won't be enough. We need to explore the timing and the importance of speed. If we don't do that, we will be left in limbo waiting for the buyer to get around to taking action. This is where pointing out the opportunity cost of no action is important, because clients assume no action has no cost. We can't leave them thinking like that. We will need to dig deep with the questions to understand their requirements, motivations, fears and concerns in this first meeting. In the next meeting, we will explain how our solution will take care of what they want. This is where we get into the nitty-gritty details of the solution and walk them though how it will unveil inside their company. Just talking about the mechanics is not enough, because we need to connect the details of the solution to the benefits they will enjoy. That is also not enough because we need to describe what that benefit will look like inside their organisation. Buyers are sceptical of salespeople, so we need to lay out the proof of where our solution has worked elsewhere and preferably for a client very similar to them. Finally, we ask them a question which is very mild but deadly, by saying, "how does that sound so far?" At this point, we don't add or explain or dilute the tension we have created with that question. We just sit there with our mouth shut and listen for the an

Aussies are a casual people. They prefer informality and being chilled, to stiff interactions in business or otherwise. They can't handle silence and always feel the need to inject something to break the tension. Imagine the cultural divide when they are trying to sell to Japanese buyers. Japan is a country which loves formality, ceremony, uniforms, silence and seriousness. Two worlds collide in commerce when these buyers and sellers meet. My job, when I worked for Austrade in Japan, was to connect Aussie sellers with Japanese buyers. I would find the buyers and then try to find the Aussie suppliers. I noticed some distinct cultural differences in the sales process. It was always better when the Japanese buyers didn't speak English. This stripped out the ability of the Aussies to directly communicate with the Japanese buyers. You would think that was a disadvantage, but in fact it was the saviour in a lot of cases. Unable to access their own language in direct communication with the Japanese buyer, they were forced to give up on some mainstream linguistic idiosyncrasies of Aussie interactions. Formality is a given in business in Japan and when, as the seller, you are forced to communicate through an interpreter, you are reduced to a staccato flow of thoughts and ideas. There is a delay in the communication and the Aussies had to sit there and wait to hear what the buyer said. They were forced into a more formal style of interaction which prevented them from free styling. This was good, because the Japanese buyers prefer the more formal approach. When the buyers could speak some English, the Aussies ran riot. They were freed from the chains of formality and immediately lapsed into casual interactions, with which they felt more comfortable. Humour is a big part of the Aussie male culture and they bring it with them wherever they go, including to the very much stiffer, buttoned up Japanese business world. The problem is you have to be another Aussie to get in sync with the humour. Self-depreciation is part of Japanese culture too and here it is more about being humble rather than putting yourself down. Aussies are also pretty humble people and self-depreciation is a male signal to other males that you are not trying to get above everyone else and that we are all equal. This reaction against the English class system in Australia has made fairness and equality basic building blocks of the culture down under. The problem is self-depreciation is very hard to translate. When we speak foreign languages, we are constantly translating what is being said in the other language into our own. Japanese buyers always had trouble trying to get the point of the self-depreciative attempts at humour by the Aussies. When it bombed, did the Aussies regroup and go in a different direction? No. They just doubled down harder to try to make the point, which meant they just kept digging a deeper hole for themselves. Hint to the wise, when selling in Japan be humble, but don't make self-depreciative remarks about yourself – it won't land the way you want it to land. Sardonic humour is a close cousin to the self-depreciative remarks. We Aussies got this from the English, because they love sardonic humour too. Again, it is very hard to translate and for Japanese to understand. Japanese communication is rather circular and vague. Sardonic humour is angular. You make comments at an angle to what had been said and hit hard on that angle to make a dark point, which is witty. Japanese buyers are fabulous at never making a direct point if they can avoid it, so no angles to leverage off. I notice this with my Japanese wife when I say something sardonic and it just goes absolutely nowhere. They don't have that angle in their own language, so it is a hard one to grasp in a foreign language. Hint number two: forget attempting sardonic humour, because only you will get the joke. Sarcasm is a close relative to the sardonic humour category. Aussie male culture means growing up under a constant barrage of sarcastic remarks and one-upmanship. You have to learn how to be tough and take it and how to hand it out, to defend yourself. The speed of the riposte and the lacerative edge to the comment are being judged as a sign of wit and intelligence. No one gets sarcasm in Japan, in my experience. Trust me, I have tried it many times, only to see it fall as flat as a pancake. Hint number three: remove all efforts at sarcasm with Japanese buyers, they simply will have no idea what you are talking about. Irony is another Aussie favourite in the humour stakes. Like sarcasm, we males grow up navigating our way through ocean waves of irony smashing into us all the time. It requires a very high level of understanding of the language and the cultural context. Most Japanese buyers just don't have strong enough English to even get close to understanding the point of the ironic comment. There is also an edge, a sharp blade attached to the irony too, which is usually u

Blarney, snake oil, silver tongued – the list goes on to describe salespeople convincing buyers to buy. Now buyers know this and are always guarded, because they don't want to be duped and make a bad decision. I am sure we have all been conned by a salesperson at some point in time, in matters great and small. Regardless, we don't like it. We feel we have been made fools of and have acted unintelligently. Our professional value has been impugned, our feelings of self-importance diminished and we feel like a mug. This is what we are facing every time we start to explain to the buyer why they should buy our widget. We are facing a sheer, vertiginous rock wall of climbing difficulty. The cure for all of this caution, disbelief, doubt and fear is honesty. I talk about understanding our kokorogamae or true intention in sales. Are we here sitting in front of the buyer to make a bigger bonus, higher commissions, keep our job or there to help them succeed in their business? If our true intention is anything other than trying to help the buyer do better in their business, then we are never going to be able to continuously scale that rock face of difficulty. Yes, we might get one deal done, because we are a silver-tongued sales monsters who can snow the buyer. The object for the vast majority of us is never a sale, but always the reorder. Yes, there are some smash and grab businesses where they grab the loot and never see the buyer again. I know one salesman here in Tokyo who told me when he was selling meat in the US, he always had to find a new town, with new suckers to sell to, because once the buyer received the meat, the quality was poor and he could never go back. The difference between us is that I would never have taken that job because it offends my fundamental values and professionalism as a salesperson. I don't want to be that guy who has to run away from the buyers and be afraid to meet them again. I can honestly say that I have never sold anything to anyone that would cause me to be ashamed or fear meeting the buyer again. That is the sales life I want for myself, not one where you are forced to live in the shadows and fear being outed as a crook. I can say that after he told me that story, I lost all trust in him and would never buy anything from him. His basic human values are doubtful to me and I don't want spend my time with people like that. Realistically, though, there are few cases like this and for most of us in sales, we are looking for an ongoing relationship with the buyer. We want to build the trust and get the repeat business forever. If we have the best interests of the buyer firmly at the front of our mind we are fearless. We can walk into any networking event full of strangers and meet new people without trepidation and search for new buyers. We can walk into that first meeting safe in the knowledge that we know what we are doing. We understand that in that first meeting we are there to find out what they need and make a judgement as to whether we have it or not. If we don't, then we don't waste their time or ours and we move on to find the buyer we can help. I liken this to if you were a researcher who found the cure for cancer, you would be fearless to bring this to the attention of the buyers. There would be no hesitation and you would try to find as many people as possible to help. For an introvert like me, walking into a crowded hall full of businesspeople is overwhelming. Walking up to total strangers and introducing yourself is not the norm in Japan. I have to overcome my fear of this moment to find who are my potential buyers in the room. It is never easy for me and most people who meet me assume I must be an extrovert. Not true, but I am in sales, so I have to become more extrovert in public. One of my sales heroes is Zig Ziglar and he put it beautifully, "you can get everything you want in this life, if you help enough other people get what they want". That is the true sales mantra and the one I follow religiously. It steels me against my introversion, my fears of the strange looks I get when networking, the rejections and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which come as part of this sales life. If we have the buyer's best interest firmly in the front of our minds, we will find the right words, the proper explanations, be able to answer the difficult questions fluently and in general, exude a vibe of total confidence, which the buyer picks up on. They are not just reading our words. They are searching for a holistic answer to this questions: can I trust this person? The only answer can be "yes" and if our kokorogamae is correct, then that is the answer they will be feel and receive.

We are slowly emerging from Covid, yet a few leftovers are still hanging around, making our sales life complicated. One of those is the sales call conducted on the small screen using Teams or Zoom or whatever. These meetings are certainly efficient for the buyers, because they can get a lot of calls done more easily and for salespeople, it cuts out a lot of travel. Efficient isn't always effective though. In my view, we should always try to be in person with the buyer. Some may say I am "old school" and that is quite true. Old school though has a lot of advantages when selling. Being there with them, we can take the client through the materials much more easily and we can read their body language in depth and minutely. Buyers are always sceptical about salespeople, because everyone is risk averse and concerned about getting conned or taken for a ride. When we are in the room together, they can get a better sense of who we are. They can read our body language to make sure our words match up with the intentions we are spruking. I had a sales call with a new client and, being in the room together, I could hand over the training manual and take him through it page by page, explaining the content of what he would be buying. I could easily control what page he was on so that we were in synch. We have to be careful when handing materials over that we are on page five and so are they, rather than they are racing ahead of us to page twenty. The commentary coming out of our mouth has to line up with what they are looking at in the materials. It happens that they race ahead of us, so we have to be aware of that danger and control what the buyer is looking at very carefully. I had another new client sales meeting, this time online and with three people on their side. They degenerate into three tiny little boxes on screen and it gets worse once you start sharing documents online. It is very hard to read three people's reaction when you are in the room with them let alone trying to do it remotely. As we know the current systems aren't as good as teleprompter technology. You can look into a camera lens on a teleprompter and read the text appearing on screen at the same time. With these various virtual platforms, the camera is located on one part of the computer screen, usually at the top and the people you are talking to are located way down below. You have to make a choice – look at the camera and not at your audience or look at your audience and not at the camera. The teleprompter technology eliminates that choice, but it hasn't been applied to the virtual world as yet. In this situation, I look at my camera and give up trying to read the reaction of the buyers online. This is a big give up, by the way, and most unsatisfactory. I do it this way, because what they see is me speaking directly to them, making eye contact all the time. From their screen angle, they see me staring straight at them. This creates the sense of trustworthiness. On screen, I can keep staring at them intensely, without it creating any tension, as would happen in Japan if we were in person. Japanese culture avoids too much direct eye contact. This is why people look at our chin or throat or forehead. On screen, though, we are safely removed and so if we look down the barrel of that lens, we can keep applying the eye contact without it becoming intrusive. It allows us to connect with the viewers. Yes, we cut out the travel time and the costs to get to the client, but we are giving up a lot more in return. Being there is so much better and more valuable. Yes, it may take three hours there and back to hold the meeting and only one hour to do it online. But that one hour in person enables us to be so much more persuasive. We are also better able to recognise pushback or reluctance. It is almost impossible to read the vibe going on between the attendees on their side. When you are together in the room, you can see if there is any difference of opinion amongst the buyer group or cases where one person is not onboard with the idea. Onscreen, that is much more disguised. These various elements are hard to gauge on the small screen. We often find ourselves doing too much talking to compensate for the restricted nature of the small screen interaction. We feel we have to add energy and vitality to the sale process in a way we don't feel such a strong need when we are in person. The communication distance gets us ramping up our side of the conversation to try to inject some enthusiasm into the buyer group. We are trying to will them to buy because we feel the remoteness of the situation. Buyers are often working from home these days and so they insist on online meetings. Remember, for them, not buying is the safest and preferred option. We, on the other hand, have a duty to help supply solutions to buyers and for us we should always choose the best medium for that purpose. That superior medium is definitely face to face, so let's try to make sure the vast majo

Getting a deal done in a single meeting is an extremely rare event in Japan. Usually, the people we are talking to are not the final decision-makers and so they cannot give us a definite promise to buy our solution. The exception would be firms run by the dictator owner/leader who controls everything and can make a decision on the spot. Even in these cases, they usually want to get their people involved to some extent, so there is always going to be some due diligence required. In most cases, the actual sale may come on the second or even third meeting. Risk aversion is a big thing is Japan, so everyone is very careful to make sure their decision is the right one and that there will be no blow back on them, if things go bad. I met the owner of a very successful accounting business at a networking event. It was a very crowded affair and as is my want, I will just shanghai strangers and introduce myself. "Hi, my name is Greg" as I extend my hand to shake theirs, followed in short order by my reaching for my business card. I followed up to set up a meeting, which we had, and it went quite well. He invited me back to meet his team. The people I met were quite well established in the company and focused on the administrative side of things. He was obviously thinking about the training arrangements and logistics and that is why he wanted me to explain what we will do to these two staff members. He was the decision maker, but we still had to involve other members of the team to get the internal buy-in. We had a third meeting with just him and I, to sort out the final arrangement and set dates, etc. In another case, I met an insurance company representative at an event and followed up for a meeting. He directed me to one of the staff who takes care of HR and I had an initial meeting to uncover their needs. Following that discovery meeting, we had a second meeting where I presented our options to solve their issue. There was a competition with other suppliers of training to see who they would choose. We then had a third meeting, and he brought a colleague from their department and I explained what we do and what we do for them in that meeting. Again, the decision had been taken as we had won the competition and now he was harmonising the next stages internally, to get it to become a reality. Because the steps are elongated, I often don't even bother to bring any Flyers with me to the first meeting and spend the whole time trying to best understand their needs and wants. This way, the full hour of time usually allocated can help me clearly ascertain if we have what they need or not. It is always a good idea to set up the next meeting at the end of the first meeting, because everyone in Tokyo is so busy you need to get into their schedules fast. Once I have done that, I bring the materials to the second meeting to support my recommendation and we go through them together. It is not uncommon to have to come back a third time and go through specific elements once more, to help them gain a clearer understanding of the contents and its suitability for their situation. Once you understand the cadence of doing business here, you are not getting exercised by how slow the process is or by trying to cram everything into one meeting and driving for a "yes" decision. That is very unlikely, and we need to be thinking in terms of three meetings rather than one. If we can get it done in two, then magic, but don't expect that to happen. Risk aversion and team decision-making ensure that things will move slowly. No one is in a hurry to buy anything we have to offer and we have to keep that thought firmly in the front of our minds. No one gets fired for being overly cautious in Japan and risk taking is not well regarded as a concept. Patience and a full pipeline are the requirements for doing business here. If you are desperate, then you will have a rocky time because no one is on your timeline and frankly, they don't care. We have to adjust ourselves to the way they do business, and trying to reverse the natural order of things here is a fool's mission. "Ride the wave in Japan" is always the best advice.

We often hear that people buy on emotion and justify with logic. The strange thing is where is this emotion coming from? Most Japanese salespeople speak in a very dry, grey, logical fashion expecting to convince the buyer to hand over their dough. I am a salesperson but as the President of my company, also a buyer of goods and services. I have been living in Japan this third time, continuously since 1992. In all of that time I am struggling to recall any Japanese salesperson who spoke with emotion about their offer. It is always low energy, low impact talking, talking, talking all the time. There are no questions and just a massive download of information delivered in a monotone delivery. As salespeople, our job is to join the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer. But it is also more than that. The buyer's mental meandering won't necessarily have the degree of passion we need for them to make a purchasing decision. So we have to influence the course of that internal conversation they are having. This is where our own passion comes in. I always thought Japanese people were unemotional before I moved to Japan the first time in 1979. The ones I had met in business in Australia were very reserved and quite self contained. They seemed very logical and detail oriented. After I moved here I realised I had the wrong information. Japanese people are very emotional in business. This is related closely to trust. Once they trust you, they have made an emotional investment to keep using you. No one likes to make a mistake or fail and the best way to avoid that is to deal with people you can trust. How do you know you can trust them? There is some track record of reliability there, that tells you the person or company you are dealing with is a known quantity that will act predictably and correctly every time. The problem with this approach though is that you will only ever be able to sell to existing accounts. What about gaining new customers? You have no track record and no predictability as yet. When you meet a new customer they are mentally sizing you up, asking themselves "can I trust you?". Naturally a good way to overcome the lack of track record is to create one. Offer a sample order or something for free. This takes the risk out of the equation for the person you are dealing with. To get involved with a new supplier means they have to sell the idea to their boss, who has to sell it to their boss, on up the line. No one wants to take the blame if it all goes south. A free or small trial order is a great risk containment tactic and makes it easy for all the parties concerned to participate in the experiment. The other success ingredient is passion for your product or service. When the buyer feels that passion, it is contagious and they are more likely to give you a try to at least see if there is some value to continue working with you. When he was in his mid-twenties, my Japanese father-in-law started a business in Nagoya and needed to get clients. He targeted a particular company and every morning he would stand in front of the President's house and bow as he was leaving by car for the office. After two weeks of this, the President sent one of his people to talk to him to see why he was there every day bowing when the President left for work. When he heard that my father-in-law wanted to supply his company with curtain products, he told him to see one of his subordinates in his office to discuss it. That company eventually became a huge buyer and established my father-in-law's business. Was that a logical decision, just because some unknown character is hanging around your house everyday like a stalker? No it was an emotional decision. What my father-in-law was showing the President was his passion, belief, commitment, discipline, patience, seriousness, earnestness and guts. That is a pretty good line-up for a new supplier in order to be given a chance. We need to remember that buyers are wanting to know our level of belief in what we are selling. The way we express that is through our passion and commitment to the relationship and the product or service we supply. Is our demeanour showing enough passion, without it seeming fake or contrived? Do we have enough faith in what we are selling, that it naturally pours out of the pores of our skin? Are we painting strong enough word pictures to get the buyer emotionally involved in a future involving what we sell? Audit your own levels of passion when you are in front of the buyer. Do you sound sold on your own offer? Do you sound committed to go the extra mile? Do you sound confident and assured, showing no hesitation? Are you honest about what is possible and what is not possible? Always understand that buyers, whether for themselves or for the company, buy on emotion and justify it with logic. Make sure you can supply that emotional requirement as well as the strong rationale for them to buy your offer.

I recently launched a new project called Fare Bella Figura – Make a Good Impression. Every day I take a photograph of what I am wearing and then I go into detail about why I am wearing it and put it up on social media. To my astonishment, these posts get very high impressions and a strong following. It is ironic for me. I have written over 3000 articles on hard core subjects like sales, leadership and presentations, but these don't get the same level of engagement. Like this article, I craft it for my audience and work hard on the content and yet articles about my suit choices get a lot more traction. What I take away from this is people are interested in how we present ourselves in business. The thesis of Fare Bella Figura is that first impressions are so important. In sales, people judge us hard based on how we look, before we even have a chance to open our mouths. If we don't get that initial visual interaction correct, then we can be playing catchup to correct an unhelpful first take on us. "Clothes maketh the man" is an old idea and is related to this first impressions equation. The other thesis of Fare Bella Figura is that I dress for the meetings I am going to have that day, rather than some random selection of what is back from the dry cleaners. We are going to make an impression with the buyer one way or another, so I want to be in control of that impression as much as is humanly possible. I believe there is a direct link between how we present ourselves and the degree of credibility we can instil in the client. If we make a mess of the fabric and colour combinations, we are screaming "unsophisticated". I do not recommend for men to ask their wives for advice. Study this "dress for success" topic for yourself and become the master of your own universe. If we are turning up with ancient stains on our tie, or our suit, it is interpreted as sloppy and there is now a strong doubt about our quality consciousness. If our shoes are scuffed or not displaying a high shine finish, it says we are lazy, not detail oriented and unreliable. The term "down at heel" means "poor" and it comes from the fact that the back of the heel of the shoe has worn down and has not been repaired. Either we are too poor and obviously not a success in the sales profession to be able to repair it, or too indifferent and either way, it is a bad sign for the buyer. If we are wearing a brown or tan belt with black shoes or vice versa, it says "hick" and someone who lacks common sense. The exact matching tie and pocket square colour combination is another faux pas these days. Would we want to accept these types of salesperson as our "trusted advisor"? I doubt it. I certainly wouldn't take their advice on anything if they can't even dress themselves correctly. Suits too large or too small are another bad indicator. They have either lost a lot of weight, but haven't bothered to get their suit taken in, or they are getting chubbier and haven't had the suit taken out, because they won't spend the money. It isn't that expensive to alter an existing suit, and the difference is total. If the suit trousers are too long or too short, it looks off – go and get them altered or replace them. Style and fashion are difficult to navigate. Suit jacket lapels get skinnier, ties get wider and then get narrower, trousers get slimmer and then get fuller, socks get discarded when wearing shoes – all sorts of temporary fashion trends take over the dictates of what is appropriate. Suits can last more than one fashion trend and you have to debate with yourself whether that wide lapel is still going to present the right image with the client when everyone else is wearing a narrower lapel these days. I struggle with this. I have a favourite double breasted Versace suit from years ago and because the style is dated; I don't get to wear it much or at all and that seems a waste. However, if I am dressing for my client, then the answer is simple – leave it in the wardrobe for a day in the future when that trend makes a comeback. My mantra when I leave the house every day is to check my look in the mirror and ask myself, "do I look like one of the most professional people in my industry?". If I don't, then I go and make a few changes, until I am satisfied I can pass that test. Here is a caveat. For a lot of men in Europe, they will be wearing a jacket and trouser combination, rather than a suit and the American trend is to much more casual clothing. In certain industries, like IT, you will hardly see anyone wearing a suit. Now I sell in Tokyo and everyone here wears a suit. I remember I was so surprised when met the President of a gas stand and he was wearing a suit, so men's suits are predominant here. Therefore, I dress for this business environment and you should do the same for your reality. There is a correlation between the quality of our clothing and our personal financial success. Buyers judge us based on what they see. If we look cheap and nasty, they won'

Public speaking spots are a great way to get attention for ourselves and what we sell. This is mass prospecting on steroids. The key notion here is we are selling ourselves rather than our solution in detail. This is an important delineation. We want to outline the issue and tell the audience what can be done, but we hold back on the "how" piece. This is a bit tricky, because the attendees are looking for the how bit, so that they can apply it to fix their issues by themselves. We don't want that because we don't get paid. We are here to fix their problem, not for them to DIY (Do It Yourself) their way to a solution. All selling is public speaking and presentations skills. However, very few salespeople are trained as speakers or presenters. This is incongruous, isn't it? We need to be able to present to the one person in front of us or to hundreds of prospects all gathered together at an event. First of all, we are selling our personal brand and then by extension the solution we are representing. That is the correct order and just jumping to the solution won't work. Buyers buy us first and then what we sell. We all know we can't do good business with a bad guy or gal and our talk is a due diligence process to see if we can be trusted. The dumb way to sell from stage is to provide all of the content up front and then come in at the end with the shiny sales pitch. There is a discernable break in the flow and the audience braces themselves for the pitch. This isn't the way to do it. We need to be interspersing our pitch throughout the talk, so there is no discernable shifting of gears by the speaker. This way, there is nothing to brace against or push back on. The way to do this is to determine what are the key problems and fears confronting the audience. We have the fix for these and can be a trusted partner for them. Once we have determined what are the key problems, we construct our talk to address all the most high priority needs in the time allotted. The talk is broken up into specific chapters, rotating around the key issues. We need to create hooks, which will grab the attention of the listeners. In each chapter, we outline the downside of not doing anything about fixing the problem we have raised. We also talk about what needs to be done to fix it, but we don't reveal how to fix it. To get the point to register with the buyers, we pose rhetorical questions about what will happen if they don't take action to deal with it. We are painting a dismal picture for them of the future ramifications of leaving the mess as it is. The fact that we understand the problem in detail tells the audience we are an expert in this area. If we have some visible proof of our expertise, all the better. We might point them to our books, blogs, podcasts or our video shows. Today, all of these things are much easier to pull off than ten years ago. For example, Amazon prints my books one at a time if I request it and so no garage is full of unsold books, which used to be the reality for most authors. Today, creating blogs and pushing them out through social media gives us credibility at almost no cost. The same with podcasts and videos. There might be some small cost to recording the shows and hosting podcasts on a platform like I use with LibSyn, but really the cost is marginal. YouTube hosts my videos and it is free. Our mobile phones provide amazing quality for recording video and video editing software is not prohibitively expensive. Editing things yourself is possible in a way it wasn't before. This means we can project our expertise beyond the physical limits of the stage. Let me give you a case study. Please go to LinkedIn and find my page. You will see I am posting all the time on three subjects – leadership, sales and presentations. If you scroll down through the feed, you will just see over three thousand posts. My prospective buyers don't need to read them all, but they can see there is a substantial collection of my expertise there. They can read what I publish and check it for themselves, whether it is good enough or not. This substantially bolsters my personal brand. It also allows the buyers to follow up after the talk, to check me out further before they buy what I am selling. For risk averse buyers, this is very important. By incorporating the key hooks into the talk itself, using well-crafted questions to create fear that they may have trouble if they don't fix a problem we have flagged, we eliminate any resistance against what we are selling. When there is an obvious transition from sharing information to now selling, there is a large barrier created between the speaker and the audience. They are thinking, "I love to buy, but I hate being sold. Now I am getting the hard sell by this speaker". Doing it the way I have outlined, we never have any barrier, because we have been working the crowd all the way through the talk. If our questions hit the mark, they will want to know the "how" from us, after we have sold

Finding clients is expensive. We pay Google a lot of money to buy search words. We pay them each time someone clicks on the link on the page we turn up on in their search algorithm. We monitor the pay per click cost, naturally always striving the drive down the cost of client acquisition. If we have the right type of product, we may be paying for sponsored posts to appear in targeted individuals' social media feeds. This is never an exact science, so there is still a fair bit of shotgun targeting going on, rather than sniper focus on buyers. If we go to networking events, we may have to pay the organisation membership fee to be able to access the event and the fee for attending that meeting. Or we may pay a usually very expensive amount to attend as a guest. If we do old style advertising, then we pay for the ad and it has a very brief shelf-life before it is discarded, usually unseen and unread, despite our best wordsmithing efforts with the copy. Given how difficult and expensive it is to get a client, you wonder how we could be so crazy as to lose a client we have already spent time and treasure on acquiring? It usually happens for a number of reasons. Our solution fulfilled a need they had at that time, but that need is a one off or not a consistent feature of their spending. It might be a seasonal spend, so there are limited time during the year to interact with the buyer and the connection isn't as strong as it needs to be. The company may have run out of dough because of the market, currency exchange rates, wars disrupting supply chains or a pandemic killing millions of people and disrupting the entire global economy. Maybe our quality slipped up or our consistency of delivery wasn't where it needed to be and the buyer punished us by going to another supplier. Perhaps the buyer got moved around inside the client firm or quit and a new person has appeared. The new broom has their own ideas and wants to mark out their territory by bringing in their own preferred suppliers and we are now out in the cold. Or we have had a change of personnel. The person responsible for that firm has left the organisation and a new salesperson has to take over the account. The chemistry is not there and the buyer moves their business to a rival firm. Client bonds are very fragile and so many things can destroy the continuity of the business. Even if you get on well with the buyer, they have bosses and maybe they have a different idea about how to move forward. This travels all the way to the top of the organisation back in headquarters. So many times the boss of the global business changes and a few months later you find yourself out on the street, because the purchasing has been centralised or rationalised or right sized or whatever and you are out. I have seen so many deals fall over because someone up the decision-making tree has decided to override the decision of the buyer I am dealing with. There is a policy change and now hiring is frozen, expenditures are reeled in and suppliers are cut loose. A lot of this is beyond our control and we just have to accept the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in business. When we make the change, we can do a better job of controlling the transition from one salesperson to the next. Unless we have fired the individual and they are out the door quick smart, there is usually a month period of notice that gives us the time to glue in the new person to the buyer. Japan as a formalised cyclical redistribution of jobs every few years, so firms here are used to people moving. This should give us time for the existing client salesperson to take their replacement for them to meet the buyer and do the handover. What happens after that is the critical piece. If the new representative doesn't work on creating their own connections with the buyer, then the business continuity can be at risk. This requires time together and busy salespeople may feel they are already maxed out taking care of their own existing clients. That is a big mistake and this is where some strong guidance is required to make sure they make the time and build up a relationship with the buyer. Just going once with your predecessor and then not making subsequent contact is a formula for losing the business. Yes it takes time to go visit these individuals, but so does finding new clients to replace the ones you lost. We know that existing clients are like gold. We need to keep them close to us, but not everyone lives that truth and problems arise. Building chemistry between two strangers doesn't happen overnight and it requires great skill in communication and time management to get all the right synchronisation to occur. We need to take this transition process very seriously and make sure everyone knows their role and responsibilities. Despite our best efforts, it does happen that the change in staff leads to a loss of the business. Obviously, we need to make sure that is a rarity. We should assume the business will con

Salespeople are good talkers. In fact, they are often so good, they decide to do all the talking. They try to browbeat the buyer into submission. Endless details are shared with the client about the intricacies of the widget, expecting that the features will sell the product or service. Do we buy features though? Actually, we buy evidence that this has worked for another buyer very similar to us, in a very similar current situation in their business. We are looking for proof to reduce our risk. To get us to the proof point, we make a big deal about how the buyer can apply the benefits of our solution inside their company. Is that what happens in reality though? In Japan, judging by what our clients tell us and by the raw material we find attending our training classes, it would be a miracle if the salesperson went through these critical five phases of the explanation of the solution: 1. feature 2. benefit 3. application of the benefit 4. evidence and 5. trial close. Most Japanese salespeople are absolute experts on the most intimate details to do with the features. However, they completely forget to expand that information to elucidate the benefits and beyond that, they have no clue what is supposed to come next. In fact, finding a similar client in a similar situation in the current market is usually a stretch for us in sales. Even if we had such a rare case, often we are precluded from talking about it because of certain clauses in the contract or by a Non-Disclosure Agreement we signed. How do we prove what we are saying then? This is where a trial session or a demonstration comes in handy. We can talk as much as we like about how great we are and our solution, but seeing is believing. If it is equipment, then running the machine can show whether the output will satisfy the demands of the buyer. If it is a service, we may have to recreate the situation and show how we do things. Recently we did both. We had a request from one of Japan's biggest financial institutions to run a sales training session, to see if we have what they want for their 3000 person sales team. In any trial, we have to make a decision on what we will choose for the content? My advice would always be to choose the most difficult content. Isolate out the areas where everyone really struggles. This is usually the most relevant content and also the content which they currently have the most trouble with too. If the content is too easy, then they will think they can do it themselves and therefore they don't need us. In the services sector, this also raises the bar on the delivery side of things. Complex content needs a lot of expertise to deliver it professionally. If they are thinking to bring it in-house, they may watch the session and decide that they do not have the right resources to pull that off by themselves. Ergo, they have to buy from us to eliminate the gap they are facing between where they are and where they want to be. In a demonstration, similar to a trial session, getting the participants to get their hands dirty is critical. Theory is fine, but doing it for real is a totally different thing. I was teaching a module on "How To Disagree Agreeably" to the leadership team of one of the 5 star hotels here in Tokyo. We went through the theory and then we had the role play practice. It was revealing how much they struggled to replace their old habits with what they had just learnt. It really brought home the importance of not just understanding things intellectually, but the importance of getting it to gel inside yourself and make it your own. When we run a session or a demonstration, the client can see the content relevancy for their need and our expertise to deliver it to the team. We can usually customise the content further, if it is not quite where they need it. The delivery part shows our professional standards, our ability to relate to the team and whether we can be trusted. We have talked up a big game in the first few meetings about how great we are and now it is "game time" to show what we have. These impressions have to match up or there is no trust. No trust means no sale and we can't have that outcome, can we!

I am very active networking here in Tokyo, scouring high and low for likely buyers of our training solutions. I attend with one purpose – "work the room" and as a Grant Cardone likes to say, find out "who's got my money". I have compressed my pitch down to ten seconds when I meet a possible buyer at an event. My meishi business card is the tool of choice in this regard. Most people here have English on one side and Japanese on the other. I was like that too until I got smarter about selling our services. Typically, I would hand over my business card - Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training. The recipient would then ask me "what do you do?". I realised I needed to have a better organised approach to that frequent question. Knowing that we do better remembering things we hear and see at the same time, I created two cards – one for English and one for Japanese. On the front of my card is all the logistical information – title, location and contact details. On the rear of the card is the pitch deck. On that side, I note we are experts in "soft skills" training, we have been here in Japan for 61 years and around the world for 112 years and that we cover five main areas – communication, sales, leadership, presentations and diversity, equity and inclusion. At this point I ask them which one of these they need the most at their firm and then I shut up. In ten seconds, I have them telling me their needs. This opens up the opportunity to visit them after the event and go through what we might be able to do for them. It is not the right occasion to attempt to have that conversation in a busy networking event. By the way, if they say, "all of them", I still ask them which one is of the most interest. I need to get them to prioritise otherwise, it is left too vague and the conversation cannot advance. Naturally, I write to them immediately and try to set up the appointment. Most people ghost me and don't reply. I know everyone is busy, so I also know I have to keep following up until they consent or tell me to buzz off. Those who agree to meet will answer my questions and listen to what we have. At this point, things slow down as they work their way through the labyrinth behind the meeting room wall, where their decision-making colleagues sit – out of my sight and touch. They need to reach a consensus internally, to do the training and pay the dough. The problem is they are never on my timetable with their decision-making. Don't they know I have a monthly target to hit? Don't they know we need money now, not later? Aren't they aware we don't like 60 and 90 day payment terms, because that is grossly unfair to the little guy? So often when we complete a deal and I look back at the spark of that deal, going from the initial ten second pitch deck networking event chance encounter, to the time of payment, it can be six months or more. If you have a cash flow issue in your firm, that is a big problem. Yes, you can discount fees to speed up payment and you get less, but you get it faster. The better approach is to keep stacking your funnel with deals, so that if one is slow to fruition or falls over, you are not wiped out. Deals falling over is super painful. You have spent a ton of time marshaling this payday through their elaborate and baroque system. Everyone is ready to go, the contract is agreed by their legal beagles and then "someone" intervenes and scuppers the entire enterprise. That payday may happen or it may not happen, but if that is all you have on the go, then you are naked and alone in a harsh world of pain. I am reminded of watching a show on television when I was a kid. A performer was keeping plates spinning on top of cane sticks. As one would falter, they would leap in and wobble the cane stick to get the plate back to maximum speed. It was always fast-paced and frantic. I am sure it must have been incredibly stressful for the artist. That is the sales life to me. We are busily spinning the plates to make sure none fall and we get a deal done and get paid. Too many plates and the things start to go awry or too few plates and you don't get fed. Finding the balance is difficult, but I reckon we should always err on the side of too many deals rather that not enough. We can always work harder to make the deals happen. There is a contradiction between being so busy we can't prospect and being able to spend a lot of time prospecting, but not getting paid yet. This is the plague of coaches and consultants. If they are in the act of coaching or consulting, they are getting paid but are not prospecting. You don't get paid for prospecting. So no earner there while you search for the next client. There is never a balance and we have to live with that inequity, because that is the sales life. The key is to keep in mind the buyer is never on your timetable. You need to stack the funnel all the time, no matter how busy you become. If you don't, you enter the Valley Of Sales Death as the deal flow evaporat

Access to social media has really democratised salespeople's ability to sell themselves to a broader audience. Once upon a time, we were reliant on the efforts of the marketing team to get the message out and, in rare cases, the PR team to promote us. Neither group saw it as their job to help us as a salesperson, and they were more concentrated on the brand. Today we have the world at our beck and call through social media. We can promote ourselves through our intellectual property. We can post blogs on areas of our expertise. We can do video and upload that to YouTube, one of the biggest and most powerful search engines. There are so many paths to the mountaintop, and they are all free. Of course, the platforms are looking for money and so they shaft us and only show our stuff to a minute section of our followers, but the price is right. I was making this point in a recent speech to the American Chamber here in Tokyo, which you can see on YouTube. One question following my recommendation to salespeople to get out there and promote theirexpertise and experience, was "what about the haters?". It is a good point and if you are delicate and sensitive, then social media could be a bruising encounter for you and your content. Or like me, you can just ignore it and work on the basis that people who get it know you are an expert, because they consume your content and they will ignore the haters as well. Let me provide a real life case study for you. I was recently involved in a thread on LinkedIn responding to a post by the author about promoting your credentials when speaking in Japan, otherwise the audience won't trust what you say. I didn't agree with the way this was characterised by the author and so added my "expert" comment. Most people just ignored what I was saying, because they had what they wanted to say as their main interest and fair enough. One person though said, "master trainer and executive coach coming in to bash an entire 125 million people country as non-professional in a single comment and blatantly disregard any suggestion on how to customize the message to appeal to a specific audience. Excellent communication strategy! 笑". So what would you do with this type of criticism? We can ignore it, as I suggested during my AmCham speech, or we can choose to expose it. On this occasion, I decided to expose it. This was my reply, "tell us your experience and share your insights. I am relating mine based on my experience here since 1979 and over 550 public speeches in Japan. Your comment doesn't match with what I am suggesting from what I can see. What do you suggest that is diametrically opposed to what I am saying? I have published 373 blogs on LinkedIn on presenting in Japan and the same number of recordings for my podcast The Japan Presentations Series and published my book Japan Presentations Mastery as well as teaching the High Impact Presentations course. How about you - tell us what you have done?". As you see, I am heaping on my own credibility in my reply and asking the critic to pony up and tell us their credentials. I chose this route for a simple reason. I have a very high profile here because I have published 7 books, including three best sellers, and release six audio podcasts and three video podcasts a week. I also pump out four additional videos a day through LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram and Threads. You may not have this type of onslaught happening and can simply ignore the irritation. I didn't plan it this way, but I also drown out any critics, because of the constant flow of content I keep posting every day. Their previous negative posting gets pushed down the fold in the screen and just disappears. It remains high in their postings on their page, but is crushed by my new posts on my page and is soon forgotten. In my reply, I made a special point of not criticising the person making the negative comment, but challenged them to put up and tell us what they would recommend. This reply comes across as reasonable and not getting bogged down in the mud and the blood of personal recriminations. Never go there, because this is our public profile and we have to maintain our professional decorum. Will I keep going in my responses, if they keep adding criticisms? Probably not. They have been challenged to show what they know. If they go the personal attack route, it is better to stand above the riffraff and ignore their salvos. People reading the thread will see they have got no experience or expertise and will discount what they say as mere opinion. As salespeople, we should use social media etc., to get our expertise out there for potential buyers to find us and to assure potential buyers we meet, that we are the real deal. Today, buyers will search us out before they meet us to better understand who they are dealing with. Now, if they searched on you, what will they find? In my case, everything is business. I chose to not to mix business with personal on social media. I want to

Japan is facing a serious shortage of staff in many industries. The job-to-applicant ratio rose to 1.28, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare announced recently. The ratio means there were 128 job openings for every 100 job seekers.The figure has not yet reached the pre-pandemic level of 1.6 in 2019. The hospitality sector in particular, lost a lot of part-time staff during Covid and they haven't returned in numbers sufficient to match the needs of employers. Hotels are getting back to pre-Covid occupancy rates, but they worry they don't have enough staff to clean rooms and run the Hotel at the standards they adhere to. In July, the Japan Times noted 75.5% of surveyed hotel operators said they face shortages of regular employees while 78% said they lack part-time and other nonregular workers. The Immigration Services Agency recently announced the total number of foreigners in Japan has topped 3 million for the first time. The Japanese government has created a new skilled workers No. 2 visa category, just for the construction and shipbuilding industries. The Nikkei Asia in April quoted the Japan International Cooperation Agency estimates that, given Japan's labor shortage, reaching the government's economic growth target for 2040 would require nearly quadrupling the number of foreign workers to 6.74 million. This is a profound change for Japan, which as a society highly values conformity and harmony. No "melting pot" for Japan. Foreigners in large numbers may threaten that harmony, because they don't appreciate how things work here. The Government is facing that labor shortage head on though and creating more visa availability for foreign labourers to enter Japan and do the jobs locals don't want to do. In the white collar world, the language barrier and the weak yen, both guarantee that there won't be a rush of foreigners coming here to take up jobs. That means that for most multi-national companies, there will continue to be a war for talent for Japanese staff. If you require English as well, the pool of talent available becomes tiny. If you are a large corporation, you will have deep pockets and can offer large base salaries to attract people to join you. If you are a small to medium size business, then the nightmare has already started and will only get worse. The Council for the Creation of Future Education, chaired by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, has the goal for Japanese students studying abroad to reach 150,000 students seeking to earn degrees by 2033. The Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengō) conducted a survey in 2022 which showed 30% of new employees quit their jobs in the first three years. This more mobile younger group, called the Dai Ni Shinsotsu (second stage fresh graduates) will be attractive to target, especially those with international exposure, better English and a few years of work experience. They will still need extensive training, though. In the world of sales in Japan, the picture is very grim. If you need English speaking capability, the pool of talent available is very shallow and we are all competing fiercely for a limited resource. In my hiring experience, I have noticed over the last seven years that salespeople are becoming more expensive and certainly very expensive relative to their ability. The vast majority of salespeople everywhere are untrained and they are working it out by trial and error. Japan is just the same. Assuming that someone knows what they are doing after working for a number of years in sales is too optimistic in my experience. Bosses need to accept that they will need to give these salespeople training to get their skills to the levels required. We teach a lot of salespeople here and we notice some common trends. They need particular work on asking questions to fully understand the buyer's needs rather than just delivering their pitch. Also, they need help on handling pushback from the client on pricing in Japan. The typical response here to drop the price by 20%, when confronted with the buyer's "your price is too high" statement, isn't the best choice. They need to be taught how to handle objections properly. The sales staff supply shortage moves the locus of power to Japanese salespeople. They know they are in strong demand and they can be very picky about who they join. The resume flow is also very brittle and thin. The range of choices is not there and if you get to interview someone, you are thinking this is a good day at work. Like me, if you have been hiring people on and off over many years, the first thing you notice is the quality is going south at a rapid clip. Facing sub-standard talent, we have to make some serious adjustments. We have to totally rework our on-boarding process and make it much longer, more comprehensive and intensive. We need to really train people hard during the Probation period, so we need a longer period of six months. The quality of people we will meet will likely stay low and more often than not, they are th

Sales people are in massive competition today, with all the distractions that are out there for the client's attention. We want to get our message across about how we can help build the client's business, but it is a tough row to hoe because of all the competition we face from meetings, emails and social media. There are so many things that are occupying the minds of our clients and our buyers before we get to talk to them. We have the appointment, we have their time; we turn up on the day. But inside their minds, there's a lot going on about what has already happened in the day and what is going to happen in the day. They are thinking about many things, but not about us. There's a great little acronym, C A R E S cares, which will help us break through some of that competition we have for their attention. C stands for compliment. When you go to someone's office, there might be something there that's really spectacular or something that's very impressive, so pay them a compliment. But don't pay them the sort of compliment that every other salesperson coming through the door is giving them. There's a company here who have a very beautiful foyer entrance wall. It is a very spectacular wall feature. Now, I know every single salesperson who goes there will say, "Oh, what a spectacular wall feature". We have to do better than that. We can go in say, "You have a beautiful office. Have you found that it has really impacted the motivation of the team since you moved here?" We have to say something a bit more intelligent. We are now asking about the impact of the feature on their business. Importantly, we are now on a business topic. A is for Ask. We ask a question. It might be something like, "how have you found things going with the prospect of a rise in taxes. Is your company confident that this is not going to have a big impact on your business?" So we get them into a business discussion straight away about where their business is going, getting them to talk about how they see the future. This is good for us, because we get an idea, a glimpse, into where they're going. R is for referral. Now a referral could be someone who's introduced us to them or someone that maybe we know mutually. "I was talking to Takeshi the other day and he said you guys are doing a great job over here. He suggested, maybe I should come and talk to you, and so here I am today. I'd like to really find out a bit more about your business. Let's see if there is any possibility where we we can help you take your business even further". We can say something like that to get into a business discussion. We break into what they have been thinking, to move them to where we can go with our conversation today. E is for educate. Now as salespeople, we often turn up, and we have this great questioning model. We want to ask a lot of questions. We want to find out about their business, where they want to go with it, what is stopping them, what is it going to mean for them if we can see some success, etc. The problem is, this is all very much one way traffic in our favour. It is more important that we can come in and talk about something which is really valuable to them. We can share some information we've picked up in the market, something we have seen in the media or something we have seen that is relevant to their industry or their sector of the industry. We can talk intelligently about these topics because when we are in sales, often we are dealing with a very broad range of industries and companies. We will see something working in another industry which might have some good benefit to them in their industry. When we connect the ideas together, they see a benefit in talking to us because they are being provided with some information they didn't have to help grow their business. Lastly S is for startle. Now this is a technique where you can break through all the competition going on in their minds, which is conflicting with our delivery of the message. We need something which is really going to make them sit up and take notice. For example, "The youth population in Japan has halved in the last twenty years. It is going halve again in the next thirty years. We are going to run out of people for staffing our companies. We will run out of clients. What do you think about this for your company? What are your specific market demographic prospects? How are you going to deal with this major change?". From the very start of the conversation, we get them on to a business topic. We get them thinking about business with us. From this point, we are going to move along the sales cycle and go into the sales questioning phase. The bridge to our solutions explanation will be our credibility statement. This CARE formula is useful to get a little bit of conversation going, so they start to feel comfortable with us. They will like us, and trust us, so we that can ask for permission to ask questions to really dig in and fully understand them. CARES is a great way to brea

Our circle of friends will usually be people with whom we share a lot of commonalities. Our viewpoints merge, our interests are similar, we like the same types of things. We get on easily. Life however throws us many curved balls, as meet new people who are not like us. Often we struggle when dealing with them. There are nine tried and true human relations principles we can use to improve our ability to get on with everyone, rather than just a select few who are more like us. I am going to analyse some different types of people we are likely to run into and align the principles with each type. This will create a handy guide on how to do better with people – all sorts of different people. Some of these principles in the wrong hands can stray into manipulation, but that is not the goal here. We want to be able to form a good relationship with people who are different to us, so that means we have to make some changes to how we communicate with different types of individuals. You can have one mode of communication and be great with people like you, but you lose all of the others and we don't want that. The easiest type for me to deal with is the "time is money" type because that is how I am wired. This type is busy, businesslike, interested in outcomes, results, revenues, tolerates no excuses and is driven hard by their own standards and self-expectations. Don't ever whine to them about anything, because they don't care and they hate negativity. Don't bother giving them appreciation because they sense flattery and doubt it. They don't care what you think. They are driven by their running theirown race and your opinion is irrelevant. They are perpetually interested in doing better, so we can arouse in them an interest in doing new things which will get them to their goals. You can try and become genuinely interested in them, but actually, they don't care because they are totally self-contained. Smiling is good, but they don't tend to do a lot themselves because they are serious people, focused on winning. Using their name is good because they like to hear that magical sound, but don't overdo it or they will think you are conning them. Be prepared to listen to them pontificate and tell you what they think. Don't interrupt them, cut them off or finish their sentences – they hate that when they are talking. Your role is to sit there quietly and listen. They have a lot to say so get them talking, especially about themselves. Talk about the things they are interested in and despite how busy they are they will make time for you. You are warned beforehand that you only have fifteen minutes, because they are so busy. In fact, you spend ninety minutes talking with them because you found a topic which excites them. You don't have to say anything to make them feel important – they already know they are and don't care what you think. The opposite type is the most difficult for me to deal with and these are the quiet, thoughtful, reserved people who border on timidity. They like to have a cup of tea to get to know you before they can open up to you. My energy overwhelms them, so I have to really tone it down when dealing with them. They like people so don't criticise others to them because they want to see the best in everyone. They do enjoy honest appreciation, so share that with them. They are interested in people, so if you have something in mind which benefits others, they will become interested in learning more. Smiling is good because they like to smile too. Using their name is good but again don't overdo it. Be a good listener and get them talking about themselves. They enjoy sharing their experiences and insights. Let them to do most of the talking because they feel comfortable when they are in control. Talk about the things they are interested in and they will grow close to you, because they feel the simpatico. Make them feel important but do it sincerely, honestly. Everyone is an expert with flattery so don't go there. Find things you admire about them and express your feelings to them openly, genuinely. Another personality type I struggle with is the person who likes data, proof, evidence, testimonials and numbers to three decimal places. Don't bother criticising anyone to them because unless you bring overwhelming evidence, they don't believe it and basically they don't care anyway. Don't bother giving them sincere appreciation, because words don't count with them. You need to stump up the evidence before they are going to take any notice. You can get them interested in topics as long as you are supplying the proof and data. They will want a lot of it, because they have an insatiable appetite for information. They are not interested in you becoming interested in them. That is a diversion away from the numbers and they are not excited by what you may think about them. Smiling is not a bad thing, but they don't do much of it themselves, because they are serious people. Using their name isn't important to them, so d

In the first two parts of this three part series we have gone deep on how to become known and liked by buyers. That is all very well, but if they don't trust us, they won't buy our solutions if they can avoid it. If you are in an industry where the supply side is totally restricted and the buyers have to compete for supply, then lucky you. I have never had that luxury and I would guess 99.9% of salespeople are in my boat. How do we get buyers to trust us? The answer is in our kokorogamae. This is our true intention. What is in our hearts as salespeople? Are we focused on what we get, our commissions, our new car, our benefit, making our targets to get the Sales Director's jackboot off our neck? Or are we focused on the buyer's interests. Is our success wrapped up inside the buyer's success? One of my favourite sales trainers is Zig Ziglar, whose famous insight is: "you can get everything you want in this life, if you will just help enough other people get what they want". Zig has passed away already, but he hit on a profound building block of gaining buyer trust with his philosophy. Speaking of which, do you have a sales philosophy? Have you set out your approach to sales, to establish the guardrails and boundaries of your actions and behaviours. Of course, a wonderful sales philosophy is easy to embrace. Remember though that everyone has a plan until they are punched in the mouth. In sales, that means not selling and if you are on 100% commission that means not eating. Even if you are not on 100% commission, it means getting fired and having to find another job. Are you pushing certain solutions to buyers because they are the group with the highest commissions for you? Are you putting your personal interests ahead of those of the buyer? When things are going well, then all of these issues can be eliminated, but when you are hungry and can't support your family, then your own rules get thrown out the window and you become desperate. There is nothing worse in the business world than a desperate salesperson. They will damage two brands in perpetuity. One will be the company brand. They will create distrust of their company because why would an honest, reputable, reliable company tolerate dodgy salespeople? The other brand is their personal brand as a businessperson. I remember a salesperson relating to me how he had to keep going to new towns in the US to find new clients, because the quality of his solution was bad and once the buyers discovered that fact, he couldn't show his face in that town again. That was a companywide issue, but I silently asked myself why did he keep working for that dodgy company? What was his kokorogamae as a salesperson? In another case, we were talking with a well-known businessperson here in Tokyo, about a possible collaboration, when up popped this note in my social media feed; "Has anyone seem Mr. X, because he owes me money?". Wow! I knew the author of this social media post, so I went online and checked Mr. X out a bit more thoroughly and what a tangled mess I found. So many accusations of no trust and broken trust that it was scary. Needless to say, we stopped the talks with him immediately. What was his kokorogamae? His reputation never recovered from this incident. My point of view is that if you are not making it in sales, then get out and leave the profession to the rest of us, who know what we are doing and who have the correct kokorogamae. All that bad actors do is pollute our profession and make it that much harder for the vast majority of us to win the trust of our buyers. When you have the interest of the buyer at the forefront of your approach to the deal, then you will always make the right decisions. Your will take the long term view and try and build up a reputation of being trusted and always dealing fairly with everyone. That personal brand is worth a fortune and only an idiot would do anything to destroy it. It takes a lot of consistency to build it and this is where having a correct kokorogamae comes in to guide us, when we have to make tough decisions. If we are in a transactional business model then maybe none of this matters. But seriously, is that the type of sales life we want? Don't we want to have a solid book of repeat business, with buyers who trust us and who appreciate our kokorgamae? We all know what is the right thing to do. We have to make a choice about whether we are going to defend that approach, against all of the pressure and temptations which will arise or not. Yes, sometimes we will make less money on a sale. Yes, sometimes we will leave money on the table in a sale. But if our mindset is long-term, then we can amortise these occasions against a long successful career in sales. We will benefit a lot more from being the choice of partner by our buyers, because they know we are honest, can be trusted and we always have their interests as our first priority. Where do you locate your kokorogamae – your true intention?

In Part One, we went deep on the KNOW Factor in sales and today we turn to why we need to be likeable. Actually, do we need buyers to like us? Maybe not in every case, but it doesn't hurt does it? As a buyer yourself, would you rather deal with someone you like, rather than a person you didn't like? We will all prefer to work with people we like, but what makes us likeable? Some clients we get on with like a house on fire and others not so much. In my case, I want to turn all of my clients into my friends, and I want a lifetime relationship with all of them. Does it always work out that way? Of course not, but that doesn't mean I should stop trying for that outcome. We tend to be most comfortable with people who are like us, who have similar interests and who are easy to talk to. To get on well with others we need to know how they work. None of this is an accident, by the way. We are constantly sorting through the people we meet to find those who are the most similar to us. This is the easiest group for us to deal with. The problem comes from dealing with the rest of the population, who are not like us. There are four basic personality styles we need to be aware of, to help us understand how we should communicate and work with different types of clients. We want to capture all of the business available and not just a share based around our comfort. What if we can make buyers who are nothing like us feel quite comfortable in dealing with us? Won't that open the door to doing more business and isn't that what we want? To do all of this we have to make two decisions when we meet buyers. The first decision is to place them on a horizontal scale of whether they are highly assertive or not. If they are assertive we place them on the right of that scale. If they are not assertive, we locate them on the left side. How do we tell? If they have strong views on a subject and readily state their opinion, they are assertive. If they rarely venture their opinion and seem passive, then they are less assertive. The other decision is on a vertical scale, regarding whether they are outcome driven on the bottom of the scale or more interested in people on the top of the scale. How do we tell which one they are? If they talk about KPIs, ROI, targets, goals, etc., then they are going to be results oriented. If they talk about how to get the team to work well together and how to build a strong culture etc., then they will be people oriented. This locates them on the top of the scale. This gives us a four-quadrant frame to understand better who we are talking to. Amiables are top left. They are less assertive and very people oriented. When we meet them, we should be talking about how the solution we are offering will positively impact their people. We should take our time, have a cup of tea and reduce our voice strength and body energy when we are with them. I was supposed to give the new guy a brief about my Division, when he joined the firm. I started out explaining the detail and he immediately diverted me to talk about people we both knew. I never did brief him on what my division did, because he spent the whole time talking about people – definitely an Amiable. Smile when you talk to them and be friendly. Give them honest, sincere appreciation. Make it real and not flattery. If you mention some positive attribute back it up with proof, so that they know it is real and not some dodgy salesperson snake oil. We should not cut them off or finish their sentences when they are talking and we should encourage them to do as much talking as possible. Try to be genuinely interested in them. We should use their name when we are talking to them - just don't overdo it. The direct opposite type is bottom right in the frame - the Driver, with which I am very familiar! They don't care about your smiles, because they are results and outcome oriented and have little time for small talk. They want to get down to business and hear about the outcomes they can expect. "Time is money" is their mantra, so don't waste their time wanting to have a cup of tea together and get to know each other. Be high energy, strong in voice and body language. If that is not your natural play, then you have to switch it up when you are with them or you will just irritate them. Now that is not the position a seller wants to find themselves in. Be strong and get straight into the three reasons why they should buy your solution, the concrete measurable results this will bring and then get the hell out of their office. They like that. I was in a sales meeting with a foreign executive, newly arrived in Japan, talking to him for the first time. As he joined me while I was waiting in the meeting room, I began to engage him in some typical small talk. After five seconds of this, he cut me off very abruptly and said , "let's get down to business". That told me straight away he was a Driver and I knew I had to be quick, concise, confident and assertive with him. We did the de

We have all heard this bromide about Know, Like and Trust in sales, but have we really deeply explored what it means in today's post-Covid business climate? Over the next three contributions, I am going to go deep on these three aspects of sales. The Marketing Department will work on promoting the brand, but it very rare that they ever promote individual salespeople. Let's assume they won't be spending any money on us and so we are on our own. Grant Cardone is a really hard driving, hard core American sales trainer who I like, but who I know would be a disaster in Japan. Nevertheless, he makes a very good point when he says in sales we are all invisible. This is the "know" problem. How can people buy from us, if they have never heard of us. During Covid, the entire networking apparatus just broke down. Participating in online events, we could see people trapped in their tiny little boxes on screen, but we couldn't connect with them. What a frustrating time that was in the sales profession. Fortunately, networking at live events is now back in fashion. Are you making the most of this opportunity? This is such a great chance to meet people and make a personal connection directly with buyers and allow us to set up a sales call with them. Within ten seconds you should be able to tell if this person is a prospect or not. If they are not, then go find someone who is. It is time to get back out there and "work the room". Cold calling was a nightmare too. The decision-makers were camped out at home and we didn't have the foresight to collect their mobile numbers prior to the pandemic. That meant a call to the general number was the only alternative. Astonishingly, many firms I called hadn't mastered the logistics of remote work. They had a central phone number, but no one was picking up the phone. What a mess. Even if you rang the central number and managed to speak with a human being, they were savage beasts, hell bent on getting rid of salespeople. They are still savage beasts post-Covid and getting through to buyers is still tough, tough, tough. Target the person you want to connect with and send them a package by mail and that same junior person who was blocking your call from getting through will diligently place that parcel on their desk for you. Existing clients are always the backbone of most sales efforts, because finding new clients is so difficult. That doesn't mean we should give up on cold calling though. As I said, we should carefully target who we think we can help and sniper-like, focus on connecting with them. Social media is another dimension where we can become known. Where is the attention focus in Japan for your buyers? Finding out this type of general information would be straightforward you would think, but across the various sources, the discrepancies in reported numbers are just astonishing. I honestly don't know who to believe, but according to humblebunny February 2023's 8th edition, the order of ranking of monthly users in Japan is YouTube (102m), Line (92m), Twitter (59m), Instagram (49m), Facebook (26m), TikTok (18m), Pinterest (9m), and LinkedIn (3m). This is where your clients potentially have their attention, but do you know which platforms they visit? Also, what about you - where can you be found? Are you using the same platforms as your buyers? Think about who is your target market, which platforms are they using and most importantly, what is your presence on those platforms? Are you just a consumer of other people's content and not a creator for these platforms? Does that demarcation make any sense, if you want people to know who you are? As a creator, which mediums are going to get you in front of your potential clients. Can you produce text content which marks you out as an expert in your field? Can you get your text content on to platforms to distinguish yourself from your competitors? Even if you cannot do this easily, AI has the capacity to assist and it is very fast. The danger is that at this stage in AI's development, the content can easily become rather generic. That is why if you can add your secret sauce, your special spice, to help you to stand out in your fellow AI dependent crowd. Can you produce video? Absolutely. Everyone has a high-quality camera in their mobile phone today, so the barriers to video production have really come down. Video is good, because we can see you and we can more easily connect with you. We feel like we can know you. What about audio? The soundtrack can be easily stripped out of video and bingo, you now have an audio version of the same content. Or you could create a podcast and have your guests provide the majority of the IP and you just add your two cents worth. Do you have to be handsome and beautiful and sound fantastic for these mediums? Many people won't do video or audio, because they lack confidence in how they look and sound. Is that you? Think about rock musicians? Are they all gorgeous and good looking with great voices? Mostly n

AI has opened the floodgates to allow any idiot to create content. If content marketing is an important vehicle for promoting your credibility in business, then be concerned. Most content is currently created by people who are literate, that is, they can write the pieces themselves. One notable exception is Gary Vaynerchuk and I am a big fan. He is a prolific creator of content, including best-selling books and readily admits he cannot read or write well. However, he is really able to talk and as we say in Australia, "he can talk under wet concrete with a mouth full of roofing nails". He has others transcribe his comments and clean up what he says. This then becomes his output in text format. A funny irony is that he doesn't read his own text when he records the audio versions for his books. He basically speaks the book again, so that the two versions are never the same. Anyway, his "speaking" idea to create content is not a bad one, if writing is not your forte. There are no longer barriers to entry for text content because of AI. At the moment, anyone can command the machine to produce content for them and they can upload this as their own work. Well, we had this before didn't we, when people were using ghost writers. I remember reading a really good article by an Aussie guy I knew here in Tokyo. Let's call him Mr. X. I was surprised by the quality. Frankly, I didn't think he was that smart or that articulate. In fact, he wasn't. He paid a professional to write the piece for him and then he put his own name on it. The difference with AI is it is cheap, fast, prolific and good enough to pump out standard content. Now, if you are trying to show potential buyers that you are an expert in your field, by uploading relevant text content to social media, expect that all of your rivals will be able to do exactly the same thing using AI. In fact, expect a flood of new content into social media by your rivals. How can we differentiate ourselves in this frothy "red ocean"? The bad news is that AI can produce generic content at scale and speed. The good news is that your rivals are all tapping into exactly the same sources for their content, so they cannot easily differentiate themselves as a consequence. It is going to be mass plagiarism on a grand scale. To stand out from the crowd, the missing secret sauce here is "you". When creating content, you must inject your ideas, experiences, insights, feelings, observations and examples into the text. AI cannot do this. It cannot be you at the creation point. Yes, it can write content in your style, but it still isn't you. It didn't see what you saw today or experience what happened to you today. Basically, it comes down to not just our writing ability, but more importantly our storytelling craft. The stories we can tell will be what will differentiate what we are saying from the grey blob mass of AI generated sameness polluting our creator world. Perhaps you are not used to sharing things about yourself publicly. Get over that idea. We all need to personalise our content much more and that means injecting ourselves into the picture. It is easy to pontificate. I know, I do a lot of that on the subjects of leadership, sales, presentations, communication and DEI. Apart from preaching what we believe, we need to insert our stories into the content to ward off AI derived competitor pontificating. They may be our own stories or stories from other people's experiences. It doesn't matter, as long as the content reflects a personal approach, something which is not generic in the slightest. This requires us to start working on collecting our stories, rather than just moving forward in an orderly manner every day. Things are happening around us all day long and we need to spend some time to capture them for use in our creative work. Gary Vaynerchuk was very clever. He realised he was a not going to sit down and write stuff out, so he decided to capture what he was doing every day and turn this into his content, called "The Daily Vee". He has Daniel Rock, AKA "D-Rock" follow him around all day videoing his activities. He always had D-Rock video his keynote speeches for the same reason. Behind him, there is a 30 person "Team Gary" crew who work on this content and slice and dice it to feed Gary's social media machine. Genius. I don't have "Team Greggy" of thirty people to do that for me and you are probably in the same boat, but what we can do is start collecting what happens in real life. We can generate stories to add to the point of view pieces we publish. These events happen everyday, but we don't record them and allow ourselves to access them, to add as a special spice into our content creation. These stories are items that AI cannot create, because they are your stories and you are the only one who knows about them. To deflect the tsunami of AI generated content, which is about to consume the entire world, we need to work on how we can stand apart for the dross. Maybe in the fu

Sale's solutions are what make the business world thrive. The client has a problem and we fix it, our goods or services are delivered, outcomes are achieved and everybody wins. In a lot of cases however these are only partial wins. Problems and issues are a bit like icebergs – there is a lot more going on below the surface than can be spotted from the captain's bridge. The salesperson's role is to go after the whole iceberg and not just the obvious bit floating above the waterline. The standard sales interview is based on two models comprising the outer circles surrounding a bull's-eye. The extreme periphery is the "telling is selling" model. This ensures the salesperson does most of the talking. The client is subjected to a constant bombardment of features, until they either buy, die or retreat. The second model, the inner circle adjoining the bull's-eye, is the solution model of providing outcomes that best serve the client, based on what the client has understood is their problem. The latter is a much better tool and is in pristine condition because so few salespeople use it. The rapid fire of features at the client, rarely provides success because of the randomness of the proffering of alternatives. Welcome to the "toss enough mud at the wall and some is bound to stick" School of Sales. Aligning the fix with the client need in the solution model is the mark of the semi-professional. There is nothing wrong with this model but what are the rock star sales masters doing? They are zipping up their wetsuits and diving into the icy water under the iceberg, inspecting things closely and really understanding the full scope of the situation. They are on a mission to try and find what nobody else is seeing. Their ability to deliver previously unseen, unconsidered insights is pure gold for clients. Mentally picture our big red bull's-eye at the center of a series of concentric circles. Stating the features of a product or service is the first level, the very outer circle. Our solutions constructed around what the client knows already is the next inner circle. The highest level is providing solutions for problems that the client isn't even aware of yet. A truly magical client statement would be: "Oh, I hadn't thought of that or allowed for it!". Think about your own experience. Anytime we have been a buyer and have uttered those words to ourselves, as a result of insight from the salesperson, we have experienced a major breakthrough in our world view. Now that is the bull's-eye we want right there. The salesperson who can provide that type of perspective, alerting clients to over-the-horizon issues, provides such value that they quickly become the client's trusted business partner. Be it in archery or business, hitting the bull's-eye is no easy matter. Insight can't be plucked from the air at will. Plumbing one's experiences, sorting and sifting for corresponding relevancies and then diving deeply into the client's world looking for alignment are the skills required. In a way, ignorance is an advantage. Paraphrasing Peter Drucker, our success can come by asking a lot of "stupid" questions. A salesperson has an outside perspective, untainted and pure. There is no inner veil obscuring the view, no preconceived notions or ironclad assumptions clouding judgment. Counter intuitively, the fact that we don't know, what we don't know, becomes our strength. Ignorance allows us to question orthodoxy in a way that insiders can't because of inertia, group think, company culture or the internal politics of the organization. When salespeople serve numerous clients, be it in the same industry or across industries, they pick up vital strategic and tactical commercial intelligence. Researching various client's problems, experiences, triumphs and disasters is valuable – but only if you know how to process the detail. In all of our companies, we can only see clearly what we are doing ourselves. We all exemplify that Japanese saying: "the frog in the well does not know the ocean". Everything is too familiar and so we don't ever question everyday normality. We don't have the opportunity to peak behind the curtain and look into what our competitors are doing. It is also very rare for company personnel to do study tours of totally unrelated businesses. If we classified industries alphabetically, in a standard business setting, representatives from A and Z would rarely meet, let alone get to trade ideas and experiences. Salespeople however are floating around businesses and therefore able to know many wells and oceans. The ability to select and apply one particularly successful thing in a different context is a commercially valuable skill. How can salespeople get that skill? Some ways salespeople can provide over-the-horizon value include being highly observant. Take what you have seen working elsewhere for one client, in a different company or industry and then apply it for your current client. Sounds rather easy doesn't it. The reality

He slid effortlessly into the chair and before I knew it, he had popped open the oyster shell of his laptop and was pointing his screen menacingly in my direction. Uh oh! Powerpoint slide after powerpoint slide bombarded me with detailed data, specs, diagrams and text information. After 20 minutes he stopped the torture. "Wow", I thought, "he hasn't managed to ask me even one teensy question during this session of our first meeting". His business card announced he was the Sales Director – that seemed a definite worry if he was responsible for others. The irony of this sales presentation was that I had requested it. I was in fact, a hot prospect. I had heard his President at a function talking about the new whizbang service their firm offered and I was intrigued. So intrigued, I approached the speaker and asked that he send one of his crew over to see me. I should have suspected something was amiss though, by the reaction of the President when I made my "visit me" request. Did he become buoyant with anticipation of a sale and reassure me that this product was the best thing since sliced bred? Surprisingly aloof, I found him, in fact almost disinterested. Was this a Nordic thing, I wondered or just his personality? I will never know, but what I did think to myself was, how important it is in sales to be positive and upbeat about your product at all times. So back at the meeting, after a death of a thousand powerpoints, I miraculously revived and questioned the Sales Director. Why? Well despite his incompetence, I still had a need. In the end though, I was not a buyer. What could he have done with me? He could have asked me a few questions to ascertain what I was interested in. He could have holstered his weapon before drilling me with detail, dross and pap. Of the ten functionalities of the whizbang, there were only two or three that were of any match with what I needed. We could have dispensed with all the irrelevant detail and gone straight to the finish line with the "hotties". We could have spent the bulk of our time talking about the aspects which were most likely to lead to a sale. We had limited time and he limited his own chances of gaining a new client by telling me everything, instead of only those things I needed to know, to make a buying decision. Reading this little vignette, I hope you take immediate action and self-audit whether you are any better at questioning than this guy? Do you have a sales process in place. Are you spending the bulk of the client interface time, laser focused on where they have the greatest likelihood of success? If you are a "teller", then here is a simple questioning step formula that will help you get to the heart of the matter and uncover where you can be of the most assistance to the client. Start with either where the client is now or where they want to be – it doesn't really matter which one you ask first. This is because what we are trying to understand is how big is the gap between "As Is" and "Should Be". By the way, unless the sense of immediacy about closing that gap is there, then there will probably be "no sale" today. Clients are never on the our salesperson schedule and will take no action, unless they clearly understand there is a benefit to doing so. Having plumbed the parameters of the current and ideal situation, next enquire about why they haven't fixed the issue already. This is an excellent Barrier Question and depending on the answer, you might be the solution to fix what they cannot do by themselves. Finally, check on how this would help them personally – what is the Payoff? They may need this fix to keep their job, hit their targets, get a bonus, get a promotion, feel job satisfaction, rally the troops – there are a myriad of potential motivators. Why would that particular question be important? When we come to explain the solution to the problem, being able to address their closely held personal win, helps to make the solution conversation more real and relevant. If my sales Powerpoint maestro had applied some of these basics, he may have had a sale that day. He was in his forties, so one can expect that he has probably been repeating this same flawed performance for decades. Adding it all up, the total amount of lost sales over that period would be mind boggling. Such a shame really and so unnecessary. If you want to see revenues go up, ask clients questions, before you mention one word about your magical widget. Do this one simple thing and watch the difference.

In 1936 an unknown author, despite many frustrating years of writing drafts and receiving publisher rejections, finally managed to get his manuscript taken up by a major publishing house. That book became a classic in the pantheon of self-help books – "How to Win Friends and Influence People". Surprisingly, many people in sales have never read this work. Plato, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius etc., were all around substantially prior to 1936 and we still plumb their insights. Dale Carnegie has definitely joined that circle of established thinkers, offering wisdom and valuable ideas. His aim was to help all of us be better with each other, particularly in a business context. He did this by laying down some principles, which will make us more successful in dealing with others, especially those people not like us. Salespeople should definitely be friendly. Ancient Chinese wisdom noted, " a man who cannot smile should not open a shop". What this is saying is there are some pretty basic things we must do to be successful with people. We know all of this, but we forget or even worse, we know but we don't apply our knowledge. Here are nine principles for helping us all to become friendlier with our clients. Become genuinely interested in other people Our buyers are actually more interested in what we know about what they want, than in what we know about our product or service. It is a common mistake though to be wrapped up in the features of our offering and lose focus on the person buying it and what they want. At the extreme, transactional thinking means you don't care about the individual, you only care about their money from the sale. That is the hyper short career in sales option. For a long career, we better get busy really understanding our clients. The key word in this principle is "genuine". Having a correct kokorogamae or true intention, means we will be honestly focused on understanding the client so that we can really serve them and build a partnership. We must be fully focused on their success, because wrapped up inside that outcome is our own success. Talk in terms of the other person's interests Salespeople have a self-defeating habit of selective listening and selective conversation around what they want to talk about. Their kokorogamae is centered around their interests and the buyer's interests are secondary. Sales talk is a misnomer - there is no sales talk. There are well designed questions and there are carefully crafted explanations around solution delivery, which are tightly tied back to what the buyer is interested in. Questions uncover interests and with laser beam focus, that is the only thing we talk about. Sounds simple, but salespeople love to talk, they love the sound of their own voice and they become deaf to the client, often without even realising it. Check yourself during your next client conversation – imagine we were to create a transcript of your words, would they be 100% addressed to the buyer's interests. If not, then stop blathering and start talking in terms of their interests. By the way, Japanese buyers are rarely uncomfortable with silence, so don't feel pressured to fill the conversation gaps with pap! Be a good listener. Encourage the other person to talk about themselves Good listening means listening for what is not being said, as well as what we are hearing. It means not pretending to be listening, while we secretly think of our soon to be unveiled brilliant response, witticism or repartee. It means not suddenly getting sidetracked by a single piece of key information, but taking in the whole of what is being conveyed. It means listening with your eyes – reading the body language and checking it against the words being offered. Talkative salespeople miss so much key client information and then scratch their heads as to why they can't be more successful in selling. The client doesn't have the handy dandy sales handbook, where the questioning sequences are nicely aligned and arranged for maximum efficiency. Instead the client conversation wanders all over the place, lurching from one topic to another, without any compunction. I am just like that as a buyer. I have so many interests and will happily digress on the digressions of the digressions! Well designed questions from the salesperson keeps the whole thing on track and allows the client to speak about themselves at length. In those offerings from the buyer we learn so much about their values, interests, absolute must haves, their desirables, their primary interests and their dominant buying motives. Japanese buyers usually need a level of trust to be developed, before they may open up and talk about themselves. It is exceedingly rare to wrap up an agreement in Japan with just one meeting. So salespeople, play the long game here and don't be in a rush. We are limbering up for a marathon, not a sprint in Japan. Arouse in the other person an eager want This is not huckster, carnival barker manipulation. This is becoming a

Salespeople are carrying around a lot of baggage with them when they visit clients. The smooth talking, dodgy sales person trying to con us, is the folkloric villain of the piece. Reversing that doubt and hesitation is critical to gaining acceptance as a valuable business partner for the client. This entire problem is magnified when we meet the client for the first time. Because the client's don't know us, their default position is one of caution and doubt. We have all grown up being rewarded for being risk averse and so we are resistant to change. The new salesperson represents "change" – because they are asking the client to buy something new or to change suppliers. So that we can properly serve them, we need to breakthrough that mental protective wall erected by the client and establish trust and credibility,. Great – but how do we do that? Try crafting a Credibility Statement. This is a succinct summary that will grab the attention of the client and help to reduce their resistance to what we are offering. It unfolds in four stages: First we give an overview of the general benefits of what we do. For example, "Dale Carnegie Training helps to deliver the behavior change needed in the team that translates into improved results". Next we need to quote some specific outcomes, as evidence that we are a credible supplier of services. So we now might say something like this, "An example of this was where we helped XYZ company, a very high end retailer with training their entire sales staff. They are now enjoying a 30% increase in sales". Now, we introduce an important suggestion that makes this benefit and result summary relevant to the listener. "Maybe we could do the same for you?" Finally, we need to create a "verbal bridge" so we can move on to questioning the client about what they need. In Japan, a lot of buyers expect to control proceedings, such that the seller turns up, gives their pitch and then the buyer happily shoots it full of holes. What Japanese buyers are doing is trying to ascertain the risk factor of what you are proposing, by disparaging everything you have just said. They now want you to provide answers that eliminate their fears. You are immediately on the back foot. The client, not you, is controlling the sales process. Good luck with that and let us know how that is working out for you? To break this pattern (which has a very low success rate), we need to ask pertinent questions and find out what they really need. In order to do that, we need to get their permission to ask questions. This transition into the questioning part of the sales process is absolutely critical. Don't miss this: in Japan the buyer is God. Hence, buyers here may feel our questions are impertinent, intrusive and unnecessary, so we must gain their permission to proceed. Every single time I have been forced to just give my "pitch", because the buyer has denied me the opportunity to ask questions, there has been no sale achieved. We need to better skilled, to get them to allow us to fully understand how we can best serve them. That is why we need to be asking questions and listening carefully to their answers. So that we can make that transition, after saying "Maybe we could do the same for you?" , we softly mention, "In order to help me understand if we can do that or not, would you mind if I asked a few questions?". We say this, almost as a throw away line. No big deal, nothing to see here. When they agree, we are now free to explore in detail their current situation, what they aspire to, what is holding them back and what would success mean to them personally. If you don't ask these questions you have little chance of convincing the client you can help them solve their problems. Amazingly, the majority of sales people don't ask any questions, but just blab on about the features of their product. I had a sales presentation given to me recently here in Tokyo by the Sales Director of a software vendor and after some initial pleasantries, he plunged straight into walking me through his powerpoint presentation of the functionality of his solution. Forty minutes later he finished. Not one question about my needs or about my difficulties – nothing. Amazing – he was an experienced guy who had always been in sales! Come on - as salespeople, we all have to do a lot better than that! So putting it all together, the sequence flow would be like this: "Dale Carnegie Training helps to deliver the behavior change needed in the team that translates into improved results. An example of this was where we helped a very high-end retailer with training their entire sales staff and they are enjoying a 30% increase in sales. Maybe we could do the same for you. In order to help me understand if we can do that or not, would you mind if I asked a few questions?". This Credibility Statement should be short (under 30 seconds), delivered fluently and confidently (no Ums and Ahs). This takes a lot of preparation and practice because it is so shor

The hardest sales job in the world is selling something you don't believe in yourself. The acid test is would you sell this "whatever" to your grandmother? If the answer is no, then get out of there right now! It is rarely that clear cut though. The more important test is whether what you are selling solves the client's problem or not. Selling clients on things that are not in their best interests is a formula for long-term failure and personal and professional brand suicide. There are elements of the sales process which are so fundamental, you wonder why I would even bring them up. For example, believing in what you sell. There are lots of salespeople though, trapped in jobs where they don't believe but keep selling. You don't have to look far to find them. They are going through the motions but you never feel they have your best interests at heart. They usually don't have any other sales process than blarney and BS. We may buy from these people, but we come to bitterly resent being conned and we don't forgive or forget. Today with social media, your "crime" is soon broadcast far and wide, warning everyone to be very careful when dealing with the likes of you. The more common problem is that they actually do believe in what they sell but they are not professional enough to be convincing in the sales conversation. They often have a sales personality deficiency, where they are not good with people or not good with different types of people. They get into sales by accident. They should have been screened out from the start but sadly the world is just not that logical. When I joined Shinsei's retail bank, I recognised immediately that 70% of the salespeople should never have been given a sales role. My brief was "we have 300 salespeople and we are not getting anywhere – come in and fix it". The vast majority of people in the role of convincing wealthy Japanese customers to buy our financial products were really suffering. They lacked the communication skills, the people skills, the persuasion power, the warmth, the concern for the customer, etc., which they needed to be successful. Why on earth were they there then, you might ask? Many of them had never been in a sales role, many had been in backroom jobs, never facing customers. When Shinsei moved all of the operations components out of the branches they gained tremendous efficiency. The operations part became centralised and worked like a charm, but the operations staff were still there and were given sales jobs. Disasterous for them! How about your sales team? Are all of your colleagues in the right role? Are you in the right role? As Shinsei, we worked out who was best suited for a sales role and gave those people the proper training to equip them for success. The remainder were given a role elsewhere in the bank. What training did we give them? Before I arrived, mathematics was thought to be really important for bankers. It probably is for certain roles but the ability to ask good questions, to fully understand wealthy customer's needs, was much more important. So was the understanding that first impressions should not be left to chance but need to be created. If I don't like you or trust you, why would I want to buy anything from you? At Dale Carnegie we do a lot of sales training and we see the same client issues come up continuously. Certainty around the thing being sold must be in evidence. Selling is the transfer of your enthusiasm for the product or service to the buyer. Your body language must naturally exude belief. Your face needs to be friendly. This sounds a bit ridiculous except that many people in sales roles don't smile easily. They don't exude warmth, coming across as cold, hard, clinical, mercenary and overly efficient. We all love to buy, but we hate being sold and "efficient" sales people make us nervous. Fluency in communication is critical. Be it Japanese or English, a lot of "filler words" like Eeto, Anou , Um, Ah, etc., might help you to think of what you want to say next, but you come across as if you are not sure or convinced about what you are saying or proposing. We definitely don't buy sales person uncertainty. Record your own sales conversations and check if what you are saying is coming out in a professional manner, bolstering the confidence of the buyer in what you are saying. A totally canned sales speech is the opposite problem. I sold encyclopedias for Britannica as my first sales job and we had to pass a memory test, where we could recite the entire 20 minute presentation precisely. Having passed, we were then dropped off in a forlorn, working class outer suburb in my home town of Brisbane and turned loose on an unsuspecting public. There were no questions involved, but a lot of data dumping going on in that canned speech. Astonishingly, despite all we know 40 years later, there are still people trying to make careers in sales while wading through minute after minute of the features of the "whatever". Where are the client

It has always been astonishing to me how hopeless some salespeople are in Japan. Over the last 20 years, I have been through thousands of job interviews with salespeople. We teach sales for our clients and so as a training company we see the good, the bad and the ugly - a very broad gamut of salespeople. We also buy services and products ourselves and so are actively on the receiving end of the sales process. Well actually that is a blatant exaggeration. There are almost no salespeople operating in japan using a sales process. But there are millions of them just winging it (badly). Why? On The Job Training (OJT) is the main training pedagogical system in Japan for training the new salesperson. This works well if your boss has a clue and knows about selling. Sadly, there are few sales leaders like that populating the Japan sales horizon. So what you get are hand-me-down "techniques" that are ineffective and then even worse, these techniques are poorly executed in the hands of the newbies. We like to buy, but few of us want to be sold. We like to do business with people we like and trust. We will do business with people we don't like and very, very rarely with people we don't trust. Neither is our preference though. The million dollar question is, "what makes YOU likeable and trustworthy?' Building rapport in the first meeting with a prospective client is a critical make or break for establishing likeability or trust. When you think about it, this is just the same as in a sales job interview. In both cases we enter an unfamiliar environment and greet strangers who are brimming over with preoccupation, doubt, uncertainty, reluctance and skepticism. If a sales person can't handle a job interview and build rapport straight away, then it is unlikely they are doing much better out in the field, regardless of what is glowingly written down in the resume. So what do we need to do? Strangely, we need to pay attention to our posture! Huh? It is common sense really - standing up straight communicates confidence. Also, bowing from a half leaning forward posture, especially while we are still on the move, makes us look weak and unconvincing. So walk in standing straight and tall, stop and then bow or shake hands depending on the circumstances. Smiling at the same time would also be good, depending on the situation.. If there is a handshake involved then, at least when dealing with foreigners, drop the dead fish (weak strength) grasp or the double hander (gripping the forearm with the other hand). The latter, is the classic insincere politician double hand grip. Some Japanese businesspeople I have met, have become overly Westernised, in that they apply a bone crusher grip when shaking hands. Recently I have met a couple of Japanese businesswomen, who are trying to out man the men and are applying massive grip strength when shaking hands. It sounds very basic advice, but please teach your Japanese team how to shake hands properly. Too weak or too strong are unforced errors which impinge on building that all important first impression. By the way, we probably only have a maximum of 7-10 seconds to get that first impression correct, so every second counts. We are all so quick to make snap judgments today, we just can't leave anything to chance. When you first see the client, make eye contact. Don't burn a hole in the recipient's head, but hold eye contact at the start for around 6 seconds and SMILE. This conveys consideration, reliability, confidence – all attributes we are looking for in our business partners. We combine this with the greeting, the usual pleasantries – "Thank you for seeing me", "Thank you for your time today". Now, what comes next is very important. We segue into establishing rapport through initial light conversation. Japan has some fairly unremarkable evergreens in this regard – usually talking about the weather or about the distance you have travelled to get here, etc., etc. Don't go for these bromides. Try and differentiate yourself with something that is not anticipatory or standard. Also be careful about complimenting a prominent feature of the lobby, office or the meeting room. I was in a brand new office the other day and they have a really impressive moss wall in the lobby. I will guarantee that my hosts have heard obvious comments about the moss wall from every visitor who has preceded me. "Wow, what an impressive moss wall " or "Wow, that is a spectacular entry feature". Boring! Teach your salespeople to say something unexpected, intelligent and memorable. In this example, "Have you found that team motivation has lifted since you moved to this impressive new office?", "Have you found your brand equity with your client's has improved since moving here?". This get's the focus off you the salesperson and on to the client and their business. For example, if you are a training company like us, you definitely want to know how the team motivation is going, as you may have a solution for them. Having a