The Sales Japan Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.