The Sales Japan Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You would think that if your business has survived Covid, then the pandemic will have cut a swathe through your competitors. Therefore, we would all be granted a temporary reprieve from the usual rigorous competition for client business. Counterintuitively, there seems to be more and more competition for the same clients, so we need to differentiate ourselves very clearly. What we absolutely don't want is for the buyer to think they can just swap another company's solution in to replace us, like a modular part in the modern car engine. We need our Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) to be crisp and sharp to make sure the buyer knows we are different and better than the competition. We need to point out what we are offering, that they are not. However with all of this focus on bare bones survival have we looked at our USPs lately? Are they a bit dusty and the sheen gone off from lack of attention? Some things to think about when crafting our Unique Selling Proposition is to look at things from the buyer's perspective. This seems completely obvious but often we are operating in our own little bubble and we see the world through the limited prism of our own value system. It is no help talking about what we sell in our USP. That is tremendously interesting to us, but not as important as what is of interest to the buyer. Do we really know what they are interested in now? Have their interests shifted since Covid shook up the business world? What are they trying to buy today? What new problems do they need help solving? In today's commercial environment where do they need to receive more value? Let's use Dale Carnegie as the example. We may think we sell sales training. However, what company buyers want is to receive greater per head sales revenue outcomes from their salespeople. In fact, we need to sell outcomes and our training services are the tool to achieve that. Let's see some examples of our USPs Dale Carnegie Training has been in operation since 1912. We think that is terrific and important, but the client doesn't care about that. In Japan, in particular, what they do care about is risk reduction. We need to emphasise that our track record of 109 years provides the Japanese buyer with the sense that our company has a solid track record, so therefore, we are more trustworthy as a result. "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" was a fantastic ad tag line in the 1970s and this is the real USP for us not the 109 years. If you have longevity as a business in Japan, what is your real USP in your case? We teach 90% of the Fortune 500 companies. Again, "so what" from the buyer's point of view. The essence of the USP is that these Fortune 500 companies are the richest and most powerful companies and they can choose whoever they want to provide training services. The fact that they choose Dale Carnegie is an indication that the biggest organisations have done their due diligence and like what we do, so we are a safe choice. Remember, nobody wants to be first to try something in Japan, so this precedent idea is a winner here. Can you marshal your biggest clients as proof that there is a safe precedent to buy from you? We have offices in 100 countries. This is another "so what" potential reaction from clients. We need to point out that because of our global network, we can deliver training wherever the client is located. Further, we can do it in the language and cultural context of that society, ensuring the best reception of the training content. Do you have global capacity, so that buyers can have a global one-stop shop solution when using you? How are you framing your USP around this point? Our trainers are required to complete 250 hours of train-the-trainer content before they can be certified by Dale Carnegie and be allowed to instruct. The point is to mention that this whole process takes about a year and a half and only the most motivated and dedicated people are willing to put themselves through this rigorous process. This is why we can claim our trainers are the "best of the best". The hours are not the key – the selection process is the key. What processes do you have in place to assure the client that the people serving them are extremely well selected and well trained. You may be doing both right now, but not thinking to mention it to the client as a USP differentiator in the market. The point of the USPs is to differentiate what we are doing from our competitors and give the client the comfort that they are making a wise decision in choosing us to provide the solution to their problems. Have your USPs changed since Covid started? Are they polished, shiny and sparkling, ready to impress the buyer? It is time to revisit and rework them as we move glacially toward a post-Covid business world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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