The Sales Japan Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So far, we have dealt with making the cold call to get a meeting, building trust, getting permission to ask questions, using a four step structure to get information about what the client needs. Now we deal with how to present our solution. In the face to face world, after asking all of these questions and deciding we can actually help this client, we would go back to the office and put together our proposal, outlining our solution for them and the price. Given how hard people are to catch these days, if we were well organised and smart, we will have already locked down the date and time for our next call, during this meeting. In the next meeting, we can share our screen with the client. The client may want the proposal before hand. Do not do that. When they get it, what do they do? They go straight to the last page, idly skipping over all the bits where you have laboriously explained the value of your solution. They are now solely focused on price to the exclusion of the value you will bring to their business. No, no, no. We don't want that, so resist sending it until after your online meeting. In a face to face meeting, we would be nuts to hand over the proposal document at the start, because they will go straight to the last page. In person or online, we need to walk them through the document, so that we keep control of the navigation, the pace and the build of our argument, as to why they need our help. If we were sitting in front of them, we would swivel the document around, so that we are holding it on the table facing them, so that they can easily read it. We take our expensive pen and we point to the bits where we want them to look, when we want them to look at them. This is vitally important, because we are doing a number of critical steps at this moment. If we are online, then we are showing our page and we have the onscreen pointer to show where they should be looking, as we control the page advancement. We take them through the context. We check for understanding around whether we have fully grasped their situation and their needs. If we have this wrong, then we need a new proposal and we need to know that, before we proceed any further. Presuming we have understood them correctly, we now move on to explaining our solution. Before we do that, we give them our capability statement, summarising that we have the capacity to meet their needs. This lets the buyer know that we have understood what they want and that we have the means and the capacity to meet their requirements. If that wasn't the case, well we wouldn't be holding this meeting in the first place. So at this point before we go into the detail of the solution, we need to make it explicit that we are confident in our ability to help them. They told us where the gap was between where they are now and where they need to be and what is holding them back from bridging that gap by themselves. We explain in detail how we can bridge that gap for them. When we do this, we start with the details of the solution – the data, the facts, etc. But clients don't buy facts. They buy the application of the benefits of our solution. So before we get to that part of the explanation, we start going through the detail of the benefits and how these align with their needs. In particular, we connect back that question about what is in it for them personally. We might say, "you mentioned that the team will feel good if the outcome is achieved. With this solution, they will be able to hit their targets more quickly and easily. They will really appreciate that you helped them to do that". We then go into the full detail on how the benefit will work inside their company when applied. This explanation of the applied nature of the broad benefit is what they want to hear about. This is very, very important, because a benefit by itself, can seem rather abstract. We need to anchor it to the concrete actions to be taken and the specific outcomes to be achieved inside their workplace, so that they can mentally visualise the results. Having piled on the concrete benefits to their business, we now scroll down the screen to the pricing attached to enjoying these benefits. Which, by the way, is always referred to as the "investment" and never as the "price", when we are talking with buyers. Because we have been controlling the flow of information, by the time they get to this page, they are fully aware of the value we will bring. The cost is now in context for them, rather than being a set of isolated figures on a page, cast off from the value we bring. Now it is the time to go for the trial close. We want to flush out resistance, hesitations, further questions and objections at this point. It is always amazing that even after carefully walking buyers through this process, they sometimes ask questions that tell you, they haven't properly grasped what you have been telling them. You could say to yourself, "boy, this buyer is really dumb". However, you are better to question you

The Cold Calling On Zoom Salesperson - Part Three In Parts One and Two we looked at the early stages of the cold call, getting rapport established and then asking for permission to delve deep into the client's situation. The initial questions we need answers to are either "what is your current situation?" or "where would you like to be with the business?". We are searching for a floor and a ceiling. We want to know how things are travelling at the moment and what they aspire to achieve. Why do we need a floor and a ceiling? The perceived distance between the two tells a lot about our prospects of making a sale. If the gap is felt by the client to be very close, sadly, they will imagine that they are fully capable, given time, of getting to where they want to be unaided. On the other hand, if the gap is large and they have realised they can't bridge it by themselves, then they are possibly open to our help. Even if they believe they can do it by themselves, the salesperson's job is to demonstrate that it will take longer, cost more or divert valuable resource to do it that way. Ergo, they are better off using our solutions. Now the client presumes the cost of doing nothing, of taking no action, is zero. That is absolutely, inescapably, inextricably untrue. Never allow a buyer to harbour such a toxic lie in their mind. The salesperson has to point out the weighty and substantial opportunity costs of no action. They also need to emphasis the value they personally bring to the equation. They buy the company's solution and the salesperson comes free, to support the buyer. Often companies get to a point where they see the floor and ceiling gap and think they can do it themselves, but in fact they never get around to doing it at all. Different personnel changes interfere with the progress or the resources for this project are overwhelmed by the need to focus on another more pressing priority. In retrospect, if they had used us, it would have been done already and they would be enjoying the benefits right now, instead of constantly procrastinating about starting the project internally. This is the sort of practical insight the salesperson must be explaining to the over confident buyer, who imagines they don't need to outsource this project. Once we know the floor and the ceiling, next we need to know the construction of the mezzanine floor separating the two. This is the hideous barrier between floor and ceiling, separating top and bottom. If the client knows where they are now and they know where they want to go, then we need to ask them why they aren't there already? This is the millions of dollars in salesperson commissions question. Yet, incredibly salespeople are not even asking this question of the buyer! We need to know about this barrier. What is the thing missing for them to get to where they want to go. Hopefully, we are the one to supply that missing solution to their problem. We could ask sweetly, "so far, you have mentioned to me where the business should be and where it is today. May I ask you, what has been stopping your company from bridging that gap as yet?". Oh, excellent question. A veritable bonanza of a question. This is the entry point for us, from where we can inject our solution for them into their business. Next we investigate the buyer's own most fervently held desires, the thing that excites them the most, the major driver of all they ever do and think about. What is in it for them personally, if this solution works like a charm and delivers the goodies? Some may protest and claim this is too mercenary a view, but I think self interest drives us all. In a western company, the typical answers to this question would be, "I will keep my job", "my boss will be happy", "I will get a pay rise", "I will receive a big bonus". In Japan, the answers are more likely to be less about themselves personally and more indirect, "the team members will be happy", "the company will succeed", "we will be respected inside the organisation". We were able to get all of this key information in Japan for one simple reason. We asked for permission to ask questions first and then we asked structured questions to help us understand the problem and whether we had a matching solution or not. We told the buyer that "maybe" we could help them, that we "weren't sure until we asked them a few questions". This is a such a simple step missed by 99.99% of Japanese salespeople, because they are too busy pitching to ask questions and are terrified to question the buyer, aka "God". Now we are forced to make a very important decision. Should we work with this buyer? Are we actually able to help them solve their problem or not. Feverishly desperate, commission starved salespeople will quickly drive the square peg into the round hole. They will get one deal and blow up the brand and their own reputation in short order. The deal won't deliver for the buyer, so there are no reorders and just lots of pain left lying around. If we can

The Cold Calling On Zoom Salesperson - Part Two In Part One we looked at how to get a meeting when you are cold calling and cannot meet the buyer face to face. When working the phones, cold calling salespeople have a very low conversion rate of turning dials into actual meetings. The same barrier stays in place because we still need to use the phone to speak to the buyer, to make a virtual meeting appointment. If we can design a good enough hook, to get the initial phone contact interested on the phone, then they will take a risk and transfer us or connect us with the buyer. This is the hook value versus the personal risk equation in Japan. That equation usually ensures salespeople almost never get put through to the buyer. The person answering the phone concludes the risk/reward computation is not worth the effort. If lightening strikes and you do manage to get the buyer name and contact details, or are transferred through to them, then what do you do? We repeat the whole hook delivery approach directly with the buyer again. Having successfully arranged the online meeting, we come on line and meet them for the first time. This can be a a hostile environment. In the meeting room we have their full and undivided attention, but online is a different matter baby. American research shows that 88% of salespeople believed that buyers were multitasking during their sales presentation and not paying full attention. Also 62% of buyers didn't even turn their cameras on and in fact, 82% of salespeople didn't have the guts to ask the buyers to turn on the camera. This is our first impression opportunity with the buyer, so we want that camera on. We should definitely ask them to come on camera. Just say, "Thank you for joining me today, please come on camera and allow me to introduce myself". Being Japan, we may get a certain percentage of buyers who will push back on that and say, "I prefer the camera off". That is not a good sign. We have few choices but to soldier on and do our best, but I would take that as a very negative buying signal right there. Presuming they do cooperate and come on camera or are already on camera, what are they discovering about us? Were we punctual, trustworthy, on time and online before they joined? Do we look professional, dressed in our business battle gear? Do we have the camera situated at eye height, rather than zooming up our own nose? Are we talking to the camera lens rather than looking down at their image on screen? Are we speaking fluently with no hesitations like um and ahs, being concise and clear in our communication. Do we sit up straight, away from the back of the chair, projecting confidence and credibility through our body language? Do we have an additional light source in front of us, which overcomes the other lights in the room and lights our face separately, so that we appear very crisp on screen? Have we wrestled our background into submission and eliminated anything that is a distraction or destroying our credibility, like giving the buyer a peek into a very messy room. There are some basic rules in selling in person and online and building rapport is a good place to begin the sales process. We repeat the hook and explain why we are meeting. We then segue into something like this, "So much has changed, so quickly and February feeling like a million years ago to me. By the way, how have you found working from home rather than the office?". We do this because we have been doing all the talking so far and now we want to encourage them to start talking to us. After listening to them, we express some empathy with what has been their experience. Now we come to a vital component of the sales call. We seek their permission to ask questions. In our case, we would say this, "We started the company in 1912 and have been in Japan for 57 years now and have been active across all major industries here. We have worked with XYZ in your industry. What they really liked was the fact that we could produce increases in revenues above 20% in a three month period. Maybe we could do the same for you? I am not sure, but in order for me to understand if that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked a few questions?". Here we have started with a broad statement about who we are, why we are differentiated from our competitors and what we do for clients. We then provide concrete evidence of where we have been successful with their competitors. We do not say we can "definitely" help them, as Americans are taught to do in sales. We specifically say "maybe". We do this to sound less pushy. Also, in truth, until we ask them some questions, we actually have no idea if we can help them or not. Finally, we seek their permission to ask a "few" questions. This implies it won't be too many questions or take up a lot of their valuable time. Ironically, if there is some interest there, then it could become quite a lot of questions and take quite a lot of time. When there is interest though, the buyer wo

The Cold Calling On Zoom Salesperson – Part One Cold calling is always a subject of great debate and interest. I have been doing podcasts for the last seven years and episodes which feature the subject of cold calling, always get a lot of downloads. When I re-purpose these episodes as blogs on Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook these posts will certainly have people leaving comments. Many buyers are locked away at home, or in the office, but not receiving visitors. How can we cold call companies who we have deduced are a perfect match for our solutions? The arrangements are not that different. We call their company general number, the person answering the phone gives us the bum's rush and abruptly ends the call. We have been unsuccessful in speaking with the buyer. At this point we make one more call and experience the same miserable result. We promptly give up on cold calling clients and find some busy work to take our mind off our incompetence. Do we try to rework our hook to generate interest inside that company, such that we will get transferred to the buyer? No, we just crawl off and lick our wounds. The hook has to exude value for the client company. The buyer may be at home and only receive a message that you called, if you are lucky. If they are in the office, the person answering the phone wants to get rid of you, because they don't want to be criticised for transferring the call and wasting the buyer's time. In most cases, in my brutal experience, Japanese companies won't release email addresses or mobile phone numbers to callers, even when you know the name of the person you wish to reach, let alone cases where you don't have a name. You need toughness in sales and always be clear, they are not rejecting you personally, only your offer. The hook can go like this: "Hello, this is Greg Story from Dale Carnegie Training. Do you have a moment to speak? Thank you. The reason for my call is we have a new solution for 'X' which companies just like yours in the your industry love, because it generates excellent results. By the way, your competitors are very much appreciating the outcomes we are producing for them, so I thought maybe we could do the same for your company. I am not sure if there is a match between the need we are fulfilling and your current needs, but I would like to speak with your head of HR to find out if there is in fact a match. May I ask you to transfer me please?". The structure here is be polite, be clear about who you are and why you are calling. Reference success for others, especially their competitors. Say "maybe" rather than "certainly", because it comes across as less hard sell. Ask to be transferred to the right person. Japanese buyers like things which are "new" and which others are already using. They are also curious about what their rivals are up to. Even with the most appetising hook, the call transfer rate is low. Japanese employees would rather forego their company a business chance or advantage, than possibly make a mistake or get into any trouble. Therefore, the easiest thing in the world for them, is to do absolutely nothing and they are masters at it. Don't worry about rejection and keep calling. You will find a company open to a conversation with the buyer, but only if you don't quit. Let's assume you finally do get to speak with the buyer. Certainly try to get a face to face meeting. If that is not possible because of anti Covid-19 related company measures, then ask them for an online meeting date and for them to click on the link you will send them, to have the virtual meeting. Make their role as easy and simple as possible, as they may not be familiar with the required tech. When doing this, of course use the alternative of choice approach, rather than suggesting a "yes" or "no" outcome. You can say, "Can I meet you this week or is next week better?. Next week. Then how about Tuesday or Thursday? I see, Friday is better. How about in the morning or do you prefer the afternoon? Morning. Then how about 10.00am. Great I look forward to meeting you next Friday at 10.00am on Zoom. By the way, does your company policy allow meetings over Zoom? I see, how about WebEx. Great. What is the best email address for me to send the link to? Thank you and please look for my email. I look forward to speaking with you again soon". In Part Two, we will go through how to conduct the sales call with the potential new client. Selling virtually, actually has some advantages over selling in person. All will be revealed in the next instalment.

The Ubiquitous Meishi Exchange and Event Networking - Are They Now Dead? As the President of my company in Japan, it is almost impossible for me to cold call Japanese companies. If a Japanese prospective client got a cold call from the President of another company, they would immediately be suspicious of that organisation. Why does the President have to make cold calls? What sort of company is this, they don't sound very sizeable, stable or credible? Consequently my modus operandi, to date, has been to be the Tokyo King of Networking. I would happily go off to many events, work the room, exchange meishi with as many people as I could get to, in the time available. I would get there early and visually scan all the name cards lined up outside the room to see who was coming. Who did I already know (so I wouldn't forget their name) and who did I want to get to know? I would start early and stay late. I would ask one simple, subtle qualifying question in order to know how to approach this company representative. Lockdown put the sword to that little niche sales play of mine. Everyone was at home, organisations who used to sponsor networking events, only hold their meetings online these days. Even in post lockdown Tokyo, there are still no networking events being held. Organisers are not confident enough they can secure the safety of their guests, to invite them to come to a room and mingle with potentially asymptomatic strangers. The punters themselves are not confident to go into a confined room, with a bunch of other people and potentially be exposed to the virus. The online meetings being held are not networking events. They are information events, usually with speakers and a moderator and limited Q&A. There is no possibility for me to meet the other participants on the call. Is this going to change anytime soon? I don't think so and even when meetings are held again, they will be quite different. Social distancing will place a physical limitation on how many people can attend the event, at any one time. Shaking hands, which is a well established business custom, designed to project reliability, confidence and trust, will be out of bounds. Even exchanging meishi may not be allowed nor welcomed. You have to stand relatively close to the other person to do that exchange. Also our grubby fingers are touching the card. When we are on the receiving end, we are touching their grubby bit of paper as well. Maybe we don't want to risk transferring the virus, via meishi exchange, any more. Is the meishi going to become a relic of the past? Can we connect electronically instead? Anyone remember "Bump", a discontinued app which electronically exchanged our business contact details on the spot at a networking event? Years ago, I remember offering my meishi to a young, thrusting American businessman. With a disparaging flourish, he whipped out his mobile phone and told me he doesn't "do meishi anymore". He explained to this old geezer, that he could connect with me via this cool West Coast app called Bump. I installed it, but I didn't really warm to it. The ceremony of receiving someone's meishi is a tradition in Japan. I decided to stick with the accepted way of doing business around here. Bump is no more, discontinued in 2014, but several apps have surfaced such as iCheck, Camcard, PiQy, Eight, and Shoot. Some of the available apps are scanning technologies, which still require an actual meishi, but others do offer a real "no physical touch" information exchange. Thanks to Covid-19, these and other similar apps, may get a new lease of life now. By the way, if you know of something good for this old Luddite, please share the love around and let me know!! For someone in my position, sadly, there is no real alternative for replacing networking as a niche activity, to tap into potential clients. I don't think networking is no more, passed on, expired, dead or about to disappear forever. Until it comes back though, there are plenty of existing clients to contact. This is most likely going to continue to be by phone or video call. It may be sometime before we are in a position to hightail it over to the client's office for a physicaly distanced, face to face encounter. Unlike me, my sales team can continue to cold call potential clients. It works well, because you can go direct to the decision-maker. On some occasions though, we find the target company has turned the gate keeper loose in the office. They are still acting as an unreconstituted, cold call killer, so we get short shrift on that front. This sales life continues to be character building.

Presenting Your Sales Materials Remotely Sitting in that tight, too cosy meeting room, opposite a throng of buyers, is now a figment of our fevered salespeople's imaginations. We were able to whip out our brochures, flyers, catalogues, corporate propaganda with frivolous abandon. Today we are sitting at home or the client is sitting at home and now this is a one to one conversation. We have been geared up for in person client meetings, where our physical marketing assets were chosen for their maximum impact. Beautiful four colour pages, sharp photographs, compelling diagrams and graphs, carefully manicured text. I know it is hilarious, but I am sure you have seen webinars, where some rather ambitious person is holding up their paper document in their hand in front of the camera, to make their point. Remarkable stuff really, although pretty delusional at the same time. There is no certainty that we will still be able to just flourish our flyers in the buyer's face and get the deal done. We may find that time spent with buyers remains an online experience, as companies ban outsider visits or individuals stay closeted at home from fear of contagion. Even if we do get to meet them, the time allotted may be curtailed to a stringent fifteen minutes. In this case, all the propaganda has either been delivered across to the buyer, or we are required to send the soft copies well in advance of the meeting, for the buyer to be able to survey our goods. Remember our Rule Number One is never give the buyer your flyer, catalogue, brochure or whatever. You hold that baby firm, arranged upside down to you, so that the buyer can easily read it. Using your expensive pen as a pointer, you scrupulously guide them to where you want them to look. All of this is now out the window, many of the rules of sales have been trashed and the buyer is looking all over the place and at no place in particular, because it is all gobbledegook to them. In the online situation, we need to be guiding them to the page and the section where we want them to look. That may mean loading up everything that might possibly be needed before the meeting, on to the platform we will be employing. We should then open the soft copy of the relevant document, and we should be controlling the page advancement and the document selection. Once we get to the place on the page we want to highlight, we should be placing our pointer, circling, drawing or underlining where we want them to note. With the technology available today this is easy. Two popular platforms - WebEx and Zoom - both allow the uploading of documents and we can transform any on-screen document into a virtual whiteboard, allowing us to scribble all over it. This requires you master the medium and be competent to wield the on-line tools with flair and confidence. If we make the most of the tech and we draw some procurement interest, the buyer may ask us for a proposal. Remember Rule Number Two. Never send the proposal in advance. This advance document reconnoitre by the buyer usually leads to no sales taking place, as they are zeroing in on the money and remain contemptuous of the value. Typically, the buyer will go straight to the last page, chasing the cash flow killer imposts. They simply ignore the carefully crafted value statements spilling over the edges, inside the rest of the proposal. That sale's rule is out the window too. Today, we have no choice, we have to show them the document, but please take careful note - we don't have to send it in advance. We should arrange the online meeting, and reveal the document page by page, as we walk them through it. We can send the whole thing over later as an email attachment, but critically we must control the explanation of what the proposal says. We write the proposal with complete knowledge of what we are saying. Often, however, the reader cannot grasp the meaning as we intended it. That is why we need to be there, supervising their understanding. Normally we would do that face to face in the meeting room. We still need to do it, if we want a sale and now we just move across to the virtual room. By walking them through the document, we can highlight the key points. They can read the screen for themselves, but our job is to highlight key attributes, justifying the price tag at the end. The value is poured on first and then like a wizard, we enfold the pricing in the context of our explanation. A piece de resistance of copy writing, logic, emotion and logistics. In the vaccine deprived world of Covid-19, actually being in the same room as the buyer may not be a possibility anymore, so we must adjust. Darwin didn't talk about the survival of the strongest. He talked about the triumph of those species which can best adapt to survive. The salesperson species must adapt or many of us won't survive.

Covid-19 Triggers Tough Negotiations (Part 2) In Part One we looked at some of the key basics in negotiating: Our Position The Client's Position Our Analysis What We Will Present How Will We Bargain What Should Be In The Agreement These are all the things we can control on our side but obviously we have to be ready for how the other side will approach the negotiation. In business in Japan, the idea of a win/lose negotiating outcome would be a very short-term view of the relationship. Actually , there wouldn't be a relationship, as the business would be purely transactional and would end fairly quickly. Japanese companies are looking for long term partners they can trust. A negotiation is just the details of the business conducted within the broader confines of the relationship. If things change then Japanese companies expect the seller to make adjustments as well, regardless of what is written down in the contract. The relationship is the central piece not the contract. Having said that though, when we are talking about big deals and lots of money, the contRact confines become a lot more important and lawyers and courts get involved to sort it out. In Part Two we will look at some Negotiating Tactics to get us to an agreement. These are not designed to trick or fool the other side. That makes no sense, if you are approaching the negotiation from a partner building perspective. These are just some tactics to help move the agreement process along. The walk away option Establish your BATNA - Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement. We need to decide at what point we will leave the negotiating table, if the client is unreasonable. Not every business discussion is destined to establish a partnership. The selection of a long time partner, either in marriage or in business is never easy or certain. Sometimes the best decision is to decide not to become partners, but we need to identify the tipping point where we will determine this isn't a deal to be had. Silence The pressure of silence can cause people to make concessions or offer up valuable information we can use in the negotiation. This is most often used by the Japanese side in the negotiation, as they have learnt that foreigners cannot bear a long silence and will want to speak up to fill the airwaves. Learning to sit there and shut up, is a skill we have to master in the negotiating process with Japanese companies, no matter how much it is killing us. Authority to negotiate We mention we need to refer the offer to a higher authority in the company This can buy time or let things cool down if they get heated. Japanese companies usually have a collective of divisions who will be affected by the negotiated agreement and often these groups, being absent from the negotiating table, need to be consulted. We might misinterpret the reference to others to make the decision to be a ploy, but actually it may well be the case on their side. This process may also have intensified, as companies have come under greater financial pressure, thanks to the business disruptions caused by the virus. Ultimatum This is a deal/no deal decision point, similar to the walk away. Having previously decided the breakoff point, we can suggest that the other side either accept this provision in the agreement or all bets are off. It is human nature to be greedy and push the other side to try and get the best deal for your side. Covid-19 may be pushing people harder to get a better deal than before, so it becomes a win for them and a semi-win for you. This is when you call them on it. Our landlord is the giant Mori Building company and when we looked at the space initially, the rent pricing was too high. They gave me their offer and I told them that if they couldn't get it down to a certain number then forget it and I walked away. I was amazed to get a phone call a few weeks later accepting my counter offer. Persuade We add value to sweeten the deal to get them to agree. Sometimes there are things we have which won't cost us a lot of money internally, which we can offer to the client which has high value for them. It might be additional research reports, surveys, consulting services, part payments, delayed payments etc. Time pressure We deliberately shorten the decision-making period to force an answer. Pareto's principle says that "work expands to fill the time", ipso facto, the work compresses if we diminish the time in the negotiating process. Japanese companies are highly risk averse, but they are also often paranoid about their competitors stealing a march on them. If they think that the opportunity may be lost and therefore benefit a rival, they may be more induced to get to a decision. Delay or Inactivity We slow things down. We don't respond as quickly to their communication. This is similar to the "silence" tactic. It would be rare that we would use this with a Japanese company, because they are already world leading experts in going slowly themselves and never feel much pressur

Covid-19 Triggers Tough Negotiations (Part 1) Clients who are now suffering will shortly make you suffer too. They will be much more price sensitive and cautious than before. They are reading the same newspaper articles and watching the same news programmes you are, where it is all doom and gloom right now and the same prospect for going forward. In 1929, everyone stopped spending and unfortunately that included the governments around the world. This time we are better informed and the Japanese government is trying to prop up the economy. Clients may have not spent the lockdown boning up on economic history, so they may have forgotten some of the hard won lessons of the past. In Japan, the safest option is to do nothing, at any point in time and particularly so in a crisis. That means sales are going to be hard to come by and the previously agreed pricing is going to be on the table for renegotiation. Are you ready for that? Let's go over the basics again, so we are ready and able to join the conversation with the buyer and not get killed. Before getting into any negotiations, we need to specify the following items: Our Position What are some of the features and details of our offering, which we consider are negotiable items? In a realistic appraisal of the "New Normal", what would now comprise our ideal outcome? Given things look like the virus may get contained a long way ahead of the recovery from the economic damage, what would constitute a realistic outcome? If we can't get what we want, can we get what we need and if not, what is our fallback position? The Client's Position What do we imagine the client's fallback position will look like during Covid-19 and in it's immediate aftermath? We must try to identify what, from a client point of view, would be a realistic outcome for them? Putting ourselves in their moccasins, what do we suppose would be the client's ideal, realistic negotiation result? Our Analysis We should start looking for alternatives and ways to add value. Things have changed, so we need to get busy discovering the client's new positions and new interests. Everyone is feeling stressed so we should be sensitive to reframe conversations so as to avoid confrontation What We Will Present Prepare the client's case as though it were ours, for this current crisis situation. We should put a lot of effort into presenting value added alternatives, to head off buyer resistance and sales offer rejection. Link your excellent solution to the client's current positions and vested interests How Will We Bargain In the face of Covid-19 and the resultant global economic meltdown, identify exactly what are your ideal, realistic and fallback positions in the negotiation. Respond to harsh or tricky client tactics, rather than reacting to these new approaches by the client, as they try to drive your pricing into the ground. Communicate your suggestions and proposals in ways which are easy to agree with and hard to reject. What Should Be In The Agreement Specify all points of agreement during the negotiations, in order to head off future trouble. When clients are in survival mode, we often find the Marquis Of Queensbury rules have been tossed out the window. Things can cut up rough. That means we need to put every agreement into writing, so that there is a record and clarity around what was agreed. Create a checklist and schedule for order fulfillment that both sides are in agreement with and get that signed off. Sales is a demanding profession when the economy is working and a nightmare when it is crashing. We may have had agreements and price points set in the past, but that is now ancient history. We don't want to be discussing post lockdown business with the client and get waylaid by stiff demands to "improve" our price point, terms, conditions etc., or else!

Salespeople Should Start Preparing For V-J Day At what point will things get back to some semblance of normality? It is a bit like trying to pick the bottom of the current stock market drop. We won't know until after the event, but it will happen. The Covid-19 numbers in Tokyo are gradually coming down, the lockdown in most prefectures has already been partially released. We are not talking aeons here. Actually, we are now talking days until the official lockdown will end. Yes, there will be restrictions, but for all of us, it is that great feeling you get when you stop bashing your head against a wall. Okay, none of us has ever bashed our head against a wall in our entire lives, but we all get the general idea. The pain point has either reached peak or must be close now for a lot of companies. That means that the sleeping giant that is the Japanese economy will gradually tear off the thethers that have enveloped it and we will be able to get the wheels of commerce driving forward again. As salespeople, are we going to wait for the all clear siren to sound or are we going to get going now, in anticipation of Victory Japan Day in our war with the virus? Our clients are gradually emerging from their fetal positions and starting to look around them, wondering how to get things rolling again. Guess what? We are right here to help them do that. There will be pent up demand, there will be fresh demand, there will be no demand. We need to be talking to our buyers to determine which category they fall into. I would guess that nothing will be done on our timetable based on what we desire, as far as rebooting revenues go, but that is definitely the light at the end of the tunnel which we can see. The broad commercial downturn will have either mortally wounded some of our competitors or at least given some of them seriously debilitating flesh wounds. We may be carrying a few of those ourselves. The survivors though, are self-selecting to serve clients and clients themselves are going to be happy that we have survived, because they like dealing with companies which are reliable and dependable. Basically, they like winners. We should get the entire sales team charged up to hit the phones, pound hard on the keyboards and get cracking contacting all of our clients to get a pulse check going, on how far out of hibernation they have emerged. There will be early, middle and late contenders for celebrating V-J day, but the point is we want to be the one having that celebratory conversation, not our competitors. One of the downsides of this process of emerging to fight another day, is our own mental framework. We may be scarred ourselves from the lack of commissions, mental stress, the grinding pressure, the moronic beatings handed out by idiot bosses or demonic buyers. We will now be unleashing the equivalent of a massive cold calling campaign, as we get in touch with inactive buyers. They haven't been available or ready to speak and here we are, all preppy and bristling with desire to do a deal. For many buyers that won't fly, as they may be emerging very gracefully from their industry chrysalis. However, by casting a broad net, we will pick up those beautiful butterflies ready to move or those who at least are ready to make a plan for a move. Japanese companies love the intricacies of the planning function and for many months, their planners have left their favourite weapon in their holster. They may be getting ready to do a quick draw and get back to work on their responses for navigating this U-shaped recovery. We need to be at their side to help them do just that. Perhaps things won't spring back quickly, but they will come back. Are we ready to go? The game may have changed in many industries. What was possible before is now out of bounds. Alternatively, what wasn't considered kosher before now gets a look, as the world has changed for them. The key is to know what they are thinking, what they are seeing, what they are planning. If you are not doing this, your still extant competitors will be doing it. Make sure you, not they, are the one gorging on the business feasts to be had, following V-J day.

Covid-19 Or Not, You Still Have To Master Client Objections 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. Here is a five step process for handling client push back on our offer. Listen 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 wait to hear them out and really understand what is the problem, not what we think is the problem. Use a cushion When we hear the objection we often 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 issue 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 professional objection handling mode rather than reacting emotionally to what was said by the client. Question The first thing we should do is not respond to what we heard. Instead we should ask them why that objection is a problem. What 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. An objection is often shorthand for a much more complex set of reasoning as to why they are not going to buy from us. We need the complex version not the abbreviated headline. Respond Now we know what we need to say and we have three choices: Deny: Do not accept anything from the client which is factually incorrect or is misinformation. Correct it immediately and be prepared to offer proof. Admit: Admit any problems your company has had now or in the past. Don't try and deny things which are true, we just seem untrustworthy. Reverse: Turn the objection into a reason for buying. When we respond we need to consider the interests of the buyer – who are they? We need to be talking about things from their point of view. Are they the Executive Buyer looking at the big picture, the Financial Buyer looking at the cashflow, the Technical Buyer worried about the spec or the User Buyer worried about reliability and ease of use? We need to ask more questions because we have missed something: What is their primary interest – the thing they are trying to achieve, their buying criteria – budget, timing etc., other considerations – payment terms, delivery times, warranties and their buying motive – what will it mean for the client if the solution works well? Now we have better understood the client's situation and needs, we start again to persuade them to buy. We need to provide proof and evidence that shows what we claim is true and they can trust the solution will work. Evaluate Check that we have dealt with their objection completely. Are they ready to move forward? If not find out why and work on that issue. We may be in lockdown, but the basics of sales have not changed. Clients will have all sorts of reasons why they don't think they can buy from us right now. How we deal with their pushback differentiates the dilettante from the professional.

Typically we speak at 150-200 words per minute but we can listen at up to 600 words. We have excess capacity and sometimes our concentration strays and we stop really listening to others. We might be thinking instead about what we want to say or what point we need to bring up. Have you noticed this about yourself? We miss a lot of valuable information when we are not fully listening to others. We have to hear with our eyes, watching their body language and we have to listen for the tone with which they deliver the words. Sounds reasonable, except today, we are trying to do all of this via a small screen with bad audio. Even worse, the person we are talking to is trapped in a little tiny box dangling in the screen corner. There are three levels of listening. Which one are you demonstrating, when you are on-line Distracted The on-line audio quality isn't all that great yet, which makes it even harder to hear what is going on. We are also possibly thinking so much about something on our side, we are not really paying close enough attention to the client. We find we may have missed some key details and we may be ignoring the nuance of what we are being told. We cannot concentrate well at home, because the kids are running riot. We could also be thinking about the brilliant thing we are going to say next. The upshot is, in reality, we are just pretending to be listening. On-line is even more deadly too. While the other person is speaking, we may be multi-tasking in the background, like a demon on speed, making the whole conversation clarity even more fraught. Selective This is very typical for salespeople most of the time, on-line or otherwise. We are listening for words or phrases that indicate we can advance the sale. We tend to tune everything else out and just listen for what we want to hear. The issue with this is that clients may have subtle concerns which we need to address, but we are not even aware of them, because we missed the hints they were giving us. With everyone at home or having only half the team in the office, client companies internal communications can also be disrupted. We need to pay close attention to find out how they are operating their approval system in this Covid-19 lockdown environment. Attentive When we are attentive, we are 100% focused on what the client is saying. We are not cutting their sentences off or finishing their sentences for them. We are allowing them to tell us and we are taking it all in. If we speak while they are speaking on-line, no one can hear anything of what was said. We need to really avoid this. If we have an idea or thought, we can just jot it down in short form and keep listening, knowing that we can bring it up later. At this level, we can become empathetic to what they client wants, because we have fully understood all the nuances around what they want and how they are thinking about business at the moment. Here are 8 Listening Principles to apply to our daily work with clients. Maintain eye contact with the camera Don't always look at the screen, when they are talking. Instead, wherever possible, look at the camera on your computer. It is a bit weird though, because they appear to us on screen about 10-15 centimeters below the camera. We have to ignore the screen version and look straight at the camera when they speak. What they will see, is us looking straight at them, following carefully what they are saying. Observe body language for hidden messages Our body language can tell a lot, because we may be saying one thing but showing something quite different. On screen it is not easy, but we have to observe the client's body language and also control our own at the same time. Even on small screen versions, you can see changes in client body language, if you pay close enough attention and you should. The remote environment is starving us of feedback, but we have to do our best. Do not interrupt, finish the client's sentences or change the subject Salespeople are desperate at the moment. Sometimes we may want to move the conversation along so that they decide to buy from us. We need the client to feel fully understood though and the best way to do that is shut up and listen to them without breaking in. If you are a chronic interrupter of clients, when speaking face to face, the chances are you will bring this into the remote world as well. Don't do that. 4 Listen empathetically This requires supreme concentration. We are not just listening to the words we are listening to the emotions behind the words. We are trying to see it from the client's point of view. Fathoming the intricacies of the client's current world through a little box on screen is a nightmare, but we have to try. Rephrase what you heard We often make mistakes in daily conversation, misinterpreting what someone said. We usually had something in our mind which was overriding what our ears were hearing and so we make errors in the follow up or the next steps. Some clients are not so articulate

Covid -19 Sales University Living in Brisbane, I would commute to and from work by car listening to audio tapes on business subjects like sales, customer service, negotiating, speaking skills, etc. Moving back to Japan in 1992, I continued commuting to work and continued to turn my vehicle into a university on wheels. It is amazing how much you can learn from listening to smart people, with rich experience and fresh ideas. In those ancient days, we didn't have YouTube, podcasts or the internet like today. I used to buy big bulky plastic box collections of audio tapes and play them in the car while commuting or on a Walkman while I was running in the mornings. Fast forward to lockdown city and here are all these salespeople sitting around with a swarm of irritants, difficulties, obstacles, disappointments and frustrations enveloping them. Clients are tucked up at home and not buying. Companies are having their share prices gutted, whole industries are being vanquished, unemployment levels surge as we go into mental lockdown about purchasing anything. Where is my commission when I can't sell anything? How do I get through the long dog days of nothing to do? It is amazing. We have over 950 videos available for free on our YouTube channel, over 800 podcasts on iTunes and over 1700 blogs on LinkedIn and it is all free. I am not alone. All the major leaders in the field of sales have tons of free content, because we are all converts to content marketing, where we offer our wares for free believing that you will eventually recognise our worth and be prepared to buy something from us. There are endless books available on all aspects of sales, there are self paced adult learning courses, there are MP3 audio programmes – the list just goes on and on. In normal times, salespeople are too busy or too lazy to find the time to further educate themselves. Maybe they got into sales by accident and have never had the concept of investing in themselves to improve their professional abilities, because they don't see it as a profession. This is what they do until they find a "real" job. Full mercy on the buyers who are being served by this miserable excuse for salespeople. Who wants to buy from someone who is not committed to their profession? Who wants to buy an undereducated, low motivation, going nowhere loser? This is the time to start studying. We need to invest in ourselves to read, listen, plan, create. We have the time. In our lifetimes, this sales sabbatical will probably only come once. We should make the most of this time to really go back to the basics, to recapture what has been lost, to reimagine how we can better serve our clients. You can try and work it out by yourself. Or you can access the knowledge of someone who has already done it and done it much better than you would have ever managed. Usually, we all scrape by with a "just in time" equivalent amount of knowledge of the industries we sell into. We don't really devote enough time to grasping the finer details and deeper complexities of the market. We pick up intelligence on the market from our clients. We sit there with that face that wants to portray we do know what they are going through and the exigencies they are confronting, as they duke it out with their competitors. We try to second guess where the market is going even when we have no real clue where the market is today. We can use this time to really educate ourselves on the market. Yes, it is stuck in neutral at the moment, because everything has founded on the Covid-19 shoal. However, that situation won't last forever. What will be the issues facing our clients when they re-emerge from their respective foxholes, once the bombardment has ceased? Are we just going to return to the sales profession, as we were before this virus turned the world upside down or are we going to return more learned and more wise than before? What about our product knowledge? It would be a rare salesperson who knows their full product line-up in depth and with mastery. This Is another 'just in time" job, where we maintain the minimum knowledge we can get away with. What if we decided to go for the maximum knowledge possible and used this time to get it done? Now is the time to really learn the full breadth of our line up, so that we can draw on all of the resources we have available to serve our clients. Covid-19 has driven us home, but we don't have to allow it to drive us crazy. We can seize back the initiative and own what we do and how we do it. Studying our craft, mastering our profession makes a lot of sense. The riff raff will just idle their time away and go back to polluting the sales world making it harder for the rest of us to gain client trust. We cannot control what the pond scum do, but we can take command of what we do. So let's go do it!

Managing Client Expectations In Lockdown Working from home is new and difficult for many of us. Sales, in particular, as a profession is such a human to human, knee to knee, face to face business. It is always hard work selling to existing clients, but the difficulty becomes much more magnified when dealing with new clients. This lockdown will not last forever, but this staying at home, remaining isolated, new normal could potentially last much longer. The wheels of commerce must continue or the entire economy will grind to a halt. "In business nothing happens until there is a sale", is an old truth. And we are the ones to go get that sale happening and the economy moving. Typically, salespeople often overcommit their back office capacity to deliver. Salespeople love getting a deal. Discounts are offered up without compunction or need, corners are shaved, outlandish promises are made in order to get the deal done. In more normal times, the organisational machine can be called upon to deliver what should have never been promised in the first place. Today though, that may no longer be the case. Supply chains are fragile. With many working at people at home or only a skeleton staff at the office, the coordination and communication issues become fraught. What once would have been easy to fix and to get resources behind, now becomes much harder and takes much longer. Salespeople sometimes assume an arrogant air, looking down their noses at cost center types. This hubris is fake, because the back office team actually perform miracles and make good on the false claims peddled by the salespeople. As we have found in many industries today, although the logistics people are viewed as down at the bottom of the food chain, they are absolutely vital to making the engine run smoothly. As business dries up, salespeople can be tempted to take any deal, make any commitment, to get some revenue and related commissions coming in. This is a slippery slope and one best avoided. Reputations can be lost over the long term, made from decisions based on a short term pain relief perspective. This crisis won't last forever. Clients will re-emerge from their home office purgatory and head back to the office. Life will return to some semblance of normality. How will your reputation fare the bright glare of retrospection of what has happened this year? If you dudded your client, they won't be saying, "well, that's okay, it was lockdown after all". They will hold salespeople to the same standards of service and reliability that they have always demanded. Understanding what new clients need is no simple process, even in the best of times. We can be sitting with them face to face, getting a full read of their body language their voice tone, their eye line, etc. and still have trouble getting a correct understanding of what they expect. When they are on screen, the audio isn't that sharp, and the video quality, though much better than in years past, is still not perfect. This is particularly the case if multiple people are on the call and the screen gallery shot is the client presented in a tiny square on screen, while you are doing the talking. It is almost impossible to get an accurate read on how they are responding to your ideas or your suggestions. You think you have seized upon what they want. Away you go beavering over the proposal as fast as possible to get things moving again. Yet when they react to the detail, they are not happy with it. They have discussed it internally, consulting people you have never met or heard of, cloistered away in the background, as they seek the consensus to move forward. It hasn't met their expectations or standards. How could that be? You were sure you were clear on their context, the details of the need and so crafted this magnum opus in response. If they didn't like it, then find out why. Expect to be shocked that there is a such a gap in understanding. Keep calm, control your massive salesperson ego. Don't mistake the rejection of your carefully crafted proposal as being a rejection of you personally. They may have said rude things in their response, but they are rejecting the offer, not you. As the mafia characters say in the Hollywood movies, just before they put a bullet in your head or mash you with a baseball bat, "this is business, it isn't personal". New clients can sometimes be of the same ilk, putting harsh verbal or written responses to your temple and pulling the trigger. Also remember "no" is never "no" in sales. It is just "no" to this offer, at this point in time, in this budget context, with this construction, with this content. We have to find a way to get to the differences and get to a "yes". Selling and getting new business under the Covid-19 viral cloud is no fun. Everything is harder, sales are fewer, mutual understanding is in short supply. Make a commitment to never trade your reputation for one deal. Don't rage when you feel your professionalism has been unfairly slighted by

Presenting Your Solution On Line In Japan When we sit down with a client for a face to face meeting there are a number of phases to the time together. The initial stage is spent catching up over some small talk on what has been happening for them personally. The conversation is then directed back to business and their current needs. Having heard that, possible solutions are introduced. The client says they will think about it and get back to you. Later based on a followup meeting or an email or phone exchange, the decision to move forward or not is relayed to the salesperson. What about when they are sitting at home and so are we? With the video conferencing technology available today, we can have a face to screen meeting together and pretty much replicate the usual in-office exchanges. Japanese apartments and homes are usually very humble for most salespeople and for their clients too, so there can be some reluctance to reveal too many details of your abode to the client. The kids are also at home with no school, so trying to have a meeting can be fraught with domestic issues as well. We have all probably seen Robert Kelly, an expert on Korean politics being interviewed live for the BBC in 2017. Suddenly his two very young children decide to crash the interview and then the video went viral globally. How about if you are in the middle of your sales conversation with the client and you have the same thing happen to you? There are green screen backgrounds available which provide any background you wish rather than having to show the inside of your home. Or there may be a rather blank background wall where you can set up the laptop. Make sure wherever you set up, that you can raise the camera level on the laptop to your own eye level. Make sure that we are not looking up at you, which can be very unnerving or at the least distracting. Use a headset to get the best possible clarity, because the audio the technology allows is often the weakest link in the process. The clients also understand that only you are privy to what they are saying, which makes the conversation more secure. If the kids come bursting into the video background like John Wayne leading a 5th Cavalry charge over a sand hill, just apologise and excuse yourself for a minute while you relocate them and then return to the video meeting. Clients will understand and I am sure Robert Kelly wishes he had done that at the time too. The video technology allows you to share your screen and show slides and video to the client. Be careful of this attribute. The rule for in the room meeting and for the virtual meeting does not change. Never show the client anything until you have a very clear idea what they want. In person, flogging the client with your product catalogue or pelting them with a flyer storm is the mark of the rank amateur. Moving proceeding to the virtual world doesn't change anything. Keep the visuals in abeyance until the timing calls for their appearance. With flyers and catalogues, it is easy to move to the page or select the flyer when in person with the client. On screen, the slide deck can't be so easily manipulated, so the process of locating the right information is a bit clumsy. Don't hold up physical documents to the camera please – that doesn't work well and makes you look clownish. You can always send the client the information by post and then have another meeting where you can reference page numbers or just send the relevant materials related to the conversation you had previously. When preparing the slide materials try to make sure you animate the slide deck so that the text lines, photos or videos only appear when you click on the mouse. Use video sparingly because it is rarely specific enough for your purposes. We are trying to control how much visual information the client receives at any one point in time. A flyer or a brochure has a lot of information and we would use our pen in person and direct the buyers gaze only to those parts of the page, we want to highlight. We can't do that in the virtual world but we can still look for ways to control the information flow. WebEx allows you to move your pointer to any part of the slide, allowing you to highlight a particular piece of information and that is a handy functionality when selling. Don't forget that whether in person or virtually we can't get trapped at detailing the spec. We have to educate the buyer on the general benefits of your solution and very, very importantly, talk about how these benefits can be applied in their business. When it comes to the evidence component, demonstrating where this has worked for another firm, this is where a video or audio testimonial would be genius if you can organise one. The basics of sales don't change, even if these new mediums for your delivery seem strange and foreign to you. The tech is here for us to utilise, so we need to study about it, as well as about our product line-up. Don't practice on the client. Do sales presentatio

What Can You Do In A Crisis When You Can't Sell? Getting hold of clients has become very strained. Normally, we have their work number and their email, but right now they are sitting at home with just their laptop and their mobile phone. Getting hold of them can be tricky. I was unlucky the other day. I wanted to speak with the Vice President and had sent an email along those lines. Silence at the other end, so I call his company number on his business card. The woman who answered the phone sounded like she was there answering the phone, because she was the least important person in the company. Everyone else more important was sitting safely at home. I asked to speak to the Vice President. "He isn't here at the moment". "Was he working from home?". "Yes". "How about the sales manager, is he in the office?". "Also working from home". "Can I have his mobile number?". "No". This was followed by an uncomfortable silence, as she was not offering any help to ensure the wheels of commerce could continue to turn. Now I was using their names, so it was obvious I knew them. IT didn't matter. In frustration, I went back to sending more emails. If you keep up with the latest news, you realise that business is grinding to a halt. Even if you do get hold of the client, there may be no capacity to purchase your solutions at the moment. In fact, they are laying people off and shutting down production capacity. So what can you do? Sending emails is fine, but very hard to convert into business in this environment. You can't visit clients, because you and they, are all supposed to be staying at home isolating from the virus. Cold calling might be possible, if you can get through. The difficulty of getting hold of decision makers when they are at home goes up dramatically. A few days ago, they were probably still at the office, but now they are at home following the "soft" guidance from the Government. Being Japan and everyone knowing what will happen to you, if you don't do what the bureaucrats say, everyone slips into step and follows the directions. So existing clients are either hard to contact or uninterested and non-clients look like staying that way for some time to come. The chance of your manager actually being able to manage you in this crisis is pretty slim. They usually can't manage anyone in peacetime, let alone in the wartime we face today. You are at home with basically very little to do and the days become very long. Why not use this time to bolster your sales education. I don't mean casual listening to podcasts or watching videos. I mean full on hard core study. Really look at honing your industry knowledge and particularly your product knowledge. There are always products in the line up that you are a bit shaky on for details. Now is the time to get right across the full product line up. We have a training grid, where we line up the customer names across one axis and the products we supply across the other axis. The number of intersections is always super revealing. They are a lot fewer than they should be. We all get shunted into pigeon holes by the buyer and we wind up only talking about a limited range of solutions when we discuss business with them. Here is the chance to be able to broaden those discussions when things get back to some semblance of normality. Sales skills is another area that needs work and you can practice by recording your voice or videoing yourself and then playing it back and refining your delivery even further. We often become Johnny One Note, giving everyone the same basic spiel every time. All you need is your phone as far as equipment goes. Here is the chance to really customise what we can say to clients based on different situations and scenarios. There is an astonishing amount of free education available today. I know, because I am creating it every week myself and so are a lot of other people. Having it available and getting busy really studying it are universes apart. The lazy salespeople will be binge watching multi season shows of their favourites, completely wasting their time. The smarter salespeople will see this current lull as a chance to skill up and be ready to serve clients at a higher standard, when we all get back to business.

Managing A Sales Team In Covid-19 Lockdown Farmers and hunters in your sales team represent a type of harmony in peacetime. But Covid-19 has us all on a war footing and that balance needs to be looked at. Isolation of sales staff at home allows farmers to hibernate. There is nothing happening and they just sit around in their pyjamas, going through the motions, waiting it out, expecting the clouds to pass and the sun to emerge. Of course, they expect to be paid their base salary, despite the tumultuous times. Hunters come into their own, because they understand what it means to be proactive, to shake the tree and make things happen. We can't just ignore them though, leaving them to their own devices and concentrate on the farmers. Everyone needs to be managed in their own way. This is the point – a lot more hands on management is needed, a lot more checking in and checking up, needs to be occupying the sales manager's daily activities. Time management, scheduling regular meetings, frequent reporting sessions become the higher priority items. If there is a big enough list of To Dos on everyone's calendar for the day, then things will happen. The start of the week needs to set the strategy for the week. Who will be doing what, what will be the reporting frequency, how will Key Activity Indicators be tracked – all need to be clear and confirmed with everyone. The daily cadence of contact between the sale's manager and the team needs to be set. Some of these will be group on-line huddles at the start and the end of the day. Other contact will be one-on-one. This means the amount of manager communication time with the team goes through the roof. If you are a player-manager, that will complicate life quite a bit. Your own selling time is substantially diminished, because you need to be driving the team sales process more than in peacetime. That is one of the costs of doing business in lockdown and the adjustment needs to be factored in. Clients are in lockdown too, so the playing field is level. If your rivals are not as well organised as you are, then there is a golden opportunity to steal a march on them. Even if buyers are not buying, that doesn't mean they shouldn't be engaged in sales conversations. Often buyers are operating from a scarcity mind set that blinds them to opportunity. Their needs have changed and they may not be aware of that. You may have multiple solutions, some of which can be activated right now for the client, but they didn't know that about you. We often get into very linear conversations with our clients. We can have trouble getting them to look at the full range of what we can do for them. They have put us into a very narrow box of possibilities. This might be the chance for the sales manager to direct the team to rectify that mighty wrong. When leading farmers, this is the time to make sure they are getting in touch with existing clients and finding out if there are things from your line-up of solutions, which may be of assistance in this particular set of Covid-19 circumstances. They need daily client contact goals and these need to be checked up on at the end of each day. For your hunters, this is the time to make sure they go hard to contact the non-clients. The chances are high that your competitors are sitting around at home in their pyjamas doing very little. The gate keepers may not be able to block your hunters making contact with decision makers, because the bosses are either at the office or at home and are undefended. This needs a strategy session with the hunters, to determine what the approach will be for each case and then getting busy executing that strategy. The sale's manager needs to keep requiring daily reports on their progress – who has been contacted, how many could be spoken with, what was the reaction, etc. All of this is valuable data has to be fed into further refinement of the strategy. There is a lot more micro managing needed in business war time and sale's managers need to make that adjustment, if they want to see any selling being done. Nothing is easy or simple, but so what. Time to get busy leading. Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community. The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e

Selling From Your Home Office Normally we lob up to meet the buyer in their office meeting room. With the buyer and ourselves now working from home, we have to switch gears on how we interact. Usually there are a number of people on the buying side for us to meet and there is no reason why we can't meet them all on-line. The technology today can handle multiple people in the same virtual meeting. We should encourage everyone to attend because we want as many on the decision making side to hear our presentation as possible. It gets a bit tricky though, because other key decision makers are not online in the meeting and we are at the mercy of our champions, to be able to sell our message in the on-line environment. That means we cannot rely on just the virtual meeting to do the selling for us and we need additional documents to be distributed to everyone involved. It also means that the entire process slows down because the buyer team may not be confortable or adept at working on-line. Normally we don't want the buyer looking at our materials while we are talking during the meeting. We want them focused on us and what we are saying and this is the same situation. Don't use the technology to go into a slide show with your commentary, until you know what they want. The temptation is to hammer the buyer with as much information as possible during the meeting. It makes no sense when we are face to face, so the virtual environment doesn't make a virtue of this approach either. Ask good questions, wait for answers and don't feel pressure in the on-line environment to have to keep doing all the talking. Sometimes there is a delay in the audio and the silence can make us uncomfortable. Ask your question and then relax and wait for them to answer. They may be thinking what they want to say. Don't cut them off when they are talking or interrupt them on-line, as the technology doesn't handle this well. Actually we shouldn't be doing it in face to face meetings either, but it creates real dissonance when we are all on-line. In a face to face meeting we can easily go to the relevant materials quickly but on-line there is a bit of potential fumbling around, to get to the right place. You can bring up the slide deck on-line. The slide you want may be in the middle of the document and so you have to spend some time finding it. Just take your time and don't feel any pressure for speed. Just excuse yourself and ask for a minute so you can bring it up. Buyers understand this is an on-line environment and don't expect the same fluency from you that you would normally demonstrate with your materials in a face to face meeting. Because of the impersonal nature of the on-line exchange, make sure to check for understanding with the buyers. The audio isn't always reliable, so it makes sense to allow for that and from time to time summarise what you were saying and check that this was clear. Also, don't feel pressure to do all the work. Remember the ratio of buyer to seller should be 80/20 speaking time, so let them do most of the talking. They may be flat and operating in a monotone when they are on-line, but we shouldn't mirror that approach. Use your energy to add credibility and belief to what you are saying, just as you would in a face to face meeting. Just be careful about speaking too quickly, because the technology can be unforgiving in these circumstances. You may need to pace yourself a little more than normal. Bring your passion though, don't let that slip. Remember, for most on-line technology, the person who is speaking becomes full screen. Get your laptop camera to be at eye height, so the buyers are not getting a great view of your nostrils. Also make sure you have plenty of light on you in the room. At home this may require some rearranging of the environment. You may also have some issues with the background when in shot. Most of the cameras have quite a wide shot, so a lot of stuff gets picked up on screen. Go on line by yourself and check how you look and the room looks, before you do anything on-line with buyers. Some technology allows you to create a virtual background so that the family chaos is not visible. The secret is to practice before you go on-line. You may be very comfortable in face to face meetings, but that skill doesn't necessarily transfer to a virtual sales meeting. Check your skills handling the technology, the lighting, the arrangements etc., and you can record yourself to see how you come across. It is a bit like starting our sales careers over again, but this is a different medium and we need to master it. Free LIVE On Line Stress Management Sessions On a separate note, we are running public LIVE On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered LIVE On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our communi

Selling To Clients On-Line In These Covid-19 Times Covid-19 might actually be good for sales. It might short circuit some of the dumb things salespeople do, when meeting face to face with buyers. With clients reluctant to hold business meetings because of their fears of the contagion from Covid-19, we need to connect to buyers through either phone calls or video calls. With more people working from home, it might be easier to get hold of buyers than normal. They are bound to be in less meetings and will have ample time on their hands because few buyers in Japan yet know how to work properly from home. A lot of people will have not much to do everyday, but avoid colleagues and the other virus bearing individuals. Cold calling can make a great comeback. There are bound to be companies you wish to make customers, but have never been able to pull it off because you couldn't connect with the decision-maker. That buyer is now home alone and undefended. Their stalwart junior office lady who normally answers the phone and swiftly and efficiently dispatches you to the badlands of contact oblivion, isn't in the office, because she is working from home. Or she may be valiantly defending the office from salespeople like you, but her boss is at home. Either way, the drawbridge has been lowered, so time to start cold calling. Don't make the call empty handed. Think of something that you can offer the buyer during these straitened times. It might be on-line industry training or joint advertising or some free services. When you make your cold call, it will be to the company general number. You won't have the decision maker's direct number, in fact, you probably won't even have their name. The person taking the call needs a strong reason from you to pass your number to the buyer or to transfer you to them. They may not be in a position to do anything at the moment when you do make contact, but you have achieved a contact with the decision maker. Hopefully you now have their name, email address or maybe even their mobile number. You might have been able to get them to set up the industry training or some means to engage their team further. If they are an existing customer, then certainly product training would be a good way for their marooned staff stuck at home, to while away the time. In this case you will have the decision maker's name and you may get hold of them at the office because everything is a bit slower at the moment and they are more likely to be available. They know that their workforce are not skilled yet at working from home and that they are not being particularly productive. If you can front up with something that will make the buyer's team more effective, you will get a good hearing. They will appreciate your initiative and your great customer service. By the way, do you want your competitor calling them making their own offer and you are just sitting around moaning about the business downturn and taking no action? The client company is still likely a buyer of products rather than services at the moment. So if you are in that category, it is a good time to call the buyer. They have time to talk to you, to be asked about what they need both now and will need post-Covid-19. Don't bombard them with the on-line version of your catalogue. It makes no sense in the face to face world, until you know what they want. Reproducing the same dopey behaviour on-line is no help. Ask questions first, uncover need and then and only then, introduce your solutions. By focusing on the future it releases the buyer's mind from the worries of the present and allows them the freedom to focus on the next steps. If they are working from home you may find they are happy to speak with you, as they may have been feeling isolated. There is always a silver lining to every cloud, so let's find the silver lining. Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on March 19 (English) and 24th (Japanese) and April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community. The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e

Covid-19 Is Truncating Your Sales Activities, Therefore…. First the agreed purchases were postponed. Then the events were cancelled. Next the sales calls were canned. Buyers are in lock down, many are at home working from there. The economic fallout from the virus is weaving its way into the fabric of the economy, starting with the small and medium enterprises. It won't stop there because this is a global phenomenon like the Lehman Shock. All the little fish around the world stop spending, because they are trying to preserve cash and commerce grinds to a halt. Big fish are not immune, because they depend on the little fish to open their wallets and buy their stuff. The effect is not as immediate as for small companies, but as the damage to small companies adds up, the big guys begin to feel the heat and they stop spending too. Ring a bell with you? Is this going to be a re-run of 1929? Supermarkets and convenience stores are doing well, because people want toilet paper, face masks, alcohol hand cleansers and daily food needs. These suppliers are doing well too, because there is increased demand. However, do you want to go to a department store, eat out at a restaurant, invest in your business, buy an insurance policy, shares, a new car, a holiday, jewellery, clothes, shoes, movie tickets, etc. right now? Maybe not. For B2B commerce, the buyers are not interested in seeing you and are refusing face to face meetings. They are not in a positive mood, because everyone can see we are either already in a recession or are about to enter one, so mentally, it is time for contraction not expansion. How do you sell to people who are not able to buy, because of a mega event like Covid-19? Not every single company is out of the game. Some have strong cash reserves and will weather the storm. Others are in industries, where there is demand and they are generating cash. We all need the very basics - electricity, water, food, etc,. We cannot know each company's individual financial circumstances looking in from the outside, so this cannot be a presumption game, about who we think are okay and who we think can't buy. We need to contact them all. This gets tricky, because unless you have their mobile numbers, it will be hard to reach people who are working from home. The good news is there will be no gate keepers blocking your call to the decision maker. This is actually a golden opportunity to get hold of people you normally cannot speak with so easily. In Japan, though the higher up the totem pole, the less information on their business cards. I was reminded of this the other day. I had been coaching a very senior executive at a large domestic automaker for his speech at the car show in Geneva. He made huge progress and was A Game ready when we finished. Then I read in the newspapers that the Geneva show has been cancelled because of Covid-19. I think I will drop him a note about it, but find no email address on his card. Certainly no mobile number either. So there are limitations to this strategy, but it is still a good one where you can get their mobile numbers. You still have their email addresses, so try and ask for their mobiles so you can talk to them. Some will agree and others won't, but you have plenty of spare time on your hands so why not try. Also, try to come bearing gifts. Is there something you can do for the client? Maybe some product training for the client's team, delivered remotely, while things are slow? Maybe work up a strategic plan for them, for thinking about their business post-crisis. Maybe you provide some credit payment plans to alleviate the pain of having to give up cash? Start brainstorming what is possible rather than only considering what isn't possible. Get a plan together and then work the plan. That is how we do it in sales, so let's all get to work. We are a training company, so there is not much training being held because people are worried about the virus. We are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on March 19 (English) and 24th (Japanese) and April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community. It is also giving our trainers something positive to do, when we can't deliver normal classes. It gives our salespeople something positive to do, when they are having a hard time getting anyone to buy training at the moment. This is what we are doing, how about you? What are you capable of doing? The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e

Unprofessional Professional Salespeople Salespeople in their forties, who have been selling their whole careers are professional salespeople. They are not Johnny Come Latelys who found themselves washed up on the shore of the sales profession or people who wandered through the wrong door and found themselves in a sales job. They have been in the game for decades and have acquired vast experience. Or so you would assume but Japan always has a surprise or two up its sleeve. My wife contacted a very large multi national insurance company here to buy some cancer insurance. The company rep was coming around on the weekend to get me to sign the dotted line for my component of the policy. Being a sales guy myself, I am always nice to fellow salespeople and treat them well. The policy was wrapped up and the documents duly signed and completed when they bridged into a cross sell. We had now moved away from their insurance range of products to an annuity product. It wasn't announced as such but I quickly realised what it was because we used to sell these when I was at the Shinsei retail bank. Actually they are a good idea for Japan because the Government pension scheme will collapse in the future when there are not enough young people paying in, to support the retirees taking the money out. Being a best selling author of Japan Sales Mastery you can imagine my interest in seeing how these seasoned Japanese insurance sales guys were going to conduct the sales process with me. The brochure was immediately produced and we were walked through the details. Dollar cost averaging got a lot of attention and there were graphs and tables to support the idea. There was even a quiz with three amounts to choose from representing how much we thought the dollar cost averaging investment approach would produce based around a fluctuating graph of investment fund performance. I chose the largest return amount and was immediately congratulated as being only the second person he had even met who got the answer correct. Terrific! However, while sitting there, I was beginning to wonder when these two characters would start quizzing me on my investment and financial goals, the structure of the family unit, current allocations etc. Nope, not a question about any of that. Just a long pitch on this product and the returns parameters we could expect at the end of ten years. Actually, Japan has a such a low interest environment, the number proffered at the end of ten years was a peanut. I took hold of the brochure at the end of the pitch and started reading through it. They said their company was the fund manager, but what I found was it was a fund of fund structure. That is fine, nothing wrong with that, but what was the composition of these various funds they had selected. Not a word about that. I also found the bit about the fees, that the funds charged, including the tail. I asked about these fees and it was instantly obvious neither of them had ever looked at that section of the brochure. How could that be? These are professionals in sales who don't know their own product and don't ask any questions. I would not qualify them as "professional" despite the many years they have been in sales. How can you expect to sell a sophisticated annuity product to a client, if you have no idea what their timelines are for retirement, what is the nature of their inheritance tax planning regime, their goals for investing? This is Japan. Salespeople here are woefully under trained. You may have a sales force here and assume that "professional" salespeople in their forties, who have been in sales all their careers have a clue. You would be wrong.

Selling Through Others In Japan We may think we are selling directly to the buyer in japan but often we are not actually dong that. Selling through distributors is obviously a case where we sell through others. However when the buyers are sitting in front of you, you can easily delude yourself that you are going direct. No true in most cases. Yes, if you are dealing with a "one man shacho", the founder/owner dictator, all powerful President, then it may be true. They make the decisions and everyone snaps into line and carries out the boss's wishes. In reality, these types of cases are very few and far between. In our case, as a training company, we still find that the HR department sabotages the Presidents wishes and despite the orders from above, they never proceed with the training. Sitting in the meeting room with the buyers gets us excited because we think we have the chance of getting an agreement to buy. We go through the sales cycle of building rapport, gaining trust, getting permission to ask question, asking about their needs, presenting the solution, dealing with hesitations and objections and then closing the deal. They tell us they will think about it and get back to us. The reason they say this in the West is to get rid of you. American sales trainers have a whole suite of aggressive tactics for dealing with this push back. When I listen to their stuff I am always thinking "there is no way that will fly in Japan". In Japan, yes, sometimes it will be a no loss of face mechanism to get rid of you, but more often the case is, that they can't make the decision by themselves. There are people sitting unseen a few meters from you on the other side of that meeting room, who are division or section heads, who need to be consulted. The job of the people sitting in front of you is to collect information. They then share that with other people important to the decision making process, who we salespeople will never meet. When they say "we will think about it", we should never go into arm wrestle overdrive to force them to buy, like a lot of American sales trainers teach. As an Aussie, I find America an interesting place. The Wolf Of Wall Street is out of jail and teaching salespeople how to con buyers, using the same techniques he used. Bernie Madoff conned buyers too, but he is still in jail. How does that work? What amazes me is that there is a market for learning sales from someone who was rotten to the core and ripped off thousands of people. I absolutely detest this sales culture of win/lose in favour of the seller. The Wolf should still be in jail, as far as I am concerned and I one hundred percent reject everything he stands for and everything he teaches. Pond scum should never be our model in sales. "I will think about it" should have us understanding we now need to sell through those people who are in the room with us. We should ask them, "I am sure there will be other sections and divisions who will be involved with this buying decision. Thinking about this opportunity from their point of view and given their individual personalities, are there any people you think might need a little more information to help them make the decision to buy?". What we are searching for here are the possible objections other people will have with the new buying decision. Once we draw out as many of the key hesitations as possible, then we need to arm our interlocutors with the answers that they can use in their subsequent conversations with the supreme sceptics on the other side of the wall. We will never get a chance to present our solution to these hidden decision makers, so it is critical we do a good job with our buyers in the room. We usually only get one chance to do this and we have to calculate this into the time we are given for the meeting. In Japan, this is usually only one hour. In big companies, there will be a knock on the door at the hour mark and a horde of people will be standing around outside, with their half open laptops at the ready, waiting to start streaming into the room for their own meeting. This part of the conversation must be planned at the start and cannot unfold under its own momentum. Consensus reigns supreme in Japan, so we can anticipate there will be a need to brief others on what came up in the meeting. Better to head off trouble at the pass, so we need to find out who else has a voice in the decision and what is likely to bother them about buying our solution. The better we prepare our hosts for that conversation, the more likely we will make a sale.

Dealing With Buyers Who Won't Reveal Their Problem The basics of professional selling requires good questioning skills on the part of the salesperson. We understand the buyer need and then we match that need with our solution. Pretty straight forward stuff really. What do we do though when the buyer won't reveal their real issues or are hiding the problem from us? This is a deal killer right there because you have no where to go. In desperation you start pitching your solution in the faint hope lightening strikes and you chance upon exactly what they need. When we analyse the reasons for this buyer smoke and mirrors we can see a couple of factors at work. In the initial rapport building phase of the sales call, we failed to establish sufficient trust for the buyer to impart their woes to us. We may have assumed too much about their level of interest and just started banging away, interrogating them about all the dirty laundry of their company. Japan is pretty good at small talk in the early minutes of the meeting. This is not going to help us much though, because it doesn't address the trust issue to any great extent. We need to be looking for connections with the buyer such as shared experiences or people we know in common. Maybe we have the same alma mater or have lived in the same city or travelled to the same places or share the same hobby. We should use the start of the meeting to try and ascertain if we have anything in common. Familiarity breeds comfort in this case. We also need to establish our credibility from the get go. Our Credibility Statement has some layers. We explain our company's business in very broad terms. Next we provide an example of where we have helped another similar company, quoting some verifiable data points around results as evidence. We make the suggestion that "maybe" we could do the same for them. It is important that we say "maybe", because the client doesn't want to be given any hard sell. Finally, we ask their permission to ask questions in a way which makes it hard to refuse. How do we do that? For example, "Buyer san, I have a bit of a dilemma facing me. As you know we have been delivering training around the world for the last 108 years and 58 years here in Japan. As you might expect we have developed a huge curriculum as a result. If I can get a hint of what would be of help to you, mentally, I will pinpoint only those parts of our curriculum which are the most relevant and of the highest value for you. I know your time is very valuable, so I don't want to waste it. In order for me to do that, would you mind if I asked a few questions to see if we have something which may be of use to you?". Having established our credibility, we now begin structuring our questions in such a way that the buyer is inclined to give us an honest answer, rather than trying to hide from our enquiry. We project the buyer into the future, say three to five years ahead, about what would success look like for the firm at that time. This makes it easy for the client to answer because it is all aspiration, rather than any hard facts about the company. Now we ask them, "Given these are the goals for the company, can I get some idea of how you see the current market, particularly in relation to your competitors. How do you think you are doing against them?". The focus is not on company secrets, but a comparison with their rivals and how they are doing. This is easy to answer. Once we have the "As Is" and their "Should Be" information, we ask a simple question. "I understand where you want the firm to go and where you are now, so may I ask you what has been slowing you down to bridge that gap?". This will bring out some of the hurdles using this Barrier Question. Finally we ask about what is in it for them if they are successful in reaching those goals. "I read recently that even the Keidanren, the Japan Business Federation, is advocating that companies get rid of the old system of everyone getting the exact same annual wage increases and instead start basing the rewards and promotions on performance. It sounds like leaders are going to be held more accountable for results than in the past. If you were able to make your targets, given this new environment, what would success mean for you personally?" By asking these pointed questions in this way we make them disarming and easier to answer. The key is to build trust at the start, establish our credibility and get permission to ask questions. Once we have that we draw the answers out of the buyer in a very indirect way, which is hard to resist. The other component is that this whole communication piece must be practiced and polished, so that we can deliver it is a very mild non-threatening manner to relax the buyer. If we do that, our opportunities to cement a relationship with this firm increase dramatically.

Expectations Of Newly Hired Salespeople Be they people new to sales or new to that company, there is always a delay in new salespeople producing results. Sales leaders often have unrealistic expectations around how much a new person to the business can produce. If they are already selling in that industry, product or service area and have an existing client base, then it is reasonable to expect them to get results pretty promptly. In this day and age in Japan though where hiring new salespeople is like finding a lucky clover, we are often making compromises over who we hire. Recruiting companies are charging us 40% fees of the first year base salary, so the cost element of the new person drives up the pressure to have them perform. The money is going out like a flood with the new hire and their revenues are coming in like a trickle. The issue is further compounded if you need English speaking sales staff, because they cost more in terms of base salary in the initial costs. Companies set themselves up for failure as well by giving the new salespeople superficial training. The expectation is they already know how to sell, so all they need is product knowledge training. There are usually two or three client visits with the sales manager, to show the newcomer how we do it around here. There are problems aplenty with this way of doing things. Very few Japanese salespeople have ever been trained in how to sell. They join companies, get a microscopic amount of OJT – On The Job Training – and then have to work it out for themselves. This is who you are hiring. Sending them off to get proper sales training is by far the best way to get them up to speed quickly. They will learn how to get permission to ask questions, how to design the best questions, skills on how to offer the solution, techniques for dealing with objections and direction on how to close the sale. Given the absolute vast majority of Japanese salespeople ask no qualifying questions of the buyer, the newbie will be miles ahead from the outset. Instead of going into a pitch like everyone else and playing hit and miss with the product catalogue or the flyers, they will be zeroing in on what the client needs and only discussing that in the time allotted to them. Setting targets for new people is also often a ridiculous exercise in fantasies. The sales leader makes up a number, based on who actually knows what and then pushes the new person to make that number. This is very disheartening for the new person, because often that number is way too large for a first year target. In our case, we try to add a little more science to the affair. We have this big spread sheet, that lists all the salespeople down the left side and across the top list each quarter since they started. Everyone has a day one and that is the equal starting point for comparison. By doing this you can work up averages of revenue production quarter by quarter. This then translates into what would be an average for year one, year two etc. Knowing what is realistic to expect for a year one performance allows us to take some pressure off the new person and instead work on encouraging them. This becomes important when the other side of the coin to recruit and the difficulties therein is the retain side. If we pile on too much pressure in the early stages the salesperson comes to believe they can't succeed where they are and they quit. By this time, they have some degree of product knowledge, hopefully some substantial sales training and a connection with some clients. We don't want that package walking out the door. We lose time and money when that happens and it makes our operation look unstable and unreliable to clients. A bit more science behind expectations, solid training to ensure more success and a lot of positive encouragement are the factors needed for onboarding new salespeople. All terribly obvious and unremarkable stuff – but are you doing it?

Just In Time Is Bad In Sales Toyota is famous for its JIT or Just In Time system of logistics when building cars. Parts arrive exactly when needed, so have vast space for item storage isn't necessary, saving time and money. When we are selling we sometimes stray into this territory too, but this is a bad move. In the case of salespeople they are doing their background research into the company in the taxi or on the subway, as they head to the client's site. They begin thinking about the buyer needs only once they get into the meeting. The come with nothing for the buyer because they haven't prepared anything. In a perfect world, the salesperson will bring some information or insight for the buyer that they will value. This enables them to differentiate themselves from all of the other salespeople out there selling the exact same thing. This is the beauty of sales, if you spend the time to research what is happening in the industry, to make the effort to collect data that is relevant, to showcase likely trends for the buyer, to bring forth some best practise they may not be aware of, then you can stand far above the crowd, If the aim is to partner with buyer then this is what a good partner will do. If you are looking beyond the initial sale to the reorder and to a lifetime relationship with the buyer, then these pieces of the puzzle become worth investing in. You cannot do this in the subway car On the way there, trying to be JIT efficient with your time. In fact this is totally inefficient and counter productive. In the sales meeting we don't want to be cutting corners. The typical Japanese salesperson will leap straight into the product catalogue or the product flyers and start expounding on the virtues of the company's line up. They are waxing lyrical over their pink range not knowing that the buyer wants blue. This is totally inefficient and ineffective, yet this is what 99% of Japanese salespeople are doing everyday – running around giving their pitch before they know what the buyer needs. Does the buyer believe what the salesperson is telling them in a first meeting, where there has been no precedent of supply and no track record of reliability? Of course the answer in Japan is a big fat "no". There is no trust, so no matter how glorious the photos in the catalogue and how flashy the flyers, they won't go for it. Out first job is to build trust. Part of that process is to break the ice wall with the suspicious buyer, to find out what they need by asking questions. It sounds the simplest thing in the world but buyers in Japan have been trained by lousy salespeople to expect a pitch and not to have answer questions. After all, the buyer is God and God shouldn't have to do anything for the seller. This is how hard getting permission to ask questions is in Japan: "We have a very big line up of solutions, so it makes it very hard for me to know what will serve you best. In order for me to really pinpoint only the best solutions for you, from this big line-up, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?". This process can't be short-circuited in Japan, if you want to make sales. When we are asking our questions we are searching for the size of the gap between where they are now and where they want to be. I was meeting the new President of this firm after having failed for eight years to interest his predecessor in our training solutions. During the course of the questioning I realised that the gap between their current position and where they wanted to be, was small enough that they felt they could bridge it themselves without outside help. That meant we had no hope of making a sale. Unless there is a big enough gap, our ability to get involved in providing solutions is removed. Trying to cut corners and save time, by going straight into solutions is a waste of time, because we just don't know enough about what the buyer actually needs and whether we are the ones to provide that solution. So we should research well beforehand, come armed with insights, get permission to ask questions upfront and try and widen the buyer's perception of where they are now and where they want to be.

Selling Beyond The Sale The main goal is always to get the sale agreed. To get the buyer to say "yes" and specify when delivery will take place. All of the efforts are concentrated here but is that enough? Over promising by salespeople is legendary. They do this to get the sale over the line. The potential damage to the brand is not in their minds because that is not their department. "Production, Logistics, Marketing and Customer Care need to take care of that stuff, my job is just get the deal done". This thinking is a pact with the devil in sales and leads to a lot of heartaches down the road. The supreme focus on the sale is a big mistake. As I always keep harping on, it isn't the sale we should be focused on - it should be the next sale, the reorder, the next assignment. The current sales discussion we are having with the buyer needs to be mindful of the value we have claimed being substantiated by what we deliver. That means we don't blow up the supply elements of the company to make them do the impossible, in ridiculous timeframes, because that is when problems will arise around quality. We do what we can to make the client happy but we don't drag our brand through the blood and the mud to do one deal. Reputation in the market is everything. A client pressured me to cut some corners on our quality to satisfy some costs calculations. I told the client that If we do it this way there will be pushback and unhappiness. He wasn't phased in the least and wanted it go ahead anyway. I was mesmerised by the opportunity of a new sale and a new client and went along. What I didn't think about at the time was that for him there was no risk. I was carrying all the risk because this was my brand and not his in the firing line. It was a mess as I predicted, but again he wasn't phased. I wasn't happy because by now it had dawned on me that my brand had just taken a hammering. At my cost and my insistence, we re-did the training for his senior people. I thought I had recovered the situation. Go forward five years later when one of my staff visits that same company, who by this stage is four presidents and HR directors down the succession line. Does he hear the whole scrambled original poor plan was their idea, that we went back in at our cost and fixed it? No, instead the corporate memory over there is we were sub-standard in our delivery. Ouch! I didn't see beyond the sale by thinking about the high cost of short money. I just went with the President's wishes, when I should have just said "no" and walked away if he didn't like it. We are still hear paying the price and he isn't even in Japan or with that company anymore. I learnt my lesson. A start-up founder had me meet the whole senior team and him finally. They are very successful and doing well, but they have grown so fast they have outstripped their leadership capability and are losing good people as a result. I had what they needed. However when I met the President, I realised this guy doesn't care about people. He told me he was really focused on HR issues and building a team. As I spoke with him I realised his rhetoric and his real thinking didn't match up though. To him they were just interchangeable parts in his machine and he can just switch them in and out as he needs to. On purpose, I let that business just slide off the table, because I knew the fish rots from the head and no matter what we did, it would have zero impact. Being blamed for having zero impact is not a brand builder and I walked away from the precipice. I don't know what happened after that, but I do know whoever took on that work will have faced a train wreck and they will have been the first casualty. I could see there was no possibility to sell beyond the sale and we were better to leave that time bomb well alone.

Dealing With Really Tough and Mean Questions From Clients When we give our presentation to the client we are in full control of the situation. We know what we are going to say. When we get to the end, or part way through, and the client asks us a really tough question, this can be difficult to deal with. Especially, if the client is unhappy and asks the question in a very aggressive or accusatory manner, we can easily react emotionally. The normal response for human beings in these cases can be the release of chemicals into the body to get ready for flight or fight. This is how we survived from cavemen days when confronted by a sabre toothed tiger and it still applies today. Regardless of our species roots, we have to make sure we keep our control and a cool head. This is not so easy sometimes. Apart from our release of chemicals into the body, we find our mind can often become confused, as we try to think of the best way to respond to the client. We usually never know when we are going to be hit with a tough question, asked in an angry or aggressive manner. The surprise factor is one of the reasons we have trouble knowing how to respond. If we know the client can be difficult, then we can mentally prepare ourselves. We need to have a plan. It is when the client is new and unknown, or a known client suddenly behaving unpredictably, we find ourselves getting into trouble. Because of the random nature of these occurrences, it means we need to consider this possibility before every meeting. We should consider what might be some issues the client may raise with us and think about how we should answer them. When we get hit with a tough question from the client, we can quickly find ourselves on the defensive, trying to think about why what they said isn't true or why the the scale of the problem isn't as large as they say it is. We need to consider those answers beforehand and we should also prepare some positive messages, to get ourselves back on the front foot and in control of the conversation. The other area we need to pay attention to is our body language. We may show to the client that we are lacking in confidence or that we are scared of what they said (or the way they said it) or that we are becoming defensive and dismissive of their opinion. We need to mask this body language and maintain a cool, calm and collected appearance, totally unfazed by what they have just said. This makes us look more confident and credible. Handling objections needs the use of the "cushion". We inject a short neutral statement into the conversation to buy us thinking time. We want go to that part of our brain where we have a better response ready to deal with the pushback. Before we attempt to answer the objections however, we should ask clarifying questions. "Thank you for mentioning that. May I ask why you say that?". And then we shut up and don't add, revise, or adjust what we have just said. We want the client to give us more detail. We need to nail down precisely what is their problem, before we open our mouth and begin offering solutions. So often though, salespeople jump right in and try to answer a problem they haven't fully isolated yet. It well may be there has been a misunderstanding or there has been some miscommunication. We need to know about that before we try to respond. For formulating our response, here is are seven things to keep in mind. Listen carefully to the client outburst, without stopping them, interjecting or starting to answer them When we hear the complaint or angry outburst from the client, we make sure to mask our body language so there are no subliminal messages being sent. We need to buy some thinking time for ourselves, so we use a cushion, such as "well that is an important issue and thank you for raising it". We ask some clarifying questions to find out what the real issue is, so we can concentrate on answering that highest priority item. We try to flip the balance of the conversation away from 100% negative to a better balance between positive and negative. We do this by starting with our positive messages. We can apologise for any inconvenience they have suffered and then lead in by saying, "the good news is… Now let me deal with the issue you have raised". We respond to their issue in a calm manner, supporting what we are saying with evidence or proof We check to see if we have fully resolved their issue and if we haven't, we outline the steps we are going to take to resolve it going forward. In this case, the best defence is offense. If we are thinking ahead, anticipating trouble and preparing for it, we will always do better. We need to stop reacting and start responding to the client, when things get a bit rough and tough.

How Good Are Your Key Touch Points In Sales? Jan Carlzon's book "Moments Of Truth" should be standard reading for everyone in business and particularly those of us in sales. He talks about taking over as CEO of the Scandinavian Air Services (SAS) airline when the company was failing and had terrible consumer reviews, regarding their service. With his team, they identified every touch point on the customer journey with the airline, to discover where the gaps were located. We should be doing the same with our business. Now you might be thinking that is the CEOs job, not the work of a humble salesperson. You would be wrong!!! The client sees you as their guy or gal inside your company and they expect you to fix everything for them. That includes fixing things before they even become a problem. The marketing department takes care of the website, the social media, the advertising, the collateral materials, etc. As a salesperson, you won't have much input into that degree of detail. Nevertheless feedback what you are hearing from clients, so that marketing can do a better job of representing the firm to the buyers. As a salesperson, you can take care of your own social media and make sure that any materials you present to the client are up to date and in pristine condition. Clients do a lot of shopping on-line before they meet us today and that includes looking at our own social media. What are they going to find? You in a club doing the limbo dance, dressed in board shorts and a T-shirt, totally off your face and looking outrageous? Or you in a business suit, looking professional and plausible as a business partner? You can't control marketing's activities, but you can control what you put up on social media and therefore you can control your own professional image. For example, I have two Facebook accounts – one for business with around 5000 people connected to me and one for my karate mates, with about 30 people on it. I have 24,000 followers on LinkedIn and the content is always professionally related to subjects around leadership, sales, communication and presenting, because that is what we sell. I try to control what buyers see of me before we ever meet. When people call your company, what do they hear? In Japan, in 99.999% of cases, the person answering the phone won't venture forth their name, is not pleasant, happy you called or excited to do some business with a possible new commercial partner. They are guarded, cautious, stiff and sound like they hate their job. First impression management in Japan is a concept that hasn't hit these shores as yet. Well now, how do you answer the phone yourself? Are you very "business-like", that is, you sound serious, terse and unfriendly? Get your phone Voice Memo app ready and the next time you answer the office phone, tape yourself and play it back – you might be shocked at how unhelpful you sound forming that vital first impression with your initial greetings. When you send emails do you have a signature block bursting with contact information so the client doesn't have to do any work to find your contact details? How do you start the email? Are you straight down to business or do you try to build some rapport? Japan has some set pieces here, but that is the problem, everyone uses them, so people's eyes glaze over and they don't bother reading the first couple of sentences. I have disciplined myself to make the first word of every email I send start with the word "thanks", whether it is outbound or in reply. I never get these types of greetings myself, so I know it is differentiated and not common. That is good. I want to stand out in a crowded field of people selling to my buyers. We can't go through every touch point in this piece, but at least let's start thinking about how many touch points we have with clients and what is the current quality level like? Look at how can we improve the current reality and how to maintain a consistent professional level of interaction with buyers. When your competitors are just doing the same old, same old, you win.

Happy Holidays! How To Massacre Your Brand Promise The end of year holiday season is a time of great retail commercial activity around the world. Brands work well because they bring with them a promise of reliability and trust. We buy the brands over the non-brands to reduce risk and increase our certainty that our buying decision is a good one. The issue for firms is how to protect the brand image during the provision of service component of the brand promise. Those at the top in the executive suites and those deep in the guts of the organisation, in the marketing department in particular, are really "on brand" no doubt. What about the rest of the organisation? There are lessons here for all of us in sales, when the big boys and girls get it wrong. Many years ago, on holiday, I bought a very nice watch in the Versace Piazza di Spagna store in Rome. I have been quite a Versace fan over the years and have a lot of gear from them. The leather band broke a few years ago and through the good offices of the store here in Tokyo, it was sent off to the headquarters to be repaired. Recently, the same thing happened with the leather band again, but the outcome this time was a brand destroying, rather than brand enhancing experience. I took my watch to the main Versace store in Ginza, to have the leather band replaced. The staff member told me that they don't have that type of leather band in stock, so get lost. I persevered and asked about the possibility of sending it to the headquarters to repair it there. A few minutes later, the shop manager informs me that they can't do that, because the operator of the Versace store in Japan is a different company to the one in Italy, same brand but a different store ownership structure. As the buyer this is puzzling. We buy the brand, we don't care about the inner workings of the company providing the service or about their rules and procedures. The store manager in effect tells me to buzz off. Subsequently, I began thinking about my own business. This type of thing irritates me because the staff on the ground don't care that I am loyal customer, because I am not a loyal customer of their shop, because I bought this watch overseas. In our own case, what systems do we have in place in Japan for serving international Dale Carnegie customers, because we are a franchise organisation with many separate companies around the globe, operating under the same brand. Are we able to take care of the buyer, regardless of where they have interacted with us in the past or currently interact with us somewhere in the world. Would my staff do the same thing and apply that Japanese company worker mentality of "no accountability", if a problem arose? It gets worse for Versace, because realising I am dealing with idiots in the Ginza store, who appear to be Versace staff, but actually aren't Versace employees, I go the main website. I find the contact information and I compose a very nice note expressing my long love affair with the brand, this watch in particular and my inability to get it fixed in Japan and asking what I should do next. I get an immediate automated response telling me they have my mail and will get back to me. I wait three weeks and get nothing back from them. This is the issue with systems to deal with problems. If the client has a problem we have to fix it. The buyer bought the brand promise and if we provide different avenues for dealing with buyer problems, then they have to work properly. The correct response from the store staff should have been "we are Versace, we individually will take responsibility for the brand, we will fix your problem and hopefully you will continue to love our brand and buy something from our Ginza store". It begs the question, are my staff taking full responsibility to fix problems for buyers? As the boss, you never even hear about these issues, because the matter is never drawn to your attention and you are super busy anyway. Japanese staff are all ninja at hiding problems from the boss, so you really have to work hard to find out what is really happening. So, on reflection, have I properly guided them on our philosophy toward the buyer? Am I assuming too much knowledge and when was the last time I talked to my team about this type of customer care? A lot of money is spent on websites and all and good, but the service component behind the pepper and spice on screen has to be in place. There has to be a human being somewhere receiving the email, reading it and then taking action. Can we be sure in our own cases, that when buyers send us an email, that the people designated to receive it are doing their job? How can we check up on this type of on-line service? Do we have the protocols in place to do so? Automated responses are easy to build, but the "care" factor in the mentality of the staff servicing the client, is a lot more complex to create. The upshot is I went back to the contact page and sent another note and again got the automated respons

2020 Ushers In New Deals – Are We Ready To Get Our Share? Greek myths don't have too many happy endings or uplifting messages. Mostly they are cautionary tales about the Gods treating us like playthings, usually with unhappy consequences. The patron Greek myth for salespeople is the one about Sisyphus. The son of Aeolus, the God of the Winds, he was sent down to Hades to be punished by fulfilling the eternal task of rolling a large stone to the top of a hill, just to watch it roll to the bottom and then start again, and again, and again forever. That is what we do. We roll that big stone of the annual budget to the top of the sales year, when the revenue results are announced, to watch it roll back to zero as we start the whole process again, year after year. "Don't tell me about your last deal, tell me about the next deal" is the driving sales manager philosophy. It has been thus ever since they created sales managers. It doesn't matter when your firm arbitrarily decides that the sales year kicks off, the phenomenon is the same. 2020 is here – are you ready to roll or keep rolling that big stone? The tension, pressure, uncertainty, fear and foreboding are unrelenting in sales. You had a good year last year. You won an award at the sales convention, you were on stage getting your medal, you got your big bonus, you made some good money. So what? That was last year, what about this year? Alternatively this last year was dismal, you hardly made any money at all and you were a hair's breadth away from being axed. So what? That was last year, what about this year? Good year or bad year, the rock rolling awaits you. There are deals to be done in every year, so there is business out there. How much of it will come to you? If you are sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, the email to hit the inbox, the buyer to walk in then you are too stupid to be in sales. Harsh! Yes, but true, because that type of approach is what idiots do and why they are not successful. We need to do better than that. Grant Cardone is a sales trainer in the US and he has a book called "The 10 X Rule". The basic proposition is a good one. We have taken Grant's idea and have a big signboard on the wall of our office that says "10 X Your Thoughts and Actions". The issue we all face is we get into a rhythm with rock rolling. We look for incremental gains. The 10X idea is to look for big gains, how to leapfrog our rivals all focused on kaizen scale improvements. To get anywhere we need to change our thinking. The same thinking that got you last year's result will only get you to roughly the same point. We need to get to a much higher point. By challenging our thinking, we start to operate at a different level. The next step is to put those thoughts into action. Genius thoughts unapplied are not much help. Is applying a 10X philosophy easy? Obviously super easy for the first thirty seconds, but it gets a bit tougher after that. This is where we need discipline and the sales manager to be driving this thinking everyday. It means we have t look at every angle on rolling that rock up the hill. Who has bought from us recently? Are there other firms who likely have the same need but don't know about us. Are we shy about cold calling them, because we fear rejection and that the effort will be wasted because the success rate is so low? Is sitting around waiting for lightening to strike a better use of our time? Remember always that in sales we have the cure for cancer and we need to get it to as many sufferers as possible. Each of our firms provide a great solution for companies. If we didn't, we wouldn't still be in business. We can't cure an individual's cancer, with our solutions, but we can cure corporate cancers that afflict our clients. When we understand this idea, we have no fear to contact companies who don't know us and inform them we have the cure. If we 10X our thinking on this point and we take massive 10X action, then we will get the meetings we need with buyers and we will get deals one. The new year is a great time to readjust our thinking about how to roll our stone up the hill. How can we 10X this activity from start to end. It has to rolled. Let's look for 10X ways to do it this year.

Reflecting On Your Learnings In Sales You are as only as good as your last sale is harsh but true as a synopsis of our sales life. Bosses are not interested in what you did last year, because that is history, done and dusted. They are focused on this year's numbers. They got their big commissions, bonuses, promotions, their five star holiday with the family. They are looking at you for a bigger number this year. You might be thinking just how you are going to pony up that bigger number, when getting last year's number was a herculean effort. We tend to be like sales locusts. We swarm in, eat everything we can find and then move on to find the next meal. The reflective salesperson is a rare bird because the pressure is always forward facing. "Don't tell me about yesterday. Show me what you can do for me today" is the driving philosophy and we tend to get sucked into that vortex. This translates into forward momentum without allowing us time to ruminate and reflect on lessons learnt throughout the year. Take some time for yourself and go back and visit the deals. This means the ones won and those lost. The records on those lost can often be scanty, because we tend to lick our wounds on the move, as we are off to secure the next deal. You may have a strong regime of record keeping within your Content Management System (CMS) or you may be like a lot of salespeople and hate the CMS. You see entering a bunch of stuff in the CMS as a massive waste of your valuable time, when you could be talking to clients. Hopefully, you at least kept some notes of your meeting discussions with the clients? Whether you were a good boy or girl and kept the CMS up to date or you were a rebel and just kept you own notes, you will have a record to consult. If you are reading this and you have nothing, then what the hell are you thinking? Start keeping detailed notes of all sale's meetings, so that you can be sure you are clear what the client wants and what is the next step. Assuming you are not totally crazy and have some records, make some time to go back and consult them. This should not be some casual review of Caesar's triumphs. Make it more specific than that. Analyse the notes by looking for some things that went well and areas where improvements could be made. The better organised among us will have ensured that immediately after the meeting, they could review their notes, make the writing legible, flesh out some key things they didn't have a chance to write down and add their thoughts. Those thoughts should also include an analysis of what went well and what needs to be worked on to do better next time. This is the best time to do that. Everything is fresh in our mind and it allows us to grab the gains immediately and apply them to the next meeting, which might be in the next thirty minutes. If you are reviewing your sales calls over the year, with this type of insight, then the whole exercise becomes that much more pointed and valuable. This would be ideal but even if your were not so well prepared, then make a commitment to change your ways and become better organised in the next year. Take the notes you do have and look for patterns. Where did the client originate from? Did you identify the client or did your organisation generate the client as a lead for you? What was the client's problem? Is there a commonality in play here, where this problem may be a trend or is it just contained within this particular company? What was the reaction to your pricing. Did they think it was expensive or reasonable. Did you supply more than one solution? Was there a chance to spider out into other parts of the organisation and help them with their problems? Did the person you were dealing with get moved and the replacement prove to be a pain and not helpful? Did you make a note to wait for their replacement to reconnect with that company and try again or did it just fade out and disappear from your mind? There is so much rich material in the review process, but we miss it, because we are so busy and constantly moving. We need to organise time to review each month what happened and then gather it all up and take an annual view of the what happened. Time spent in this activity will set us up well for the new year.

Leading An Intentional Sales Professional Life In 2020 The targets for the year are already set or will be set shortly, no matter when your financial year begins. These numbers are irrelevant. What is more important is what you are going to do to improve yourself this year to make hitting those targets more certain and easier to do. We tend to roll one year into the next without any interventions to recalibrate what we are doing and why we are doing it. Habits are good and bad and bad habits are the enemy of progress. Let's ditch those in 2020. Here are some things to work on for the new year coming up. Decide you will become a professional.Sales is the refuge of failures from other jobs. They lose their current job and because companies are always in need of more salespeople, they find themselves in a sales job. Naturally they get no training, so the job is horrible. Was this you? Before you know it, you have fallen into a victim mentality and it can be hard to break free from the chains of low esteem and low self confidence. Study about sales and communication. If you can't read, then listen to audio or watch videos – there is so much free content marketing pieces available out there today it is unbelievable. Get yourself on a sales training course and even if you have to borrow money to go on that course, do it, because the investment will repay you a hundred fold and more. Naturally I recommend a Dale Carnegie sales course for you, but at least get training. The difference is night and day and so is the money flow which comes back to you as a result. Get your "kokorogame" right.I wrote about this in my book Japan Sales Mastery and we can translate the term from Japanese to mean "true intention". In the martial arts we meditate before commencing hostilities, in flower arranging the master strips the flower stems, in shodo the calligraphy expert rubs the ink stone to produce the ink. These are all done with the same aim, to get our mind in the right frame for the activity we are about to undertake. Sales is the same. Why are we selling? Is it to make ourselves money or make the client money? That is a fundamental question. The answer sets off a chain reaction of further decisions and actions, which totally define whether we are professionals or transients in the world of selling. Decide to control the sale conversation.In Japan, in 99% of cases, the buyer controls the sales conversation and this is just ridiculous. The salesperson's job is to help the buyer make the best decision to advance their business. Why do we leave it to the client to self-service? No! This only happens when the salesperson is inadequate and untrained. Instead we need to ask questions of the buyer to find our A. do we have what they need and B. if we do have it, then present the solution in a way that the client thinks, "fantastic – this is just what we need". In Japan we will be dragged into the mud and the blood of giving our pitch by the buyer unless we get their permission to ask them questions. Japanese salespeople are pitchpeople not salespeople. How on earth do you know what the client needs unless you ask them questions first? Well you don't, but in this culture the buyer is God and God demands the pitch, unless the salesperson intervenes and redirects the conversation. Once you have permission to ask questions, life gets good and you will get sales. Pitching is a very tenuous way of striking it lucky and happen to chance upon what the buyer wants. This is basically the stupid way of doing things, so don't do it. There are many things to work on in selling in 2020, but if you can only concentrate on these three things then you will become a much more professional and skilful salesperson. Attitude and skill are the basic building blocks on top of which we pour on the product knowledge.

Why "Okay, Send Me Your Proposal" Is A Bad Idea In Japan Getting to the request for a proposal stage is usually thought of as significant progress in Japan. This means there is an interest. Or may be not. Japan is a very polite society so a direct "no" is difficult to deal with. Over centuries, the society has found all sorts of clever ways of saying "no" indirectly. When you get this request you have to know if this is "no" or not. We are all super busy people, so slaving away to craft a proposal is a big waste of our very precious resource – our time – if it is just a polite means of giving us the bum's rush out the door. To understand if this is real or fake we can answer "yes, I can send you a proposal and in fact I can help you with determining if there is a match for your budget by explaining our pricing while we are here together". This relies on the assumption you can offer a price on the spot. Generally we know what will be involved in the solution for the client, so we should be able to talk about pricing or a major part of the pricing required at that point. If there is a budget issue this will help to flush that out. Being Japan, we can't expect any agreement whether we talk pricing at that point or not, because the person we are dealing with will need to gain a consensus in support of the offer from their colleagues who are unseen, sitting behind the meeting room wall in the office. We can however gain some insight into whether we are going to be a contender or not for the business. Their body language is a key indicator we should be studying when we start talking price. They may still want to see a proposal because they need to show something in writing to the other members of the team. Or they may prefer to say "no" in your physical absence because that is less stressful and embarrassing. We can always rely on Japanese buyers to take the path of least resistance. I was listening to Victor Antonio's podcast The Sales Influence on how he does it for American buyers. In his case, he tries to inject some sense of guilt with the buyer around him having to spend hours on making the proposal. The idea is that he wants them to clearly say no they are not able to go ahead right there and then or say they are interested, but not sure. This wouldn't help much in Japan, because the buyer is going to avoid any possible confrontation over a "no" answer and will always go for the interested but not sure possibility regardless of the reality. The Japanese concepts of tatemae and honne are fundamental to polite society here. Tatemae means the public truth and honne the real truth. Often Western businesspeople encountering tatemae for the first time will feel like they have been lied to. We shouldn't get too moralistic about this because we do it too in our own societies. We dress it up as a "little white lie" which is actually tatamae under a different flag. If your family member or friend has been trying to lose weight and actually look like they have gained even more weight and ask you how they look, we don't go for honne and say "Man, you are even fatter than before". We bald faced lie and say they look like they have lost weight and look better, because we don't want to hurt their feelings or discourage them. Japan is the same but on a grander scale and it is more institutionalised here. So in Japan, we do have to give them a proposal but we should never "send" it. By this I mean we should always present it in person whenever possible. If we send off our proposal by email the document arrives alone and undefended. We need to be there to explain what it means so that there is no mistake. I can't count the number of times I have been presenting a proposal and the client has misunderstood what I was trying to say. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. The key is to be there to clear up the issue. Whenever we get a proposal where do we look first? Straight to the numbers – how much is this going to cost? All the value explanation is in the front part of the document, but their view has been tainted by that big number at the back. We need to control the physical document and walk them through the value explanation, checking all the while that we have successfully understood what they need. We can answer questions, make clarifications and shepherd the buyer through the value detail to the number section, which should by now have a tremendous amount of context wrapped around it. So make a proposal but always take it, never send it in Japan. If you do that, you will have much more success, by taking it with you.

Selling Yourself Before You Meet The Client I have been recruiting new staff over these last few months. One of the younger candidates breezily told me during the interview, "I checked you out on social media". This is the modern age, where everything about us is available only a few mouse clicks away. This "checking you out" phenomenon has been around for some time and the frequency only increases. My LinkedIn profile tells me that twenty three thousand people are following me, around a thousand people are looking at my profile and that around two thousand people are searching for me. That is a lot of scrutiny and unthinkable ten years ago. As salespeople we are being "checked out" before we even meet the client, but what will they find? I was not active on social media until I heard sales training guru Jeffrey Gitomer speak at our Dale Carnegie International Convention in San Diego in 2011. He was speaking about his 40,000 followers on Twitter, challenging us about how many followers we had and stressing the importance of social media. I had been cautious about this social media thing and had avoided opening accounts. After the Convention I opened up accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. From the very start I only posted business related content. You won't find photos of me in straw hat, with an exotic drink in my hand, as I sit around the pool, basking under a friendly sun in some tropical clime. It is all business and there are over one thousand eight hundred blogs on my social media. This is no accident. Coming late to the party proved to be fortuitous, as I found many of my American friends who got on to Facebook while they were at college, had content on there they didn't want to share with potential clients. This is the point. Clients look at our social media to "check us out" before we have that first business meeting. We may have connected at a networking event, followed up with them and wrangled a date and time to meet. Before we do that they are looking at our social media to get an idea about who we are. So in your case what are they going to find? When they Google you, what comes up? Is it random stuff or is it content within your control? I suggest it should be content in your control. What would that be? Content marketing is a broad based term for putting your wares up for free on social media, to demonstrate you provide value. As salespeople we should be clinical in looking at what we put out there. We can write articles, now known by what I think is a most unattractive term "blogs". We can write about issues in the industry or the market and how to fix those. We absolutely should steer clear of anything that sounds like propaganda for our company, product or service. The first blatant hint of gross self-promotion and you have lost your audience. These blogs may be suitable for publication in industry or business related magazines. The editors are always looking for high quality, free content. Those blogs can be read into a microphone, recorded, spiced up with some music, edited and turned into podcasts like this one. Some people prefer to multi task and walk the dog, run around the streets or go to the gym and simultaneously educate themselves by taking in good podcast content. These same blogs can be delivered in front of a camera and now you have video content for YouTube. It might be a simple affair on your phone live streaming, or recorded for later editing to spruce it up or you might have some high quality gear involved, including teleprompters. Gary Vaynerchuk is a total legend of self promotion, but is verging on illiteracy. He knows he cannot write, he hardly reads anything except for social media posts, so he uses video as his main means of message delivery. He strips out the audio for podcasts and the content for transcripts to become text posts. If you don't like writing and you can talk and most salespeople can certainly talk, then this may be a way to create content that will impress potential clients. The point is to control what clients will see by getting your best foot forward. Provide credibility through the value of your knowledge, relevant for buyers. I release five podcasts a week now and have two television shows on YouTube. On August 8th this year Google announced they are using AI to enable them to do voice search, in addition to text search. If you haven't created voice assets like podcasts or video sound tracks, you will be missing out on the opportunity to be found by clients. You will be looked at and checked out, that is a certainty. What is less certain is what the client will find. Choose to impress potential clients by cramming your social media full of content that make you look like a legitimate expert in your field. Build credibility before the sales meeting. We all understand the client mantra of 'know, like and trust" can be amplified so powerfully through social media. Make it happen.

How To Sell To A Buying Team Selling to companies in Japan usually means sitting in a meeting room with a single buyer or perhaps two people. There are occasions though where we may need to present to a larger number of buyers in a more formal setting. It may be a pitch to secure the business or it may be a means of getting the buying team more easily coordinated on their side. Before we know how to present to a team, we have to analyse the people in the team. That means we need to know ahead of time, who will be in the room from their side. A team comprises multiple layers of responsibility. We might have some functional interests represented such as the Executive Buyer, Financial Buyer, User Buyer, Technical Buyer and Our Champion. Each one has a different driver for making buying decisions. The Executive Buyer will have a strategic vision for the organization so they are interested in opportunities and growth. We need to include the big picture here of what our solution will do to position the company into the future, as well as today. The Financial Buyer is always interested in cash flow, no matter the size of the organisation. They focus on the cost, the terms of the transaction and how much flexibility it can provide for them. The User Buyer wants to know about the features, how easy is the solution to use, how reliable will it be? The Technical Buyer is concerned about efficiency, practicality and capacity. Usually we are in that room because of our Champion. They are concerned about their relationships within the company, with having influence over the buying situation and gaining recognition for their efforts. Just to make it more complicated, there are also the buyer personality styles to contend with The Amiable who is focused on relationships and is never in a hurry to make a decision. The Driver is the exact opposite. They are dynamic, fast movers who just want the facts so they can make a decision and move on. The Analtyicals want data and lots of it. Three decimal places is fine for them. The Expressives are bored with the nitty gritty detail, preferring the big picture. It is possible to focus on just one group but not very wise. The presentation should have a little something for everyone. There are also going to be attitudinal differences. Some will Hostile, Resistant, Discontent, Ambivalent, Favourable, Supportive and Enthusiastic. We need to get our body language meter on full throttle to read the audience and we need our Champion to give us the who's who of who is in the room, so we can anticipate where we might hit trouble. There are different levels of expertise in a team. There will be varying levels of Experiences, Education, Biases, Problem/Positive issues, Goals, Expertise and Culture. Before we present we need to know who is going to be in the meeting and try to understand what will be driving their reaction to what we are going to say. We may not know this completely beforehand but we will certainly start locating people into different sectors once we get into the meeting room. We need a presenting structure which will be well regarded by the majority of people in the room. We need an opening to grab attention, a statement of need for change, an example of the need for change and to suggest three possible solutions. For solution one, we outline the advantages and disadvantages. We repeat this balanced formula for solutions two and three. We then suggest the best solution of the three, with evidence as to why it is best. In our closing remarks we repeat the final recommendation. Selling to a buying group is fraught with difficulty, because of the massive variations in the room, as to perspectives, needs and interest. Nevertheless we can use this structure to cover off as many of the needs in the room as possible. We rely on our champion to brief us on who is in the room beforehand and to go around drumming up support following our presentation. We win or lose though the quality of our preparation and our structure. If they are both in good working order, then the chances of winning the business go up dramatically. We won't get so many chances to present to a buying group but we need to be well prepared when we do.

Nine Major Mistakes By Japanese Salespeople We see Japan as a modern, high tech country very advanced in so many sectors. Sales is not one of them. Consultative selling is very passé in the West, yet it has hardly swum ashore here as yet. There are some cultural traits in Japan that work against sales success, such as not initiating a conversation with strangers. Makes networking a bit tricky to say the least. We train salespeople here in Japan and the following list is made up of the most common complaints companies have about their salespeople's failings. Only talk to existing customers because you are scared of finding new buyers Japanese people are risk averse and everyone here prefers the devil they know to the angel they don't know. Staying in the comfort zone of the known customer is preferred to trying to create a new relationship with a buyer they don't know. Measurements systems and incentive schemes definitely need to include the number of new clients achieved as well as the overall revenues, if you want to grow the business. Pitch your product range, without having any idea about what the buyer needs Diving straight into the company brochure or the product catalogue, the nitty gritty details is favourite here. The trouble is they want blue, we don't know that because we haven't asked what they want and we keep showing them yellow. Don't seek permission to ask questions Why don't Japanese salespeople ask the buyer questions, to find out what they need, like the rest of the universe? It is considered rude by the buyer. That is a cultural aspect that can be overcome if permission to ask questions is asked for first. Why don't they do that? Because they are trained by their seniors who never asked questions and just went straight into the detail of the spec. The salespeople need training to learn how to craft the permission request. Let the buyer control the sales conversation In Japan the buyer is not a lowly King but an almighty GOD, whose penchant is to destroy pesky salespeople's presentations. Salespeople here don't know how to control the sales conversation, because they don't know how to get permission to ask questions and control the direction of the conversation. Don't uncover the buyer need at all It is almost impossible to hit a target you cannot ascertain. If the questions to ask need are not there, it is impossible to work out whether you have what the client needs or not. Only talk about the spec and maybe the benefits of the spec but never talk about how to apply the benefit, show evidence where this has worked before and then go for a trial close. When salespeople dive into the detail, they get stuck there. We don't buy the spec. We buy the things the spec does for us. We need to draw out what are the benefits the spec delivers but much more than that. Few Japanese salespeople even get to the benefit explanations stage. We need to show how the benefit when applied in their business will improve their business and we back that up with evidence of where this has worked before. Don't have any clue how to properly handle objections Japanese salespeople suffer the same objections as everyone else, "your price is too high" etc., but they have no way of dealing with them. On the job training taps out pretty quickly when we get down to the finer points of sales ability. The simple answer is professional training because this the difference between the pro and the mug. Always drop the price to gain the sale It is shocking to think how much money is being left on the table by salespeople when they get price objections. Just dropping the price by 20% is common and it doesn't have to be like this. If you know how to handle these types of pushback, then you can do a deal and either defend your value or reduce the amount of discounting. Don't ever ask for the order So many meetings end with a big fat nothing. The salesperson left the client "buy or won't buy" bit quite vague and not clarified. Always ask for the order. The worst that can happen is you are told "no" or "we will think about it" but always ask. Don't make the client do all the hard work, ask for the business. Sales is not complex. It is a serious of basics that need to be performed professionally. Take a good look at what your Japanese colleagues are doing and see how many of these nine you uncover.