The Sales Japan Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useless salespeople who cannot sell get fired. But are they really useless or are their sales managers useless or their companies useless? There are some industries which are notorious for the up or out mentality and recruiting certainly comes to mind. There is a lot of rhetoric floating around about saving mankind, through matching the buyer and seller of services, but the reality inside these companies is brutal. These are corporate meat grinders, who have massive churn because the targets are high, the profitability enormous and the degree of patience miniscule. This modality worked when there were sufficient people to throw into the metal teeth of the machine, but we are running out of bodies here. The number of young Japanese going overseas to study in the US for example, dropped off from roughly 80,000 per year to 50,000. It crawled back to 60,000 a year when Covid stopped that flow for the last couple of years. The types of stay have also changed away from four year, full immersion studies to shorter less comprehensive experiences. For the last seven years or so, Japanese domestic companies have become competitors to hire these English speaking, western culture exposed young people, where once the multi-nationals had the field to themselves. So if you want to hire an English speaking salesperson in Japan, brace for impact! The salesperson training system inside Japanese companies is also broken. The OJT or On The Job Training regime still exists in name, but the actual content and quantity of the coaching has diminished. Bosses are doing their own email these days, often have their own player/manager targets and generally are busy, busy, busy. Having the time to coach new salespeople, isn't as available as it used to be. Are these companies doing anything about training these salespeople, given their bosses are too preoccupied? Basically "no". The penny hasn't dropped yet, that there is a big gap between what the company thinks is happening with salesperson development and what is actually the reality. No boss is going to admit to their own bosses, that they are not doing a proper job training the young salespeople. It is a tatemae or superficial reality festival. Once we realise this is the case, then we need a different thought process about hiring and training salespeople. The good news is that while most companies are in denial, there exists a window of opportunity to pick up their people and hire and train them. Often, young salespeople will wilt under the pressure of numbers expected every month and just leave. If we take in these rejects, then we can give them the tools and skills they need to be successful. When targets are being set for salespeople, the numbers are often pulled straight out of the ether, with no relationship to reality. I have a spreadsheet called Ground Zero, which I consult when setting targets. People join companies at different times, but they all have a Day One. I keep their sales records each month since they started and can compare this against their colleagues at the same stage and can see how they are faring. I used to use the wet finger in the air technique to gauge the necessary targets for the salespeople, but this new system is a lot more based on science than intuition. When you set realistic targets, the pressure on the salespeople becomes lessened, because you are not expecting miracles from them. Combining this target setting truth with training and we can start to get somewhere. When they feel they can succeed, they are more positive about the profession and the company. Regular training is the key though, because even the most grizzled veteran will be accumulating bad habits like barnacles on an oil tanker. We all do it. We take liberties with our clients, we shave processes to save time and we forget key parts of the sales regimen. Now if it is just a matter of training, why aren't companies seeking competitive advantage against their rivals and training their people to get the deals, thus reducing the market share of their competitors? After all, sales training is the one form of training where the results immediately improve the revenue results and the pay back is super fast. Part of it is the sales managers are worried about their own reputation and position in the company. After all, they are supposed to be training these people, even though they are not, but no one wants to fess up. Sometimes the Learning and Development people want to do the training themselves, to justify their own position and to supposedly save money. Bad training or useless training or mediocre training is the most expensive training on the planet. There is a big opportunity here to rescue salespeople, who have been failed by their bosses or companies and turn them into capable staff, who can get results. Yes, we are a sale training company, so of course we would say that, you might be thinking. Well it is true and just take a close look at your own sales managers and how much c

Japan just devours data, statistics and information. When you visit some scenic spot, there will be an amazing level of data available about that venue. The announcement on the subway train when you arrive at your stop will warn you that there is a specific gap in so many centimeters between the platform and the train, so be careful. I first discovered this data addiction when I was here as a student, some forty years ago. I attended a scholarly conference on Sino-Japanese Relations, as that was my area of specialty, trying to combine my Chinese and Japanese skills to access original source documents for my research. A Japanese Professor was making a point in his lecture about the differences between China and Japan and he used a story about the introduction of Zen into Japan. Zen originated in India and came to Japan via China, so various Japanese Zen monks would make the perilous journey to China, to study there. There was a Zen story involving a well and a bucket to make some esoteric point about the condition of humanity. In the Chinese version, the concentration was on the broader allegorical point. The Japanese version had that too, but went into supreme, finite detail about the dimension of the well, its construction, how the rope and bucket were made, etc. This love of detail and data still permeates in business today as well. Because there is that distinct fear of making a mistake, one of the clear antidotes in Japan, is to amass masses of data, so that you can analyse everything before you take any decisions. We have the same thing in the West and we characterise it as "paralysis by analysis". When we turn up to sell our widget, we had better come packing data, lots of data. This is a slippery slope though. The temptation is to wade straight into the detail, the facts, the stats, the data. This is certainly what the buyer wants, but we have to temper that data obsession. The data doesn't sell anything. We know we buy benefits, we buy the application of the benefits, we buy results and the data is just the detail to explain how we can provide the required benefits. We should certainly lug around a lot of information to the sales meetings, but we shouldn't show it. My recommendation is to have the product catalogue, the flyers etc., at the ready but either leave them in your bag or place them on the seat next to you, well out of sight. If you put them on the table, the magnetic attraction will be too great and the buyer will want you to start wading through the minutiae. The point is to know which part of that thick, bulging catalogue you should go to or which Flyer you need to bring forth. We need to find out what they need first, before we have any idea if we actually have what they need. If we do, then we need to dole out the information sparingly in the meeting. We only have limited buyer time, so that part should be concentrated on digging deep into how we can add value for them, such that they don't do it themselves or do it with our competitor. The other part of this equation is do we have the information needed at two levels – very high level and the into the morass level. Our Flyers should have a structural split between the key points and the nitty gritty details. We should avoid the deep detail dive at this point, but assure the buyer we have it and they can parse the entrails later by themselves. If we don't get to the benefits part, then this won't become a purchase decision. It may not happen in the one meeting. Often, we will go away and put together a proposal. One key thing is to get the appointment for that discussion during that first meeting. Everyone is so busy and you don't want to be ghosted, when you are trying to get things moving to the concrete stage. Set the day and time right there and lock them in. When we are going through the Flyer or the catalogue, don't just hand over the details and let them read it by themselves. We must control what they are looking at and we decide what that will be. Turn the document around to face them. Using your pen, draw their attention to the parts of the catalogue or the Flyer which you want then to look at. If it is an online meeting then share the screen. Use the annotation tool to draw lines on the document on screen, directing their attention to the key bits you need them to know. There is an ocean of information in our materials and we need to be very time efficient as to which parts we highlight. Naturally, the materials must be set out professionally and must be clear in the presentation of data and information, such that it is easy for you to find and also easy to show to the buyer. If we need to leave supplementary materials with them then certainly do that, but don't concentrate there, rather focus on the areas where the sales decision is most likely to be made. Your supporting materials should be just that – supports – not the dominant element in the sale. You are the key part of the sale and let's make sure we keep the attenti

Tension is a good thing in business, because this is how we get things done. There is an issue which needs solving and either we fix it ourselves or we outsource the specifics to someone else. There is a tension between scaling up and preserving oxygen, otherwise known as, "cash flow". I have this issue all of the time. I want to grow my company, but I don't want outside investors, so bootstrapping is required. That means the process is going to be slower than getting the cash in the door and diluting the ownership. There is tension between time, cost and quality. These three inputs cannibalise each other constantly. If we go for the higher quality, there will be cost and time to market considerations. If we reduce the cost, then the quality threshold may not satisfy our buyers. If we go for speed, we may need to pay more for production machinery or overtime and that impacts the cost equation. Given tension is a constant in business, you would think we would all be masters of dealing with it. This element of tension though, when it arises when dealing with Japan, can seem a mystery. Western culture favours the quick, the agile business "backflip with pike" manoeuvre to maximise the market opportunity. We like the snappy rejoinder, the quick wit, the sharp off the cuff comment. We view these attributes as indicators of intelligence and articulation. We are constantly hustling, making things happen, pushing the envelope, forcing the issue. Japan is not particularly keen on any of these things. While we in the West are fixated on the correct answers, Japan is considering what is the right question? Being the market follower is preferred here because that is the safer option, that is why precedent and track record are so highly valued. You might get fired for being too slow in your decision-making in the West, but the chances of that happening in Japan would be rare. You really notice the temporal dynamic in meetings between foreigners and Japanese. The visiting businessperson feels pressure to come back with a deal and the Japanese feel this first meeting is the start of many needed before an agreement is possible. This is a basic negotiating mistake when trying to do deals in Japan. Instead of thinking about the sale, switch gears and start thinking about re-orders. How can we form a trusted partnership with this Japanese company and benefit from the lifetime value of the customer? If we think about it his way, then getting on a plane and coming here numerous times, is an acceptable commitment of time and money, because the time frame is now "forever". Speed decision-making is the hallmark of the competent Western leader. Seizing the moment, grasping the opportunity, "building the biggest ships, getting there first, sinking everything" bygone British Navy style strategy, still lingers long in corporate life. What about Japan? Have a long term plan, enrich it with kaizen style micro-improvements, build for the future, are all more appealing ideas than bustling around. Sales is a noble profession, although often misrepresented by the unethical, unskilled and undereducated. The fast talking, hard driving successful salesperson is sent to Japan to ink the deal, to get the business. With no investment made in learning how to do business here, bluster and supreme confidence are brought to bear on the problem. The meeting room often has the sole Western businessperson seated across from a phalanx of buyers, a seeming rent-a-crowd of hangers on, from the other side. "Why are so many of them in this meeting, who is the decision-maker" and other similar irrelevant thoughts are racing through the foreigner's mind. Actually, unless it is a founder led company, there is usually no one decision-maker and there will be a collective decision made somewhat later. In the depths of the discussion, the foreigner asks a question. Silence. Not your average garden variety silence, but profound silence. With so many of them in the room you would think one of them could answer this question? The rapid pace of commerce in the West cannot tolerate this breakdown in communication. So more words are added to the question and to no avail, because the silence continues. The bluster and confidence are rapidly withering and confusion sets in. The internal conversation is now, "What is going on here, I asked a simple question but I am not getting any answers?". What is going on is that the other side of the table are deferring to each other, as to who should answer the question. There will be hierarchies in play, as the more senior people are the ones who should be speaking. Divisional responsibilities may be confused and as yet not clarified, so it is not clear who should speak. A lot of effort will be going in to consider what to say. A quick answer may be seen as flippant and not well considered. Concern about face will be on edge, in case the answer doesn't sufficiently measure up or is deemed incorrect or trespasses on another division's

The phrase "I was ghosted" is a new addition to the sales lexicon but the problem is ancient. You meet someone at a networking event, have a positive conversation and then you follow up with them. Your email goes nowhere and all you get is crickets. So you send it again as a forward, so that the previous one is there in the thread as a subtle shaming reminder "hey, I wrote to you, but you haven't answered me yet". More crickets. What do we do in these cases? Being old school, I like the phone. I prefer to speak with people, but in the modern world, getting anyone on the phone, has become harder and harder. Also, I observe like some sort of amateur anthropologist, that the younger generation have become more text based. The reason for this is the low confrontation element through using text. It gives the other party the escape route of just not replying and ghosting you. No sales come from this approach though. Also, I get a truckload of emails and messages on various social media everyday and so does everyone else. Sometimes my computer screen top right hand corner will whiz in a notification that so and so has contacted me and in two seconds it has gone and I have missed it, because I was concentrating on some work I was doing. Then begins the search for which social media platform that message came from, wasting an enormous amount of my time. I hate that. Anyway, are they not replying because what they told me at the event was total crap and they are ghosting me? Or are they like me, drowning in a tsunami of information inputs from the different sources hammering us all day long? I always work on the assumption of the latter and I keep trying to make contact. The risk here is you become annoying and start to create flesh wounds to the brand. We get spam emails and notifications all the time, so we don't like it and the temptation of the potential buyer is to see our correspondence as spam and start becoming upset about it. In the second email, we need to be sensitive to their schedule and make an apology for adding to their inbox. We also need to restate the benefit we can bring to them and make that the justification for following up. We are duty bound to do our best to help them advance their business and that is why we are following up. For the third email, I like another slightly different version of the same message maintaining that all of this effort we are making is to help them. For the fourth email, I like the nine word formula used by Dean Jackson. Sending something very brief is unobtrusive, but makes the point. It might be something like, "Are you still interested in doing something with ….?", and you can fill in the blank referencing your company, product or solution. I sent this to a suspected ghoster recently and was delighted to get an apologetic response, talking about how busy they were etc., etc. We all get a lot of emails, so my email technique has two consistent themes. I always start my reply emails with the word, "Thanks….". I do this because I am very outcome driven and I can be so focused on the point of the email, I forget the human element. I need to remind myself to start my message from that point of view. Left to my own devices I would be straight into the business point of the correspondence. If there has been a little time since the last correspondence, by using a trigger word like "thanks" I am able to remind myself to say something like, "Thanks, I hope all is going well", before I get into the business at hand. My second technique is to make their personal name the header. If they are a Japanese person, I will put it in polite form – Tanaka san or maybe Taro san, depending on how well I know them. However, if I write "Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo" in the header, that will give potential readers a headache. It signals there is a heavy duty message coming their way, which is going to suck up their time and they are already feeling put upon by the amount of work on their plate right now. We are all more likely to open an email addressed to us personally, so their name alone is the best guarantee of the email being looked at. It has never happened so far, but if someone challenged me on this practice, I would just say, "My commitment is to help your business succeed and I want to make sure you will at least have the option to consider if what we have makes sense and putting your name in the header helps to elevate my email above the other hundreds of emails you are dealing with every day". I use this same basic reply whenever anyone ever challenges me about the amount of follow-up I do. I will also add, "I am sure you teach your sales team the importance of serving customers and that means doing the follow-up consistently and properly, so that is why you are hearing from me – we are here to help your business beat your rivals and do better". The reality is they know their own sales team are not doing enough follow-up and secretly they wish their people were more persistent a

What would the buyer's agenda be, during the sales call? "Don't take too long, because I am busy", "Don't waste my time with stuff I don't need", "Don't erode my cash flow", "Don't rip me off", would probably be the most prevalent. Our clients often tell us one of the biggest problems they have with their sales teams, is the buyer runs the sales meeting. Their own salespeople just sit there, nice and sweetly and do whatever the buyer wants. "We are paying them, but we feel they are working for the buyer not for us", is another common complaint. This is all very fortunate or we would have nothing to do! "Always be closing" is an old saw in sales and is partially correct. As salespeople, we have no idea if what we do or what we have is going to be relevant for the buyer. From the buyer's point of view, they are not sure if we or our company are the right people to do business with. We need to build trust from the very start, before we even think about closing the buyer. How do we do that? Trust is hard to build in sales. The image of salespeople is high pressure, lots of smooth talking and duplicitous attempts to get a sale. This would be a great set of descriptions for failing salespeople, who will shortly be ejected from the profession. We do not want to get smeared with that brush, so we need to make it clear to the buyer we are real professionals. We present ourselves in a manner which says, "this is a solid person, who looks professional". Buyers initially only have our outward appearance to go by, when they meet us. We must make that winner. For men, that means no food stains on the tie, no crumpled suit or one which doesn't fit properly, no scuffed, worn down shoes, clean ironed shirt, etc. In my experience, women have better common sense about how to dress for business and don't have these types of problems. What comes out of our mouth has to be clear, articulate and confident. That means no umming and ahhing. If we don't sound like we know what we are doing, the buyer is certainly not going to feel they can trust us. We start by explaining four things: 1. Who we are, 2. What we do, 3. Who else we have created success for and 4. our suggestion that maybe, we can do the same thing for this client. This should be concise and clear, in order for the buyer to decide to invest more time listening to us, rather than getting back to more pressing matters. Next, we map out the meeting. We do this so that we are in control of the agenda and don't allow the buyer to take us off course or highjack the sales call. This might be a prepared piece of paper for the buyer to look at or we might just go through the items verbally. We start with the benefit to the buyer to have this meeting with us. Next we ask how familiar they are with our company and what perceptions they may have. Why would we ask about perceptions? Aren't we setting ourselves up for trouble with that type of question, you might be thinking. Now in the rough and tumble of business, competitors may be spreading false information about our financial situation or this client may have had trouble with one of the salespeople who preceded us, who has long since left the company, but not the memory of the buyer. We need to draw this resistance out early and deal with it, because if we don't, it will sit there as a blocker to building trust with the buyer. If the perception is so bad, then we won't be able to make a sale anyway, so we are better off to meet it head on and early. If the buyer says, "I remember one of your company's sales reps and he was useless and unreliable, so why should I deal with your company?". We can reply, "Mr. Customer, if you had a member of your sales team, who was not reliable and you received complaints about him from customers, what would you do?". The buyer will probably say, "I would fire him", or "I would move him out of a sales role". At this point we say, "That is exactly what we did, which is why I am here today, to serve you and make sure my company provides you with real value". After getting through the perceptions bear pit, we move on to suggest we look at their current situation and where they would like to be in three to five years. We also add we will look at any challenges which may be impacting the company's ability to get to those five year goals fast enough and the implications therein. There is a small detail here which is important. We don't just talk about getting to their goals. Given 100 years, they could probably do it on their own without any assistance from us and there would be no sale. Instead, we inject the element of speed to reaching their goals which gives us some leverage to talk about how we can speed up the solution achievement from our side. We then talk about addressing how we might be able to assist the company, based on our solution lineup. Importantly we then ask, "how does that agenda sound and do you have any items you would like to add?" If they have no other points then, we ask sweetl

We have all heard that business advice to "work on your business, not in your business". When we are the owner of the business we can sometimes forget this, because we love doing the sales ourselves and spending time establishing relationships with our clients. I know this a problem for me, because the successful sales process is like a drug and you want more of those dopamine hits when you land the deal. Salespeople like people and they like the personal elements of dealing with buyers. To grow the business though requires scale and that usually means hiring, training and developing more salespeople. If you are out there landing deals, then you cannot scale and will be stuck right where you are now. Most small businesses are trying to bootstrap their growth, so you need deals to fund the growth. This leads to a chicken and the egg situation, where you need to be in sales mode to land deals to generate the cash to expand. If you stop selling, then the cash flow gets impacted and there isn't the cash to hire more people. Another issue will arise if you ever decide to sell the business. If you are the key or one of the key producers, the new buyer will want to reduce the price to take into account that you won't be there to generate the deals or they will want to lock you in as a part of an earn out over a number of years. Being the boss is one thing, but selling the business and then having to now work for someone else is entirely another thing. If you weren't unemployable before you started the business, then after years of being your own boss, you are likely totally unemployable now. Going from a big component of the sales flow in the business to zero is a bad idea. Revenues will tank and then you have all manner of cash flow dilemmas. We have to wean ourselves off the star salesperson role. Like the successful athlete who has to move out of the limelight to being in the background as the coach, we have to make that adjustment. A lot of our ego can be tied up in the sales role and this can be hard to diminish. We can also enjoy the thrill of the chase and landing big deals and now we have to live that process osmotically through our salespeople. We have to start handing off clients to our salespeople. This is painful, because they are "our clients" and maybe they like having the boss taking care of them, because that is tied up with their ego too. Another pain point is we now have to start paying our salespeople commissions for taking care of them and that is a cost we didn't have before. All of this thinking is small beer. We have to get our mind on the big picture. We need to be looking for ways we can add more salespeople and we need to be thinking "how can I build this business, so that it can run without me". If you can get it to that stage, then you have something to sell, otherwise you will never get to sell the business. If you are planning to hand it all over to your kids, then keep going, but if they are not interested in being part of your dynastic ambitions, you can't live forever and you will have to sell it one day. In this case, you need to get yourself out of the revenue engine and make sure others are doing that job for you. When we are super efficient, we find we are doing things ourselves, because we are really good at them, but actually are we really being effective? Getting freed up from our selling activity to spend that time coaching, mentoring and driving our salespeople will provide leverage. I am a hard worker and I work 12 hours a day, so bully for me. However, if I have ten salespeople working for me, they are putting in 80 hours per day, so nearly seven times more than me. That is leverage, so the key point is to decide what I should be doing with my 12 hours a day, to make their 80 hours more effective? We might think, "well they are on base and commission, so that is all the motivation they need to succeed". I wish that were true. Invariably we all get into certain work habits and sometimes these habits are not helping us to be as productive as we should be. There may also be a sales manager between the sales team and yourself, so you might think, "I can concentrate on my sales because my sales manager is taking care of the sales team". I wish that were true. Invariably, they could be doing a better job and they need closer supervision too. Everyone loves it when you are busy selling, because you leave them alone and there is no close scrutiny going on. That is not as effective as when we concentrate on what the sales team and the sales manager are doing. Gradually, move your clients across to the sales team and become more knowledgeable about what your salespeople are doing all day long. The results will be insightful, if not downright scary.

The famous Green Bay Packers Coach Vince Lombardi often referred to the importance of the basics in the American Football game, the blocking and tackling. Being an Aussie and a Rugby fan, I sort of know what he is talking about. The brilliant plays, full length of the field returns, Hail Mary throws, the tactics and strategies are all important, but if the basics are not being done properly, it all comes crashing down and you will never win. Sales is the same. Blocking and tackling is boring, grinding, not flashy and not exciting. There are many aspects of sales which are dead boring, painful, annoying and irritating, but they have to be done. For some salespeople though, landing the whale client is a much more scintillating idea. I have had a number of salespeople, who were very talented, smart individuals, who found all that blocking and tackling was for lesser mortals. They decided to start at the top and work up from there. Their intelligence proved to be a stumbling block to success in sales. That big deal would be the game changer. This client is going to be a huge contributor to profits, once the deal is landed. Except I am still waiting years later for that deal to be landed. That revenue they trumpeted never turned up and they are gone, gone, gone. Recently a friend of mine asked me to coach someone whose business was struggling. In the course of the conversation, it became clear that the blocking and tackling of sales wasn't exciting for him. Here is a revelation – it isn't exciting for anyone! Nevertheless, the business needed income and he was the one designated to go out and get the deals. Our mindset can work against us, as well as for us. If we want to pursue bright shiny objects, because that is exciting and we want to avoid the slog of sales because that is boring, we will be out of a job or out of our business. We have to change our mindset and there is nothing like survival to focus your attention where it needs to be. The pandemic has not negatively affected all industries, but it has hammered most, mine included. This is the most difficult time in business I have ever experienced, due to a catalyst we haven't seen in play since the Spanish Flu in 1918. There is no corporate memory on how to deal with this existential threat to corporate survival. Clients are now working from home. You call their office and all you get is subordinate obscurantism regarding their email address or their phone number or any other details about how to get in contact with them. The blocking and tackling of cold calling has become so irritating in Japan. Maybe it is the same everywhere, but here there is a definite mindset that anyone calling the company is an enemy and they must be thwarted at every turn. The boss's minions who answer the phone probably imagine they are doing a good job keeping their boss away from callers, but are they really helping? The wheels of commerce need to turn and nothing happens in business until a sale is made. We need new and better services than we did pre-pandemic, but it is proving very hard to get that message out. Consequently, cold calling is in remission for most salespeople. Blocking and tackling still has to move forward and we need to think of different ways of grabbing buyer attention. In normal times, turning up to the office and trying to see the buyer would be thought to be inefficient. Tobikomi eigyo (飛び込み営業) needs to make a comeback. It is much harder to eject people from the office reception than on the phone or over email. Companies are getting back to the office at least a couple of days a week, so there is a chance the buyer will be there and guess what? They are not meeting other sellers because the guard dogs are keeping salespeople at bay and no one else is just dropping in. Naturally, many of the newer buildings have elaborate entry procedures requiring QR codes etc., but not every buyer is thus shielded from us dropping by. Is it efficient? Compared to just getting blocked all of the time, it is slightly better than nothing. At least it gives us a chance to meet the buyer and set up a formal appointment for a later stage. Is it enjoyable, just suddenly barging into the reception area and trying to meet the buyer? Not really, but you need a thick hide, if you want to be in sales, so you have harden up. By the way, if anyone ever complains to you about your tactics to see the buyer, just say, "Yes, I can completely understand your viewpoint and I am also sure that this is the type of mindset and approach you would want to see from your own sales team, when facing these tough times due to the pandemic". Believe me they will quickly get the point and even if you are still blocked, there has been no brand damage. Sending something interesting by mail is another good idea. The guard dog will block your call but will diligently deliver the mail package to the boss's desk. Put together some contents which will get the buyer interested. Make the package slightly

If you have ever watched one of those nature documentaries about the piranha fish, they can strip an animal of its flesh in seconds. The way they do that though is totally different to a shark. Growing up in Australia, we are all experts on sharks and we know that they can distend their lower jaw to make the size of the bite larger. They will take huge chunks of flesh off your body at a time. The piranha however only takes small bites but there are a tremendous lot of them and this is where the trouble comes from. These small bites remind me of some clients and how they attempt to strip you of your deal content, one little bite sized piece at a time. We are dealing with a large company and a new division. This is a group we haven't worked with before, so the people are new to us. We struck a deal for a reasonable piece of business and imagined we would set some dates and get busy with the delivery. Gradually, they came back with a little larger piece of business and wanted discounts for volume, which we agreed to. And then they came back with another tranche and wanted more discounts. And then another tranche and a request for more discounts. "Hmm, I am being played here", was the thought going through my mind. I was in a bind now because being unable to see the total deal size from the beginning, I had nicely backed myself into the corner labelled "Big Discounts" and had no wiggle room. Did they plan that approach from the outset or did they get into a feeding frenzy on the discounts and think "let's see how far we can push this along?". I am not sure which is which, but I do know we are working for a substantial reduction in revenues as a result. In retrospect, I should have entertained the possibility that they would want further discounts and should have arranged my numbers, so that there was a hard stop which came into play much earlier. In fact, they actually came back with a slightly different requirement and I was determined that if we had more of this scope creep, I would pull the shutters down earlier on the discount front this time. They were also taking bites on another front. There are always issues around personnel resource availability and certifications in the training business. Dale Carnegie is very strict regarding trainer development and it basically takes 18 months to get the first level of trainer certification. After that, for every other core course you want to get certified in, you have to add a week of specialist training and pass the accreditation, which isn't a forgone conclusion by any stakes. The next level of piranha activity surfaced around trainer selection. We recognize that trainer quality is everything for a training company, which is why we spend so much time and treasure getting people certified and put them through hell to get accredited. If you don't believe me, come on over and give it a try! There is always the question of the alignment between how many people are qualified to teach a certain piece of content and how many are actually able to meet the timetable requirements of the client. This is a tricky balance at the best of times and made even more difficult because of Covid. We have external and internal trainers and in normal times, we have good availability, but thanks to Covid destroying the training industry, a number of those external trainers are no longer available. If they cannot get regular work doing training then they gravitate more towards things like consulting and they have limited windows to do training. The upshot is when we are getting more piranha bites about wanting to see more and more trainer profiles and more and more demands about selections, we have to push back. Are we prepared to walk away from the whole deal, especially during a devastating pandemic, if the client proves to be a pain? Many service industry companies have a "no idiots" policy regarding who they will work for. Actually they use a much stronger word than idiots, but I think you get the picture. Scope creep, discount pressure, difficult to deal with individuals are a toxic cocktail. Where do you draw the line for your business? How much is too much, when trying to satisfy clients?

The sales process has a number of stages we must pass through. One big one is gaining trust. We need to explain who we are, what it is we do, where we have had success before and suggest we could do the same for the buyer's firm. Permission to ask questions is another key step. When you think about it salespeople are incredibly rude. We hardly know them and yet we start asking questions about corporate secrets around our failures, lack of progress and barriers to success. Salespeople are looking for a match between their solution and what we need. Nevertheless the process can be confronting and that can be why it is sometimes very hard to get any useful information from the buyer. Salespeople need to ask permission first "to ask a few questions" , in order to delve into the depths of corporate despair and failure and thereby learn if they have the solution this company needs. One part of that questioning process can get very personal. We start by trying to get a fix on what the firm is doing now, where they want to be and why they are not there yet. Next we ask about their self-interest. This is a sensitive subject in Japan. Sales is all about what we say and how we say it. The semantics of language is important and this is one area where it is critical we get that equation right. We need to know this self-interest information for later when we present the solution. Of course, we are looking at the interests of the firm and how what we are doing is going to help the business. We are dealing with people though and we all have our own individual motivations. We want to connect the solution we are providing with the buyer's direct personal interests and this is the highest level of appeal we can aim toward as the seller. In Western companies, this isn't such a big deal. If we ask, "If this solution is successful, what will it mean for you personally?", then we will get a very straight answer. They will tell us, "I will get a big bonus", "I will get promoted", "My boss won't fire me", etc. The Western ladder of corporate success is up to you to climb and consequently people are very focused on themselves and "what is in it for me". So being asked a direct question about the correlation between this solution success for the firm and the link to their personal self-interest is nothing to be shy or squeamish about. Japan is quite different. When we ask, "If this solution is successful, what will it mean for you personally?", it can be greeted by some degree of confusion. Generally, Japan has a weaker linkage between personal performance and promotion. In larger firms, it is usually a case where you move up the career ladder based on age and years of service to the firm. The summer and winter bonuses are actually deferred salary payments rather than recognition of outstanding work, so any focus on getting a big bonus is a non-starter. I have found that when I ask this question, I have to repeat it because the buyer's brain is not thinking of any connection between their individual work and a direct reward. When they finally get my drift they demure. I don't ever recall any Japanese buyer saying things like, "I will get a big bonus", "I will get promoted", "my boss won't fire me", etc. Instead they will say "The team will be happy", "the company will benefit", "everyone will feel satisfied". Actually, it doesn't matter what they say. We don't care whether they are connecting at an individual level or at the group level. All we want is them to make a connection and we need to store that away in our mind for later, when we present the solution. One important thing to remember is after you have asked the question, SHUT UP. This type of question creates a certain amount of tension. You actually want that tension to be there because that is how you get the answers you seek. If you are with another person from your team, brief them beforehand to keep them their mouth shut and do not say anything which will release the tension and allow the buyer to escape from our question. The first time that happened to me, my Japanese colleague couldn't take the tension in the room and added something after my question. It was a disaster. fixin before my eyes, I saw all the tension drain from the room, the buyer just evaded giving me the answer I was seeking and we didn't get the deal. I vowed that would never happen again and so I am always prepared now if I have to attend a meeting together with someone else. After discovering what the buyer needs, we then present the solution. In Japan, that usually means we come back for a second meeting and take them through the proposal. We will go through specific stages of the sales process at this point. We will outline all the key features. We will then connect the benefits to those features and we will talk about the application of the benefits inside their firm. We will offer some evidence where the solution has worked before with a similar firm and which relates to their position in the fi

I do a lot of coaching for salespeople and there is a common theme which continuously arises, which reveals why they are not getting sales with their clients. They get very deep into the weeds of the solution for the buyer. The features of their widget monopolise their own minds and that is what they try to use to envelop the client with. It doesn't work for a simple reason. Clients buy the application of the benefits of the solution, not the features. You would think, "Greg, this is highly obvious buddy", yet salespeople keep leaping to the features and forget about extolling the virtues of the benefits. Take a long, cold, hard look at your own sales materials. Are they a compilation of features, describing in detail how the widget works and substantially light on the benefits of employing the widget? Salespeople are often engrossed with the execution piece of the sale. They want to explain how the widget will function for the buyer, going into depth on the intricacies of the how it works. This is important because the buyer needs to know they can integrate this solution into their existing business. But this not why they will buy. I was accosted by a salesperson who battered me with the gritty detail for twenty five minutes. It was a slide driven sales presentation and it was very comprehensive and detailed in explaining how the widget worked. Now this was a totally non-customised presentation, so it had to cover off all manner of buyers, with their different situations, needs and motivations. In other words, it was shotgun spray hoping to hit a buyer or two. I noticed in that slide deck, that there were two cases where there were other companies, a little similar to my own firm. A big opportunity was missed however, because the salesman didn't bait the hook to catch me as a buyer. He launched straight into his pitch, which doubtless was something he had been doing for the last twenty years or so, judging by his age. So he has been failing now for over two decades and still hasn't worked it out. If talking about the benefits was so obvious, such a default position, then how could this be happening in this day and age? By failing to ask me any questions, he didn't know where to zoom in, where to focus his remarks. By asking me where we are now and where we want to be, he could have pulled back the velvet curtain and revealed the scale of the gap between those two points. He could have hit gold, by asking me, if I know where we are now and where we want to be, then what is stopping us from getting there? That is such a wonderful, elegant question and absolutely has to be in the tacklebox of everyone in sales. If the gap is too close, then the buyer will reveal they don't see any need for outside help, because they believe they can bridge the gap using their own internal resources. Or they may reveal they already have a supplier and they are entirely, even deliriously, happy with that provider. If we know this information, then we can move to baiting our hook to lure them to not do it themselves or keep using that existing company. If we keep bleating on about our features, we will never know why they have no interest in buying from us. Knowing they don't believe they need us, we can start asking intelligent questions which challenge their entrenched ideas. If they want to do it themselves we can bait the hook with the opportunity cost of that route. We can ask, "Doing it yourself is a possibility and do you think that you can do it fast enough to steal a march on your competitors, who by the way, seem to be getting a lot more active recently?". Japanese companies in particular, are usually quite paranoid about what their competitors are doing and they also know that getting things done internally is rarely ever achieved at speed. The key here is to not make this statement, such as "Doing it yourself will take too long and your rivals we eat your lunch while you are trying to DIY the process". When we frame it as a question and they say "yes", then the statement is true. If we as the salesperson say it, then as a statement it is just so much salesperson hot air and they can dismiss it as such. Regarding the incumbent supplier we could say, "Well we are much better than them and you should use us instead". This won't fly because they are happy with their current arrangements and nobody in business in Japan likes change all that much. We need to bait the hook. We should say, "I understand you have been using this current firm for a number of years. Can I guess that you made a change at some point from the much earlier suppliers to this one, because you saw a benefit of doing so and wouldn't you want to enjoy that benefit again today, given business has changed so much over the years?". We are asking a question which is easy to say "yes" to and difficult to disagree with. We are also trying to get them to make that idea relevant and plausible, by their saying "yes" rather than us proffering the idea. Asking que

I was contacted by an international training organisation about facilitating training for their clients here in Japan. They solemnly announced they do "value based" selling. Well I think all good salespeople do value based selling, so I checked out their website to see what they meant when throwing this type of terminology around. As I suspected, it was another one of those persistent re-inventions of something old, but cunningly repacked to appear shiny and new. Basically, they find out what the client needs and then supply it. Wow, why didn't I think of that? It led me to think about values in selling, rather than value delivery in the sales process. When we meet salespeople, we are going to be impressed by a number of superficial elements. The way they dress and carry themselves are the first indicators we look at. It takes a while to get to know someone, but you can spot a slob very quickly and have severe doubts about any of their claims to be a quality organisation. If they drive a luxury car and are well dressed, with the watch, pen, suit and shoes all obviously expensive, we take these as visual indicators of success. They must be good at what they do, because enough other people are giving them their business, that they can afford such high quality items. It is the same psychology of the crowd waiting to get into the restaurant. It is a clue that the food must be good, because experienced, in the know people are lined up trying to get in. We follow the crowd sourced feedback when making our decisions. When we talk with these salespeople, they know their line-up of products. They can answer in depth and with accuracy. They don't need to tell us "let me get back to you on that", because they have the knowledge at their fingertips. They are articulate, concise and considered in what they say. They allow us to do most of the talking, rather than trying to railroad us into a buying decision or by trying to overpower us with their ambition to get the deal done. They are calm and in control and are leading us to a buying decision by asking us very well crafted questions. They turn all of their statements into questions. For example, they could just say "this comes with a twelve month guarantee". Now that is a statement from a salesperson and as the buyer, based on our previous experiences with salespeople, we may or may not believe that statement. But if we can have the buyer say the same thing then it is true and that is what the professional salespeople would have the client doing. In this same example, they would say instead, "If you were able to have a twelve month guarantee would that give you more confidence in agreeing to the offer?". As soon as the buyer says "yes", then they have validated the proposition that the twelve month guarantee has legitimate value. The real "value" component however comes from a different angle and this goes to the heart of who they really are and what are the "values" they hold. I often talk about kokorogamae or true intention. What is in the heart of the salesperson about serving me as the buyer? Are their recommendations around the proffered solution to my problem in my best interests or their best interests? We can never know their entire line-up of products or services, so we depend on them to help us select the right outcome. They know what the margins and profitability tables are for each solution, so are they pushing one that we don't need, but which earns them the bigger commission? This comes back to who are they really? Are we being snowed by their suave manner and obvious competence? Is their kokorogamae about getting the sale or about getting the re-order. There is a world of difference between those two intentions. After we have bought the solution, we will start to understand whether what we have been told is correct or not. It is too late if we have been taken for a ride, because the monies have been paid and the solution delivered, but we will become very unhappy with the treatment we have received. The possibility of an upsell or the next sales are extinguished immediately. Their real values have been exposed and our trust is destroyed. The smooth talking salesperson is the greatest fear of every buyer, because we don't want to be revealed as idiots who fell for it. Once bitten twice shy of course and so that means for every sales interaction with buyers, we have to keep that thought uppermost in our minds. The buyer has plenty of fear already and our job is to be congruent with our values when we deal with the buyer. That would include walking away from the deal if it isn't in the buyer's best interests. This sounds easy, but requires a lot of integrity, because there is that constant pressure to get the revenues and meet the quotas. If you live your values and you have the right values, then that walk away decision becomes consistent with who you really are. That is the key to a long and successful career in sales.

A bloody war in the Ukraine, sanctions on Russia, global oil and gas prices surging, grains in short supply driving up food costs, rare metals shortages, inflation taking right off, increased spending on guns rather than butter – none of this looks good. By the way, did I mention we have a world Omicron virus variant pandemic raging still, while 25% of Americans are unvaccinated and 42% of the US population are obese. Even non-academic, totally amateur economic observers like me, can see the signs of a world about to tip into a recession. If you are in sales, this can't be making you more sanguine about the future. For many of us in Japan, the pandemic has torn through our industries like one of those mid-western American tornedos you see on the news. They lay waste to everything in their path, yet miraculously spare some houses in the same street, while totally obliterating the others. Some industries have sailed through Covid but most others are on the ropes, looking for an end to the bout, so that the pain will cease. Buyers working remotely during the pandemic and emergency declarations have made networking almost impossible, as has been contacting them to start a business conversation. In my experience, the Japanese glass of water is always half-empty and any excuse to do nothing is seized upon, like a drowning man grabbing a life-preserver. "Doing nothing" means not buying from us. Any hint of trouble and the faucet for various areas of spending is immediately turned off. How do you sell in such a hostile environment? "With great difficulty", I would venture and it is likely to get worse over the course of the next year or so. The impact on our salesperson mindset is going to be extremely negative, unless we take steps now to bolster ourselves and prepare for "winter is coming". Great advice, a wonderful homily, a passionate declamation or more hot air and by the way, so what? Here are a couple of tools to use to steady our mindset before the economic recession hits us like an avalanche: Live in "day-tight compartments".We turn off the nagging worries and horrible memories of past recessions, which can paralyse us by stealing valuable energy from today. We know bad days are coming, we have seen this movie before, but we don't allow our fears to impinge on what we can do today. We concentrate 100% of our time and energy to make things happen today. We investigate past recessions of a similar nature and we look for industries or firms who have managed to continue buying regardless. We may even have to get out of our industry and get a job in another which looks better able to withstand the assault of economic rationalism. If we are going to lose our source of remuneration anyway, it is better to choose the timing and get a job somewhere else. Professional salespeople are always in demand. Cooperate with the inevitable.Complaining, despairing, whining are all natural reactions to a coming recession, but none of them are much help. We are better to accept that we have no control over external forces like geo-political events, wars, global economic trends and instead think about what we can control. We can begin by contacting our current clients and find out what they are thinking about the future. Are they preparing by reducing expenditures or are they thinking this is an opportunity to expand? Your recession induced meltdown is my buying opportunity, your jettisoning of staff is my hiring chance, etc. Not every company is affected the same way and we need to know who is who and we need to be doing that right now. We also know that after the banks beat up companies by calling in their loans during the Lehmann shock, Japanese companies swore "never again" and they are well cashed up. There is a buffer there that didn't exist during past oil shocks and recessions. What is the situation for your clients at the moment? Are they well protected by cash or are they nervous and about to start hacking into their investments and expenditures to shut things down? We need to know the lie of the land here, so we know who can continue to buy from us. I hope I am totally wrong and we don't sink into a global recession. However, rather than wait for the morning news broadcasts to tell you what is happening, let's all seize the moment and work on our frame of mind. We can control 100% of what we put into our brain and if we decide to, we can replace negative thoughts with more positive ideas. Let's get our mindset ready for whatever may come at us and be prepared for a possible Armageddon and let's start today.

Price conversations are a bad thing. Invariably, you are dragged into the mud and blood of comparisons with someone ridiculously cheaper. We get these requests – "send me your price sheet". My ears prick up like a Dobermann when I hear those words, because I am mentally getting ready for trouble. I know a couple of things are happening here, none of which are good for me to make this sale happen. The buyer is possibly shopping the deal to get three quotes to keep the compliance department happy, so that they can award the deal to their already selected and much preferred, favourite provider. My job is to be used by the buyer, to pony up the necessary paperwork, so my rival can get all of the money. Another reason may be so that they can play all of the providers off against each other and fill in the matrix. Along the top they place the names of the suppliers and down the left hand column, they put in the names of the solutions they need. They populate the corresponding cells with the numbers of the respective pricings. The cheapest alternatives are quickly identified, you are too high and then are tossed on the scrap heap. Sometimes, the buyer will say "just send me the pricing" and you will try to resist. You want to meet with them online or in person, to fully understand what they need. You are doing what you should be doing, but they are not playing ball. They say, "send it". My advice – send it and then completely forget about it. The chances of this going anywhere are almost zero, not fully zero, but pretty much indistinguishable from zero. Instead, spend your time finding people who want to share their issues with you, so that you can understand if you have a solution for them or not. They will be price focused and that is natural, because they have a spreadsheet somewhere for the P&L. This document has a set of numbers therein, which specifies how much they have allotted for the solution. Now here is the wonderful thing about the P&L – the whole thing is a fiction. Those numbers in those cells can be moved around with the clicking of a mouse and the pressing of a keyboard button. Rather than offer a price, offer a packaged solution. Let me give an example. You notice your competitors are getting revenues from an accommodation business. The target client is advertising the business, but you have no action with them. You have tried contacting someone down the food chain. All they said was "send me the pricing" and they didn't want to meet with you. You have found the boss's name but no email address. Being creative, you guess that the person at the bottom of the decision-making hierarchy has an email address which may be standard. What if you insert the boss's name? It might work and get you access to the real decision-maker, the maestro of the P&L spreadsheet, who has the authority and means to move those numbers around. Great, but what are you going to offer them? You have a very desirable audience for their product, so that is a key prerequisite covered off. Rather than offering exposure with a hope of some take up and some minor sales, you do better than that. Your package is to create a contest, where the winners are able to stay in the accommodation as the prize. To enter the contest, the target audience have to give up their contact details. With their receipt, now there are concrete opportunities for the client to directly market to these highly valuable potential customers, who have raised their hand. To make the offer attractive, you give away five to ten accommodation prizes, so that target individuals do the mental math and work out they have a pretty good shot of winning and are activated to hand over their contact information. Being the accommodation business, there are always cases of product which is vacant, so there is only the cost of administration and cleaning to worry about, so a relatively low cost prize can be secured. The point is the package is the offer, rather than a single solution. We come to the big boss with a well thought out strategy for getting more business. The means to get that new business is through the tools you have on offer in the package. The decision to move some numbers around that P&L spreadsheet just got a whole lot easier for the big boss. "Send me the prices" is a losing proposition. We have to do better than that by responding by navigating our way further up the food chain, to the more savvy decision-makers who can recognise a great package when they see one. Don't allow yourself to get stuck with people who can only say "no" and who can't re-arrange the P&L expenditures. If this is where you are now, either get to the boss or find another potential client company, where you can get in front of the boss.

"Greg, you are everywhere!". I am often told this by business people here in Tokyo. What they mean is that I am prolific on social media, video and audio. Well, if you are in sales today and you are not prolific in promoting yourself, then what are you doing with your time? It is an old saw in sales that "it doesn't matter how many people you know, it is more important how many people want to know you". Fine, but how do you get that to work? Afterall, there are only so many people we can meet in a month and naturally, we want all of them to want to know us. The democratisation of social media and the free nature of the medium has changed many things in getting our reputation in front of many more people than we could ever physically meet in a month. I was always wary of social media. I didn't trust the platforms, so I avoided them until December 2011. That year I made my first visit to San Diego in California to attend the Dale Carnegie International Convention. One of the speakers was Jeffrey Gitomer, published author and sales training guru. He was quite a character. He was wearing a bright red shirt that from memory had his name" Jeffrey" and "Sales Dept" embroidered on it. He was dressed like some guy who would be working at a gas stand pumping petrol. Dale Carnegie is a pretty conservative organisation, so he had been told to tone down the profanity, but what he said was shocking to me. He asked the one thousand plus attendees "how many twitter followers do you have?". At that point he had over 30,000 and I had none. On the plane back to Tokyo, I was thinking about what he said, so I made my first sceptical foray into the social media platforms. I found Twitter didn't suit me as much as Facebook and Linkedin, so I tended to concentrate there. I don't post any personal stuff on these platforms. It is all business and I make sure none of it is controversial or embarrassing. Around 2012 I started publishing blogs on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and I am still doing that. I was also publishing articles in the American Chamber Journal and the Acumen magazine every month. The American Chamber Journal editor Roberto de Vido suggested to me that I should do a podcast. I asked him "what is a podcast? I can't remember how, but I discovered this other American guy, Gary Vaynerchuk, popularly known as Gary Vee. Another character and this time plenty of profanity from Gary. He was interesting because he was combining reality TV, education and motivation together and was pumping out massive amounts of content. He taught me to multi-purpose my content. I could use the content for my blogs for the magazines to become the content for my podcasts. The first blog was published as a podcast called The Japan Leadership Series on August 2nd, 2014 on the topic "Flexible Japan-Stop Dreaming". I was covering leadership, sales and presentations content in that one podcast. I started hearing that going deeper into niches was important, so I created two more podcasts called The Presentations Japan Series and The Sales Japan Series and started publishing podcasts on those specialities from November 3, 2016. In mid-2018 I read that Google would start using audio for search in addition to text. In the text world I was competing with millions, maybe billions of blogs. The audio podcast world was a bit less competitive. I already had three podcasts by that time, but I decided to strip out the audio from two of my YouTube TVs shows, The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show and the Japan Business Mastery Show and create podcasts. The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show first episode was on "Not Meeting the Leadership Challenge Is Quietly Killing Us" on August 18, 2019. The Japan Business Mastery Show came out on October 4th, 2019 on "Five Deadly and Dastardly Leader Misperceptions". The next year I launched a new show called Japan's Top Business Interviews where I interview CEOs and we talk about one topic – leading in Japan. The first episode was on June 6th, 2020 with Yasuaki Mori then CEO of Infinion Technologies Japan. What has been the upshot of all this effort and time? My personal branding has skyrocketed and I have a core of true fans who regularly follow the content. Because I am posting fresh and different content Monday to Saturday on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook I get people contacting me about training in Japan. I don't do any paid promotion and just rely on organic search to find me. Yes, I get a lot of people trying to sell me sex, dodgy investments, various products and services too, but I just ignore those. For those who are genuinely interested in business in Japan, then they can judge the quality of what I offer by accessing my oeuvre. They can try before they buy. So are you having a Jeffrey Gitomer moment like I had in 2011? By the way, Jeffrey has 67,000 followers on LinkedIn and I have 26,000, so I am only 40% as good as he is, but for my niche, how many people have more than I do? How many people are accessing audio

Even the best laid plans go astray. The sale has been completed, the funds have been paid and we get busy in our sales job moving on to help other clients. Another department may be tasked with handling the next steps with the client. It doesn't matter who is doing the delivery of the solution, because if something goes wrong, the buyer expects us to fix it and to take accountability. In Japan we are their tanto, the designated person to handle this account and there are strong expectations about how we play that role. Being busy with other clients is of no interest to this client, because they expect us to be at their beck and call 24 by 7. If there has been some problems, minor or catastrophic, we have to get busy fixing them. So what should we do? Here are seven steps to handling post purchase problems for the buyer. Listen: We have to shut down all the noise going on in our brain and just concentrate on listening to them, when they tell us what they are unhappy about. Don't react, argue, justify or cut the buyer off when they are talking. Just shut up and listen to what they are telling us, watch their body language and think about what they are not telling us. Don't try and escape responsibility. Nothing annoys buyers more than when sellers try to avoid responsibility by shifting the blame to someone else. The buyer doesn't care about that. As far as they are concerned "you are the firm". Expect that the buyer can become quite emotional and upset. We can never know what is going on in the buyer's firm. We may have done something which is burning their precious clients. We can't be sure of what financial and political pressures they are under, how safe is their job, what grief they are getting from their boss, what is driving their emotional reaction. What we can do is stay calm in the full frontal gale of invective that is coming our way. Question: We should try and clarify exactly what is the problem? They may be spitting out every problem under the sun, but there will be some higher echelon issues which need to be worked on immediately and we need to know what they are, rather than trying to sift through every problem they are raising with us. We need to set this up, otherwise it may come across the wrong way. We say, "Thank you, just so I can make sure of what I need to do to fix this for you, can I just clarify the precise most immediate issue you are facing, to make sure I fully understand it?". This may not be greeted with joy when they hear it, but stay calm and don't say a word until they give you the answer. Cushion: After they have told you their hierarchy of issues, express your empathy for their problem. We are not agreeing or disagreeing with them at this point, but we are recognising how frustrating this is for them. They want to know we understand the ramifications of our errors and mistakes for their business. We need to assure them that we have a clear picture of the problem in its entirety. This cushion is just one sentence, as it is a bridge to our answer about what we are going to do. We have to be careful that we don't jump in and start speaking before we are fully engaging our brain about what is the best reply, given the situation. The cushion buys us valuable thinking time. Address The Issue: Make a point of telling them that you are taking personal responsibility to fix this. They expect that, but it is good to state that you understand you are 100% accountable for the next steps. Do everything you can to resolve the issue. This may mean having to get the cooperation of other divisions, it may upset other people internally, it may mean you going to your boss to get help. Regardless of all of that, do whatever it takes fix it. Remember we are always thinking of the lifetime value of the buyer. You assure the buyer again and again, that you will make sure it gets fixed for them, as fast as possible. Test Question: After the issue has been fixed, you check in again to see if they are happy with your response. We may think we have done a sterling job, but what we think doesn't matter because the buyer is the final arbiter of a successful solution, not us. Offer Additional Help: You ask if there are any remaining problems or any remaining issues which need further work from your side? There also may have been hidden areas of unhappiness that still have not been directly addressed and we need to flush them out, so that we can deal with them. Follow-up: If the solution takes some time, we must keep in contact with the buyer and give them frequent updates on progress. After a little time has passed, we reach out to the client to check if the previous resolution had proven satisfactory or not and see if there are any residual problems. This demonstrates our sincerity and customer care and because we are aiming for a lifetime partnership between our firms this is a key step to make sure that becomes a reality. Western CFOs do a mathematical calculation and work out that the most profitab

The word "closing" itself can be controversial in sales. It implies we are ending the process rather than starting the partner relationship with the buyer. In modern times the word "commitment" from the buyer is often preferred. I am okay with both and I have chosen the word "closing", simply because this is what most people can easily understand about this latter stage of the sales cycle. Closing doesn't have to be something scary or any big deal. In fact, the less complicated we make it the better. There is a big difference between closing in Japan and in the US. When I listen to American sales trainers, I find their closing techniques are very forceful and direct. Well that just won't work here in Japan, so we need a different approach. Let's look at some non-aggressive closes, which are easy for clients to accept. Direct Question: We softly ask, "Shall we go ahead?'. This sounds natural after we have gone through the questioning process, the solution presentation process and the objection handling process. This is what the client would be expecting and if the trust and professionalism have been built, they will be happy to proceed. We ask in a gentle, non-threatening manner and in a collegiate way, because we are trying to become their partner to help them solve their problems. Alternate Choice Method: We give the buyer a choice of two options and either way, if they answer in the affirmative, it signals they are buying. This is a very indirect way of asking for the order. This works well because it moves the sales conversation along and provides the buyer with different options, which doesn't feel pushy. We might ask, "Would you want the delivery in this month or is next month preferable?". No matter which option they choose, we know it means they are happy to move forward. Minor Point Method: We direct the buyer's attention to a minor decision they will have to make which is tied to the purchase. The big decision is to buy or not and we don't have to go there. We can slip off to the side and ask for the business in a tangential, low friction way. For example, we can ask, "Will you require a hard copy of the receipt?". This is a small thing, but it is only relevant if you intend to buy and that is what we are trying to work out – are they ready to buy or is there some obstacle remaining which we have to clear. Next-Step Method: In this method we project past the sale and seek a decision from the buyer. This is a future decision they have to take after the purchase, which they probably haven't even thought about yet. By flagging this decision now, we are projecting into the post purchase phase of the buying cycle. We could ask, "Shall we schedule the first follow-up post-installment inspection for next quarter or for the quarter after that?". Again, if they are not interested in buying, then they will tell us because this post-purchase decision is pointless, if they are not actually going to buy. Opportunity Method: This is presenting the client with the opportunity to gain a benefit which has a time limit attached to it. They can only gain that benefit if they can move fast enough. This is the last "little black dress" close we often run into as consumers when we are out shopping for ourselves. "This is the last tie in that pattern, so you should buy it" now psychology. In business we may say something like, "Shipping costs have gone up and they will be reflected in our pricing from the end of the following month. If you can make the purchase now, you will avoid those extra charges. Are you able to make that schedule?". We are bringing some subtle pressure on the buyer to make a decision whether they will buy or not. Weighing Method: This is a visual method of helping clients to make a decision if they are stuck and can't move. We take a sheet of paper and draw a vertical line right down the middle. On the right, we list up all of the reasons to make the purchase. We help the buyer with our suggestions. On the left, we let them list up all the reasons not to make the purchase. We leave it to them to come up with the reasons. At the end of the exercise the list on the right is much more substantial than the one on the left. So we say, "it seems obvious which is the best decision, don't you think", and we lead them to agree to buy from us. Some people think we shouldn't just support the positives of the decision and that we should help with the negatives as well, in order to be perceived as objective. I get enough negativity already from buyers, so I probably wouldn't go that route, but I mention it here as it may suit your style. So here we have six very soft techniques for finding out if we are getting anywhere with this sales conversation or not. If we get push back we should welcome it. The danger is no feedback and no agreement, because mentally they have put a line through us as a supplier and they are just waiting for the meeting to end. We need to know where we stand with this purchase and these

The sales cycle is a simple progression to get the client to the point of purchase. We have established rapport and trust. We have asked intelligent questions to understand how we can help them. We have come up with a great solution to solve their issues. We may have pre-empted all of their objections, but that doesn't mean they are going to give us a "yes". Before we get to the point of asking for their agreement for the deal to go ahead, we need to set up the request. We have to remember that while the sales cycle may be important to us, as sales professionals, they are not focused on the process. They are concentrated solely on the outcomes. We can tell them the solution in very simple terms. This may satisfy some degree of their logical mind requirements, but it may not be enough. We need to be moving up into high persuasion mode and this is where word pictures can play a powerful role. We can outline a future state of supreme satisfaction, a bright future which resonates with the buyer. We want to have them see in their mind's eye, the future situation in the company, as they begin to enjoy our solution. That word picture has to engage the emotions. Previously they had told us the main reason why they needed a solution in the first place. We need to wrap our solution up in those same terms. They also told us what it means to them personally. We have to loop back and create word picture about how happy they will be personally when the deal delivers the solution outcomes which they told us were important to them. The word picture is to paint the scene of all the benefits the solution brings. It also has to describe the emotional engagement of everyone who is going to be touched by the solution. Especially the person we are talking to. For example, "Imagine this scene. You are in the office and your boss is smiling at you and shaking your hand and your colleagues are all surrounding you patting you on the back. Everyone is smiling and they are really appreciating your contribution to securing the team goals. Times have been tough and everyone has been suffering. However, your decision to ramp up the marketing effort by using more video and in the process creating a video hit, has exploded the lead flow for the team. The product has now become top of mind for the buyers and the sales team are witnessing their job become so much easier. The offers are flowing in, the phones are ringing and the whole operation is buzzing with activity. Your boss is able to report stellar results to the senior directors in the company and she is appreciating your marketing efforts which made that possible. You mentioned to me your hope for a big bonus and now that is becoming a reality, as the company rewards your efforts to grow revenues. A promotion is in the offing". This is not the type of construction you want to be engineering on the spot. This word picture needs to be built piece by piece, based on what you have been told to date. Before you get to the point of making the solution explanation, you need to have this whole scene in your mind. Usually, in Japan, there is a break between hearing the needs of the buyer and then coming back with your solution proposal. This gives you the time to work on crafting this word picture for when you offer the solution part of the sales cycle. The word picture explanation needs to be practiced, so that is comes it as smooth as silk with no mumbling, hesitations or stumbling over the words. That requires rehearsal and repetition. It will seem effortless to the buyer but it takes a lot of effort to polish the word picture to a point of perfection ready for the delivery. The impact of the word picture will be in direct correlation to the strength of the questioning component of the sales cycle. If you didn't dig deep enough on what success means for the buyer, especially personally, then the word picture can fall a bit flat. We don't want to be talking at a high level here. We want to be as granular as possible based on what we have previously heard from the buyer. If we can feed back some of their own words and means of expression, all the better. It will make it that much easier for them to relate to what they are hearing. We want them to take action and that means either stopping what they are doing now or doing something new. Neither of these items are easy to get a buyer to embrace. The better composed our word picture of their future satisfaction with our solution, the easier it is for them to say "yes" and to say "yes" right now.

Four Powerful Japanese Mindsets For Sales Sales is a battle. Not a battle with the buyer, although sometimes it feels like that when they won't purchase from us. The war is going on inside our own heads. We have imposter syndrome telling us we are not good enough to do the job, even when we have some modicum of success. We have the reverberation of negative self talk, telling us we are useless, when we fail to meet the sale's quota. The clients are beating us up on price, the sales manager is beating us up on results. The vast majority of the time spent in sales sees us failing, being constantly rejected, losing revenues, losing clients, losing opportunities. This is the battleground for our thoughts. This year is my 51st year training in traditional karate and so let's draw on four mindsets which are central to success in battle. Shoshin – the beginner's mind Our mindset when learning new skills is incredibly open. We are keen, flexible, adaptable and hungry to improve. We were like this when we first started in sales or when we started selling a new range of products or services for the first time. As time progressed and our knowledge improved, our mindset shifted from how much can I learn, to how little can I do for the same result. We are now looking for corners to cut, time to be saved, energy to be conserved. We are busy people, so much of this makes sense, but as part of the package we also carry our bad habits around with us. Some of those corners should not be cut, some of that time and energy should be deployed not saved. Each financial year we start again. Let's reinvigorate our beginner's mind and go back to the basics of sales. Let's purge ourselves of the barnacle like bad habits which have attached themselves over the last year. The beginner's mind helps us to go back to zero and look at the whole picture again, in a fresh way. "Knowing what I know now, how would I do things differently?", is a genius level question, to help us get the success we seek. Using the shoshin mindset, let's start again and re-set our sales skills, philosophy and actions. Mushin – the mind of no mind In karate training, my instep would land on the side of my opponent's temple, before I knew it. This was the product of thousands of repetitions of that kick, so that the neuron grooving was so well accomplished, the action took place without conscious thought. That is a state of mushin, which in the West we call "flow". In sales, we know our process so well, we can guide the buyer to the right decision, without having to think what to say and when to say it. What comes out of our mouth is effortless, confident, intelligent and perfect for that moment. Clients have precise, internal radar for risk. Salespeople who stumble and fumble for words or are not articulate, trigger flashing red warning lights and piercing sirens to go off in the buyer's mind. The sales conversation wanders all over the place, but the professional salesperson keeps shepherding the flow back to the next stage of the sales cycle to keep the deal on track. The outside appears calm and the inside is calm too, because the salesperson is in flow and doesn't have to scramble for what to say next. Like those many roundhouse kicks, this is the product of thousands of repetitions in role play practice with colleagues and in actual buyer conversations, such that the words appear without conscious thought. Zanshin – the remaining mind In Karate, the blow is delivered and then we exercise supreme vigilance, with no relaxation in concentration, remaining completely focused on the opponent. In sales, we need to stay focused on the client after the sale. The temptation though is to move on to the next client. This makes sense from an efficiency point of view, but is it really effective? If we see the relationship in partnership terms, we want to stay close with that buyer. We want the reorder, the upsell, the cross sell, the referral. None of that happens by accident or good fortune. We have built the trust and we have to stay with the client, constantly keeping in touch, rather than just moving on to the next target. We all know it is much cheaper and easier to sell more to an existing client, than it is to go out and acquire a completely new client. Keeping in close contact with an existing client, after they have purchased, takes time and energy and we can be tempted to move on. Keep the zanshin mindset at the forefront of how you deal with buyers and the rewards are long term and well worth it. Fudoshin – the immovable mind One of the toughest drills in karate training is to have your back heel against a wall and then face a continuous series of attacks, one after another, from your training partners. They get a break and don't tire, but you don't have that luxury, as wave upon wave of lightening fast blows are rained down on you. Rejections in sales are debilitating. Five tough rejections in a row, when cold calling, sees most salespeople giving up. Your lo

Sales is such a rollercoaster. You have a good month or a good quarter then you hit a wall. Clients change their mind, something happens to the supply chain beyond your control and the order get cancelled. You usually cannot control the quality of the solution being delivered and someone else in the organisation doesn't do their job professionally enough and you suffer. We do have total control though over our time, talent and treasure. Are we making the most of this control? Time is the most expensive asset for any salesperson. Where you spend your time determines everything. I deal with many different suppliers and potential suppliers as a client. I notice that very few firms are good at follow-up. We know that finding a new client is vastly more expensive and difficult that extending the purchase profile of an existing client. We also know that most salespeople give up after three rejections when cold calling. Given we know all of this, you would think that a good portion of a salesperson's time would be allocated to keeping in touch with buyers. Trying to stay top of mind with a buyer takes a lot of effort and time, but if your competitor isn't doing it, then you are more likely to win. I am going to translate my book Japan Presentations Mastery into Japanese. The firm I have chosen is a good example of sustained follow-up. They met me at a networking event a couple of years ago, but have kept in touch. They are top of mind. I am busy, so it is an easy decision to use them, because I know them already and I don't have to run around trying to drink from the firehose of all possible translation service providers. We know our clients are always time poor, so this is the type of mental equation they are applying too, so we need to make the decision as easy as possible for them. The time they have invested in me is going to mean a deal for them that others won't get. What are we doing with our time? Do we have good systems of follow-up, can we keep track of all of our potential clients, can we automate the process so that no matter how busy we become it gets done? It is no good putting them on the weekly email blast list and imagining that you are top of mind. Your weekly email is probably sitting in their junk mail or clutter list or they may have written to your marketing department to take their name off the distribution list and no one has told you that. We need to invest our time wisely and keep in in touch with potential buyers, lapsed buyers and existing buyers has to be a top priority. Talent is time bound. If you are a master of selling via fax machines then you are not going to be selling much, because technology has moved on. Are you a master of content marketing and using social media to sell yourself? Are you laying a breadcrumb trail back you through business social media posts which highlight your knowledge and capability? Are you comfortable in front of the video camera as you create content for free which gets pushed out through all the channels to attract buyers or to build greater credibility? The flip side of all of this is getting known has never been easier. Okay, it is not easy, but it is easier than twenty years ago. We didn't have these tools before to project ourselves globally and locally. Having the skills required for the sale is a given, although so many salespeople don't have the basics under control as yet. In this modern deluge of free information and availability of access to the best minds on any subject, how could that possible be? Back in 1939 Dale Carnegie opened up public classes for salespeople. At that time, if your company provided sales training then you got trained or you had to work it out by yourself. By providing open public classes any salesperson could access the highest level of sales training. All they had to do was spend a microscopic part of their treasure to pay for it. Fast forward to today and the same things apply. If your own company doesn't provide sales training or very good sales training, then invest in yourself and go access it. Do the top salespeople stop learning? Do they stop buying the videos, audio sets, podcasts and books? They are the top people because they never stop investing in themselves, so that they can stay current with whatever the market throws at them or whatever technological shifts upset the apple cart. The critical other piece of the puzzle is that they not only spend their treasure on educating themselves, they apply what they have learnt, then customise it and refine it further to suit their particular situation. Time is our greatest asset as salespeople and we must maximise its power. We have talent but the world keeps changing so we need to keep re-inventing ourselves and adding to our talent bank. We have access to an immeasurable amount of free information on selling and we have the best of the best, providing their ideas and insights, if we pony up some treasure. It has never been a better time in history than to be in

Objections are good. That sounds a bit counterintuitive I know, because what we actually want is to land a deal and an objection seems to be an obstacle preventing that from happening. There is a process for dealing with objections and we need to be disciplined to follow it every time and not be derailed by our emotions. When we get an objection, our automatic response is to argue with the buyer and tell them why they are wrong. How has arguing with the buyer been going for you? Not too good I would reckon. Even if you win the argument, the battle, you won't get the order and therefore can't win the war, if I can use that metaphor. We need a better process than this. Cushion. Instead we need to go to our cushion - a statement that is neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the buyer. Placing a cushion between what they have just said and what we are going to say is critical. We are all the creatures of our habits and if our habit has been to jump right in and correct the client about how wrong they are, the chances are high we will keep doing that until the end of time. The cushion is a circuit breaker to tell our brain "hey genius, don't argue with the client". The cushion buys us valuable thinking time to come up with the right response to any objection and there is only one response needed, so if we can stop ourselves defending our solution for a minute, we can start to get somewhere regarding landing this deal. Why. What do I mean when I say there is only one response needed? This sounds a bit bolshie doesn't it. The first words out of our mouth after hearing the objection are critical. We should always ask ever so sweetly, "may I ask you why you say that?". Now they have to justify the objection they came up with. Sometimes I use the metaphor of being thrown a porcupine, bristling with all of those sharp quills, when we get an objection. We have to throw that porcupine right back to the buyer by asking the question "why An objection is like the headlines in the morning newspaper. They are a very short form of conveying a much longer and complex story. We have to train ourselves not to react to the headline. Before we say anything, we want to know the full story. We want much more information, so that we know which way we should answer the objection. Clarify. Once we have received more information, we need to double check what we have heard is the main problem. We ask clarifying questions by saying, "Thank you. So, as I understand it, your chief concern is…?". It is still not that easy to understand the real problem, so that is why we need to keep checking what is the core issue. Cross-Check. Sadly buyers don't always share the thing that is troubling them the most. They may tell us some minor point, just to get rid of us more easily and not get into a big discussion. We want that big discussion, because we want the sale. Visualize an iceberg and the tip of the iceberg is what they tell us, but hidden under the waterline lies the real problem, which they are not sharing with us. So, we need to say, "Thank you. So in addition to "X" are there any other things which are of concern to you?". We just keep repeating this, until they have run out of concerns. Usually we can get there in three or four attempts. We ask them, "You have mentioned X,Y and Z as areas of concern. May I ask you which of these is the highest priority for you?" We need to know which concern is the deal breaker, because if we can fix that problem for them, there is a strong possibility all the other concerns will just fall away. Reply. Now that we have established the main concern, we answer it and try and satisfy their concern. If it is an incorrect statement or fake news such as "I heard your company is going bankrupt", then we will Deny it and offer proof that what we are saying is incorrect. If it is true, we will Agree. Don't try and justify the unjustifiable – you are just shredding your credibility. If you have had some quality issues then admit it and tell them what you have done to fix that problem. It may be a deal breaker that we cannot overcome, so fair enough and we should zip out of there and find someone we can help, wasting no more time pushing a piece of string around. In some cases, we may Reverse the logic and use the concern as the reason to buy. For example, if we take a little longer than others to deliver the solution, we can reverse it and say that "the extra time is due to our quality control system ensuring that there is no rework needed and that this ultimately saves more time because rework is a totally disruptive pain, best avoided". Trial Commitment. We need to check whether what we have explained gets rid of that objection or not? A trial close can be as simple as, "how does that sound so far?". If we have answered the main objection, but there are still other major objections, then we need to repeat the process until we get to a stage where they can buy. Welcome objections because if there are no objections

Today, we are going to talk about the importance of listening for salespeople. That might sound ridiculous. You might be thinking, "Well, of course I listen to the buyer". I can assure you my wife often complains that I am not listening to her, so we may be deluding ourselves as to what level of world champion listener we actually are. You might be thinking, "well listening to my partner may have a few flaws, but I am a legend when listening to people who can pay money and buy from me". We think we are listening, but are we really listening? Are we listening for what is not being said. Are we listening with our eyes? If you have ever lived in a country where you don't speak the language or don't speak it well, your senses, especially your eyes, become so attuned to communication through body language and tone etc. When we are capable in the language we get lazy, especially if it is our native language. Let's go deep on understanding if we are a good enough listener or not. There are five levels of listening. Ignore You might be saying to yourself, "wait a minute, I never ignore the client when they are speaking". Is that true though? The client may say something that triggers a strong thought in our mind. We are now diverted from what they are saying, to what we are thinking. We are now seized on some vital point we need to make back to them, given what they have just said. In effect, we are no longer paying full attention to them because we are consumed by our own thoughts. Fundamentally, whatever they are now saying has drifted off into the mist and we are fixated on this key point we are bursting to make. 2. Pretend. In this case we are nodding our head and looking like we are concentrating, but we may not be really taking in what we are being told. I am reminded of that Robert Palmer song lyric from his hit "Addicted to Love" about "the lights were on, but you're not home", meaning your eyes are open, but you are not listening to me. Again, our mind may be working on what we are going to say. We may have been given an indication from the client on something that interests them and we are getting ready to tell them all about it. Or if we hear something that sounds like buyer resistance. We are now mentally getting our evidence ready to go into battle with the client. We are playing out the conversation we are about to have in our mind and have left participating in the one happening right at this moment. Come on – admit it – you have done this during a sales call. I know I have. 3. Selective Salespeople have a highly tuned ability to hear buying signals and key information. Our listening skills are directed only to hear a "yes" or a "no" and nothing else. There may be key information attached to that "yes" or "no" but we are not listening for that. We are filtering what we hear, according to our interests. Effectively we are only partially listening to the client. We do this because we have to be efficient. That is a good thing, efficiency, but are we being effective? Japanese is a good language for salespeople. It forces you to hear the client out because the verb comes right at the end of the sentence. You don't know if it is a positive, negative, past tense, future tense or present tense statement until the very end of what they are saying. In English, the verb pops up in the middle of the sentence, so we can start blasting away with our reply manufacturing process while they are still talking. We often hear a "yes" or a "no" and we just dump everything else waiting for a break in the traffic, so we can jump in. There may be vital information coming after that indication which we are ignorant of, because we have jumped the gun on our reply formation process. 4. Attentive In this case we are giving the client our full attention. We are not filtering for buying signs or resistance. We are not interrupting the buyer. We are paraphrasing back to them what we heard. We are not thinking what we are going to say, because we are fully absorbed by what they are saying. 5. Empathetic This is the highest form of listening, where we are listening with our eyes as well as our ears. We are reading what is going on behind the words. We are conscious of what is not being said and we are listening to the tone of how we are being told the information. We are trying to "meet the buyer in the conversation going on in their mind". So, how did you score your listening skills when talking to buyers? Could you do a better job of listening? I think I should do a lot more with my listening skills starting with my wife! It will be a good practice for listening to buyers during my sale's calls.

After having asked the buyer a lot of questions about their current situation and where they want to be, we know if we can help them or not. It isn't a given that we can. Only we will know if we have the right solution for them. We could provide a wrong or partial solution. The client will not however get the outcomes they need. Yes, we grab the dough in the short term, but our business reputation will get slammed and our trust quotient out in the marketplace will be eclipsed. We must always keep in mind that a deal is a deal, but reputation and trust are permanent assets. If we cannot provide the right solution, then we should tell the client we cannot help them. There is a cadence for us to follow when presenting the solution for the client's problem. We go through five phases: we cover the facts, benefits, the application of the benefits, provide concrete evidence and then do a trial close. Facts: Salespeople often never get beyond this first level, explaining the facts, data, features and the spec associated with the solution. They get bogged down in the micro detail. Now these details are important because we have to provide the buyer with confidence that what we are saying will work. These facts have to be provable and we need hard evidence to back them up. Often the buyer will pull us into the morass of the micro detail, because they are analytical personality types and love the numbers. However, we have to remember that the buyer is not buying the process. They are buying the outcome from the process. Benefits: Having explained the details of how the process works and the features of our solution, we need to describe the benefits. What does this feature provide in the way of results for the buyer? What will be different and what will be better as a result of buying our solution? A certain weight, colour, dimension, process etc., are just details. They do not do anything by themselves, until they are linked to the outcomes the buyer is seeking. If the details don't deliver what the buyer needs, then we are having the wrong discussion. The content of our description of the solution and what it will do for the client, has to line up perfectly with what they require. Applications: We know that knowledge by itself isn't as important as the application of the knowledge. So it is with applying the benefits of our solution. We need to go into detail of what the solution will mean for the buyer's company. What things will it help eliminate, what things will it help expand, what will it improve? Again, having an inert benefit is meaningless. What happens inside the buyer's business when that benefit is applied to their enterprise. This is where the "rubber meets the road", as we say. What will be different after we have applied our solution? What can they see on a daily basis that will help them to do even better than before? This explanation process is absolutely critical. It works extremely well if we have fully understood their business, the market in which they operate and where they are in relation to their competitors. Evidence: Just because a salesperson says so, doesn't mean the buyer believes it. This is where we need to be able to refer to where this same solution has benefited a similar company, in a similar situation, in a similar industry. The closer we can get the example we are using to the buyer's reality, the more convincing the example becomes. This is an important stage, as it will give the buyer more confidence that we know what we are doing, have done this before and have achieved good results. Every company is specific, so there will always be differences with the comparison company. This is where storytelling comes in, as we bring the drama of the solution to life. We tell the tale of what happened in our example, through the people involved. Trial Close: Once we have gone through these stages, we test whether the client has understood what we have said. We try to flush out any hesitations or objections, so that we can deal with them. It isn't a complex step – we just ask, "how does that sound so far?" and then shut up and wait for their answer. That question is enough to find out where we are in the Sales Cycle and whether we can ask for the order. We should never fear objections or clarifications. We should fear the opposite. If they don't say anything, then start to worry. It may be that they don't care, because they have already deleted our solution as a possibility. Objections, questions etc., shows interest. This allows us to add more pinpoint proof to how our solution will help them achieve their desired outcomes. These steps are all required and required in this order to convince the client to buy. The conversation is unlikely to be this neatly ordered, however we must keep the discussion on track and address each of these points in this cadence to be successful and get the business.

Do you have a sales questioning model? Is there a journey you want the buyer to complete? Do you have questions organised which will lead them along that path? Or are you all over the place, following your "muse" instead? Surprisingly, a lot of salespeople have very little structure in their sales meetings with buyers. Why would that be the case? They may be untrained in sales. They may be constantly winging it. Or they may have a partial system, because they won't be shackled by any system and want to be a free bird, to fly in whatever direction the sales conversation goes. This is ridiculous. We don't have unlimited time with the buyer and we have tons of competitors offering similar solutions. We have to get to a quick understanding of the buyer's needs and then come up with a solution that perfectly matches what they need. Having a plan around asking the required questions is the most efficient and effective methodology and we should all be doing that as close to "genius" levels as possible. The questions we need to ask have a cadence, a logical order, a flow. Usually, the process never gets completed in the order we are setting out here today, simply because buyers will pull the conversation in different directions. That is fine. We cannot predict what the buyer will say or will ask or what segues they will pursue. That is why having a questioning model is vital. We need to keep the conversation on track, that is to say, the track of our choosing and get to a purchase result. There are four questions in this model, none of which are complex or difficult. As-Is Questions. These are aimed at establishing the base line. What has the client been doing so far and how have the results been? What is the situation within the organisation at the moment? What are they doing that works and what hasn't been working well enough? Sometimes, the client will start telling us where they want to be. That is fine, but we need to find out where they are so we can gauge the distance between these two points. Should Be Questions: Clients have goals and aims. They might be focused on strategic or financial outcomes depending on who we are talking to, but they will have them. They may be published in the annual report or they may be secret. Nevertheless we need to know what they are, so we can measure against them as to whether we can help them achieve their goals or not. At this point, we also need to ask some Implication Questions. The point of an implication question is to cast doubt in the buyer's mind about whether they can get to their goal by themselves or get there fast enough or get there cost effectively enough. It is key to always include time factors with implication questions. They may get to where they want to be, if it takes 100 years. They usually don't have a hundred years, so we need to draw out the downside of taking too long to get their solution working for them. In the last episode, we looked at the buyer's gap – the difference between where they are now and where they want to be. If the buyer feels that gap is so close they can get there under their own resources, then we are not needed. Some implication questions could be , "if things stay the way they are, will you be able to reach your goals and targets fast enough?", "What happens if you don't meet your goals in the time frame needed?", "How big is the downside of being beaten by the competition or not being able to contend with a shift in the market?". The Change Questions: The client knows where they are now and where they need to be. The obvious question is to ask why they are not where they need to be? This is such a critical question. In their answer may be our rationale for being able to help them. Maybe we have the thing they cannot do by themselves or which they cannot do fast enough. The Implication Question here is whether the inability to make the necessary changes will ultimately damage the business? They know what they need to do and just delaying it is not improving the situation, because the market waits around for no one. Taking no action is not cost free. There are always opportunity costs of no action and we need to highlight these, because we want them to use us to fix their issues. Payout Questions. What is in it for this buyer personally, if the project goes well? The company expects them to get results and they need to produce outcomes. We need to know what those internal pressures are on the buyer. Once we know what is at stake, we can get to work to help them achieve their goals and we can frame what we are going to achieve for them in those terms. We can also ask the Implication Question of what happens if they are not able to produce the results the company expects? This requires high communication skills and must be done very diplomatically. We might ask, "In the worse case scenario, what would be the personal impact for you, if this issue cannot be fixed fast enough?". The point is to get them thinking we are here to help

The word shoshin or beginner's mind in Japanese is a great metaphor for the world of sales. When we start some activity there is a simplicity, a purity about what we are doing. We don't have enough information or experience to have any particular angles on what we are looking at. We take things as they are and we have no delusions about how they should be. We have no habits yet, because the activity is too fresh and new. There are no habits to unwind either, because we are deep into trying to grasp what we are supposed to be doing. We are hungry to master this activity and we are dedicating our mental and physical efforts to do so. We are committed to getting it right. This is a great mind set to help us improve, to polish what we are doing and to tackle new things. In sales, we are always under pressure from numbers, boss expectations, threats of removal and financial doom. One year can easily morph straight into the next, with a brief cessation of hostilities over the new year holidays. We were beaten down and tired over the course of the previous year and are slightly refreshed as we enter the new year. We tend to bring all of our baggage from the previous year with us though, especially our mindset. We just pick up where we left off and we are not elevating our chances of success in this year. If we grasp the shoshin concept, we will take a close look at what we are doing, what we are trying to achieve and what needs to happen for us to be successful. We will begin to break down the various tasks required into their component parts and analyse our strengths and weaknesses. We will investigate how we can build those strengths even further and look to what we need to alter to diminish our weaknesses. Why aren't we doing this constantly throughout the year? The answer is very simple – we are too busy running on the spot. We are constantly chasing the numbers, trying to slam square pegs into round holes and permanently stressed. The break at new year is a great time to reconsider how we are doing things and what things we should stop doing and which things we should start doing. This sounds simple enough, except that we don't do it. Each component of the sales cycle needs to be interrogated for where we can improve. Are we asking for enough referrals or at all? Can we be more proactive this year? We know we should never ask in a dumb way such as "do you know anyone….". This opens up the entire world to our client and they are crushed by the enormous weight of that consideration. We need to ask about a group of faces they can see in their mind's eye. It might be members of the Chamber of Commerce they belong to or their golf group or their friends or associates. If we have given good service to them as a salesperson, we have every right to ask for a referral and we shouldn't be shy about it. When we started in sales we had no hesitation to ask, but over the years of constant rejections and being beaten down on price by buyers, we have become constrained in our thinking. On another front, are we following up leads fast enough? Two hours is deemed as the window of opportunity to contact a client when they enter the lead funnel. Maybe they clicked on a search word and were directed to your website and then signed up for a newsletter or something where they gave up their contact details. Is the internal system able to deliver their details to you within that two hour time frame and are you sufficiently motivated to drive this lead followup to the peak of your priorities? When you got your first leads, you were a demon on speed to do the followup, you were like a rocket to get hold of that client. Over the years you may have gotten into a lope and forgotten how to sprint hard to grab the business. Go back to your beginner's mindset and remember how you used to approach things. Are you doing enough research on the company and the buyer before you contact them? Were you an avid detective when you first started selling, trying to unearth as much information as possible on the target company before you made the call? How about now? Has complacency set in and you feel you don't need to do that anymore, because you can wing it and you are too lazy or too busy to do the work? If you have been selling for a while you have seen the emergence of unbelievable engines of client search called social media. Even if there are no annual reports available because they are not a listed company, the chances are high they will have a company website or multiple social media accounts. Before we meet the buyer, we can know so much more about them. We are looking for connectors, commonalities to break that wall between us, so we can build the credibility and trust. What a wonderful age in which to be a salesperson. Let's re-create that shoshin, beginner's mind for this year and get back to doing the things we know we need to be doing, but which we have let slide. Let's get our mindset right while our competitors drag their sorry selves

In 2022, let's all commit to asking more intelligent questions of buyers. For those who don't ask questions, because they are too busy delving into the micro details of the solution, this will be a major change for the better. How on earth can you know if the solution you are promoting is the right fit for the client's problems, if you haven't clearly established what the real problems are? Rather than going through the charade of guessing what the best solution should be, we take the time to find out precisely what they need. In Japan, if the leap straight into solution provision is because you are afraid of the buyer's reaction to questions, then we need to work on how to get around that issue. The answer is question design. Just jumping into detailed questions can be an abrupt turn of events for a buyer, who is meeting the salesperson for the first time. If some stranger started asking detailed questions about the inner workings and problems in your marriage, you would be aghast. Keep this metaphor in mind, because this is close to what we are doing in sales. We are trying to ask questions to find out what are the problems facing this buyer. Probing questions about the firm's failings may trigger an alarm in their mind about the danger of sharing confidential information with a stranger. They may become reluctant to do so, because the trust is not there yet. Suddenly we are only getting to the tip of the iceberg issues. Even if we think we have solutions for those problems, we still are not addressing the more important hidden concerns of the buyer. The first question we need to design is how to get permission to access very sensitive insider company information. We need to set this up early in the sales conversation. The 3WBigMaybe structure works well in this stage of the conversation. The first "W" is to explain WHO we are. For example, in my case, I would say, "we are softs skills training experts specialising in deep learning sustainment techniques, so that the training sticks". I have packed a lot into that short sentence, including a strong USP or Unique Selling Proposition, about the training not fading away after the classes are over. The next "W" is WHAT we have done for a similar company in the same business and market. We need to pick another client very similar to this one, so that they feel the success will also be relevant for them too. The third "W" is WHEN we did it. If the example was ten years ago or five years ago, this client may feel that so much has changed in that time, that the example is broken and not relevant. The BigMaybe comes immediately after the Who, What, When structure. We haven't asked any detailed questions yet about the client's situation, so we actually have no idea if what we are offering will fix their issues or not. So the next step is to be very strategic in what we say. After having outlined what we did for another client, very similar to them, we say, "Maybe we can do the same thing for you. I am not sure. But in order for me to know if it is possible or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?". Clients are cautious about big talking, pushy salespeople. By using a very soft word like "maybe', we are signaling we are not like those other aggressive, thrusting salespeople and instead are focused on the client's needs. One key thing to always keep in mind though is, that once you have asked for their permission to ask questions, do not say one more word. Let it hang there forever if necessary. Don't be tempted by the tension in the air to add more explanation or say any more about it. You have been succinct and clear, so let them answer you. This asking for permission to ask questions isn't 100% percent guaranteed to get a "yes" and maybe the buyer forces us to go into our pitch. That is almost guaranteed to lead nowhere and we will do it knowing that the chances of a sale are much reduced. The percentage of clients who force this upon us though, will be very small in the big scheme of things, so we should always start with getting permission to ask questions. Now that we have their permission to ask questions, we can investigate where they would like to be, why they haven't gotten there already and what would success look like for them. These are very straightforward questions, however the key is to wrap them up in the implications of not taking action right now. Having a need and doing something about it are not the same thing. This is where we have to ask questions in a very intelligent way, helping them to understand the opportunity cost of leaving things as they are now. The latter is always the easiest choice for buyers and the worst result for salespeople. Preparing for the opportunity cost discussion takes good planning and good data, in order to make the case appear overwhelming for taking action right now. Intelligent questions build trust with buyers and leads them to willingly provide the information we need, in order to be able to help th

Clients don't need to do anything. We discover this unfortunate fact very quickly in sales. We also discover they are never on our timetable of what needs to happen. They can stay with the same supplier or they can make no changes to their current situation. Neither of those are helpful for a salesperson. There must be some driver for the buyer to take action and take action right now. There has to be a gap between where they are now and where they want to be. This gap can be quite clear to the buyer, but even that doesn't mean they will take any action. If they think they can get to where they need to be to bridge that gap, using their own resources, they will not pay for anyone to help them. Often, when we meet the buyer, they have super strong self belief they can do it all by themselves. It is the salesperson's job to really test that self belief. This comes down to our communication skills. Can we show some different view of the problem? Can we offer some insight that the buyer hasn't considered as yet? Can we show that they are a lot further away from where they need to be and that they can't get there by themselves? Of course we are going to use logic to get them to move but that may not be enough. Can we get them emotionally involved in a better solution to the problem using us, rather than launching their own DIY campaign internally? This intervention requires a great deal of subtlety and diplomacy, because no buyer likes to be told they are wrong or made to look insufficient in their capability to run their business successfully. Leaders have a lot of self-belief in their own capacities, so we are treading on dangerous ground here, so we have to be careful with the words we use and how we use them. Energetically pointing out some major gap in their analysis of the situation may make us feel good, but the buyer won't necessarily appreciate it or want to believe it. It all depends on how we frame the conversation and how we point out what they are missing. The best form of persuasion is if they self-persuade. We ask some very intelligently constructed questions which lead them to the conclusion they cannot do this completely by themselves. If we can make the argument for change now, then we have a chance of making the sale. The client may agree that the gap is there. They may agree that they can't bridge that gap themselves. None of this necessarily means they are going to take any action though and involve us in solving the problem. They may feel they will get to it, at some unspecified and vague point in the future. Or they feel they will get around to it when they are good and ready, because there is no hurry. We can never have complete knowledge of what is going on in their organisation, how the investment monies are being allocated and what help they can expect from headquarters or which big deals are coming down the pike. We cannot be fazed by these thoughts though and we have to push hard for action now. The gap has to have pain attached to it by us. We know that we are all more motivated by reducing pain, than increasing gain. We have to paint a word picture of how much their non-action is really costing them. We have to show them that now is the time to act and further delays will be very detrimental. This is not that easy because we are talking in terms of supposition. When we talk about the opportunity cost of no action that can be a very theoretical idea and not necessarily something that is going to inspire the buyer to leap into action and hire us to solve their problem. We need to bring hard evidence to the argument when we talk about the losses associated with the opportunity cost of taking no action. Unless we can paint a picture with concrete numbers, then the urgency isn't going to be felt. We may not have all of the numbers, but we can at least start asking the right questions to get the numbers we need or have the client start to consider the numbers for themselves. When we are doing the questioning phase of the sale's call we need to be threading in the implications of not fixing their problems immediately. These implication questions are key and have to be delivered in the right format. This is not easy, but that is the skill of the salesperson. We must be up to the task or go and find another profession, because this skill set is central to whether we will be successful or not in this art of selling.

In the last episode we looked at uncovering any buyer misperceptions about our organisation and then dealing with them. How did that go? Today we will work on one of the most critical phases in the buying cycle – uncovering buyer needs. Depending on where the client sits in the buyer organisation, they can have different needs. In broad brush terms, we can assume that the CEOs are strategy focused, CFOs are bottom line focused, the user buyers are interested in ease of use and the technical buyers are checking up on the spec, to make sure it matches up with what they need. It doesn't always fall out so neatly, but experience tells us that directionally these framings are usually true. We do need however, to use our communication skills, in particular our questioning skills, to better understand the buyer and what is most important to them. Even inside the same firm, we recognise that depending on who we are talking to, these buyer needs could be quite different. I was talking to a President recently and he was pushing me for some sort of added value or a discount. When I asked him "why", he said that his headquarters had a form he had to fill out indicating where they improved on the supplier's offer. I was glad I asked, before I made a small accommodation to help him out. Otherwise I might have gotten ahead of myself and offered too much to drive the deal forward. The lesson is always ask "why" when you get an objection or a hesitation. We can analyse the buyer needs through four categories, to better help us uncover their most important needs. This step in the sales cycle precedes our direct questioning techniques, which we will handle in a forthcoming episode. To design good questions, we have to know what we are looking for and this is a vital step in our sales process. Primary Interest: The client is mainly interested in the outcome of the buying decision and not so much interested in the tool which delivers the outcome. It might be more revenues, enhanced effectiveness, improved efficiency, better safety, increased comfort, greater flexibility, higher quality or an increasing ROI. Spending all of our time talking about the tool rather than the outcome the tool will furnish, rather misses the point. We are going to face many needs, however we need to zero in on the most high priority need and focus right there. Buying Criteria: There are the "must haves" which cover the basics of the solution. These will include budget, features, internal approvals, after sales support, location requirements, quantity, quality, etc. These are often related to the application of the solution and how it will play out in reality for the buyer and the internal company divisions it will impact. Risk vs Reward Considerations: In Japan, the safest decision by the buyer is to stick with the current supplier or the current system and buy nothing. This makes life tough for salespeople, so we need to be ready for this inertia preference on the part of the buyers. In this case, the decision we want them to consider is the opportunity cost of no action. Initially, taking no action looks like there is no cost attached to it. In fact, there is an opportunity cost of the lost opportunity. This lost opportunity may favour a competitor's position vis-à-vis this buyer or it may lead to missing a turning point in the market. The purchase is designed to improve the situation of the buyer. Their question however is to what extent does the return justify the cost of the investment? How much will the buyer get back for every dollar they spend? We have to be pouring on the value for the buyer in order to make that buying decision much easier. If we don't come with concreate numbers, we will have a hard time to convince them. Individual Motive: We all have compelling emotional reasons for buying. It might have to do with strengthening our relationships within the company, gaining recognition for our good work, getting a big bonus, keeping our job or maybe being promoted. We may feel a sense of self-fulfillment that we made a contribution. We may be worried about internal rivals and need a quick win. It could be something which increases our power within the organization. Human nature is such that we are all primarily focused on our own needs first and the company's needs second. As salespeople, we know that about our buyers and we need to adjust our communication accordingly. Just turning up and pitching to the client is essentially dumb. How do we know what they need? Well we don't, which is why we need this analytical process to be completed before we show any materials to the buyer or talk about any products or services. You would think this process was the most obvious thing in the world, yet so many salespeople are skipping this step and then wondering why selling is so tough!

Business is brutal and sometimes clients have received incorrect information about our companies from competitors or the media. When I was selling on behalf of Australian exporters in Nagoya, I remember a client telling me that our competitors had said the Aussie company was verging on bankruptcy and was about to go under. You can easily imagine what effect that had on business for that exporter. There was a very famous case of national brand damage, through linguistic imperfection. In 1985, the national broadcaster NHK's announcer said in a nightly news programme that Australian winemakers were involved in a scandal, adding diethylene glycol to their wines, to make them sweeter and give them more body. In Japanese, the pronunciation of the names for Australia and Austria are very similar. Each Embassy regular receives phone calls for the other country by mistake. That wine scandal actually happened in Austria, not Australia. The Australian wine industry was immediately wiped out in Japan and it took twenty years for it to recover. So nasty stuff happens folks and we have to be ready for these types of dirty tricks and negative fake news. There is no point explaining all the attributes of your wonderful offer, if the client doubts your company in the first place. The most worrying thing is that there may be misperceptions, but they are hidden. That Nagoya client happened to share what was being said behind our backs with me, because the trust was there. When the relationship hasn't been solidified, perhaps they hear this type of damaging talk from rivals, but never mention it to us. We blithely traipse along, totally unaware of what is really going on. We shouldn't assume the client has a positive view of us, as we begin the business meeting. That would be way too optimistic and too ambitious. We should ask very sweetly, "so what are your perceptions about our organisation?". After asking this question we shouldn't say another word. We have to sit there in silence without adding, clarifying or explaining what we just said. If this question uncovers some incorrect information or a degree of bias, we need to deal with that. Jumping in and arguing the point with the client however, isn't the way to move the discussion forward. Our defensive counter actions can lead to the mouth outpacing the brain and we say the wrong thing. Instead, we need to insert a cushion. A neutral statement which doesn't agree or disagree with whatever negative comment the client has made. The cushion is a device to give us some thinking time. It helps to break the habit of immediately wanting to argue with the client and tell them why they are wrong. Don't do that. There are better alternatives available to us. Depending on what they have said, we immediately may go one of three ways. Agree: We may agree with them to a certain extent, but we clarify the new situation in a way which they may not be aware of. For example, "Yes, that has been said about our company in the past, but we have been able to eliminate that concern since we upgraded our systems". Dissociate: We make the point that many companies have been working with us and we have been able to gain great results for them. The inference is that whatever has been worrying this buyer, hasn't worried other clients. They have been able to get the results they needed by working with us. Correct: If the information is factually incorrect, then we need to supply hard evidence to get rid of that concern. The next stage takes us into positive territory, using two techniques. Highlight Our USPs: We reinforce with the buyer why we are the best partner for them. We do this by restating our strongest USP, showing our differentiation from our competitors. This USP has to be highly relevant to the client. We need to have done our research and have carefully selected the USP with the best fit for the buyer's circumstances. We have many USPs, but limited facing time with the buyer, so we always bring out the big guns when it comes to reinforcing or establishing credibility. Expand On Our Strengths: We don't make it a sales pitch, but we flesh out the full strength of our organization and introduce elements which they may not be aware of or fully appreciate. Often clients will pigeonhole us into a very narrow band and we have show the full scope of our capacity to serve them. We should not be naïve about the rough and tumble of business in Japan and we should be ready to handle any negativity. Rather than the client thinking it, but not saying anything,we are better to draw it out, face it head on and then deal with it.

This week we will look at improving our questioning skills and setting up the meeting agenda. There are a variety of qualifying questions we need to design before we meet with the client, be that meeting online or in person. What we don't want is to be trying to work it out on the spur of the moment. It is always better to have a basic structure and then adjust to suit the situation, than trying to come up with brilliance on the fly. Yes, we have to be flexible and adaptable、 but planning is also an integral component in sales success. I am not a great fan of pre-cooked scripts, but I do like structures. We can set up the parameters and then fill in the details as we require, based on where the conversation is going and the needs of the moment. Let's take a look at some of the questions we need to design and I will use our business as the model. The Permission Question: If we are meeting the client for the first time, then we need to remind them that we have helped others in a similar business to theirs and we may be able to help them too, but in order to know that or not we need to ask them a few questions. This is a simple structure and easy to ask. Remember, we are going to be asking them everything about their secret company business, especially about their weaknesses, and we are a stranger to the client. Would you tell a stranger all the things that are going wrong with your marriage or your kids? No, yet we expect the client to open up about their failings in their firm. We have to get their agreement to share with us, otherwise we cannot help them. The Need Questions: Harsh as it is to contemplate, we may not be a match for this client. We need to know that as quickly as possible, so that we are not wasting anyone's time. We can ask, "What are some key issues for your business at the moment?". If they are not forthcoming because the question is too broad, then we can try to dig down and spark some feedback. For example, we could say, "Many of our clients would like to see improved performances from their salespeople in this virtual environment. Is that the case for you or are you fully satisfied with the progress your sales team are making?". Whatever they tell us, we should also ask about what other issues are a priority for them. The first answer may not be the main issue of highest importance to them, so we have to uncover the other key problems, before we know where to zero in with our information. The Quantity Question: To get some sense of the scale of the issue we need to gather some basic data. For example, in our case we would ask, "How may salespeople do you have who could benefit from training for virtual selling?". This tells me how big a solution they need, so I can adjust my presentation accordingly. The Budget Question: We can get down to it and ask directly, "How much have you allocated for training the sales team?". Sometimes however, when you ask about their budget they don't want to share that information, because they are wary of nosy, pushy salespeople. When we ask a tangential question, such as the size of the sales team, we can gauge the approximate size of the solution and then work out roughly how much that will cost them. The Authority Question: Today many people are involved in the buying decision. We should try and find out who are the other players with the strongest vested interest in the decision. We ask, "In order for me to help you, may I ask, apart from you, who would have the most interest and input into the buying decision? The Agenda Statement: The Agenda Statement helps us to control the flow of the meeting with the client. We begin by reminding them of the need for this meeting and the benefit of meeting together. We then outline the items to discuss: We start by asking them how familiar they are with our company. We do this because want to flush out any misinformation or misperceptions, so that we can address these immediately. We mention that we would like to hear what they are currently doing and what systems they are using. We note we would like to get some idea of their future goals and objectives. We point out that we would like to learn what are some of the challenges preventing them from getting to their goals fast enough? We mention that if there is a match, we can go through how we could work together. Finally, we ask them if they have any items they would like to add to the agenda. Once we have the agenda agreed, then we move to item number one on the agenda and then start working our way through our pre-determined questions. Do things go in order? Usually no, but that doesn't matter, as long as we cover the key questions during the meeting. We won't get so many opportunities to ask these questions, so we have to make every post a winner.

In sales, we definitely need a Credibility Statement. Buyers are always worried about buying what they don't need or paying too much for what they do buy. The subterranean vibe is one of distrust toward salespeople. So we have to work hard to overcome that fundamental doubt. Salespeople without a solid sales process won't have this valuable persuasion tool at their disposal. In fact, they will be like lemmings leaping off a cliff, running headlong into the explanation of the features of their solution. We need to create an atmosphere of trust, before we start asking questions to understand buyer needs. We may love our solution, we may know about it in-depth and we may know we are a great company, but the buyer doesn't have a clue about any of this. They are sceptical, uncertain, doubtful, cautious and basically afraid of being conned. Early in the sales conversation, we need to put all of that to rest and set up for permission to ask questions. The Credibility Statement is needed when we make the first contact with the client and this may be in person, by email, phone call, Zoom call etc. It is sometimes called our Elevator Pitch because it has to be concise, clear and attractive. How do you start when you introduce yourself? What can you say about your company in one sentence, so that the buyer is very clear what you do? Do you have a set formula for this to build trust with the client or are you winging it every time? When you have a well thought through structure, it takes a lot of stress off the sales process. How does this work in reality? In my case, I would say, "Hi my name is Greg Story. I am the President of Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo. We are global soft skills training experts and masters of delivery and sustainment. Do you have a moment to talk". This tells the client who I am and gives them some insight into the intention of the call by telling them what I do. Next we need a strong hook to grab their interest. We need something that will strike a nerve with them, something that will grab their attention and tell them it is worthwhile continuing this conversation with us. "We have heard from our clients that salespeople are really struggling with virtual selling and getting through to their buyers. Have you found the same thing?". This is currently a very common problem for sales teams, so the listener can immediately relate to this being an issue. Because the solution is so difficult, there is also a strong probability they have not been able to solve this issue by themselves, so they will be curious to hear how to fix the problem. Now we need some evidence of what we have done for other clients which is relevant for this buyer. Ideally, the other client referred to should be as similar as possible to the client we are now discussing business with. "Recently, we worked with a large service provider like yourself and focused on helping their salespeople make the adjustment to selling online. They reported that their appointment rate went up by 25% after the training and their closing rate tripled". When we quote these numbers and we should quote numbers, they have to real and provable. If the client asks for proof and it becomes obvious we are using spurious data, then the whole trust comes apart and the relationship is dead. We need to suggest we can help and we do that in a special way. We say, "maybe, we can do the same for you. I am not sure, but if you will allow me to ask a few questions, I will know if we are in a position to help you or not?". This is a very important bridge, because we want to receive permission before we start digging into all of their problems and strife. As human beings, we normally would never share our troubles with a stranger, so this is a critical step. If they have the time during the call, we will begin asking our quailifying questions right there and then. If not we will ask for the appointment, which could be face to face or it might be a Zoom call. We ask for the appointment in a simple but effective way by offering an alternative of choice. I would say, "Shall we get together? Is this week fine or how about next week? I see 'next week', then how about Wednesday or Friday. I see 'Thursday is better'. How are you suited at 10.00am in the morning? Great, thank you, I look forward to speaking with you then". Salespeople who miss this vital step of the Credibility Statement make life hard for themselves unnecessarily. It is simple and effective. We should all be drawing on its power to set us up for the questioning stage of the salesnmeeting. If you are not asking any questions and just jumping into the features explanation, then we need to talk!!

What is your pre-approach regimen before you meet the buyer? We cannot do everything and our time is finite. We should be trying to save our valuable time for meetings with the most qualified clients who can buy. This might be new clients or existing clients who have more capacity to buy from us. It is always disheartening when you analyse the existing buyer activity and realise we are only selling a small amount, compared to what we could be selling. It is even worse when you discover, they are buying something you do, but they are now getting it from your competitor. We can research the company, looking at their recent business activity. Are they expanding, are they doing well financially, have they bought any other companies or have they been bought by someone else? We can check the company annual report and see what the President has to say about the future direction of the company. Annual reports are a gold mine really, because they have the direction the company is taking plus a breakdown of the financials. Unlisted companies are more difficult of course, because we cannot get access to this type of information. We can look for champions within the company. Perhaps we know someone who has moved to this company recently who can supply us with some insights. We can check their press releases and see what journalists have to say about the company. We can use social media to check out buyers within the company. Maybe we have some things in common. Maybe we went to the same university or studied the same subject or have lived in the same location. It is amazing what we can do today with a few mouse clicks. The person we are selling to has something going on inside their head. Can we anticipate what the conversation is which is going on in the mind of the prospect? We may have talked with other companies in the same industry and the chances are high that this company will also share some of the same challenges. When we are thinking about those possible challenges, what solutions do we have to meet them? What do we have in our line-up of products and services which be of most interest to this buyer? What would be some massive interest hooks we could snag the attention of the buyer with? One great source of information is an existing client. We can ask them some key questions which may help us to better position our meeting with the prospect client. For example: Why did our existing customer buy from us? What do they like about our solutions? How have they used them and what have been the results? Can they identify the ROI from using our solutions? If we could do more for them, what would that look like? Where does our buyer sit? Are they the CEO, who is worried about the future and concentrating on strategic issues? Are they the CFO, who is worried about cash flow and investing in the business? Are they the Technical Buyer, who is worried about the spec? Are they the User Buyer, who is worried about ease of use, after sales service, warranties, etc.? Depending on who we are talking to, the area of deepest interest will vary. We need to anticipate their interest and come prepared to cast our solution in terms which will resonate the most strongly with them. For example, it is no good talking about the spec to the President. They are big picture focused and want to know how your widget will help deliver their strategy. How can we show the CFO that the profits from our solution will build additional income they can stack away as a fund for emergencies. How can we show the technical buyer that our spec and what they want are a match made in heaven and we have everything they need. The user buyer has to be assured they won't be on their own after purchase. For example, I own an iMac computer and I really appreciate the online help I get when things go wrong. There is just no way I could ever work out the solutions by myself. There is no point turning up to present the solution, if you don't know what is uppermost in the mind of the person you are speaking with. If it is a buying group, then you have to cover off all of the different interests of the people in the room. They all need assurance you have the thing of most importance to them. The preparation phase is the mark of the professional. The days of winging it as a salesperson are well and truly gone. That will not work in modern business. You are winging it and your competitor has thoroughly researched the company and prepared in detail for who they are going to present to. They will get the business and you will get nothing. Frankly you deserve to get nothing too. So let's be professional and work on our anticipatory skills and WOW the buyer when we get in front of them.

In this episode we will look at KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. These are activities which when carried out effectively lead to revenue results. There are also behavioural aspects to KPIs which are important and shouldn't be neglected. Everyone has their own business area, so the construct of the KPIs will vary across industries and sectors. What are they for you? Has your company already defined them for you and you were given them when you came on board? If we haven't been given KPIs already, then we can create them for ourselves. They provide good markers to know what we are doing and what we should be doing. First of all, we have to recognize that we cannot do everything, but we can do the most important things in our sales activity. So let's start thinking about what are the highest priority items we need to be doing, to boost our sales. These could include things like the following: How many qualified leads do I have to work with each week? How many calls to clients do I need to make each week? How many of these calls are leading to appointments? How many of these appointments lead directly to agreed deals? How much am I selling on average per appointment gained? How many of my buyers become repeat buyers? We can be setting our own targets for the ratios between each step. It is a good practice to break big revenue targets down to activities, which upon completion will get us to the target. For example, if I have 100 leads to follow up, how many calls do I actually need to get through to the buyer? We can have a long list of numbers to call, but they are not answering, we get a message service, the gate keeper faithfully promises they will pass on the message so that they will call back, as they gracefully slide it straight into the bin. Of the small number of calls which get through to the buyer, how many leads do I need to get an appointment? Talking to the buyer and getting a meeting are planets apart. We have to be persuasive and spark their interest to allow us to take things to the next stage. What is my target for success in this area? What is the closing ratio I want for deals coming from meetings with buyers? These are very specific targets we are setting and often we will fail. Over time, however we will start to build up some reliable statistics, which tell how strong we are in various stages of the sales process. We will begin to see that there are some areas of weakness, which we need to work on. Our goals can have a range. We might have a number range that we can achieve comfortably. We might have a higher number which is more difficult but realistic and then we might have stretch targets. So, let's set some targets for ourselves and once we establish some ratios, we will know how much activity is needed to reach our revenue targets. For example: 100 calls leads to 80 calls making contact with the buyer. Of these contacts, we meet 50 buyers. From these 50 buyers, we close 20 deals. The deals achieved from these 100 calls attempted add up to one million yen. If our revenue target is two million yen, then we know we have to make 200 calls and so on. Having specific targets for our activity activates our time management skills. We know we have to schedule calls throughout the day, in order to get to the number of people we need to make our target. It is no good just calling everyone from 9.00am to 12.00pm, because some can be reached, but others will be better to call during lunch break, others after 6.00pm, when the gate keepers have gone home, others from 8.30am in the morning. The point is to keep calling and keep trying different times of the day until we can make contact. Starting the day with targets for activity and starting with no targets, are such completely different approaches. Sales is a diabolical art, where mostly you fail, so you need supreme discipline to do what needs to be done. We have to force ourselves to do the activities or we will never make enough activity effort to be able to hit the revenue targets. Once we know the ratios, we have a guide on how much we need to be doing. As we keep analysing where we are struggling, we can work on our weakness and improve on them, thus advancing the overall ratio of success.

We know that our attitude determines everything. Henry Ford is often quoted for saying, "if you think you can or your think you can't, your right". In the 1920s, psychologists understood that we can change our futures by changing how we think. Up until that time, everyone talked about God's will or fate and as individuals we had no options. Today we understand the power of our mind to drive our behaviour in ways which will help us to realise the goals we have set for ourselves or which have been set for us by our boss. We all have sales targets to achieve, so our sales attitude is key. We have to find ways to remain positive in the face of failure and setbacks. Sales is a roller coaster of elation and despair. You make your presentation to one client, with the same conditions of price, terms, etc., and they buy. The next client presentation is a disaster and they don't buy. What happened to us between these two extremes? Often we have no clear idea but we have to pick ourselves up and call the next client. How do we pick ourselves up though? I love these Winston Churchill quotes, "when you are going through hell, keep going" and "Never, never, never give up". But in sales, we do want to give up, because rejection and our feelings of failure are brutal. Everyone faces negativity and we all suffer from different degrees of imposter syndrome, even if we have some degree of success. Dale Carnegie has another useful quote, "It isn't what you have, who you are, where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you are doing about it." So what are you doing about it? Let's find ways of occupying our minds with positivity. I was fired from my sales job once upon a time and it was doubly depressing, because I had been working so hard, I thought the big boss was going to give me a raise. It was a cold Friday evening at 5.00pm, when he called me to his office. I had read somewhere that a lot of job related suicides result from being fired on a Friday. The next morning I got up early and went straight down to the biggest bookstore in town and bought a couple of hundred dollars worth of books. I had just lost my source of income, but here I was spending money like a drunken sailor. Why? I knew I had to push out every self doubt, and nagging, negative thought that would otherwise occupy my mind and replace those "bad" thoughts with positive, "I can do it" information. Misery loves company we say, but in the sales business, absolutely avoid negative people. When failing sales colleagues invite you to a "whine" party, don't accept the invitation. Keep your mind pure and undiluted by any negative people and their toxic talk. In the classic sales movie, Glengarry Glen Ross, Al Pacino plays Ricky Roma who is in a bar closing a buyer, while the rest of the salespeople are in the office, whining about they don't have any worthwhile leads. Ricky Roma keeps his eye on the prize and doesn't spend time with failing salespeople colleagues. Design pep talks for yourself. As a karate athlete, I remember getting to the final bouts, everyone was watching me and that nasty old imposter syndrome would start telling me, "You shouldn't be here in the finals. You should have been eliminated out in the earlier rounds". It happens in sales too. You have an unexpected good quarter or half year and the doubt sets in, that this isn't you and then you sabotage yourself to get back to where you see your mediocre self. One formula I use is very simple. Whenever I am doubting myself, I keep repeating "you can do this, you can do this, you can do this". Another one I use is "I feel strong, I feel sharp, I feel terrific". Find your word or your set of trigger words which set off positive thought processes in your mind. Our self image flows across to how we present ourselves and how we interact with buyers. Buyers judge us on our first impression with them. Until they get to know us, they simply look at how well we dress. If you have given up on yourself it will show immediately from how you carry yourself to how you present yourself. In that same legendary movie referred to earlier, Alec Baldwin plays the part of hot shot salesguy, sent down from the Mitch and Murray headquarters to motivate these failed salespeople. He is very well dressed, wears a heavy gold watch and drives a expensive BMW. He oozes the part of sales success. What are we oozing when we turn up in front of the prospect? Once we open our mouth, clients start to evaluate how smart and consistent we are. They do that by noting by how well we can communicate. Clients subconsciously fear being conned by smooth talking salespeople. We have to be highly fluent, without coming across as slimy. The client will throw up objections to see how we deal with them. If we seem reliable, they may start us with a small deal to test us. When problems arise, they are looking for how we handle tough situations, how strong is our self-control and do we have persistence. They

Usually gaining access to the big company President is a real coup. We now have the ear of the decision maker and if we can convert the Prez, then we are going to get the sale. In Japan, unless the President is also the owner, then gaining access and then a sale is usually a mirage. There is a particular species of President in Japan called a wan man shacho or the dictatorial President who decides everything. Convert them and you will get the sale. If we are talking to a larger company or a listed company though, then our sale's life gets hard very quickly. I painfully recall attending a French Chamber of Commerce "Back from Summer" party in the Ginza shopping area in Tokyo. Quite a crush of people and I happened to start talking with this senior Japanese gentleman. After we exchanged business cards, I recognised he was the President of a very large lumber business. We were chatting about his staff issues and I asked if I could pay a business call and he agreed. Naturally, I was thinking, "this is very good. I have the top decision-maker agreeing to meet with me to discuss business". Direct Reports Rebel I arranged the meeting day and time and was soon ushered into his large Presidential office overlooking Tokyo Bay. I was using my well crafted consultative sales methodology, especially tailored for Japan. The meeting was going very well. So well in fact, that he got on the phone and ordered his two HR heads to join us in the office. He then instructed them, in front of me, to follow up the discussion about buying our training services. I am getting very enthusiastic by this point, anticipating a sale is coming. I dutifully follow up with these HR heads. Nothing. I call, they never call back. I write, they never write back. How could this be? I heard the President instruct them to meet with me. How could they ignore the President's command? They did so without compunction. This is just one example of my many experiences trying to do "top sales" or President to President sales in Japan. It does work for wan man shacho style companies and I have made sales. But the scale and complexity correlates with the increase in the size of the enterprise. The Decision-Making System Is Not Your Friend What is going on here? Why wouldn't you get a sale, once you have had a business discussion with the President? The structure of corporate decision making in Japan is quite different from the West. I chuckle when American sales gurus explain how to get around the client when they say, "we will think about it and get back to you". There is usually a lot of aggressive pushing going on, trying to get a decision. In Japan, they really do need to think about it. Here is what happens after you have had your meeting with the big company President and have been escorted to the elevator. The President says to one of the direct reports to take a look at the possibility of doing business with your company. There is no top down "make this happen" conversation going on. This is important, because the President's role has now finished. One Piece Of Paper Determines All The command is conveyed down the organisation. A very young person in the relevant Division, at the bottom of the hierarchy, is given the task to do the due diligence. Any sales materials are passed to them and they begin to research you, the company and the offer. They next pass their research results to their section head boss for consideration. If the section head boss doesn't think much of you, your firm or your offer, then the deal dies a quiet ignominious death right there. If the section head thinks this might be useful, they attach their personal hanko or seal to a piece paper called a ringisho, which is attached to the materials. This signifies they have read the content and are okay for the process to move to the next stage. If it gets to the Division Head level and there is no interest, then your deal is silently taken out the back and garrotted. If it looks useful, then all the other Division Heads who may be affected by the buying decision are circulated the ringisho and the materials. They in turn hand it to a very junior person in their team, for the due diligence check. Each Division does this independently. If all of the Division Heads attach their seals, then the lead Division will be in touch with you to arrange the next meeting. Every subsequent change requires a repeat of this process and fresh ringisho will be circulated around again. All of this takes time, a lot of time. We never get to influence any of the process and we have no idea who are the main players. We are still labouring under the mistaken belief that the President is personally involved in shepherding our deal through the system, because we had our meeting together. The busy President has completely forgotten who we are by this time. Once you understand the system, you realise there is not point in trying to battle "we will think about it" or imagine the meeting with the President is st

Every minute, there is more and more competition for the same clients, so we need to differentiate ourselves very clearly. I see new competitors entering the market all of the time, even during Covid. You would think at least during Covid, things would quieten down a bit on the competitor front, but no. Existing competitors are getting more and more desperate, so they start giving everything away and this puts tremendous pressure on pricing. What we absolutely don't want is for the buyer to think they can just swap another company's solution in to replace us. The price fight is the path to oblivion. We have to change the competition battlefield to value, instead of pricing. We need our USPs to be crisp and sharp to make sure the buyer knows we are different and better than the competition. We need to point out what we are offering that they are not. One of the dangers of selling the same line up of products over a number of years is we become numb to their special characteristics. When we first start out studying the product range we are excited, we are desperate to get a clear understanding of the lineup, so we can explain its features and benefits to the buyer. Over time that freshness decays. We also get lured into a price discussion with the client. When crafting our Unique Selling Proposition we need to look at things from the buyer's perspective. It is no help talking about what we sell. That is tremendously interesting to us, but more importantly what is of interest to the buyer? We can get bogged down in the nitty gritty of the spec, the detail, the data. More importantly, we want to know what are they trying to buy? What problems do they need help solving? Where do they need more value? When do they need it? For example, in our own case, we may think we sell sales training, but what company buyers want is to receive greater per head sales revenue outcomes from their salespeople. We sell outcomes and the training service is the tool to achieve that. We can easily get confused about that though. Do our USPs address the typical objections which arise when explaining our solution? Let's make us the case study, to make the key points a bit clearer. For you own product or service, do a similar analysis and see what you come up with. For Dale Carnegie Training we have been in operation since 1912. The client doesn't care a fig about that. What they do care about is risk reduction for themselves. A track record of 109 years provides the client with the sense that this company has a solid track record, so therefore, they are more trustworthy as a result. "I won't get fired or rebuked for recommending this company with such a substantial, safe, track record" is what they are thinking. We teach 90% of the Fortune 500 companies. Again, "so what" from the buyer's point of view. The essence of the USP here has to be that these Fortune 500 companies are the richest and most powerful companies and they can choose whoever they want to provide training services. The fact that they choose Dale Carnegie is an indication that the biggest organisations have done their due diligence and like what we do, so we are a safe choice. In Japan everyone wants to know about precedent, because no one wants to be the early adopter. They don't want to be the test case. They want to be mainstream, which is the safest position with the least risk. We have offices in 100 countries. This is another "so what" potential reaction from clients. We need to point out that because of our global network, we can deliver training where ever the client is located and we can do it in the language and cultural context of that society, ensuring the best reception of the training content. We have to work out where is the relevancy for this client? Maybe it is just irrelevant. In that case we don't waste valuable client facing time and we find another USP which is more relevant. Our trainers are required to complete 250 hours of train-the-trainer content before they can be certified by Dale Carnegie and be allowed to instruct. The point is to mention that this whole process takes about a year and a half and only the most motivated and dedicated people are willing to put themselves through this rigorous process. This is why our trainers are the "best of the best". The client has no idea about our internal processes and standards, so we need to place these in a context which is meaningful for them. For example, we might talk about this tough internal standards arrangement being a cure for the common training company issue of some instructors are really good and others are not so good. In these companies, there is no consistency and therefore no certainty as to what service level you will receive. The point of the USPs is to differentiate what we are doing from our competitors and give the client the comfort that they are making a wise decision in choosing us to provide the solution to their problems. So, blow some dust off your own USPs and get the sales