The Sales Japan Series

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

We have so many things pulling us in different directions at the same time, we can get a bit overwhelmed by all the sales work we have to do. We can get caught up in the weeds of our daily work and lose sight of the big picture. We are being beaten up over the numbers or lack thereof, the revenue budget daily, weekly, monthly status. How can we get the right focus on what we should be doing and make our efforts more effective? There is a simple method we can use which is very quick and straightforward. Firstly, we need to take a brief moment and draw a focus map of what we need to be working on. Why a focus map? We need to eliminate everything that is distracting us from reaching our goals. How do we draw a focus map? In the center of a piece of paper put a small circle around the one or two words which make up the key area of focus. Now add separate related words which come to mind that fit this category and then circle those words to make sub categories. On the page, these circled words will be arranged around that original central circle like planets around the sun. For example, we might think of key topics like Better Time Management, or Better Client Follow up, or Better Planning, or Better Communicator, etc. Taking one of these topics, in a few minutes, the list of related words will soon come forth. This is because we have all of these thoughts inside our mind and we just need the chance to release them. If we take a concrete case and make the key focus in the central circle Better Time Management for example, some related sub category words to surround that idea might include words like: prioritisation, block time, procrastination, Quadrant Two focus, to do list, weekly goals, daily goals, etc. In a short period of time we have developed sub categories for us to work on, in order to improve our time management. By physically arranging these words around the central idea, we engage our mind through visual stimulation. Having done that, we now apply a template to help us decide just what we are going to do about each of these sub categories. There are Six Steps. Choose the area of focus, for example in this case, we might choose prioritisation: What has been my attitude in this area? Why is this important to me and my organisation? Specifically, what am I going to do about differently? What results do I desire? How is this going to impact my Vision? A completed version might look like this: Which Area Of Focus: Time Management with the sub-category of Prioritisation What has been my attitude in this area? "I know I should be better organize, but I never get around to taking any action to improve the situation, because I don't choose activities based on priorities". Why is this important to me and my organization? "If I am better organized, I can get more work done and I can be focusing on the prioritised areas of highest value. This will make me more productive and I can contribute more value to the organization". Specifically, what am I going to do about differently? 'I will start by buying an organiser with To Do Lists in it and a calendar to block out time for the highest value, highest priority items. I will start each day by nominating what I need to get done and then prioritizing that list and only working through the list in that priority order". What results do I desire? "My best time will be spent working on the most high value tasks which produce the results with the greatest impact". How is this going to impact my Vision? "I will be better able to achieve it because my efficiency and effectiveness will go up dramatically compared to what I am doing now". We could repeat the same process for the other words we thought of like: block time, procrastination, Quadrant Two focus, to do list, weekly goals, daily goals etc. The beauty of this focus map is we can go both deep and broad very quickly. Time poor salespeople need to maximise the time spent on thinking rather than just doing.

Over Parts One and Two we have been exploring how to apply some human relations principles when we are working with our buyers. Buyers don't buy products or services. They buy us first and the solution comes with us, as a package. If they don't buy us, then the package can be the best one on the planet on paper, but they won't bother to buy it because it doesn't feel right because the trust is not there. Let's look at three more powerful time tested universal principles to help us build buyer trust. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. "Some buyers are boring when they talk about themselves and I tune out, because I only want to hear stuff that will help me make this sale". That doesn't sound like a good approach to the buyer and using such selective listening skills can mean we miss important signals and information from the buyer. What are they saying with their eyes and body language? What are they not saying? We need our attentive and empathetic listening skills on full deployment when we talk with our buyers. Remember we need to develop a genuine interest in the buyer as a person. How can we do that? Let's find out what are some key areas of importance to them. We will discover things and experiences in common and that really helps to build our bonds together. Let's use a memory linking technique - Nameplate, House, Family, Briefcase, Airplane, Tennis Racket, Ideas. This technique by the way works for everyone you meet not just buyers, by the way. So how does this technique work? Imagine the following: A huge silver nameplate is crashing into the roof of a completely pink house. Inside the pink house in the living room is a giant baby, like a sumo wrestler size in a diaper. The giant baby is playing with a work briefcase. Out of the briefcase the giant baby pulls out a model old style aircraft. The wings have propellers, except these are special propellers, because they are huge black tennis racquets. Threaded through the strings of the black tennis racquets are the rolled up pages of a newspaper. All we need to do is remember these connectors: Nameplate, House, Family, Briefcase, Airplane, Tennis Racquet, Newspaper So now we can ask buyers we are meeting for the first time where they live, how many people in their family, what has been their occupational experiences, do they travel much for work or pleasure, what are their hobbies and what is the latest news from their industry. We don't necessarily ask these questions in this order or ask all of these questions. We certainly don't make it sound like we are interrogating them or prying into their private affairs. We use tact and diplomacy when we engage them about their private interests. Using some of these questions we will never be stuck on how to make small talk with our buyers. We can build trust with buyers through getting to know them by showing genuine interest in them. Ask the buyer questions using the Who, What, Where, When, Why, How formula. Who have they worked for previously, what was it like, where was their office, when did they start here, why did they choose this company they work for now and what do they like most about it? People love to talk about themselves, so become a good listener: What excites them? What are their interests? Make finding out all about the buyer your mission and you are sure to find the buying conversation more effective. Remember we are trying to become their trusted business advisor, so the personal connection is critical. 8: Talk in terms of the other person's interests. What if you don't know about the other person's interests? No problem. Ask more questions – remember what we learned in Principle Seven about being a good listener. We may not be told immediately by the buyer what they are interested in, because they are still checking us out, to see if they can trust us. We need to gain their trust to allow us to dig in, to find out how we can help them. By asking questions we have the chance to know more about them and that allows us to highlight similarities and things we have in common. This makes the trust building easier. By applying Principle Seven – listening – and Principle Eight – talking in terms of their interests, we will naturally make the other person feel heard, which makes them feel important: Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely. Notice how words like "honesty", "sincerity", and being "genuine" run through these first nine Human Relations Principles. Without these, the principles are simply tools for manipulation. Buyers are not stupid and they see through manipulation. It is definitely not the way to win friends or positively influence them or make any sales. Most people go through their work days with very little praise, appreciation or recognition for what they are doing. If we can find some things to recognise and we do it in an honest, non-manipulative fashion, then we will build a strong connection of trust with the buyer. How can you us

In the last episode we looked at the first three of the human relations principles we can apply when interacting with our buyers. Sales is all about trust. Trust is built up through what we say and what we do. It is also a function of our behavior with buyers. We face a tricky equation of getting on with all types of buyers with different outlooks, communication and personality styles. There are some universal aspects of our control over what we say and how we say it, which will serve us well in order to serve the largest scope of buyers possible. We know all of these things. The only problem is we don't do them! Become genuinely interested in other people. We are all severely time poor and focused on what we need to do. We have little mental bandwidth for what other people are thinking or need. It is very hard to build up trusting buyer relationships with a time poor, highly transactional approach. If we don't build trust, then what sort of relationship will we have with the buyer? The way to build trust is to get to know people and get them to get to know us. The more things we share in common, the easier it is to get on with each other. This is not manipulation, trying to get to know others, so that we can use them. People are not stupid and they pick up on this immediately. What we are talking about here is genuine interest. Each one of us has areas or experience or interests which others would genuinely find interesting. It is often amazing to learn things about buyers you have worked with over many years, that you had no idea about. It makes for a richer happier interaction. With new clients, it breaks the ice and makes the relationship building go so much smoother. You might be thinking: "but even if I start to be genuinely interested in them, it's difficult to start a conversation about things other than the products". The first step is to use Principle number 5. Smile. As we smile, we start to develop a relationship with the buyer. It sounds so simple – smile, how hard can that be? Well take a good look at people's faces at work and in business. Most are looking stressed, concerned, pressured and very, very serious. Not too many smiles being shared around. That is the way of the modern world. We are supposed to be getting more time thanks to technology, but in fact, it is making us busier and more stressed as a result. So keep this in mind, that every time you face a buyer to speak, crack a big smile first before you say anything. They will feel better about you and much more likely to cooperate with you and be pleased to see you every time you turn up. They will feel it is easier to speak with you and you can bridge into conversations beyond just the lineup in the products catalogue. Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. It is unthinkable that we would forget the name of our buyer. However, we might be dealing with a number of people on the buying side and we may not meet all of them each time. If we meet them again or pass them on the way to the meeting room or meet them at a networking event, we had better be able to remember their name. They may not be able to remember ours by the way, so we should eliminate any potential embarrassment. Here is an iron rule. Whenever we meet anyone, always start with offering our name first. For example, "Hi, Greg Story, good to meet you again". If we start packing the conversation with the buyer's name every few minutes it sounds weird and will have the opposite effect than that which we desire. It has to have a natural cadence. We need to get the personalisation balance right and common sense should be determining when to use their name. How well can we apply these three simple, yet effective, principles with buyers? None of these ideas are new, complex or difficult. The secret is having the discipline to change how we currently communicate with our buyers. We get into ruts, get stuck in fixed patterns of interaction. Try to break out of those confines and make the buyer, the human being, the center of the conversation. Our competitors won't be doing this, so it is an excellent and simple way to differentiate ourselves from the competition.

If we want to succeed in sales, we want to build a strong relationship with our buyers. Having to run around and create a new buyer every single time is seriously hard work. Yes we must hunt, but we also want to farm. However, nowever, nHoot all buyers are easy to deal with. We might think they should change, so that they are easier to deal with. They should make it easier for us to sell them our solutions. Unfortunately, we can't change others. We can only change how we think and behave. Doing so can in turn, have a positive impact on others. That's the whole thinking behind Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People – it's not about manipulation. It is not about us waiting for them to change. It's about changing ourselves first and how we approach buyers. If we approach buyers in the same way every time, we will always get the same counter reaction. This is Newtonian physics which we learnt at High School, "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction". In sales, if we change the angle of our approach to the buyer by just three degrees, then we will get a different counter reaction. The point is we have to make that decision to change those three degrees on our side first, rather than expecting the buyer to change themselves to suit how we like things. There are some excellent, proven, time tested Human Relations Principles we can draw on to help us with this. Human Relations Principles 1-3 Don't criticize, condemn, or complain. How many times have you criticised someone and had them admit they were wrong and tell you that you are completely right? It almost never happens because people rush to defend themselves and want to justify whatever it is they are doing. If we do criticise them knowing this, then all we are doing is setting ourselves up to fail to change them and even worse, create bad feelings between us. We might be tempted to criticize the buyers company for forcing us to have 120 day payment terms. Or by suddenly changing the order at the last moment. Or by leading us down the garden path and then buying from our competitor, because we were used to provided the compliance department with their required multiple bids. We need to deal with such negative buyer actions in a different way. Give honest, sincere appreciation. This sounds so simple, except that we don't do it. It is not that we give fake or dishonest appreciation, because we don't give any appreciation period. We expect everyone to be doing what they should be doing, but we show no appreciation of that. Then we wonder why it is hard to get people to cooperate with us? The consequence is that everyone is starved of appreciation. They are also quite sensitive to any attempts at flattery and will dismiss it as dishonest words, somehow trying to trick them into doing something they don't want to do. So, we have to identify something concrete and provable that they did and then praise that. For example, with a buyer, "Suzuki san, I appreciated the fact you got back to me on time with the information I requested, it really helped me meet the deadline. Thank you for your cooperation". The praise is specific and true and Suzuki san is more likely to accept the praise as being honest. Arouse in the other person an eager want. We all want lots of things. In fact, we spend almost 100% of our day focused on what we want. The issue though is when we need the cooperation of others. They are focusing on what they want too and are not interested in our needs or requirements. We need to switch our communication to focus on things which are also important to them. What does the buyer as an individual, not the company representative, want? Do we know what that is and do we know it in detail? When we frame things in this way, they feel there is something positive for them and they are more motivated to agree to our ideas. How do you need to change your communication style and content, to get the type of buyer cooperation you need, where the other person thinks this is in their buyer interests too? Which principles are you going to use with your buyer today?

You would think that if your business has survived Covid, then the pandemic will have cut a swathe through your competitors. Therefore, we would all be granted a temporary reprieve from the usual rigorous competition for client business. Counterintuitively, there seems to be more and more competition for the same clients, so we need to differentiate ourselves very clearly. What we absolutely don't want is for the buyer to think they can just swap another company's solution in to replace us, like a modular part in the modern car engine. We need our Unique Selling Propositions (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. However with all of this focus on bare bones survival have we looked at our USPs lately? Are they a bit dusty and the sheen gone off from lack of attention? Some things to think about when crafting our Unique Selling Proposition is to look at things from the buyer's perspective. This seems completely obvious but often we are operating in our own little bubble and we see the world through the limited prism of our own value system. It is no help talking about what we sell in our USP. That is tremendously interesting to us, but not as important as what is of interest to the buyer. Do we really know what they are interested in now? Have their interests shifted since Covid shook up the business world? What are they trying to buy today? What new problems do they need help solving? In today's commercial environment where do they need to receive more value? Let's use Dale Carnegie as the example. We may think we sell sales training. However, what company buyers want is to receive greater per head sales revenue outcomes from their salespeople. In fact, we need to sell outcomes and our training services are the tool to achieve that. Let's see some examples of our USPs Dale Carnegie Training has been in operation since 1912. We think that is terrific and important, but the client doesn't care about that. In Japan, in particular, what they do care about is risk reduction. We need to emphasise that our track record of 109 years provides the Japanese buyer with the sense that our company has a solid track record, so therefore, we are more trustworthy as a result. "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" was a fantastic ad tag line in the 1970s and this is the real USP for us not the 109 years. If you have longevity as a business in Japan, what is your real USP in your case? We teach 90% of the Fortune 500 companies. Again, "so what" from the buyer's point of view. The essence of the USP is 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. Remember, nobody wants to be first to try something in Japan, so this precedent idea is a winner here. Can you marshal your biggest clients as proof that there is a safe precedent to buy from you? 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 wherever the client is located. Further, we can do it in the language and cultural context of that society, ensuring the best reception of the training content. Do you have global capacity, so that buyers can have a global one-stop shop solution when using you? How are you framing your USP around this point? 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 we can claim our trainers are the "best of the best". The hours are not the key – the selection process is the key. What processes do you have in place to assure the client that the people serving them are extremely well selected and well trained. You may be doing both right now, but not thinking to mention it to the client as a USP differentiator in the market. 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. Have your USPs changed since Covid started? Are they polished, shiny and sparkling, ready to impress the buyer? It is time to revisit and rework them as we move glacially toward a post-Covid business world.

At the center of everything we do is the customer relationship. Additionally, like planets revolving around the sun, there are five stages of the sales cycle revolving around the customer relationship, which we must pass through in order to make the sale. In a way, this is our roadmap for when we are talking to the buyer. If we want to make a sale and get the re-order, we must control the sales conversation with the buyer, not the other way around. When we are talking to the buyer we are never stuck, because we know where we are in the cycle and what needs to come next. Let's take a walk through the galaxy and visit each of these stages of the sales cycle. This is all about forming a positive first impression. Remember the client doesn't know us yet. We may have met them at an event, through a referral, via a website lead or through a cold call. We need our credibility statement beautifully refined to explain who we are and why we can do a great job of serving the buyer. We need to ask some qualifying questions at this point to really understand if we can in fact serve the buyer or not. We need a plan for the conversation, so we have prepared an agenda statement. We invite the buyer to add any items they think necessary to get the right buy in, to progress the meeting using this agenda. They don't know us and this is an important point. We need to find out what they do know about us from their research or what they have heard in the market. Definitely we need to immediately correct any misperceptions or wrong information. We are here to help them solve their problems, but like a medical doctor we need to understand the situation completely, before we start prescribing any solutions. To do this we need to ask as series of questions. What is their current situation? Where do they want to be in the next few years? What things do they need to change to get where they want to be? If this is a successful project helping them with their solutions, what will it mean for them personally? After hearing them out we need to tell them if we can in fact help them or not. If we can't then we need to get moving and find someone we can help. If we can help them, we give a quick summary of what we heard. Then we add our declaration that we do in fact have the right solutions for their issues. We take what they have told us and we build the solution. Next, we have to take them through the solution, so that they know exactly how we can help them, how it works, what is involved, etc. At this point we are confirming that our understanding of their issues is correct. We need to provide the detail, the facts, features etc. Importantly we need to provide the benefits of the features we are describing – tell them how to apply this in their business. We also must provide evidence of where this has worked before – we need to provide proof of what we are saying. Finally we should check for understanding or any concerns at this point, by using a trial close to test the waters. Now if we haven't been clear enough in our solution explanation, questions will arise. If we haven't been persuasive enough, then concerns will arise. We may even get strong pushback against our solution. We need to know how to professionally handle any objections. We have outlined the solution and dealt with any concerns, so now it is time to ask for the order. Before doing that, we need to paint a word picture that can conjure up in their mind scenes of success using our solution. We use one of our many techniques for softly asking for the order. Once we get agreement, then we have to flesh out the details of how the solution will be delivered. We need to maintain contact with the client to make sure all is well after we have delivered the solution and see if they need any other help. A very happy client is perfectly poised to refer us to others who could also make valuable use of our solution. The five steps in the sales cycle are our roadmap and all we need to do is work our way through them. Probably steps three to five will be at the second meeting. Do you have a road map? Do you have your credibility statement, agenda statement, qualifying questions? Do you have the right strategy for dealing with objections and for gently asking for the order? If you don't, then "Japan Sales Mastery" will become a Sales Bible for you in Japan.

We all know that without trust there will be no sale and much worse than that, no ongoing sales. So how do we build trust with our buyers? It is a critical salesperson facility, because research shows that 63% of buyers would rather buy from someone they completely trust, than from someone who gives them a better price. Think about that – trust trumps price. What is the cost of creating trust versus having to resort to discount pricing to get deals done? Our mindset is the key. We have to be thinking "relationship" and "partnership" with the buyer, rather than a single transaction, a fleeting encounter, a "one and done". We always want the reorder, don't we? Of course we do. Because our thinking is "long term relationship", our communication will also reflect this approach. Once our communication changes, the buyer will relax and will be more open to building a long-term relationship. Buyers are experts at sensing danger and duplicity. They can smell a rat from a long way away and they are permanently on guard against being ripped off. How happy they are to find a salesperson they can genuinely trust. We say, "a good man is hard to find" and we can also say "a good salesperson is hard to find". When you are the buyer and you find one you are relieved. What is our salesperson mindset about winning in business? Is it "in the buyer's success lies our success" and so the business must benefit both parties? If we are thinking like this then we don't want: Win-Lose or Lose-Lose or Lose-Win outcomes. We want Win-Win between the buyer and seller. This sounds simple, but desperate salespeople have trained buyers to be very wary about whose interests this transaction is really designed to serve. Buyers can feel our salesperson intention and if it is "we win- they lose", they can feel that too. We have all made purchasing mistakes which we have come to regret and have have had a harsh internal conversation with ourselves pledging "that will never happen again". Therefore we salespeople need to be projecting we are honestly searching for a win-win outcome. We are seeking the reorder. Now buyer repeat business is a simple equation: Trust + Relationship = Buyer Loyalty Buyer loyalty is an emotional and behavioral commitment to keep using us. Buyer trust reflects the buyer's belief that the salesperson will focus on the buyer's interest and that the salesperson is reliable. There is a horizontal scale to represent the buyer/seller relationship. On the left horizontal extreme, we have the product pusher who is focused on getting the highest price and then moving on to the next buyer. On the right horizontal extreme, we have the trusted advisor salesperson who is focused on mutual benefit and a continuing relationship with the buyer. Where do you currently sit on that scale? Let's drop the rhetoric, shall we. We all know brands that say one thing publicly, but internally, their messaging about how to treat the customer is entirely different. What is the real message you are getting from your bosses about how to think about the buyer? If we want a long career in sales, then we all need to be moving ourselves to the right on that scale. Now it may not be with the current employer, if you find they have the wrong mindset. We need to find a solution and a company that really serves the buyer. As professionals we will be very happy to work in that environment. How do we build trust? There are Five Drivers of Trust: Confident in our intention that we are creating win-win outcomes. Competence that we can serve the buyer properly. It isn't much help if our heart is the right place, but we are totally useless and unreliable as a salesperson. Customer focused 100% of the time. The buyer needs to know we are trying to help them succeed and that we believe that inside their success lies our success. Communication skills are vital. Each side needs to know what is supposed to be going on, what are the expectations and what are the commitments. Providing massive value must be the salesperson's mantra. If we can't add value to the buyer, then we have no right to be in sales. Trust is the most expensive thing a salesperson can lose. The cost of building trust with the client is much cheaper by comparison. Let's never be like those bad egg salespeople who constantly mix this calculation up. We know the right path of the professional in sales and so let's commit to treading that straight and narrow path every day.

I listen to a lot of sales gurus because I am a permanent student. I have noticed there is a consistent theme which comes up. Because being a guru is quite competitive, they have to draw a line between themselves and the rest. The way they do this is to make the point that "sales has changed". They then go through introducing their version of the new sales methods for the new era. I was reflecting on this and thinking about sales in Japan. SPIN Selling, Consultative Selling, Challenger Selling etc., reflect waves of change in the West. I haven't seen any waves of change much in Japan. So what is going on here? The Japan model reflects some specialties in selling here. The core difference with the West is the decision making system in Japan. There are tons of books in English on "overcoming objections" and the "100 closes you need to succeed" type of thing. Generally they come across as quite aggressive and they try to force the buyer into buying. Tricky closing tactics won't work here in Japan for the vast majority of sales. Of course, if the person we are talking to is the owner of the business, then "yes" they can make the buying decision. More likely we are talking to a salaried employee of the organisation. They are not the sole decision maker in most cases and in fact are more like an influencer. Wrangling them to the ground and extracting a "yes" out of them just won't happen. There are bound to be a number of Division or Section Heads in the company, who need to give their agreement. This is a bottom up system. It is frustrating to meet the President and think you have the golden entry point to a buying decision, only to find out that is not the case. The President will push the proposal down the ranks to the person at the bottom, whose job is to do the due diligence on you and your offer. That person will consult with all of those leaders whose sections will be impacted by the buying decision and whom we will never meet and may never even know they exist. Western sales tends to be hand to hand, one on one combat between buyer and seller. In Japan it is you against a whole team of invisible 'ninja" decision makers. We have similar phenomenon in the West too. Sometimes we realise the person we are talking to has to become our champion inside the buying organization. In this case we can't wait for the objections to arise from invisible stakeholders. We need to be proactive with our champion and help them with answers for all of the possible hesitations and objections which may come up. This is the case almost every time in Japan. The other speciality here is that this is the Land Of The Pitch. When I first started selling in Japan, I was trying my best consultative sales methodology on buyers and getting nowhere. They wanted my pitch and just ignored my best efforts to ask them questions about pain points, needs, future desired situations, barriers, payouts, current situations etc. I was quite shocked. What I didn't realise at that time was that before me had swept in an entire army of salespeople talking features and pricing. I don't know if the salespeople trained the buyers to expect a pitch or whether it was the other way around, but that is where we are still, even in 2021. Fundamentally, don't you think pitching your features at a buyer is just crazy? If you don't know the buyer's needs, how on earth do you know which features will be the most relevant, even ignoring the importance of describing benefits, applied benefits and evidence, for the moment. Dale Carnegie introduced the first ever public sales training back in 1939. Back then it was all about asking questions to understand buyer needs. Here we are 82 years later in Japan and most salespeople are still giving the pitch and asking zero questions. All of these Western guru variations on variations and fine tuning the semantics of selling have just swept by Japan, which is still back in the dark ages of pitching. It doesn't have to be like that. Here is what we need to do to update the sales process in Japan: ask permission to ask questions; ask the questions; decide what is the best solution; present that solution; deal with any hesitations or objections and then ask for the order. If your salespeople are not doing this, then you have to ask the question "why?". Also when are we going to do something about bringing Japan into this century? What are you doing about it?

New clients are so demanding. They want to hear what we have to offer and quickly find out how trustworthy we are. They don't want to be wasting their valuable time either. This can trigger some bad choices though for salespeople. Remember that the client playbook is not our playbook. We shouldn't fall into the trap of tracking along their preferred path. We have our job and they have their job and both are highly specific, so we had better master ours, if we want to really help our clients. There is a transition zone in sales, which is a make or break moment for salespeople. The new client doesn't know us and we don't know them. Online or in person, there will always be some degree of small talk. By the way, Western versions of this "small talk" can be microscopic. I was reminded of this in a meeting with the Western president of an international company here. I had barely gotten out a few words of small talk, when he hit me with the directive – "okay, let's get straight down to business". After working here for so many years and adjusting to the Japanese style, I was a bit shocked. I was thinking to myself, "oh yeah, that's how things are in sales in the West". What is going through the mind of the buyer? In most cases it will be "how much is this going to cost me?". They are fixated on price. In sales, we are thinking about the value trade for the price impost. From the outset we are speaking two different languages. We need to address that gap right at the start and set the tone for our salesperson playbook version of how the meeting should run. After the initial pleasantries, we should outline the meeting agenda. We will mention why we are meeting, just to confirm we are both clear about how our time is going to be used. It might be, " I appreciate Suzuki san introducing us. She thought there might be some mutual benefit to meeting, so let's use our time together to explore what that might be. I thought we could look at what we do and how this may help you. I would like to better understand what types of solution you may need and see if there is a match between what we have and what you need. Are there any other items you would like to discuss today?". This is a nice start which gives them a basic direction for the meeting and also the chance to specify the direction, so that they don't feel we are hustling them in any way. We should be careful with how we explain what we do. It should be well structured, but sound unstructured. Using my company as an example, I would begin, "We are global soft skills training experts, who have been here since 1963 and we specialise in sales training in Japan". This brief sentence has four clear USPs (unique selling propositions) efficiently loaded into the opening. One, we are delivering our training all around the world, so that means we are successful as a training company and have both scope and scale. Two, unlike our domestic competitors, we are bringing world best practice to Japan. Three, we have been here nearly 60 years in Japan, so that means we have stood the test of time and have a solid track record. Four, it also subtly says we have localised what we do for the Japanese market, so you can be comfortable it works here and everywhere else around the world. Next I would say, "Recently we delivered some sales training for a company in your industry and had outstanding results. We measured salesperson confidence and it went up on average by 40% and they told us their sales revenues increased by 18% in the first six months after the training". Here, as salespeople, we must bring strong proof that what we do works. We are noting a company similar to them, so the results are relevant for the client. The confidence increase and the revenue numbers are real numbers, which they can believe are true. By the way, if you are inclined to manufacture these types of results out of thin air, don't do it. Your credibility will go to zero. Think about it. What are the chances of a long term relationship being built on a lie? Remember and this is key, you are not here for a sale. You are here for the re-order. Now we deliver the piece de resistance, "I don't know if we could get the same results for you or not, but in order for me to understand if it is possible, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?". This is no pressure sales at its best, which is what works well in Japan. We have remained in control. We have been following our defined structure from our salesperson playbook. First, we explain what we do, who we have done it for, what were the results and then we deliver the request to ask questions. None of this is in the client playbook by the way, which is all about "is this too expensive?". I absolutely cannot understand how you can talk price, if you don't know what they need? We just can't do it. We need to get permission to gently interrogate them about all the defects in their people and their company, all of the shortcomings, all of the dirty laundry they

We are all hungry for Covid to end so that we can get back to normal. It looks like it will be all good by September. Then it looks like October, then November and this goes on and on as some fresh piece of diabolical news filters out. Will a bell ring or an alarm go off announcing "Covid is done"? Unfortunately that isn't going to happen. It will ebb and wane and then probably resurface intermittently over the next couple of years. So when do we start moving out of the orbit of our existing customer base? Are we just digging deeper into the fox hole, waiting for the all clear announcement or do we get up and head back into the fray? New clients have been sparse. Companies are holding their money in a vice like grip concerned about the economic damage from Covid. Others are almost impossible to contact. Buyers and decision makers were always protected by an iron wall of nobodies who were preventing us from making contact in the good times. Now the buyers are not even in the building. Do we wait for them re-emerge from their hibernation, slip out of their cocoon? We could be waiting a long time. We were having discussions with clients when Covid slammed into our businesses and scared the living daylights out of everyone. First in the batting order would be renewing those discussions. Should we just pick up the threads of that last conversation and continue? Take a good look at your own business? Has Covid created new dimensions, new concerns, new problems that weren't there before? The answer would be "yes" and so that will be the same for the clients we were happily chatting with, before the virus wall came down to end all discussions. Two good starter questions would be: What are your strategic plans for a post Covid business world? and What are your most immediate problems of concern Obviously we will tailor these two broad question to our particular business. The first question is a good one, because like a lot of us, our clients may not have had much bandwidth to start thinking about the future, given we have all been struggling to survive. We are leading them with our question to consider the future and by inference we see ourselves as being a partner with them working together as we go into the future. In manufacturing, getting into the "design in" phase is critical, because once your component is part of the design process, then you are a fixed supplier to the manufacturer and very hard to dislodge. We want to be part of the buyer's design in process for the future and now is the time to have that discussion. The second question is where the immediate money is located. We cannot survive on future income, when we are being battered senseless at the moment. Covid will have revealed a lot of problems for companies. What are they? We want to know that because we may be the solution. They may not have any money to invest in that solution right now, but that position will change. As Covid subsides, they will suddenly get religion and be ready to get back out there. We want to make sure we are uppermost in their minds when that happens. The only way we can do that is to be contacting them now while Covid is going the craziest it has ever been and as the vaccination rate starts to climb vertiginously. We may be meeting online but we have to be meeting nonetheless. For new clients, the difficulties never get old. Only knowing the title and not knowing the person's name is a big buffer to getting in contact. Companies in Japan are not very interested in business, which is why they make sure we cannot contact buyers. A friend of mine who had worked in Japan for many years went to Hong Kong to work. I was asking what was the major difference. He said, "when you go to a networking event in Japan, no one wants to meet anyone they don't already know. In Hong Kong everyone wants to meet you to see if there is some way you can do business together. The mentality was door open rather than door slammed shut as it is in Japan". Nevertheless, we have to try again. Send a bulky package to the person. Make sure it doesn't look like a flat sales document. Underlings are likely to just place it on the boss's desk, rather than have the temerity to open the boss's mail. This happens to me all the time. A package turns up whose contents actually aren't for me, but there it is, carefully placed on my desk. Inside that package, include something that will really pique their interest enough that they will contact you. Is this impossible? Maybe. But what else are you going to do? You will have zero chance of getting through their KGB designed phone message system, specifically designed to screen you out. Try the "package technique" and keep experimenting to see what a successful "pique" looks like to a potential buyer.

At the age of sixteen, I was wandering around the streets of a lower working class area in the suburbs of Brisbane, working my first job, trying to sell expensive Encyclopedia Britannica to the punters who lived there. Despite my callow youth, I had a tremendous gift as a salesman. I could tell by looking at the house from the outside whether they were interested or not in buying Encyclopedia Britannica and so could determine whether I should knock on their door or not. I was saying "no" for the client. Obviously, I had no clue what I was doing. The only training we received was to memorise, word for word, a twenty five minute pitch for the buyer, synchronised with showing the flash looking pages inside the encyclopedia. I am sure though there are many much older and wiser salespeople out there, still making that fundamental error I was making. Eventually, I discovered I didn't have any x-ray vision gift. I was just an idiot. There will be plenty of opportunity for the buyer to say "no", so we shouldn't be joining in to support them on that quest. Even before the call, we will have anticipated some potential pushback and we are fully armed and ready to go when it emerges. I was reminded of this x-ray vision into the buyer problem recently. The top salesperson of an organisation I know, said "no" for the buyer. He was an intermediary for me with the client and didn't like one of the conditions of the sale I was proposing. This was an important source of his commissions for him and they had been a big buyer over a number of years. He had them wrapped up in cotton wool and was extremely nervous about maintaining the relationship. I have learnt the hard way and so I don't believe in saying "no" for the buyer, so I pushed it. I rejected his rejection and told him to put my request to the client. We got into an elongated email wrangle over this, but not only am I dim most of the time, I am also supremely stubborn, especially when it comes to sales. Stubborn and dim is a lethal combination. He didn't like it at all, but he held his nose and put my proposition to the client. Guess what? They went for it. As we say in Japan, "even the monkeys fall from the trees" and even Mr. Number One sales guy can get it wrong. I refrained from mentioning that Japanese proverb of course or being a smarty pants and just thanked him for his cooperation. One common case of saying "no" for the client is when the prices are raised for the product or service. Salespeople invariably will start whinging to the boss, that the client will never agree to buy at that higher price. Effectively, they are saying "no" for the buyers. There are many ways to dilute the pain of raising the price. The terms of payment can be elongated. The guarantees and warranties can be expanded. The rise can be counterbalanced by discounts for volume purchases. The proposition can be ramped up on the value equation scale. Additional incentives can be packed together with the original offer to justify the price rise. Services can be thrown into the product purchase process to make it more palatable and vice versa. Interestingly, salespeople complaining about the price increase, spend zero time thinking about how to sell the value increase to the client. Price increases are one thing, but defending existing prices against discounting is another case of having to say "no" to the customer. In Japan, salespeople are very weak in front of the customer. The buyer here isn't King but GOD and GOD doesn't brook hearing "no" from salespeople. The constant complaint from our clients is that their firm's salespeople identify too closely with the client and don't defend the company's policies well enough, including pricing. I had the same problem with one of my salespeople. He was happy to discount and take a lower commission, even though the firm made very little profit. He got his base salary and some commission, so he was happy. I wasn't so happy. I get it - the logic is simple. The salesperson heavily invests in the relationship with the buyer and works hard to defend that relationship, even against their own employer. This sounds crazy, but they know the value of an existing customer, compared to the pain and effort to find a new buyer. This is where the value element has to be worked on more, so that salespeople can justify the existing pricing, without resorting to discounts to get the business. The basic sales skills of the team have to be improved, especially their communication skills. This don't say "no" for the client arena, shows the real capabilities of the salesperson. Sadly, there is a major population decline underway here and salespeople are in increasingly short supply. The quality of the people we can hire isn't going to improve, so our sales training mechanisms and our sales leadership mechanisms, become even more important than any time in the past. Are you ready for this and are your people ready to say "yes" for the buyer?

It is seriously sad to be dumb. Nothing annoys me more than when I finally realise something that was so obvious and yet I didn't see what was there, right in front of my nose. We talk a lot about value creation in relation to pricing, trying to persuade clients that what we are selling is a sensible tradeoff between the value they seek and the revenue that we seek. We want the value we offer to be both perceived and acknowledged value by the buyer. Often however, we get into a rut in our sales mindset. We carve a neuron groove once in our brain and keep ploughing that same row. Outside stimulation is needed. I realised that fact when I recently did some formal online training. My previous companies had sent me to the Harvard, Stanford and Insead business schools in the past, which of course, were all amazing. However, when I was doing my recent studies, I recalled that it has been some time since I did something formal like that. During the coursework, I realised many things we could do around value provision, which we have not been doing or not doing sufficiently well enough. I am an avid reader, but I also found that the mantra of both "formal" and "informal" lifetime learning is a good one to follow. I found we have had a lot of assets lying around, which we have not fully utilised, hence the "I hate how dumb I am" statement. We need an omnichannel approach. Often, we may have videos hanging around, explaining the benefits and the details of a service or a product. Now the video has an audio track, which we can strip out of the video. This allows us to turn it into a different medium, allowing clients to access the information in that format. So many people are now processing information through audio, thanks to the recent proliferation of podcasts and audiobooks. Buyers are busy, busy and so many are multi-tasking while listening. Having audio alternatives may help to save them valuable time, compared to them having to sit down and watch our video. Depending on the content, the audio might also become a training tool for our own staff. Now if that video is sitting there on YouTube for free, then once people have watched it, suddenly, a whole world of YouTube's other groovy offerings appears on your client's screen. They are being tempted to look at our competitor's videos. That is not a great result for us. We want to keep the client on our website for as long as possible. There are companies like Wistia, for example, which will host the videos for a monthly fee. These videos are no longer mashed into YouTube's offerings, but sit independently, such that the client cannot stray into competitor territory. We want to build a moat to keep the client in our ecosystem, so that after watching the video on Wistia, they have to come back to us. Are you able to free your clients from the YouTube loop and make sure they escape your rival's charms? The audio track can also be run through AI programmes like Descript, which will turn sound into text. Once the text emerges, we need to edit the content, because the AI is good, but it is not perfect. Once we have the corrected information in text, it can go into our newsletters, get it on to our website and we can send it out to clients. When we have text in English, we can translate it into Japanese and use that for clients. We can use this text information to supplement other information we are going to send to clients or include it in our after sales service programmes. Do you have any opportunities to create text, which didn't exist as text before and find ways to employ this to add more value for clients? Often we have multiple solutions for clients, which we could bundle together. As salespeople though, we tend to be stuck in that Johnny One Note neuron groove and only sell clients one solution. An ideal bundle would be so attractive that the client would be willing to enter into a subscription format to pay something upfront for a whole year or each month or each quarter. The point is to get them to sign up for more than an episodic transaction that always has a formal completion date. We want repeat business and this subscription model is one way to weld the relationship between buyer and seller closer together. Once we become part of their ongoing business plans, it reduces the buying friction. Importantly, it also increases their internal friction to turn the buying process off. It is always easier to keep something going, than to start it in the first place. This builds a moat around our client, denying our rivals an option to steal our business. So, what could you bundle together to create a no-brainer, totally stupendous offer for the buyer? There might be some administration associated with using our type of product or service. The buying entity inside the client's company is always time poor. Perhaps we can offer a system which supplies the service or product, but in such a way that we reduce the friction involved on their side. A famous example is the

When we think of team selling, we imagine a room with the buyers on one side of the table and we are lined up on the other. There is another type of team selling and that is taking place before we get anywhere near the client. It might be working together as a Sales Mastermind panel to brainstorm potential clients to target or strategising campaigns or plotting the approach to adopt with a buyer. Salespeople earn their remuneration through a combination of base salary and commission or bonus in Japan. There are very few jobs here in sales, which are 100% commission, simply because salespeople don't have to accept that model. There is always a demand here for salespeople and in fact the declining population is keeping a lot of dud salespeople afloat. Given there is not much 100% commission selling going on, there is also not so much salesperson competition going on with each other. There is competition, but the losers usually don't get fired, as they might in some Western business environments. So the opportunity is there to collaborate more on approaches to the client and generating more business. What often happens though is, salespeople tend to operate from within their own little castles. They have their moat around their existing clients, which they serve and they spend their time trying to find new clients by themselves. They may have sales managers, but in these modern times, sales managers are expected to produce revenues as well. That means there isn't a lot of coaching going on. If we have one person looking at the client through the prism of their own experience, things get a bit thin quickly, if that person doesn't have such a wealth of experience. It would be more logical to gather a team of salespeople together and look at the best approach for that client, rather than relying on the best efforts of a single person. But we don't do this very often. This tends to be because of a territorial concept, where each salesperson has their clients and they should take care of them, without wasting anyone's time, especially when they are getting paid a commission or a bonus, for the sale. This does make sense at one level, but we are missing out on the sum of the parts being able to exceed the whole here. This is often a culture issue within sales teams. If you run things with tight individual accountability, it is hard to get other salespeople to assist a colleague. As leaders we need to establish a framework for teamwork even in a commission based world of focused individual benefit. The money getting paid out doesn't change, but the time becomes the sticking point. How do we get salespeople to spend time to help others be more successful? One way to do this it to treat a particular client as a project and pull in other salespeople to work on the best approach. Once the salesperson in question has spoken with the client, then we need to gather the Sales Mastermind together again and brainstorm what would be the ideal solution. This should be one of the tasks for the sales manager, but often they are swamped with their own clients and trying to keep the whole sales team coordinated and moving forward. Breaking out time for one-on-one discussions may simply not be happening and the salespeople are often left to their own devices. When we approach this on the project level, the time required becomes contained and less oppressive for the other salespeople. It is also a case of quid pro quo too, because it will be their turn to benefit next time, from having more heads than one tackling client problems and helping match the best solutionS. This is where the sales manager can play a role in setting up the project teams and monitoring progress. It is good for the salespeople because one day they will become sales managers and will need to introduce similar systems into their own teams. Funnily enough, we often have the experience of learning a lot ourselves, when we are working on someone else's problem. We can be too close to our own issues and be blind to aspects which could have an important bearing, but we cannot see the wood for the trees. Somehow looking at another's problem brings clarity for us about our own contemplations. There are many benefits to using Sales Masterminds from within the team, working together for the best outcomes for the client. There is an education process going on both up and down the scale of experience, as we all come away from the process that little better educated in our craft.

I was studying an online learning programme from Professor Scott Galloway, where he talked about Appealing To Human Instincts. His take was from the strategy angle, but I realised that this same framework would be useful for sales too. In sales we do our best to engage the client. We try to develop sophisticated questions to help us unearth the stated and unstated needs of the buyer. Professor Galloway's pedagogical construct can give us another perspective on buyer dynamics. The first Human Instinct nominated was the brain. This is our logos, our rational, logical, analytical mode. What are the unanswered questions and key internal conversations occupying the minds of our buyers. If we can meet the buyer in their thought process, then we are more likely to be able to understand their needs and then be in a position to meet those needs. We know that some buyers will be analytical types, for whom three decimal places is unremarkable when considering data. Often though salespeople are big picture. Macro types who shun this level of detail because they feel it is boring. They love the sale and abhor the paperwork which goes along with it. I had two insurance salesmen in my home trying to get me to buy various policies. What astounded me was they were middle aged, well experienced gentlemen and yet they couldn't fill out the paperwork correctly, so we had to do it again. They loved the conversation with me but not the conversation with the fine print in the contract. The next instinct was the heart. Our emotions are there for all to see, if the right stimulation is provided. We laugh, cry, get angry, become determined and give up, based around our emotional configuration at any point in the day. Salespeople walk into a mine field of buyer emotions, with no way of knowing which particular configuration we have bumped into today. Our job is to gauge as quickly as possible where the buyer is emotionally and how they prefer to communicate at that moment. We know our tempers once frayed, tend to trigger a supreme impatience with everything. Woe be tied a salesperson who cannot "kuki wo yomu" or read the air, as we say in Japanese, to understand this client needs another visit on a better day for them. Instinct number three was the gut. This reminded me of Maslow's hierarchy of needs where survival was at the bottom and became the prism through which information and ideas were judged. Company buyers are always bound firmly by risk reduction, budget stringencies, cash flow imperatives and fears for the future. Everyone loves a bargain except salespeople, especially those salespeople who have commissions attached to the sale price. Value is the only antidote for this price discount swamp fever infecting buyers. Babbling on about features won't cut it. Yet amazingly this is the step where many salespeople check out. They never even attempt to consider scaling the summit. We had better migrate up the value scale and talk about the application of the benefits. We need to lock in the evidence where this has worked magnificently somewhere else, for this buyer to feel safe that there are precedents. The fourth instinct was sex appeal. Buyers want to attract attention to themselves as capable, highly promotable, sexy beasts attracting a lot of favourable accord. Our role is to make them look like heroes, legends, masters of the universe. They want to elevate their worth, status and value within the organisation. "Look at me, I am clever" they want to say. We become their instrument to promote that message by giving them our product or service, which becomes a game changer inside the client company. Salespeople have to be master jugglers, elevating many balls in the air at the same time. We need to see our buyers in a holistic manner, to fully appreciate the tack we need to take buyer by buyer, because they are all different. This takes a change in the sales mindset because most salespeople are focused on themselves, their commission, their Beemer upgrade and a thousand other things, which the buyer couldn't care less about. So next time we sit down with a buyer, we need to make sure we are engaging all of their human instincts and appealing to them from many angles.

Group crowdsourcing has been around since cave dweller days. Gathering a crowd of prospects and getting them to buy your stuff is a standard method of making more sales or starting conversations which hopefully will lead to sales. Trade shows provide booths but also speaking events, if you pay more dough to attend. These days the event will most likely be online rather than in person, but the basics are common. "We all love to buy but we don't want to be sold", should be a mantra all salespeople embrace, especially with selling from the stage. The common approach at events is to provide a lot of information, generally the features of the product and then trot out the sales pitch at the end. As an audience, we brace ourselves because we see the switch from value to pitch coming. Mentally, we get our sceptic hat out and put it on ready for the sales blurb. When you think about it this is a pretty dumb approach. The giving value first idea is a good one, but why separate the value from the pitch at the end? Why not integrate the two together, so there is no audience bracing required? It all comes back to design. We have all grown up with the explanation, then pitch model, so we tend to just accept that is how it is done. This is even though on other occasions as audience members ourselves, we are experiencing that "brace yourself" mental switch. It is a bit strange isn't it, so why not learn from our own experience and make a change for the better. The talk will be broken down into chapters. Chapter One is the opening. This is where we have to say something that snaps a distracted, sceptical audience member out of their social media induced coma and gets them to listen to us. We may share a really surprising piece of high value data or information. We might tell a gripping story that attracts the audience. We might ask a devilish question that completely consumes the attention of the audience. Next we start to move into some features of the solution we are proffering and critically, we must link these to the applied benefits. We do this by using examples of what other buyers have done with our solution so that the audience can draw a direct line between the purchase and the benefit. These claims have to be backed up with solid evidence or it comes across as salesperson hot air. At this point we need to ask a question which gets the audience thinking about their situation. It must be subtle, rather than bold outbursts like "You should have this shouldn't you?". Rather we can say, "can you see an area of your business where this widget would increase revenues or reduce costs?". We then say nothing and let that question hang in the air, to allow the audience to focus on it and make a mental evaluation for themselves. We will keep repeating this formula in each chapter – feature, benefit, application of the benefit, evidence and then a subtle question. We can't keep repeating the exact same question every time, because that sounds ridiculous, so we need a stock of these. Others could be, "Thinking about some of your strategies for your business, can you see where having this widget would help advance the business for you?", or "Even incremental advances are welcome, so can you see where you could gain a five, ten or fifteen percent improvement in results through applying this widget to your business?", or "Business is super competitive today so stealing a march on your rivals is always a challenge. Can you see an avenue through using this widget which will differentiate you from your competitors in the minds of your buyers?". By the time we get to the end of our presentation, we will have used a variety of questions which will resonate differently with each of our potential clients, because not all of their situations are identical. We need to use this insight when we are designing our questions, hoping at least one will hit the bullseye for a particular client. We finish off with inviting members of the audience to stay back and chat, if they found some solutions to their business issues from our talk. At no point could the audience members "brace for impact" from our sales pitch. We have eliminated resistance to what we are saying. We have also come across as a company who focuses on value for clients and are not a collection of rabid shysters, spivs, hucksters and dodgy carnival barkers. Even if they don't buy from us today, our reputation will have been enhanced and they are more likely to look favourably on us in the future.