The Sales Japan Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.