The Sales Japan Series

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

Do you subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc? The following morsel popped into my inbox the other morning, "People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care–Anonymous". Wow! What a powerful reminder of the things that really matter in our interactions with others. This piece of sage advice should be metaphorically tattooed on to the brain of every single person involved in sales. Don't miss it – we all know selling stuff is a tough gig. Rejection is the normal response to our spiffy sales presentation and follow up offer. You have to be mentally tough to survive in a sales job. You need other things too. Product and technical knowledge is important. Total command of the detail is expected by clients. This has to be a given, so if you don't know your stuff cold then get studying. However, we also need to be careful about what we focus on. Are we letting the product details and features confuse us about what selling is really all about? I am a buyer too and am constantly amazed by what some people get up to. Some salespeople I have encountered remind me of an icy mammoth trapped in a time warp from the past, still trotting out the product brochure and seeing if I will go for one of their goodies? You don't like that one, well then how about this one, or this one, or this one, ad nauseam? I want "blue" but they keep showing me 50 shades of "pink". They are playing that pathetic, failed salesperson game named "process of elimination". Why on earth are they doing this? I want to buy, but are they really showing me they are focused on understanding me? Are they demonstrating to me that they foremost care about my benefit? Are they communicating to me that, "in your success Greg, is my success"? Or do they come across not with stars in their eyes, buy $$$$ signs? I can recall seeing them sitting across the table from me, mentally salivating at the thought of the big fat commission this sales conversation is worth? I can sense they have already bought their new Beemer before the ink is dry on our agreement? Actually, there is no agreement, because I don't buy from these types of amateur salespeople and that is the same reaction from most people. The quote at the beginning, "People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care" reminds me of a great Japanese word, which should be embraced by everyone in sales - kokorogamae (心構え). It can be simply translated as "preparedness" but the Japanese nuance goes much deeper than that. Anyone studying a martial art or a traditional Japanese art (道) will immediately be on my wave length, when they hear this kokorogamae term. I would prefer to translate it as "getting your heart in order". This means to really hark back to your most basic principles of true intention. What we can call True North – the purity of our intention. What is the spark in our heart driving our behavior? Is it the money or is it the serving? Is it what we want or what the client wants? Is this going to be a long-term relationship or a fleeting transaction? Salespeople need to start by searching their heart for their true intention. Huh? Does this sound a bit too "hug a tree" California emotional for you? Why do I recommend searching your heart? Because clients can sense your motivation isn't centered on their best interests and therefore they won't buy from you. The trust is never established. Of course, there are the exceptions – the Hollywood image of the "smooth talking" salesperson who could sell you anything and will certainly try to. They are like skyrockets that initially blaze through the night and then explode! They are here for a good time not a long time and they give the profession of sales a bad brand. The best Japanese salesperson I ever interviewed for a sales job was a criminal. The criminal part didn't surface immediately, but came up later through some background checks (note to Sales Managers – do background checks!). He was absolutely brilliant in the first two interviews, polished, genius personified in the role play, and WOW, what a fantastic closer! I thought "Yes!" at last, I have found my perfect Japanese salesperson. Actually, he was a liar, a thief and a baddie. He had zero True North orientation and his kokorogamae was plain wrong. What a wake up and smell the coffee for me. When you have the client's best interests in mind, you do all the right things. You ask well designed questions to fully understand how best you can serve the buyer. You present your solution in such a way that the buyer feels this is exactly what I have been looking for. You calmly handle any hesitations or concerns from the client, reassuring them that what you have is exactly what they need. And you are confident to ask for the order. That is the sales professional in action So let's ignore the outliers, those riff raff of push sales and come back to the vast majority of salespeople who are not evil, just inept. Change y

We have all seen it – the pendulum swings of organisational change. You can basically break out your stopwatch and get the timing down perfectly. The new CEO arrives and reverses whatever the predecessor was doing. If things had been centralised, now everything will be decentralised. Then here we are five years later, another CEO and we reverse course again. In the sales area, the goalposts keep moving. The raw numbers chase may now be leavened with big numbers, but from a better quality of client, as we move more up market. Or it may be that we spread the risks, by having a lot of middle level clients, rather than being too exposed and dependent on the big fish and our occasional whales. Or it may be profit, rather than market share, is the Holy Grail of the moment. There is no doubt that these types of changes are distracting for salespeople. We get into a rhythm, and we are well organised and then next thing a big change swings through and we have to re-organise our lives and clients. We may have a campaign to get behind which alters how we have been working. It may impact the pricing, as we trade profitability for volume or the other way around. We may be on a mission to increase the number of new clients and bulk up the sales funnel. One of the issues is that these distractions take our eye off the ball with our clients. We are suddenly wrapped up in admin activities and our time for prospecting is being diminished with endless meetings, new systems and more reporting requirements. Most salespeople are big picture expressive types. They hate the admin, the forms, the inputting, the detail focus. They feel they could be better off spending their time with buyers. We may get a new Section or Division boss and the whole picture changes immediately as the new broom makes changes to territory or client allocation or commissions or whatever they feel like doing. These changes drive the entire team's focus inwards and away from clients. We know this is bad, but we are swept up in the changes. We are desperately trying to navigate a fast flowing stream, which has just transitioned into deadly white water. The answer to these externally generated woes is our time management discipline. If we think about it, time is all we have. Therefore, what we do with it determines our level of success. When we are under siege by these types of changes, we can lose control of our time and feel we are just being buffeted and beaten by the waves of the broiling white water, as we try to avoid the rocks and waterfalls. We know that Quadrant Two is where the gold is kept – Not Urgent but Important activities like planning. We cannot do everything every day. That is just impossible in this modern business world, so we need to be focused on doing the most important things every day. The only way to get that done is to plan to do it and to stop all of the noise and distraction from taking us away from our most important goals for the day. The number of things we can get done during these distracting times may be less than normal, but at least if we are only doing one or two of the most key things, we will stay on track as the chaos unfolds around us. The important thing is that this is what we do every day and not just occasionally when the planets align. That regularity builds the discipline, because our time control is working to help us do better, with the time we have. Okay sometimes we are swept away by the chaos and our time is being wasted, but that loss needs to be sequestered to just that day. The very next day we get back into the discipline of regaining control over our time. There are three groups of clients we face. Those who will never buy from us, those who will buy eventually and those who will buy right now. In times of chaotic organisational change, we need to be concentrated on those who will buy now and keep working on those who will buy at some point in the future. We need to be brutal with sorting out who is who and making some tough decisions about where we spend our time. It may require us to fire some argumentative clients who take up a lot of our time, but don't want to pay our fees and are basically a noisy pain. When we are short on time, we have to place a high value on how we spend our days and with whom we choose to spend them. Time is all we have so, we must invest it wisely and in chaos, that dictum become even more important. You can calculate the cost of your time – divide the income you want by the hours available to earn it and you come up with your effective hourly rate. It is always humbling to do this exercise. You quickly realise if you don't keep a tight rein on your time, you can easily be working long hours for peanuts. Troublesome clients are expensive in this calculation. Fire them and concentrate your energy and time on wonderful clients, who will become lifetime business partners.

Pitching for the business is quite different to selling to a client representative we may be meeting in a meeting room. In the latter case, we have only one or sometimes two people to persuade, but in a pitch it could be department representatives from many parts of the firm. The worst possible pitch environment is when on this occasion you have had no chance to meet the client beforehand to understand their situation, aspirations, issues and problems. Hopefully the pitch would be after you have had a chance to consider all of their requirements and instead of just sending in a proposal, they ask you to deliver it to the key people in the firm. There should be no reason why you cannot meet with some members of their team beforehand, but let's assume that worst case is the scenario. Even though we may not be able to meet before the pitch, we can still do research. Often we have other clients in the same industry, so we will have some broad ideas about the current issues facing similar firms. Even if we don't have such clients, we may know someone working in the industry or we can find access to someone to find out more about what is going on at the moment. Additionally, we can do a literature search on media reporting on the company in question and on the industry in general. There may be stock analysts who follow the industry, who for a fee, will provide us with their findings on what is going on. Through LinkedIn, we might be able to connect with a senior person who has left the firm recently, who may be willing to provide some broad insights. We shouldn't expect to get all of the company's dark and dirty secrets, but they may be happy to share in broad brush terms. ChatGPT is a bit useless as a research tool for current information. For example, when I asked about the current state of the 5 Star Hotel industry in Tokyo, I get this answer: "I'm unable to provide real-time or the most up-to date information as my knowledge cut-off date is September 2021". In Tokyo 5 Star Hotel terms, September 2021 is like a hundred years ago in terms of vacancies and losses in revenues thanks to the pandemic. Today they are doing a booming business, as foreign tourists flood in to enjoy a very cheap yen environment. Anyway, back to the pitch question. We may not have been given direct access to company staff, but we can still try and do a matching process between what we offer and what we believe would be of most value to the firm. As we don't exactly know what is ailing them at the moment, we need to offer up a few alternatives, on the basis that if we just burst into action on one and it isn't resonating, we will be out the door in short order. So we draft up a few scenarios which we think could be reasonable cases for seeking our help with finding solutions to their problems. There is no point starting with the weakest case and moving to the strongest. Everyone has limited time, patience and availability to listen to us, so we have to go in hard with the best case we can come up with. When we are delivering this first case, we will be able to tell by the reactions whether we are on track or not. This is not a perfect angle though. There is also the issue that different departments have different interests and they may respond variously depending on what strikes a chord with them. If we are striking a chord with no one at all, then we better move on to case number two and keep going. There will be senior people in the room and the rookie mistake is to only talk to them. Often the President is there, but he or she is not a sole decision-maker. The top executives may only look at the possibility of working with you, after those lower down the totem pole have worked on the due diligence. I have made this mistake, imagining that if I could win over the President, then the orders to work with me would rain down on the rest of the crew. I remember sitting in the President's office as he got very excited about all the wonderful things I was telling him about our training. He jumped on the phone and called the heads of the HR team to drop everything and come to his office immediately, to meet me and hear what I had to say. I was getting very positive about the direction this sales call was going. These two HR guys turned up and did a lot of nodding in front of the President. When I left I said I would contact them to have a further meeting to go through the detail. I am still waiting for a reply to all of my follow-up emails to these two guys. I presume they didn't like him getting involved in their world and so did nothing, despite the President's excitement. So when we present our pitch, we should assume everyone will be involved at some point in the decision. This includes those junior people who will do the due diligence, to those who will shepherd the idea through the labyrinth inside the firm, up to the senior executives who will approve the consensus decision. That means we work on everyone in the room and don't just look

Selling to idiot buyers sounds a bit harsh doesn't it, but I am sure we have all had a version of this experience. It usually manifests itself in the pricing component of the transaction. We provide value, but the buyer is too inexperienced, uninformed, basically stupid, has a massive ego or is lacking in context to appreciate why they need to pay more than they suggest. We have to remember they are in the market for a service or product only a few times a year, but as salespeople, we are talking to companies constantly. We have a much better understanding of what the market will bear, than the buyer. The problem with value is it isn't known until the delivery of the solution. Because we are delivering solutions all of the time, we know the value. Our value is also confirmed by other buyers who become repeat customers, because they appreciate what we bring to their firm. They pay the fare, because they can see the value equation works in their favour. Most companies can probably solve their problems internally and save a lot of money. The time factor is often the difference. They don't have a decade or even a year to get it right under their own steam. This is where we bring an instant solution and they can enjoy the benefits immediately, with no time loss or disadvantage in the market. The other idiocy is imagining that all suppliers are the same and we are providing some generic solution that can be easily interchanged between similar suppliers. Because they may have not used any of us yet as a potential solution supplier, they have very little to go on apart from pricing. This is where the greed gland gets activated, and they imagine they are doing their firm a favour by going for the least expensive option. If the procurement department gets involved, then you know you are in for a rough time. They have their spreadsheet with the supplier's names along the top side and on the left side, the names of the service or good and the cells in the middle are populated with pricing numbers. This is a very convenient method to delineate who is the cheapest supplier for a solution, but often has no nuance for the value equation comparison. Our job as salespeople is to break through all of these obstacles and make sure the buyer is clear on the difference we provide and why our higher price is justified. It may be a quality comparison that our competitors cannot match. Quality means the good itself or the people who supply the service. This latter component can vary enormously. Speed is always a factor and this is where being more flexible and better organised than the opposition is an advantage. It might be a history of credibility and reliability as a supplier, which the rival operation doesn't have. After sales service is also has real value. Often organisations are often well sculptured for the buying component of the conversation, but are not so interested in dealing with the buyer's problems after the cheque has been cashed. Having many decades in a market has a higher value than a rival who has only been operating for a few years. It might be a global scope that means the solution can be taken around the world for them, if they want to benefit at that scale. When we list up all the various aspects of value, we realise that price is just one component. Often in business, our time is the thing we are most interested in preserving and we will pay more to protect our time. When the client is uninformed, it is our job to educate them. The dumb salesperson way of doing this is to blurt out the differentiation we have compared to the rivals. The issue with this approach is that buyers have been trained to doubt whatever they are told by people trying to sell them something. The better avenue is to draw out the differences by asking well designed, highly intelligent questions. If we want to highlight quality we could ask, "Would not having to do any rework after delivery of the solution save your firm time and money?". If it was speed, we could ask, "If the speed of the delivery was able to exceed your expectations, would that provide positive knock-on benefits to your firm?". If it was a global scope we could enquire, "Would being able to take something you have found works well in Japan to the entire global network of your firm, raise Japan's stakes internally?". You get the idea. If the proposition doesn't fly then, there is no point labouring the conversation with any more content in that vein and we need to move on to find something which will resonate with them. The alternate option is to not do business with idiots and let the competition lose money when providing the solution. Idiots can be expensive for us to work with. I am dealing with this right now. I am providing basically the same service to two companies and one is paying six times as much for the same service compared to the other firm. As you can guess one buyer is an idiot. I am only doing it, because this person is temporarily involved and I have

Understanding client's needs presumes we care about what they want. For many salespeople this isn't even a topic in their mind. Their understanding is that they turn up and tell the client all about their widget in microscopic detail and somehow the client will buy once they have all of that data. Now this approach may work with certain analytic personality types and certain professions, but it is still a sporadic approach with a low success rate. How do we know that what we are showing them will resonate with what they need? I was interested in a certain solution and asked the President to send someone to me to explain more about it, after hearing his presentation. The Sales Manager for the firm came to see me. He didn't ask me a single question, but went straight into a prepared slide presentation with about sixty slides. Japanese all look so young, but I guess he was in his forties, so he was not some green kid. He had been doing this sales approach for his whole career, over the last twenty years, I would guess. Here is the problem with the spray and pray angle in sales. There were two slides out of the sixty, which I judged were interesting. He had wasted his time showing me 58 that were useless because he didn't ask me what I wanted. If he had known, he could have gone straight to those two and we could have spent all of our time digging into how they would help me grow my business. Instead, he got nothing and left empty-handed. Presuming we are salespeople who are professionals and so ask questions, are we sure we are finding out what we need to know? Our primary task is to draw an early conclusion concerning whether or not we have what the buyer needs. If not, then we should waste no more time and we should go find someone we can serve. If we can help them, then we need more detail to work out exactly how we can assist. We ask questions about their current situation to get an idea of where they are in their business at the moment. We next ask them where they need to be and we measure the gap between these two points. If the distance is relatively small, there is the danger they think they can get there by themselves without anyone's help. That is why we also ask about the timeline they have set for the achievement of their goals. We try to draw out the point that the market and their rivals are always moving quickly and they need to do the same. We need to create a sense of urgency. Now we ask, if they know where they need to be, why aren't they there now? What is holding them back? In their answer, we may find our solution may be a possible antidote to what is ailing them at the moment. Finally, we ask them what success for this project would mean for them personally. We do this because when we are explaining the solution, we want to tie it back to what they told us was in it for them. All this is very good, but do we actually get answers to our questions which are useful? We remember that the person we are talking to will have to navigate a "yes" decision through the different divisions and sections within the firm. These are people who we will never meet and will never be able to question. That means we have to anticipate there will be opposition to doing something different or new within this client. We need to get some early insight into what the internal opposition will look like. I was speaking to the President to a small company who was very enthusiastic about buying our solution and it would have been perfect for them. Nothing happened. I kept following up and kept getting excuses. What I realise now is that the CFO comes from the parent company and the President doesn't have that much power. Now he won't tell me that because it is embarrassing to be the President but unable to approve such a modest investment. This is the issue we have as salespeople. We cannot know everything which is going on behind the client's closed doors and we operate on the most sparse diet of information fed to us by our contact. Japanese companies are paranoid about secrecy and so often we are not told much at all, as they try to keep all their dirty laundry hidden away. This is especially the case when it comes to individuals who may block us internally. We should keep asking, though. For example, "Inside your firm, I am sure this buying decision will interest some key groups. Thinking ahead to dealing with any concerns they might have, so that we can address them in advance, can you think of where there might be pockets of resistance to this idea we are proposing?". We are trying to work out what information we need to provide to our champion, so that they can pass this on to these hidden groups and deal with any pushback. If we don't do this, we may find we hit a brick wall and the deal never materialises for us.

Imposter syndrome is a fact of this sale's life. If we try to avoid that and strive for safety by staying in our lane and just repeat the same actions, we will probably master what we need to do to complete the job. The problem is organisations keep moving the goalposts every year and they want higher revenue productivity. The market also moves on us too and we cannot control that. The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same things over and over again, in the same way, but expecting an improved result. When things don't go as well as we need, we feel like imposters. Maybe that previous good result, that big deal was just a fluke, a bit of luck, rather than ability. Having clients tell you they have gone with another provider really hurts. Getting them to tell you why is difficult. They don't want to get into an argument, so they try and ghost you and give you no answer. When you persist with your follow-up, they send you some bromide message that doesn't tell you anything. If you try to ferret out what they paid to your competitor, they just ignore you. Losing deals sparks self-doubt. Am I not good enough? Are we way out of line with the market on our pricing? What if this snowballs or continues for lengthy periods? Where did I go wrong? Where was the breakdown point in my explanation of the benefits? What do I need to change? What information did I fail to supply to my champion with, to get a "yes" answer pushed through the organisation decision-making machine? Salespeople are always under pressure to perform, so none of this is helping our mental outlook. It is such a fragile self-belief system in sales, so it is so easy to spiral downwards into oblivion and ultimately, ejection from the company and possibly from the profession of sales itself. What do we need to do? Pricing is always the elephant in the room for salespeople. "If we were cheaper, I could make more sales", is the logic. That is true, but what does your brand stand for and what is your positioning in the market? How does getting in less money per deal get you to your revenue target? Price is not the main thing for a lot of successful sales. The buyer has to weight up price against value. A cheap but inferior solution can cost a lot of time and disruption, so it effectively becomes an expensive proposition. Many years ago, I was on a temporary assignment in Australia. I bought a cheap blender from a retailer down there. The rubber seal ring was a problem and after a while what was being blended would go everywhere. I replaced that blender three times before I gave up and dispensed with the whole idea. The price was cheap, but the irritation and time loss traipsing back and forth to the store, was enormous. I should have spent more money and ensured a better quality outcome. That is the message we need to get across to the buyer about our product or service here in Japan, to overcome price sensitivity. I have had a couple of potential sales fall over on price lately. This is excruciating, because I thought I had built good rapport with the buyer. The issue today though is there are more and more people coming into the circle of decision-making and your buyer has to navigate the sale through the turbulent waters of their organisation on your behalf. If they hit an internal reef and capsize, your deal drowns. I now reflect on did I do a good enough job providing the bullets for my champion to fire to get the deal done? Did I explain the value equation well enough? What was missing in that presentation of mine? When deals fall over in sales, our self-doubt bubbles to the surface. Have I lost my mojo? Am I no longer able to persuade buyers to pay what we need for our solution? We cannot stop the process of these self-doubts arising, but we have to keep moving forward, regardless. The answer to deal loss is to have more irons in the fire, on the mathematical basis, that more deals come from having more conversations. If there is a deal flow issue, then we have to get busier talking to more buyers. We increase the chance of doing a deal in this situation. Talking to more buyers needs more activity to generate those conversations. We have our pool of previous clients who are not active at the moment. They are a good place to start because they will at least know of us. We need to go back to our existing clients and see if we can cross sell them or upsell them. The client is never on our timetable, so we have to keep making the effort to get in touch regardless of how busy we become current servicing clients agreeing to deals. If we don't, we run out of deals and then we have nothing – the Death Valley of Sales. Once we have exhausted all possible leads, we have to rev the whole process up again and that takes considerable time. There are no free lunches or givens in this sales life. We recreate our realities every single day. No matter how hard we get bucked off the rodeo bull, we have to climb back up into the saddle and try again. If we c

We have products and services to sell and there are key details about their features which we need to explain to the buyer. Clients need to know what they are getting for their money, so fair enough. In Japan, the client will lead you down the road of morbid detail about the ins-and-outs of the purchase, as they suck you dry for all the information you have. This is a defence mechanism to make sure they are not making a mistake. It is also tedious and over the top from the salesperson's point of view. We know we should supply just enough information for them to make a buying decision without adding unnecessary data. Our mindless throw away comment can often lead to deal assassination, as we have triggered something that we shouldn't have. We nnow have to balance out the detail with explaining the benefits of the purchase. Buyers buy benefits notfeatures except in Japan they focus on the features and keep dragging more and more detail out of us. Japan is special. This is not a business-like culture. Companies are not interested in doing business. Japanese buyers attending a networking event are not thinking, "today, I might meet someone who will add a lot of value to our company and my job is to find as many people like that as possible, in the time I have available at this event". They don't want to meet people they don't already know. Because unknown people are dangerous and there is risk involved. If their friend or acquaintance introduces someone new, that is acceptable because there has already been a filtering process in place to get to this point. The unfiltered person is to be feared. Don't believe me? Try walking up to Japanese businesspeople at an event and introduce yourself. Watch their face very carefully and you will see them react with shock and trepidation. They are not thinking "great, a potential business opportunity has just presented itself". They are thinking, "I should be careful with this unknown person and anyone who just walks up and says hello can't be trusted, because that isn't how we do it in Japan. They should have had an introducer and followed the proper procedures". So we cannot rely on the buyer to do our job for us. We have to get to the benefits and the application of the benefits with the buyer, as soon as we can. Otherwise, they will squander all the time available for the meeting on the nuts and bolts of the purchase. They will never make a buying decision because we didn't cover the benefits in our explanation. The buyer is happy to not decide because doing absolutely nothing or nothing new, is the safest path in business in Japan. One benefit we can explain is about the reaction to the purchase. This could be by the users of the product or service and how they will react very well because it saves them time, money or effort. Buyers worry about the reaction of others to the buying decision and their biggest fear is getting criticised for making a poor decision. The reaction could be by their bosses or colleagues. Generally though, because of the buying process here, there will be many people involved in the buying decision. Nevertheless, everyone involved needs to react positively concerning the purchase. That means internally, the buyer has to shepherd the decision through many corporate layers and they have to appeal to various interested parties to make sure their interests are met and their reaction is positive. If they are in the distribution process for purchase to on sell to another company, then the way the sale is made needs to consider how that buyer and their client will react. As we are making the original sale, we have to tell our buyer how the other buyers will react positively and why that will occur, in order to push our sale into the distribution funnel. We will never meet these buyers further down the funnel, but we have to create the bullets for our buyer to fire when they are doing the on sell. We start with the end user in mind and work our way backwards, explaining why the reaction to the purchase will be positive. We need to draw on our word pictures here to describe the emotion of satisfaction in the post purchase phase. Just a dry retelling of the features of the widget won't produce the reaction we want and it won't travel across the many touch points toward the final user. We can talk about things like, "You will be very happy when you receive smiles of genuine thanks for making your end users work a lot easier thanks to this purchase. They will really appreciate you for helping them and you will have built an even closer relationship of trust with them". We know ourselves when we have made a good purchase as a consumer how we react. We feel that we have done something worthwhile and have done well. We have calculated the purchase decision against the benefits centered on time, money or effort. Our buyers are the same and we have to use our communication skills to flesh out the benefits and the positive reactions which will arise from everyon

Nobody in sales likes it when buyers pushback and don't make a purchase decision. There are varying degrees of pushback though. Sometimes it might be the buyer being the Devil's advocate trying to better assure themselves that buying would be the right decision. Other times it is just the buyer being a pain and exerting their power and authority over the sales person. Most buyers have never been salespeople, so they are coming into decision-making positions through general management or technical areas like being an engineer, HR or through the CFO route. In some cases, they don't respect the profession of sales and look down on salespeople, even including those in their own firm. They are seeing the profession as a bunch of shiftless liars and dodgy magicians trying to con the punters. Salespeople, at least the professional salespeople, see themselves as playing a vital role in making the wheels of commerce turn. They connect buyer and seller to the mutual benefit of both parties. "Nothing happens in business until a sale is made" is an old saw and still true today. Japan is a tough place in many regards in business but at least salespeople are not looked down upon here. My Carnegie colleagues in Taiwan have their salespeople double hat as the training instructors. They do this because in Chinese culture, the salesperson isn't respected but the teacher gets respect, so combining the two roles together makes it easier to sell in their culture. Japan doesn't have that bias. Buyers in Japan though are consumed with doubt and fear. There is no upside in Japan for doing a good job and a huge downside if something goes wrong and your name is attached to it. In most cases though in sales, the buying decision is spread broadly across many sections within the company. Everyone who will be impacted by the buying decision is included in the final decision and in a way this is a great mechanism for making sure that no individual gets the blame, if it turns out badly. It also diffuses the pushback. There may be individuals in sections within the firm, who we will never meet, who are pushing back on the offer. That makes the sales process here extremely hard, as we will never get to meet with them and allay their fears and concerns. This is why our contact point person is so important to navigate the deal through the labyrinth. The problem is the reward for being brave and doing the hard yards is zero. They don't get any appreciation if it goes well, no bonus, no promotion – nothing because this is just seen as part of the job. However, the penalty for pushing this deal internally and then it doesn't work is very scary. This could impact their career progression within the firm and affect them later when decisions are being made about who to promote. That means that our person has to be made to become a believer. We have a huge task ahead of us to overcome their fear of failure, their terror of errors and their pain associated with past mistakes. Free trials and small sample testing are good antidotes to overcoming fear of failure. In this way, the product or service can be experienced. All of those people behind the scenes who are involved in the final decision can get some concrete feedback on the value of the proposition. Seeing is believing and this helps our champion to push the decision forward. The testing phase can also yield valuable information on any modifications which may be needed before they adopt the whole shooting match. The fit for the company is highly important and can be of more concern than price. If they don't believe the fit is there, then price doesn't matter, because the deal will not progress. Another good idea is guarantees and warranties if the purchase doesn't live up to expectations. In our case, we deal a lot with HR people and they are terrified that the training they choose will get complaints later and they will be held accountable. In order to overcome those fears, we use sample training and also will give a 100% guarantee that the training will cost nothing, if they are not satisfied. It is possible that some evil person will decide to use this clause to their benefit and get the training for nothing. In the thirteen years we have been offering this clause, we have never had a case where we have had to do the training for nothing. This is Japan and generally people here are honest and their main concern is that the purchase will perform as advertised and benefit the company. I am sure there are other markets where this clause will be an invitation to misuse and ripping you off, so you have to know the mentality of the buyers before making this offer.

If we have done a professional job in selling we will have understood what the buyer is attempting to achieve and we will have concluded if we have a solution that matchs or not. Following that we need to explain the solution to the buyer and convince them that this is what they need. Japan presents a danger at this point. There is a ravenous hunger in Japan for data and detail. Buyers are super risk averse in this country so the antidote for risk is information and the more the better. They will suck us dry of the detail at every opportunity. If we the seller are not in control of the sales conversation, the solution presentation component of the sale cycle will descend into a very long winded expose on all the nitty gritty details about the product or service. What is wrong with that you might be asking? Doesn't the buyer need all of that information so that they can make an informed decision? Yes and no. They need a certain amount of information, but they need other things as well. They need to know what is the benefit related to the nitty gritty detail. The deep dive into the detail is the buyer's attempt to short circuit the risk component, but that in itself won't get the deal done. The most effective risk reduction strategy is to do nothing and that doesn't help us. We need to balance out the risk reduction with the upside of purchasing our solution so the balance of the presentation has to include these aspects. What can easily happen though is the buyer keeps trying to extract more and more information out of us and there is no time left in the meeting to talk about the benefits of the solution. The buyer is happy because they dealt with the risk reduction part of the meeting. The seller is not happy because they never got to the why they should buy component of the talk. There will be key components of the solution which will have the highest priority for the buyer and if we did a good job in the discovery phase, we are aware of what these are. The detail we bring up should be aligned to these high priority items. After we explain each element, we need to immediately bridge across to the benefit for the buyer. We don't know how much we can get through in the time for the sales call and so we want to start with the highest value parts of the solution and the highest value benefits to match the priority. Then we move on to the next highest priority and the benefits attached to that item and so on, as we go through the list. We should only entertain the highest priority items because if we are not careful, we will miss the application of the benefit part of the sales call. In this part, we talk about how they can translate this solution benefit into their company's operation. If we only talk about the benefit, then we are stuck at the theoretical stage of the discussion. We need to paint word pictures so that they can visualise how the solution will fit into their current situation and bring additional value. Without this bridge from theory to reality, they will not be empowered enough to make a buying decision. This requires that we have enough knowledge of how their business works and that we can paint those word pictures such that they resonate with the buyer. The quality of our questioning skills in the early part of the discussion is vital. We need to be thinking about and planning for where the application of the benefit will come when we are asking our original questions. The visualisation part is key for the client, because seeing it in their mind's eye is so powerful and positive to help them make a buying decision. After explaining how the solution will make a high value impact on their business, we need to find time in the talk to reference evidence that what we are saying is true. Buyers have been trained to discount what salespeople tell them, so they are always putting up walls around what we say. By being able to talk about a similar buyer in the same industry sector we can talk about what happened when they introduced the solution and what were the outcomes they enjoyed. Now this has to be real and just making up a fairy story is a fatal idea. If they want to contact that other buyer to get more insight and you hesitate or the other buyer doesn't confirm what you are saying, you lose the deal. You also lose all credibility in the market and your name is mud forever. This type of personal and professional brand suicide is permanent and there is no recovery in Japan. Never forget that bad news like this travels fast, especially in the internet age. Finally we add in a trial close question. This can be as simple as "How does that sound so far?". All we are doing here is smoking out any objections, hesitations, confusion, errors in understanding and anything which will get in the way of a "yes" decision. This simple question will bring any and all of these barriers to the fore and then we can deal with them using our objection handling techniques. We cannot allow the buyer to control the

For most places in the world, and Japan in particular, when you find a good salesperson, you tend to stick with them. Why is that? There is a huge trust component to the idea that this person is someone you can rely on and who isn't going to rob you blind, so that they get rich at your expense. There are so many unprofessional salespeople floating around on every continent and this is just base incompetence in action. Then there are evil salespeople who scam buyers, but this is a very small number of crooks and dirty dealers. The problem is that buyers are always thinking of the scammers in any sales transaction. They may not have personally suffered at the hands of these scoundrels, but the urban legends are powerful and the warning signals are always being scanned in the sales talk. How do we build trust? The most basic requirement is to not lie to clients. Anotherbasic requirement is to have the buyer's interests at the forefront of your mind rather than your interests. There are different profit margins for products and services. Sales Managers have opinions on what you should be selling, there are sale's contests to push products etc., which can confuse salespeople as to what they are there for. Any time the equation surfaces that the sale should be more for the benefit of the firm, rather than the buyer, then we are destroying the basis for trust building with buyers. Buyers follow salespeople they trust around and if your current firm is evil, then keep your customers and move somewhere else. What do the new firms look for in you – how many buyers have you got to bring to the company? Don't put up with anyone in the company trying to get you to compromise your relationship with your buyers, for some short-term goal like a sale's contest or a manufacturer bonus for sales over a certain number. These ideas are fine, as long as the filter of fit for the client is applied and you can honestly say that this is a good deal for the buyer, because it will deliver what they are seeking. That is the key consideration – will it give the buyer the outcomes they need or not? When you operate like this you build up that key trust and your buyers recommend you to other buyers and your good name is out there in the marketplace as someone you can work with and who you can trust. What is the value of that reputation? It is gold! The issue though is you don't get that prominence after one deal. It takes thousands of deals and many years to build up a following of current buyers and potential buyers, who will look at using you based on what they have heard about you. From time-to-time things will go pear shaped and you have to do your best to repair the relationship, and that might have some financial elements attached to it, like giving them back their money. Often though, the firm hierarchy will not support you and this is where you can be compromised. That is why leaving for a more stable company who can see the long-term relationship as an asset, is a much better idea. Telling the buyer that you are unable to give them their money back, because of the firm's policy and that as a direct consequence of their decision toward this client, you are leaving that company, leaves your trust element intact. Clients won't be happy to not get their money back but you taking the high moral ground will be noted and appreciated. They won't deal with your company again, but they will continue to deal with you and will speak highly of you to others. We all know that gaining trust in sales is so difficult and that it takes a lot of time but that is how it is and we have to work within those boundaries. Walking away from a deal that isn't in the best interests of the client, hurts at that moment, because the revenues associated with that deal won't be arriving when you need them to get there. That is painful and financially can make things hard. Giving in to temptation to do the deal anyway is a sugar hit and you will suffer massive depression later, when the market hears you can't be trusted, you are too expensive and because what you offer doesn't work. Maybe you think you can skid from one client to another before the bad news catches up with you, but that is very optimistic in this internet world, where bad news travels at lightspeed. The one-to-one personal recommendation from one buyer to a potential buyer is a much slower transition, but the value component of the stacked trust factor is enormous. We will question what we read in our social media feeds, but we will believe what our trusted friend or associate tells us about you. What would you pay to get that outcome? You would pay the price of doing the right deals that are in the buyer's interests and sustaining that approach over many, many years. That is how you build a following – one trusting buyer at a time.

In Japan, we meet the client, build the rapport, seek permission to ask questions, ask the questions and then we set the date and time for the next meeting. Usually, in the first meeting this is where we expect to get to and we know we have to come back with a lot more detail for the second meeting. What level of detail do we need to go into in the proposal? Decision-making is done differently in Japan, so the proposal carries a lot of weight here, because so many eyes need to check it. Consensus decision-making is favoured here in Japan, because if something goes wrong, no one gets landed with the blame. We are all responsible, so actually no one individual is responsible. This has proven to be a winner for Japanese companies, when it comes to decision-making. The due diligence on a purchase decision means that many different sections and divisions will need to take a look at it. The idea is that section by section, the approval document proceeds upwards, toward executive sanction. The individuals meeting with the salesperson won't be the only decision-makers. The proposal document has to take into consideration that most of the people making the decision will never meet the salesperson. The proposal document has to mend it way through the buyer organisation on its own. The level of detail needs to be appropriate to the task. Generally speaking Japanese buyers are information vultures and have an insatiable appetite for data. They are all operating on the basis that risk reduction is the key thing to be considered and the antidote to risk is data and information. So for a Japanese proposal we should go in much heavier than we may do normally. One of the dangers though is that the key points get swamped by the detail and it becomes less clear what needs to happen. Having a lot of supporting information in the appendices is a good idea, as it allows the data vultures to feast. It frees the rest of the narrative up to be more readily absorbed by the readers. The key to the document is that it answers all of the questions being asked by those different section representatives who are charged with doing the due diligence. This is where the people we as salespeople are speaking to become very important. They will know better than we will what are potential sticking points for the other sections or areas of the most intense interest. It is difficult for us to second guess what all of those areas will be. We should ask for their help when preparing the proposal, so that we can capture everything needed. This takes longer at the beginning, but is quicker in the end, because the answers are there. The readers will move straight through the content, without us having to make too many revisions. The proposal section on the solution will need to be the most detailed. How will it work and more importantly, how will it work inside their organisation? If we have a similar firm in a similar sub-section of the industry, we can reference, that is ideal. Japan loves precedent and they love having someone else's example to peruse, rather than being the guineapig themselves. We have to anticipate what some of the concerns will be and address these in the proposal before they are brought up from their side. This way the various section readers can move more quickly through the document and speed up its internal elevation toward the C-Suite. There will be some detail which is more important than other content and these sections should be kept in the main body. The appendices are where we can layer more complexity into the argument. If there is a need for those doing the due diligence to cover this off, they will seek it out for themselves. For everyone else, the detail provided will be sufficient for them to move the approval process forward. We don't want to dilute the key advantages of our solution by drowning in too much detail. This is a tricky line to navigate and we have to make some decisions about where to hold certain data. We should err on the side of more data than not enough though. The data vultures need to be fed. Proposals are great communication vehicles for attacking the doubters sitting behind the wall of the client's office, who we will never meet. We have to anticipate their requirements and produce a document which covers off their concerns and which can be easily absorbed by everyone else. If we can strike that balance, then the chances of us getting the deal done go up dramatically.

Content marketing has been around for many years now and is an accepted way of appealing to clients. Thought Leadership and Intellectual Property are given away for free to establish our credentials with the buyers. If we show how knowledgeable we are, prospective clients will choose us over our rivals. So for many years now, blogs, books, podcasts, magazine and newspaper articles, videos, Medium articles, social media posts, white papers, surveys and numerous other tools have been at the vanguard to prove we are experts in our fields. This has required a lot of hard earned experience and an ability to communicate that experience to others. Then ChatGPT turns up and opens up a floodgate of content for people who are vying with us for the client's attention. ChatGPT is a vast curator of knowledge from the entire world and it is unbelievably fast at churning it out. How can one person compete with that? Our rivals can go to ChatGPT, then tweek the content and pass it off as their own efforts. Our clients probably cannot tell the difference. In a lot of cases, perception is everything. If the buyer sees you are pumping out vast quantities of content, they will conclude that you are an expert in this area, even though the chances are strong that they will never even read the content or not very much of it. ChatGPT can become the great equaliser between competing firms in the content marketing department. This is real for me. I have 6 books published, 1779 Podcasts and 652 Video show episodes released, over 3000 articles on LinkedIn, etc. I am sure others will also have substantial resources released out into the wild to prove expertise in certain areas. What can we do about all of this? The answer is differentiation. ChatGPT and other similar engines are good at collecting and synthesising information. At this point, it is generated in a quite recognisable style and tends toward the generic. ChatGPTso far, is not great at distinguishing the quality of the content. It also makes things up and lies, which the industry has cleverly marketed as "hallucinations". I quite like "bald faced lies" as the preferred descriptor. How can you trust a machine which cannot differentiate between fake and real content and can only collect and collate it? Because it is synthesising vast amounts of content, the style tends to be a bit utilitarian and dull. This is where we have an advantage still. We have examples, stories, happenings we have witnessed first-hand from our specific component of the industry and we can include these in our content. The specificity means it is hard for ChatGPT to collect the information as this is personal to us and we have never published it anywhere as yet, to be swept up and homogenised by the machine. There is also a gap between when we publish it and when ChatGPT can get its hands on it. There is also our style. A competitor telling ChapGPT to write something in the style of Dr. Greg Story is certainly possible, but all they are doing is reinforcing my content and my expertise. Dr. Greg Story also has 100% control over his style and he can vary it as well with no qualms or permissions. I try to write my content such that someone reading it will recognise the style as mine. I write in a very informal style, often using slang and I quite like idioms and alliteration. These are not complete moats which will deny people from copying me, but how many people in my industry are going to try and reproduce me? You have to be interested in Japan, leadership, sales, communication, presentations and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. That is an incredibly small circle of rivals. For most of us in business, this will be the case - we will have relatively few rivals in the content marketing world in our specific area of expertise. Even for famous authors and influencers, there have always been copycats and people trying to rip their stuff off and yet they are still going. For all of us, we see so many attempts to fool us with social media spewing out constant phishing attacks, deep fakes, etc., but we want the real McCoy. We get upset when we are fooled into buying something that is not what it is supposed to be. If we get a ChatGPT fake version of a favourite writer or thought leader's content, are we going to be happy? Are we going to be satisfied with an avatar or a deep fake trying to pass itself off as someone we admire in an attempt to fool us? If you cannot write and have a limited intellect or parsimonious business experience, then ChapGPT will certainly be of help. The problem is after people meet you, they find you cannot write and that you have limited intellect or parsimonious business experience. You get the meeting through subterfuge of clever repackaging, but the reality is still the reality. Either you have the real goods or you don't. If you have them, then you don't bother with ChapGPT fakery and trying to pass yourself off as something you are not. Will ChapGPT and all of the other machines o

Usually in Japan, we meet more than one buyer. In Western meetings, it is more likely to be a one-on-one situation. Sometimes the buyer boss will bring others to the meeting and they are there to represent their functions and report back what has taken place. The danger is we just focus on the boss and ignore their henchmen. These hangers-on have important roles to play in the decision-making process about the purchase, so it very unwise to ignore them and spend all of your time just addressing the boss, assuming there is only one decision-maker present. In bigger meetings, it becomes much harder to gauge who is who. It is not unheard of in Japan, for the most senior person to say very little during the meeting and they may even look like they are sleeping. The other tangent we can go off on, is focusing on the English speaker, imagining that they are a key decision-maker. In large companies, that is rarely the case. They are just considered a technician by their colleagues and they may have very little influence on the buying decision. In larger meetings, it is always good to work the entire room and try and engage with everyone. If you are using an interpreter, this should make no difference. Address each person on a one-on-one basis in English and let the interrupter catch up with what you have been saying. It doesn't matter about the time lag, if the interpreting is being done consecutively. The fact that you are looking at and speaking directly to that person will have the desired effect. Most Japanese businesspeople understand a lot more English than they let on as well and for various reasons may choose to not speak in English, when in fact they can do it well. You might be asking why is that? Part of it is hierarchy and roles for the meeting. Usually, one of the better English speakers will be tasked with being the interlocutor for the buyer. The others are there to hear what is going on, as they represent their Divisions or Sections, but are not required to speak. They also may choose to use the interpreter when they get into some questions because that lag gives them a lot more thinking time. Another reason is they either are a bit shy about their own proficiency and don't want to embarrass themselves or the opposite. If they are very good, they don't want to show everyone else up and embarrass others who are not so good, particularly if the latter are the more senior people. You often discover at the end of the meeting, as you are heading for the elevators, that many of them have perfect English. This is always a bit of a shock, because you were humming along thinking they couldn't understand what was going on in English. We know that there will be a consensus reached about the purchase and so every section has a part in the final decision and that is why we have to work the entire room. We don't ignore the boss, but the leader is expecting others to do the due diligence and then make a recommendation, which by the time it gets to the inner circle at the top, it has been agreed upon across all affected areas and will become a fait accompli. In smaller meeting, say three people, it is easy for us to concentrate on the most senior person, but again that is a mistake. The boss has brought these other people with them for a reason and they need to be included as well. Even the most junior person needs to be included, because often they are given the grunt to work to evaluate the offer. These more junior people will often ask the questions, because they know they will have to come up some type of report on the matter. We need to draw them into the discussion and find out what angles they are most interested in and then try and connect with them along those lines. Usually after the meeting, we will communicate with these people rather than the boss. They have a reporting function, so it is very important to follow up with them and find out what type of information they need and then proceed to give it to them. They are often in more command of the details than the boss as well, so they are good source of information and a good destination for our information. They can become a strong internal champion in this process and we should work toward that outcome. They can also give us good guidance on what we present and how to present it, because they know their internal systems perfectly, which for us will mainly remain a mystery for the most part. Bosses can be moved around to a new post, but these more junior people tend to stay in one place longer and they can be a valuable ally across time. In a few years, they may in fact become the boss and we have built up a strong connection with them, where the trust has gradually been cemented. When dealing with multiple buyers in a sales call, treat everyone as a decision-maker, because they are. Don't ignore the boss of course, but don't cosy up to the boss and ignore the others either. That will be a mistake and the whole room will recognise you are clueless ab

Every professional salesperson has a set script of how the sales call will run. Amateur salespeople just turn up and don't try to direct the action. Having a set script means we know what will happen during the call, what the stages will be, what we will say at certain points, what we want to know from the client and how the call will conclude. We have already worked out how to be charming in the small talk component of the call at the very start and how to get the client to do the talking, so we can gauge their personality style, allowing us to adjust our own style to better suit them. We know when to bridge into our credibility statement, so that the client will know they can trust us and that we are totally unlike all of the unprofessional salespeople they have dealt with thus far. We will move on to the questioning phase to try and understand if we have what they need or not. If we do, then we introduce our solutions based around what they have told us and nothing more. We will ask for the order to test their reaction and if we get objections, then we know how to handle those calmly and smoothly, again asking for the order. This is how it is supposed to run. Sometimes however the client doesn't follow the script. In a few instances, the buyer has been so well conditioned by the salespeople they have met, that they directly ask for the pitch, so that they can evaluate the offer. This is bad. Pitching when you don't know what they want is flying blind and very ineffective, but sometimes you have to just suck it up and get on with it. In these cases, we have to use our experience and try and anticipate what similar companies like this one have needed. It may be that we have some all-weather solutions which will basically suit everyone and these would be good places to start. We shouldn't show them too many solutions because we want to get them to tell us what they need. Actually if what we are pitching isn't on the mark, then the obvious next step is to get them to tell us what would be on the mark. We can get to the same point we want to reach, but we have to take a time wasting detour. Another variety is more problematic and this is when the buyer doesn't know what they need. They may already have internal solutions and the firm is geared up for those, so they haven't explored what is also available in the market. It may be that they are the intermediatory for the group, who will be the actual users of the solution, so they are not at the coal face themselves in this case. We have to throw a wide net to try and cover off their needs. Again, we have to draw on our experience with what generally has been a common need in this industry. I had this case recently with a tech company. They had quite elaborate internal solutions of which they were profoundly proud and at first blush, it felt like they were fully sorted and didn't need anything from me. The people I was talking to were the HR team and again their role is removed from the coal face of the divisions doing the actual work. We have had other tech clients and there tends to be some consistent issues with tech teams where they need training and so I decided to just hone in on a couple of these, knowing full well they have their own internal solutions. The HQ sponsored solutions are always limited though, compared to what a specialist supplier like us can provide. There is always a gap. Also, often with multi-national companies, there is the fact that the centrally driven solutions are delivered in English, which is not ideal for Japan. We can bring that local cultural and language delivery piece which they need and which is always more effective. I always have my product Flyers on the seat next to me, out of sight of the buyer and will only show them the content I think will resonate with them. I am curating their needs, based on what I know and will only add more content when I get a sense of a requirement. This keeps the conversation very focused and I don't overwhelm them with solutions, such that they become immobilized. I know that I can always come back and add more content as we get a better picture of need and the whole shooting match doesn't have to be rolled out in this first meeting. It is still unfulfilling to do it this way, compared to hearing their specific needs but sometimes we have to be flexible and play the long game. I always say to myself they may not be a buyer today, based on my current solutions, in this market, at this stage of the economic cycle, given the internal machinations of the firm, but one day they could be a buyer. If all I can leave them with is a feeling that this guy can be trusted, then I have achieved quite a lot and perhaps one day I will get the chance to serve them.

Salespeople are always desperate to make a sale. There are targets, quotas, KPIs aplenty and the pressure is unrelenting. When you are in a downturn, a recession, a pandemic etc., which are driving down sales, the desperation becomes even more intense. Getting meetings at all is considered a win and we go for it, regardless of whether the buyer is qualified or not. Telling your Sales Manager you are seeing a potential buyer feels a lot better than telling them you are seeing no one and a five percent chance of a deal is more attractive than a zero percent chance. Self-delusion is like a balm in tough times. Desperation tends to drive bad behaviour and deals are done which shouldn't be attempted. Long-term reputations are sacrificed on the altar of short-term gains. We push clients into buying things they shouldn't buy, knowing it won't deliver the outcomes they seek. We celebrate in the short-term about getting some numbers on the board and we regret what we have done at leisure. Trust and reputation in sales are worth a fortune, but we can squander that fortune through bad choices. Once the word gets out that you cannot be trusted then the end is nigh for your sales career. The social media world has sped up the revelations about untrustworthy behaviour and bad news travels at internet light speed. Badly behaved salespeople will move around from one firm to another, but the stench follows them and eventually they have to move again and again until they run out of runway and have to depart Dodge. These are the people who make the profession so difficult for the rest of us. When we meet clients they have that fear that we are a loser and we will dud them, so eager to part them from their company's money. B2B buyers are worried about the long-term impact on their careers, rather than just the amount of money which has gone up in smoke and they are unforgiving and remain that way forever. The other side of the coin here are clients who look for weaknesses and who can smell the salesperson's desperation. They sense they can drive the price down to oblivion and they start playing that game of "sport negotiating". This means that a sale gets done, a number goes up on the board, the Sales Manager is temporarily assuaged, but the brand and the salesperson's reputation have taken a hammering. Now there is no real price for the solution and it becomes whatever the buyer wants it to be. Once you get into having special pricing for a buyer, there is little chance of going back to full pricing and you are now trapped in a funnel of death, where the profitability is close to zero or even negative. That buyer will just keep working you over because they enjoy torturing salespeople. It is a game for them. I had a client who I liked, but he was a bad man. He was very handsome and charismatic and I really got on with him at our first meeting. Where possible, I try to make my clients my friends and I thought I had found a new friend here. He suddenly nominated what my solution would command and as this was the first time to work with him, I went with it. I immediately regretted what I had done. I subsequently realised that this was going to be the price for all subsequent engagements and there was no differentiation across the quality of what we were providing against our much cheaper competitors. I refused to work with that company anymore, because that pricing was very bad for the brand and frankly I considered it an insult. So much for my newfound friend. He subsequently left Tokyo and went overseas, probably never to return and I won't be in any hurry to meet his acquaintance again. He was a non-client, but I couldn't see it at the time. Another client was a sports negotiator and we wound up haggling over pennies on the price. We got down to a substantial discount and very close on the number, but he pushed me to go even lower and I just said no, I wasn't going to go any lower. That deal never happened because I realised he was another bad man and he was toying with me, for his egotistical gratification. When you meet someone once in a sale call, it is hard to get a full sense of the individual you are dealing with and you assume the best in people. Which for the most part is the correct approach. It was a reasonably sized multi-national firm and looked promising as a client. As a firm they may be promising, but he was not the counterparty to work with. He was transferred out of the country to a new post and I doubt I will be seeing him again either and "good riddance" is how I feel about it. He was a non-client, I finally worked it out and I terminated him. Yes we lost the deal but we maintained the brand and the pricing and guess what – other clients were happy to pay full price, because they appreciated the value. There is always another potential client and you need to draw a line in the sand and not tolerate bad people masquerading as potential clients. Did I tell either of these two characters that they were bad peo

Buyers don't know us at first, so all they have to go on is the brand and our personality. If the brand is a powerful selling point, great, but for many smaller companies that is not something which is going to make the sale for you. A lot of Japanese salespeople rely on the brand. They never learn how to do sales as a professional and instead decide to transform themselves into glorified order-takers. If you ask them to go out and find a new client, they will recoil in fear and horror because they know they cannot do it and actually have no clue where to start. This is why salespeople need sales training and why not doing it is one of the most expensive decisions, a leader will ever make. A senior business executive I met recently shared that when he was younger, his company's policy in sales was to only approach buyers who they could be introduced to by a mutual acquaintance. What a tremendous waste. If they had invested in some sales training, they could have been able to target all companies in their area of the industry and make a lot more sales. Naturally, cold calling, approaching people you don't know are all difficult, but that is the job of the salesperson. That is why you get training. An order taker is simply not a salesperson, in my view. One of the dangers of trying to sell yourself to the buyer is we do too much talking. We are keen to show our expertise and the benefits of our solution and before you know it, we are doing all the talking. Naturally, when the buyer tells you their problem and you have a solution, you have to give them confidence that they are talking to someone who can help them. Often we are excited about the potential of our solutions to help the buyer and off we go, blah, blah, blah. That happened to me the other day. I caught myself going blah, blah, blah and realised, "wait a minute buddy, you are doing all the talking here and you need to shut up right now and get them talking more". It is so easy to have this happen, if we are not keeping a close leash on ourselves. There is a difficult line to draw here around how much is enough. In the initial section of the sales meeting, there will be some small talk and this is where we can try to convince the buyer that we are the one to become their trusted partner. The trick though, is not to go on and on about ourselves, but to talk about the benefits our other clients have received from the service or product. Talking about yourself positively without sounding arrogant and boastful is also a difficult line to tread. It is natural for the buyer to want to know if you are a serious person in this area and someone they can trust and rely on as a partner. It would be good if we were given rails to know where not to go, but the conversation is totally fluid so that is not possible. Overall, we say that the ratio should be 80% the client doing the talking and we the seller are at 20%, however that balance may be flipped at the start of the conversation. We may do most of the talking at the very initial exchange. As we get into the questioning phase, they will be doing most of the talking and we are just asking intelligent questions to draw out things, which are obvious to us, but which may not be obvious to them. We have to be careful here too, otherwise it can sound condescending or manipulative. Talking down to buyers is pretty dumb, but that doesn't stop salespeople from doing it, especially when the sellers are legitimate experts in an area and the client may be less so. The questioning skill actually has a manipulative aspect to it, as we draw the buyer to a realisation about their need that we have identified. Of course, it cannot come across like that, so again the line is not clear and we have to traverse that tricky balance. Getting the client to self-discover is the best solution. Sounds straightforward, right? However, it takes a high level of communication ability to help the buyer get there without it coming across as a trap we have set for them. This is where very high-level questions come in. The ideal reaction is the buyer is saying to themselves, "we haven't thought of that" or "we haven't prepared for that". Either of those reactions are gold and will cement the seller's place as a trusted advisor for the buyer, pointing out issues and problems, even before they arise. We plan the sale around the questions we will use and the solution explanation we will employ. Do we do enough planning for the small talk at the start and how we will come across? Are we doing enough role play practice with our colleagues before we set off to see any clients to make sure we have the right balance? I doubt it and we could all do a lot more in this area and that includes me, too.

Recently, I was asked to do a hands-on session regarding post-Covid sales for a group of CEOs. What was interesting to me was the different idiosyncratic approaches many of them had come up with to make sales. It was immediately clear that none of them had ever had any sales training. This meant that they had been relying on trial and error and hope to make sales. Given the amount of information out there for free and the easy access to high-quality sales training, this choice set is a bit puzzling. What was also profound was how they were all so deeply invested in what they have been doing, even though it hasn't really been having any significant success. I realised that there was an arrogance here about sales, as if it wasn't an actual professional activity. The sense was that anyone could do it and do it anyway they wanted. One of the leaders mentioned that his technique was to be helpful to the buyer and build up a sense of obligation, so that the buyer would purchase from him. He said he did this in the small talk at the beginning of the meeting, trying to make useful suggestions to the buyer, like which are the great restaurants in Tokyo. I had to restrain myself from bursting out laughing at this suggestion that today's hard-nosed buyers would be swayed by something that trivial. The problem with this approach is we need to be helpful to the company when they use our solution and that is what will make the buy decision much easier. That buyer sitting in front of us has to sell the idea internally and telling others that he or she had received some genius restaurant recommendations won't cut much ice with the other decision-makers. Another CEO mentioned that getting referrals was the way to get business. His firm had a method where they would scout out people who knew the buyer and then get that person to recommend them to get a meeting. I asked what happens when you cannot get a referral and he just said in that case they don't contact the buyer. "Wow, what a self-limiting approach that is", I thought to myself. What he is really saying is that his company's salespeople don't know how to cold call buyers. They also don't know how to use networking events to meet potential buyers and then follow-up with them. Of course, cold-calling is hard and so is getting appointments with people you exchange business cards with at an event, but that is the bread and butter of the professional salesperson. We cannot be limited to scouring the earth for referrals and ignoring all other possibilities. Salespeople who are professional use all the tools at their disposal and they have a thick hide, so they can deal with rejection, being ghosted and having a low strike rate. They know they have to keep swinging if they want to get any business going. Another CEO complained that he was not having much success in getting business. He had his own company, so he has to be the chief salesperson. What was quite obvious though, was that he had no sales methodology. He would just try something, see it fail and then get frustrated with the buyers and have no clue what to do about it. There is a professional progression on the sales journey with the buyer and all of us have to follow this path, if we want to get revenues rolling in. We need to master the small talk at the beginning to tune into the personality style of the buyer, so that we can adjust our conversation style. We need to get permission to ask questions and then ask well designed questions to fully understand if our solution will be the best fit for the buyer or not. Then we need to present our solution in a way which makes sense to the buyer and becomes the obvious next step. If objections arise, then we don't argue with the buyer, we ask why that is an issue for them and get more information before we try to deal with the pushback. Finally, we ask for the order and then organise the follow-up. This is hardly a complex process and yes, there are sub-structures we need to master to make it all work. That mastery of the detail is the difference between the professional and the amateur. These CEOs had not framed sales as a profession and so they weren't aware of the full set of options available. They were scrambling around in the dark trying to chance upon a methodology which would work for them. The obvious step is not to do it that way, but to get training and become a professional. They also clearly had no chance to do role-plays and get feedback and coaching on what they had been doing. Working it out by yourself when the sales profession is so well established is a curious choice from people who are accountable for their organisations. The salesperson in the field is getting this or should be getting this every day and that is how we polish the blade. The gap between the amateur and the professional was revealed yet again.

When we meet the buyer in Japan, it will be extremely rare that they are the final decision-maker. Usually, there are other people sitting behind the meeting room wall, who will have an interest in any changes or new initiatives. A collective decision will be reached about whether or not they will proceed with you. Japan likes this splitting of the authority because if things go bad, the blame gets spread far and wide and people feel better protected. "We are all responsible, so no one is responsible" type of logic. This means that our contact is going to be the messenger to the rest of the group and our job is to help them make a sterling effort promoting our idea. Normally we are concentrating on extolling the benefits of our solution for the business and we focus in right there in our explanation. Of course we have to do this otherwise there will be little point in the buyer using us. We should also not neglect to find out what success would mean for the buyer individually. This is rather more complicated in Japan than in the West. Most expat multi-national executives will tell me "I will get a big bonus" or "I will get a big promotion" or something very specific about their own glorious career. Japanese executives don't talk about themselves. They will say things like "the team will be happy" or "the company will benefit". We shouldn't take those types of answers verbatim. That is just typical Japanese modesty. We have to think about how we can help them advance in their career and to marshal a success for the firm. The nenko joretsu (年功序列) escalator system of staged career progression, based on age and years in the company is starting to break down. Even the peak industry body the Keidanren has recognised that individuals should be promoted based on ability rather than age and stage. This means that where once upon a time the individual buyer had little prospect of being recognised for a successful initiative, that situation is changing. We can play a role here to make them look like a hero inside their organisation. All the usual caveats apply. Hearing their issues, we have to decide about whether what we can offer in solution terms will genuinely improve their firm's results. Just selling a deal, to sell a deal, is desperate activity. It means you are failing and now flailing at any hint of getting a deal done, regardless of the consequences for that firm, based on what you are suggesting. This type of salesperson is the one who ruins it for everyone else. We should only suggest solutions which will actually help the buyer and if we can't do that, then we shouldn't sell them anything. Now this is easier said than done, when the sales manager is breathing down you neck threatening you with termination unless you make your monthly or quarterly sales quota. Maybe you shouldn't be in sales? If you cannot become a professional, then please leave and go get another job and leave the sales industry to the rest of us who are committed to doing the right thing by our clients. When we personalise the buyer and try to make them the hero, we are taking on responsibility for their career now. That is a heavy weight and we have to make sure that we boost their career, as a result of us becoming a trusted partner. They are going to go to bat for us in the internal meetings as the decision is walked around throughout the impacted sections. We have to make sure we give them the watertight guarantees about the quality which we will deliver and that we are there to fix any issues which may arise. We cannot airily hand these off to the customer service people because we have made that strong personal commitment to the buyer and we have to back up our promises. When we meet others in the company, we need to praise our buyer, especially to his or her superiors in the organisation. I don't mean meaningless praise, which sounds like flattery. The key to giving anyone praise is that it must have a strong kernel of obvious truth in it and it must reference something which can be proven. Instead of saying, "Tanaka san is doing a good job", we can say "Tanaka san's coordination of this project has been very effective and we really appreciate the way he takes care of even the smallest details. It really helps us a lot". This has to be true of course and that is where the line is drawn between flattery and praise. When we make our buyer the hero we have to back them up from our side. We have to deliver what we said, on time, on budget and at the required quality. We are building a lifetime relationships with the people in this organisation and we have to make a key goal. Burning your contact inside the organisation is guaranteed that you can never work with this buyer ever again. Our buyer is going to bat for us and we support that buyer at every step along the way, especially when problems arise. Often our own internal systems will try and subvert this effort, but we have to prevail and protect our buyer's position inside their

There is nothing worse than meeting a buyer with no problems. Theoretically, we shouldn't be meeting them at all because we should have qualified them first. After three years of Covid forcing us all on video, getting to meet a buyer face-to-face is a genuine thrill for salespeople. We are likely to meet every single buyer we can get in front of. There is also the point that a buyer may think they are "all good" and have no issues, but perhaps we can help them see that is not the case. The simplest illustration of that is the buyer thinks taking no action is free. It isn't free, for there is always a price to pay for inaction. Our job as salespeople is to point that fact out to the client. Unprofessional salespeople in Japan get straight into the detail of their solution for the buyer and just bypass the questioning bit. How do they know if their solution fits the needs of the buyer and even worse, how do they convince the buyer who believes they already have enough solutions, that this isn't the case? If the buyer thinks they are self-sufficient or are already well taken care of by another supplier, then getting the business is going to be extremely difficult. The only way to break through that wall of non-interest is to use questions to plant the seeds of doubt in their mind. Just repeating the "sales points" of the solution won't go anywhere, because mentally they have dismissed us as irrelevant. All they are doing is thinking how they can shorten this meeting and get on to something more beneficial with their time. Salespeople are talking to a lot of buyers and hear a lot of information about trends in the industry and about issues relevant now and also about issues which will surface soon. Buyers are often stuck inside the groupthink of their own companies. There is a single truth being observed internally and this can make them impervious to our solution. Our job is to shake up that belief in a single truth and point out how dangerous that idea is in a fluid and complex business world. Let me give an example. Many companies are actively working on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) for their companies. The belief is that they can tap into greater innovation by involving women and younger people more in coming up with ideas. In traditional companies these two groups are excluded, because older men dominate the direction of the firm and they distil the single truth, which everyone must follow. Talking to some clients who were early movers in the DEI arena, I found they had done a good job of the WHY component of DEI, but they hadn't been able to get to any meaningful diversity stage. Therefore, the premise of gaining greater innovation wasn't working, despite all the time and effort put into the DEI campaigns. I realised they hadn't progressed from the WHY to the HOW. Knowing this, when I speak with potential clients about DEI, I don't go into any detail about how it works or what is in specific modules, etc. I ask questions which inflame their thinking, strike fear deep into their hearts and scare the hell out of them. Remember, they have come up with their own solutions or they are using my competitor's solutions, so I have to blow all of that up with questions which challenge the accepted truths. For example, I would ask, "Change fatigue is a real thing inside companies and it accelerates when the benefits of the changes are not being seen by the team. Given you have been working in DEI for some time now, are you seeing concrete changes around innovation inside the company?". The buyer has to nominate the benefits of the DEI programme and prove that it is working. If they cannot, then I need to push harder and say, "Could it be that you are very close to a breakthrough, but the missing piece is something beyond just explaining the WHY of DEI?". I don't volunteer the HOW part of the solution, because I want them to tell that to me, rather than it comes from my side. If they say it, then it is true. If I say it, I am a salesman and they might not believe it. If they supply the answer I want and say they haven't been able to move from the WHY to the execution piece needed to get the changes leading to innovation, then I just ask them why that is and then shut up. I am drawing them into my web, through questions which are designed to destroy their belief in what they are doing and force them to open their minds up to my solution. It is a hard thing for people to admit they are failing or that they made the wrong decision to use my competitor. Because of this, the answers must come from them and I cannot be proffering the solution. If I say, "Well, what you need is to do more work around the HOW piece and fortunately we have five out of eight of our modules which specifically address the HOW piece". I will run straight into a wall of negativity to that statement, as they feel they have to defend what they are doing now and not admit the actual situation. I need to be asking questions which push them to

If you are in the consulting or selling fields, then telling buyers that what went before is now irrelevant is an attractive way to generate revenues. You can see numerous offerings in social media about the "new" dimension and their "out with the old" remonstrations. Thinking about this for Japan, what has happened here, as buyer concerns about Covid begin to ebb away. The biggest difference is we are now back in the office for 70% of companies. We can make office visits once more, after having been relegated to doing Zoom calls for the last three years. It also means that face-to-face networking events are being scheduled again, after a long hiatus. One thing I learnt during Covid was the importance of getting client mobile phone numbers into the database system. When the buyers were working from home, it was almost impossible to get hold of them. The general number on their business card would throw up some mightily unhelpful junior person, designated to answer incoming calls. Their lack of enthusiasm for that task was only surpassed by their obvious distaste for "grubby" salespeople calling the boss. "I will pass your information on and Suzuki san will call you back" was a typical riposte I received. Three years later, I am still waiting for those various Suzuki sans to call me back. Was Suzuki san actually informed that I called? Was a message passed on or did the whole promise just immediately evaporate the moment the call ended? I will never know, but I know that nobody ever called me back. For cold calls, they had worked out that if they put us through to the section chief or the division chief, they exposed themselves to being scolded for doing so and therefore they just shut down that option. Again, the go to method was "I will pass your information on and someone will call you back". No calls were returned and in this case I strongly suspect that they did absolutely nothing. What about now? Most people are back in the office today and when we call, we have a higher likelihood of catching them at work. One thing I always recommend is to leave a recorded message if their system allows it. Rather than calling and just hanging up if the answering system kicks in, at least register that you called and that you want to speak. Naturally, we shouldn't rely on them hearing the message and then calling us back. We should call back again until we get through. The fact that they have been called is there and they are mentally ready for your call when you finally get through. Getting appointments has also returned and meeting them in their office is again a possibility. I prefer to meet them in their office, because you get more immersion on their culture and branding when you can do that. It is highly convenient for them and they feel relaxed in their own environment. They can also effortlessly grab other people who may become pertinent to the conversation when we meet in their location. The questions to be asked have morphed. Now a good warm-up opening question is about what has changed for their company or business since Covid. This is a broad sweep which will immediately tell you how they have fared during Covid. It will also tell you if they are still mainly working from home or whether they have switched it to back in the office three days a week, etc. Maybe what you were discussing three years ago may be relevant still and there are additional items which they now need your help with. This warm-up question opens up channels of questioning to ascertain where the solutions are needed and allows us to quickly zero in on what we can do for them. They may try to expand post-Covid and now have a problem recruiting staff or a retain staff problem. Often, in these cases, they may need to outsource more of the business than prior to Covid. They may have invested in technological solutions to drive down their reliance on staffing. They may have had a "good" pandemic and really boosted revenues over the last three years. Now however, they are coming off those inflated highs and things are slowing down. Today they are subject to HQ instructions to freeze hiring and cut costs, as other regions leap out of the Covid frying pan into the global recession fire. We should never say "no" for the buyer and we should presume there are plenty of the things we supply which they still need until we are told differently. We don't want negative thinking such as "I talked to them three years ago, but everything will have changed now, so there is no point going back to them". Our mental frame has to be whatever they needed three years ago has probably not been solved and actually has been joined by additional needs, which will open up an even bigger market for us. Although the fundamentals of selling remain unchanged for the past three years, the access barrier is finally declining. Therefore, we must act quickly and reach out to our clients. They have new requirements and we have the solutions, so we need not be shy about contac

There is a certain well known Japanese recruitment focused company, who keeps calling me at regular intervals. Maybe there is nothing particularly outstanding about a firm doing follow-up, but I am impressed. The reason this firm stands out amongst others for me is that the people calling me change from time to time. Usually, with sales teams, someone is the designated salesperson for that firm and when that person leaves, the relationship falls in a hole. No one else in the company does any follow-up or if they do, they don't sustain it. This firm has been calling over the last five years and the callers keep changing, but the calls keep coming – they haven't given up on me. When I think about that effort, I wonder how they do that? What system are they using which makes sure that someone from that company is well organised enough to call me? The second thing I reflect on is how well organised are we as a sales company? How well organised am I? There is no doubt we suffer from the falling through the cracks problem when people leave. It is rarely the case that we can guarantee to keep going with the buyer when the people change. Sometimes it is chemistry and sometimes it is effort. You can work on the effort component. Keep in mind though, that, by definition, we are often dealing with the 80% of our team, who contribute a 20% share of the results and likely cause 80% of our problems. If one of those people takes over the new client, then strap on your seat belt for a rocky ride. Now chemistry is even more difficult. The previous salesperson built up a close personal relationship with the buyer, which has now been broken and needs to be re-established. It is a fact that we don't necessarily get on well with all our buyers. It can be personality, style, communication differences and varying expectations. Sometimes, the new salesperson just cannot keep that buyer with the firm and we accept that. We have to differentiate between laziness, stupidity and genuine lack of fit though. The other factor we need to consider is stickability. The capacity to stick with the prospect and turn them into a client. We read about these studies around eight touches needed before we can close the deal. I don't know about these statistics for Japan, but I know it is very easy to let the buyer get away from lack of organisation, poor time sensitivity and ineffective effort. I also know that for many salespeople, one or two touches is the maximum and if it requires eight, then no wonder no deals get done. In my case, Covid has slightly lifted in Japan. Instead of being trapped in a tiny box in a screen during an online event, I can actually get out there and risk catching Covid and network in person. So now I meet people after a long break and then I follow-up. I tell my team we need to all be talking to at least 50 people at any given time. Some will do nothing, some will do something – eventually and some will do something now. We just don't know who is who until we push things along. I always copy the previous email into the next one, when I don't get a response to the first email. I am trying to shame them into answering me. Once upon a time, people would be polite and answer your email, but no more. Like me, they are simply drowning in emails and we get buried in the bottom of their inbox. Always send the follow-up email at 8.30am or 1.00pm. We want to elevate our email above the rest of the competing emails. We can get to the top of their inbox early in the morning, when they start work and after lunch, when they return to their desk. There is little point emailing after 4.00pm, because it will get buried and then lost in the crush. Sending a follow-up email at 5.00pm on a Friday evening would have to be confirmed as insane behaviour. What happens if email number two gets no response? Well, I send the next reminder copying the previous two emails into this one. I don't labour the point. I make the email as concise and easy to absorb as possible, by just asking one question: "Any progress?". Those who are never going to answer will ignore this one too, but there will be those holdouts who will realise they have a need, but have been swamped by other stuff and haven't got back to me yet. There will be those who are overcome with guilt for not respecting my emails and will write back, even if it is to say "no thanks". That is fine too, at least we got a response and we know where we stand with this buyer. I stop at three and occasionally, I will go to number four, before I give up. I cease contacting them because I don't want to impact my personal brand by being seen as unreasonable, spamming them and being too pushy. If I ever get pushback on my follow-up activities, I just ask them, "How many times do you want your sales team to follow-up with your prospects". They have nowhere to go, because they all know they wish their salespeople were more active around their own follow-up efforts. So let's find systems which will help