The Sales Japan Series

We hit hard times often and quickly in sales. Deals have been done and the solutions delivered and then nothing. The income flow of revenues suddenly dries up and the revenues attached to your name are looking very sad. There is a monthly target or a quarterly target or both and you are not scratching. It is embarrassing to see your name on a spreadsheet of salespeople showing the forecast for the rest of the year and you have little or no income to show for yourself in the months ahead. In sales, there is no place to hide. Maybe, could, possibly, hopefully, eventually are meaningless words in the word of sales. Bosses want to see the colour of the money and are not interested in fairy stories about deals in the offing. What do you do? Here are some ideas: 1. Knuckle down and go hard seeing buyers. Basically, we all need to be talking to about 50 clients at any given time. One third will do nothing, one third will do something eventually and the remainder will do something now. If you are talking to 15 clients then that means we are left with a tiny dribble of deal flow coming through the pipeline. We are basically fishing in a small barrel rather than in a river or an ocean and we need to be seeing more clients. That thought triggers a range of problems. Who can we call? The obvious answers are lapsed clients, orphan clients who have seen their sales rep disappear and now no one is taking care of them and new clients we have never had any contact with but who look similar to the profile of our best clients. Covid decimated the event business and with it networking opportunities to meet potential clients. Finally, we are seeing networking returning and we can attend events in person and talk to potential clients in the flesh, rather than on a miserable, tiny screen in an online call. Many clients may have stopped buying during Covid but they may now be opening up their purse strings, as we hit a new financial year. We have to make sure it is us they are talking to, when they decide to jump back into solution purchase activities. They will buy from someone, so our job is to make sure we are top of mind and tip of tongue. 2. Develop grit and tough it out In Japan, buyers are never on your timetable. Yes, you need some revenue before the end of the month or the quarter and so what. That is what you want and clients are usually not cooperating, so get over it. You have to dig deep and find the guts to keep going regardless of how many deals fall over, how many rejections you get or any of the thousand indignities which the world of sales throws up for salespeople. Activity is the cure for a slump. Brute strength is needed to eke out some sales. Make the cold calls, go to the events, write to clients, call lapsed buyers and keep going regardless of how miserable the results are. Poor results can wilt our will and destroy our confidence. We have to put that aside and just barrel onward until we force a break in our favour. 3. Review your sale's techniques We all get into bad habits. Especially when things have been going well. We tend to cut corners, shave off some of the sophistication and skip steps we should have followed. Go back to the basics and do the pre-contact research. Gather information and insights on their marketplace, their competitors and the direction of the industry. Come to the meeting armed with better quality questions based off this knowledge component. Find out how decisions are made and see if there are people not present in the meeting whose opinion internally will have a strong influence on the due diligence. What are their concerns and what can your interlocutor do to convince them this is a good idea which should be supported? Get together with colleagues and do some roleplay practice. This should be aimed at when the buyer tells you the price is too high, or your quality isn't good enough or your delivery is going to take too long or the other main reasons for buyers not to proceed. In any industry or market there will be similar pushback comments and we have to be ready to handle them. Don't forget to make sure the first words out of your mouth are "May I ask you why you say that?" when you hit pushback. We need to get more information before we try to answer the pushback and for us to know from which angle we need to mount our defence. Slumps, downturns, failings are the norm for salespeople and we have to face that reality. Good times are just an illusion to convince us we are good at sales. Bad times teach us hard but valuable lessons and brings us back to the reality of this harsh world we inhabit. We have to break free of the gravitational pull of giving up and collapsing mentally and physically. No matter how bad it gets, just put one foot in front of the other and keep going and going and going.

This was very frustrating. It became obvious from the client's email response that there was a sizeable gap between what I thought was going on and the reality. How could that be? I am an experienced salesperson with a solid track record of sales; I have written two books on selling in Japan, one in English and one in Japanese, I have had a weekly blog on the subject for nearly seven years. I teach selling techniques as part of my job. What went wrong? In the email response, he clarified that he was only thinking of a very minimum role for us in the sales training process. Now that was not obvious to me when we met and had our discussion. This was perplexing. I have been replaying that sales call in my mind looking for what did I wrong. Where was the bread crumb trail that I missed? The questioning phase of the sales call is crucial because if you don't know what the buyer wants, how do you satisfy them, how do you fix their issues, solve their problems? We know many salespeople don't ask questions because they are too busy going straight into the nitty gritty detail of explaining their solution. Let's put it in simple terms. This is the problem of not asking what is the buyer's favourite colour, which is blue and then just talking endlessly about your awesome range in pink. It just doesn't work well to get the sale. What if the buyer's answer isn't that clear? This can happen, of course. Not every buyer is articulate or well thought through or well considered or smart. Often, they don't have a clear picture of what they need. Operating from a flawed central proposition can also complicate matters, because not every client is sophisticated in understanding their own core underlying issues. As salespeople, we can make the problem worse too. We ask questions which get them thinking and considering the problem from fresh perspectives. Normally, this is a good thing because we want to rock them back on their heels and have them thinking, "We haven't thought about that" or "We haven't prepared for that". This is where we establish ourselves as the trusted partner with the buyer, by bringing greater value and a fresh angle to the issue. However, we may also trigger some concerns they haven't thought about as yet and raise issues which until now have lay quietly dormant. Thinking back to that sales meeting, I realise I didn't dig in deep enough on the issues they were facing. Our solution was a good fit for them and I fell in love with that idea. Unfortunately, that email showed me they hadn't fallen in love with it. I should have stopped talking and should have looked for additional barriers, especially internal barriers within the company, which would prevent this deal from happening. Sitting right in front of me, across the meeting room table, I could see the wheels of the Swiss watch inside his brain whizzing around as he was obviously processing a lot of information and possibilities. Instead of just noticing that he was just doing a lot of thinking, I should have asked him what he was thinking about. I needed to do this, to flesh out where he was in the internal conversation he was having with himself, which was going on silently in his mind. If I had said, "What is going through your mind at the moment?", that would have been a very disarming way of tapping into his thought process at that point. He may have shared what was holding him back from accepting my proposition, instead of getting the rejection later in an email as part of the meeting follow-up. I could have dealt with it on the spot, while we were face-to-face. I should also have dug in for areas where he had concerns about this solution I was offering. As I have noted, I fell in love with my solution for him, because I could see how this would really help him. I was convinced myself and that just led me down the path of more detail on how the solution would help him. He was sitting there thinking why this wouldn't work in their situation, because he felt they could do it themselves, to a great enough extent. Grant Cardone, the well-known American sales trainer, is very good at this. He challenges the buyer to justify making the investment to buy Grant's subscription video courses. He says things like, "How could you justify spending $10,000 to buy this subscription for your people?". It is quite clever, because now the buyer has to become an advocate for Grant's business. They have to justify the rationale and the pricing. He is flushing out resistance on the spot, so that he can deal with it. Maybe this wouldn't work in every case in Japan, but this buyer was quite Westernised and educated overseas, so he could have deal with this approach. Maybe a more local Japanese buyer would have been simply confused by the proposition. I am still annoyed this one got away. Not for the size of the deal, but because I couldn't read the buyer well enough during the meeting and I made too many assumptions about what was going on. I pushed him to do something a

Victor Antonio is one of my favourite podcasters on sales and he recently had an episode on reducing friction in the sale. This got me thinking about how would that work in Japan? A big barrier to sales in Japan is the culture. I remember a business contact of mine, a long time Tokyo resident, who moved from Japan to Hong Kong a few years ago, pre-pandemic. I asked him what differed from doing business there compared to here. He noted a big difference in Hong Kong was businesspeople there were "interested in doing business". I asked him what he meant by that? He replied, "In Japan when you go to a networking event, people are not interested in meeting new people all that much. There is a lot of hesitancy in Japan and a fear of new people they don't know. In Hong Kong, everyone is interested to find out if there is a way to do business together and build their businesses". I thought about that statement and actually it is true. When I go to the Japanese language only business networking events, as opposed to the international Chamber of Commerce events conducted in English, there is a big difference. At the Japanese only events, very few people will walk up to someone they don't know and introduce themselves. I do it, but I am a gaijin and the same rules don't apply to me as much as they do to Japanese businesspeople. I have had to train my Japanese sales team to walk up to people they don't know and meet them, because left to their own devices, they would do what everyone else does, which is not all that much. The accepted play here is to seek people you already know and talk with them and if they can introduce you to someone they know, then that is how you meet new people. I noticed with my team that they would meet someone new and then get stuck with that person all evening. They did this because that was a lot easier than bounding up to total strangers and meeting them. I always had a debrief with them on how many business cards they exchanged, to see how hard they "worked the room". The latter, one of my favourite activities to find potential clients. In the early days it was pathetic, but after years of water on rock, they are now pretty good. The point is the way things work here, strangers are by definition radioactive and have to be treated with great caution. The other point is you can network here in a Japanese context and find new buyers, if you have the leadership guts to make sure it happens rather than hoping it will happen organically. This fear of the unknown extends to decision-making being slow and tedious. No one gets fired for missing a business opportunity, failing to save money or not identifying new areas for growth. I was talking to a foreign business executive who worked as a CFO for a Japanese company in Europe. He had identified a way to reduce their expenses, but his Japanese Country Head boss would never agree to it, because it varied from what had been done in the past by his predecessors. In other words, there was the risk of a fresh approach being weighed against the additional benefit. Japanese business conservatism identified doing nothing as the safest decision on his watch while leading in that foreign clime. Invariably, a change in supply represents a risk and if we are the one trying to break into the supply chain as a new entrant, we have to make sure we can reduce that conservatism as much as possible. The people we are talking to in the company are only a small section of the decision-making spider's web inside the firm. We need to know what the other parts of the spider's web are concerned about and try to address those worries,so that they can buy from us. It is not always easy to pry that information out of the buyer, but we have to keep hammering away at it or we will never move the deal froward. We need to get on that first rung of the supply ladder, thus establishing our credibility and reliability as a trusted partner. This will require some creativity, far beyond what will be needed in other markets and we will have to convince our overseas HQ, that this is what we need to do to crack the Japanese market. Often, they are not supportive enough but they do a lot of complaining about the lack of results. We find ourselves caught in a dilemma without relief. We might offer a results-based deal, where they pay nothing unless we deliver for them according to an agreed outcome. Getting agreement on how success will be measured is critical for this to work, which in some instances can be devilish to achieve. There may also be quite a delay between the start of the process and the results coming in, which can be hard to swallow, but swallow it we must. We could offer a 100% money-back guarantee to make the decision easier. This won't recover the time spent, but it will keep the investment safe in money terms and it won't show up as a financial disaster if things don't work out as expected. Trial shipments are always good to test the system, quality and consistency of

Listening to a young salesperson in his first sale's role talking about being nervous to present to a high powered, senior company President, made me think about that. As we all get older, we forget about our younger "age and stage" evolutions in business. Somehow, we imagine that in those days, we were exactly as we are now. A conversation like that got me reflecting whether I was the same, when I was starting out in sales? I probably was, but it has all coalesced into the mists of time and I frankly can't pinpoint any of the emotions I may have been experiencing. It raises the excellent question though, about how we in sales should regard the buyer? Japan makes it very easy. The buyer is not King, but GOD and that is that. GOD knows it too and so likes to run the show when the salesperson turns up. Some enjoy pushing salespeople around as well, just to emphasise how sublime they are. None of this is likely to end in a sale, so why put yourself through this nonsense. We would all do better to find a kinder, gentler more cooperative GOD as buyer. In a word, someone "normal". In my view, there is absolutely no place in sales for the buyer to be running the sales call. That is our role. The seller's job is to seize hold of the responsibility for the sales call and run that meeting along tried-and-true lines, which will result in a win-win outcome for everyone. In Japan, the first order of business is to build rapport with some initial small talk. Japan, as a culture, is brilliant at this, so for Japanese salespeople, this is like breathing – they don't even think about it. If you are awkward in social contexts, shy or introverted, then this may present some substantial problems. The simple answer is it won't fix itself, so this barrier requires communications training and practice and really, it doesn't require that much complexity. The point is to get them talking so that we can conclude which personality style they are and so better temper our approach to suit how they like to operate, rather than how we like to do things. A simple question such as, "How long have you been with the firm?" is enough to get them talking or, "How long has your office been in this location?", are good enough starters. The point is, we want them doing the talking early, rather than us blathering away. If they are a Driver type, they will be all "time is money", be brief and want to get down to business. If they are Expressive types, they will talk about the big picture. Either way, they are bound to be assertive and confident. If they are Analyticals, then they will be into facts, statistics, evidence, proof, numbers, etc. If they are Amiables, they will want to get to know us better as human beings and they will check to see if they are comfortable with us. Those in the latter two categories are likely to be less assertive, rather quieter and more reflective than those in the former category. Once we know which basic style they prefer, we can switch our communication style to match theirs. Our basic personality remains the same, but we start speaking in a different language. The next step is to seek GOD's permission to ask questions. In Western business meetings, this step isn't necessary and we can just wade in with questions. In Japan, that is often not the case. They have trained the Japanese buyer to expect a "pitch", which they can then destroy, in order to eliminate any potential risk from this purchase decision. If we have our correct kokorogamae or true intention sorted out, then we should have no fear about asking questions. We always have in the forefront of our mind that we are not after a sale. The re-order is the goal, so the leaping off point is totally different. Is there a match between what they need and what we have? If there is no synergy, then we need to extract ourselves and go find a buyer who we can serve. Our kokorogamae informs us we are here to help the buyer succeed and in their success, will be located our success. This can sound rather trite, but so many salespeople are there for themselves and the buyer is just a glorified ATM, from whom they can extract money. If we have the right intention of helping the buyer to succeed, then we should have no fear of the buyer, no matter how prestigious the firm, no matter how stratospheric their title, no matter how much dough is involved. We will quickly know from their response to our questions if we can help them or not and if we can, then we are "duty bound" to do all that we can, to see their business succeed. The metaphor I like is – in a business, not medical sense – we have the cure for corporate cancer. Like a medical doctor we are duty bound to make sure as many cancer patients as possible get the cure. This is the same in sales - our solutions are the cure for their corporate ills and we must do our best to help them. If that is your mentality, then rank, seniority, position power on the part of the buyer all become irrelevant.

In Japan we don't have the custom of haggling when we go to shop. The price is the price is the price, in the consumer world and if you don't like it, don't buy it. In the B2B world though there is often a price negotiation. This can be related to volumes being purchased for tangible goods or it could be for services as well. Tangible products are somehow psychologically easier to price defend than intangibles like service provision. The item is right there in front of you, you can inspect it, weigh it, feel it. Services are rather a mystery when it comes to pricing. I was coaching a sales team recently for a service offering and this service had a time bound element to it. Time bound can often drive the price up in the case of tangible goods, because it is the last item in the store or in inventory. In this instance, the opposite was the case. They were offering a discount to move the sale forward. Whenever I hear salespeople are discounting their offer, the bristles stand up on the back of my neck. I don't like to hear this type of talk. The service has a value and a price has been attached to it and that is what they should be selling. Untrained salespeople however, are very quick to start conditioning buyers to expect a discount by dropping the price immediately. I don't like that unforced error type of sales behaviour either. In this case the service price was four hundred thousand yen as the list price and they started their client contact with an offer of two hundred and fifty thousand yen. What a massive mistake. When the price gets dropped so dramatically by 37.5%, without any pushback on the four hundred thousand by the potential buyer, there is no floor established. Now the buyer is lost. They have no idea what this service is worth and the immediate inclination is to be like a shark tasting blood in the water and go for bigger bites out of the pricing. If the seller can drop the price so quickly, then maybe they can drop it even further, so ridiculous counter offers start to spring up. This seller must be desperate is the idea and now let's find out just how desperate they are, by driving the price right down to oblivion. Two hundred and fifty thousand yen becomes the ceiling and the buyer explores where the floor is and that means starting super low on the pricing and seeing how much they have to come up. In this example, if it was me on the end of that offer, I would say, "this is not in my budget, so there is no allocation for this service. The best I can do is ninety thousand". There is no pressure on me and I can nominate any crazy number I like. Now the discount is at 77.5%. The reason I am doing this is because I have no clear idea of the value of the service because the salesperson is only talking price to me and telling me if I take the offer by "x" date, I can get it at this discount. Am I in a hurry – no. Do I care when the cut-off date is - no. The better approach would be to sell the service at four hundred thousand yen and explain why that number is justified by detailing the value behind it. I wouldn't even mention the cut-off date, because that is pressure on me and not for the buyer. You could argue that this effort has been previously made and hasn't produced enough sales, so there is a need for a desperate last push to get some money in before the cut off date. The reason I don't like this approach is we are training the buyer to slam us with demands for discounts, every time we contact them. When we call next time, all they remember is we are the salesperson with no floor on their pricing and we can push the seller around hard and get a big discount. We would be better to let the money walk away and allow the cut off date to pass. We should try again at another time, when there isn't any time pressure being applied to us. If we were going to discount, then where possible it should be in exchange for a volume purchase. The discount increments should be small and the floor price should be set high. We need our BATNA – best alternative to a negotiated agreement. In other words, we fix the minimum price we will sell at and we walk away from the buyer, rather than the other way around. In this example, I would have recommended a discount of only 12.5% which is not insignificant and set the price at three hundred and fifty thousand, only if the buyer pushed back on the price. I wouldn't have mentioned any deadlines, because that information is giving the buyer more power relative to the seller, If they still pushed on price after we offered the discount, then the next drop would be ten thousand yen, so the offer is now at three hundred and forty thousand yen. The bottom would be set at three hundred and thirty thousand yen, a 17.5% discount and that would be the end of the discussion. I do this to inform this is a hard floor and I will walk away, if you don't take this offer, after you have beaten the hell out of me on price. The buyer has to have a sense of a win here and for that

Role play is one of the keys to improving in sales. We are in a psychologically safe environment where we can experiment and learn. The majority of salespeople however are practicing on the client. That is an extremely bad idea, but they do it anyway. The main reason is the firm is not well organised or the salespeople are not well organised. Even if the firm isn't helping, grab a colleague and agree to help each other by using role play practice before you see any clients. It doesn't have to be for hours at a time, but fifteen to twenty minutes will be a big help in refining what you will say and how you will say it. There has to be different version of the same talk. Some clients will be incredibly detail oriented, sceptical and wanting tons of proof, before they will consider buying anything from lowly salespeople. When we do this practice, we need to marshal all the proof we have to explain why this solution is a safe option. Another client will be the opposite. They are big picture people and don't like getting tangled up in the weeds of all the detail. We need to go macro too and talk about the way this will elevate the firm's status and success. Some clients are very focused on the relationship and will want to have a cup of tea and get to know us. That conversation is bound to be soft, non-pushy and allowing time to work its magic to get the deal – eventually!!! The "time is money" client will be driving the meeting, they are always in a hurry and want the key points so they can get back to what they were doing. What will be the outcomes they can expect, when can they get them and how much will it cost? Forget about the cup of tea. Doing a single version of the role play the way we normally function, means we are missing the options to appeal to the other 75% of buyers who are not like us. We need to speak these four languages and we need to spend time practicing them. The other three styles are not natural for us, so they need refinement. This takes commitment and practice. If you are a "time is money" type yourself, slowing down and having a cup of tea is the last thing you would ever think to do. To drop the strength in your voice, slow down your speech and fit in with someone totally different to you, is a form of torture. It requires work and patience to make it happen. Ideally, the practice would be geared up for the clients we will meet that day and we may need to work on a couple of versions in preparation. If we don't have anyone in particular that day, then we can work on all four types. The key is to make it as realistic as possible. Ask your partner to become an actor and play the role of the client, matching the way they conduct themselves in sales meetings. It won't be a perfect match, but if the client is time poor, we have to practice with that in mind and truncate a lot of explanation, get to the key points, make a very assertive recommendation and be prepared to be ushered out of the meeting in very short order. We shouldn't just do one repetition either. We should do at least three repetitions, with feedback, to get the practice cemented. The feedback is important too. Don't expect your partner to be a genius of feedback and know how to do it properly. You can tell them what you are working on and ask for their feedback on that particular point. Ask them what you are doing well – the good – and what you can do to improve – the better. Left to their own devices, the majority of people will immediately start demolishing your confidence and telling you a million things you are doing which are hopeless or wrong. As we get the feedback, we polish what we are doing and we can step it up in the next practice. Doing it once and doing it three times should be dramatically different and becoming much more persuasive. Often though, wd do it once and then move on to something else. Think about the rest of your experience. When did that ever happen? We had to repeat things at school in order to recall them. In sports, we did massive repetition practice. When we are down at the gym, we don't do just one rep on a set of weights and leave it at that expecting to get stronger. Why would sales be something that gets a "once over lightly" touch and suddenly we are geniuses? If the firm is well organised, we can do our three repetitions and then rotate partners after each set, to get a different feel. All of this requires the time to be allocated and the session to be led by the manager. You would think that was the most obvious thing in the world, but often this is not what happens and there isn't the needed repetition or feedback in play. The manager just pushes for results, but doesn't invest any time or effort to help that occur. That isn't very smart. Role play is important and role play done professionally is a lot more important. How are things down at your shop?

Salespeople are constantly talking to clients, but if you think about it, clients don't have that many conversations in a year with salespeople, so there is a massive power imbalance in play. That imbalance is in favour of the salesperson, if they know what they are doing. Humans have survived on the basis of many factors, physical and mental and certainly pattern recognition is one of those crucial skills we have accumulated. When we encounter any situation we search our memory for our experiences of a similar situation, as a guide to what are some of the possibilities available to us. This applies to sales as well. When the client says a certain thing, we have a huge database of other sales conversations and outcomes to draw upon, to filter what we are hearing and to also prompt us to do what we did last time, which worked out well and we got the deal done. We are searching for patterns to recognise to assist us with marshalling our response. The problem though is a lot of this is just left to memory and as we know, the faintest ink is more reliable and superior to the best memory. In other words, we need to capture this information, so that we can remind ourselves of the patterns we have encountered. We work in teams and across the sales team, there is a tremendous resource base of patterns and experiences, but it is rare that sales teams will capture these gems. Every salesperson is an island and this is especially the case if there is an individual sales commission remuneration system in place. The better approach would be to get everyone together and share their experiences and patterns. For example, Japanese buyers think they are GOD and they don't brook insolent salespeople asking them questions. All they want is to hear the pitch, so that they can tear it limb from limb. How can we sell anything if we don't ask questions to find out if what we have is what they need? So we need to seek permission to ask questions first. There will be certain patterns around asking for this permission which have proven more successful than others. We should all work on using the more successful approaches, rather than trial and error or just trying to work it out ourselves. And we should capture the best practice patterns. When we get to presenting the solution we go through a five phase structure. We talk about the details of the solution – weight, cost, size, colour, delivery timings, etc. Next we draw out the general benefits of our solution. This is a great topic to gather the total possibilities available and we should make a record of these for future reference when we speak with clients about the widget they need. In phase three, we go deeper and we talk about the specifics benefits for this particular firm if they use our solution. Most salespeople never get to this phase, so what a great opportunity for the professionals to burn off their competitors by using this technique. This is also where the pattern prediction comes in. Across the sales team there will be people who have dealt with this same industry sector and with similar clients. We ourselves may be encountering this type of business for the first time, so we have few reference points to talk about the successes of our widget with this prospective client. Where have others in the team seen this particular application of the general benefit in this type of business with this type of firm? We need to capture this and store away the information for when we need it. By pulling on the total power of the team we can best position ourselves with the client. When we meet the client we have no idea what they need and we spend a considerable amount of time trying to understand their business, their situation and trying to fix upon the best solution for them. In Japan, this solution provision usually comes at the second meeting and so there is time to work on plumbing the database of similar cases before the next meeting. We are looking for predictive success patterns to help us assure the client that what we have will deliver what they want. Assuring the client that this solution works is vital, but they may not be inclined to take our word for it, so we need to present some evidence – this is phase four. The best evidence is a similar firm's experiences especially one coming from a similar industry sector. This is where we need to be capturing this type of information across the firm, from all of the salespeople. One salesperson may not be able to build up a big enough pool of similar cases, but collectively, the chances are high that the firm has covered off a lot of possibilities which can be used as evidence. Over time, we can build up a strong library of patterns where our solution has worked well and we can convince the client it will work for them too. In phase five we test for resistance and use a trial close asking "how does that sound so far?". The secret is to tap the entire salesforce for their predictive patterns, capture them and get them into

I was chatting with a prospective client about a proposal I had submitted and he offered this feedback from one of his colleagues from the senior management team, "we don't need to bring in trainers, we can use LinkedIn Learning instead". I was shocked to hear that from the lips of a senior leader. Is this guy really a leader? I have used LinkedIn Learning myself and is cheap, but I found the quality is also quite various. Individuals can shoot some training video content and LinkedIn Learning uploads it on to their platform. The main problem is that self-paced online courses have a tremendously low completion rate of only 3%. This leader may sign people up for online courses, be they LinkedIn Learning or from other online providers, but the outcomes won't be there. This is magnified in the case of sales training, because of the nature of the beast. We teach Leadership, Communication, Presentations, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Sales. Sales is by far the hardest subject to teach. The content isn't the issue, it is the attitude of the people in the class. It seems to me very few people in sales have ever had any formal training or even read a book on the subject. They are in sales and have cobbled together a sales methodology from their bosses or colleagues or through trial and error and they are fixed on their way of doing things. This results in a patchwork of sorts, where they get certain parts of the sales process to work for them but there are big gaps still, because they are doing things in a hit and miss fashion. In Japan, we find there are key parts of the sales process skill set, which are severely underdone. Having said that, generally speaking, building rapport is well executed because that is a component of the culture. There is also a strong tendency to use referrals, which is good. However, there is a bad tendency to rely on the brand too much to do the selling for you. Japan is a risk averse nation and dealing with big brands is considered a safe option. That isn't so great if you are selling for a company which isn't a big brand though. Let's explore some of the areas we have noticed are weaknesses for Japanese salespeople entering our classes. Asking questions of the buyer is a major flaw in the sales technique of most Japanese salespeople. Part of the issue is cultural and part is ignorance about how to ask. Culturally, the buyer is seen as GOD and you are just there to tell GOD all the details about your widget and GOD will decide what happens next. In this format, the buyer controls the sales call not the seller. That is a bad idea if you want to make any sales. The salesperson's job is to guide the buyer to a "yes" decision, if that is the best outcome for the buyer's business. The problem is neither the buyer nor the seller have any idea whether that is possible or not, until some basic questions have been covered off. We need permission to ask GOD a few questions. Here is the five part "Permission From GOD Formula" salespeople need: 1. Explain who you are 2. Explain what you do 3. Explain who else you have done this for and what were the results 4. Suggest "maybe" you can do the same for them 5. Ask, "in order to know if that is possible or not may I ask a few questions?". Once we have received permission from GOD, we can explore what they want to achieve with their business and why they are not where they need to be. This is a four part formula: 1. As is – where are you now? 2. Should be – where do you want to be in three to five years? 3. Barrier – what is stopping you from getting there fast enough? 4. What will success mean for you personally? Asking these questions will tell us if what we have will be what they need. If we don't have it, then we should stop wasting everyone's time and go find someone who does need our solution. Getting pushback in Japan often triggers an automatic twenty percent discount, which is an extremely bad idea from every perspective. Why is there pushback in the first place? This comes from a poor effort explaining what difference your solution will make to their business. A proper explanation formula has five elements: 1. Explain the facts, details, spec, etc., of the solution 2. Link these to the benefits your solution provides to the buyer 3. Extrapolate these benefits into how it will make their organisation more effective 4. Reference a similar client and the results they achieved using your solution 5. Do a trial close ("How does that sound so far?") to flush out any questions or resistance. When getting resistance, we don't argue the toss with the buyer and use our magnificent force of will to overcome them. The first thing out of our mouth has to be, "may I ask you why you say that?". Now the locus of accountability has swung back to the buyer, who has to justify why they are saying the price is too high etc. We are no longer on the backfoot trying to argue the point. We immediately get more insight and information on why and how this objec

How could we lose track of buyers? Unfortunately it is very easy. That nice person we have been dealing with inside the company, the one with whom we have built a solid relationship, where the trust is brimming and the bonhomie is pumping, is transferred to another section or they leave the company for another job. Suddenly we are left with nothing. If it is an internal transfer, we may find there is a new person who decides they will put their own stamp on things. They bring in their own suppliers who are their favourites. They have a competing established relationship or maybe they don't like the cut of our jib. If a new person is being hired in to replace the incumbent, then there will be a break in the traffic for a couple of months and before you know it, things have begun to drift and we have trouble making the connection with the new person. Maybe there is a global pandemic and everything shuts down for a couple of years. The company has stopped spending on what we offer and when we go back to rekindle the relationship quite a lot has changed. The people may be gone, the budgets may be gone, the strategy may be new and different. Basically, we have to start again. We know the history with the client, but often the new people we are dealing with have no idea who we are and we are basically doing a cold call to this company. Some are working in the office and some are still at home. Getting hold of people puts us in quandary. That iron wall of disinterest on the part of those answering the phone is there in all its confronting glory. In Japan, if you don't know the actual name of the person, you are almost guaranteed to never get through to the function you need to be speaking with. "We will take a message and let them know" in my experience never translates into getting a call back, no matter how many times you call. The junior person answering the phone fully believes their duty is to keep you as far away from their company as possible and they are incredibly diligent in that endeavour. If you ask them the name of the person performing that functional role they won't tell you, as if this information was a major corporate secret and you are an industrial spy. I remember there was a change of President in an international luxury firm here we had been dealing with and I tried to speak with the new President. Unfortunately, I didn't know the name of the replacement and no matter how many times I called, the young woman answering the phone would block me and was most unhelpful. Frustrating doesn't even begin to describe the feeling. I never did meet the new President What can we do? If there is going to be an internal transfer, these usually take place every April in Japan, as that is the start of the new financial year. It is a good practice to check with our champion that they are not getting transferred to a new section and we shouldn't assume they will be staying put. Every year we should get it into our calendar to check in on any likely staff movements which might effect them. If they flag a move, then we need to ask them to sprinkle the sacred water on our brow and anoint us into the bosom of their colleague who is taking over. Being introduced by our champion is very powerful because it helps us to overcome any likelihood their replacement may go crazy and introduce our competitor. There is an implicit obligation to honour what their predecessor was doing, otherwise it looks like an oblique criticism of their work. When we meet the new person we have to start again and build the trust. What personality style are they? Highly analytical, time is money, have a cup of tea together or a big picture person? What communication stye do they prefer? We need to rejig everything. If there is a new person being recruited from outside then the whole effort becomes more difficult. Our existing champion has left the building, so they have no influence any more on what happens. How will we know when they have recruited the new person? This is not very easy because when we call, we get that junior person who is highly motivated to tell us absolutely nothing about what is going inside the firm. We can try and ask our champion to nominate someone in the same section or in a related section, who will take our call and who will share the name of the new person. Another tack is to ask the junior person who usually answers the phone to help us meet the new person. We can explain that Suzuki san is leaving and we know that it will take a few months for the replacement to arrive and that we would like to call them every now and then and get an update, so that we can meet the new person. Given we have a relationship with Suzuki san, there is a super slim chance they will agree to help us. Sometimes our champion is the President of the organisation. As we know, corporate life can be brutal and suddenly your President champion is out of the organisation. This has happened to me a couple of times recently. One was through a

The front row of sales training courses will often have the best salesperson sitting there trying to get even better. The salesperson who is failing or is a mediocre performer is nowhere to be found or is there, but is solidly resisting the content and approach. I read this many years ago and decided I would attend all sales training I could get and that I would be in that front row because I wanted to meet the top performers. I walk the talk and recently I attended a webinar on sales for a Chamber of Commerce being run by my competitor. I wasn't there to spy but there to learn. In the same vein, I read books on sales and listen to podcasts of the subject. I was listening to one recently where the guest being interviewed mentioned four excellent attributes in salespeople. He noted Coachability, Urgency, Resilience and Curiosity. You would say that is pretty obvious and fair enough, but still these are not always present in salespeople. Coachability is an interesting one. At the superficial level people say they are ready to learn, to improve but the rubber meets the road when it comes to changing habits and shaping behaviours. In fact, they are not really coachable because they resist change, even though they are not doing well in sales and have in fact never done especially well in sales. You would think their numbers would inform them that they need to try a new approach, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They are in their Comfort Zone and they don't want to emerge from there, to do what is needed to improve. Sales has a big accountability aspect to it. Sales leaders only take a certain amount of responsibility for their salespeople, because they see the individual has to be accountable for their inputs and effort and really, it is up to them to do the work themselves. There isn't a lot of hand holding going on in the world of sales management, because the exit door is the preferred mechanism to solve problematic salespeople who won't change or can't improve. There is no great appetite to rescue them. For Japan, this won't work anymore though and the rescue part or the amelioration part is becoming more needed. Declining population, in particular declining youth population, means there is a shortage of staff and especially salespeople. We can't expect even competent people anymore and have to take what we can get. That also means we have to pump more energy into getting them to be effective in sales. Urgency is about speed of taking action and having excellent time management methods in place. There is a lot to do in sales. As we get deals we get busier and when there aren't any deals, we get busy trying to get clients – it doesn't stop. Disorganised people get into sales and they stay disorganised making it hard to be successful. I will bet that if you peel back the factors behind why a salesperson is struggling, their poor time management skills will be a prominent factor. This is not complex though. The Time Management Quadrant Two – Not Urgent but Important is where the planning has to get done and the Urgent and Important is where we live for the rest of the time. Planning means setting out our goals and then matching our priority schedule against the time required to get them completed. The key is to plan first and then follow the plan, which seems to defeat the vast majority of salespeople. We have to work with a sense of time poor urgency to make sure we can get everything done, which needs to get done and we need to know what is the order in which it should be done. Resilience is all about self-belief in the face of rejection and failure. I have to keep in mind they are not rejecting Greg Story. They are rejecting my offer in this business cycle, at this point in the financial year, at this point in their internal planning, in this offer's current format, at this particular price point, with their sense of relative value, etc. Winston Churchill's great quote is needed for salespeople about "going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm?". Most of the time we fail in sales. Most of the time the client doesn't make a decision or goes with a competitor or rejects our offer. There is a fine line between learning from failure and being overwhelmed with self-doubt. Of course, we have to reflect on what we could have done better without beating ourselves up, such that we can't get back in the saddle after having been thrown. It is easy to spiral down further when things are not going well, but we have to dust ourselves off and keep going. We need to do more study of the industry, the firm, the techniques of sales, do more role play practice, make a bigger effort to find prospects, make more calls and see more buyers. Curiosity is about really trying to understand the buyer's needs. If all you are doing is blabbing on endlessly about the features of your widget, then this idea has no meaning for you. If we have a genuine desire to fully understand what is driving the buyer's problems, we a

You have done an excellent job as a salesperson, hitting your numbers and getting a strong reputation as a "producer". The big bosses like the cut of your jib and decide that they will promote you into the role of player/coach to lead the sales team. No training is provided of course. It assumed that as you know how to get results, you can just sprinkle your pixie dust on the rest of the crew and clone those good outcomes. The first thing you discover is that what made you awesome, is different to what will work for the rest of the team. "Do what I do" sounds highly reasonable, except they are not you and it doesn't seem to work for them. You have your own clients too, so you are pretty busy trying to get the revenues in the door. The amount of time you have to spend leading the sales team is limited. They keep producing at the same rate, you now have a lot of non-sales stuff to get done as well and your workload seems to keep going up. The annual targets keep going up too and in two years time, you find yourself fired, because your team didn't get to their number. You are held accountable and so you are replaced. The same cycle then kicks in again for your successor. None of the big bosses lost their job by the way. You found you were stuck between your role as a leader and your role as a producer – you found you were twixt and tween two contesting goals. So, what is the sale's leaders job then when you have your own targets? Leverage is the key to success here. If we can help our team members be more successful, then we will be able to hit the team target. We absolutely need to provide opportunities for training the crew. It could be formal training aimed at substantially raising sales capability and technique or something simpler. By the way, the time to ask for a training budget is when the bosses first offer you the job. This is the moment of the most influence with the training budgeting decision. Having sales training professionals come in substantially speeds up the process and in the long run, saves you a lot of time and effort. Once you start the job, you may find the hierarchy just expects you to get on with it and they are not prepared to financially support your success. They are in that "harvest" rather than "invest" mode. So push them hard to support your success. The worst result is they don't agree, you turn down the job and they put someone else in that role. You will just keep producing and getting paid well for doing so. In two years time the job will be available again. However, if you still want to take the offer and step up, even if you are unsuccessful getting any training budget out of them, there are still some things you can do. You personally may have benefited from the stars aligning for you in sales and you may have never had any training either. As the leader you need to study sales and understand the basics. Your personal flair or talent no doubt, will not have been sprinkled across the team and they need to absorb the basics. To do that you need to master the basics first yourself, so that you can educate yourself, to be able to teach them. Have everyone read an excellent tome on selling and form a type of reading club. This is a cheap and good idea. It gets everyone on the same page and it creates a common vocabulary of sales. This will make the communication of concepts and practices much more effective. You will have a number of critical points to check on, to see if they are doing their sales role professionally. It will also assist to align the direction of the team. Role plays at the start of the day, to practice on each other, are a vastly better idea than letting salespeople practice on the clients. These role plays need to be supervised however and the salespeople need feedback in order to improve. Tell them what they are doing that is "Good" and then tell them how they can make it even" Better". This type of positive feedback is vastly superior to criticising people. If you ignore this advice and you prefer to critique your people, you will find you are either driving up their resistance to you or driving down their confidence to do the job. Visits with the salespeople to their clients, to watch them in action, are also a good practice. Obviously, there is a limit to this, because of the time involved, but from time to time, this is a good idea. In this way you find out their issues and after meeting the client together, you can give them good/better coaching feedback to help them improve. The temptation is to see all of this as taking time away from your own sales. That is true, but if we understand leverage, then we can trade our time for bigger, scalable results. If we have ten people in our team working eight hours each, they collectively put in eighty hours a day. As a group they will always be able to sustain the work hours being put in, compared to what we as an individual can do. How many twenty-hour work days do you think you will get through, before you s

There was an excellent effort on display here. A salesperson was using LinkedIn to find potential buyers and conducting energetic prospecting activities to reach out with cold emails. A total waste of time though. We all get tons of these cold emails on social media and we religiously delete them and move on, because we are busy, busy people. I asked how many of these emails had been sent out? The answer was "hundreds". While I applaud the commitment, it is always better if it produces results. The obvious next question from me was "how may responses did you get?". You all know the answer don't you – none. The email being sent introduced the salesperson, the company and what they did and mentioned if they had any questions to reach out. My immediate question was "What is the hook? What is the element of this email which will hook the interest of the reader, such that they will keep reading and actually respond?". There was some fairly benign information in that email, but nothing addressing any possible issues facing the reader. To be fair, the motivation to take any action will vary from reader to reader, so you cannot accurately gauge what that will be, when sending the email. However, there are common issues which companies face in their industry. When we are working with buyers in those industries, we note there are some common themes and one of these can become our hook. We can improve this salesperson's efforts and success rate substantially with a few tweaks. Firstly, we are going to put the potential buyer's name in the subject line, rather than some boring title which screams "I want to sell you something". We all get hundreds of emails a day. However we are more likely to check the email which features our name before we look at the others. If I see a subject line with just "Greg", I cannot resist clicking on it to find out what this is about. Obviously if I were writing to a Japanese potential buyer, I would write "Suzuki san" in the title, as that is more polite and I don't have any relationship yet, which would allow me to write their personal name. I would also send this email at around 1.00pm. When we get to work in the morning there are tons of emails from the night before piled up. Throughout the morning, new ones turn up, flooding our inboxes. We probably take lunch around 12.00pm-12.30pm and so do all of those people sending us emails, so that when we come back from lunch there has been a slight break in the email traffic. Our email therefore rises to the top section of their inbox, featuring their name in the subject line. There is a much higher chance of them seeing it and clicking on it as a result. After the typical Japanese aisatsu or greeting ("The Sakura blooms will be early this year and are a nice signal of the warmer weather arriving"), we very briefly explain in the email who we are and what we do. For example, "Dale Carnegie is a global company specialising in soft skills training. In Japan, we have been doing that for the last 60 years". That short, simple sentence says a couple of things – we are global which means we have scale. We only teach soft skills (and every company needs soft skills capability for their people). The 60 years in Japan is a sign of longevity, credibility and that we have a proven track record here. We now immediately mention a trend (the hook) we are seeing amongst this person's competitors. We would say, "Lately we have had a lot of enquiries from companies looking for solutions for 'x' problem". This is a good start, because it tells the reader what their competitors are doing and it raises the possibility that being in the same business, they may also have a need for this 'x' solution. Now we add in some evidence. We talk about a similar client to them and the result for their business after we worked on their issue. We say, "A client similar to you had this 'x' issue and we worked with them using our 'y' solution. Within three months, they saw a 45% rise in their quality and an 80% reduction in customer complaints". Obviously, these numbers have to be real. If the client calls you out for the proof to back up these claims, you can't be floating results around which are pure fantasy. Lying to buyers from the very start of the relationship is a really dumb move from every angle. If you don't have concrete numbers, just say, "the client was really delighted with the results". Having offered the hook of another buyer getting results, we now make the point, "Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure, but in order for me to understand whether that is possible or not, let's get together. How is next Tuesday or is next Friday better?". We don't say, "we can definitely do the same for you", simply because we have no idea yet. We don't want hard sell tactics, because the delete key will get hammered. We don't know their situation at this stage and our objective is to get them to respond to our email. We are only trying to get the meeting. At that me

Arguing with buyers is a slippery slope to sales oblivion. "I told him off and made him fly straight", is a leap into seller delusion. In Japan, the buyer isn't King, but GOD. The seller is in no position to tell the buyer anything here, let alone start arguing the point. The upshot is that Japanese salespeople, for the most part, are very weak in the face of the buyer's remonstrations. We often hear from our clients that they are concerned that their salespeople don't stand up for the brand, the deal, the price and just roll over straight away whenever the buyer pushes back. This raises a prickly point about how do we counter buyer assertions, which will make our sales job difficult or impossible, if unanswered? We will always know a lot more than the buyer about our firm, our goods and services and our capacity to become a trusted partner for them. They will get things wrong for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they will hear something in the market from our rivals, disparaging our financial state or our quality guarantees. Maybe they are just suspicious of salespeople, based on hard won experience and they will challenge everything we purport. Maybe they are analytical personality types, who won't consider any numbers short of three decimal places and are hard to convince. When we get the pushback, it triggers a primeval, emotional chemical reaction where the brain starts pumping adrenaline into the body for flight or fight. Because we need to make this sale, we always choose fight. What comes out of our mouth next is critical and we absolutely cannot leave that to whim or chance. We have to be in total control and choose our next words extremely carefully. GOD doesn't brook impertinent salespeople arguing with them. If the buyer is mistaken in what they say, there is no point in trying to correct them directly. Never say, "no, that isn't the case, in fact….". We are better to take the scenic route and go around the claim. We know that what they have said is factually incorrect and that we can prove it. The way to introduce some truth into the discussion is to ask them a "what if" question. This would be, "What if "x" wasn't the case, would that make it easier for you to consider the widget for your firm?'". What we want them to do is to admit that if "x" wasn't a problem, then they can proceed to consider our offer. Once we get that grudging admission, we can then lay on the evidence and proof. Again, we need to be circular in our language. "For example, "I understand the issue with "x" and based on research published in "y", it seems to indicate that this previous flaw has been resolved and is no longer an issue. As far as our other clients go, we are getting feedback that they are very happy with the new version and are not experiencing any problems. Does that help to remove this "x" issue from your concerns?". Another approach would be to use the weight of numbers against them. We can say, "We have supplied "x" to over a hundred clients so far and for the last two years we haven't seen any reoccurrence of that previous problem, after we issued a new and corrected version. It would seem the previous problem has been well and truly resolved. Are there any other issues beside this one, which are a concern for you?". We just gracefully glide past that issue they raised and move them along the sales cycle, to expose any other issues which until now may have remained hidden. The presumption is that if there have been no issues for other clients, then this client can relax about it too. What if the client objects to the new pricing, especially if the pricing has gone up of late? We need a solid strategy for dealing with that pushback. As with any objection, we cushion first to stop the chemical reaction in us brimming to the surface and we start arguing that the price is just fine and dandy, thank you very much. We just say something quite neutral such as, "budgeting is always a critical element in business". That little aside gives us time to regroup mentally and think carefully about what we say next. The only thing we should say next is, "May I ask you why you say that?". We don't yet know the context of their objection and we cannot answer them, until we have that vital information. Once we know the detail of their concern we can work on the angle of approach. We might agree with it. "Yes, the prices have gone up quite quickly and it is not just us, the whole industry is reeling from the war in Europe raising energy input costs, combined with the supply chain confusion and the subsequent major uptick in costs to get things to Japan. At the moment this is where we all are, but it won't last forever and in the future we can get back to some greater normality. In the meantime, we have supply and you have mentioned to me that you have a need and demand for our widget , so shall we proceed?". We are using a "third party" argument here to indirectly say, "it isn't us being greedy, this is just how the world is

In Japan we usually need a couple of meetings with the client to get the business. In Meeting One, we build the rapport and trust, we explore their needs and try to understand if what we have is actually what they need. We are tremendously disinterested in slamming any square pegs into round holes and wasting our precious sales time. If we have understood their needs and we can help them, then we set up Meeting Two, right then and there, to come back with our proposal. In some cases, we might have a simple requirement and we can provide the pricing and terms on the spot and try and do the deal while we are in the first meeting. Usually anything with big numbers attached to it needs a proper proposal, because various sections of the buyer's company will need to conduct their due diligence on the deal, so there are multiple decision-makers involved. How much detail should the proposal include? Some salespeople in Japan work on the basis that Japanese clients are always hungry to devour as much data and information as possible, to make sure they reduce the chance of making a mistake. So they have a long and very detailed proposal for the client to wade through. This is a very tricky equation. We are in danger of diluting our key points by over-powering them with too much information. On the other hand, as noted, there is always more than one person involved in the decision and some people will be data vampires who want to suck up as much information as possible. So we have a number of audiences for our work and how do we keep them all satisfied? One answer is to keep the main body of the proposal fairly simple and clean – we don't bog it down in endless detail. The heavy lifting detail can be moved to an accompanying document or we sequester it at the end of the proposal, as a separate entity for those who need lots and lots of information. We know that the Analytical personality style will be looking for numbers to three decimal places and these types are usually in the technical fields or are to do with the money side of the business and we have to cater for them too. Driver and Expressive personality styles will not be interested in so much detail – they want to get to the point and keep moving, because they either see time is money or they dislike getting into the weeds. Because we know that our document will get moved around it is a good idea to assume some of the readers won't know anything about who we are and what we do. So, a small section outlining the company background and the scope of work we cover will be a good little addition aimed at people we will never meet, The people in the room with us know about us of course, but we shouldn't assume they are going to tell all of the other readers everything they know about us. We can consider some additions and deletions for the proposal. Additions would be ancillary services or products which the buyer might like to consider. You get this on Amazon and other shopping sites, where they tell you what other similar buyers also bought as a way to add to the shopping cart while they have your attention. We can do the same and add in some additional suggestions which may help the buyer. In our case, we might be talking about a training course and we might add in as an optional extra some one-on-one coaching as well. They won't have mentioned it in the original conversation, but we put it in the proposal and price it, as a way of stimulating their thinking. If they don't want it, then they can just take it out and we only price the main service. A deletion would be scope creep. If we are not specific enough, buyers will agree to our proposal and then assume it also covers a bunch of other stuff, all of which costs us money, but which was not covered in our original pricing. Without going crazy, we need to delineate what we are going to include for the price and what is not covered, but which could be included for an additional payment. Payment cadence is also a good thing to mention. Perhaps you want to receive payments on the way through the project, is if is stretched out over time and you cannot get paid up front. Some big companies are very happy to screw the little guy and will force you to agree to 60, 90 or 120 day payments. Their CFO has done a calculation of how much they can make extra by not paying us in a timely manner and force us to wait to get paid. It is a good idea to stipulate your payment cadence terms in the proposal and make it clear from the start. Sometimes you just have to suck it up if you want the business, but it is a better idea to try and fight for better payments terms from the get go. After a while we will come up with some templates which work well and we can keep polishing the process. Some salespeople like to use PowerPoint slides and others like to use a word document – I don't think it really matters too much. One exception - please, please please, don't cram all of the information which should be spread over ten slides into

We salespeople love to talk. We are enthusiastic about our differentiation, our solution, our features, the benefits and a myriad other remarkable things about what we sell. Many salespeople have never moved out of first gear and are stuck there just telling the buyer all about their widget. The more advanced salespeople are asking questions and trying to become the trusted advisor, helping the client grow their business. Regardless, one of the biggest failings of salespeople and I definitely include myself here, is that we talk too much. We want to connect with the buyer, to build the rapport, the trust and so we do that by talking, talking, talking. If you ever realise that the only sound in the room or online is your voice, then you are talking too much. This happens to me still. I get on a roll and away I go, all enthusiasm and belief and then it clicks – wait a minute – I am doing all the talking! It is time to ask a question, shut up and let the buyer do the talking. We know what we know, but we need to know a lot more about the client and their business and the only way that will happen is if we let them talk. When we first meet the client we are not sure of each other. They are wondering if this meeting is a waste of time or not. We are wondering if we have what they need. Usually in Japan, the meetings start with some light conversation before we get into the meat of the discussion. If we are a bit nervous about this meeting then we can easily find ourselves talking too much and too fast. The early stage of the meeting is a chance for both sides to get to know each other and it shouldn't be a one way conversation. By letting them talk we pick up hints as to what type of person they are. I had a funny experience with the foreign president of a large well known global manufacturer here. I arrived early for the meeting, as you do in Japan, was shown into a large conference room and was patiently sitting there waiting for the president to arrive for the meeting. As he slipped effortlessly into his chair, he dexterously skimmed his business card across the table, like he was dealing me a poker hand. That was a hint. He was obviously brand new here and hadn't picked up anything about Japanese business culture as yet. I started with an effort to engage him in some very light small talk, to get to know him. He stopped me after about ten seconds of this and said "let's get down to business". I concluded he was a "time is money" Driver personality type and that I could be very direct with him and make suggestions which would be best for the firm. Normally though, we conduct aimless conversations at the start of typical Japanese business meetings. This is fine because both sides are feeling each other out and the key is to make sure that this isn't one-way traffic and that we are giving them plenty of chances to talk from their side. This sounds easy, but the temptation is to often project ourselves too strongly, trying to create a powerful, professional image with the buyer. The key is go in bursts and if you find your burst in getting too long, then switch the focus to them and off yourself. Some classic questions directed toward the buyer will be "How long have you been in this role", "Are you originally from Tokyo?", "Are most of the team back in the office now or still working remotely?". The main course will kick off soon enough, but we need to get them talking, so the question content and answers aren't that important at this stage. We can then bridge from these simple conversations into the needs of the firm and where they are heading in the business. The other time we should be very careful is at the end of the sales process, when we are getting to agreement on the solution and what we can do to help. Often we don't know when enough is enough and we keep layering on information to really nail down the sale. They have agreed and actually the best advice is to shut up about the solution and start talking about the next steps to get the execution piece underway. However, we can often start adding things which pop into our head at this point, to try and reinforce their buy decision. These contributions usually don't add much value and in fact may snag the sale entirely. Too little information is bad, but too much information is also bad. We need to tell them enough to get agreement and not one skerrick more. We may inadvertently flag some issue which hasn't been an issue until we foolishly raised it. It is a good thing to assure them that they have made a wise choice and to try and avoid any "buyer's remorse" but be careful about how much we say. Just broad brush comments are fine, such as, "I am sure that this new solution will make a real difference for the organisation and we are here to do the follow-up to make sure it works for you". That is enough, without getting into any more detail about the spec or the features etc. Avoid "overselling" where we keep piling on the value after the sale has been a

If you are a student of sales, then you will know all about SPIN Selling developed by Neil Rackham, based on his 1970s and 1980s research involving 30 researchers who studied 35,000 sales calls in 12 countries. The acronym stands for S- Situation, P- Problem, I-Implication and N-Need Payoff. The concept was not to be just packaging up the details of the solution and then jamming it down the throat of the buyer- the preferred method of most salespeople at that time - but to become a trusted advisor, someone who would act as a consultant to the firm to help them improve their performance. The consultancy part required an analysis of the client's current situation and gaining clarity around what was the problem inhibiting their growth. Rackham's insight was that this wasn't enough to be successful in sales. We know that the human condition leans in favour of pain avoidance more than gain. For example, if I wrote two articles, one titled "How I Made $20 million" and another titled "How I Lost $20 million", the latter is bound to get more attention than the former. This is where the Implication component of the formula comes in – what will be the downside, if the firm doesn't solve this problem. Drawing out the implication is key, because the easiest decision for any buyer is to do nothing. Keeping the same supplier is easy, making no changes inside the firm is easy, trying to incrementally improve what is already being done is easy. The key to success with the implication question is in how we ask it. It is also the most complex part of the formula. Asking about the client's current situation and what are their problems are relatively straightforward questions. If the implication question is done too aggressively then it will fail. For example, "Aren't you concerned about going bankrupt (or losing market share or running out of cash) if you don't fix this problem, which you told me was holding the firm back?". Another too strong question would be, "Aren't you worried about your own job security if you cannot overcome this problem?". Buyers will not react well to what sounds to them like a sad attempt at blackmail. They don't like the hard sell approach in Japan and this will backfire if attempted here. The implication question has to be subtle and considered. For example, "I am sure that over time, you can solve this problem you have outlined for me. I guess the question then is can the organisation afford to wait for that long or is there a greater benefit to making some changes now, to reap more immediate rewards?". This is a good question because it doesn't say the buyer's company is stupid or that the buyer is stupid or that they are not capable to fixing their own problems. It just raises the issue of time and of course in business time is of the essence, so it is easier to conclude that taking action now is the wiser course. We are still faced with the problem though that although the buyer knows they should act, the inertia drag is so strong they still don't do anything about it and just procrastinate on taking any steps to fix the issue. When we see that this is what is going on in the mind of the buyer, we have to join them there and push them to take a more urgent approach, without tipping the scales too far toward panic. We can now say, "Change is always hard, however we know that progress requires change and there is always a big advantage to be gained over competitors who cannot make any changes. Rivals however may stir and steal a march on us and we don't want that do we? Increasing market share because of internal agility translates into better financial outcomes and quickly justify the changes needed to reap the greater rewards. When we think of it, on balance, doesn't it make sense to take the opportunity presented now, to gain the tangible benefits available?". We have to drive in a sense of urgency around the decision to buy from us, otherwise they just never get around to making it happen. Japanese buyers in particular are very sensitive to what their competitors are doing and do worry about being outfoxed by their rivals. Certainly questioning skills are an important tool in the salesperson's toolbox, but the implication tool in particular, is one which must be fully mastered. The delivery is key and this requires practice and always remember never practice on the buyer! Clients vary in personality style, so we have to be sensitive to how we communicate with the buyer. Some prefer a more direct approach and others want to have a cup of tea and get to know each other first. Very detailed buyers enjoy data, proof, testimonials, evidence while others find all that boring and prefer the think in big picture terms. The important point is to know who we are talking to and then adjust our delivery to suit the way they prefer to communicate.

In many sales organisations, sales scripts are a way of harmonising the messaging as well as getting newbies up to speed. ChatGPT can come up with a sales script within about one second. We just need to design the question we want answered intelligently and it will do all of the work. When you have to listen to sales people using sales scripts on you, the conclusion is ChatGPT must surely be able to do a better job, because the bar is set so low. Of course there are scripts and there are scripts, so the breadth of possibility is vast. Even the best designed script will fail in the hands of idiot sales managers. I blame the managers for the sins of their staff, who have to deliver these scripts and do so in a pathetic fashion. When you can hear the cadence is someone reading the script to you, then you know you are dealing with an idiot-led organisation. If the manager was doing their job then this would never happen, but sadly it does and it negates any potential the script had to identify business. The other challenge with scripts, be they AI generated or not, is to match the content with the client's situation. Hopefully, we are going to try and join the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer with our first approach. "How are you today" is a pet peeve of mine as an opening volley in cold calling. As soon as I hear that line my toes curl up and I brace myself. I know what comes next won't be intelligently constructed or useful to me. I have problems. What can this caller do to help me with my problems? When we programme ChatGPT properly to work on the various problems the buyer may be having, then we can get a range of scripts to suit the situation. The list of problems is not hard to put together – lack of revenues, costs too high, can't get or keep staff, stiff competition in the market driving down pricing, not enough differentiation in our solution, the buyer is happy with the current supplier, etc. We will have to work a bit more on the scripts to personalise them for each buyer, but we can get a start using the machine. The other key part is the delivery, because the buyer doesn't get their side of the script to follow and they can be unpredictable regarding what they might say. As salespeople, we have to be able to pivot on the spot and deal with whatever the buyer sends towards us. ChatGPT is of no help when we are live and the process is fluid. An area it may be able to help is the designing of the solution explanation. When we get a chance to talk about what we can do for the buyer, we usually start with the details of the solution – the nitty gritty. Some of this nitty gritty is of more value than other parts and we should be seeking help to design for that rich vein of information which will delight the buyer. The next stage up is to outline the benefits to the buyer and this is where the machine helps us to get a nice list of these and we can use this as the base from which to select elements to impress the buyer. We have to feed it the information first though, so if we know this stuff, then why do we need the machine to re-work it for us? Can't we just use what we have come up with? The organisation of the evidence could use some ChatGPT love. Ideally, if we can do it we can organise our data based on the industry sub-set and the solution chosen and then match these with a satisfied client who took our solution, executed on it and reaped the rewards of doing so. Once we think about this structure the complexity increases very quickly. That is where programming the machine to absorb all of this data and then spit it back out in a tangible format can be helpful. We have to command all of this data at our fingertips because in the to and fro with the buyer, all of this will have to be coming out of our heads. The machine will consolidate the information, but we still have to absorb it and be ready to draw on the relevant parts, for the buyer sitting in front of us. There is always a high degree of personalisation of the messaging for the buyers and no machine will be able to handle that requirement in real time. The base of the information pool or the examples or the alternatives are certainly things we can always use help with. We should always keep in mind that just because we have the ability to tap this fountain of wisdom and knowledge, that we shouldn't always do so. The buyer should be talking 80% of the time and we just 20%. The temptation is for ChatGPT to turn into a professor and make us "talkers" rather than "questioners". Introducing who we are and what we do and explaining how the solution works are three excellent occasions for us to be talking and the machine can help us out here. Like all technology the intelligence is in what we feed into the machine. This is where we have to try and educate it on addressing what we want for our buyers. This takes practice but the upside is the speed of production is basically instant, so we can invest time to keep polishing the input q

We have found the prospect. It might have been through desk research then a cold call or a chance business card exchange at a networking event. We have decided they probably need our solution, because they fit into the ideal client persona profile we carry around in our heads. If we have been artful, we will have managed to secure a meeting, be it online or more preferably, in person. After some preliminary small talk to gauge some sense of what personality style they are, we switch up our communication to match their preferences. We make them feel comfortable with a stranger and we very skilfully seek their permission to ask questions about their current situation and their aspirations for the near future. Once the buyer GOD has bequeathed this entrée into their needs, we are on our way to make a decision regarding whether we have what they need or not. If there is a match, then we will move to the next stage around explaining how we can satisfy their need with our solution content. Now comes the moment of truth. Will they believe what we are proposing is in their best interests and will deliver the outcomes they seek? Naturally we have to go through the details of the solution so they can get an idea of what we can deliver for them. This must be exhausting for a lot of salespeople because this is where they flag and drop the ball. They go on and on about the facts, the details, the nitty gritty and nothing else. Those salespeople with some training don't stop there. They move into explaining what all these various details will deliver for the client, in particular detailing the benefits. This is where the next round of salespeople drop out, thinking they are done enough and are expecting this is a strong enough launching pad to secure the order. They would be wrong. A theoretical benefit isn't convincing. What the client really wants to know is what this benefit will do inside their company, inside their business. Every business thinks they are special, unique, distinct, different and that our standard solutions are never going to satisfy their exact needs. This is where we start painting word pictures of what will be different inside the company with our solution onboard and helping them to succeed. We have to become master artists of the word picture to bring the dream we have proffered to reality. You would think this would be enough, but it isn't. Buyers have had all manner of tall tales and grand promises made to them in the past and they are all card carrying members of the Sceptics Guild. What they seek is proof positive data, real world relevant case studies of where these elaborate promises have been translated into real outcomes in the past. They want evidence. By definition, this evidence has to come from prior clients who have been consumers of our solutions and who have benefited in ways which match this client's situation. Ideally they would be a close competitor, in the precise same industry sector, with a very similar range of issues and problems to be overcome and who had breathtakingly great results. Is this easy to find? No it is not and often we are limited in our thinking about finding the match. We are digging into a chest of memories of other deals and trying to extract the doppelganger. We don't have to be doing it this way. Why are we only tapping our clients list for evidence, when the company has been around for many years in most cases has had hundreds of clients on the books over that time? Part of the problem is the way sales teams are organised. Being on commission doesn't breed teamwork, in fact, it often breeds a zero sum game, toxic environment where someone else's success gets you fired. Let me digress for a moment and tell you a funny story about executive expectations. Our bosses had been off on a boozy off-site and the next Monday announced that they wanted the members of the sales team to nominate other competitor highly successful salespeople who they could approach to hire into the firm. What was the result? Nothing of course, because who would be that crazy to invite a serious high performer into the team, who will no doubt get you disappeared at the first hint of a downturn. The consequence is we don't share our evidence and we all run around in isolation, little bare islands of evidence, when if we combined everyone's evidence together we could have a rich continent to work with. Get together and share. Nominate the client, the industry, the problem, the solution and the outcomes. Instead of having evidence from the thirty or forty clients you have been working with, you could have many hundreds of pieces of evidence. No, they weren't your direct clients, but that doesn't matter, because your firm provided the solution and got the results. You know the solution and have experience with similar results for your own clients. In fact, you know enough to own the information as if it were your own. The sceptical buyer wants assurance that what you are saying works an

There are many non-Japanese speaking business people doing deals with Japanese companies. They may be flying in for meetings or may be based on the ground here. Even those locally based may not have sufficient fluency to conduct a sales meeting in Japanese, even though they make speak some level of Japanese language. I don't know if I would call myself "fluent", because I know how complex the Japanese language is and I know that often I cannot always understand everything being said in the meeting. Having said that though, I have sold multi-millions of dollars worth of goods and services to Japanese buyers, so something must be working. The further you get out of Tokyo, the higher the degree of requirement for a Japanese business level capability. The situation is improving though, as younger people are generally better at English than their parents, regardless of where they are living in Japan. So the provinces are certainly not a wasteland of opportunity, but be prepared for more problems finding someone to be the counterparty with sufficient English to hold the meeting. The flip side is the rarity of speaking with a foreigner is attractive to a lot of regionally based business representatives. In Tokyo, talking in English to a foreigner is a bit blasé and nothing that special. In Ehime, the reaction will quite different. The key to any sales success is your kokorogamae - your true intention. If you are fully focused on the buyer succeeding and want to be a trusted partner, one who is gripped with a burning need to foster the relationship so that there are continuous re-orders, then the counterpart will feel that. Most Japanese can read English much better than they can speak it. This presents the opportunity for you to marshal your resources and provide a clear picture of what you offer, why it is going to be a benefit to the buyer and a ton of detail on the how. If this has been translated into Japanese then excellent work. However, even if it hasn't, getting it to the buyer ahead of time will give them a chance to familiarise themselves with your company and your solution. In my experience, Japan has an unlimited appetite for data and information. The risk aversion current is so strong here that surrounding oneself with lot of data is like putting on your armour to protect yourself from making a mistake. So come packing heavy with data and keep giving them data throughout the interaction. Think a baroque rather than a zen like approach. Following up in writing to clarify what was discussed is also an important tool to make sure we all understood what was decided. This is particularly important for the next action steps. When expectations are blurry and misunderstood, the trust element takes a whack, which we certainly don't want to see happen. I have a very poor memory. In fact, as I get older it is becoming worse. A long time ago I read this little gem "The faintest ink is superior to the best memory". I take copious notes of all meetings, so that I have a record to consult on what needs to happen next. These go into my organiser which can then be filed by month and notes can be located to check what was decided. I wasn't always this well prepared. I remember making a business trip back to Japan from sunny Brisbane and visiting a client in Nagoya after a year had passed. In fact, the person I had been dealing with had been rotated into another section and I met two new people. In that dense, smoke filled tiny meeting room, sitting on a super low couch, in front of a super low table and sipping my cheap, bitter, green tea, I was astonished when they brought out this very thick binder, which extensively detailed everything we had discussed previously. That was the day, I realised I needed to be better organised if I wanted to succeed in selling stuff to Japanese companies. If possible invite the counterparty for a meal or drinks at night. This is a bit harder than it used to be, because of compliance rules, but it varies from company to company. In the good old days they would invite you with the sole purpose of enjoying great food and booze on the company's dime. It took me a while to work out it wasn't my charm and charisma which was generating these offers for a good time together after work. A lot of budgets for that type of entertaining have gone by the wayside, so you should invite them and pay. The other thing to consider is working on your English ability. "What? I am a native speaker, what do I need to work on?", you may be asking. Immediately purge your English of all idioms, especially sporting idioms. During the daytime, "play it with a straight bat" (only those from countries who know cricket, will get this meaning and now you know what it feels like to be left out of the context of the point, when idioms are being thrown around with gay abandon). Leave your attempts at humour until the counterparty has had a sufficient amount of alcohol to get your dubious jokes. Don't be sardonic, as an a

I was listening to a sales podcast and the expert guest was lampooning some typical closes as outdated, insulting and useless. He was relating how early in his sales career he had come across these closes and they didn't work. Naturally he had written his one book with a better alternative. I was thinking about what he said and asked myself are these typical closes actually outdated or not? Everything is contextual so it is hard to give a bullet proof undertaking, but I think they still work and it is all in how we deliver them that makes the real difference. All of this discussion presupposes we have done a proper job in all the stages of the sales cycle leading up to asking for the business. We must have developed trust with the buyer. That means we have worked out the stye of business communication they prefer. Are they super direct or do they want to have a cup of tea together and get to know each other first? Are they highly detail oriented or do they prefer big picture discussions and don't want to get into the weeds? Have we dug deep enough in asking questions to fully understand their needs or are we missing some crucial insight. Often buyers won't share all their dirty laundry with a salesperson they have only just met and they keep key information from us. That means our proposed solution may not fit their needs perfectly and we won't get the deal done. Did we explain our solution in terms which makes sense to their situation and they can see how they can adapt it into their company? When they raised some issues were we able to deal with them fully and eliminate all concern and doubt? All of these conditions have to be met, before we raise the issue of buying the solution we are proffering. Once we get to this stage, we can vary how we ask ,based on the client and how the preceding conversations have played out. If the client is the direct type, then we can ask a very direct question such as "shall we go ahead?". They won't be offended and will prefer we get moving, because for them time is money. If they are a "let's have a cup of tea" type then something less direct might be needed. We can ask a question which requires them to make a decision for something in the future. The alternative of choice close works well here. We can say, "I know that planning and coordination within your firm are both important aspects of why you are so successful as a business, so to help me serve you properly, would you like to start next month or would the month after that be better for you?". You will notice I set this question up. I didn't just say, "Shall we start this month or the next month?". It is best to link the phrasing of the question to the context of the conversation, to make sure you are demonstrating you are sensitive to their interests around the timing and not pushing you own wagon, because you need the commission sooner rather than later. Another close looks at a small detail they will have to decide after they have purchased. Again, we should try and link this expression to the context of the previous conversations. We can say, "I notice that there is quite a push from the Government to move things across from paper to digital formats. This digitisation policy varies quite a bit amongst our clients. In this regard, would you prefer paper or if we send you a digital invoice, will that satisfy the accounting team in your firm?". Whatever the answer it implies that they are willing to buy and pay. It is also critical that the tone of our voice does not vary when we get to the close. It must be a smooth transition to the sharp end of the decision and yet be seamless and comfortable, as if this was the most ordinary thing in the world. If we are pushing for a deadline to be met regarding the buying decision this can come across as crass and pushy to the buyer, so we need to set this one up carefully. We can say, "Head Office has been very helpful to us here in Japan by making a discount available on the purchase, if it takes place before the end of next month. Normally, they don't do many discount offers, so this is a rather rare occasion. It does however provide a nice 15% discount on the purchase and the deadline still has a couple of weeks to run before they withdraw the offer. Do you think that the leadership team would like to enjoy the discount before it disappears and make the agreement before the cut off date?". A similar close is the so-called last one in stock approach. Again, this come across as a bit dodgy unless we handle it correctly. We can say, "Demand for our widget has actually been surprisingly stronger than expected. Also, as you know, there are still major issues with supply chain for a lot of products and our case fits into that category too. Actually, it has been much more difficult that usual getting re-supplied and everything has slowed right down. If we can make a decision fairly soon, I am positive I can guarantee supply of the widget and I know that this will be a big help t

Riffraff inhabit all corners of the business world, but the sales profession suffers more than many others. Bankers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Stock brokers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Real estate agents tell one version of the truth to buyers. Government officials purloin our money. Everywhere you look, someone is ripping us off. However, these industries and institutions do not get blanket smeared with the failings of the few, like in the case of salespeople. We are our own worst enemy in many ways. There is a taint to the profession, an odious odor, scandalising the hallways. Desperate people do dumb things and tell lies to buyers. There are no common standards of conduct being adhered to in the sales profession. You just become a salesperson by dint of putting your hand up for a sales job. After that point, you are free to unleash your reign of terror and destruction on all around you. "I am not like that" you may say, but how would the buyer know that? They have been trained to expect to be ripped off by salespeople. It is one of my pet hates with the profession. Lo and behold anyone who calls me up and starts with a lie. Starts with a lie? How could anyone be that stupid, you might be wondering? Well, have you heard this one before, "Hello Mr. Story, how are you today? I am from XYZ company and we handle a range of investment products. One of our representatives will be in your area and so are you available for a meeting next week?". This industry of selling investment products is tricky. I know, because I oversaw the sales of these products at the Shinsei Bank and the National Australia Bank here in Japan. What makes them difficult is you can't hear, see, touch, smell or taste these intangibles. Investment products are abstract ideas. The buyer will have no idea if the decision to buy was a good one, for many months and in some cases, many years. So the obvious thing we are all buying is the trust that what we have been told will in fact happen. Given the trust element is so vital, how could the leadership at XYZ company come up with a sales script, built on a bald faced, blazen lie? Amazingly, this is the first thing coming out of their mouth. Reality check: their representative won't be in my area. That is a total fabrication, a complete lie, a nefarious fiction. Why? They think that somehow this will convince me to see that person. When they call, I ask them which area their representative will be in. They panic, look at the suburb address on their screen and blurt out "Akasaka". So I ask, "Well given Akasaka is quite a big place, which exact part of Akasaka will they be in next week?". More blustering and panic, because now we have gone totally off piste. Japan is a very honest culture. This means though, that when people tell lies, they never admit to it. They never take any accountability. Instead they will tell you anything, in order to not admit that what they told you was crap. They try and move the blame back to you, by claiming you misheard or misunderstood what they were saying. This honest culture can blind us to this quaint trait to lie. So when we are leading our salespeople, we can't just assume because everyone is so honest in Japan, that our salespeople won't lie to the client. This is also a culture where the buyer is GOD and whatever the buyer wants the salesperson will make happen. This can include lying, breaking the rules, over promising and being disingenuous. The delivery component of the company cannot easily deliver on salesperson over-promised goodies. Now we have a new set of problems to deal with, as sections within the company start to feud amongst themselves. Or they agree to a deal that is bad for the business. Being truthful with clients also means delivering bad news too. Salespeople in Japan have to be guided to do this, because of their own accord, they will avoid it every time, hide it and prefer to sow chaos internally. It is important to state and keep re-stating what should be obvious – don't lie to buyers. We have to explain we would rather forego a deal than get it by lying. This gets harder when their bonuses and commissions are linked to the sale. Also, a hard-nosed selling culture will force people into positions where they will compromise their personal and the firm's integrity to do the deal. Do you recall the Suruga Bank catastrophe? They had been a very aggressive lender in the market. They wound up reaping the whirlwind of negative media coverage, because of all the lies told by the bank staff to get loans written. In America, the famous Wells Fargo organisation had a similar issue with staff creating fake accounts to meet aggressive quotas. The real costs of those episodes played out over many years and it took Wells Fargo's shares five years to recover from this branding disaster. Suruga Bank has never recovered and it's share price has been trashed since these incidents came to light. We may have our own aggressive

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 metaphorical bull's-eye. The extreme periphery is the "telling is selling" model. This ensures the salesperson does most of the talking and tries to bludgeon the buyer into agreement. 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. They want it in blue, but we keep talking, talking, talking about our wondrous pink. Why? Because we didn't ask them what colour they want. There are better ways of doing it than this. 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. We can't just make it up on the spot. 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, groupthink, company culture or the internal politics of the organisation. 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 g

We are starting the New Year and have we decided how we will start it? Are we going to just slide back into our old habits and pick up the threads of the deals we were working on before the break? Or are we going to do some fresh thinking about what we are doing and how we are doing it? As salespeople, we are all massively time poor. That sets off a series of decisions where we are constantly cutting corners to shave off some time. Unfortunately we also shave off some activities we shouldn't be minimising. Deciding how we are going to work as a professional this year is a good discipline. Selling has some very consistent requirements. There are the basics and they must be perfected. When we sit back and look at our activities and behavior, we are bound to find areas where we have deleted necessary activities or truncated them. As we get back to work we need to make a commitment to ourselves to become more professional this year, than the level we achieved last year. That means studying the art of sales. We need to break it all down and minutely examine what we are doing at each stage of the sales cycle. We are reading what other sales leaders are doing, searching for ideas and new information. Business is in a constant flux and technology is a tremendous enabler of business. What have been the latest advances and how can we adopt these into the sale's process? Habits are both great and dangerous. Poor habits need to be eliminated and replaced with better habits. Changing a habit however needs a tremendous amount of lifting to get it done. The rationale has to be very strong, otherwise we won't sustain the effort needed. Exactly what better or new habits do we want to introduce and what is our strategy to make them stick. Just wishing that habits improve is delusional, because nothing will change without some application of dynamite to blow up the bad habits. We need a plan that works. Are we tracking our activities? Probably we did this when we started in sales, but as we become more comfortable with the sales process we stop bothering. This is a good time to do an audit of how we spend our time and where we are prioritizing our activities Some activities are nice to haves but are starving the must haves for our attention. We need to strip everything back to the basics and look at what we are actually doing as opposed to what we think we are doing. We have a scary matrix we employ which is always shocking when we investigate the results. We all know it is better to expand the sales with an existing client because it so much cheaper and faster than finding a brand new client. However, do we actually do that or are we stuck in first gear with just the one solution being applied to this client? The matrix is a simple one. Along the top we write in the solution lineup we have. In our case it would be all of the key courses we can offer clients. Down the left side we write in the names of the different clients we serve. The cells are then marked to show the match of what we are selling to the client today. What we quickly realise is we have a lot more solutions this client needs, but we haven't been promoting them enough. We get into a habit with this client and they also pigeon hole us into the one slot as well and don't see us as agile and able to serve them in more that just the current manner. Maybe when we raised the possibility of doing more for them, there wasn't that need, but business constantly moves and things change. There is nothing more frustrating than discovering the client has gone elsewhere to seek a solution you could have provided them. We can't blame the client, because our job is sales and we weren't able to escape the gravitational pull of our old habits and change the conversation to include more solutions from us for them. Are we tracking the breakdown of where things went well or went badly? The sales cycle has a cadence and there are bottlenecks we must clear to advance the sale. Do we have a big enough pipeline? If we don't, how have our cold calling efforts fared? How well have we been able to network during Covid? How well have we designed our first interaction with buyer? How many of these initial touches with the client resulted in a sales conversation? Was it online or in person and what was the difference in terms of results? How good a job did we do on uncovering their needs and understanding their motivations and desires for the firm? Did we match up our solution with their need correctly. What objections or hesitations did we get and why? Was it a mismatch because we didn't fully understand their needs? Could we flush out the real objection or we were we stuck with the top of the iceberg and missing the real problem under the waterline? Could we close the sale and get the deal done? What were the ratios at each stage of the sales conversation? Could we then flag an area of particular weakness, so that we could work on that area more? Basics are the foundation of success in sa

A cushion, in the sales world, isn't that thing you bite into with frustration when your old client buys from your competitor rather than you. It is a ploy, a trick, a device, a subterfuge to stop us making a mess of the deal. Most salespeople have no idea what a cushion is or how to employ it, which is why they are losing sales on a regular basis. The hardest people to teach this technique to are seasoned salespeople. Actually, in my recall, teaching anything to experienced salespeople is fraught. They believe they know it all or they feel their own methodologies are the best and need no additions or alterations. "Cushion, smushion" is often the view, when we introduce this idea to salespeople. Where do we use this cushion and what is it? After we have dug deep and found out where the client is now, where they want to be and why they are not there yet, we are in a position to offer some of our potential solutions to help them get there and for them to enjoy the kudos associated with it. At this point we will get pushback, hesitations and objections to our genius ideas to fix their problem. This is when we need to bring out the cushion. Being emotional creatures, we don't like pushback from buyers, because all we want to hear is "yes we will take it", at our original non-discounted price and right away, pronto. If we get "your price is too high" we become agitated and we do dumb things like trying to justify the offer. This is typically what these so-called "seasoned" salespeople do and then they can't work out why they have to drop the price all of the time, to land the deal. What if you could land the deal without any discounting? Sounds good doesn't it and let's explore how to do that. Chemicals from the brain are released the moment we hear "your price is too high and we go into fight mode with the client. Actually, we cannot control the release of the chemicals, but we can control what we do in terms of our reaction. The first reaction is to justify the price, by talking about the tremendous value our solution represents. We try to get the client to buy through force of will or by going on and on about how great our solution is and why it isn't really that expensive, especially when you amortise the cost over a thousand years. Clients become defensive in response to these assaults on their opinion and often get in their little bunker and hunker down to resist all that we say, until they hear those magic words, "I will drop the price". So arguing with the client isn't the smartest method, but still it is a favourite with some of these seasoned salespeople. We have to get more information before we know what to say to the client's attack on our pricing. Objections are also often smoke screens. What they say may not be what they are thinking. Even if we bite and do a brilliant job on answering their pushback, we still don't get the deal done, because that wasn't the core issue. We answered it brilliantly but to no avail. We need to test for the real objection before we try and answer anything and this is where the cushion comes to the rescue. A cushion is a neutral statement which neither agrees nor disagrees with the client's opinion. "Your price is too high" receives a cushion like this, "budgeting is certainly an important element of every business". That short little offering is a breaker, like the circuit breaker in our homes, to stop an electrical surge burning down the house. It stops us from answering the client's preposterous claim that our price is too high and reminds us we need to say only one thing in response. We have created a breaker from the chemical reaction and have allowed the brain to start functioning properly again and we say, very, very sweetly, "May I ask you why you say that?" and then we shut up and do not speak. This is a genius question because now the client has to justify their claim and provide us with the reason. As we assemble more information, we get more possibilities available to us and more angles from which to approach our answer. We are going to give a very well considered response, as opposed to that first chemically induced, emotional response we would have given. If we can manage that process directly, then we don't need a cushion. The problem is "your price is too high" is the siren call to battle with the client and it is very hard to stop yourself from diving straight into the entrails of why the buyer is wrong. Once we get an answer from the client we cannot stop there. We need to keep ferreting out the real objection. After hearing their answer, we say, in "in addition to "x" are there any other concerns" and we keep repeating this process until we have them all out on the table. Usually they have two or three and occasionally four, but rarely more than that. Next, we ask them to choose which is the most concerning for them and that is the one we answer. The cushion is a key to a better conversation with the client, helping us to clear the emotional fog clou

Most salespeople are very good on the detail of their solutions. The more technical the solution, in order to be able to explain it to the buyer, the more expert level of knowledge is needed. The only problem with this expertise concentration is that buyers don't buy features. They have a problem which they need solved and the features are a necessary tool, but it is the outcome produced through the tool, which is what attracts the buyer's attention. If we spend all of our time in the weeds of the features, we are missing the one thing which causes the buyer to purchase from us. We don't get unlimited time with the buyer and usually an hour is allocated to our meeting and we need to cover a lot of ground in that hour. In fact, the solution component of the sales call is often the second visit to the buyer. In the first visit, we did our best to understand what their issues were and to see if we have what they need to provide the necessary solution. During the second visit, we go into how what we have will fix their problem, how it works and we deal with any pushback and ask for the order. So the sales call is an exercise in two parts. One of the problems may be that the buyer themselves don't fully understand how this solution will impact their business. They are working in their own little section, but the solution may have ramifications across the whole business. We need to get other section representatives involved too, if possible, because otherwise they could become blockers behind the wall and we don't even know what their issues are, let alone be in a position to help them too. There may be a number of benefits which our solution delivers, but some will have more potency for the buyer than others and we need to zero in on these. Presumably we will have a reasonable idea which ones will resonate more strongly than others, if we did a good job in the questioning stage in the first meeting. There will be a Primary Interest on the buying side, the greatest thing of most urgency and our benefits need to strongly address that aspect. While the benefit is important of course, what about how they can apply that benefit in their business. Many salespeople fail to talk about the benefits at all and get stuck in the features explanation part of the discussion and don't move to the next stage. These are usually the people who fail to sell very much. Even if some salespeople do get to the benefits stage, they pull up there, expecting the buyer to do all the work and discover for themselves how to apply the benefit in their business. That is our job. We need to have some reasonable knowledge gained about how their company works and about their business, to know how to tell the story of where our solution will make the difference for the buyer. For example, let's take a simple case of the plastic bottle of coffee which you can buy at a convenience store. There are other varieties of course, including canned coffee with a ring pull access to the beverage. Usually the weight of the two varieties are not that different, so the transportation weight burden factor is similar, so there is no great differentiation there. To have the buyer choose our product, we need to know if they are likely to consume the coffee over a period of time and if they will be doing that in different locations, from where they made the purchase. The ring pull coffee can once opened cannot be resealed and basically must be consumed shortly after purchase. The benefit of the plastic container is it has a screw cap arrangement, which means we can consume the coffee anywhere we like and can transport it with us, without the risk of spilling any of the contents. So the feature is the screw cap and the benefit is the time convenience of the access, anywhere, anytime to our beverage. The composition of the coffee is important because taste is a big factor preference, but that is not the only benefit we need to consider. It has to taste good and be portable if the latter point is important for the buyer. The application part is where we suggest they can buy the product quickly and keep moving fast, as they carry the bottle with them as they move around town and have instant access to the coffee, whenever they want. We need to tell a story here to have them see the scene in their mind's eye. For example, "After purchasing our coffee with the resealable screw cap function, you don't have to stop what you are doing to consume it right there and then, instead you can immediately head off to your next meeting without delay. After the meeting finishes you have been working hard, so you may be feeling a bit thirsty, so again no time is lost, as you can simply reach into your bag and pull out the bottle and drink the coffee wherever and wherever you like". In the case of our own product or solution, at this point we should now move to the next stage of the sales process and tell the story of a similar company, in the same industry (if possible), who bought th

A very common complaint from foreign bosses here in Japan is that their sales staff are over-servicing the Japanese buyer. Sometimes they are left to wonder who their staff are really working for – their company or the client's company. I am sure there are many sales bosses based outside Japan thinking, "that is the type of problem I would like to have with my sales crew". When we travel out of Japan and we are exposed to service in Western countries, there is always such a negative contrast with Japan. For the most part we are interacting with the service industry in airports, hotels, restaurants and shops. We will have to draw on our memory of what the B2B service standards were like, before we got to Japan to recall what the proper comparison should be. American B2C service is the outlier, because it is so strongly driven by their tipping culture, which doesn't really apply that much in the rest of the world, where service industry staff are properly remunerated through their salaries. Australia is a better comparison, because we have a similar non-tipping culture to Japan. I was down there attending a funeral for my relative recently and staying at a city Hotel, when the valet parking young guy scratched my rental car. Interestingly he didn't make a bee line for me to immediately apologise. In Japan that would be unthinkable. He did eventually apologise, but the timing was too slow from my Japan trained point of view. His manager took over and organised the insurance companies to get to work and he also eliminated the valet parking charges for my stay. That would be a basic response and if that had been Japan, there would no doubt have been additional things they would have done to compensate me for the inconvenience. Here is the difference. In the West we are trained to think in terms of minimums of service, but Japan is trained to think in terms of maximums. A big part of the over-servicing culture here is driven by the buyer's expectations of what they regard as appropriate service levels. So we have the foreign minimums boss dealing with maximums Japanese sales staff and the divide is large. The Japanese staff also have a long-term view. Foreign bosses come and go, but customers are based here and are not leaving Dodge for their next posting. I also found that when commissions are involved, staff are happy to get the deal and get paid, no matter how much overservicing is involved. The company may be the loser, but they are the winner and they are fine, because they are not seeing the total financial picture. The boss though is seeing all of this and isn't happy with the productivity. Bosses are also not happy with the amount of discounting that gets done to land the deal. It always seems the sale staff are too quick to drop the price and to give extras to get it all across the line. This is a tricky balance, because as the boss, you cannot be involved in the entrails of every deal and you have to trust your people to do their best to get the revenue in. Usually we are involved post-agreement remonstrating with sales staff on why they agreed to such over generous terms to get the business. By that time, it is way too late and you cannot go back to the client and renegotiate the deal if you want to keep the business. So what is the answer here? Briefing staff on where the line of generosity is being breached is a good idea, but often they will just ignore that and go for the deal anyway. They know it is not a fire able offence. In a few years you will be gone anyway, so just hang in there and keep the relationship with the client, because that is way more valuable than the one with the current boss. We can try and influence their behaviour by adjusting the commissions paid. You would think that salespeople who get paid by commission, would be really keen and highly motivated to defend the price as much as possible, to gain the highest commission but that is rarely the case in Japan. They prefer to keep the buyer happy and take the hit on their own remuneration. They see the long-term relationship as more beneficial for them and they prefer a deal, to no deal. Now this has a deleterious impact on the company revenues, but that isn't their main concern. If we are dealing with a chronic discounter, we may need a bit of shock therapy here. We can set a limit on how much they can discount the price and then adjust their commissions savagely, if they go beyond that red line. For example, say we said 15% was the red line and if they go above that, we will have them bear part of the pain. They are already down 15%, but we will also take another 15% off that lower figure, to further substantially reduce their commission. Another approach would be to do more coaching on the value they provide, so that they can change the content of their communication with the buyer. Over time buyers beat up our salespeople on pricing and weaken their belief in the value of what they are providing. We need to resuscitate their

Proprietary research findings, industry experience, thick product catalogues, detailed flyers were the currency of the salesperson, before the advent of the iPhone. The salesperson was an unknown quantity, so the only guarantee was their firm's brand. The individual didn't have a personal brand. Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007 and changed sales forever. That salesperson of old has been killed off by the technology. The client today has access to everything the salesperson has and they can access it from anywhere. In fact, they can know a lot about the salesperson before they ever meet and size them up accordingly. Content marketing has flooded every field with knowledge, insight and experience. It is all free and literally within your grasp as you pick up your phone and plug into the internet. Someone I know here, picked up their phone, wrote this message and sent it out to their social media network – "Has anyone seen Mr. X, he owes me money?". Mr. X had a business here in Tokyo and they were trying to sell us their services. Once upon a time the disgruntled businessperson could have told a few people about their issue with Mr. X. He could have easily evaded broad public scrutiny and kept going as before. Not now. His name is mud and anytime someone checks him out, there will be a thick trail of brand destruction for all to see and so people will be wary of him. It is as easy as picking up your iPhone. The same thing can happen to any of us. If we are not doing the right thing by how we serve our clients, then public purview will be close behind. The well will be poisoned for other potential deals. Another person I know here had a business dispute with the seller of a company they bought. The post deal elements became acrimonious and was waged in the Court of Public Opinion, courtesy of the internet as well as in the legal courts. They told me that subsequent to this issue going out to the internet, they had a lot of trouble attracting business partners, investors and buyers for their businesses. Research thanks to the mobile phone has become instant, cheap, easy and in some cases deadly. On the flip side what positive things can clients learn about you before you meet? I was introduced to an executive of a major firm here in Japan over a lunch. The first thing the person said was ,"I checked you out on LinkedIn". I was very cool, calm and collected when hearing that. This was because I have been making a constant effort that what he saw on LinkedIn would generate a specific reaction. What he said next was "it was very impressive" and that is what I wanted to make sure I heard. That praise from him was no accident, it was planned because anyone can check us our instantly with the minimum of effort thanks to Steve Jobs. Knowing this, what are you doing about it? Your website can now house all of that information you used to have to carry around on client visits. You can access your own website and bring up information for the client using your phone and so don't have to lug heavy items around anymore. That is very nice. You can write articles on specialised subjects and blast them out through the internet to the world. Potential clients will be able to sample your fare before they buy it, to understand if you are trustworthy or not. If what you are writing is high quality, then the buyer will see you in the same way, before you meet. The buyer can see if you are a cleanskin or not. If someone is complaining about your integrity or honesty and the service you provided them, that is going to be a deal breaker with potential new clients. I always talk about we don't want a sale. We want the re-order, because the psychology behind that is totally different to going after a single sale. The way you think about the buyer is different. You are trying to become a trusted partner for the long term, with tremendous repeat business and lots of farming going on and not just running around hunting all of the time. When potential clients grab their phone to do a search on you, what will they find? Do you know what they will find? If you don't, you should be checking regularly to make sure you are happy with what is out there about you. And you should do the search on your phone, not your computer laptop, because that is most likely the medium the buyer is going to be using. Clients can also quickly fact check what you are telling them as well, so we have to make sure we are always being honest with the buyer. Lying to buyers is so far beyond stupid, I don't even want to discuss it. Steve Jobs has handed us all a powerful truth finder in sales. It isn't going away and will only become more intense. We have to find ways of making this work for us when selling, to open up new opportunities and vistas.

Knowing where to find potential clients is one of the core skills of salespeople. Yes, marketing drives activity and we have our networks, but we need to keep that sales funnel full. That means we need a healthy flow of new prospects to talk to. Where will these new buyers come from? Often we have to create them out of thin air. Cold calling has become so much more difficult with remote work, as our buyers are hiding out at home. They are protected by a steel wall of blockers making it impossible to get to them. In this case, we need to re-group and re-think how we need to go about connecting with potential clients. Identifying the perfect client is a good way to start because this will mean we are only focused on buyers with the highest potential, rather than spraying our efforts everywhere without any great focus. Let's look at some markers we can use to locate these ideal clients. Company size This could be the number of people or the size of the revenue. Some operations may be too small to worry about and others may to big. A very large client can often be a problem, because they have so many resources they may not need our help, particularly with regard to our provision of services. Age bracket The staff of the company may be a target for us and this may vary depending on the age range. Are they newbies who have just started and are in their twenties? Or are they seasoned staff on their thirties and forties. Gender Are we focused on a particular gender for our product or service? Some industries are very heavily weighted toward one gender over the other. What is your situation? Years in business The maturity of the business can make a difference. Are they a start up, thrusting and growing or a mature company heading toward a gradual decline? Are they in peak condition and thriving with substantial volumes of business and substantial war chests available to be spent growing the business even further? Our Champion's profile We need a champion inside the company to push for us, but who would they be? Are we after a C-suite executive, a middle manager or maybe a very specialized technician? How we found them Referral – this is a warm call, because we can leverage the name of the person they trust who is connecting us. This is not a perfect blocker antidote, but it is certainly a big help in that regard. Networking is a bit of a hit and miss process. They may not be the right client, but it will take at least one meeting to find that out or not and the time and effort is committed first, as opposed to knowing if the time is worth it or not. Cold calling is similar to networking, as we are uncertain if this buyer is actually going to lead to any business, so we are taking a guess on the outcome. Getting a meeting though from someone who doesn't know you is a good indicator that there may be some business here. Contact changed company. Often people take us with them to their new employer. We have built up a relationship and the trust is there, so this is a very valuable champion to have. Introductions are similar to referrals, but the strength of the association may be weaker. They know you and if they just mention you it might be helpful without doing much more than that. For example, "you should talk to Greg Story". Websites have a lot of money spent on them to yield SEO outcomes through getting buyers to contact us, so this is a good sign, because they are actively looking for what we have. Nikkei (Japanese domestic companies) and Gaishikei (foreign multi-nationals) are quite distinct categories, requiring separate approaches. Does your offer work better with one, more than the other. Do you need rapid decision-making, in which case Gaishikei companies will be a better focus. Profitability Being profitable is a great indicator of the capacity to invest in your solution. Companies losing money or just breaking even, may love to buy what you sell, but they honestly cannot do it. Recession proof We are about to leap out of the frypan of Covid into the fire of a global recession, so which industries and sectors look like they can withstand that likelihood? Product or service fan We will manufacture fans of our solution and they are great supporters inside the buying organisation. They may not even be our direct contact or in a related section, but behind the scenes they are supportive. Going through organisational change Change forces new options and new perspectives. When everything is smooth sailing, it may be hard to get buyers to make a change of supply arrangements. There is nothing like a good crisis to spark an interest in improving the current situation and being open to new possibilities. So when you are thinking about where to find good clients cast your eye over this list and remind yourself where they are hidden away.

The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離. Shu is to protect the traditional techniques, the basics, the fundamentals. Ha is to detach and break away from the tradition, to innovate and depart from our attachments to what we are doing. Ri is to transcend to a level where there is no self-consciousness of what we are doing, we make it our own, because we have absorbed it all and it is now part of us. We have this same notion in the West, but I don't think we have come up with three words to describe it as the Japanese have done. In sales we can see the process at work. When we get sales training, there are so many moving parts, so much sophistication and subtlety, it can be a bit overwhelming at first. We have to make sure we know our USPs, our unique selling propositions to differentiate ourselves from the great unwashed who represent our competitors. We need to know how to build the trust needed with the buyer. How do we open the conversation, how to bridge from one conversation to the next? How do we set the agenda for the meeting? How do we handle the questioning discovery component, deal with the pushback and ask for the order. There are a lot of elements in a sales process. Clients are not helpful in this process. They will try and drag the conversation all over the place, away from our well plotted little sales track. In the process, at the end of the sale's call, we realise we didn't get certain key information and we have to go back and get it which is both a waste for everyone's time and rather embarrassing. We also realise that our questions were too perfunctory and too superficial and didn't yield any of the gold we needed to convince this client that urgent action is needed on their part to buy our offering. In the Shu stage, we have to memorise the steps we need in the sales process and keep moving along the continuum to make sure we get to a deal at the other end. As we get more sales calls done, our sales talk improves and we also begin to realise we can handle sales talks for a variety of buyers with their different personality styes and their different needs. At a certain point, we are comfortable with the process and we enter the Ha stage where we are looking for improvements and innovations, because the sales world is super competitive. We may start experimenting with new approaches to clients, to see if we can increase our success ratio or if we can speed up the deal flow process. We might start adding in techniques we have studied from sales gurus which are for more advanced salespeople. There are so many variables in the sales process, it means the opportunity for innovation is almost unlimited. This whole frame only works for those salespeople who are trained. The untrained don't have a solid base off which to work and to elevate through innovation. They are doing idiosyncratic sales which they have cobbled together through a process of trial and error. Of course we can all do it this way, except that it is very wasteful of good opportunities and it takes a lot longer to become excellent in sales. Trained salespeople benefit from a broader perspective available to them to start innovating and trialling new approaches off an established base of techniques which already work. In the Ri stage we don't even feel there are stages anymore. The whole sales process becomes a smooth and seamless flow from one aspect to another, as we move clients along the railway track to an agreement to buy. When we get pushback such as "your price is too high" we don't even blink. We are not having any mental conversation with ourselves about how should deal with this objection, because we are already dealing with it, without any conscious thought. It is as if our sales reflexes just kick in automatically and all the while we are relaxed and confident and these feelings are being flooded to the buyer. When 100 people have told you your price is too high, you are not fazed at all. When you are trained you have a process for handing these types of objections and you just unleash the system on the buyer and it does all the work. This doesn't mean we become too relaxed and arrogant about our own skills. Naturally, every buyer and every situation is different and we need to taper our remarks accordingly. So where would you locate yourself on this Shu-Ha-Ri journey in sales? One thing we cannot do is let the grass grow under our feet and believe we have plenty of time to move through the these three stages. Sales is unforgiving and It is in a constant make over. We need to always be out in front or we will be left behind. Business moves at the pace of sales being made, so the pressure to speed up that process up is immense.

Many salespeople contemplating this title would be flummoxed. They don't have really good questions for the client because they don't ask any questions whatsoever. They are losers who go straight into the detail, the nitty gritty of their solution. How do they know this is the right solution? They don't worry about that, because they are delving into the product catalogue or the flyers for the micro detail of the solution. I can call them losers because they irritate me. They pollute our profession because they never study about how to become better in sales. Also, I will never hurt their feelings because they will never access my content. We know there is a sales cycle which is neither mysterious nor complicated. We establish some rapport, move into questioning the buyer, suggest our solution, deal with any objections and ask for the order. Simple right? Maybe not. The questioning part is absolutely key. If we get this wrong then our solution will be rejected. There are a couple of things we need to be doing to make this work. I was reminded of one of them the other day when I failed to get the deal. Like many salespeople, I get into a rhythm with my sales calls and ask the questions needed. I hear the key points and my mind races toward the best solution for the buyer. I am confident, sure this is what they need but I have cut a corner. I have shaved off a piece of the process, because I am arrogant about my own abilities and are forgetting some of the basics. I thought I clearly understood what this client wanted and duly put together a proposal, but she rejected it. I was shocked because I thought I had correctly parsed what she needed for this training for her team. When I reviewed my activity, I realised that while had her on the Zoom call, I neglected one step which proved to be a deal breaker. I was too sure of myself, which is why I didn't run the solution by her right then and there to check what I was proposing was the right thing for her team. I assumed too much. There are some key things in the questioning process which we should all remember to ask especially the 5 whys. What I mean is we keep drilling down by asking why of the answer. For example, in my case, the client says we want leadership training, but that is a pretty broad church with many alcoves and vaults. I need to ask why (1)? They reply that there is a communication problem between the middle managers and their teams. Why is there a communication problem (2)? Because the leaders are not properly skilled at leading. Why aren't they properly skilled (3)? Because we have never trained them. Why haven't they been trained (4)? Because we never understood it was needed. Why? (5). We didn't see the need, we thought they were capable enough. Do you see how this works? Another brilliant question is "why now"? Whenever a client tells us they have a problem, we should always ask this timing question, because it will help us to understand what is driving the organisation to take action. They might say Covid revealed the leadership ability gap of their leaders, in the example I used. They might say there is a new President or HQ has issued a mandate about this and they are rolling out the solution country by country or the competitors are taking our market share , or we have surplus funds at the end of the year we don't want to hand back, etc. Knowing this helps us to establish their sense of urgency and commitment to take some action to fix the problem. Having a problem and actually doing anything about it are worlds apart. Another object on the sale call is to ask a question which they have not considered. We want to get them thinking one of two things: "we haven't thought about that" or "we haven't prepared for that". This is not easy, but is the mark of the professional in sales. Anyone can ask about simple questions about their current situation and where they want to be and try and build a solution around that. Getting the client to project into the future and see trouble aplenty, is the ideal outcome. We now move from being the salesperson to becoming their trusted advisor, flagging key issues they haven't considered. In my example, I could ask, "if this communication problem between your staff and their managers continues, there is a strong chance the engagement levels of the staff will go down and they will be open to recruiters encouraging them to leave and go work for your competitors. Given the declining population and no major immigration on the horizon, there is going to be a continuing huge problem regarding recruiting new staff. There is also a major disruption to the business whenever people leave and new people have to be trained. Have you factored these occurrences into your calculations about achieving this year's targets? The client is thinking about a simple leadership problem but we are talking about a business disruption problem through lack of retention of key people. They haven't considered this possibility and it ra

Buyers can smell fear and desperation on salespeople. When the sales funnel is sad and prospects are few, we panic. The client picks up on this and unconsciously they hesitate to work with us, because for them something doesn't feel right. We are suffering. We are reminded of the Sales Manager's mantra, "don't tell me about what you have sold in the past, tell me what deals you are doing today". Sales is a moving feast where we have to constantly recreate our results every week and the boss pressure to perform is unrelenting. In these circumstances our confidence can take a battering and we are pushed over the edge into a savage downward spiral, rocketing toward sales oblivion. Here are four strategies to boost our self-confidence to get back on the bucking bronco that is the sales life. Self-Acceptance We need to stop beating ourselves up when sales are not going well – that is the Sale's Manager's joy. We have to realise we cannot control currency rates, market movements, interest rates, wars, supply chain fiascos, pandemics, etc. We need to look at what we can control. In fact, we have perfect control over the most powerful weapon in sales – our time and how we use it. Once we make that decision to exercise control over what we do every minute of the day, we can start moving our mindset from one of deal poverty, to one of deal abundance. We know what we need to be doing, but are we actually spending our days doing that? If we don't have clients we need to get busy contacting previous clients where the trail has gone cold and find new clients. Remote working styes has created new barriers to contacting buyers and so we need to adjust what we were doing, to what we need to be doing now. We need to be searching for potential contacts through data banks, LinkedIn, our contacts in the market, the media - anywhere we can locate a name and then we need to call that person. Yes, we will run into blockers who answer the phone, but we need to leave messages, send items using mail which don't look like spam and even turn up there to meet the buyer. We know our buyer avatar, their profile and so we can target new buyers who are similar and then make a concerted effort to meet them. Self-Respect We have had deal successes, we have served clients extremely well and so we know we can do this. Our confidence takes a hammering though when things are not moving forward and in the process, we can forget our track record and all of the things we have learnt along the way. We need to dig into our past successes for reminders of what we did to be successful. The sales process is made of microscopic elements and it is a game of millimetres in terms of driving sales forward. By focusing on those building blocks, we can make sure we are not cutting corners and are completing the right steps to get to a sales. Did we actually follow-up with that client? Was the follow-up fast enough, comprehensive enough, exciting enough, attractive enough? Let's break down the steps and remind ourselves of what we were doing when we were harvesting deals and being successful, making good commissions and gaining confidence in ourselves. Go back and analyse what made you a deal maker. You have done it before and you can do it again. Take Risks Certainly push the envelope, but not with your reputation. Taking risks with your reputation is a one way ticket out of the sales profession. I am not talking about that. I am thinking about challenging new ways of doing things and tackling new ways of analysing where the business might be had. We tend to get into ruts and we get stuck in our thinking. We need to do a reboot of our perspectives about where the business might be gained. We might need to re-allocate our time and try something new. Maybe we haven't been doing enough research on the industry or the market and so our sales call conversation is not getting us anywhere. Time management is full of risks, if you get it wrong and aren't working on the right things. I mentioned before about dusting off some tobikomi eigyo (door to door) sales techniques, which because of the time involved could be considered a risky use of our time, but maybe it is worth giving it a crack and just see what happens. Your competitors certainly won't be rolling up unannounced to the client's office looking for the buyer. Self-Talk Salespeople are often terrible self-talkers. We get down on ourselves when things are not going well and our self-talk turns toxic. This confidence death spiral must be avoided at all costs. Once your self-talk talks you out of your ability to succeed in sales, you are done. Sales is hard enough when things are going okay, let alone when times are rough and tough. We need to change our diet of what we put into our minds. We need to ramp up the motivational material, the self-belief gurus, the whole gamut of positive mind control. We must switch the words which come into our minds for the negative to the positive. When we notice a nasty negative

The client is always right. No they aren't. We usually have more information about our offering than the buyer and are across the breadth of our range of solution in a way they can never be. We are interacting with a variety of buyers in the industry and the sector and are constantly picking up intelligence on what is working and what isn't. We are not being driven by internal politicking, as ambitious rivals jockey for position. We have the client's best interests at the forefront and firmly in our mind, because we have one goal for our business and that is getting the re-order. Clients however will have partial information, wrong information and will lack information, none of which disqualifies them from telling us their view of the world as they see it. This can become very frustrating for salespeople. We are often setting ourselves up for frustration because we forget that the buyer isn't the same as us in terms of scope. We are expecting too much of them and when we don't get it we are upset. We know the buyer but they forget and ask another company to supply them. They met us a while ago and that memory has disappeared. They just went to our competitor because it suited them to, but we absolutely don't like that. We feel betrayed. Add these frustrations to the pressure cooker that is sales and tempers can be short or fraying. I divide clients into two bundles – those I like and would want to make a friend and those I just do business with. The chemistry won't be there with every client and we still need to get business done, so if the stars don't align, so what, make the sales anyway. If we can turn the client into a friend, then that is better because we all spend so much time at work it makes sense to find people you like in that environment. If you are in sales then you had better be spending your days with buyers, if you want to get anywhere. It stands to reason some number of the buyers will become friends. For the others, it will be a strictly professional relationship of supply and demand. Inside this group will be people you just don't like as human beings. There will clients who are arrogant, rude, have short tempers, are unrealistically demanding and are a hand full. There are variations of this idea – some more colourful than others - but there is the "no idiots" rule in sales, which says who not to do business with. We effectively "fire the client" because we don't want to deal with them. On the path to firing them we will be doing our best to squeeze a deal out of the process. When trying to serve them we may be biting our tongues, holding our breath, counting to 30 in order not to explode, but the tension is palpable. Our degree of perseverance will depend a great deal on the health of our sales funnel. If we have numerous buyers in the funnel and the new buyers are constantly being refreshed, then we can be relaxed about firing a nasty client. The problems arise when we are desperate and are not seeing much revenue coming down the pike. We tend to have to suck it up a lot more and somehow these nasty clients sense that and can become even more demanding and unreasonable, simply because they can. Power doesn't always sit well in the hands of certain individuals and the buyers always feel they have power in the relationship. Where is the line between making the point to the client that what they want or what they are saying is not going to fly with our values and our situation and the start of an argument? This is often a hard one, because few of us are trained for this type of conflict. We are usually working off a trial and error formula, which can be the hard way to do it. Proper training would give us the needed edge to work out how to help the client understand this arrangement is not attractive to our company and we don't want to do it, without getting into a massive bun fight with the buyer. Arguing with the buyer isn't effective. We should be looking for points of agreement rather than zooming into the pain points. We should be carefully educating the buyer on what they don't know about the current state of the market or about the intricacies of our solution. We also want to keep in mind that idea of "coming back to fight again another day". We don't want to destroy the relationship just because we might not be able to find a middle ground today to do business together. Things change inside companies and markets and a "no" today can become a "yes" tomorrow, if things change sufficiently. Sometimes the client's ideas are not very good and what they want us to do won't fix their problem. We might be tempted by getting a deal, any deal, but the relief is short and the pain is long in these cases. Naturally, when it doesn't work we get the blame and the brand collateral damage. I believe it is always better to walk away for those types of deals which have potential brand damage written all over them.

In modern economies, asking the buyer questions to understand their needs would be considered the most basic skills of a salesperson. This isn't happening as much as you would expect in technologically advanced, well educated, sophisticated Japan, the world's third largest economy. In Japan, busy bosses or more experienced salespeople, will take the new salesperson with them on a couple of sales calls. End of the training. Going straight into the detail of the features of the solution is the mainstream technique here. Should you adopt the same sales approach when trying to sell to Japanese buyers? If this is how they roll, then isn't that the obvious way forward? Let's explore what we need to know about how to be successful in selling to Japanese buyers. What is different in the Japanese sales equation? Of course, you can be like all the Japanese salespeople, except it isn't very effective and is even more difficult for foreign suppliers to pull off. The buyer needs benefits, not features to be able to give you a "yes" decision. Logically, you would think that this would ensure Japanese salespeople first ask questions too, rather than focusing on the features of their solution. However, poorly trained salespeople in Japan have trained the buyer to expect this method. The buyer then tears it apart, to make sure the risk element of the decision has been eliminated or reduced. To get the decision accepted by the relevant divisions within the company, requires the outcomes to be substantially worthwhile for them to agree. Features won't be enough, so we have to know what the needs are first, in order to match our solution and make it convincing to the buyer side. That means asking questions first to understand their needs. In the West, we never even think of the process of asking permission to ask questions, because consultative sales is the accepted way of doing things. When dealing with Japanese clients, because of the status imbalance between seller and buyer, we have to ask for permission first. Remember, they don't know us and they may be reluctant to start sharing all the problems (dirty laundry) their firm has with a salesperson they met just two minutes ago and especially from a foreign salesperson with whom they feel zero cultural and linguistic similarity. Trust takes time in Japan, a lot of time. The trust element for foreign suppliers is close to zero, until there has been a track record of reliability established. How do you create a track record if you can't get to the first sale? This is where we need to provide similar cases from other buyers who resemble this buyer and preferably those who are in Japan. By the way, any statistics you show, which don't have a Japanese element, will just be rejected as not relevant. "These are the excellent client satisfaction results in the US and Europe", means nothing to the Japanese client, because from their point of view, Japan is so different, these foreign numbers don't mean anything. The "slow" part is a pain for foreign suppliers, because everything in the West is about speed to profit. Quarterly share performance as a basis for making investment decisions is ridiculous anywhere and Japanese buyers feel absolutely no time pressure to do anything. We might think the concept of suffering an "opportunity cost" by being too slow to move, is going to be convincing to get them to buy now. Don't worry, many of us have tried it, but without great success. This idea is always trumped by a preference for risk free or low risk decision making. Using sample orders or small scale commitments are the way forward to establish that trust. Don't expect anything to happen fast and at scale. It may take a while to become accepted. If you ask for a small piece of their business to demonstrate your reliability, that is an easier concept to get pushed through the many layers of Japanese buyer decision-making hierarchy. Japanese buyers definitely prefer the Devil they know (your established competitors) to the Angel they don't (that would be you), because it is less risky. You have to become familiar, but that takes time. If you don't have a long enough time horizon for the Japanese buyer, you are better off selling your solutions elsewhere, because you are the only one in a hurry or facing time pressure for results. Let me give you an example. The Toyota Prius car was launched in 1997 and did not make a profit until 2001. Losses for five years in a row. However, by 2009 it became the top selling car in Japan. How many foreign Boards and shareholders would be able to match that patience and acceptance of years of losses? How long will your bosses support you to crack the Japanese market or to make a sale to Japanese buyers located outside Japan? As an aside, Toyota is busy researching Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel source, while everyone else is concentrating on advances in battery power. My prediction is Toyota will dominate the global Hydrogen fuelled vehicle market for heavy l

When you are told that "hope is not a strategy" you get the point. You also know that actually there is a fair bit of hope built into your strategy. Every sales organisation comes up with targets and often these are based on hope more than science. There is imperfect information floating around and we use this as the basis of our assumptions. There is incomplete data and we have to extrapolate based on those numbers. Things can change quickly and the ramifications can be completely unexpected. January 15th, 2020 was the first case of Covid in Japan. February 23rd, 2022 was the start of the war in Ukraine. You couldn't predict these events and there is a huge amount of hope that both situations will resolve themselves and we can all get back to some version of normality. We say things like, "let's focus on what we can control". That is jolly heart warming but it isn't much help. There are numbers which have to be generated and these have to be produced regardless of external factors, most of which we cannot control. This whole ensemble of difficulties can be very discombobulating in sales. If we are set targets too high, we mentally check out and give up. We don't make any declarations to the boss that we have given up, but our activities are such that we are not doing all we can to get the numbers, because we don't believe in the fairness of the process. If you are the boss, the management of the sales operation gets more and more difficult in the work from home or hybrid arrangement. Keeping track of what people are up to gets harder. Our expectations have to be tempered by the external environment, be that Covid or the global downturn. The numbers get harder to reach. If we push too hard, people will quit and they will have little issue with finding another job, if they decide they don't like this one. The whole process becomes more delicate and complex at the same time. If we take a long hard look at our strategy and we realise there is a fair bit of hope built in there what do we do about it? Not every industry or sector is affected by Covid, the war in the Ukraine or a global downturn. Are there pockets of opportunity in certain spheres where they can still spend? The timing of things may be faster in some sectors than others. If we can get deals happening faster, then that helps a lot with getting to the targets. Often we just run out of time, because the speed of the deal flow has ground to a halt or has really slowed down. Can we re-organise the sales team? We can create smaller teams, apply more supervision and have more roundtables, to share information and insights. In good times the team can be allowed to run around at will, because the numbers are being achieved. When things get more desperate and the numbers are not coming, we need to do more coaching and more checking. Often circumstances can outstrip the experience of certain members in the sales team. The Lehman Shock was back in 2008 and there will be team members who have had no direct experience of doing business during that meltdown environment. Anyone in sales under the age of thirty-six hasn't suffered through a major downturn since Lehman. This is where the more experienced people become important because they have seen a version of what we are going through now, at some stage in the past and have experience of what to do. We all have dead pools of clients who have lapsed. They were active but situations changed and they are no longer a client. They are a good place to start because they at least have some record of buying from us. We may still be an accredited supplier for them and the paperwork is already there to make the buying process that bit easier. Often the people will have changed, but the underlying issues may not have been completely solved or new issues have arisen and we have the solution they need. We may have served one client but there will be other similar clients we have not had the chance to do business with. If we come across an issue in one industry it is often going to be a common issue with other companies in the same industry. If we find a problem for one client we need to look around at which other firms may have the same issues. For example a five star Hotel may be having trouble with retention. There is a strong chance other five star hotels are having the same problem. That means we should start contacting all the major hotels and see if that is the case. Gradually we can replace hope with action and try to stimulate the sales process in that way. The key is to get started and to not just become immobilised because the hope aspect of your strategy is not working out.

Inertia is a powerful retardant to getting deals done in Japan. Either they already have a regular supplier or this is a new solution with which they have no experience and they don't want to risk anything. Buying from you represents a number of changes which must take place on their side. Change equals risk in the Japanese buyer's mind rather than opportunity. Doing nothing with the new solution is an easy decision. Sticking with the existing supplier is an easy decision. When we are trying to create a new client we must have the right mindset. If we are focused on getting a deal done then we will have trouble, because the whole process can be so frustrating and take such a long time. We are more inclined to give up altogether. If we are focused on the re-order, we will be in a better place mentally to do what is needed to get the deal done. Speed is usually seen as a positive but not always in sales in Japan. Rushing into something which might blow up in your face, doesn't enthuse the buyer to move things along at a brisk pace. As I like to remind myself, "the buyer in Japan is never on your schedule". To get things moving a bit faster than otherwise, requires us to understand what is slowing down the process. We are usually talking to one section in the company but the post buying decision flow-ons will affect many sections within the organisation. Some will be much more affected than others and our job is to try and find out who that would be and what would be worrying them. This is not that easy because we may never have the opportunity to meet that section and hear directly their concerns. Nevertheless, we need to ask our contacts for the lay of the land regarding who is pro and who is anti the new buying initiative. We can say, "I really appreciate all of your guidance and I understand that buying from us would be a new thing inside the company. I am sure there are many sections which would be directly impacted by making this change and based on your expert knowledge of the organisation, who would you say would be those most affected?". The key at this point is to not dilute the power of the question by adding anything or by speaking. Don't say anything and let them answer you. After they have given you some hints on who will be most affected then we need to ask what would their particular concerns be? We can ask, "It is natural for the key sections you have nominated to take this change seriously and for them to investigate all angles involved. Often I have found that we have information which may not be known to these sections, which would change their perception of the ease of making the change. What would you say would be the major concerns of the ABC section?". Again, we shut up and do not speak after asking the question. It is important to keep digging. They may tell us some information about ABC section's concerns, but we need to get more information. We should say, "Thank you for mentioning that. Apart from this concern can you think of other major hesitations which we may need to work on solving for them?". It is often surprising that the key information doesn't emerge, until we have dug down two or three levels. This makes sense though. The longer we give them to consider the question, the deeper they can go with their thinking, rather than just giving the first answer that pops into their mind, when we first bridge the subject. We should do the same for the other key sections which are most likely to be impacted by the change we are proposing. At this point, we have built up a picture of the obstacles facing us to get this deal across the line and also regarding what we need to do to turn this deal into constant re-orders. The process will have revealed points of friction on their side to make the necessary new arrangements. We have to think about what we can do to remove or reduce those friction points. Perhaps we have to slow the process down to allow them the required time to make the adjustments. Maybe we have to eliminate some aspects of the deal in the first run and see if we can add these back in later, once things settle down. Maybe we have to adjust the payments schedule to fit in with their budgeting cycle or their current cash flow situation. Maybe we need to run a pilot test to help them fully understand what they need to do to make this solution work best for them. This is a low risk formula and once the option is proven, then ramping up the delivery of the solution gets faster and easier. We are all creatures of habit and we prefer the Devil we know to the Angel we don't. In the sales context we are the Angel they don't know and we have to work out how we can make the change we are proposing as friction free as possible by fully understanding what they need to go through to implement it. To do this we need to be full professionals and ask intelligent, carefully constructed questions to unearth the information we will need. There are no shortcuts, it takes time and it is neces

Depending on your industry, times have been tough in sales. We see the Japanese Government trying to resuscitate the inbound tourism industry to increase jobs and revenues to gather more tax income. They are about to open the economy right up to stimulate business. Domestic tourism is worth about three times as much as foreign tourism contributes to the economy. There is a big kick opportunity there once Covid allows us all to travel more freely within Japan. Capital expenditures have been put on hold, as companies worry about the future of the economy. The weak currency self-selects winners and losers, so consumer spending may be impinged by inflation concerns. The kick on effect is felt across a broad range of businesses and so this may be an impediment to them opening up their purses and spending. Worries about a pending global recession driven by the war in Ukraine, energy shortfalls and supply chain issues, may also have company leaders thinking they shouldn't start spending again and just wait and see. Very few salespeople have been super busy over the last couple of years and most have been living a hard scrabble to produce results. This impacts our positivity and mental state about what is possible. We have also seen the numbers of active clients decrease and the volume of business deteriorate. Covid has shrunk our world and our mentality – we are mostly living small these days. How do we adjust to a post-Covid world? Let's be clear, the future isn't great, as we will be alternating between bouts of the flu and Covid every year. Just like the flu, Covid will be killing off older people every year and weeks of productive work will be lost as people have to recover. Our clients will be cautious about any emergence from Covid and will be expecting the worst to happen. They have been conditioned to live small too. We can expect that there will be pockets of client spending available to us as salespeople and our key job is going to be to identity these areas and concentrate efforts there. If a particular firm is emerging from Covid, we can expect that other firms in that same industry are doing the same thing and we need to get busy contacting as many of them as possible. Some won't be ready but some will be ready to buy. We won't know until we contact them. We have to keep in mind that we want to be the one having the conversation with them rather than our competitors. We will need to keep in close touch with them because at a certain point, a bell will ring and they will be back in the game. We just won't know when that decision has been made internally, so we have to keep in touch and keep gauging the timing. Having had no end of trouble getting hold of buyers over Covid, as everyone moved home and being blunted by the gatekeepers to the decision makers, a lot of salespeople are now gun shy about calling firms. They are sick of rejection and being treated like a nuisance, an irritant. The point to keep in mind is that this is exactly how your rivals are feeling too. If you make the effort, gird your loins and pick up the phone and call, you will have a jump on the competition. That bell will ring and it is key that we are the one to hear it and get the business, when the client is ready to come out of their cave and reengage with the world. The prospecting muscle has atrophied during Covid and now is the time to get working on strengthening it again. Better to go early than to go late. There will be a lot of changes inside firms as well. No one goes through a global pandemic unscathed. Whatever was the reality before, there will be changes and we need to understand how the buyer sees the world going forward. What are the new problems they are facing? Has there been any changes in how decisions are made? Have certain key people left the firm, especially our previous champion? Where did they go and can we help them in their new company? What are the firm's immediate priorities? Is there capital to invest in expansion or recovery? Do we have the right solutions for this new world or are we imagining we just go back to how it used to be? A lot of our assumptions and corporate intelligence may now be irrelevant, so we have to go back to basic questioning of buyers about what they now need, almost like starting over again. Have we been able to work on strengthening the value line-up of what we provide. Our workload may have declined during Covid, thereby freeing up time to work on creating added value for when it was time to re-join the battle. Did you manage that? Is there still some time to allocate resources now before things heat up again? Perhaps your early interactions with previously inactive clients have recently yielded up some hints on things you should start working on to add to your line-up of solutions. Can you take some of the friction out of your processes for your buyers? Can you increase prices by adding some extras which have perceived value when judged by the clients? If we approach thing

In modern economies, asking the buyer questions to understand their needs would be considered the most basic of the basic skills of a salesperson. This isn't happening as much as you would expect in Japan, the world's third largest economy. Most salespeople everywhere are untrained and are left to work it out for themselves. Japan has what they call OJT – On The Job Training - as the main teaching method. In this busy boss life, that is now reduced down to taking the new salesperson with them on a couple of sales calls and then the salesperson is on their own. If your boss is an ace salesperson, then this sounds reasonable. If only that were the case. From our real world research across the classes we run reaching sales to Japanese employees and my own buyer experiences, it is obvious the skillset to ask the buyer questions hasn't been well developed. Pitching the features is the mainstream technique. That lazy shotgun approach makes little sense though, so why aren't Japanese salespeople asking the buyer questions, to be able to zero in on their needs? Here are six reasons why Japanese salespeople prefer to pitch. The buyer is not King in Japan, but God. God doesn't tolerate pesky salespeople asking questions, so the pitch seems safer. In Japan, relatively low ranking people in very large companies, are treated as superior by the Presidents of much smaller firms. Social hierarchy is very defined here by both the size of the company and the rank of the individual. That is why business cards are so predominant – you need to work out the stranger's rank to know how to deal with them. The buyer always outranks the seller. The salesperson's role is to pitch their offer. The buyer's role is to shred it in order to eliminate all risk. No questions brooked by God in the sale. Therefore salespeople are in no social position to be asking anything of the buyer God. Don't embarrass the buyer There is the fear that the salesperson might ask a question which the buyer can't answer and the buyer will lose face. Often senior people don't have all the details and embarrassment may engender. This may ensure that the salesperson will never do any business with that company ever again. I have directly experienced this myself. We deal with a lot of HR people who are looking for training on behalf of line managers. When I asked the HR team my very first needs based question, they clearly had no clue. An ominous silence followed and in Japan silences, unnervingly, can be very long. Then they suddenly said they wanted my "pitch". Actually all they were doing was collecting the vendor prices. I innocently asked if I could talk directly to the line manager. I was bundled straight out the door. Goodbye to that sale. It is too direct Our sales questions are quite specific. What are your problems, what is not working, where are you failing, why aren't you fixing it, etc. The whole culture here survives through vagueness. Being indirect is a form of polite intercourse. Ambiguous conversation is a well refined art in Japan. Asking direct, pointed questions upsets the social harmony, so this makes the pitch the better choice. The questions asked may be poor Asking a potentially dumb question creates fear. It indicates a lack of professionalism or a lesser intellect. You have to know the industry well to hone in on pertinent issues. Failure to ask smart questions says you are clueless and not to be taken seriously. Better to keep that dirty little secret to yourself, by pitching and not asking any questions. You seem to be stealing secrets Asking about the current results, the firm's plans, strategies, pricing margins, delivery quantities, activities, average sales per head, etc., is highly confidential. They have only just met you and yet you want all of this sensitive information? They never think to ask questions Salespeople think their job is to go through the catalogue or the flyers etc., explain all of the feature details and then the client will decide if they are interested. They are here to tell the client everything about the solution and answer any questions they may have. Therefore, according to this logic, there is no need to ask any questions. Doing something different in Japan is greeted with suspicion. If all of your colleagues and bosses are pitchfest acolytes, you need to fit in. Each generation keeps shovelling poor approaches down the line to the next generation. Salespeople are never taught how to ask permission from the buyer to launch forth with their questions. Simply tell God about the results you have produced for other clients and say, "Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure, but in order for me to know if it is possible or not, may I ask you a few questions?". So easy, just try it. In Japan, there is a major imbalance in power between buyer and seller. That is not the way to think about it though. When you have the cure for cancer, who has the balance of power, the seller or the buyer? We have to thi

Usually, we meet our contact in the company through a cold call, a referral or networking and we sit down and have a talk about the needs of the organisation. If we are doing a professional job, we will have explained what we do, mentioned a client we have done work for and the success they achieved as a result. We will then suggest that "maybe" we could do the same for this company too, but in order to know if that is possible or not, we ask if we can ask a few questions. Once we have received their permission to ask questions, we can go deep on the issues facing the company and they will tell us. In the next stage, we will start suggesting solutions which are matched to their needs or we will say we are not a match and go and find a client who is. At this point it sometimes comes out that our contact in the company is all in favour of fixing the issue, but they are being hamstrung by others in the organisation. These could be line managers or senior executives further up the chain. In Japanese organisations there will be multiple decision-makers. Each division which will be impacted by the buying decision will conduct their own due diligence to see what it will mean for them. As each Section Head clears the decision, they will put their seal on the proposal document and it will move up to the next level, to the Division Head. The Executive committee will review the Division Heads approval of the decision and then it becomes official and things can start happening. That is a tremendous number of people involved in the decision and the person we are sitting across from is just one individual in the chain of command, who may or may not even have the ability to put their seal on the piece of paper. As salespeople, we may never meet anyone else inside the decision-making system and we rely on this person to help us steer agreement through the machine. The trust build with our contact that we are sincere about helping them is critical. We have to make sure they are confident we are credible and reliable to do what we say we are going to do. If things go badly, it makes them look bad and may negatively impact their movement upwards within the organisation. I was selling mobile telephone antennas steel towers in Japan, being sourced from Australia. We were able to install them for 30% of what the local suppliers were able to offer. It was a first for imported steel towers, so there was a lot of complication. The company I was selling to was a joint venture and the people came from various shareholding companies into the organisation. Some of them brought their preferred local suppliers with them, so it was a battle to get the Australia towers through the decision making process. My champions fought hard and managed to get the deal done. This was even in the face of the local supplier dango or cartel group banding together to try to undercut the import pricing to destroy the deal. Their idea was to drive the Australian suppliers out of the market, so they could put the prices back up to what they were before. Fortunately, the buyer saw through this strategy and wanted to permanently change the supply chain to substantially reduce the cost. The first few deliveries went well, until the Australian side thought they would switch production to Malaysia to save money. Then the quality problems started and in the end the business stopped completely and the Australian were out of the market forever. It had a negative impact on my champions inside the company who had fought so hard for the deal. I saw that promising business end and my relationship with my champions was in tatters. It taught me a valuable lesson about mutual responsibilities and reputation. On our side, we had let everyone down and the trust was destroyed. My name was mud. When we are dealing with the contact inside the company, who we are hoping to make our champion to help us navigate this deal through the buyer organisation to get an agreement, we have to keep in mind the risk we are bringing to them. My champion inside the buyer organisation got burnt when supply failed to meet expectations and the contract was torn up. I don't know how they finally fared, because they wouldn't talk to me anymore, which I took for a very, very bad sign. It wasn't my decision to use Malaysia for production but that is not how the champion looks at it. I am their guy and I failed them, so in their eyes, I bear all the responsibility for this deal and how it eventuates. I still feel bad about what happened, because we are talking about people's careers here. The point is we need to find our champion, protect them, take care of them and make this deal a winner for them within their own organisation. If we start with this in mind, we will make the right decisions and our personal brand will also be protected in the marketplace.

I am a big fan of Victor Antonio who is a sales coach in America. He has an excellent show called the Sales Influence Podcast. In a recent episode I listened to he had some very interesting statistics. According to US research, salespeople, on average, close about 40% of the deals they are seeking. That means they lost 60% but what happened to that group who didn't buy? The shocking component of this research was the fact that only 20% went with a rival offer in preference to our genius effort. That leaves 40% who didn't buy from us and didn't buy from the competition, so what were they doing? Victor mentioned that of that 40%, 10% didn't move because the price scared the hell out of them and they became immobile, frozen in the headlights. Okay, then we still have another 30%, which is a big group of buyers who didn't take any action and the reason wasn't related to the price we offered. So what was the issue? Victor believes it was a matter of the value we were able to offer wasn't attractive enough for them to move. Price and value, as we all know, are not the same thing. The buyer needed to feel the size of the gain they would receive was worth it, based on how they measured the gain. That gain could be measured in a number of ways. It could be reducing costs, speeding up delivery times for their solution, integrating with another solutions they already have, making themselves more attractive to their buyers, etc. One of the problems with Japanese sales teams is that they have no clue about what the client values. How could that be? Simple. They don't ask questions or if they do, they don't ask the right questions. We teach sales to employees of Japanese companies who want to improve their sales results. When we get to the question design part, invariably, it is a new concept for most of them. They have been taught to get straight into the nitty gritty of the spec, the data, the features of their solution. They are throwing mud up against a wall and trying to work out which bits will stick. It is so ridiculous, you wonder why on earth they would do it in such an ineffective way. Part of the reason is that professional sales is not well established in Japan and most of the instruction is done with OJT or On the Job training. That is the blind helpfully leading the blind. For those who at least understand you need to be questioning the buyer to find out what they need, their questioning can be very shallow. They miss the hints, the flags, the arrows that points to "dig here" for the gold. They just skip on to the next question without finding out what the buyer needs at a deeper level. This is where the "what do you consider value" conversation is required. Victor flagged another element, which was about the degree of perceived effort required to implement the solution we are recommending. I teach in a non-profit programme called the Japan Market Expansion Competition, where teams of young people from different companies work on a client's business and come up with a business plan for them, as part of the competition. I was also a paying client of this JMEC programme but I threw the plan away. The reason was just this issue of the effort we would have needed to implement the plan, wasn't proportionate to the gains we would have made. Our counterparts in companies are the HR department and we notice that in most cases they seem overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to get through for the number of people allocated to do it. They are often very uninterested in doing things to help their companies do better, because they know the amount of work they will have to do, will go up dramatically. Another friction point can be the amount of internal coordination needed to adapt to a new supplier. We know that the ringi seido system of all related divisions signing off before the change is made, requires a lot of agreement internally. It may be that our offering isn't sufficiently compelling to overcome that internal friction stopping the deal from progressing. When we are presenting the solution we can often get caught up in features, benefits, application of the benefits and evidence and forget about the issue of friction becalming the progress through the labyrinthian corridors of internal decision making. We need to ask, "if you are able to implement our solution, are there any likely friction points we need to consider, in order to reduce or remove potential issues?". They may not be willing to share that amount of information in the first meeting, but we should keep asking the question on subsequent calls, in order to find out what we need to do to tweak our suggestion to get through the internal barriers. If we can reflect on the deals that didn't happen, we may be able to better prepare ourselves for future sales calls. We can head off rejection possibilities before they arise, by presupposing what is required on their side to see this deal come to fruition.

I had been busy, so setting this appointment had been difficult. Eventually, we found the day and time to meet. I asked for the address and the text note mentioned the building and I knew it well, so all good to go. Except when I arrived there, the entry registration desk people said there was no company of that name in the building. I checked my text note and sure enough, it specified this building. I did a quick search of the company name and found the right building, but now I was late. I texted the person I was meeting to explain why I would be a bit late. The person I was meeting called me, apologised and ten minutes later we finally got to meet. Now getting your own office building address wrong when meeting the client is quite strange and as the subject of this conversation was going to be investing my money, the trust factor has just taken a big blow. Being a flexible Aussie, these types of small things don't bother me particularly. I have messed up meeting appointments too myself. Getting a call at lunch asking where you are for the lunch with them, is always unnerving. It doesn't happen very often, but you feel really bad when it does happen. I have been guilty of forgetting a meeting too, so I am not one who can run around saying I am perfect. Nevertheless, I was curious about how they were going to recover from this debacle and try to rebuild the trust. We had met once on Zoom and he had wanted to meet me in his office face to face. I get that because as a salesperson I prefer that too. Having made a big deal out of meeting in his office, I was a bit surprised to find that this was one of those executive floors, run by a company who specialises in providing high end space to companies who don't have their own offices. The trust goes down again. Is this company solid enough? If they are solid enough why don't they have their own office space? How big is this company? In this case, he needed to explain why they were in that executive floor and not in their own premises but there was no thought to mention it. He could have said their company policy is that they prefer to give value back to the customers through the lower fees they charge, rather than making a building landlord rich, by spending money on expensive lodgings. That explanation would make a lot of sense, because I know I am making my landlord rich leasing the entire fifth floor in my building. I would be able to identify with that logic, but again another trust building opportunity missed. The rest of the rebuild attempt was perfunctory at best I would say. Apologising is a good start, but we have to do better than that. Forgetting your own building is inexplicable, but you have to explain it anyway. There is no point in trying to move on in this situation, because unless that trust is restored, there won't be any business flowing from this meeting ever. He needed to use storytelling to flesh out that his mind had been preoccupied with an important meeting, where he was closing a huge deal in the first building I went to and somehow that preoccupation was so strong, at the time of his text reply to me, that without realising it, he had just mentioned the building by mistake. This will only get you there partially though and you need to do more. At the very end of the meeting, he handed over his corporate brochure and information on the firm, without explaining any of it to me and just suggesting I read it for myself. He should have segued from his initial apology straight into extolling the virtues of the firm in order to re-establish credibility for his company. He was in a hole and he had to get himself out of it. Spending time at the start with the firm's USPs – the unique selling proposition of the company was the better move. But he didn't do that though, so an opportunity lost right there. He needed to walk me through the highlights of that corporate brochure and rebuild the trust. If the trust isn't re-kindled, I am even going to bother reading the corporate brochure or will I just bin it, when I get back to my office? During the meeting he made a point of differentiating the fee structure from a well known competitor, making the point that certain charges they were applying were unfair to the buyer. The only problem with that construct is that he used to work for that competitor for many years and so what about all of the clients he took care of, who were getting unfair treatment? In this case, he needed to make the point that it was company policy, he never agreed with it and that is why he left that employ, because he didn't feel the way the customers were being treated was correct. That is understandable and acceptable. However just dissing the rival, to make the point you are more trustworthy than them, isn't enough, because the fact remains that he still worked there and the implication is that he was happily gulling customers at that time, so why should he be trusted now? In this case he really needed to draw a line betwee

Many years ago, my job was to help Australian companies crack the Japanese market. One of the elements of that job was explaining the Japanese business psyche to the Australian businesspeople targeting Nippon. As you might imagine this wasn't an easy task, as the mindsets are so different. White colonisation of Australia started in the late 1700s and the first convicts and settlers arrived into a vast continent, without one permanent structure, bridge, road or port. Aboriginal life was nomadic. Hunt everything you can in the area around you, then pack everything up and move to the next location. You didn't need modern infrastructure for that lifestyle. The consequence has been that the culture built up amongst the early English settlers was very much one of "can do" and optimism that they could tame the heat, droughts, fires, cyclones and floods that are part and parcel of life in Australia. Six generations ago, my ancestors hacked their way through the bush by hand, to create fields for agriculture and to feed the cattle and sheep. If you couldn't take it, you could always go back to Mother England. Japan is a also country with no shortage of natural calamities. Earthquakes trigger fires in cities and wooden houses burn quickly. They also trigger tsunami and these can wipe out entire towns, as we have seen in 2011. Typhoons and floods destroy crops and building. Floods and landslides are common. My super wealthy, famous Japanese friend was walking his dog after heavy rain and a wall suddenly collapsed and killed him. Japan has volcanos as well and recently the well known Sakurajima volcano has had a major eruption. This tough environment is part and parcel of Japan and there is no Mother England to retreat to – this is it for the Japanese population. The mindset of the Japanese in my experience is one of the glass is half-empty and life is difficult. When I was trying to explain the different attitude between the Aussie glass half full and the Japanese glass half empty approach, I found a useful comparison. I discovered a graph showing the degrees of business optimism in Australia spread over many years. Fundamentally the Aussies were positive and optimistic. Japan has regular tankan surveys of business optimism and fundamentally the Japanese scores are usually negative or very low in terms of positivity. When you compare the graphs, the results are strikingly different. Historically, when a person working the land in Australia needed to replace an implement, there would be a six month turn around, as the sailing ship went off to Merry Old England and then sailed back with the replacement. In the interim, people became innovative and flexible about finding a solution. It created a "can do" mindset, because there was no choice. So having these problem solving, positive, "can do" Aussies convincing Japanese buyers to start relying on them was a huge job. I would show them the graph of how basically for the Japanese the glass was always half-empty and so the Aussies should curb their enthusiasm and approach the sale in a different way. This is a generalisation and it doesn't make it any less true, but Australia is a country of creating things out of nothing and finding solutions and Japan is more one of caution. Once you understand that the Japanese are not expecting anything spectacular to happen and are more concerned about things going horribly wrong, then you focus on reducing risk, rather than trumpeting your capability and your successes. This is where track record, data and "smarts" about doing business in Japan come in. Japan is a graveyard for MVP (Minimum Viable Product) launches. The product has to be working extremely well, with no defects or problems. If it has any of these issues, the situation becomes problematic very quickly. Similarly, early adopters in business are a small crowd here. Basically, in business, nobody wants to go first. "You trial it, we will watch very, very carefully and if it doesn't blow up, we may take a look at it" is the usual ethos. Note the word "may", because even if it goes well, they may not take any action. You don't get into trouble in a Japanese company for not being a path finder. Steady as she goes is preferred to anything smacking of risk taking. When things go wrong in Australia, then the suppler gets to work to fix it and if some money needs to change hands as a result, then it gets done and everyone moves forward. In Japan, you have to fix it, but that isn't where it ends. You have to head around there to apologise in person, bearing gifts and expect to be lambasted for your poor reliability and shoddy work. You also have to have forensic detail concerning why this problem occurred in the first place and a detailed, clear plan of making sure it never happens again. Even then you may be removed as a supplier, especially so if you are not genuinely contrite and authentic in your remorse, for having caused the buyer problems. Never forget, your buyer has their

"Out of the frying pan into the fire", seems to be an appropriate descriptor for where we are now. We have been battered by Covid, or at least many of us have had that unpleasant experience, but now everyone, even those who sailed through Covid, are about to get swept up in to the next recession. Inflation, rising interest rates, supply chain turmoil, energy supplies being weaponised, the list is long and depressing. Japan relies on foreign markets and if the USA has a sniffle, Japan catches a cold is another old idea. So what happens in sales if we find ourselves getting daily cases of covid deaths and infections under control through vaccinations and herd immunity and yet are now in a global recession? Here are some things to think about. Covid may have wiped out some of your rivals. I couldn't believe that the Heichinrou Chinese restaurant in Yokohama closed down in May. It has been serving customers since 1884 and now is gone. For the other Chinese restaurants who are still in operation in China Town they have seen a major competitor vanquished. The other businesses are still operating and so they have buying needs. In fact, they may have an uptake in customers who cannot go to Heichinrou anymore and so their sales may pick up. It is a sad day when legendary business names fall, particularly in Japan where corporate longevity is treasured, but that is the capitalist system. Maybe your rivals are not extinguished entirely but they may be wounded. They may have fired staff to reduce costs and so their scope of capacity has diminished. They cannot see as many potential clients as before, but maybe you can see them, because you toughed it out and kept your crew together. Recessions are uneven phenomenon. Some industries are hit harder than others. Covid hit tourism, training and hospitality particularly hard, but other industries sailed through the pandemic with barely a flesh wound. The recession will impact certain industries more than others and so it is useful to identify which of those industries will still have the capability to buy. Unlike a global pandemic, most of us have seen recessions before, so we will have some idea which businesses we should concentrate on and which we should avoid worrying about. We will also have probably experienced inflation before too and the ramifications that has on your industry. Look back at what happened in the past for useful lessons on what to expect this time around. In our sales training, we use a matrix which aligns your existing buyers with your products and services. It is always shocking to realise you are only supplying some clients with a very narrow band of offerings. It reminds you that they have multiple needs but you are not servicing them. Maybe you were unable to gain entry before, because the incumbent was so strongly positioned, however Covid may have changed that power balance and now is the time to suggest other solutions from your line-up. Existing clients know you well, they trust you, they will take your call, so you don't have to navigate your way through the serried ferocious gatekeepers to get to the buyer. Existing clients can become past clients quite easily. In our case, the HR Director changes and next thing you know, you are out on the street and they have replaced you with their favoured suppliers. During Covid perhaps some of the line managers have left the company or moved to other sections and maybe there is some nice new buyer who comes to the conversation with an open mind and no baggage. Perhaps the gate keeper is still being a barrier, but at least if you have dealt with that company before, they may be willing to take a message from you, even if they won't transfer your call. You could try and bypass them altogether by sending some mail to the new person or at least to the position most relevant to your business. The beauty of this is that the same gatekeeper who won't transfer the call, will diligently walk over to the manager's desk and drop your parcel on their table. They will open it up at some point and they may decide that you have what they need and be open to talking about reactivating business with you. It works in your favour sometimes too. That nice buyer you have built a strong relationship with, is now in a similar role in another company and they realise you have the solution they need. If you haven't found where they went, now might be a good time to do so. LinkedIn only has about two million followers in Japan, so the chances you can track them on LinkedIn if they are working for a Japanese very domestic company are slim. Often if you call and ask for them, the person taking the call will tell you they have left. If you are lucky, they may be able to tell you where there have gone. The Game of Thrones character Petyr Baelish noted that "chaos is a ladder" and pandemics and recessions are chaotic. It is usually more like snakes and ladders though and sometimes you are lifted up and at other times you are pushed

A miraculous thing often happens when I am meeting clients for the first time. We have had our meeting, I am closing up my organiser where I have been taking my notes, I am getting ready to leave, when they will drop some major insight or important piece of information on me. It is always a bit fraught because the meeting has obviously ended, I am already packed up and I cannot easily unpack the organiser and start making additional notes. I have to wait until I am out of sight to then grab that vital titbit or garnish they have added and record it before I forget it. I have come to realise that the way I run the meeting isn't allowing for these opportunities. Naturally, I am running the meeting rather than the client. I have the navigation in mind. I know where we have to get to and how we will get there. It revolves around me directing the action, because that is my job in sales. Asking intelligent questions and listening carefully for the answers is the sales life. Many salespeople reading this will have no idea what I am talking about. They think the job is to do all of the talking, batter the buyer with data and information and through force of will, wrestle the buyer to the ground and get them to sign the order form. They are pitch people not salespeople and there is a vast difference between the two. In the course of asking questions, I am searching for opportunities to ask something in a way that stops the buyer in their tracks. I want them mentally reeling back and thinking, "I haven't thought about that", or "I haven't prepared for that". I want to bring them to a point of realisation that if they don't buy my solution, life will be grim, the business will suffer, the future looks bad, etc. Now I could just tell them all of these things as a statement but that is not effective. If I make these statements, the buyer is thinking, "well of course he would say that, he is trying to sell me something". Instead, I want to ask a question in such a way in which the buyer has to agree with the proposition. When the buyer accepts the idea, they are saying it and so it is true. I might say something like, "If there was a way to make sure your key people are not going to be poached by the current horde of ravenous recruiters who are constantly scouring firms like yours for bodies to move to your competitors, to collect their 40% first year salary fee, would that help to keep your business from instability?". Perhaps this client wasn't aware that recruiters were getting paid so much for lifting people out of companies like theirs or that there was so much of this poaching going on. Maybe they were aware, but they hadn't concentrated on the problem until I brought it up. I am purposely using highly evocative language, drawing word pictures of disaster, doom and destruction: "poached", "horde", "ravenous", "scouring", "competitors", "40% fee", "instability". The question is also framed in a way in which the only logical answer is "Yes". As professional salespeople we go through the process of asking questions about where they are now and where they want to be, to gauge the distance between the two to see if there is a possibility of the client taking immediate action. If they think they can get from point A to point B under their own steam, then we have no urgency in play and we won't do a deal today. We are looking for what changes need to happen to get from point A to Point B and what is possibly blocking the path. Usually, we have what they need to clear that blockage and help them make it to where they want to be and we can do it faster and cheaper than they can do on their own. Given a 100 years, anyone can get to the goal, which is why we always emphasise the time it takes to get there and the consequent opportunity cost of unnecessarily waiting. We also want to know what all of this means for them personally in career terms. If we solve the issue, how will this help them inside the company. Even if they don't proffer an immediate answer, we get them thinking about their own self interest and subtly make the point we are here to help them in that endeavour. In Japan, the chances are strong that we will need to come back to them with the details of the solution for them and there will be another meeting required. This is the point where we may be tempted to pack up and head out the door. Before we do that, we should just pause and wait a moment to see if they are going to add anything additional to the conversation about what they need. Remember we are experts at this. We are doing this questioning gig all day long, five days a week, fifty weeks a year. They are not experts in this field. They will only be in the receiving end of this occasionally, because most of the time they will be getting smashed with a pitch by our competitors. Consequently, their brain will be slowly digesting the essence of our message and processing it. Further things will occur to them, especially toward the very end of the meetin

Have you ever paid for something that you found was very good and which you used for many years. You will have forgotten perhaps the price you originally paid, but you have not forgotten the quality you received. You always maintain a positive mindset about that company and the product or service. On the other hand, if you paid for something that didn't deliver what you expected, over time, you will forget the exact amount of money involved, but you will always recall that the quality was poor and not acceptable. This is where salespeople make the mistake of concentrating on price and don't make the effort to bolster the quality aspects of what they are supplying. Not only does the item or service suffer from a negative association with poor quality, the salesperson's personal brand is also damaged and maybe irrecoverably. When you find a bad deal, you make the determination to never buy from that supplier again and by extension from that person again. Not only that, you will also make a point of warning others not to deal with that person, because they are not reliable or they lack integrity or they are a rip off. In the market our reputation is everything and we cannot afford to allow it to be stained with ill repute. Sometimes even good quality firms have problems. Machines, supply chains, people are not perfect so there can be problems. How these problems are addressed says everything about the integrity of who you are dealing with. No one likes people who want to justify the unjustifiable and you would think that no one would be that stupid, but you would be wrong. Yes, there are people who will try to slip out of any and all accountability and who run from taking any responsibility. We can all accept that things can go wrong, but what we want is for it to be fixed and fixed pronto. We will forget the price we paid, but we will remember that the problem was sorted out fast and with integrity and no arguments. Given all of this logical discussion about price versus quality, the expectation would be that when salespeople talk to clients they are concentrating on quality to justify the price. Instead what do we get? The pitch. The salesperson goes into great detail about the specs for the widget but doesn't take the time to align what the widget does with what the buyer wants. The latter is the quality conversation, not the rattling off of data and details about the weight, size, colour, etc of the widget. Getting the requirement to be matched by what is going to be supplied is the key aspect of providing a quality service. How do we know what is required? No mysteries there – we simply ask. In Japan, this is where things break down. You might be thinking "wait a minute, how hard can it be to ask what they buyer wants in Japan?". Surprisingly, salespeople here usually don't ask questions, because they are busy going headlong into their pitch. One cultural twist is that the buyer has been trained to expect a pitch and every Japanese person has been trained since childhood to do what everyone else is doing and don't stand out and be different. As the sales leader you can talk to you are blue in the face about what they are supposed to do, but if you don't actually go with them to make sure they are asking questions, they won't take that route. Conformity is a crushing weight in Japan and few are willing or able to buck its oppressive limitations. Once you have asked the first key question, life gets better immediately. What is that key question? It is so simple – "may I ask you a few questions". We not quite that simple, because you have to set it up. You need to talk about what it is you do, then mention some results you have had for similar clients, proffer that "maybe" you could do the same for this client. At this point you then say, "in order for me to know if that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked a few questions?". There is a very tiny number of buyers who will dismiss this approach and ask for the pitch anyway. That cannot be helped and that comment is a red flag anyway, which tells you it is better to hightail it out of there and find a better client. The vast majority of clients will agree and then you can start aligning what you have with what they want and the whole quality dimension possibly starts to go straight up. If we keep in mind that quality lingers in the mind of the buyer, then we are always better off to be concentrating on that. Prices fluctuate based on the market, supply chain, energy disruptions and currency movements, but the fundamental quality doesn't fluctuate, unless there has been an unforeseen event. If we can align the price to justify the quality, then over time the memory of the price paid fades, but the recollection of the quality never goes away. When it comes to the time to do more business with you, the buyer is open to that because the track record is there and the trust has been built.

"In our business, at our size, we have to be the speedboat, we cannot be the oil tanker", is a key mantra for my Franchise company. Why is that the case? I am the only non-Japanese in the firm and I was frustrated at the slow pace of decision-making and action taken by the team. Growing up in Western business, speed of decision-making and taking action are requirements drummed into you from any early age. Other foreign leaders in Japan reading our speed mantra will be sagely nodding their heads at this point, because their multi-national firms may be much larger in scale, but the issue is the same. It doesn't seem to make sense why things are so slow here. Japan Seems Efficient But Is It? Japan seems very, very efficient. The famous Bullet Train, the Shinkansen, has an unbelievable record of being on time. The average delay of Shinkansen trains is less than one minute per year and there are over 3000 trains annually whistling by at speeds of over 230 kilometers per hour. Train commuters based outside Japan will be astonished at these numbers. There is also hardly any litter here, graffiti, drugs, guns or crime – the usual reality for many people living in big Western cities. Everything works and works well, so it seems the pinnacle of efficiency. Inside companies though the picture is quite different. In the West, ambitious, thrusting employees trying to make a name for themselves and get promoted, are rapid fire machines. They are constantly pushing the boundaries, taking calculated risks and quite aware they are being judged on how quickly and well they can get things done. In Japan, none of these things are particularly important. Sprinting off a cliff is thought to be a bad idea in Japan. It is much better to take some time, cross every "T" and dot every "I" before moving work along. Speed often leads to mistakes being made and in Japan that is unacceptable. Measure Three Times, Cut Once In Japan This fear of making mistakes and errors has everyone measuring three times, before cutting once. Western CFOs are clever. They have worked out that there is a ratio of defects to profitability. The thinking is "if we accept a three percent error rate, even taking into account having to replace defective goods, the firm will make more money that trying to achieve a 100% no defect outcome". This would get CEOs salivating at the thought of making more profit and the CFO will get a big bonus, but not in Japan. That CFO suggestion wouldn't see the light of day here, because it is unthinkable. Supreme attention to detail, no defects, no errors are rock solid values in Japan. To achieve these vaunted outcomes a lot of triple checking is required and that takes time. Getting things out the door pronto is not valued here if there are any mistakes in the process. The MVP or minimum viable product idea is a difficult concept here because the product has to work well and reliably or no one wants to buy it. Of course there is a love of kaizen here around making further incremental improvements, but the original release cannot have problems or the product is dead in the water. Few Marriages Of Corporate Convenience In Japan This safety first idea in also a mantra in decision-making. Japan is not as litigious as some Western countries, so the legal ramifications are not necessarily the prime driver. There is another fundamental concern which slows down business deal making. Western firms enjoy marriages of convenience. Two firms come together to make more money collectively, than they could individually and there is the thought that this situation is only as good and lasting as the immediate benefits. When these run out, then we all move on. Japan sees business marriages as monogamous, life long and full of mutual obligations. If the business partnership is a lifelong arrangement then a lot of due diligence has to be carried out before any agreements are struck. This is all understood within Japan and companies here know that Western companies operate off a much more short-term framework, so there is an inherent risk associated with dealing with non-Japanese firms. The President Isn't Necessarily The Key Decision-Maker Unless it is a founder led company, usually the President is not the key decision-maker. The more junior people will conduct the due diligence and then the results go up and get homogenised across the various Divisions within the firm which will be affected by the decision to do business with this other firm. This homogenisation works well for milk but it can be a painfully slow process within the company decision-making structure. Imagine everyone is worried about taking any responsibility for this decision in case something goes wrong, so the triple checking is being repeated at every level. No one gets rewarded for speed, but the downside of mistakes is vast. There is an internal decision document called a ringisho ( 稟議書 )which collects the personal seals of each decision-maker, before it can progress to the

The ferocity of competitors depends on a number of factors. Are we in a commodity market where price and supply capacity determine all and it is a race to the bottom? Are we in a narrow band market where there are few suppliers and market share is hard to expand? Is our business exposed to currency swings? Are technological breakthroughs by rivals either going to deeply wound us or even drive us to the wall? Would a regulatory change up end our business relative to our competitors? Are deep pockets the key to winning in the market? If our rival poached our key people, would it be a disaster from which we may not be able to recover? In most cases in business, we have tons of competitors and we have to duke it out in the market. Usually in these cases though there are also tons of potential buyers too. Usually, we are limited in our ability to access those buyers, relative to our competitor's capacities. Your sales team of twenty is dwarfed by the rival's ranks of hundreds of people able to fan out and meet more clients. New competitors are also often happy to enter into price destruction to buy market share. You have diligently worked the price up over many years and suddenly all of that effort is out the window, because Deep Pockets is undercutting you. It is all a zero sum game of winners and losers and not much grey in the middle. What can we do. We need to build moats around our castle to help us withstand attack from outside. Now here is the irony. We need to be doing this before we have a problem. This is problematic because mentally we are thinking everything is fine. We are making money and doing well. In fact, we are pretty busy just keeping up with the demands from buyers. No moat construction spare capacity available. That situation well describes my business in 2018-2019. We were surging, money was coming in like never before and life was looking pretty peachy, until January 10th, 2020. Japan's first case of Covid-19 triggered cancellation after cancellation of scheduled training by our clients and things were suddenly looking grim. No moat either. They say to never waste a good crisis, so we did that. For the last two and half years we have been working on building that moat, because now we have the time. A lot of time. We looked at how can we get out of the apple to apple comparisons and create a situation where it is a musk melon to apple comparison. For everyone based outside of Japan, musk melons are prohibitively expensive here and considered high value, warranting the yen required to buy one. Maybe you have suddenly found some excess capacity thanks to Covid trying to destroy your industry. Don't worry if you missed making the most of a good crisis, there will plenty coming down the pike in the future for you to work on. Even better, if you can actually get some moat building going on even if things looking pretty good. Remember, the good times roll, but they don't keep rolling and one day you will need that moat. We had been doing virtual training delivery in Dale Carnegie since 2010. We toyed with the idea for Japan but the big bug bears were the money to translate the curriculum and the time and effort to train instructors and producers to do it. Guess what? We found the money and time to rectify that situation pretty snappily once we released we had to switch across to delivery online to save the business. In retrospect we should have done that whole online thing before Covid but there was no pressing urgency, so we dawdled. What do you make the moat out of? Value is the obvious answer. Often though, we think we are already giving sufficient value. What more could we do? Because the life and death urgency isn't upon us, we may need to do dedicate the time and do some serious brainstorming to identify where we can bring impact to our buyers, beyond the current configurations. It may mean adding value which has a cost and you don't get directly compensated for it. Moats are expensive and that is the point. If they were cheap, you wouldn't have a moat, because it would be easy for your rival to replicate what you are doing. There are internal costs which you can bear, in order to pass on some economic advantage to your buyers. Find them. Musk melons at apple prices or slightly higher than apple prices is a serious moat. What is the equivalent in your business? What extras can you bring to the party? What services can you attach to physical items and vice versa? Where can you save the buyer money and time sustained at a high quality point, because they are usually the key things they are concerned about. Start the search now and get busy building that moat, because you can guarantee you will need it and generally the correlation of need and urgency is at the worst possible timing too.

In the good old days we could have multiple public personas in sales. We could be the professional salesperson, but that image was entirely separate to our family life. We could enjoy boozy celebrations and getting off our face with relative anonymity. We could accumulate customer complaints and deal with them in private. We could rely on word of mouth from within a limited circle of acquaintances. When we met people for the first time, they basically knew almost nothing about us, except the name of our company and any reputation that brand name had in the market. Times have changed haven't they. I was reminded of this fact recently. I host a weekly podcast called Japan's Top Business Interviews where I interview leaders about one topic – leading in Japan. Through a mutual contact, a young man about to graduate from Temple University sought my advice on his speech at the Commencement Ceremony as the student body representative. In the course of that conversation with him he told me he had already chosen a prominent American insurance company to work for, entirely based of the interview I did with the CEO. Separately, two other leaders here mentioned to me that when they were interviewing people to work at their companies, the candidates mentioned they had listened to their interviews with me before the job interview. Potential clients reach out to me, because I am producing a prodigious amount of content spread across the six podcasts and three TV shows I release each week. My point is never before have salespeople had the opportunity or the risk of having everything out there in social media about them, quite easily discoverable, before meeting with the prospective client. Buyers do check us out, in the same way that we check them out. Naturally they are looking for red flags and we are looking for commonalities, so that we can create solid connections with them. This means we need to carefully curate our social media information and image. There are plenty of occasions where I have been out on the booze with mates or clients, but you won't find any of that on social media. Of course, I can control a great deal of what goes up on social media, but when someone else is taking and uploading the photos of the debacle, it gets a bit trickier. Nevertheless, when we are in sales, we need to be very much aware that these occurrences will be seen by potential buyers. I suggest you be the demure one in the photo, while your colleagues in the shot are completely off their faces. If buyers do a search on you, what will they find? If you don't know, then I suggest you get busy and start doing a forensic analysis of what they will find. Better you know before they know. If they find nothing, that is a problem in itself. If they do find content, what will they discover about you? Originally, I was scared and doubtful of social media. In 2011, I attended the Dale Carnegie International Convention in San Diego and well known sales instructor Jeffrey Gitomor was a guest speaker. He told us he has 30,000 followers on Twitter and asked how many we had. I had zero because I wasn't on any social media. After I got back to Japan, I took my first tentative steps to build a social media profile and a following. Today I have 26,000 followers on LinkedIn. The good thing about a late start was I could be very scrupulous about what I posted. I avoid politics and religion as topics and stick to business content. I had previously been writing articles for the different Chamber of Commerce magazines, so I started uploading these to the social media. In 2012, I started podcasting and also loaded that content up to social media. LinkedIn tells me I have 2700 articles posted on LinkedIn. These will be around 800 words long and will have been multi-purposed into audio and in some cases video, to extend the reach. Around 2018 I started releasing my own TV shows on YouTube. There is no swearing or bad language in any of these posts or shows, despite how popular this has become. Am I a prude? No, I am a typical Aussie male with a fulsome vocabulary of colourful expressions, but I know there will be members of my audience who don't appreciate that degree of authenticity, so I restrain myself. My rule is, if my mother was still alive, would she want to hear this type of language in public from me? Today my weekly shows have grown. The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show which goes out as video, audio and text is up to 245 episodes, 8th year. Both the Presentations Japan Series and Sales Japan Series podcasts go out as audio and text and are up to 299 episodes, 6th year. The Leadership Japan Series podcast is both audio and text and we are up to 473 episodes, 10th year. The Japan Business Mastery Show is video, audio and text and we are up to episode number 145, 3rd year. The Japan's Top Business Interviews show is video, audio and text and we are up to 112 episodes, 3rd year. Okay, I am bragging, because who else do you know in sales who produces t

For the last two and a half years business networking has been dead. The usual suspects who hosted live networking events migrated everything online, so you become totally restricted in your ability to create any relationship with the people attending the event. The hosts kick it off, the speaker speaks, the Q&A gets underway, the hosts wrap it up and you are left hanging there, without any good means of connecting with possible clients on the call. The hosts these days, don't release who is on the call, so you are left with the names shown on screen, which can often be single names, initials, even numbers and not much help to try and find them later on LinkedIn. Lately, very tenuously, some face to face networking events have been taking place in Tokyo. Everyone is wearing masks, doing fist or elbow bumps and being careful, trying hard not to catch Covid from each other. It is a curious sales activity though, because you are literally weighing up the amount of new business you can find at the networking event, against how sick you will become if you catch Covid at the event. That is a hell of a thought for a salesperson. Nevertheless, that is where we are today and that is our reality. It feels like you are throwing the dice every time you go to one of these in-person events. Will I get the deal and not get Covid, is the equation in mind. Is it worth it? Are the risks warranted? This is a scary prospect, because most people catch Covid from people who themselves may not even be aware they have it. The little temperature gauges being used at the door give the temperature reading, but the individual may be infected, but the fever hasn't kicked in in yet. The best we can do is to make sure the host are checking people's temperatures, have plenty of hand cleaners available, keep or mask on as much as possible and try to keep some distance from people. Eating and drinking is a problem, because off come the masks and then they don't back on again. I was at the first networking function in a long time recently. Everyone was masked up until the food and booze emerged and then it was a free for all. Masks were off and conversations were in full throttle. I was thinking uh oh, have I now hit a super spreader event. I missed the bullet on that occasion, but that was good luck rather than good planning. I suggest let's make sure the temperature checks are being done properly at the venue, only eat and drink if everyone is seated at table, with sufficient distancing between guests and keep the masks on as much as possible. If it is a standup buffet arrangement, well we could all probably lose a couple of kilo anyway, so forgo the food and drink and keep your mask on the whole time. Keep washing your hands throughout the evening and avoid handshakes and go for fist and elbow bumps instead. If you have to shake hands, then discreetly wash your hands immediately afterwards. We should have a brilliant ruler to run over prospective clients anyway, but if you don't then start developing one. What we want is to know within one minute whether we are talking to a prospective client or not. Normally, back in the good old days of a big crowd and a hiving throng, we would try to meet as many people as possible. That meant we had to keep each interaction brief, in order to meet as many possible prospects in the room as we could in the time available. We were "working the room" at full pelt. We need to keep that mentality in the somewhat thinned out networking crowds today. I have one question, which immediately tells me if this is a possible client for me or not. I need to get that baby out early to decide if it is worth while spending any more than the minimum possible time with this potential Covid carrier. The idea should be self preservation at all costs and to keep healthy, while trying to progress your business. This requires absolutely no apologies. We want to meet them, strike up a conversation, identify if they are a possible client and then lay the ground work for a follow-up contact later, from the safety of your home or office over Zoom. Yes, there will be people who will subsequently ghost you. That has certainly happened to me, but there are also others who will give you the time for the Zoom call and have a conversation, taking the initial conversation to a much greater depth. There is a balancing act needed here between spending more time, so that they don't ghost you and them giving you Covid. I would rather suffer the ignominy of being ghosted, than being out for a week with a Covid infection. If they ghosted you during your follow-up, were they really a prospective client after all? I would say the answer was no, so don't worry about them and concentrate on finding people who need your solutions and need them now. We are not out of Covid yet, in fact there is talk now of a 7th wave for Tokyo. Events are happening though and we can attend them, if we are super careful. Discretion is the better part of valour in th

In our presentation training classes we ask the participants, "how long does it take for you to make a judgment about someone you are meeting for the first time?". How about you? How long do you take to make a judgment about someone you are meeting for the first time? It used to be people in our classes would say 30 seconds, others would say up to a couple of minutes. Today, the answers are now down to three seconds! What does that mean for us in sales? We have such a small window to make that good first impression but are we prepared? However are you really planning your first impression or are you leaving it to random chance? Let's work on a couple of areas to build that excellent first impression. Visual (1) Dress for success because we make 100% of our assumptions about your professionalism, reliability and trustworthiness based on how you look, before we even talk with you. Dr. Albert Mehrabian's research showed that we need what we say, to match up with how we are saying it, to grab people's attention with our words. When people see us for the first time, all they have to go on is what they see in front of them. What does that mean? Let's use this check list of things not to do. It is hard to argue you are reliable around the quality of your solution, when your shoes are scuffed. They need to be polished to a mirror sheen. The same thing goes for food stains on your clothes that obviously have not been dry cleaned. You want to seem professional, but your hair is messy and your clothes don't fit well anymore, because you have put on some weight. For men, I often see an old looking pants belt that should be replaced or it is brown in colour, when they are wearing black shoes. Is this hard to get right? What about when the tie knot is loose and not tight against the collar. Are you really telling me you are great with your attention to detail, when you look like this? (2) When we meet people, smile first and then bow. That smile says, I am not anxious, in a hurry or nervous, but instead I am confident and professional even before we have exchanged one word in conversation. (3) Make initial eye contact when you first see the client but for no longer than six seconds. Japan has some distinct cultural perspectives on making eye contact. For a salesperson to make continual eye contact with the buyer may make them feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless make six seconds of eye contact at the very start to form a solid first impression of confidence. Vocal Having a friendly tone of voice sounds obvious, but often salespeople get stuck with a "businesslike" voice which doesn't sound friendly. Also don't mumble, speak with a lifeless voice quality, be too soft or too loud. 2) Use their name immediately but don't go crazy and overdo it thereafter. We like the sound of our name and so dropping into the conversation, especially at the start, will be welcomed. Start with an insightful remark that gets them talking as soon as possible about their business. We might feel nervous and think we have to carry the conversation, but that is not the case. Get them telling you about themselves or the company, so that you can relax and just gauge what type of personality type they are so you know how to interact with them. Are they big picture or detailed in orientation. Are they assertive or rather quiet? By the way, if there is something new in their office environment, don't just say it is new, they know that. Ask if this new thing has had any impact on their business or their staff or their customers etc. When we meet the buyer, the ratio should be 80% of the time the client is talking and we take up the rest. If you find yourself waffling on too much, then shut up and ask a question, to get the spotlight back on them. They have all the answers we need, so particularly at the initial meeting, we want them to tell us what their issues are, so that we can plumb the angle we will need to come back at in order to fix their problems. These are some things to think about when first meeting buyers. Remember don't just walk in off the street and simply leave first impressions to luck or chance. Plan them carefully, every time, for maximum effectiveness.

The most common complaint we get from clients about their sales team is that they are too passive. They are great at farming, but not great at hunting, growing the size of the existing business and finding new buyers. "It is as if they were working for the buyer and not for our company, because they bend over backwards to keep the client happy. Maybe too happy", is not an unusual comment. On the other end of the scale is the American style hard sell effort which takes no prisoners, brooks no hesitation and keeps pushing until a deal gets done. For Japan, that will never fly, so we need something in the middle. Where is the line though? When is too much, too much? Some schools of thought are that you need to push until you get regular resistance, because that is the point where you realise you have taken it to the limit for Japan. This whole equation is complex. Ultimately, I believe we need to become the trusted partner of the buyer. When they feel we are working to help them succeed, we are on the right track, without forgetting who we are working for and who pays our salary and commissions. In my view, weak salespeople just fold in the face of every client demand, no matter the consequences for their own firm. This is especially painful when it comes to revenues. Many times, these salespeople are earning commissions on what they sell, so you would expect that their own self-interest would dictate that they do not discount too heavily to win the business. Unfortunately, because they don't have skills around explaining the value, they cave and drop the price every time, even though it hurts them financially. Their view is that they would rather have a client gained at a big discount, because finding new clients is so much harder. Generally speaking, in Japan starting low and then trying to elevate the buyer's appetite to pay more for the existing solution doesn't work all that well. Once they get you down to a low price that then becomes the ceiling, not even the floor, for them no matter how hard you explain this is a once in a lifetime case, a rarity, an exception, an instance of the planets in the Milky Way aligning once every thousand years. They just see that as the ceiling and then try to work you lower. When I was selling solutions from Australia, I had to tell the Aussie suppliers not to go in with their "best price" in Japan, because they would then be on the back foot trying to defend it, as they came under assault for more discounts. I used to do a lot of networking at events in the good old days before the pandemic. We might finally be getting back to some of that in Japan, wearing masks and trying to avoid super spreader events. You need a thick skin to use networking as a tool for gaining clients. Foreigners can be brutal. We have a 50/50 split between multi-national and domestic clients, so I attend a lot of foreign chamber sponsored events. I was walking into an event and this guy refused my business card when I offered it, because he said he was only there for the information and didn't want to meet anyone. Ouch! At another Chamber event, a businessman saw me heading his way and started complaining "You are always spamming me!!". Ouch! At another event when I caught the attention of a potential client, to engage him, the guy he had been talking to, snidely noted "Here you are Greg, always stealing people's attention". Ouch! What is too much? Whenever people complain that I am doing too much networking, or networking too hard, internally, I have a little smile to myself. Usually, the people making these comments are not in sales and have no idea how hard it is to land a new client. I had one of my staff come back from a Chamber networking event very upset. They were telling me that someone there was badmouthing me. What do you do about this type of thing? My answer to these few critics is simple. I try to explain that as a sales leader, I don't ask my team to do prospecting that I won't do myself. I try to lead from the front, as a role model and example. I continue to explain to them, "that is why I am working hard to find new people we can help, because we know what we do can make a difference in improving their businesses". Then I lower the boom, I hit them with the big one, I smash them when I say, "Wouldn't you want your sales leaders and sales teams making the maximum effort to find new buyers, to expand the range of companies you can serve?". There is really nowhere to go in response to that argument. If they still say "it is too much", then you can respond with, "does that mean your competitors are inactive and you have the market to yourself and you don't have to constantly keep pushing for new business?". Very few people can withstand this line of reasoning. Secretly, they are flooded with shame, shortcomings and guilt because they know their sales teams are passive, maybe great farmers but timid hunters and they wish their people had more of our grit and determination. What about