The Sales Japan Series

Japanese salespeople should love to hear "that sounds pricey" from buyers. Why? Because they know that this statement is the most common objection to arise in response to their sales presentation and they are completely ready for it. It is one of the simplest buyer pushback answers to deal with too. Well, simple that is, if you are trained in sales and know what you are doing. Untrained salespeople really make a big hot mess of this one. They want to argue the point about pricing with the buyer. Or they want to use their force of will to bully the buyer into buying. Or they want to use one of those American style aggressive response statements, to try and push the deal over the line. This is all nonsense. The only words emerging from our lips should be "Thank you. May I ask you why you say that?". We could say something else like "compared to what?", which is a pretty snappy rejoinder, but it is a bit too aggressive in this situation and doesn't really yield enough information about buyer thinking. We could simply drop the price to be "competitive", but that is the mark of the weak, whining, unwashed, pathetic salesperson. We need to do better than that, unless that proffered discount is directly linked to certain purchase volume prerequisites. When we first hear "that sounds pricey" we may feel some pressure to justify our numbers. That is totally the wrong way of thinking. That number of ours is there for a reason. There is a justification for that number, based on the value it provides. There are plenty of clients willing and happy to pay that number for the goods or services they receive in exchange. When we sweetly ask why they say that, we now have moved the pressure for justification back to the buyer. This is called "tossing back the porcupine". The comment "pricey" is like a spiky porcupine being thrown to us and it is tricky to handle, without incurring lots of pain. We ask "why" thus shooting the porcupine back to the buyer and we can sit there cool calm and collected and listen to what they have to say. This is important because we need to use our highest level of empathetic listening to comprehend what they are saying, in order to understand what is really on their mind. Our object in sales is to meet the buyer in the conversation they are having in their own mind. That will be a compilation of their current situation, their experiences to date, their personal situation and a million other factors which we will never be privy to. Asking them that "why" question gives us the chance to tune in to what is important for them and to alert us to factor in things which we hadn't considered before. I was given that price pushback for some training I was proposing to the HR team at a Japanese company. I asked them the "why" question and then just sat there stone cold silent. They did not reply immediately. It was one of those long uncomfortable silences for foreigners. Fortunately, I have learned to become comfortable with silence in Japan. After what seemed an absolute age, they explained that they are given a quarterly budget for training and my number was over that quarterly limit. Did I rail against the inequity of having such dopey quarterly budgets or rage that they should change their entire budgeting system and get that accounting department better geared up to suit my preferred pricing? No. I sweetly asked, "If we could spread the payment across two quarters, would that be of any help?" and again I shut up and didn't say one more word. They looked at each other and I saw a light get switched on inside their heads and they said that would work. So, it wasn't too pricey after all. It was too much price for that arbitrary temporal unit called a quarter of the year. After the buyer tells us all the good reasons why our price is too high, we need to be packing heavy with our value justification for the number we have just quoted. This is why salespeople need to be well prepared and practice for this "that sounds pricey" pushback. Trying to wing it and produce some intellectual and articulation magic on the spot is possible. Unlikely though, especially when your brain is frozen with fear getting that infamous pushback. Recently a multinational client wanted presentation training in Japan, after having conducted training in APAC with another provider who was based out of Hong Kong. They were unable to deliver in Japan so the client contacted us. I gave them my proposal and they told me my number was "pricey". When I sweetly asked "why", they not so sweetly told me that the other vendor did the exact same training for a price significantly at a discount to what I was proposing. They said that I should match this other provider, whom I had never heard of. I checked them out. They didn't have a 109 year history of teaching presentation skills, a track record of 58 years in Japan, teach 90% of the Fortune 500 companies, have 200 branches in over 100 countries, teach in 35 languages, have ISO 9001 certific

Japan's image as a sophisticated country with a solid, unique traditional culture is well placed. For example, every year around 130,000 Shinkansen bullet trains run between Tokyo and Osaka, bolting through the countryside at speeds of up to 285 kilometers an hour and boast an average arrival delay of 24 seconds. Think about that average, sustained over a whole year! Such amazing efficiency here is combined with basically no guns, no drugs, no litter, no graffiti, very little crime and the people are so polite and considerate. If you step on their foot in the crowded subway cars, they apologise to you for getting their foot in the wrong place. If you drop your wallet there is a close to 100% chance of you getting it back, intact. Considering all of the above and with the biggest concentration of Michelin three star restaurants in the world, no wonder Tokyo is the best city in the world to live in. Once Covid is contained, put Japan on your bucket list folks, you won't regret it. Yet sales professionalism is still so far behind, by Western standards. I am going to make incredibly broad, general statements here, but actually they are true for most salespeople in Japan. How do I know this? We have been teaching sales training here since 1963 and these are the things companies consistently ask us to fix. Let's highlight a few things which may surprise you about sales in Japan. Asking for the order is avoided. Saying "no" is culturally taboo, so the best way to avoid having to say it or to hear it, is to save everyone's face and leave the outcome deliberately vague. There are shelves of books in English on how to close the sale, many are in translation, but not a great take up here as yet. When the seller meets any resistance from the buyer, the first reflex is to drop the price by 20%. Western sales managers would be apoplectic if this was the default objection handling mechanism. Here defending your price, through explaining the value, is thrown overboard and simple price point reductions are the preferred lever. Objection handling skills are weak, because the seller sees the buyer not as a King but as a God. The seller's job is to do everything God wants. The salespeople are predominantly on base salary and bonus remuneration arrangements, so not much commission sales "fire in the belly" going on here. Salespeople love the spec, the data, the detail and are not so keen on the application of the benefits. How do we know this? I am a buyer here too and in they come bearing their catalogue, flyer or their slide deck to take me through all the details. Surprisingly, they never rise above the spec waterline to talk about value or benefits or how to apply the benefits. It is the same in our sales classes and we see this phenomenon in the role play sequences. Salespeople struggle to think about what the spec represents in terms of the benefits to the buyer. This opens up the can of worms about understanding buyer needs. By any definition, getting straight into the detail of the product or service, without asking the buyer any questions, is insanity. Yet this is normal here. So much for all that slick American consultative sales jive. We are back to the God problem. The seller must not brook God's displeasure by rude behaviour, such as asking questions about what are their firm's problems. Ergo, the buyer completely controls the sale's conversation. They demand the pitch be made straight up, so that they can lacerate it, to make sure all the risk has been cut out. Buyers are incredibly risk averse in Japan. This a zero default, no errors, no mistakes business culture. This is great as a consumer of course. However, the seller is not considered a partner here, more of a slave to the buyer's every whim and demand. So the Japan business sales process is pretty "refined". There are only three steps. The salesperson opens with their pitch, then we move immediately to client objections. Next, the buyer will get back to you, but probably not. How does any business get done here? Please see the next section! Sellers really prefer to concentrate on existing clients, rather than running around trying to find new clients. They rely on the firm brand to do all the prospecting work, rather than their skill as a professional in sales. Hunters are a rare breed of salesperson in Japan, as everyone prefers being a farmer. This is probably true of everywhere, because obviously it is much easier to keep the business going, than to start a new piece of business. Japanese salespeople just take it to new heights of speciality. Salespeople never think to ask permission of the buyer to ask questions. Such a simple thing, but so hard to break out of your own cultural context to actually execute. Once we teach them how easy it is, the scales literally fall from their eyes and they become true believers in asking questions, before introducing anything about the detail of their solution line up. The first foreigners who lived in Japan in the la

Selling to a buyer in-person and selling to the same Japanese buyer online are worlds apart. Yet how many salespeople are succeeding in making the transition? Are your clients seeking virtual sales training? Not enough. COVID has revealed a lot of salespeople weaknesses. which were hidden in the face-to-face sales call world. Wishing things get better is a plan, but not a very good plan because things don't appear like they are going to get better for quite some time. There is also the fact that a lot of companies are not going to have staff in the office every day anymore. So selling online, isn't going to disappear as a part of our reality. Our skills have to include this piece of the puzzle, whether we like it or not. What do we need to do? Here are some ideas to apply with your sales team and get them better able to get the deals COVID or otherwise. First impressions whether at the office venue or online are critical. Posture sounds like an unlikely choice for something to focus on, but think about the body language clues we pick up from people according to the way they hold themselves. Online, we need to be quite formal sitting up ram rod straight, or if we are standing, than standing tall. Our posture needs to convey confidence, competence, trust, and reliability. Sit forward, Roman style toward the edge of the seat online just as you would do in a face-to-face meeting. Get the camera lens up to eye height and frame yourself on screen so that your upper half of your body is visible. This becomes important when we want to use our gestures. Many people I see in online meetings never use their gestures when explaining things. Gestures work online too, but you have to make some adjustment. The corridor between your chest and your ear height is where to use gestures, because that way they will be easily seen. Also don't wave your hands around. These fake backgrounds can't take that type of movement. So it means we need to maintain our gestures longer than usual and move our hands very slowly. You wouldn't slouch in the chair in front of a buyer. And you would look them in the eye when you talk to them. Looking at their faces on screen looks like you are looking down on them when you're talking and that cannot help build a good relationship. Instead, look straight at the lens and try to engage the buyer. We need to make greater use of our voice and lift the energy up at least 20% louder and stronger than usual to compensate for the power loss, which the camera extracts. We need to hit key words and phrases much stronger in order to give them emphasis. We also need to slow our speaking speed down because the audio on these video platforms is universally poor. Pauses become more important to allow what we have said be captured, processed, and understood. We should eliminate ums and ahs because we've rehearsed our sales call online before we make it. We want to sound assured, confident and convinced about what we are saying. Any vocal hesitations defeat that effect so we have to get rid of these verbal ticks. We need to lead off with our credibility statement. This is a brief highlight of our USP or unique selling proposition. We should be using the screen share function to show any visuals supporting what we are saying. For example, one of our USP is longevity, having stood the test of time. For that purpose, we show the New York skyline as it looked in 1912, when the company was founded and the Tokyo skyline in 1963, when we opened in Japan. This visually is much more powerful than just saying we started in 1912 and 1963. Next, we should put up a draft agenda for the call using the screen share function. In this agenda we specify why speaking with us is a good idea. We nominate that we are going to discuss their current situation and their desired future situation, as well as barriers, challenging them from reaching their targets. We ask them if they would like to add any points to the agenda so that they feel ownership of the plan for the call. If they have any additions, then we just type them straight into the document and put it all back up on screen. As we work our way through the detail, it is important to check for understanding. One of the bad elements of online meetings is that buyers multitask while we are talking. In person, they can't do it. But online is the new wild west and there are few rules. This means we have to be insistent that they turn on their camera even though this may uncover some pushback or reluctance. We need to set this up. We both appreciate that mutual trust is very important in business. So let's both turn our cameras on today while we have this meeting. If they won't even turn their camera on, you have to ask yourself if this is really a prospect you should be spending any time. After the meeting, we need to send a lot of data they can look at on their own time. Japan is the data vortex of the universe. And the basic rule is you can never give Japanese buyers too much infor

You manage to get the appointment, which at the moment is seriously job well done. Trying to get hold of clients, when everyone is working from home is currently a character building exercise. You ask permission to ask questions. Well done! You are now in the top 1% pf salespeople in Japan. You do ask your questions and quickly realise you have just what they need. Bingo! We are going to do a deal here today, so you are getting pumped. But you don't do a deal, in fact you leave with nothing but your deflated ego and damaged confidence. The finish line was right there in front of you and you fell down short. Why? This is one of the most frustrating things in sales. You do all of the right things or so you think and then you don't get the deal. You start analysing what went wrong. Let me save you some time on that one. You didn't ask your questions in the right way. Finding out things like: what they want, where they are now and where they want to be, are all brilliant questions. They won't do the deal though, because you have missed one vital step. That step is to ask the question about where they want to be, and ask it in a specific way. We can say, "so you have mentioned to me the current state of play in the business, can you now please allow me to understand where you want the business to be going forward?". Good try, but no cigar. That question needs an addendum. We need to ask it this way, "so you have mentioned to me the current state of play in the business, can you now please allow me to understand where you want the business to be going forward and what are the implications, if you don't get there fast enough?". This is a clever phrasing of the question, because it is no longer about whether they can get there or not, but can they get there fast enough. Often, the buyer is sitting there listening to us, but thinking to themselves, "that is all very true and we will work on all of that – BY OURSELVES". That may be the case, but the world has not stopped, so that they can get their act together at their pace, when they are ready, in the fullness of time. No, they have competitors and are engaged in a life and death struggle for survival and in that fierce contest, speed to market is a big factor. This is where we come in. The question is a good one because it challenges their ability to get it done themselves internally and done fast enough. They have to allocate scarce resources to this project and they are already quite busy with what is on their plate now. We can provide that high level of expertise immediately and make a big difference. The best plan in the world never executed is no help. Procrastination affects people and institutions. Getting stuff done inside companies can be excruciatingly slow. So many meetings required, so may sign offs, so much paperwork and bureaucracy to wade through. Having a problem and doing anything about it are different things. As the salesperson, the first thing we learn is that the client is never on our timetable. You need that deal now but they don't feel any sense of urgency. We have to make sure that sense of the size of the gap between where they are now and where they need to be is enormous. So vast that they just won't be able to do it by themselves. Also, we have to create that sense of urgency that the cost of doing nothing is not zero. We have to paint the picture of the opportunity cost of being too slow to get going and how their competitors are active and moving forward, while they are lagging behind. If we don't do this well they will imagine they can do it by themselves at their leisure. The person we are talking to is thinking they can be a hero to their boss by fixing the problem with no need to hire external solution providers. We could say to them, "By applying our solution now, you will speed up the opportunity to gain increased revenues. These additional revenues will not only pay for our solution very quickly but will build a war chest for you to be more agile in taking on your competitors". That won't work. Why? Because it is a statement from a salesperson, trying to sell something. Instead, we need to extinguish that false hope of doing it themselves at their leisure, by pointing out through asking well constructed questions, the folly of that approach. For example, "If by applying our solution now, would it be beneficial to you to speed up the opportunity to gain increased revenues?". After they say, "yes", we continue. "If these additional revenues allowed you to not only pay for our solution very quickly, but also build a war chest for you to be more agile in taking on your competitors, would that assist your business?". We need to be sensitive to the client becoming our competitor for the needed solutions. We can most easily attack that false flag by raising the issue of speed. Few companies can move as quickly as they need to and our agility becomes our competitive advantage, as a solution provider.

Salespeople have sales tools which often are not thoroughly thought through enough. These can be flyers, catalogues, slide decks, etc. They can also be proposals, quotations and invoices. Usually the salespeople are given the tools as they are and either don't ask for improvements or don't believe the marketing department has much interest in their ideas about the dark art of marketing. Consequently, there are some areas for improvement which go begging. Flyers, catalogues and slide decks tend to be very evenly arranged. Every page is basically presented in the same way. Yet, as salespeople we know that there are going to be certain products which are more popular than others. These items and corresponding pages should be up the front. It might mean breaking away from the sectional approach, of all the bits and bobs being collected together in their respective places, separate and cordoned off. Also, on important pages of these most important products or services, there are bound to be key words or key paragraphs that, over time, we have learnt are of the most relevancy to our clients. There will also be key data tables, diagrams or photos which should be drawn to the buyer's attention. Why don't we have marketing do something with this information. Maybe make the font larger, or add bold or highlight using colour. This is only a matter of adjusting the layout of the page and getting the next round of printing or soft copy to reflect these updates. Generally speaking, we don't want to be handing our materials over to the client, in the first instance. We want to spin the item around, so that they can easily read it. With our nice pen we draw their attention to the areas we want them to see. Not everything on that page has equal value. Some sections will be more important than others. They can read the whole thing later at their leisure, but while we are there with them, we want to go through the content and determine what they need to focus on. When we leave the materials with them the highlighted areas will draw their attention to where we need them to be looking for information. If this is so easy, why are all the sales materials we see all look the same – flat, undifferentiated and no attempt to direct the eye of the reader? Everyone has their job. Marketing is there to produce the materials, but they don't know which are the key sections for buyer purview. Salespeople are busy running around seeing clients and just take what they have been given. They never think to make requests to marketing to change the materials. What if the buyers have different interests? That will be true, but it will also be true that 20% of the key information will suit 80% of the buyers, so we should concentrate on that content. If there are particular sections which are not highlighted, then we can deal with that problem when we are with the buyer. The other areas for some marketing effort are around how we present quotations, invoices and proposals. We should be advertising our services or goods on the quotations and invoices. Key people in the buyer's company will see these materials and here is a chance to get our information in front of them. If there are soft copies involved this allows us to add links to the website where more information can be found. QR codes are also good for taking information on a page to a website. Proposals can be very florid or very flat. Something in the middle is a good idea. We don't want the presentation of the information overwhelming the messages. We also don't have to just rely on text. Visual stimulation is very powerful and photos of people are always attractive to us. This is where we salespeople need marketing's help. We need someone who has great layout skills and knows how to assemble the look and feel of the pages. Let's rethink our sales materials and ask what more could we get from them?

I hear some people say translating terms like "nemawashi" into English is difficult. Really? I always thought it was one of the easier ones. Let's just call it "groundwork". In fact, that is a very accurate description ,from a number of different angles. Japanese gardeners are superstars. There is limited flat space in this country, so over centuries gardeners have worked out you need to move the trees you want, to where you want them. They prefer this approach to just waiting thirty years for them to turn out the preferred way. It is not unusual today to see a huge tree on the back of a big truck ,being moved from one location to another and presto instant garden. The roots of that massive tree will be wrapped up in cloth to protect them. That wrapping process is called "nemawashi". In business, it means being well prepared for the business meeting – doing the ground work beforehand. In a Western context being well prepared for the meeting will mean assembling all the data and analysis in order to make an impassioned plea for your idea or suggestion, to be accepted by the big bosses. We all get to the meeting, listen to the different approaches and we make a decision in that meeting. What could be more time efficient and logical? They never do it that way in Japan. Concepts of time efficiency differ for a start and throwing massive amounts of overtime at a problem is not problem in Japan. The meeting is also a ceremony, because the decision has already been arrived at beforehand and the gathering is just to formalise the outcome. This happens in the West too. Whenever you see global leaders delivering their joint statements or signing agreements, they didn't arrive at the wording during the meeting. That was all worked out by their minions beforehand, over many hours of debate, negotiation and discussion. The TV cameras just capture the big guys and gals inking the document, after all the "groundwork" has been completed. I was talking with a Western businessman recently and he was relating how hard it was to get the team behind his ideas. The issue was, he was trying to get it all agreed to, at the key meeting and hadn't invested the time to do the groundwork. What he needed to do was go to see all the key people, the influencers, the stakeholders with a vested interest and explain the idea. Get their input and agreement and then rinse and repeat with the rest of them. By the time the meeting happens, everyone will recognise parts of their preferences and ideas in the submission. Agreement flows easily in these cases. In sales, we will probably not have direct access to all of the decision makers, influencers and stakeholders. Our primary contact has to become our champion for sheparding the agreement through the internal nemawashi process. Asking them directly who are these hidden decision makers is insulting. It says, you are a nobody, but I still need your help. We need to be more considerate of their "face" and ask in a way that enhances their face. Once we have established the trust, have uncovered their needs, shown we can help and have dealt with any hesitations they may have, we are ready to marshal our forces for the final push through to a "yes" to the sale. We explain, we understand that many people will be interested to know about this change in the delivery of product or services. We also know that they will be tasked to explain it to others who cannot join our meetings. We ask how can we help them? This is a rhetorical question because we want to get into the detail of who are the players. So we go straight into asking who do they think would have the most concern about the change and why they would be concerned? We keep repeating this process until we have fleshed out the people who will have the most interest in saying "no". The next stage is to arm our champion with the tools to deal with the pushback. We try to understand the concerns and then arrive at creative ways of overcoming those concerns. This is what we mean by nemawashi or ground work. Is it time consuming – yes! Do we have to invest the extra time – yes! There is an internal logic to the way decisions are made in Japan. There is no point railing about how the Japanese business decision making process should be Westernised, so it is more familiar for us. That is never going to happen, so we need to be better and more flexible to understand the system and then become a master of influence within it. We need to become the nemawashi maestro!

Minato-ku or the "Port Area" is a central part of Tokyo, which used to be harbourside for goods being delivered to the capital in ancient times. My three barbers' stories are tales of customer service opportunities gone astray, in a country where customer service is the envy of the rest of the world. Each story brings forth a reflection on our own customer service and how we treat our buyers. My apologies to Gioachino Rossini for lifting the title idea for this piece from his famous opera. Barber Number One worked in a men's barber shop in the Azabu Juban shopping street which I frequented (and took my son too), for fifteen years. During that time a number of different barbers there took care of my hair as they came and went. One day, while trimming the hair on the back of my neck, the electric razor must have had a fault, because he cut my skin where he had been shaving my neck. My wife, being a typical demanding Japanese consumer, was appalled by this poor customer service and went there to complain about how they were treating her husband. Me being a laid back Aussie, I didn't raise a fuss myself, but that didn't stop my missus from wading in. The youngish barber decided to argue the point with my wife and wasn't immediately forthcoming with a satisfactory apology. My wife showed the offending damage on the photos on her phone and wasn't backing off. One of the more senior barbers intervened and made the apology on behalf of the shop. Did that satisfy her? Not in the least. Why? Because she didn't feel it was a sincere apology. She told me I should never attend that establishment again. The lifetime value of a regular customer is high, especially in a crowded market. There was a management issue there because the service culture wasn't correct. The interesting thing I understood was that barbers are hard to recruit these days, because not so many people want to join the trade. They felt they could afford to lose me as a regular over fifteen years or more but they couldn't afford to lose the barber. The point though is where do you draw the line around the culture of your service? What are you saying is acceptable behaviour to the other staff? When things go wrong, this is when the real culture of your organisation is revealed. Barber Number Two belonged to a well known chain of successful barber shops and was introduced by my wife as an appropriate alternative to the previous bloodthirsty razor wielding maniac she disapproved of. I wasn't all that keen on this Roppongi establishment, once Covid-19 hit, because it was a rather confined space. In the centre of Tokyo, a lot of companies are using what were once apartments as business premises, so the layout and size can be quite small. Having trained this young guy on how I like my hair done, I persevered, Covid or otherwise. I called to make an appointment only to be told he had been transferred to one of their shops on the outskirts of Tokyo. Staff movements happen, but how we handle them is another matter. Did my barber call me and introduce his successor? No. How expensive would that have been? Again, no one was thinking about the lifetime value of the customer here. I had invested in educating him about what I liked and so I would not switch easily unless I had to. This is another management failure, where handovers are not being properly choreographed. Customer continuity has a distinct value to it. Barber Number Three is my new barber and belongs to a shop which has been continuously operating on that same spot for the last 203 years, again in the Azabu Juban area. It must be the oldest barber shop in Japan and probably the world. The young guy cutting my hair showed me to the chair and started asking me about how I liked my hair done. Red flag there. He didn't introduce himself to me, and I had to ask him for his name. Why would that be the case? I asked him about the history of the shop and it was clear he didn't know much beyond it was 203 years old. He didn't know if they had famous people over that time as customers. I asked him how they traditionally cut hair in Japan, before western scissors arrived in the Meiji era – he had no idea. So, this was really just the same as any other barber shop, because the management has not educated their staff about the heritage value of their offer. I was a new client, so here was the chance to make me a permanent client. In a sea of so many competing establishments, I thought what a waste of an opportunity to differentiate themselves, beyond just having a sign in the window, that says they are over 200 years old. There was no narrative around that fact, no great stories attached to it, no buzz, no particular vibe. The common theme across these stories is how to differentiate your service in highly competitive industries. There were also poor levels of understanding about the lifetime value of a customer on the part of the staff. These were leadership issues and the solutions were basically cost free and simp

There is no doubt that the pandemic has made it very fraught to find new clients in Japan. The new variants of the virus are much more contagious and have already overwhelmed the hospital infrastructure in Osaka, in just weeks of the numbers taking off. Vaccines are slow to roll out and so extension after extension of lockdowns and basic fear on both sides, makes popping around for chat with the client unlikely. We forget how much we give up in terms of reading and expressing nuanced ideas through not having access to body language. Yes, we can see each other on screen, but it just isn't the same. In this situation, which looks to be scheduled to last until early 2022, we have to work on new skills. We know about storytelling, word pictures and refined word selection for better communication. Knowing about it and doing it though, are ridiculously different. I know, because we teach this stuff. I can explain the formulas and the methodologies and the class participants get it, but doing it is often a struggle. Obviously practice with strong coaching is the cure. We will be beginning our conversation with a client online and this could be a new client or more likely, a new person down at the client's company, as every April the wheel of fortune is spun and the HR department nominates who goes where. The explanation of who we are and what we do and why you should deal with me (and by extension my firm) is a critical juncture. Jumping straight into the product catalogue tour is dumb. This made little sense when we were sitting knee to knee, but makes absolutely no sense when we are screens apart. Instead, we need to get their permission to ask cogent questions, which will ultimately unveil needs. There is a simple formula for doing this, so there is no excuse why every salesperson should not be doing this. Firstly we need to explain who we are and what we do. This is a great opportunity to build your firm's credibility with the client. We shouldn't forget to weave our history into the narrative and make it personal. This is not a history lesson on the company but a base on which to build trust and we have to make sure we are represented in this part of the storytelling. For example, "We are global soft skills training experts and Dale Carnegie launched the company in New York in 1912. The fact that ninety percent of the Fortune 500 companies use us, shows that the most discerning firms recognise the value we bring. We have stood the harsh test of time globally and in Japan too, since we established operations here in 1963. We are way beyond all of that 'it is American so it won't work in Japan' stuff, as we have localised the content and 80% of our delivery in in Japanese. I have been with the firm for the last eleven years and have seen the impact our training has across all industries". In this forty second burst we have packed the content to the gunnels with credibility statements and emotive words. This initial reference point tells the buyer we are a safe option. "Nobody got fired for choosing Dale Carnegie Training" type of idea. Next, we tell a story about a client. They had a certain issue, preferably one we think might be shared by this client and we explain the solution applied and the result achieved in a very micro and brief manner. We emphasise the pain this problem was causing for a particular decisionmaker inside the company, someone in a similar position or role to our interlocutor. We briefly explain what we did and then we dwell on the perceived value of the solution formed from the client's point of view. We should bring back pieces of their dialogue with us, to fully express their happiness that the problem was fixed, so that the buyer we are in front of on screen, will have confidence in our suggestions. This is a reference point for the client that we can help them. Finally, we say, "Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure, but in order to find out, may I ask a few questions". And then we say nothing. Wait until they speak – don't add, or clarify, just sit there in total silence until they give an answer. Once we have their permission, then we can dig in and see if we have a solution for their problem. This is a reference point that says the buyer is now willing to share a lot of confidential information with us. If we don't get a match between what we do and what they need, then no slamming of the square peg into the round hole – we get off that call and we hold another potential business discussion with another buyer. The pandemic has made the whole art and science of selling more complex, but there are some fundamental basics we have to get right or nothing will go our way. Business is hard to find at the moment, but never find bad business – the money won't be worth the trouble and you only tarnish your personal and professional brands. There are plenty of clients who have problems we can help them with, so we need to be concentrating our efforts right there.

Japan is a very hierarchical society. I am getting older, so I appreciate the respect for age and stage we can enjoy here. Back in my native Australia, older people are thought of having little of value to say or contribute. It is a youth culture Downunder and only the young have worth. "You old so and so, you don't know anything" is reflective of the mood and thinking. As a training company in Japan, we have to be mindful of who we put in front of a class and in front of clients. If the participants are mainly male and older, then it is difficult to have a young female trainer or salesperson allocated to that company. That young woman is going to be talented and effective as a trainer because our trainer development system is so demanding. She is also going to be highly skilled in sales, because we teach sales. It doesn't matter. The HR people or the line manager complains, because the class members don't feel young people have anything to teach them or are qualified to sell them anything. I was reminded of this recently when trying to allocate trainers and salespeople for certain companies. We have a lot of internal trainers and salespeople who are under 35 and a few who are over 45 and so there is an imbalance. One of my senior guys has suddenly quit. He was performing both functions, so it is a double loss. As our older team members age, they have seen their kids leave the home and then have their aged parents to worry about. The life of a small business owner is always like this. There is never an equilibrium or a period of extended stability with staffing. Just when you think you have it working like a smoothly oiled machine, in goes a wrench and the whole thing comes to a shuddering halt. The transfer of responsibilities for clients between staff is not that easy. It goes both directions too. We have staff who build strong personal relationships with counterparties and then their interlocutor is moved to another function and a replacement appears. Often, this can mean the end of the relationship with that firm, as the new broom have their preferred suppliers and you are not one of them. You also imagine that within the client big firms there is a seamless transfer between their staff for that part of the business. Not so. I was dealing with a big multi-national and to my amazement the new person had absolutely no knowledge of what we had been doing for them in terms of training. Obviously there was no hand over of the tasks and things have been going less smoothly as a result. Normally in Japan, we try to recruit younger people, however we have to also be flexible and look to hire older staff, the venerable grey hairs who can gain the respect of the clients. Trying to maintain the right balance between the generations is not that easy. Also, anytime we have to replace someone as a salesperson, then we can draw a big red line diagonally across each month of the calendar for the next 18 months. They will not be particularly productive for that period of time. Learning the business, really understanding the products and our methodology takes a lot of time. They also have to build their own client base and that doesn't happen in a hurry. It takes about the same period of time to see someone make their way through the Dale Carnegie labyrinth of trainer certification. It is an arduous, challenging process and not everyone is suited to become a trainer. The skills for selling and training have similarities but there is also that X Factor of personality needed to become accepted by clients. The infamous and elusive Plan B needs to be dusted off and then we can move into action. The problem is we don't spend any time thinking about negative circumstances that require a Plan B. Also, the mix of possibilities across the range of staff is so complex, how can you effectively anticipate what happens next. Nevertheless, I quickly realised I need multiple Plan Bs ready to go, in case of changes in the team complexion. I usually spend a minus amount of time thinking about those myriad possibilities, because I am too busy doing other things in the business. I will need to do better in this regard and have an update process scheduled throughout the year, rather than leaving it to surprise announcements of staff departure, to stir me to action. How about your case? How are your multiple Plan B development scenarios going?

When we read commentary about how we should be recruiting A Players to boost our firm's performance, this is a mirage for most of us running smaller sized companies. If you are the size of a Google or a Facebook, with massively deep pockets, then having A Players everywhere is no issue. The reality is A Players cost a bomb and so most of us can't afford that type of talent luxury. Instead we have to cut our cloth to suit our budgets. We hire C Players and then we try to turn them into B Players. Why not turn these B Players into A players? This is a contradiction isn't it, because we always striving and thrusting for the best possible results. If we invest and take a B Player to A Player status, there is a very strong likelihood someone else will admire our handiwork and poach them from us. We have all heard that truism about "what if I develop my people and they leave", countered with "what if we don't invest in them and they stay?'. This is correct up to the point of your cash flow reserves. We are not talking about having useless people staying on, sucking up our cash resources. B Players are very capable and are worth investing in to become even more capable. The additional investment to turn them into A players though, if they have that capability in the first place, may be a case of over investment. Having large portions of your revenue centered around a very small number of clients is recognized as a very dangerous position to be in. In the same way, having one or two people accounting for a disproportionate amount of firm income or expertise is also dangerous. When the top performers leave it can be very disruptive. Most bosses do not sufficiently explain their departure to the remaining staff. In this vacuum, the other members of the team worry about what the A Players know that they don't. Is the firm going down and are those most capable of getting another job jumping ship? Will an exodus of A Players introduce fragility into the business? The loss of the contribution of A Players is bad enough, but their departure can be interpreted by staff in ways bosses would never imagine. That is why no matter who leaves, leaders always need to carefully reassure everyone else, that the firm is fine and this was a personal choice by one individual. Don't allow rumours, imaginings and guesswork to creep into the equation. We need to own the narrative every time. I have a very carefully designed spreadsheet which allows me to track my sales team's performance. It includes all of their costs and related costs, to give me a clear picture of what each sales person's contribution to the company actually is. This allows me to see the amount of leverage they represent. I want to know what is the multiple of their revenue return against their total cost. The bigger that multiple the better, up to a point. If the multiple is fantastic, but the overall income volume generated is too low, then we can go broke in short order. So there has to be a balance between raw volume of funds coming in and the effectiveness of return on their efforts. This is where B Players can excel. They produce multiples which work for the business and generate a positive profit result. The A Players can have bigger numbers, but their multiples may not be that outstanding. They also point to their big numbers and say rude things like "I want more money". That pay rise to keep them will hammer the attractiveness of their multiple pretty quickly. A Players are like an oasis in the desert. The vision through the heat haze can lure small business owners to invest, when that may not be the best idea. It can be better, over time, to build the ranks of the B players from the within the ranks of the C Players. This is the classis bootstrap approach to building companies. We all do it at the beginning don't we, but then with some success comes hubris and we start to imagine we can extrapolate our genius. Before you know it, the multiples have swung in the wrong direction. For this reason, it is wise to track the multiples down to the last cent and determine to keep on tracking. When you are small, love your B Players and hold them close. Invest in them, but don't over invest. Where is that elusive line of demarcation? Experience watching newly minted A Players, who were once your B Players, heading for the exits and more money, helps to establish it in your mind. Monitoring the multiple components will create an algorithm indicating how much is enough and how much is too much. We won't always get it right, but we can get pretty close if we pay careful attention to the issue. Remember this is art, but with big servings of science tossed into the mix.

If we try to hide the bad news for the buyer will that work? How long with it work for? Bernie Madoff died in prison, his wife left in a perilous state, one son dead from suicide and the other from cancer. I call that family devastation. He got away with his lies and cheating for quite a while. He offered modest, but steady returns. He told people he had no capacity to take their money, then rang them back at a later stage to say there was an opening. They were grateful for the chance to give him their money. The 2008 recession showed who was "skinny dipping" in the markets, as Warren Buffet termed it and Bernie could no longer sustain the fraud. If we are loose with the facts and the truth with our buyers, how will that go toward fostering the re-order culture we want to create? The usual ploy is to downplay the costs by offering the best case example and not offering the most realistic case. I was reminded of this the other day, while watching a video from the President of this particular organisation. He wanted more money, a lot more money for this project. Let's park the fact he was a hopeless advocate for his case, bumbling his way through his pitch. The examples he offered were very carefully culled to make the pain look miniscule. The obvious problem with that though was the vast majority of the stakeholders did not fit into that minimum damage category. He was trying to avoid the pain, but that came across as dodgy and duplicitous. We have to reach for our financial calculators and work out the damage for ourselves and we are left to our own conclusions. It would have been much better to meet the elephant in the room head on and explain why the bigger number was a good decision. That way the seller controls the narrative, not the buyer. Call out the number, then justify the living daylights out of it. Talk about the long term benefits and the opportunity costs if we take no action now. Pile on the value of the proposition in the context of the number. Trying to talk about the value proposition unrelated to the number doesn't fly. We need to connect them together as we explain the value. We unveil the ugly number but wrap the pain up in the value to come, to the glorious future, to the sunny uplands, the better days herafter. Context is everything here. Our hero didn't do that and I believe he missed a great opportunity to get people to back his proposal. When we are selling there is a number attached to the service or good. Actual tangible objects are easier to understand from a pricing point of view. Services though are nebulous. I was selling some training to a major corporation and the people I was dealing with were HR folk located outside Japan. If you live here, you understand the cost of living and all the relativities which apply around pricing. If you are in Hong Kong or Singapore you don't. Living in these low tax, low cost environments makes Japan's numbers look stratospheric. They told me our pricing was much higher than this Hong Kong located from who delivered for them in English speaking countries in Asia. I asked them why they didn't use them for Japan. Of course, they didn't know Japan, had no capacity to deliver here in cultural and linguistic contexts, so that is why they were talking to me. Yet the expectation was my pricing would fit in with this other vendor, based in Hong Kong. Who were these people? I checked them out and they are nobodies. They are not global, they don't have 109 years of credibility or 60 years on the ground in Japan. In the end, I had to do a demonstration of what we would deliver. It blew them away because the value proposition was so much greater than the other firm. Now the cost, the higher price, the bigger ask, that larger number made sense. I didn't fold on the price for two simple reasons. I know our value and I know what companies here will pay for the value we generate. Yes, it is Covid and yes it is perilous for training companies at the moment, but you have to believe in your value based pricing and you have to be prepared to fire the client. Don't run away from the hard conversations. Instead find ways to demonstrate and show your value. Keep honing your persuasion skills to sustain the narrative about why they should buy from you and buy from you now and keep buying from you.

The buyer is King. This is a very common concept in modern Western economies. We construct our service approach around this idea and try to keep elevating our engagement with royalty. After living in Japan for 36 years and selling to a broad range of industries, I have found in Japan, the buyer is not King. In Nippon the buyer is God. This difference unleashes a whole raft of difficulties and problems. My perspective is based on an amalgam of experiences over many decades and I am generalising of course. Not every buyer in Japan is the same, but those foreigners who know Japan will be nodding their heads in agreement. The most intelligent sales approach the West has come up with is "consultative sales". This basic term gets bandied about, in different ways and at different times, but the fundamental concept is to uncover the buyer's needs through asking insightful questions and then determine if you can satisfy that need or not. By definition, if you use this methodology, you are intelligent. If you were going to sell to buyers from the world's third largest economy, where 50% of young people are University educated and is known for its advanced technology, then intelligent consultative selling is bound to be your "go to" model. You will fail because GOD doesn't approve of your funky Western ways. Pitch Momentum Predominates In Japan In Japan, GOD expects a pitchfest. GOD does not brook questions from low life salespeople. Instead give your pitch, put it up, so that the buyer can slam closed the two barrels on the shotgun and then blast your pitch to pieces. Japan is a very conservative business climate where failure is not accepted and mistakes are not allowed. The Western CFO sharpening the pencil and working out that a 5% defect rate is the most profitable construct, will get a big bonus and a promotion. Going to a zero defect rate is deemed too expensive and unnecessary. GOD doesn't accept any defects or mistakes in Japan and to achieve that the science of risk aversion has been taken to the ultimate heights of human possibility. The Japanese buyer wants to hear your pitch, then viciously attack it to satisfy themselves that they are eliminating any possibility of future problems from this supplier. I was working with a company exporting bark to Japan as part of the gardening boom. It had to be clean - no pebbles, sand or twigs, just pure bark. The foreign supplier breezily rang to tell me the shipment had missed the boat, but "no problems, it will be on the next one". GOD was apoplectic. Storage costs in Japan are expensive, so the "just in time" idea of holding little in the way of stock and delivering at the right moment, is well accepted. Our buyer had just burned all of his buyers down the food chain, because the foreign supplier had missed the boat. The Japanese buyer's trust, built up over many years with his client base, had been broken. In Japan that trust is almost impossible to rebuild. You Need A GOD Approving Credibility Statement Pitching is a daft idea. How on earth do you know what to pitch? Imagine your favourite colour was blue and I turn up to sell you my awesome range of pink. I am warbling away like a morning lark about the wonder of my pink and you haven't the slightest interest, because you want blue. If I had asked you a question about your colour preferences, then knowing you wanted blue, I would have only spoken about our range in blue. This is pretty simple. So, why don't Japanese salespeople ask GOD some questions about what is needed? Well GOD is a deity too high for that type of inappropriate familiarity and base rudeness. Consequently, everyone is pitching into the void. The cunning antidote to this GOD induced pitch problem is to have a well crafted credibility statement. For example, "We are experts in soft skills training for adult learners. We recently helped a client's Tokyo leadership team raise their Japanese staff engagement scores by 30% and their New York headquarters was very happy to see that rapid improvement. Maybe we could do the same thing for you. I have no idea if that is possible or not, but if you would allow me to ask a few questions, I will soon know if it is a viable option or not". Switch From The Pitch To Consultative Sales Once GOD acquiesces and allows us to ask questions, then we are out of the pitch business and now immersed in the consultative sales flow. When asked this way GOD does allow questions in most cases. Sometimes we will get a stern GOD who says "just give me your pitch". We comply because you cannot deny GOD, but mentally we know we should down the lukewarm, cheap, bitter green tea and head for the door, because there won't be any sale here today. Knowing what a client needs is the key enabler to craft a sales presentation tailored to that particular buyer which resonates, excites and satisfies. GOD just needs some nudging to get religion about consultative sales. When you have your next sales meeting with a Japanese buyer, mentall

Confidence sells. We all know this instinctively. If we meet a salesperson who seems doubtful about their solution or unconvinced it is the right thing for us, then we won't buy from them. The flip side is the con man. They are brimming with brio, oozing charm and pouring on the surety. They are crooks and we can fall for their shtick, because we buy their confidence. They are usually highly skilled communicators as well, so the combo of massive confidence paired with fluency overwhelms us and we buy. We soon regret being conned but we are more cautious thereafter every time we meet a salesperson. By the way, there is a good chance we are that next salesperson. So how do we navigate the rapids and the rocks here of coming across as confident and being skillful in describing our solution, without tripping the client's internal con man alarm system"? Ultimately it comes down to your kokorogamae. This Japanese compound word can be translated as our "true intention". What are we on about with this sales lark? Who are we showing up for – ourselves or the client's best interests? With con men it is always their self interest. They keep moving like a shark, swimming around constantly in motion, always looking for something to devour. If we sit down and examine ourselves we can make a decision. Are we in sales as a profession – yes or no? If the answer is no, then please get out of sales immediately. Go. Do something else, because the rest of us, who want to be professional, don't want you polluting our waters. If the answer is "yes", then examine what does "professional" actually mean to you? We can get caught up in the finer points of sales technique, but what I am asking is please look at sales and ask what is my true intention here? If it is to serve the best interests of the buyer then we are getting on the right track. If the answer included to serve the buyer forever and to be aiming for the reorder, rather than the sale, then go to the top of the class. That mentality is the antithesis of the con man who knows they have to leave town after the sale, because they have cheated the buyer and can't expect any further business – ever. There is a successful businessman I know, who told me a story about his early days in sales. He sold an inferior product and the client would only come to realise that reality following the purchase, when the product itself was consumed. He had to have a big territory from his company, because he could never go back to a town he had sold into. I had liked him but after hearing that story I liked him a lot less. He knew the product was inferior and was not matching the claims he was making. He was confident and fluent. In other words, he was a con man. His kokorogamae was incorrect and I am wary of him because I am not sure about his mentality in business today. Maybe he has reformed, but I am in no hurry to find out at the cost of my own personal business. If our true intention is correct, then being confident and fluent come into their own. The way we think about the business changes. We see the lifetime value of the business rather than a transaction. That means the effort we make to serve the client changes. The follow up is done in a different and superior way. The client feels our commitment to their success. We obviously ask particular questions which would only be of interest to someone who was committed to serving the buyer. We are thinking as if this was our business and we are looking for ways to build it higher. The questions around that aim are a lot different to discussions of the features of the widget and the needed logistics to supply it. We are thinking and talking beyond the initial sale. So ask yourself – what is my kokorogamae? What types of questions am I asking – are they transactional or long term oriented? Am I communicating well enough my commitment to help this buyer succeed or am I only operating at a very superficial, order taker level? Am I thinking about potential buyer problems down the track and how to fix them? Have I wrapped my confidence up in truth? Record your presentation and have a good listen to it. Are you coming across as (A) a very basic provider of transactional solutions (B) a con man or (C) a true sales professional who has sorted out their kokorogamae? If the answer wasn't (C) then there is a lot of work to be done on you by you!

Buying from people we like and trust makes a lot of sense. Sometimes we have no choice and will hold our nose and buy from people we don't like. Buying anything from people we don't trust is truly desperate. So when we flip the switch and we become the seller to the buyer, how can we pass the smell and desperation tests? How do you establish trust and likeability when you are on a virtual call with a new potential client? What do you do about those new buyers who won't even turn on their camera during the call? The best defense against buyer scepticism is to be professional. You will be well presented whether face to face or online. In the latter case, you will have a background that advertises your firm and hides the background of your home, because this reduces the distraction factor. You will use gestures which are in front of your body, so that your arms are not suddenly cut off by the fake background. You will be sitting up straight in your chair and looking straight at the lens on the computer camera, which you have cleverly arranged to be at eye level. In a face to face meeting, we are communicating quite a lot through our body language, so we are going to be sending out messages of confidence, credibility and trustworthiness. We are going to be well dressed for all meetings regardless of the medium. That means put on your business battle dress, which means a jacket and tie for men in the online meeting as well, so that we are not looking too casual. We are going to be precise and clear in our language, with no filler words like ums and ahs diluting the message and annoying the buyer. Online, the body language factor can be tricky, especially if we are showing any documents or slides on screen. In these cases, we are reduced to a tiny box on screen and so is the client. The lesson here is to not show too much information on screen such that the size of the faces is maximized, so that we can each read as much body language information as possible. What about those Japanese clients who only turn on the sound? We are now at the equivalent of a phone call, except that they can see you and you cannot see them. We have a couple of choices. I don't match them with turning my camera off to even out the stakes. I still want to exude credibility and the camera gives me more scope to do that, than the audio only. We have to grab the opportunity of the sales call and we, not the buyer, have to run the meeting. Right from the start, I ask them to turn their camera on. This is difficult for our Japanese staff to do, because for them the buyer is God. If the omnipresent deity doesn't want to reveal themselves to mere mortals, then what right has the lowly supplicant salesperson to demand that of God? Nevertheless, we have to train them on how to do that. We need to say to the buyer, "Thank you for your time today for this meeting, I appreciate it given I am sure you are very busy. Over the last year, I have done a lot of these meetings online and they always seem to be more productive for both sides, when we both turn the cameras on, so let's both turn our cameras on today for this brief meeting". Now what comes next is the key component. Shut up and do not say one word, no matter how much awkward painful silence ensues. Sit there and wait for them. Isn't this risky? IN my view, if they won't even come on camera, how successful do you imagine you are going to be selling them something? By definition they are not a buyer and you are better to go find someone who can turn their camera on and can buy. What happens if they say they prefer not to turn their camera on? Mentally reduce the prospects of a subsequent positive outcome to a substantial negative integer and carry on as best you can. A non-buyer is a non-buyer, online or in person but in sales you often have to grit your teeth and just plough on. All very depressing isn't it. To just to end on a real downer, let me relate a recent story from the sales trenches here in Tokyo. My salesguy cold calls a company here. The person answering the phone says, "we do not deal with people we are not already dealing with". Being the supreme optimist from sunny Australia, I encourage him to go once more into the breach and call again at a different time. Potentially he might encounter a different person and hopefully receive a better reception. He did just that and he got exactly the same response from another member of staff, "we do not deal with people we are not already dealing with". As we say here, "welcome to Japan!". ˜We Buy From People We Like And Trust Buying from people we like and trust makes a lot of sense. Sometimes we have no choice and will hold our nose and buy from people we don't like. Buying anything from people we don't trust is truly desperate. So when we flip the switch and we become the seller to the buyer, how can we pass the smell and desperation tests? How do you establish trust and likeability when you are on a virtual call with a new potential cli

Is selling telling or is it asking questions? Actually, it is both. The point though is to know what stories to tell, when to tell them and how to tell them. We uncover the opportunity through asking the buyer questions about what they need. Once we know what they need, we mentally scan our solution data base to find a match. This is when the stories become important, as we explain why our solution will work for them. What we don't want is having to scrabble together stories on the spot and then make a dog's breakfast of relating the details. These stories have one purpose and that is to give credibility to our solution. The content should have elements of the context of the solution and evidence of where this has worked for others. Buyers may not be familiar with your company in detail, so the background of the company told in two to three minutes is a micro story we need ready to go. Longevity or fresh innovation are the two spectrums. Either we have stood the test of time and you can trust us or we have come up with something new, that will be a game changer and you need it. Often though salespeople don't know the detail of the company or even if they do, they have never spent any time weaving this into a brief narrative for the buyer. This requires practice to ensure the micro story is kept tight and packed with credibility. We cannot go on and on about our own company or the buyer will switch off with disinterest. They are only going to listen if the background of the company has some strong relevancy for them. This is why we have to craft that story specifically for them, before we talk to them Our systems, products or services all need explanation about how they will help the buyer. Just leafing through the five kilo, tome like product catalogue is not enough. Pitch salespeople will do this. They will go through the catalogue hoping to snag some buyer interest by using this shotgun pitch approach. When I had my first sales job selling Encyclopedia Britannica door to door, that is what were taught to do. We all learned a canned twenty minute walk through the pages of the book, introducing all the cool features. Not recommended! If we have asked the right questions, we know exactly which few pages in the catalogue to show or which sections of the flyers we need to introduce. This is where we want our micro story about how this solution was created, including legendary moments of daring do by the R&D team or genius manufacturing breakthroughs or whatever that sounds amazing and clearly differentiates us from the competitor rabble. These have to be short, sharp and terrific. That means delivery practice. They have to be customized and then memorized for the best content and cadence for that particular buyer. There are often too many products in a catalogue though, so being able to remember all of them may be unrealistic. Over time however, there will be a smaller group most important to most buyers and so we can work on remembering the stories associated with these products or services. We definitely need to include client stories there as well. Telling the buyer what the widget will do is not enough. What are the benefits the widget will bring to their business. How have other buyers applied the benefits of the widget and what were the results. Often salespeople never get beyond the widget features and yet we all know we don't buy the features, we buy the benefits, but that doesn't stop a lot of salespeople dwelling on the wrong thing. The story needs to have included the location, season, characters involved, some drama around an issue the buyer needed to fix and the triumphant outcome resulting from our solution. We need the context placed in the perspective of the prospective buyer. What is the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer and how can we meet them there through our narration of our brief story. Sales raconteurs were part of the furniture in the pre and postwar periods, prior to the modern switch to consultative selling. We have moved on from just telling amusing stories and jokes to entertain the buyer. We have also gone beyond pitching products. Contemporary selling skills means asking clients excellent questions. This is now a high tech, time poor world and the buyers are busy, busy people. Our stories are important because they grab the attention of those with short attention spans, by adding some colour to the solution explanation. Relevant, well delivered stories help us to deepen our engagement with the buyer. Today we all need to master the art of micro storytelling. Does your sales team have their micro stories ready to go?

Japanese salespeople really care about their clients. This is good, except when it isn't and that is usually when they are prioritizing the client over the firm which employs them. Japan is a relationship driven, risk averse business culture, where longevity is appreciated. This often translates into the salespeople being captured by a type of "Stockholm Buyer Syndrome" where they identify with the interests of the buyer, over those of their boss. Going to bat for the client is admirable because the salesperson is their representative inside the organisation. It can create problems though, when perspectives become skewed. Price rises, stock shortages, quality issues, staff allocations can create a divide in the priorities of the buyer and seller. Where does the typical Japanese salesperson plonk themselves down? Right in the buyer's camp. They become advocates for the buyer's interests over the firm's interests and this can create tremendous friction inside the organisation. As we know, in Japan the buyer is not a royal, an aristo or a King. The buyer is a deity, a God and that changes things up considerably. As the boss, you can hand out the orders but that doesn't mean the salespeople are going to compromise their relationship with the buyer aka God, to keep you happy. They are thinking about their bonus or commission and the lifetime value of that client. In that equation, the boss's views and interests are mildly interesting, but not arresting. So boss orders are issued like confetti and then the Great Obfuscation commences. Delays, excuses, detours and ninja like silence start cropping up. The sales staff can always rely on the boss to get distracted and be so time poor that they never get around to following up at all, or at least for some considerable time. With multinational firms, with any luck, the boss will get transferred or fired and the coast will be clear again. Or the market shifts, or the currency moves and the whole point becomes moot. The salesperson rule is keep your helmet pulled down tight and low and dig a bit deeper into the foxhole, waiting for the boss order barrage to die down. So as the boss, how do we navigate between ensuring the salespeople take brilliant care of the client, without sending the firm to the edge of bankruptcy? We have to become much better time managers, because that is the key to following up and keeping track of the change you have initiated. We need to keep a note somewhere of what was discussed, what was requested and then some milestones to check against for progress. It could be electronic reminders or something analog, it doesn't matter, as long as it works for you, but do it. Coaching is one of the victims of tech today. Tech is supposed to give us all more time. It hasn't. Everyone is so busy, including the boss, that the time is not created for coaching sales staff. If we want the salesperson to go down there to the client and deliver some distasteful news, they may need some help on how to handle that interview. Imagine asking a Japanese salesperson who has spent an entire career agreeing to everything the client wants, to head over to the buyer's office and tell them "no" or the new price has been increased to "x". They are just not trained for that and have no clue how to do it. This is where they need help and the busy, busy bee boss has to pony up the time for them to help have that difficult negotiation. Depending on the situation, it may be time for the boss to go and speak with the client. Hierarchy is important in Japan and having the more senior person turn up, is a mark of respect which the buyer in Japan will appreciate. It won't make them any happier about the bad news, but at least they feel their due was given. The salespeople will appreciate it too, because it allows them to keep their relationship with the buyer and heap all the blame on their mad dog, crazy, gaijin boss. The answer is simple and complex at the same time - encourage a sharp client focus by the salespeople, but keep that tempered within the interests of the firm, by making your time available to follow up, coach or intervene.

Luck is the nexus of hard work and persistence. Salespeople need some luck, even if they have to create it themselves. That old blues refrain "If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all" can't apply. We have to make our own luck and here are seven luck creation principles we can start using immediately to help us get there. No fancy varsity degrees or puffed up IQ scores needed. Common sense that morphs to common practice is all we need to change our luck in sales. Arouse in the other person an eager want Salespeople are consumed by what they want and it is usually getting enough commission to be able to eat. Buyers don't purchase for any other reason than getting what they want. Our job is to communicate in such a way the client realises they have a want they didn't recognize or give sufficient import to previously. Opportunity cost is a measure which shows that taking no action is not a zero cost option. Clients are not in a static market, their competitors are still alive and hungry for market share. Talk in terms of the other person's interests We have to show that taking action today is needed and that argument has to be based around a good understanding of what the client needs as opposed to wants. If we honestly have the buyers interests foremost in our minds we can build the trust needed to secure the business. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it Salespeople arguing with buyers is the silliest thing in the world. Nevertheless, there are legions of salespeople out there trying to slam square pegs into round holes and make a deal fit which should never even be a consideration. Trying to overpower the buyer to drive them through force of will to buy is ridiculous, has always been ridiculous and will remain ridiculous. Some salespeople don't learn however. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking Talkative salespeople lose a lot of potential business. Being good in sales means being a tremendously good listener. Understanding what the client needs is critical to providing a match that works between what you are selling and the gap in the clients business which they need to fix. When I realise I have violated the 20/80 ratio of salesperson to buyer occupying the airwaves I shut up and ask a question to get them talking. We all need to be alert to our proclivity to love the sound of our own voice. Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view What are the buyer's fears, headaches and aspirations? If we don't know these answers then we are not doing our job as salespeople. Force feeding our pitch down the buyer's throat is stupid, but so many salespeople do just that. They launch straight into their widget pitch without finding out what the buyer needs. Something so basic, but so commonly missed in sales. Ask questions instead of making statements If I say it, as a salesperson, it might be true, but if the buyers says it, then it is 100% true without any doubt. Our communication skills are called upon to make sure we ditch every opportunity to tell the client something and rather replace that statement with the same information, but now reconstituted as a question. For example, "we have overnight delivery" is statement. Rather than trotting this out, we say instead, "would having overnight delivery be of value to your business". If they say yes, then we can talk about how we do that. If they say "no", then we keep fishing for what is of value to them by asking questions Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest We want action. We want the order right now, without delay. We don't want buyers to think about it or worse, agree in principle and then do nothing about it. We need them motivated to buy. What will success mean for them in their business? What can we do to help them become even more successful? If we can wrap our sale up in those flags of self-interest, then they will buy and will they buy right now. Keep these principles in your mind when talking to clients. They are not complex to remember, but are complex to execute. Well, that is sales and that is the requirement. Get on to them fright now, delay no more and make sales today.

Japan is a complex market. Brash plugging of your wonder widget won't work here. American style sales techniques are always a lot more aggressive than will be tolerated in Japan and so fail with prodigious regularity. So I added the key words "For The Japan Market" to the title of this piece, to make sure I was talking about a niche I understand. Clubhouse is an app on your iPhone, which is a doorway to an audio world, bristling with myriad rooms, devoted to every possible topic, across every time zone. Hosts organize rooms and you can swan by and decide to join the discussion, if the title grabs your fancy. So where do we draw the line on self-promotion and solution promotion? There are topics exclusively devoted to making money such as marketing, social media, equities, real estate etc. You enter these rooms expecting to pick up valuable insights which will help you do better with your investments. You choose this type of room because you know there will be others also interested in this topic. I think it would be rare to go into a room expecting to buy something, while you are in the room. For Japan, the content marketing approach is more acceptable. Rather than being on the receiving end of a sales pitch by some svelte voiced golden warbler, you are more likely to appreciate information based on which you can make a judgment about parting with your hard earned moolah. As with all sales, buyers first purchase us and then the good or service we proudly represent. In an audio world like Clubhouse, the only visual clue is our tiny photograph on the screen and the details we have chosen to enter into our profile. We should make both professional and congruent with our industry. In some cases, that may mean being photographed in full business battle dress or it may mean a more casual approach. We shouldn't mix them up though. Also, the first three lines of our profile is what people can see below our photograph, so that content has to ooze expert credibility in our field. All the other clues are coming from our voice. Do we sound smart? That means are we demonstrating we are articulate, by being concise, considered and insightful. The delivery of the content should have a voice brimming with confidence and devoid of filler words like um and ah. We will only have a few minutes to speak, so we need to create an impression in the listener such that they would like to hear a lot more from us. I had an example of that recently, not on Clubhouse but on video. My organisation sent out a link to a video of Scott Galloway, a Professor at New York University Stern School Of Business. I had never heard of him before, but they included the video because he was making a point which they agreed with and were using him as a relevant expert to support their case. This first exposure was dynamic. "Wow, who is this guy? He sounds really smart. I want to hear more from him". Is this how people will perceive you when you are active on Clubhouse? I am certain that Prof G, as he calls himself, was totally well prepared for that video and knows his stuff. So we have to be the same. That means we search out rooms on topics which relate to what we sell. "Fish where the fish are biting" type of basic sales nous. We may have to sift through a lot of dross to find the gold, but that is the Clubhouse reality, as it is currently configured. Once we identify where our buyers are located, we need to become regulars to those sessions. We should be following the people who are also in the room and trying to connect with them on LinkedIn etc. If we have a strong profile and are a regular, the hosts are likely to give us the opportunity to contribute. We should be totally prepared for that with two tools. A simple timer, so we know when we have reached three minutes and we should voluntarily stop speaking. Also, have a note pad with the key bullet points, and be well prepared ready to pontificate. We must try and come across with the highest value contribution in the time we have, so that the audience goes, "Wow, who is this person? Sounds really smart. I want to hear more". When we follow up after the session with the people we think can become clients, they are more likely to want to interact with us because they have built up a solid and positive impression, from what we said and how well we said it. Pitching will be met with skepticism, because the trust hasn't been built. We need to show our intellectual goods first and then we can move to a direct contact, making it a warm rather than cold call. It sounds like a Zen riddle, but Clubhouse should be selling without appearing to be selling. Provide massive value first, connect and then follow up.

What are the biggest problems for salespeople in the online sales world today? Cold calling would be number one, networking to find new clients would be number two and getting hold of the decision maker would be number three. Is paddling around in the bitter cold and humid summers travelling to see clients inefficient? Yes, but please, please give me that over trying to sell online. The sad news is we are never going back to the old format. There is always going to be an online component, because companies have found it works for them to have a dispersed workforce. Are we really ready to play the long game of sales or not? Judging by how well people have adjusted to online selling over the last twelve months, the answer would be a resounding "no". If you had an existing client base then you could service them online because there was no choice. The relationship had been sufficiently invested in to be able to extend the interaction from face to face to screen to screen. They were happy with it and you had no alternative. New clients are more difficult. How do you build the trust online with a completely new person? We have to spend more time shooting the breeze on line with new clients at the beginning. Being "efficient" and getting straight down to brass tacks is dumb. The meeting has now slid into the muddy ditch of a transactional arrangement between buyer and seller. The care factor is low, the forgiveness scanty and the margin of error is zero, because we haven't been successful in building the relationship. Japanese buyers are often stilted, formal and awkward in meetingS with people they don't know. Being a foreigner allows me to play the gaijin card and get cut some slack for not being Japanese, with all the cultural and linguistic expectations that brings with it. Regardless, our sales teams don't have that card to flourish because they are mainly Japanese, so what are they going to do? What they need is some serious role play practice on how to handle the first five minutes of the online meeting. It is going to be different to when we are face to face, because the body language has gone missing and all we have is our voice. In a way, online meetings are more similar to doing phone sales, than in person sales. Sitting in front of the buyer provides them with so many reassuring or alarming signals, from which to make a judgment about the seller. The signal rate online is very much reduced so the buyers are a bit flummoxed as to how to divine if this person can be trusted or not. When in doubt in Japan, "do nothing" is the tried and true formula. Doing nothing means not buying from us and well, we can't have that. How many sales teams are spending time every day or even once a week, practicising online role plays with coaching? I would vouch that number would be "not enough". We have been working on storytelling online in our sales training, to bridge that chasm between buyer and seller at the start of the meeting. We work on how to tell the Dale Carnegie Training Japan story of these last 58 years. People who don't know us need to be told how awesome we are and so a 150 second burst is about the maximum time we can expect to be allowed from the buyer, before their attention wanders. It takes a lot of practice to make the story interesting for the listener and not sound like a boring, self aggrandising history lesson or come across as a bunch of platitudes strung together. They don't know us, so we have to assault their supreme skepticism with evidence, credibility, and testimonials all bound together in the storytelling format, after completing the chit chat at the beginning. We need this for each of our solutions as well. Each solution has its history, so let's get that into a context that makes us look valuable, reliable and professional. For example, "we started teaching sales training in 1939, when Dale Carnegie realised that salespeople only got sales training if it was provided internally by their company. He also distilled that his training method, being based on building great human relations and communication skills was perfect for sales too. He began offering public courses to fill that void in the market and today our Winning With Relationship Selling programme reflects the 82 years of kaizen applied to that original sales training course". That takes 25 seconds to get through and it is packed with credibility statements, giving the buyer confidence in what the company offers. Online is here to stay, whether we like it or not. We need to recalibrate what we are going to say, in order to build the trust with the buyer when online in the first meeting. We can't leave this to each individual to work it out by themselves. It needs some group brainstorming on what is the best formula and content for this vital first impression piece. Are you doing it?

Client hesitation or objections to buying from us are indicators we have failed in some keys areas in our preparation, questioning or solution explanation with the client. We have not fully understood what the client needs; have not matched our solution with what they need; have not shown sufficient value from our solution and have not created any sense of urgency to take action now. It is hard enough getting all of these right in the face to face environment, so we can't be surprised that we are having even more trouble when dealing with the buyer remotely. Try these four steps for handling client push back. Listen Did we really hear what the client wants in our previous calls? We may have missed some vital information previously and this is our last chance to get clarity about what the client is thinking. The objection we are hearing is probably something we have heard before. We think we already know what the client is going to say before they finish and we jump in to overcome the objection. Big mistake! We have to really understand what is the problem, not what we think is the problem. Stay completely silent until they have finished speaking. Use a cushion When we hear the objection we often have a nervous knee jerk reaction and say the first thing that comes into our mind. This is rarely our best response. We need a few seconds to think how we are going to approach this with the client. This is where we make a neutral statement, which neither agrees nor disagrees with the client so we can buy ourselves some thinking time. It might be something like, "I know making the right decisions for the company is very important for you". In the few seconds it takes to say that, our brain can move to objection handling mode rather than reacting emotionally to what was said by the client. Question The first thing we should do is do nothing – we should absolutely not respond to what we heard. Instead, we should ask them why that objection is a problem for them. Now we are not sitting there face to face so we have to be incredibly careful how we ask this why question. In Japan, this question could be taken as a challenge to everything they have said and it sounds like we are accusing them of lying or not being clear enough in their explanation. Neither are good responses from the buyer. So we sweetly and with great naïve curiosity, ask "Thank you for explaining the issue. I should know your business in more detail and much better, but to really help me find the best way forward for you would you mind if I asked you to explain a little bit more on why the issue you have raised is creating difficulties for your firm?". In a very delicate fashion, we need to keep digging for hidden issues too. There is bound to be more than one issue. What we have been told may not be the deal breaker, because there is another bigger problem lurking in the shadows. We need to flush out all of their objections and then decide which is the exact issue we need to fix? We need to get the client talking because we will pick up valuable information about their situation and constraints on them moving forward. Respond Now we know what need to say we have three choices: Deny: We should not accept anything from the client which is factually incorrect or is misinformation. Correct it immediately and be prepared to offer concrete proof. Admit: Admit any problems your company has had now or in the past. Don't try and deny things which are true, we come across as mealy mouthed, duplicitous and untrustworthy. We learn from our mistakes, we correct errors and we have moved forward from where we were. We need to point that out Reverse: Turn the objection into a reason for buying. For example, "your delivery options are too slow" is countered by saying, "We have found that taking that extra care and attention before we ship to our clients, really eliminates potential problems and in the overall scheme of things, makes everything run much smoother". Explain: Now we have better understood the client's situation and needs, we again start on the solution provision to persuade them to buy. We do this by providing relevant proof and evidence that shows what we claim is true and they can trust the solution will work. We speak about where our solution has worked for other buyers, providing the names and numbers of people they can call to validate how our solution really helped. Evaluate: Check that we have dealt with their objection completely. Are they ready to move forward? Actually, when online we need to be doing more mid-term checking for understanding than we would in a face to face situation. There is no doubt that the basics of sales still apply whether face to face or meeting online. We should assume less though and ask more clarifying questions when we meet online. Anticipate the communication is going to problematic and work on that basis everytime.

We do a great job on building trust with the client. We get permission to ask questions and away we go on that magic journey of buyer needs discovery. We have a clear idea that we can help, know what will happen and what the likely outcomes will be for the buyer. We are doing a good job as a sales professional, then suddenly we drop the ball, we stumble at the finish line, we flub it. We are presenting our solution, but we are not persuasive and we don't get the business. The solution provision component of the sales process has a number of clear steps. Just going through the motions reciting the features of the solution like a pirate's tired parrot is so very 1970s, you can hardly believe there are salespeople today still doing this. These features are dry facts, basic information about what is involved. If we only do this, we are relying on the client to get excited about a solution, but we are underpowering the persuasion part to push them to buy. The hole we make in some materials such as wood, brick, concrete, steel etc., with a drill is the result the client wants and the drill is the mere tool to provide the outcome. We need to know what we are going to be drilling into, by asking basic questions. All good and here is where the storytelling becomes important. When we get to the benefits part of the conversation we need to weave storytelling into the conversation. We relate how our solution made a dramatic difference for another client by relating the background and context. For example, "This Super Drive 4 Speed Supremo Model is just what you need for this concrete drilling job you have in mind. This is the preferred model for professional construction crews. They are required to get the wooden framing attached to the concrete base as quickly and rigidly as possible, because these crews are always under tremendous time pressure. Weather problems, supply delays, missed deadlines are the bane of their lives. They cannot work with inferior equipment because time is money for subcontractors, as you know. Last month we sold a batch of drills to a crew who were building a shopping mall, so you can imagine how much concrete square meterage was involved. It was a big order, so I delivered the drills for them. Watching these skilled tradesman at work was incredible. The speed at which they swarmed all over that Shopping Mall foundation with those drills was amazing. They were flying and before you knew it, the base boards were done and the vertical struts were all up becoming an instant forest. The strength of the drill power was just perfect for concrete. Yes, the Super Drive 4 Speed Supremo Model will serve you well for many years of great reliability and service". The imagery of the vast Shopping Mall concrete slab, the swarming tradesmen, the forest of vertical struts are things we can see in our mind's eye. This information is going to capture our imagination in a way that data about the weight of the drill, battery life, the drill bit capture mechanism, the charging protocols, the power output, the colour range and speed dials will not. So think about your product or service. How can you tell a story about how another client made use of your solution, telling a story which is both powerful and memorable? In the construction story there was some drama about the Shopping Mall construction completion deadlines that gives the story more reality and flavour. What drama points can you add to your story, rather than relying on the dry retelling of the main points? We remember stories more easily than miscellaneous data. We want our clients to remember what we are telling them and to remember us. So, revise your solution provision section of your sales process and see what fabulous stories you can tell the client, to persuade them to buy. This is what will differentiate you from all of your competitors, making you memorable in the mind of the buyer.

An ideal work week for salespeople would start everyday with sales role play with colleagues. When we do serious exercise we warm up to get into prime condition for becoming better at our activities. It is the same with sales, we need to warm up before we interact with clients. We need to get our communication vehicle into top well maintained condition. By practicising what we will be saying to the client we will be so much better when we come face to face or face to screen with the client. Yet, how many people do this every day? How about a couple of times a week? How about never? Sadly the "never" answer would be the overwhelming majority. Clients don't need any preparatory work to say, "your price is too high". Buyers are all given this facility at birth, so they are always ready to go. Salespeople on the other hand, have to work hard at setting up the context for the client, so that the "your price is too high" missile is never launched. Given this reality why aren't profession salespeople working hard to perfect their skills before they are interacting with buyers? Too busy would be the typical excuse. Really? What about between 8.00am and say 8.30am in the mornings? Probably everyone has this slot open to them. No one to lead the session is another cop out. What leadership does it take to buddy up and go through different aspects of the sale's call? None. Every sales team could self regulate and practice with each other. All that is needed is to tell your partner what they were doing well in their role play and then tell them how they could make it even better. We can also make sales role plays fun. We can set up some variables for variety. We can allocate different personality styles to be played out as the buyer. The Driver – time is money types, "tell me what you want and then buzz off buddy, I'm busy". The Amiable – "let's have a cup of tea together and get to know each other better". The Analytical, "can I get the data to three decimal places?". The Expressive, "let me grab the whiteboard marker and outline for you why we are going to have a spectacular year this year. Later let's catch up for Happy Hour and have a few drinks". The buyer in the role play practices adjusting their communication piece to deal with the different types of buyers. Another game is the pushback variable game. We have different types of objections written down and placed in a container. Like getting an evil fortune cookie, the role play buyer pulls out the objection and the salesperson has to deal with it on the spot. A few rounds of this and probably most of the typical pushback conversations will have been covered, the random nature of the selection means we have to think on our feet. We can also have another bowl and draw out which personality style is giving us the objection and start coming up with different combinations. For example, the Driver says your delivery reliability is not any good with an aggressive snarl. Are you ready for that and how will you handle it? The next one is the Analytical, so you need to go data, evidence and proof heavy, are you ready for it? Your get the idea. The storytelling game is another angle. It might be the story of your firm in Japan, or the story of your products. The buyer selects the story theme from the bowl and you have to tell that story in under 2 minutes and thirty seconds. Why this short time frame? We need enough length to get the story pumping , but short enough that we are not boring our audience. Three minutes or more in length and we are pushing things with the listener's patience. Now here is an interesting question? Do you have your company Japan story ready to go? What about an individual story about particular products? People don't keep data in their minds, but they are able to retain interesting stories. When I was a kid growing up in Brisbane, I remember the radio DJs telling a bunch of trivia related to my favourite bands. I always thought to myself, wouldn't it have been more beneficial if they had told stories with something more advantageous to the country, than some rock legend's doings. The point is we can use stories to make sure the buyer remembers us when they are looking around for a solution. Storytelling is a powerful arrow in our communication quiver.

Suddenly my phone rang and the number was clearly from overseas, because of the country code. It was not a number I recognised. The crackly voice at the other end of the line was unknown to me and they shot out their name very quickly. I couldn't catch it. The company name was unfamiliar too. Silently, I wondered, "Who is this and why are they calling me?". Now, our business is global, so there is always the faint possibility it could be a potential HR Director client from overseas calling to seek training for their team in Japan. Naturally, it is better to be patient and treat the call as possible new business, until proven otherwise. No abrupt hanging up on these callers is allowed, until you know better. Gradually it became clear he was an Englishmen from Hong Kong calling me to broker the purchase of shares in a Chinese electric car company called Nio. He gave me his firm's URL, so while we were talking, I could pull up information about his firm. This was a good move on his part for building credibility and I thought "well done". I asked for his name again, but I couldn't see any reference to it on the website. Uh oh! This was now looking extremely doubtful and I thought, "am I being lured into an international investment scam here?". I let him speak, asked for his name again and questioned him on why his name didn't appear anywhere on the website. Interestingly, he didn't know where his own name was located on his own website, to guide me where to look. That would be a very basic requirement I would have thought, in his line of business. It turned out I had misheard his name and once corrected, I found out he was a real person working for this company. He was rabbiting on about the 60% to 70% returns on the share price I could enjoy, if I got into the market now, held the shares and then exited in three months. All I had to do was produce $5000 to get started. We probably had a ten minute conversation on the phone. We ended the conversation with me to consider his information and he would get back to me. I reflected on this gentleman's sales approach. I concluded that there is what we call in Japanese a hanmen kyoshi, or instruction by negative example, teachable moment here. At no point in our conversation did he ask me anything about my investment objectives, strategy, preferences, history, current commitments or access to liquid assets. He did ask me if I had experience of buying shares, which I did. His offer was based around the attractiveness of a three month return based on the expectation that this share price would now begin to rise in the next few months. When I searched the share price trends of the Nio company, I noticed that the shares had been fairly flat in their trajectory so far. The best share purchase bargain is of no use if you don't have the spare five grand to pony up to buy them. He took the trouble to ask whether I had every bought shares, but he didn't ask me about the results I had experienced. What a critical question that is and what a sad saga. My share market investment history has been miserable. It has been littered with mistakes, losses and dismal performance. Actually, I have always preferred real estate and have had the bulk of my investments focused there. The returns have been outstanding for me, because I have a thirty year plus time frame, which really suits real estate investing. Australians tend to love real estate more than the share market and I am one of them. It also suits my mental acuity, because I am not smart enough to time markets and be as nimble as you need to be with stocks. You would think that, for a share broker, this insight would be very important to ascertain if I am actually a real prospect or not, but he proffered no questions along these lines. Maybe he was worried about the answers he might get? As salespeople though, we shouldn't be afraid to ask the hard questions of prospects, because our time is our most valuable resource. We don't want to be wasting it on people like me, who are not a viable customer to buy speculative shares in a Chinese electric car maker. This guy said he had been doing this for many years. I wondered then, why hadn't he learnt to introduce himself properly on the phone? Phone lines are a difficult beast at the best of times, but the unannounced call from a stranger from overseas severely elevates the degree of difficulty. He also spoke with a UK regional accent, which is why I thought his surname was Hull when in fact it was Holt. We want to establish trust with the client, so giving our name slowly and clearly and checking for understanding is absolutely essential. He didn't bother with any of that. Also, I proactively looked for his personal information on the website. As a best practice, he should have done that, directing me where to find him. This approach would have helped to allay any fears I had this was a scam. I had to do all the work instead. Why would that be? I am a sales guy, so I am usually willing

We all understand the importance of a brand. Brands are a short form description of long term reliability and perceived trust, both based on solid evidence. Every business has a brand. You might be thinking that your company is too small and insignificant to have a brand. Yet you deal with your own staff and for them, the business is a brand because of their experience with you as their employer. Suppliers serve you and for them you are a brand, based on how you treat them. There will be buyers and they have already positioned your brand, based on the way you partner with them to serve their interests. Our company brand does the selling for us, up to a certain point. As salespeople though we have our own brands. Clients buy us first, then they buy our widget. They are putting their trust in our reliability to provide them with the right solutions to help their business. Salespeople from our firms, past and present, collectively establish the brand in the market, based on their individual service capabilities for buyers. Today, social media has given every salesperson an amplification opportunity never before available in commercial history. This is a double edged sword. If the service is poor or problematic, then bad news travels far and fast. Once upon a time, if you didn't do a good job for the client, maybe 10 people might know about it. Today, thousands can know about it instantly. Let me illustrate. A businessman in Tokyo, whom I had known for many years and would occasionally meet at networking events, had his personal brand trashed. There was some dispute with the President of another company, who said they were not paid for a service they had provided to his company. This information appeared on LinkedIn and was in my newsfeed. At that moment, I realised how powerful social media was. I did a search on this guy and what a Pandora's Box of woe and trouble that released. Based on what I read, I would never do business with him. If anyone checks him out beforehand, I doubt they will proceed with him, based on what they find online. As a salesperson, when a client does a search on you, what will they find? I don't necessarily mean high crimes and misdemeanours. Is what is being presented to the world, showing your personal brand in the best light? There is no doubt that clients today will validate who we are on social media and proactively use internet searches. Knowing this, are we taking a firm stance to control the narrative? What photos of you are up there? I took a look at my own photos, which Facebook has divined for my photo collection. They are about 95% business oriented, with a couple of karate related photos there. Nothing untoward or embarrassing. Now this is by choice. I know I must have control of my personal brand and so whatever goes up on social media from my side, has to be pre-approved by me, as a conscious decision every time I post. When I do a search on Google on myself, again the results are almost exclusively business related content, with images and content congruent with the brand I have built. Again, this is no accident and please take a look at it for yourself. Buyers will check your social media and your search information. Do we want them finding extraneous stuff that doesn't add any value to our brand? No. We want a full frontal assault, aiming for sensory overload, on what a tremendous professional we are. Even better, we want to pack the medium with content marketing value. Post your own articles on social media about aspects of the market or the product, that bolster your reputation for reliability and trust. Don't just hijack someone else's article and piggy back on their content, by writing some glib one liner and then reposting their content under your name as a curator of content. Post you own content, that you own and which makes people aware that you are an expert in your field of expertise. Remember, we have the tools for amplification ready to rumble. The more of your own content you pump into the system, the more prominent it becomes and the more likely that this will occupy the attention of the buyer, when they are making a cursory investigation of your social media presence. We want the buyer to buy our brand. We need to determine what that brand is and that means we need to exercise precise control over what is available about us out there in internet land. When we are being checked out by the buyer, we need to know in advance what they are going to find. We want it to be powerfully positive. Let's control the sale with the buyer, from even before they have a chance to meet us. We own our own story, but it only makes sense if we decide what that story is and where it appears. Let's get busy doing an audit on who we are in the social media and internet search world. If we don't like what we find, then we have to change that and change it pronto. The internet, like rust, never sleeps, so let's become intentional about our personal brand development.

Journeymen salespeople are starting another year of selling. Maybe their financial year is a calendar year or maybe the year wraps up in March. It doesn't matter, because there is a mental trick we play on ourselves that January 1st represents a new start, a new year. Sales can be exhausting and 2020 will not go down as a bumper year for the vast majority of salespeople. Yet, here we go again. How do we get ourselves back up into the saddle on that bucking bronco that is the sales life? In Japan, very few salespeople are basing their livelihood on full commission sales. Here we have either a base and bonus or a base and commission system. That means that if we don't sell much we can still eat. So the economic pressure here is less intense than in other markets. It is also tricky to get fired for poor performance in Japan. The courts expect the employer to reassign the sales failures into other jobs more suited to their lack of talent. So the downside of not selling is not that cut throat here. Also, the vast majority of salespeople are amateurs, not properly trained in the profession. Rank amateurs bumbling their way along is the norm here, so no need to feel any social pressure either. In these circumstances it can be as if everyone in sales in Japan is sitting in a lukewarm bath – not too hot and not cold, but also not very exciting either. "Blocking and tackling" was the basics of winning football games according to Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers. So with sales, prospecting and closing are the basics of sales. We have to be farmers and hunters. Finding new buyers and treasuring our existing buyers, looking for the reorder sequence to kick in. Know, like and trust are the basics of sales. The buyer has to know who we are. If they have never heard of us or never met us, then they won't be buying anything from us. The internet is a godsend because buyers can find us to solve a problem they are having and we didn't lift a finger. All that finger lifting was done by the marketing department spending dough and presto, we get the leads. Okay, we get the lead but so what? Will the buyer like a total stranger and even more importantly, trust a total stranger. What did you parents tell you – don't talk to strangers! Therefore the initial touch with the buyer is critical. It isn't a one and done thing though, because there is bound to be numerous touches on the way through. Jan Carlzon's book "Moment of Truth" is a must read on the importance of every part of the organisation taking ownership and accountability for the customer. This sounds simple enough. In my experience, Japanese businesses don't teach accountability to the entire team. Salespeople are expected to be accountable and bend over backward to meet the buyer's requests. The person picking up the phone though didn't get the email about first impressions, accountability or ownership. They got the email about if they transfer a salesperson through they will get severely scolded. Because they don't know who is calling, they have found it is best to treat everyone as guilty until proven innocent and be as cautious as possible with strangers. If the buyer calls for you and you are not there, the person picking up the phone is not helpful. They say stuff like "they are not at their desk now" and say nothing more. This forms a negative impression about your company and its care for the buyer. Your own team are killing the like and trust bit for you with the customer. This was what Carlzon found. You have to educate everyone to think differently about keeping the sense of ownership high and the like and trust part powerful. Another part of the like and trust component are our communication skills. If we sound like we don't know what we are doing, then the client won't like that. If we say one thing but the truth proves to be something else, buyers definitely won't like that either. I had a person I know here in Tokyo call me up about some animation sales tools. I was interested and we had a conversation about it. It turned out he was actually just fronting for the American firm and my next conversation was with someone from the headquarters. What the local guy told me was different to what the American rep told me. I immediately lost trust in both sides. I never went any further with the deal and I would never do business with the local guy ever again. This is another Carlzon nominated fail point. As the conversation moves around through the organisation, there has to be integrity, consistency and truth. In Part Two we will continue to look at the other key basics, the blocking and tackling of the sales process.

January 6, 2021 219: Is That Light At The End Of The Sales Funnel I Can See Millions of people are being vaccinated for Covid-19. Japan, being Japan, isn't going to accept any old tests which were not performed on Japanese people. That means that the vaccination programme in Japan is many months way from commencing and will take many more months after that to get to a 70% vaccination herd immunity stage. Covid has driven people home to work there to avoid potential contact with carriers and superspreaders of the virus. For a lot of tasks that probably works just fine and dandy, but sales isn't one of them. Salespeople in Japan, even at the best of times, with normal client availability in play, love their existing clients and are not so keen on prospecting. Going to see a client, where the relationship has been created and the trust is abundant, is the preferred conversation. Cold calling a potential new client is definitely not preferred. Covid has effectively reduced salespeople to their base of existing clients, with almost no ability to add new clients into the mix. Do we just reduce our business down to existing clients and hold our breath for the Suga san 4th cavalry to ride over the sandhill, waving a syringe in his hand to inoculate and save us? Effectively, for many companies, this breath holding exercise is what they have been doing these last nine months or so. Exhausting all of the existing client business leaves a big hole in the sale funnel and the prospects for a vaccine led sales recovery are still off in the dim, distant future. Are we going into 2021 with more of the same? There are really only four options. One is wait for the vaccine to become readily available to allow salespeople to get back into the field and visit clients for face to face meetings. A type of back to the future approach. A second one is to hunker down with the existing clients and try and squeeze out any residue demand, all the while praying for the vaccine arrival to come soon. This is the "what the hell" approach. A third one is to flickpass the ball to marketing. Pump more money into brand building and special offer generation, to drive inbound request contacts. The people we want to speak with will call us, under this model. This is the "deep pockets" approach. The fourth one is the DDay approach of storming the beaches. Have the salespeople run straight at the mounted machine guns of cold calling, risking evisceration and obliteration by the gatekeepers. After nine months of calling existing clients and emptying that well of any new business, salespeople now have a lot of spare time on their hands. We can't send them into the jaws of sales death without some prep though. In the new year, take some time to spend with the salespeople to strengthen their cold calling abilities. Take the time to draw up the lists of target companies. This could be the group who are doppelgangers for your existing clients from the same industry, but not yet a client. Or they may be just successful companies, big enough to ride out Covid-19 and be ready to come roaring back, both guns blazing. You can help them with the both guns blazing bit. Have salespeople call companies and then closely track what they hear. Do they get the brushoff immediately, being told "we are not entertaining the thought of any new suppliers at this time". Or, "we have no money to do anything new at this point". These types of pushbacks need to be worked on to help salespeople get past that person and talk with a decision maker, someone with a broader, more strategic view of the business. Are they getting the typical "they are not a their desk now" brush off?. We need to work on responses from salespeople on how to handle these efforts to pitch us off the cliff and into the boiling sea and foamy waves of destruction. Will these genius comebacks get us transferred through to the decision maker? Will the gatekeeper cheerfully hand over the key person's mobile number or email address? Usually no. That means two things. We need to do better in designing and practicising our initial explanation of why the key decision maker needs to talk to us and talk to us right now. It also requires us to keep calling back until they are in or they do call us back.

There is a process to sales. Amazingly, most salespeople don't know what it is. They are either ignorant, because they haven't been trained or arrogant, arguing they won't be entangled by any formulistic wrangling. They say they follow their muse and let the sales conversation go where it may, because they are "spontaneous" creatures, residing in the "here and now". Both answers are rubbish. There are professional salespeople and there are dilettantes. Let's be professionals and master the sales process. We are going to go deeper into the sales process and look at some of the inner workings. Gluing the whole process together are seven bridges to move us through the sales continuum. Bridge number one is the move from casual chit chat at the beginning of the sales meeting to a business discussion with the buyer. When is the best time to make that move and what do you say? The opening conversation will flow to and fro, as various small talk questions are answered and everyone becomes comfortable with each other. Let the buyer finish their point. Pause to make sure they have actually finished and are not about to expand their point. Then we simply say, "thank you for your time today". This signals, now is the time to get into the sales conversation proper. Bridge number two comes after we have explained our agenda and after checking if they have any extra points, we start to move through the points we have chosen. The agenda gives the sales call structure and helps to control where the conversation will go. We must ask the buyer if they have any points of their own. This is important because it gives them control over what we will discuss and that makes them feel better about owning our agenda. Bridge number three is when we ask for permission to ask questions. We have outlined the agenda and now it is time to get down into the murky depths of their business. Never forget we are "blowins" off the street, the great unwashed. They are about to be asked to open up the kimono and share all of their mysteries and secrets with a total stranger. We need to point to some evidence showing where we have been able to help a similar company, in the same industry. We then proffer, "maybe we could do the same for you. In order to understand if that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?". Bridge number four is what we say after hearing all of the answers to our questions. We are now in a position called the "moment of truth". We have to make the decision for them concerning if they can buy and what they should buy. We know our line-up of solutions in depth, to a degree they never will. If we decide we don't have the proper solution for them, we should fess up now and then hightail it out there, to find the next prospect. If we can help them, then we need to announce it clearly and loudly. We need to reference some of the things they told us in the questioning phase. They mentioned to us the key thing they are looking for and also why achieving that is important to them personally. We now wrap our "yes we can do it" answer around those two key motivators for the sale. Bridge number five comes after we have gone through (a) the facts, (b) the benefits, (c) the evidence and then (d) the application of the benefit. This will be news to a lot of salespeople in Japan, because they have never gotten beyond (a), the detail, the spec, the nitty gritty of their widget. After we have told the story of how wondrous things will be for them after purchasing our widget, we then ask the trial close question. It is not complicated and anyone can memorise it. Here it is, "how does that sound so far?". Bridge number six comes after the buyer answers our trial close with an objection. There has been a gap in our process located in the questioning component. We have not flushed out their concern and dealt with it already, so that is why it pops up here at this point. We ask why it is an issue for them and we keep asking if there are any other issues. We need to do this in order to know which key concern we need to answer. Once we have prioritised their concerns, we then give our answer to the major objection. We then ask, "does that deal with the issue for you?". We do this to check we don't have any residual resistance preventing them from giving us a "yes" answer when we ask again for the order. We just say, "shall we go ahead then?", or "do you want to start this month or next month?" or "do you want the invoice sent to you by post or can we send it by email?". Bridge number seven comes after they say, "yes" they will buy. We must be very careful what we say next. We must bridge across to the delivery discussion of how and when they will receive their purchase. Under no circumstances keep selling at his point. Random things blurted out after receiving their "yes" may sidetrack them to a concern they hadn't thought about. Or it may get them confused about whether now is the time to buy or should they wait until a bi

A stranger contacts you out of the blue or you meet them fleetingly at an event and they call you afterwards. They are a salesperson and they want to sell you something. Our typical reaction is one of caution. Why is that? We have all become addicted to technology which has sped everything in business up to warp speed, but somehow we are all perennially time poor. We don't want to be distracted from our tasks or waste our time listening to what someone else wants. We are also not sure if we can trust this salesperson. Why would that be? Maybe we were duped or heard of someone we know being duped by a "salesperson" in the past, so we are permanently suspicious of anyone we meet in sales. This is not a great start is it. We have to deal with all the baggage that our buyers have accumulated over the years. Japan is a brutally vicious sales environment. We are all in a street fight with our competitors and like in a physical street fight, there are no rules and little mercy shown. Rivals will lie, disparage, spread false rumours, make nasty insinuations about us and our company. "They are having financial trouble and won't be around much longer", "all I ever hear are complaints about their bad after sales service", "their representative keeps getting fired from companies, so he won't be around for long", etc. "But Greg, Japan is such an honest country, would rivals lie so brazenly?", you might be thinking. Yes, some of them will do so without any shame or guilt. I have heard these wild stories myself, shared by buyers, so from my own experiencE I know this happens. How do we start the sales call in Japan? We chit chat a little, then we get into the sales discussion. If we don't know what we are doing, we are launching straight into our pitch about our wonderful widget. If this is you, please stop doing that. Rather we should be asking questions to completely understand the needs of the client. We can do this through just asking for permission to ask questions and then going for it. Another way we can do it is to propose an agenda for the meeting. This provides the same content, but it is a more structured approach. Japanese buyers love to be given the agenda to look at, because they love data and the more the merrier. The questions we are going to ask about needs are all there of course, but we add one more. We ask, "what are your impressions of our company?". Why would we do that, why not just blast off into the nitty gritty detail of the wonders of the widget? Remember we are either a total stranger coming in off the street or a fleeting acquaintance from an event. If I visited your home and sat down and said, "tell me all about the problems inside your family?", I don't think you would want to share your dirty laundry with someone you hardly know. Company representatives feel the same about sharing the dirty laundry of their firm. If our rivals have been stabbing us in the back or if the client has some incorrect information about our company, we need to get that out early and deal with it. In our case, as an expert soft skills training company, our history of over 108 years can be a double edged sword. It means we have stood the test of time and yet, for some buyers they may think we are old fashioned and not current enough for the modern market. Chit chat is pretty thin gruel to establish trust with, so we need to work on establishing the credibility of our company. Rather than random selection in the chit chat content about what trust buttons to push, we ask this impressions question. This allows us to zoom right into the core concerns and deal with them. Now when they give me their concern, I don't immediately answer it. I cushion it instead. That is, I put up a neutral statement, that neither inflames nor tries to argue with their comment. This neutral cushion buys my brain some thinking time about what I am going to say and how I am going to say it. Rather than giving the first answer that suddenly pops into my head, I can give a more considered answer. I could say, "It is important to consider perspectives on the brand". Those three or four seconds are enough to drill down to a more polished answer. I would then say, "The balance to our longevity is that we are a global organisation. That means that every second of the day clients, somewhere around the world, are asking us to address their most pressing problems. In this way, dealing with client demands always keeps us fresh and current in the market". Are you ready with your answers for some curly questions your client may have for you? More importantly, are you trying to flush out these secret resisters, before you try to introduce your solution? Let's not assume we are on a level playing field here. Accept that for whatever reason, there may be some hidden obstacles to trusting us and so let's get those out of the way early, so that we can properly serve the client.

"I like talking with people, so I want to be in sales" is a terrifying conversation to have with one of your staff. They are not doing so well in their current role, so they imagine they will just glide across to sales to have an easier time of it. They may try and do it internally as a switch of roles or they may quit their current job and go and try to get a sales job somewhere else. Given the shortage of salespeople in Japan at the moment and from now on ad nauseum, there is a strong chance they will be picked up by a competitor or another company quite easily. They are partially correct. Yes, it helps if you like people as a salesperson. Also, having good communication skill is a definite requirement. Talking to someone and persuading them to hand over their hard earned cash is a different equation. What do we talk about, how do we talk about it, when should we be silent, when should we speak up? These are important questions about which they are ignorant. When I hear people say they like "talking to people" that sets off an alarm in my head. One of the biggest issues with salespeople is that they talk too much. I am guilty of it too. I am passionate about helping people to grow their businesses and their careers, so I bring a lot of belief and energy to the conversation. That is all good, but it is also dangerous. If I am doing all the talking, I maintain possession of what I already know but I don't gain any additional knowledge of the client and their problem. Sometimes, I catch myself and realise the only noise in the room is me talking, so I should ask the client a question, shut up and get them talking instead. I want them to tell me about their current situation and where they want to be. In Japan, you can't do that. Clients are passively expecting your pitch, so they can destroy it and assure themselves this is a low risk transaction they are considering entering into. So, the first thing out of our mouths here has to be a question seeking permission to ask questions. People who like talking will have no problem with this traditional pitch approach. In fact they will probably be happy, to get straight into the pitch. Fine all around except for one small thing. What are you pitching to the client? How do you know what solutions from your line-up will best match the client's need? What normally happens is the salesperson blunders on, talking about things which are irrelevant to the client. They completely squander their client facing time and leave the meeting with nothing. This is not good. Get permission first, then ask those first two questions – where are you now and where do you want to be? We are trying to gauge urgency on the buyer's part. If they think they can bridge this gap, then they will try and do it themselves and not involve any external parties. That means no business for us and we are wasting our time to continue sitting there chatting with them, no matter how much we enjoy a good chat. If they can't do it by themselves, then we want to know why? There is no point going straight into solution mode at this point, talking, talking, talking. We should ask that exact question: "if you know where you want to be, why aren't you there now?". What a pearler of a question. In this answer lies our raison d'etre. Maybe we can't do it for them. That is good to know, because we have to high tail it out of there and go and find someone we can help. No point hanging round for more chatting with a business dead end in front of you. Another other issue is talking past the deal. When the buyer agrees, only talk about the follow up and stop selling. People who like talking get themselves into trouble by saying too much and opening up a Pandora's box of deal breakers. If we are doing our job, we are hardly talking at all during the meeting, except to ask a few clarifying questions. "Liking to talk with people" is a mirage, would-be salespeople see about what is involved in a professional sales life. This is their uniformed illusion about the job. Instead, I want to hear, "I like asking people questions". In all my years in business though, I have never heard that lucid comment emerge as a precursor to a life in sales. If you want a career in sales, now you know what to say to a prospective boss to get them interested in hiring you.

"I like talking with people, so I want to be in sales" is a terrifying conversation to have with one of your staff. They are not doing so well in their current role, so they imagine they will just glide across to sales to have an easier time of it. They may try and do it internally as a switch of roles or they may quit their current job and go and try to get a sales job somewhere else. Given the shortage of salespeople in Japan at the moment and from now on ad nauseum, there is a strong chance they will be picked up by a competitor or another company quite easily. They are partially correct. Yes, it helps if you like people as a salesperson. Also, having good communication skill is a definite requirement. Talking to someone and persuading them to hand over their hard earned cash is a different equation. What do we talk about, how do we talk about it, when should we be silent, when should we speak up? These are important questions about which they are ignorant. When I hear people say they like "talking to people" that sets off an alarm in my head. One of the biggest issues with salespeople is that they talk too much. I am guilty of it too. I am passionate about helping people to grow their businesses and their careers, so I bring a lot of belief and energy to the conversation. That is all good, but it is also dangerous. If I am doing all the talking, I maintain possession of what I already know but I don't gain any additional knowledge of the client and their problem. Sometimes, I catch myself and realise the only noise in the room is me talking, so I should ask the client a question, shut up and get them talking instead. I want them to tell me about their current situation and where they want to be. In Japan, you can't do that. Clients are passively expecting your pitch, so they can destroy it and assure themselves this is a low risk transaction they are considering entering into. So, the first thing out of our mouths here has to be a question seeking permission to ask questions. People who like talking will have no problem with this traditional pitch approach. In fact they will probably be happy, to get straight into the pitch. Fine all around except for one small thing. What are you pitching to the client? How do you know what solutions from your line-up will best match the client's need? What normally happens is the salesperson blunders on, talking about things which are irrelevant to the client. They completely squander their client facing time and leave the meeting with nothing. This is not good. Get permission first, then ask those first two questions – where are you now and where do you want to be? We are trying to gauge urgency on the buyer's part. If they think they can bridge this gap, then they will try and do it themselves and not involve any external parties. That means no business for us and we are wasting our time to continue sitting there chatting with them, no matter how much we enjoy a good chat. If they can't do it by themselves, then we want to know why? There is no point going straight into solution mode at this point, talking, talking, talking. We should ask that exact question: "if you know where you want to be, why aren't you there now?". What a pearler of a question. In this answer lies our raison d'etre. Maybe we can't do it for them. That is good to know, because we have to high tail it out of there and go and find someone we can help. No point hanging round for more chatting with a business dead end in front of you. Another other issue is talking past the deal. When the buyer agrees, only talk about the follow up and stop selling. People who like talking get themselves into trouble by saying too much and opening up a Pandora's box of deal breakers. If we are doing our job, we are hardly talking at all during the meeting, except to ask a few clarifying questions. "Liking to talk with people" is a mirage, would-be salespeople see about what is involved in a professional sales life. This is their uniformed illusion about the job. Instead, I want to hear, "I like asking people questions". In all my years in business though, I have never heard that lucid comment emerge as a precursor to a life in sales. If you want a career in sales, now you know what to say to a prospective boss to get them interested in hiring you.

Most of the time in Japan, I attend client meetings alone. This is not how the Japanese do it. The President going to a meeting alone, without some staff in attendance is rather rare. Presidents have degrees of prestige and one of the indicators is how many flunkies they have in attendance. My ego is big enough already to have to worry about people carrying my bag around for me. The Japanese client meeting can often be quite an affair though with many people seated around the room, waiting to hear what you have to say. Invariably, you have no idea who is turning up on their side, who they are or what they do. The key word there is "waiting". They expect this to be a presentation from me to them, with zero interaction, no questions and then they go away and thrash it out internally on what they want to do next. The punters in the room are the earpieces of their respective sections, there to record and then report what was said and who said it. There will usually be one or two designated interlocuters on their side who will engage with the seller to facilitate the meeting. That facilitation is usually to insist we give them a presentation on our offer, done passively, without any insight into what they need. You can see the problem immediately. We have many solutions, so which one is the best for them? To know this we need to be asking questions. The buyer side don't quite see it that way and we can have a tense standoff. We ask seller style consultative questions. No one answers them from the buyer side and the silence hangs heavy in the air, trying to strangle the seller. If we hang tough and let that silence hang around for a long time, eventually someone on the buyer side will say "give us your pitch". When we hear this we know things are not going well. Being on our own is not a big deal, because usually we can make decisions on our own. We don't need to work the idea through the system to get some type of convocation to agree to it. What is not good though, is to squander our time before the meeting. We should be pumping whoever is organising the meeting logistics, for information ahead of time on who will be attending. Who are they, what do they do, what rank are they, etc., are key things we want to know before we turn up. We shouldn't presume there will only be a couple of people we already know in the meeting, if it is an important stage or the first meeting. If this doesn't happen, then after the initial exchange of business cards with the big boss, quickly dart around the room and exchange cards with everyone else there. This way you can arrange the cards on the table in front of you, according to where they are sitting, to see who is who and you can check their rank and area of responsibility. These are generalisations, but the CEO will be thinking strategy going forward, the CFO will be thinking protecting cash flow, the technical people will be thinking fit for purpose and the users will be thinking ease of application of the solution. Knowing roughly what the audience interests are is only a start. To avoid giving a pitch into the void of not knowing what they want, you need to set up permission to ask questions. They are expecting you to tell them about what your company does and what you can do for them. Here is an example of how this could go. "Dale Carnegie Training has been around for 109 years world wide and nearly 60 years here in Japan. We are soft skills training experts covering sales, leadership, communication and presenting. We have had a lot of success in Japan helping our clients to improve their effectiveness and grow their market share. Maybe we could do the same for you, I am not sure. In order for me to know if that is possible or not and to know which part of our line up best suits your internal needs, would you mind if I asked a few simple questions. The answers will guide me on what I should present to you regarding which parts of our line-up will be the best match for your business?". Once you have permission to ask questions, start with the people tasked with facilitating the meeting. If they need more detail to answer your questions, they will involve some of the other experts in the room. We won't get a lot of time to do this, as everyone is sitting there expecting a pitch which they can then flagellate within an inch of its life, by asking mean and nasty questions. They won't be denied their Colosseum moment of throwing you to the lions for too long. You will at least get enough information to know what to present and how to present it. You won't get an answer at that meeting on whether there is any interest or not so don't push it. They need to harmonise opinions on their approach and they will do this after the meeting. Someone will be tasked with getting all of the feedback and bringing this to the most senior person. Japan teaches you many things, especially patience!

We often hear that people buy on emotion and justify with logic. The strange thing is where is this emotion coming from? Most Japanese salespeople speak in a very dry, grey, logical fashion expecting to convince the buyer to hand over their dough. I am a salesperson but as the President of my company, also a buyer of goods and services. I have been living in Japan this third time, continuously since 1992. In all of that time I am struggling to recall any Japanese salesperson who spoke with emotion about their offer. It is always low energy, low impact talking, talking, talking all the time. There are no questions and just a massive download of information delivered in a monotone delivery. As salespeople, our job is to join the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer. But it is also more than that. The buyer's mental meandering won't necessarily have the degree of passion we need for them to make a purchasing decision. So we have to influence the course of that internal conversation they are having. This is where our own passion comes in. I always thought Japanese people were unemotional before I moved to Japan the first time in 1979. The ones I had met in business in Australia were very reserved and quite self contained. They seemed very logical and detail oriented. After I moved here I realised I had the wrong information. Japanese people are very emotional in business. This is related closely to trust. Once they trust you, they have made an emotional investment to keep using you. No one likes to make a mistake or fail and the best way to avoid that is to deal with people you can trust. How do you know you can trust them? There is some track record of reliability there, that tells you the person or company you are dealing with is a known quantity that will act predictably and correctly every time. The problem with this approach though is that you will only ever be able to sell to existing accounts. What about gaining new customers? You have no track record and no predictability as yet. When you meet a new customer they are mentally sizing you up, asking themselves "can I trust you?". Naturally a good way to overcome the lack of track record is to create one. Offer a sample order or something for free. This takes the risk out of the equation for the person you are dealing with. To get involved with a new supplier means they have to sell the idea to their boss, who has to sell it to their boss, on up the line. No one wants to take the blame if it all goes south. A free or small trial order is a great risk containment tactic and makes it easy for all the parties concerned to participate in the experiment. The other success ingredient is passion for your product or service. When the buyer feels that passion, it is contagious and they are more likely to give you a try to at least see if there is some value to continue working with you. When he was in his mid-twenties, my Japanese father-in-law started a business in Nagoya and needed to get clients. He targeted a particular company and every morning he would stand in front of the President's house and bow as he was leaving by car for the office. After two weeks of this, the President sent one of his people to talk to him to see why he was there every day bowing when the President left for work. When he heard that my father-in-law wanted to supply his company with curtain products, he told him to see one of his subordinates in his office to discuss it. That company eventually became a huge buyer and established my father-in-law's business. Was that a logical decision, just because some unknown character is hanging around your house everyday like a stalker? No it was an emotional decision. What my father-in-law was showing the President was his passion, belief, commitment, discipline, patience, seriousness, earnestness and guts. That is a pretty good line-up for a new supplier in order to be given a chance. We need to remember that buyers are wanting to know our level of belief in what we are selling. The way we express that is through our passion and commitment to the relationship and the product or service we supply. Is our demeanour showing enough passion, without it seeming fake or contrived? Do we have enough faith in what we are selling, that it naturally pours out of the pores of our skin? Are we painting strong enough word pictures to get the buyer emotionally involved in a future involving what we sell? Audit your own levels of passion when you are in front of the buyer. Do you sound sold on your own offer? Do you sound committed to go the extra mile? Do you sound confident and assured, showing no hesitation? Are you honest about what is possible and what is not possible? Always understand that buyers, whether for themselves or for the company, buy on emotion and justify it with logic. Make sure you can supply that emotional requirement as well as the strong rationale for them to buy your offer.

Ninja are masters of illusion, invisibility and subterfuge. All of these traits have pretty much died out in modern times, except for a small bastion of steadfast office workers. Some Japanese commentators have tried to imply that the salaryman is the modern day samurai. Loyal to their modern Han, the firm, giving up their lives for the greater good, sacrificing family for their corporate captains of industry. This sounds pretty good until you meet some of them. Unremarkable, grey, uninspiring, they are more often like the army of the walking dead. The system has drained all the life out of them, as they trudge forward in lockstep toward retirement. Japanese "office ladies" however are the true warriors in the modern day firm. They are the kunoichi (くノ一) or female ninja of modern times. They are always poised ready to strike. They are tasked by the older males of the firm to answer the incoming phone calls. They relish this opportunity to slay salespeople making cold calls. They have subterfuges aplenty at their ready to get rid of us when we call their firm. We boldly make the call, identify ourselves and our company. They immediately recognise we are cold calling salespeople, because they have been doing this for years. They have picked up that tell tale hesitation, that lack of sureness in our voice, that warbling reluctance to engage with such a formidable enemy. Their first weapon employed is a thick, grinding silence. You speak and they say nothing. There is no acknowledgement of your very existence. It is as if we are an illusion, a figment of our own imagination. We are unseated immediately and now feel firmly in retreat, pushed on to the backfoot, by this vicious employ of the void. Suddenly ums and ahs are tumbling forth from our mouths, as we try to regather our fragile senses and press on. If we don't know the person's actual name and most often this is the case, we ask to speak with the person holding a certain position within the company, such as the line manager or the head of HR etc. The kunoichi has been clever to not reveal her own name. They state the company name when we call and then they go dark. We don't even know who we are talking to, even if we wanted to complain about this brutal treatment. No Japanese salesperson would ever dream of complaining, but as foreigners, it may be worth a try. A common kunoichi ploy is to simply say "they are not here". We don't know if they are there or not, but I would guess in 99% of cases they are there and this is a tactic to deny us access to the decision maker. The voice telling us this information is icy, unfriendly, bored, impatient and disengaged. The whole ninja approach here is to hide people and information from us. This works like a charm in Japan. The average weak kneed, untrained, no guts salesperson collapses at this point under the weight of this ninja tactical pressure and blurts out "I will call again later". This is a bald faced lie. They didn't have the guts to engage with the kunoichi this time around and mentally, they have given up immediately on the possibility of a reengagement. They are broken into small pieces and their tender egos have been crushed by her towering strength. Even if we know the name of the person, we will get the same stall line anyway. If we are not put off so easily, we may ask when they will be back. We say this although we know the game is in play and this will register the next pushback of "I don't know" followed by more deathly silence. They are so expert at using screaming silence, it is actually impressive. If we keep pushing and ask for them to take a message, they are not so easily willing to cooperate and will just calmly and methodically say, "call back later". What would you say to that little hand grenade blowing up in your face? We have to realise we are dealing with cold calling salespeople killers here, who will show no mercy nor margin. Remember in the Japanese sword dramas, the hero drives the sword into the back of the bad guy and then twists the hilt slowly. And that is the good guy! We should never invite obliteration, so we don't ask for permission to leave our contact details. We just don't want to invite that brush off. Instead we just say, "okay, I understand, please write this down" and then go straight into spelling out our name and phone number really, really slowly. Then we repeat it all again to make sure they got it. Tell them if we don't hear back, we will call again the day after tomorrow. We need to strongly imply we know their kunoichi game, we are not falling for it and we will keep calling back until hell freezes over. Don't talk to me about how tough cold calling is in New York folks. When you have to deal with the kunoichi of Japan, you are elevated to a different dimension of pain and despair.

Sales is always a tough job, but not being able to get any new clients during Covid-19 just takes the degree of difficulty right to the top of the scale. Every company I speak with says the same thing – they cannot get any new clients at the moment, so they are stuck. Even when the target decision-maker is in the office, it is diabolically difficult to get through the steel wall erected to keep out salespeople. Today many buyers are safely tucked up at home, just placing them at that even more distant point away from us. The person who answers the phone when we call, has not the slightest interest in connecting us, in fact, they are hell bent on getting rid of us altogether. We know they will get scolded by the boss, if they put through a pesky salesperson. So we have to make sure that we are bringing so much value, that the boss won't get upset. Here is a Four Step approach to deal with this conundrum. Step One is give your company name, your own name and who your company is. The who you are part must be brief and overflowing with credibility at the same time. For example, "Hello, my name if Greg Story from Dale Carnegie Training Japan. We are experts in soft skills training, globally for the last 108 years and here in Japan for nearly 60 years". Key words are "soft skills training", "global", "108 years" and "nearly 60 years". In one short sentence the key unique selling points have been highlighted. Step Two is why we are calling. We need to go straight to the pain point facing similar competitors in their industry. "Recently, we have had many of your competitors calling us asking about leadership training for leaders dealing with remote teams. The new Covid-19 situation has made leading teams much harder and companies are noticing the substantial drop in productivity. Despite their best efforts they have not been able to find any answers internally." Japanese companies are often paranoid about what their competitors are up to, so it is always good practice to frame things such that this company is missing out on what their rivals all know. Now we explain that we have been able to fix that problem. "We have been able to provide on-line training for leaders on how to lead effectively in this new environment and these companies have seen immediate improvements in productivity across the board". Step Three is where we go for connecting with the decision-maker. We suggest that this company can also enjoy all the advantages of other companies we have helped. We approach this is a humble way, by saying, "Maybe we can do the same for your company, so please transfer me through to the person in charge of this area of the business. I am sure that they are really frustrated by now with being unable to improve the leaders' ability to lead remote teams". We need to reiterate that they have a major problem, they are not fixing it themselves and the decision-maker will be really glad to hear from us. Step Four is for the 99.9999% of cases when they won't transfer us to the decision-maker. They give us the brush off by saying, "They are not available at the moment" and expect us to crawl away, slip under a rock and disappear out of their lives forever. We again repeat the key pain point with a sense of urgency. "Thank you, I understand. In your industry, your competitors had initially suffered from reduced performance outcomes until we gave them the training to totally fix those issues. Now they are doing really well. I am sure the person in charge of these results will really want to know how we fixed that issue for your rivals. Please write down my name and number and pass that information to them, so that I can explain how we fixed the issue for your competitors. My name is Greg Story from Dale Carnegie Training Japan and my number is 080-1106-2328. If I don't hear from them, I will call back again the day after tomorrow. I know you are busy, so thank you for passing on the message." We have done a couple of things here. Importantly, we don't ask them for permission to leave a message. We are instead instructing them to write down our name and number and pass it on to the boss. We also mention we will be calling back in two days if we don't hear from them. It signals they cannot get rid of us so easily and that we are going to keep calling back, until we get to speak to the person we need to help. So altogether, it sounds like this: "Hello my name if Greg Story from Dale Carnegie Training Japan. We are experts in soft skills training, globally for the last 108 years and here in Japan for nearly 60 years. Recently, we have had many of your competitors calling us asking about leadership training for leaders dealing with remote teams. The new Covid-19 situation has made leading teams much harder and companies are noticing the substantial drop in productivity. Despite their best efforts they have not been able to find any answers internally. We have been able to provide on-line training for leaders on how to lead effect

Generally speaking, we mainly have failures of follow up in B2B sales. The conduct of the sale's meeting is normally done professionally. Perhaps the salesperson could have asked better questions or presented the application of the benefits of the solution better. Maybe they could have dealt more professionally with objections or closed the deal more effectively. In B2C though, the troubles start from the point of contact. Getting this wrong means no meeting, let alone no sale. I blame the managers for these issues. If they were doing their job properly, then there wouldn't be these customer facing problems. We are salespeople and we are also buyers. We go shopping, we eat out, we buy lots of stuff in the face to face environment. Maybe not as much as before, because of Covid-19, but we still we do engage in some B2C activities. When the whole hospitality industry is on its knees, you expect that those survivors still operating, are really maximising their opportunities to build their clientele. Imagine my surprise when I called a restaurant in Midtown for a lunchtime booking and bumped into some idiocy that flies in the face of the current reality. It was around 11.31am and I was calling to make a booking for a 12.00 luncheon. The staff member who answered the phone told me that all bookings for lunch close at 11.30am. I could just show up at 12.00 and take my chances with the rest of the punters. It is 11.31am when we are having this conversation. I asked him does that mean I should book at another restaurant instead of his. There are tons of restaurants in Midtown by the way. Irony and sarcasm aren't really features of the Japanese language, so my obtuse point went straight over his head. He had been told that bookings for lunch close at 11.30am and that was that. The idea that we are in the middle of a pandemic and that many enterprises in his industry are closing for lack of business, would warrant additional flexibility wasn't one that had ever crossed his mind. He couldn't connect the dots and realise that what his job depends on are customers. It was not clear to him that every restaurant wants to build new clients and to boost the spending of their regular clients. He is just an employee, so building the business isn't part of his work remit. Well it should be. He could have been focused on grabbing my booking, guaranteeing two covers at lunch, rather than relying on providence to supply walk-ins off the street. He could have made me feel special by telling me that although 11.30am is the cut off point, he would take the booking anyway and really looked forward to meeting me at 12.00, "Ask for Taro and I will take care of you", he could have said. How would I have felt? Would I have become more likely to go back again in the future? Could I become a valued customer? The answers are obvious to me but the concept was not in his mind. By way of contrast, I like Elios in Hanzomon, which is across town for me. I have been going there with clients and with my family, since 2001 when I came back to Tokyo from Osaka. What is my lifetime value as a customer? Elio certainly knows this equation and so do his staff. That is one of the reasons why I keep coming back. So I was wondering what is the difference and the reasons are obvious. The leadership outlook and work culture of the restaurants are different. The bosses determine the way the staff think about the business and the customers. So, the natural extension of this reflection is to move to self reflection. Are my staff flexible when dealing with our clients? Are they just following the rule book and not using their brains? Do they feel trusted enough to take responsibility to fix an issue for a client or are they ninjas, hiding behind the rules. As the boss, you cannot be in every client conversation, so you have to delegate client care to your team. Let's all take another look at the culture we have created. Are we allowing individual decision making based around a common understanding of how we think about our clients? One of the things we quickly learn as leaders is that telling people something once, almost guarantees no one will remember it. It becomes annoying to have to keep repeating the same things over and over, but you find you have to do it. So, it always a good practice to remind everyone about how we think about serving the client. Explain where this aligns with the value system, the vision and the mission of the enterprise. There has to be a symbiotic relationship between our teams and the clients. The boss determines how that plays out at every micro-interaction, every day.

Closing the deal is almost a non-existent art in Japan. Salespeople here are particularly terrified of rejection. The best way they have found to avoid that unfortunate result is to not ask for the business at all. At the end of the sales presentation, after going through the details, dealing with any hesitations or concerns and qualifying the issues, the conversation just fades out. The client finally says "we will think about it". Now the cat and mouse game starts of following up, to find out if there is in fact any interest or not. No one is embarrassed with a public loss of face from a "no" answer. Delicate salespeople egos are preserved and everyone joins in this farce. Why is it like this? There are many books published in English from America, about how to close the sale. None of the ones I have read will ever work here in Japan. American salespeople are often on pure commission or the commissions are a big portion of their income, so the desperation to force a sale is high. Sell or starve. When the client says, "we will think about it" in Japan, they are telling the truth. The people we face are rarely the final decision maker. There is a check and balance mechanism here called the ringi seido. Each buying decision has to be signed off by those effected by the result, by placing their hanko or personal seal on the discussion document. This forces collaboration based on a frank exchange of opinions and cooperation between departments. The typical western scenario of the salesperson overselling the delivery capability and blowing up the back office or the plant doesn't occur here. Yes, it takes longer, but Japan is slow to agree and fast to act. So which is better? The western system of big talk and then slow action or even defective flawed action or the slow and steady wins the race Japanese approach? We still need to get to the point of having the Japanese side come to a conclusion about what happens next. We can do that using several non-confrontational methods that will work like a charm in Japan. Direct Question In a gentle, curious way, we softly ask, "shall we go ahead?". We make eye contact, but we do not speak after that sentence. We just sit there, until hell freezes over, if we have to. Do not dilute the power of the question by adding anything to that one simple straight forward sentence. Alternate Choice This is another very soft ball question. We ask them choose to between two buying alternatives. A yes to either means the buyer agrees to buy without having to state it explicitly. "Would you like to start in this month or is next month more preferable?". We are avoiding a yes or no alternative here, making it as easy as possible for them to say yes Minor Point We select some post sales decision they have to make to test their interest in buying. We might segue during the discussion and ask, "By the way, are you okay if our invoice comes to you electronically or does your accounting department require hard copy?". If there is no deal, then the finer points of interest around the accounting department's ridiculous preferences become redundant. Next Step Again, we take the buyer mentally into the future and have them make a determination about how they will use the solution. We can say, "Do you have a preferred contract format you want to use or are you happy to use ours? Our version is very straightforward". Opportunity This is the last one in stock close. The buying opportunity at this price or availability or with all these various goodies attached, will go away at a certain point in time, unless they act now. Don't snow the buyer with some made up deadline, because we are building a trusted partner relationship here, not indulging in some smash and grab hijinks. This close has to be delivered in a very matter of fact manner, with zero pressure to do anything. Tell them the real situation and leave it up to them to go for it or not. If there are any hidden doubts, hesitations or objections, these five little darlings will flush them out and then we can keep selling. There must be clarity about how we are going to end this sales call. Is it a yes, a no or a definite maybe. We cannot be afraid of the no or the maybe. That is just part of the process. Each answer triggers the specific next steps to deal with these responses. We want to know their answer, so that we will know what to do next. Asking for the order in these non-threatening "soft" ways, suits a Japanese buyer audience and they work. So ask for the order.

Most buyers are hurting at the moment, as entire industries are under assault and many of the remainder are in a perilous state. The common American style of aggressive salesperson reaction to pushback from buyers just doesn't work in Japan in normal times, let alone now. We need to recognise this when we are sitting in front of the buyer, when we are both online and we need to change our mindset. We hopefully will have thought about the possible objections from the buyer ahead of time and will have dealt with these already in the solution provision stage. There may still be concerns and we will have flushed these out with our trial close. We have to see objections are good to have. The worst thing is to have no objections and no sale. There is nothing to work with in this situation. The buyer is hiding their objections because they have decided not to buy, but don't want the aggravation of the seller arguing with them up about it or being annoying. Getting an objection then is good news, not as good as getting a "yes", but still giving us something to apply our sales skill to. We know there is never a "no" answer. It is just a "no" at this time in the market, in this budget cycle, for this offer, in this current context. We have to see the objection as a signal that we didn't do a good enough job educating the buyer about the value our solution will bring. Remember, we made the decision for them to buy. We looked through our solution line up and selected a solution to match their issue. If we didn't have the right match we would have moved on to find a buyer we could serve. There is a structure we can follow to make sure we are going to be able to help the buyer who is in doubt still. In this order we need to listen, cushion, question, provide evidence of value and then evaluate their reaction. Listening sounds easy except that most salespeople are not skilled at really listening. They jump around between pretending to listen and selective listening. Pretend listening is going on because their brains are on fire with what they will say next. They have stopped listening to the client, because they believe they know what the buyer is thinking. The selective listening is where they pick up on key words, which then drives them down a road to a solution. Their seller brain switches over to how they are going to explain that to the buyer. Again, they have stopped listening to the client. We have to suspend these two proclivities and go up the scale to attentive and proactive listening, especially for what is not being said. If we hear a "no" we tend to get more energetic and forceful with the buyer. This then makes them dig in more and they tend to stop listening to us as well. What we need is the chance to be heard, so we use a cushion. A cushion is a mental breaker switch between the "no" and what we are going to say. The cushion's job is to open up the buyer's brain to hear our ideas. Positive cushions are great because they help the buyer to relax because they think they are not going to get into an argument with us. For example, if they say our price is too high we can say "Yes, you are right. It is very important to consider the financial health of the business when making new decisions". Saying "yes, you are right" is always a recommended start to the conversation, because we are agreeing with them and their resistance is removed. Now we have their mental guard lowered, we sweetly and softly ask for clarification. "May I ask why you say our price is too high?". We are seeking more than the headline they have given us about pricing. We want the full accompanying article, supporting this frosty headline. This will release more information about their issue. A client told me our price was too high. When more information was released on why he thought that, it turned out the issue wasn't the number, it was the timing of the payment that was the issue. If I had tried to argue with him, I would have never come up with a plan to split the payments to make it work for both of us. When we were presenting our solution, we were guessing what they will value in our proposition. When we get to the objections stage, we now have a much better idea of the issue for them and whether we in fact do have a workable solution, which will be a win-win for both of us. This is massive progress. If we do have a solution, this is the point where we focus our evidence right on this point of importance to them. To check if we are on the right track, we need to ask them to evaluate what they have just heard and give us some feedback. We can say, "How does that sound?", and then shut up. We must not speak. Don't elongate the point or add or adjust or get mealy mouthed about the wording. Just sit there in stone cold silence but smile. Let them speak, because we will learn more of value now than in the whole conversation to this point. This is the finish line of the marathon and we are centimetres from the result. Don't blow it.

We all know that buyers remember stories more easily than facts and data points. In fact, the ratio is twenty two times more likely than being able to remember simple detail. Data is like swimming in six foot surf. Each data point is overwhelmed and replaced by the next towering wave of data points. It just keeps coming, so that we are being bashed by the constant data waves hitting us. Stories on the other hand envelop us in a way where we are drawn into the detail. Because it is arranged in context, we can recall the details. Given this sale's truth, you would expect salespeople would be storytellers extraordinaire. Actually, they used to be! The sales rep would turn up with new funny jokes every meeting. They would tell stories about their product or service to the client, such that buyers looked forward to meeting them. Their only competition was newspapers, magazines and the radio. Then television appeared and buyers had other means of being entertained and what once worked in sales was lost. Storytelling works and science can now tell us why. Listening to stories releases a chemical called Oxytocin into our system, which makes people feel more trusting, charitable, bonded and less anxious about trusting strangers. That sounds like the type of buyer I would want to be selling to, especially if they are a new client. Stories are good but like everything, there is a degree of best practice required. Jokes are similar. Not everyone can tell a funny joke, which is why so few comedians make it. Unlike the good olde days, where we were competing for buyer attention against very few distractions, today we are being walloped by constant buyer preoccupation and sensory stimulation. This is the Age of Distraction and getting the attention of the buyer is not a given. Authors of fiction, only have text to work with and so they make sure the first lines of their novel grabs us and persuades us to keep reading. Our sales story has to be the same. We have to break through all the clutter inside the buyer's brain and pry open a space to pour our sale's stuff in there somewhere. The first words out of our mouth, as we begin to tell that story, had better be very well constructed to monopolise buyer attention. The story needs to have a personal element to it. We can invoke the greats of the past to our cause, but we have to fit ourselves in there somewhere too. We can't just relate a third party incident and leave ourselves out of the relevance of the story. It also has to have an emotional element. This shouldn't be hard, because most of us in business feel like crying most of the time, thanks to the economic disruptions of Covid-19 and how it is hammering our cash flows. Include a personal story about another client and the problem they had and how we fixed it. There has to be an emotional element to it, so that the listener can relate to the sale's story more easily. Drama in narratives comes from conflict and challenge. These are in ample abundance at the moment too, so plenty of scope to get these elements into our story. We need to transport the buyer into the world of the sale's story and give them a front row seat to the action. The fact that we are meeting with the buyer online makes it more important to get this right. We are not able to bring all of our body language to the story telling and we can't read the reaction to our words as easily as when we are in-person together. We need to draw mental pictures the buyer can see for themselves. We want characters in that story, some of whom they will know, to make it more relevant. We have to set the scene. We should be specific about where and when it occurred, who was involved, what happened etc. This storytelling gig is not a reading from War and Peace. The story can be just a few minutes long, yet can trigger such a crystal clear image of our offering in application, that the buyer becomes convinced they need to have it. The secret is in the practice. Most salespeople love to practice on the client and then wonder why the result is a mess. A storytelling exercise is an art form. Where to put the emphasis with certain words, where to drive up or down the energy, where to pause, where to bring in the gestures, etc. How to speak every sentence with no ums and ahs, so we sound fully convinced and confident of what we are saying. We work all this out before we get in front of the client on screen. Recording yourself is a good practice in rehearsal and do it while you are onscreen so that you get a sense of how you are coming across to the buyer. If you have slides for the meeting and you are relinquished to that small box in the corner of the screen, then practice that way. If you are half screen or full screen with the buyer, then record that version and see how you are coming across. Remember, the audio on many of these platforms is poor, so we have to pay special attention to our pacing to get the clarity we need. Storytelling works, there is no debate about th

We receive permission first, then we proceed to ask questions of the buyer. We want to gain a sense of whether what we have said makes sense for them to use us or not. If there is not a match, then we should hightail it out of there and go find a buyer who is a match. Having understood that we have a solution for their problem, we now need to present that solution. In the face to face world, this is much easier, because we are sitting a mere meter away from the buyer and we have 100% access to their total body language. Every "tell" gives us information about their degree of interest or hesitancy. Online, this is more opaque and so more difficult to digest. As a consequence, we need a higher level of engagement with the online buyer. Most salespeople in Japan just skip the needs analysis part and go straight into their solution pitch. Because we are not doing that, we are better armed to have a relevant conversation that interests the buyer. Consequently, we will have a better access to their concentration. We finish asking and receiving answers to need questions and then we tell them if we have a solution that is a fit. If we do, we proceed to the next stage. Once we start rolling out the facts and nuts and bolts of both what our solution is and how it works, we have to be very careful to control the conversation. Too much time spent on the finer points, sacrifices time for expounding the benefits of the product or service. Many Japanese buyers are very detail oriented, so they will just keep going with the detail of the detail of the detail. Their risk averse natures drives them for the nitty gritty, so they can ascertain the degree of risk attached to this deal. We have to remember, they have all been trained by dud salespeople to get the pitch and then spend the rest of the meeting time, tearing it to shreds to check for any danger flags about this purchase. We don't need to go into super detail and instead we should segue into what this data point does for their company. The solution must meet their needs and we now draw on our memory of what they told us was their company's need and what was their personal need. We wrap the detail inside the relevant benefits now. For example, "the software allows the buyer to agree electronically in the document and the result is stored in a blockchain file". This is the fact, now we bring forth the benefit, "this action can be taken anywhere, there is no need for someone be in the office". The next stage is to attach some evidence to the benefit. Before we do that, we have to reflect on just who is sitting in front of us. Are they the CEO looking at longer term strategic issues, the CFO worrying about cash flow, the technical buyer concerned about the spec match or the user buyer worried about post purchase service guarantees, if something goes wrong? Based on their interest we choose the "evidence buyer story" to suit. An example of the benefit and the evidence would sound like this: "XYZ company had a very analogue system of paper files, which all needed to be maintained and stored somewhere taking up a lot of physical space. Only one person could work on a file, at a time, because it was a linear work flow". We now elevate the benefit through the client example to show how this benefit worked in application inside the firm. We highlight what was the difference that it made. "They noticed a couple of things immediately. Because it was an electronic document, multiple people could work on it at once, which substantially saved a lot of time and freed many people up for other more urgent work. Productivity was substantially increased. They could have the document approved online, so there was no need to travel on crowded trains risking infection with Covid-19, just to attach an old style hanko to the document. Staff were very relieved about that and very thankful for the innovation. This improved the engagement and morale of the team, making for a happier, more productive working environment. The proof of the agreement was stored in the blockchain, so it could not be tampered with nor forged and was kept secure". In a face to face meeting, where we can read copious amounts of body language, we would move straight into a trial close, such as "how does that sound so far?". At this point, we are looking for some feedback to gauge interest. In the online world, we need to keep engaging the client as much as possible. As the seller, we have been speaking for quite a while, with the buyer just sitting there silent onscreen. We need to get them engaged and talking. We can say, "You mentioned working from home was popular with many staff who were worried about mixing with strangers on trains. You also mentioned that productivity had suffered at the same time with people working from home, so solutions which would improve that situation would be helpful. How would improving productivity and staff engagement impact your business?". This is a very low key approach, highly suita

In a virtual call, what is the maximum number of people who should be joining on the buyer side, to make the meeting effective? There is a correlation between the number in the group and the number who will contribute during the meeting. The more people on the call, the greater tendency for people to become less engaged. Research by the Rain Group says that with up to four people on the call, the level of engagement can be quite good. Once we get over five buyers, it becomes much more difficult. The virtual world revolves around both camera and audio based communication. If there are multiple attendees on the buyer side, there is also a strong chance that not all will turn their cameras on. This is a downer because you now have no chance of reading their body language, fraught as that might have been anyway. This is not so different to the face to face world though, when there are many on the Japanese buying side in the room. The most senior people are either actually sleeping or are sitting there with their eyes closed, doing a spectacular job of pretending to be sleeping. Usually, there will only be around three people who will even speak up. Everyone is there because they have to protect their turf and want to influence the outcome of the meeting. They are expecting you to make your pitch. Their shotgun breeches are duly snapped shut and then they drill your pitch full of holes, exposing what a travesty it is. The online world will be the same and with the exposure to all of the multi-tasking going on in the background, because their cameras are turned off. Normally, it is extremely hard to get Japanese buyers to do anything for you in a sales meeting. They think they are there to listen, then critique everything you just said. Online it is even worse. We have to go beyond using the communication platform as a tool to speak to each other and must use it to facilitate an experience. If we were having a face to face meeting and the buyer was highly engaged, asking questions, seeking more detail, then there would be a pretty good chance they would buy. We need that same level of engagement in the online world. How do we get them to participate online? Remember, the buyers all see themselves as God and we are just pesky, unwashed salespeople. We need to direct the buyers and guide them to take certain actions, which will allow us to engage with them. We need to tell them what we want them to do and then tell them how to do it. We next ask for a response, using a follow up question. This is where the preparation is critical. For example, if with a flourish, we magically pull up a whiteboard on screen and expect a bunch of Japanese buyers to grab the text tool or the arrow tool and start interacting with us, their complete lack of response will be debilitating. If it was just a one to one online meeting, they might feel some pressure to take some action, but as a collective, they will just sit there and completely and shamelessly ignore us. They are totally happy to let hell freeze over, before they make a move for any tool. They will blank you and force you back to giving your pitch. If you have already given it, they will rip into your pitch, telling you why it is crap. We need to be super well organised and anticipate their resistance. For example, we have slides that have options numbered on screen. We need to set up the participation. "There are many of us on the call today, so we really appreciate everyone joining us. To make this meeting as effective as possible would you please give me some feedback on these four options. The best way to do that is go to the chat box, under the participant panel and write in the number of the option you think would generate the most value for your part of the business?". Their names will appear in the chat showing the number chosen. We just refer to them by name and thank them for selecting their option. This is a way of encouraging the remainder to follow suit. For those who don't participate, the "I am not here to do anything" brigade, we need to draw them out by name. "Tanaka san, would you mind sharing your selection with everyone please, because we really value your insights?. I would really appreciate it". We can then ask individuals to share their thinking behind their selection. "Murayama san, I see you chose option three. Thank you for doing that. Would you please come off mute and help me to understand why this is important to you. That will really help me to better understand how we can serve you best, so please share your thoughts with us. Thank you Maruyama san". We try and do this with a number of the participants on the call, but it must be done in a deferential, "we are really trying to help you" way or resistance will be major and unmerciful. Following this we might ask a further expansion question to the group. "Could I ask everyone else to give me a green check please if they think we have sufficiently understood your situation. If you think we have

One of the sad things about salespeople is they mostly have no idea what they are doing. So we transfer that poor understanding of the basics to the online world and then wonder why they are not succeeding. Kata is a Japanese word to describe a set way of doing things. In Karate we learn kata and they must be done in the exact same way, every time. These are best practice modes and the idea is to perfect them. Sales also has kata, but few salespeople learn them, let alone try to perfect them. The online world requires new kata built on top of the old kata. You can't move to the second level, until you have mastered the first level. For those in the minority in sales, who actually enquired about what the client needs, this is only the start. Again, sadly for many, this is the end of their approach and they don't know how to go further. They enquire about what the client needs and then they spend the rest of the meeting time with the buyer, trying to convince them to buy their solution. They hammer the buyer with slides brimming with information. The problem with this approach, although much better than the pitchfest quicksand most other salespeople wallow in, is that you become a transactional element in the buyer's world. Farming should be 80% of the effort and the other 20% spent on hunting for new clients. Let's be clear, we are not looking for a sale. This is a critical point that many salespeople miss. We are not looking for a sale, because we are looking for a resale. As much as we love our clients and take super good care of them, there will be reasons why they drop out and so must be replaced. This is why we need to hunt. In Japan, there are few salespeople who can be successful hunters. In the online world this problem is really exacerbated. The upshot is you don't have a big supply of talent to do hunting and this will make it difficult to grow your business. Better to have lots of farmers, who are in good supply and only depend on hunters for 20% of your revenue. Talking to existing clients online is relatively comfortable for most salespeople. Sounds great but how do you get to 80% of your business coming from existing customers who are repeat buyers? Running around trying to fill needs will not get your there. It is a bit like today's cars. When there is a problem the mechanic doesn't even bother fixing the part. They just get a new one and replace the whole unit. Look under the hood sometime and what you see is a bewildering array of units, which are switched in and out. Forget trying your luck fixing it by yourself. When we are only satisfying needs, we become one of those replaceable units. The buyer switches us out and replaces us with a competitor. The way to stay in the game is to become a trusted advisor. Sounds easier than it is. To achieve that aim we need to elevate the dialogue with the buyer. At the bottom of the ladder are wants and needs. Fulfilling those can become a commoditised effort. We don't want to be a commodity because then we are chosen on the basis of price. We want to be chosen on the basis of value instead. We need to engage the buyer beyond wants and needs to have a discussion about their challenges and goals. We are now entering the strategic partner zone, where we don't just fix immediate needs, we start to get to the "design in" stage. In manufacturing certain products, the way to make the sale is to be involved in the design stage and get your widget "in" to the specifications. When we are clear about their goals and their barriers to achieving those goals, we are having a much richer conversation than our pitchfest or tactical needs fulfilment only competitors. Asking about their strategy, their positioning in the market and where they want to be in the industry is where the trusted advisor magic starts to happen. This requires a lot more intelligent digging in the questioning stage and the development of quite different questions for the buyer. For example, "If we can supply the solution to this issue, how will this accelerate your strategy?". If we want to go up the scale we can ask, "You have spent a lot of time, effort and money on brand building and marketing, so if we can solve this issue, how will it reinforce or improve the positioning you have desired in the market?". At the top of the ladder we ask, "If we can solve this issue, how will this ensure you continue to be a leader in this industry?". This is a long way from just asking, "If we can supply it in blue, would you be able to make a decision today?". This is the transactional kata. Rather, we want the trusted advisor kata using more sophisticated questioning and focusing on conversations about bigger picture issues than things like the colour range. When you understand their problem, start digging in for the more strategic ramifications of solving their issue. To become a trusted advisor, you have to be able to solver bigger problems for the client. Elevate the dialogue and the zeros on your invoi

In Part One, we looked at the difficulties the modern communication platforms throw up because of the limitations of the technology, in particular, the poor audio quality. Now we move forward to how we ask the questions and what we should ask. Our client has various needs and we have to uncover them and the way to do that is ask questions. This would seem the most obvious thing in the world. Yet there are legions of the great unwashed, hapless salespeople wandering around, spending all of their time pitching to clients. There are in tell mode to sell, as opposed to using questions to sell. The client has some top of mind needs that revolve around them achieving the outcomes they desire. We need to understand what results the client is looking for. In the classic example, clients don't buy drills. They buy results - holes. They want to hit targets, gain market share, increase revenues, manage costs, improve their systems, etc. There will be some buying criteria involved. Budget is often what we think of here. We want to know how much budget they have and then we can cut our cloth to match. We should never forget that time and quality are also going to be key components here as well. We need to find out more on these fronts. A client assured me they had no budget for our training. Digging in, I found they did have budget if we spread the payment over two financial years. It wasn't money, it was time, in this case. Practical details need to be found. These are often the spec components of design, shape, colour, size, weight, durability, etc. Do we actually have what they need or not? If we don't, then stop trying to slam the square peg into the round hole baby and move on. Find that client whose needs profile better matches what we do best. Although we are dealing with company representatives, they also have personal needs. What is their WHY? It could be to keep their boss happy, to rise through the ranks, to get a big bonus, to snag a promotion, to be appreciated, etc. We need to know that, because if we can frame our solution in terms of their WHY, then that is a very powerful differentiator from our rivals. We go through question phases to uncover these pieces of information. We can start by getting them focused on the gap between where they are now and where they need to be. We can ask, "where would you like to be in six to twelve months from now?". The focus here is on outcomes. To gauge the gap, our next question will be, "given those goals, where are you today?". Now we can find out if there is an opening here for us or not. I had been chasing a buyer for seven straight years with no results. It was a highly profitable business. The President wouldn't even agree to meet with me and then he suddenly retired. I thought "bingo" – time to try again with the new guy. While I was sitting there in the meeting going through this discovery process, the most unpleasant idea occurred to me. "He thinks they can close the gap between where they are now and where they want to be by themselves through their internal resources". I call that an extremely bad meeting. There was no way into that company for me, because I didn't have a solution they needed. Trust me, I tried to make that gap between where they are now and where they want be seem like the Grand Canyon. Ultimately I failed to do that and so no deal and sayonara. What we are trying to do in this step is flesh out the negative implications for the company, if they don't buy our solution. Company representatives often mistakenly think that taking no action has no cost. That is not true. There are the opportunity costs associated with no action. Markets move, business is fluid, nothing stays the same. They are also not operating in a vacuum, where their competitors are in some form of cryogenic suspended animation. Once we know where they are today and where they want to be, we need to understand what is the change they need to make to close the gap. If they think they can make that change by themselves, it is curtains for us. If we are able to find a reason to supply the change methodology they need, then we need to go for gold. We need to find out that invididual's personal WHY. This is very difficult with Japanese buyers. Even at the conceptual level, this is not something they easily grasp. When your career progression is based on age and stage, unrelated to the outcomes you produce and you get a set bonus the same as everyone else, the personal payoff is bit opaque. In Japan it will usually be personal recognition by their team or their peers, as someone doing their job well. So we need to ask things like, "If we can achieve the outcomes you have mentioned, how will that make your team members feel?", "If this works, will your team appreciate the results it brings, making their job easier?", "If this is a success, will your colleagues be appreciative?". In Part Three, we will explore how to engage decision makers with more interactive selling techniques. We

Salespeople's bad habits just migrate right across to the online world. If you were just pitching your product before, hoping to snag a deal, you will be doing the same thing when staring at the client on screen. It didn't work well then and it doesn't improve in the new environment. For the more professional salespeople, who actually understand sales and the key role that questioning skills play, the game has changed. We have to change the way we do things too. One of the biggest problems associated with asking questions is getting the answer. In the meeting room location, we have perfect audio quality. Okay, we will get clients who are hard to follow, because their own communication skills are so poor, but at least we can hear them. All of these modern virtual meeting platforms have poor audio, so just catching the answer can be a struggle. This is particularly so, if you are dealing in foreign languages. When they speak English or when I speak Japanese, we have to both expect that there is another level of complexity associated with actually hearing what is being said. The virtual world is nirvana for multi-taskers. Don't become one of them when speaking with the client. Watch the buyer like a hawk, wear a head set, remove all distractions, shift forward in your seat, lean in toward the client on screen. It is tough to discern it on screen, but check their body language for incongruent messages. This is when they are saying one thing, but doing another thing that negates what they are saying. Tatemae statements or superficial truths are a classic example of this incongruency. The other tricky part with the audio is if two people speak at the same time, no one can hear clearly what is being said. Salespeople are rabid interrupters and jumper-inners. They talk over the top of the client when something the buyer said, sparks a thought in their minds. The Japanese language has the verb at the end, so we have to wait until the speaker tells us whether this is present, past or future tense, positive or negative. That helps when speaking in Japanese, because it forces us to refrain for jumping in. In English though, the gloves are off and it becomes a shambles, when we speak over the top of the buyer. The other salesperson bad habit is leaping ahead of the buyer, anticipating what they are going to say, formulating a response while they are still speaking and then jumping in with your two bits worth. The issue here is that the formulation process tends to be internal and we cease listening to what the buyer is actually saying in detail. By that, I mean not just hearing the words in the background, but really studying their choice of words, the tone of voice, the emphasis points, noticing what they are not saying, etc. Because of the difficulty of the audio on these platforms, we really have to spend a lot more time clarifying what the buyer is saying. Normally, if we do this once or twice, no one gets upset. However, with a heavy repetition, we may find the buyer gets annoyed. Instead we need to tell them that, because of the importance of what they are saying and the fact there are audio issues around clarity, you will be asking them for clarification a lot more than normal. You will also note that you will be doing a lot more paraphrasing of what they have said, to make sure we have a perfect understanding of what their needs are. Do this up front and therefore head off client irritation with your attempts to make sure of the messages. Also, if dealing with Japanese buyers, absolutely ask for permission to ask questions. Getting questioned by a salesperson is a first for most buyers, trained over many years by dud salespeople who just gave their pitch. Expect resistance, unless you get their permission first. This is how hard it is, say: "Maybe we can help you, I am not sure, but in order for me to understand if that is possible, would you mind if I asked a few questions?". Doing this will save a lot of unnecessary cultural faux pas with buyers. Work on the assumption the audio is going to be a big problem and then prepare countermeasures to eliminate that issue. Your competitors will just be blundering away making it hard for themselves. Here is a chance to steal a march on your rivals.

We now sell in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism. When the client is talking to us online, they can be so easily distracted and can be secretly multi-tasking in the background, not paying any great attention to what we are saying. There has always been a lot of client scepticism about salespeople claims, but with the "fake news" catch phrase being tossed around with wild abandon, buyer cynicism is being added to, rather than diminished. So for our first impression, when we come online to meet the client for the first time, it is critical to grab, keep and deepen their attention. How do we do that? When the meeting starts, I will assume you have the proper logistics in place. The camera lens on your laptop is slightly above eye line height, that the lighting is such that you are easy to see and that you are wearing a headset, with a microphone attachment, to compensate for the poor quality audio these online platforms provide. Naturally you are sitting up straight, leaning in about 15 degrees, rather than slumped back in your chair. Please, please, please do not open with "how are you today". This type of fake interest in the buyer's well being has zero impact and makes you sound like those sleazy telephone sales dogs calling buyers at weird hours, trying to sell them weird stuff. Start with some appreciation instead and say something intelligent and meaningful like, "Covid-19 has really added a lot of stress to everyone's workloads, so let me begin by thanking you for making time to speak with me today". That is a highly credible opening statement that shows we are all in this together, you understand their world and you are appreciative of them. You continue by adding value, "The object of my call today is to understand whether the results we have been able to achieve for other clients are also possible for your firm. I have no idea if that will be the case or not, but I am very keen to see if we can be of some meaningful assistance to you". We are telling them that we have a track record of getting results, we are not going to a pushy, pushy salesperson and we are focused on helping them, rather than ourselves. We then bridge into the agenda for the call. Depending on the situation we may have sent the agenda ahead of the meeting or we may be pulling it up on screen at the start of the meeting. You don't ask for a "yes" or a "no" and as you are doing it, you just say "please allow me to bring up the agenda for our call today so that we can make the most efficient use of our time together". We are being assumptive about using an agenda and we are telling them we are not here to waste their valuable time. The first item on the agenda should crystalise the strategic value of the meeting, establishing why this call is going to helpful and not a waste of their time. "The purpose of our meeting is to discuss your goal for building revenues as quickly as possible, given the disruptions to the market because of Covid-19". We next go into an overview of the agenda. "Things are changing fast, so let's start with a review of the current situation, then discuss your goals and how this fits into your overall strategy and then together look at some next steps, if that in fact makes sense". We are referencing change is taking place, hinting that whatever they were doing before may not be what they need to be doing now and here we are to help them make that adjustment. We want to understand their needs in the context of the direction for the firm, so that we can tailor what we have in our solution to match that direction. Finally, we mention the solution creation will be a joint effort , where they will have some ownership of the crafting. Again we underline we are not going to be pushing any square pegs into round holes here. To show this is a joint effort we then ask, "What else would you like to add to the agenda?". This is a very critical step, because they will probably have something very specific in mind, which will take us quickly beyond the generalities we have been mentioning. Once they have added to or accepted the existing agenda, we have tacit approval to dive into asking them about their current situation. "Thank you, so let me begin by asking you for an update on where are the problem areas and barriers you are facing at the moment?". We are now off to the races with our questions. If we have a Japanese buyer in front of us, we should add an extra step and get permission to ask questions. "Thank you for helping with the agenda. I am not sure if we have what you need, but in order for me to understand if that is the case or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?". In Japan, this is important because every buyer has been trained to receive a pitch from the salesperson, so being asked questions by lowly salespeople, can seem a bit uppity and rude to buyers. How we start has a huge impact on how we finish, so mastering the first impression in the online sale, is a make it or break it

When we meet people for the first time, we put them through a number of filters. The easiest one is visual. How do they dress? What hairstyle do they have? Are they tall or short, fat or slim, beautiful, average looking or plain ugly? The next filter is voice. Where are they between having a deep baritone or a lilting soprano voice? How fluently do they speak? Do they have an accent? Accents are interesting, because they indicate where they grew up. We can then fit them into our preconceived notions about what people are like from that place. In some cultures, we can also work out their education level from their accent and then transpose our presumptions about how intelligent they are. If you ever want a demonstration of this, just search for audio of Donald Trump having been over dubbed with a pseudo Oxbridge accent. He often claims he is a stable genius, but he actually sounds much more intelligent when you hear him with that dubbed posh accent. The remaining filter is the content of what they are saying and this comes last, after all of these other biases and prejudices have had a field day. When we are online we have to pay attention to a lot of factors which determine our first impression. This is tricky, because the quality of the audio on most of these online platforms is very poor. Additionally, we can be trapped in a little box on screen, which negates a lot of our body language and appearance. You may have heard that body language is the biggest proportion of our first impression with others. Fake news! The original study in the 1960s by Professor Albert Mehrabian split the first impression into this breakdown: 55% appearance and body language, 33% tone of voice and 7% your words. While a lot of self-proclaimed "experts" quote these statistics, they neglect to include Mehrabian's important caveat. He said these splits only apply when we are not congruent. By this he meant, when the words coming out of our mouth, don't match up with the expression on our face, our body language and the tone of our voice. The tricky thing today is that the way we look is impinged by the video online technology and the way we sound by the lousy audio. On top of these issues, we live in the Age of Distraction where everyone is multitasking, when they are online and the Era of Cynicism, where everyone is worried that what you are telling them is fake. If we wanted to get across that we are reliable and credible, then we need to make sure we look into the camera lens on our computer, set at eyeline height or slightly higher, rather than looking at them on the screen. If we look at the screen in front of us, it looks to the buyer like we are looking down on them. Sit up straight and slightly forward, by about ten to fifteen degrees. This is the online equivalent of leaning into the buyer, when they are speaking, just as we would were we face to face. Obviously dress the part, because so many visual clues are captured there. Get into your business battle armour for the meeting and look and feel the part of a professional. Have additional lighting set up so that you are very clear on screen to the buyer. We don't buy things from people lurking around in the dark, so get those lights organised. Speak a little more slowly than usual, because of the poor audio quality and the audio time lag. This sounds easy to do, until you get excited about your product and start gushing about what a wonder it is and about the copious benefits for the buyer. You may find you really start ramping up your speaking speed. Also wear a headset with a microphone. This is very important for you to be able to hear the buyer as clearly as possible. Don't speak in a monotone, where every word is given equal attention and strength in some lunatic verbal democracy. Hit key words harder than the others to highlight these words are very important for the listener to take special note of. If we were in person, we could drop the strength out of these keys words, as another means of bringing contrast to what we are saying. Unfortunately, in the online world, we have a hard enough time being heard even at a strong volume, so forget whispering for effect. Speak with enthusiasm. In fact, raise your energy about 20% above normal to account for the draining effects of the camera and audio. People who regularly appear on television know this. They compensate for the camera diminishing their presence, by ramping up their energy output. You will find that increasing your gesture frequency helps with raising your energy levels. We must also project total authority, belief and sincerity. Eliminate all hesitation in your sale's talk. No ums and ahs are allowed. These indicate you are uncertain about the thing you sell. We don't buy from people who don't sound like they are 100% sold on their own product. Instead replace these ums and ahs with pauses. The pause is a genius idea, because it allows the buyer to catch up the audio lag, gives them the opportunity to diges

Online meetings with existing clients are a breeze. The connection is there, the history, the trust has been built and the rapport building was done a long time ago. Basically this is a walk in the park. Now the brand new client is a different matter. You have never met, let alone even seen each other before and now you meet online for the first time. This can be a daunting prospect. There is going to be a heightened sense of stress for this first meeting. "Will I be able to build trust online?", "Can I establish some rapport, when we are separated physically and I am only seeing them on this little screen?", "Will I be able to hear them clearly, given how poorly the audio performs in these online meetings?". If we prepare well, we can reduce some of these anxieties. Review your industry knowledge. What is their situation today given Covid-19 is disrupting so many sectors of industry? Is the market declining, rising, how fast, at what volume? What do I know about their company. How is their current revenue situation? What is the situation with their rivals – what would be some common issues they would be facing too? What about this individual I am meeting? What is their title, what information about them can I pick up through a Google search, looking at Linkedin, Facebook, my own contacts, their vendors, my colleagues, etc. Before we speak with them, we have to review the value we bring to our clients. We are not focused on the spec details of the product, but on the benefits we deliver. If they decide to adopt us as a supplier, then how have other clients applied the benefits of our value inside their own companies. This could be a very useful insight to introduce when talking to this new customer. What is likely to be their perspective? Buyers are generally interested in where they can place your solution in the triangle of tension, between time, quality and cost. Are we talking to the CEO, who will have a strategic viewpoint on where the company needs to go? Is it the CFO who is razor sharp focused on the cash flow burn and preserving the available cash inside the organisation? Is the client a technical buyer, who is going to be concerned about the spec, the gritty detail, the product guarantees available? Is the buyer a user buyer who is worried about ease of adaption inside the company, the after sales service help available, the delivery times involved? Before we even make the appointment for the meeting, we need to sit down and draw a vertical dividing line on a sheet of paper. On one side we scope up what are the likely key issues facing this company right now. On the other side we align our solutions for their possible issues. There may be things we can't help them with and that is okay. We just need to understand where we can help them, depending on the priorities they attach, to the issues they currently face. When we make the call to see about a business meeting, we try and understand if there is in fact a point to us meeting at all. We start by thanking them for their time on the phone and tell them "in order to properly prepare for our meeting, may I ask a few quick questions?". We then check on possible needs they may have. We have already done some research and have come up with some hypotheses on what they might need. We are still in the dark at this point though, so we need to try a few possibilities and see if they correspond to the needs they have. "Many companies in your industry are currently facing an issue about XYZ. Is that also a concern for you?". We are only looking for indications of what actually are their key pain points at this time. Depending on their business, we may ask them about their current usage. Due to Covid-19, are they using more or less of the thing we supply? We also check on if they have budget to do business with us. "I know that companies are looking carefully at where they invest their funds at the moment and I am sure your company is the same. What kind of budget have they given you to work with at the moment? At this point we may have sufficient information to conclude there is no actually point in meeting with them. We should say so, in a polite way, framed around not wishing to waste their time. If we think there is value, then we should make that point and confidently ask for the appointment to meet online.

Meeting a potential new customer online is a daunting prospect for salespeople. All of the skills we have built up have been tailored and refined for the face to face environment. Being in the same room with someone allows us to really get their vibe, microscopically analyse their body language, clearly hear what they have to say and in turn, be heard by the customer. The online world negates almost all of those finely honed skills. In particular, given our usual tried, true and tested modus operandi has been vanquished, how do we build trust with people who don't know us and can barely even see or hear us? When we go to the reception area of a client's office, the person we are meeting will come out and collect us and then we move to the meeting room or we may have already been shown into the meeting room by the reception staff. In both cases the first impression will be vital. If we are sitting nicely, behaving ourselves in reception and the client approaches us, we are very conscious that this first interaction has a strong bearing on how things will go. Producing a brilliant first impression is what separate the great salespeople from the rest of the punters. The same applies when they enter the meeting room, where we have been sitting waiting for them to arrive. We look them in the eye and smile before we stand. When we do get up, we stand up straight and greet them. Things are a bit different today. Wearing a face mask puts all of the weight on your eyes, to convey that smile. When we are online we can dispense with the face mask, but we have another mask controlling us and that is the screen. The size of our face in a little box will vary depending on how many others are in the meeting and who is talking. There is also the issue of their face on screen is at least ten centimetres below our camera lens, so if we are looking at their face, it appears we are talking down to them the whole time. Also, how can we gauge their reaction to what we are saying, if we are looking at the camera lens, so that we appear to be talking directly to them? Well we can't see two things at once in this case, so we have to smile, talk to them through the medium of our camera lens, give up on absorbing their immediate reaction to our words and concentrate on what they say in reply and how they say it. If possible, we want a neutral background which is absolutely not fascinating at all and so won't compete with us. The green screen backgrounds available today are pretty wonky, but may be better than the catastrophe of your home environment. We also need to make sure our face is well lit. Often, I see people attending webinars, looking like they are broadcasting from a dank dungeon, because they are hiding in the dark. Naturally we are dressed in our business battle dress, including trousers by the way, in case we have to get up. We have all seen hilarious clips of the casual bottom half, being revealed when people walked away from the camera. Interaction online is tough. The audio systems seem designed to ensure we are often talking over each, other effectively cancelling out completely what was just offered up. Getting excited and jumping in while the client is talking, during a face to face meeting, is not the best either but in an online meeting, it is a very bad decision. We need to allow the client to finish what they are saying. We need to exhibit good listening skills. We have to make an extra effort to feed back what we heard because the audio is usually unreliable. We obviously have to be on time and we need to keep to time. Clients can still be living that meeting hell, which has now shifted online rather than when they were those meeting room nomads, wandering around the corridors from one meeting to the next. If we say we are going to do something, then we need to be delivering immediately, in order to establish that feeling of reliability and therefore trust. If we are doing a good job, the buyer will be seeking our advice on what is possible. We are seen as potential business partners. We have to reinforce that idea by providing useful insights about the industry, the market and the competition. These pieces of analysis have to reflect a correct understanding of the client's current situation, where they want to be and what is holding them back at the moment. This is crunch time, because this reveals whether you have been spending your Covid-19 time at home fruitfully or just watching Netflix. Normally we are pretty busy, so our study time is limited but this has been the opportunity to really gather data and information to help clients with their business. How have you been spending your time? The ultimate objective is to become part of the client's brain trust. We bring value to the relationship that they cannot generate from within. "Design in" in manufacturing is the sweet spot. You are incorporated into the product, before it is even launched. We want to be there at the strategy development stage, adding

I love dark chocolate. One of the downsides of my chocolate proclivity is that the lift from the sugar is followed by a deep drop in energy. One answer would be to keep eating chocolate all day, so that there is no drop, but the dropping dead of a heart attack opportunity probably makes that an unwise choice. Sales is similar. We totally rev the buyer up. We skilfully word picture them into a sugary world of good fortune about to arrive and then we depart. We take off with the sales order joyously grasped in our sweaty palm. Did we allow for the depression that follows the deal sugar hit? It doesn't matter if we are dealing with an individual buyer of a high ticket item or a corporate functionary, the same sugar hit can apply. We have taken them along the railway lines of building trust, determining needs through questioning, matching our solution, handling any pushback or hesitation and gaining agreement. All good textbook stuff and we now switch to fulfillment mode. We get on to the logistics, as this often requires the assistance of other departments. We are deep, deep in the detail and busily arranging for things to happen for the buyer. We have their best interests at heart, but we have completely taken our eye off the sugar hit. What happens to the buyer after the sugar hit evaporates? What are they thinking? What things might be worrying them about this big commitment they have made for themselves or on behalf of the firm? Have we factored this in at all? We have severely raised their hopes, but we have left them in a state of "ungratified stasis". In B2B sales, we can easily forget we are dealing with human beings, racked with worries and fears. Japan is a country of "no mistakes allowed" and so people are scared to make a commitment, take responsibility or be accountable. They need strong reassurance they have made the right decision, that they won't get into trouble, that everything will be fine and not to worry. Ah, but we don't do it though. We just glide off into the sunset and start working on the next sale. We have been working on their buyer emotions, because we know people buy on emotion and justify with logic. This "justify with logic" bit is often not given enough attention. The sugar hit of the emotional rollercoaster wears off and the doubts begin to crowd in. Giving them more rah rah, about how great this will be for the company, is just trying to extend the sugar hit. We cannot keep this up indefinitely. We have their agreement, now we need to get to work to calm them down and enmesh them in the logical reasons this purchase is the right decision. We summarise what we just discussed, why the deal is important to helping their business and what will happen next. This is even down to the detail of when we will send the invoice, the date of payment clarification and the next steps they can expect from our side. It is all delivered in a friendly but calm tone of deep, studied religiosity about how much we believe this is the best thing for them. We certainly ask them if they have any questions about anything to do with the deal and the delivery arrangements. We ask the question and then we shut up. We absolutely must not speak again until they answer. We are trying to flush out any basis for buyer's remorse, that nagging doubt of "have I done the right thing or not?". Following this we ask for a referral. They are hot but calmer now and are likely to be open to introducing us to one of their circle. Please, please do not ask dumb things like, "do you know of anyone who…?". That question confuses them. We are unnaturally requesting them to take in their whole world in one gulp, rather than just a key piece of it. Instead we try and narrow the focus down to people they can see in their mind's eye. "Amongst your current business contacts in Tokyo, have you met anyone who may also benefit their business by applying this type of solution?". We say goodbye and then as soon as we get a chance, we send a follow up email. In that email we list up the 5 most important logical reasons that this deal with make a difference to their business. We should be sending another email the next morning attaching data, white papers, references, anything that smacks of concrete evidence and not just salesperson blather. By this time, things will begin to roll out and the solution will start to be applied. We make sure there is no opening for triggering overwhelming doubt and hesitations about their decision. Enjoy your dark chocolate, seal the deal, but account for the sugar hit that will come, by being fully ready for it.

We have come to the final stage of the sales process, getting people to agree to move forward and place their order. We have built the trust, understood the buyer's needs, matched our solution to those needs, cleared up any hesitations, so now we can ask for their business. What could be easier than this after all that preparatory work? In Japan, as with many things, it is not that simple. Salespeople here fear the buyer. They believe their job is to always say "Yes" to whatever the buyer wants. Buyers in Japan have been trained by errant salespeople, to expect a pitch. The idea is you turn up deliver your pitch and then the buyer will dissect it and tell you all the things wrong with it. They then expect you to deal with those issues, so that they can be assured this is a safe buying decision. Online or in person, the same expectation rules. This sounds reasonable, except it is folly for salespeople to do things this way. I can never understand how a pitch could possibly be considered a good idea for the opening of your sales presentation? How do you know what to pitch? Most of us have multiple solutions, so which one should we start off with? When pitching, we can begin talking about something which is not central to their interests, thus wasting their time or something completely irrelevant and so totally waste their time. This fear of the buyer spills over into not saying "No" to the buyer. Sometimes, it makes no sense to agree to the buyer's requests or demands. Japanese salespeople will just take the command as an order and then twist the organisation up into knots to deliver the demand. Over the years, whenever I question my sales teams about these client demands, they reply that they agreed because that is what the buyer wanted. "Why didn't you say no"?, is met with blank looks, staring at their shoes or puzzlement. The "say yes to everything" mentality is drilled into salespeople here, so that they cannot imagine a parallel universe, where you don't agree to everything the buyer wants. This fear is part of the reason most Japanese salespeople leave the order request in a vague state of greyness. It is actually a black or white decision – you either agree to buy or you don't. How can there be any grey? Japan loves living in the grey, that never never land where vagueness, circuitousness, indirectness and obfuscation rule supreme. A rejection in Japan represents an assault on the Wa (和), that societal harmony that has been built up over centuries, to allow Japanese people to live cheek by jowl, without killing each other. It is also an assault on one's own Kao (顔) or face, a humiliation best avoided at all costs, including the cost to the business of not asking for the sale. Deal closing fear exists amongst salespeople everywhere, but Japan takes it to Olympic Games gold medal winning levels. It doesn't have to be like this. Of course, closing the deal doesn't have to only reflect the typical American way of doing things. That style is very aggressive and pushy. There are books aplenty published on how to push and manipulate the client to do the deal. All of them totally worthless in this environment. We need a softer approach in Japan, but still we must have an approach. We can't dwell in the grey. Here are five "soft" closes entirely suitable for Japan: "Would you like to go ahead?" is hardly hard sell, but it is a direct approach. "Would you like to start in August or would September be better", is less direct, but in a subtle way still suggests that they have agreed and will go ahead. "The free delivery will cease after November, so shall we get things started now, so that you can enjoy that free service", is putting some soft time pressure for a decision on the client. "Would you require a hard copy of the invoice or can we send it electronically?", is an over the horizon choice they will have to make and we bring that forward now, to get confirmation that "yes", they are going to buy. "This is the last one in stock, so shall we grab it for you now, so that you don't miss out", is the scarcity with time pressure soft close, to get some clarity from the client about their intentions. None of these closes are difficult or divisive and won't offend the buyer. We may get a rejection to our offer, but at least we have their decision. It is better to get a "no" than a "definite maybe" and spend excess time and energy imagining the deal is still alive. In Japan rather than "no", we are more likely to be told it will be muzukashii (難しい), which is often mistranslated as "difficult". You tell some thrusting foreign salesperson it is "difficult" and they go straight into problem solving mode, as to why the difficulty can be overcome. The more accurate translation for businesspeople is "impossible". Hearing that answer will sit you back down and get you thinking differently about where we have come to in this sales conversation.

We have moved along the continuum of the sales process, from making the cold call, getting the appointment, building trust, asking insightful questions to presenting our solution. This is when the wheels can fall off and the sale gets lost. Up until this point of the presentation we have been in control. We have imagined we understand what the client wants, have amassed the materials to explain what we can do and how it will work, but we may have been delusional. One of the disappointing parts of being in sales is dealing with clients. If we didn't have to deal with people everything would go so much smoother. We wouldn't make any sales either so that isn't going to work. Some clients are a bit crafty. They sit there answering our questions – remember we asked their permission for us to ask questions – and yet they have been fooling us. They have been telling us about the tip of the iceberg of their problems, but hiding the real issues under the waterline. Why would they do that? Trust is the answer. There isn't sufficient trust yet for them to share with us all their dirty laundry, all the fail points inside their company, all the horrendous problems they are facing. Remember, we just walked in off the street or came down the line to their Zoom screen and they don't know us from Adam. Why would they be inclined to share the gruesome details of their disaster, their living nightmare, with a complete stranger? Now we don't know that. We have imagined we have built up enough trust for them to tell us what they need. When we get to the solution explanation point, they start to reveal their true colours. They start to point out all the shortcomings of this solution. The failing salespeople start to argue, begin to defend, to justify and to explain why the client is wrong. I hope this isn't you! If it is, salvation is at hand, so listen up. When we get this type of pushback, we must realise we haven't identified their true problem and our solution is perfectly designed to fix a non problem or a minor problem. There is no point trying to ram that inadequate solution down the client's throat, through force of will. We need to stop defending the solution provided and sweetly ask, "Thank you for your feedback. I feel that I have misunderstood what would help you the most. What would be something that would be the highest priority for you and your company?" And then we sit there and say absolutely nothing, until they speak. If time has to freeze over, then so be it. Do not elaborate or qualify or add – just sit there patiently. While this is going on, the client is having an internal struggle with themselves, to decide whether they want to share the real problems with you. Let them struggle and just wait. If they won't tell you, then thank them for their time and move on. There is no point wasting time on time wasters. Call someone else you can help and who is prepared to share their issues with you. If they do tell you the real issue, then you repeat the questioning formula again and really try to understand if you can help them or not. Thank them, make an appointment for the next meeting to present the solution and your proposal and away you go again. If they play straight with you and just say something simple like "your price is too high", then we use the objection handling process. Your brain at this point has to have the word "CUSHION" blinking on and off like a warning beacon. You need to train your brain to do this, so that you don't jump in and start to argue, begin to defend, to justify and to explain why the client is wrong. Instead you say something to give you thinking time, like, "Well it is very important to consider the financial position of the company". This is a neutral statement that will buy you four seconds of thinking time and you immediately recall, "that's right, don't argue, begin to defend, to justify and to explain why the client is wrong". Instead you angelically ask, "May I ask you why you say that?". Again you shut up and do not speak until they answer you. Now you just listen to their reasoning. "Your price is too high" is like a five word headline in a newspaper. A few centimetres down there will be the accompanying article, which will go to great lengths to explain what that headline was referring to. So we need the article too, the reason why they say that, before we know how to answer it. They have to justify their position and in the process they will give us a better insight into the issue. Have they misunderstood us, is there some value perception we have not sufficiently met, is there a budget timing problem, etc? So we either satisfy their price point or we walk away or we come up with another arrangement, that provides a volume purchase balance against a price discount, a quid pro quo, that works for both of us. Walking away is often the best option because you have spent a lot of effort positioning yourself in the market. Other clients will pay your price point so there is a