The Sales Japan Series

Stop Slamming The Square Peg Into The Round Hole When Selling One of the most dangerous people on the planet is the salesperson who doesn't listen well enough to the client's needs. They miss the key cues, misunderstand the problem, can't override their fixation on what they want and do most of the talking during the sales call. They wonder why getting an agreement to buy is so hard. One of my sales coaching students was relating how he took the client meeting into negative territory from the very kick off of the sales conversation and then proceeded to dig the hole deeper and deeper for himself. Small talk at the start is needed to set the foundation for building the trust, as buyer and seller get to know each other. In this case, the small talk conversation went into a death spiral. This is when the redirect button is pushed to make it more meaningful for the buyer. In this case, he just lent harder on the shovel and dug faster. If we find things are not going well, then stop talking and start asking questions. This allows the buyer to feel in more control to direct things the way they want them and for you to regroup and prepare to take back the reins of the conversation. Usually we have the selling plan, but the buyer doesn't have the buying plan. They are wandering around with no direction in mind, because they expect to hear what they need from us. We need to keep that conversation on track. When we hear what the client is trying to achieve, the solutions we suggest have to be in line with delivering that. You would think that is the most logical thing in the world, but salespeople do the most surprising things. They try to redirect the client's needs, to match their own needs. If there is a higher commission being paid on one product, over the others, then they want to stress that product, regardless of whether that is the best one for the client or otherwise. They may be under pressure from their boss to push a solution that benefits the company the most. This is where you start getting into hole digging territory. The client may be following our advice because we did such a very good job of establishing rapport and building trust at the outset. When we FOIST the wrong solution on the client, we are haemorrhaging that trust immediately. The ROI we should be focused on is the client's ROI not ours. Our intrepid hero was sadly successful in convincing the client to buy the thing which would have zero return. When we had our coaching session together, I was drilling down into what would the client get in return for their hard earned money, based on the conversation that had covered what the client was trying to achieve. It was obviously zero value for the client but good for the seller, who was having trouble moving this product. Great, but this destroys your reputation in the market. You do get the sale and usually the size of the sale is a peanut, as it is the first sale. You blow all your credibility at the start and then the client tells everyone in town you are radioactive and to be careful of dealing with you. The lifetime value of the client means that the loss is enormous, when measured that way. That peanut will also be expensive, given the way it will shred your reputation. We worked on a more custom solution for the client and took the solution in a completely different direction. This customisation process is always the best idea. We tend to have ready to go, off the shelf solutions, which are cost and time effective, but these won't always match the needs of the client. The more customised the solution, the better in terms of client satisfaction, ROI and perceived value. Make the solution fit the client's needs, rather than make the client fit in with the seller's needs. No more square peg solutions please.

Really Understand Your Expectations Of Your Sales Team We hire people and they don't perform as we expected. The time passes and the numbers are not rolling in. We thought they would be more proactive and more skilled at getting new business. We fire them and start over again. Except that in Japan, you can fire them, but replacing them is a different and difficult matter these days. Recruiting salespeople is horrendous, so the retain component is the mirror piece we have to master as well. Turning the tap on in the sink, with the plug removed, isn't getting us anywhere and this revolving salesperson door is just that issue. We are wasting a lot of resources. We are often the problem though. I have a start-up founder client who is a nightmare. I have interviewed all of his direct reports and finally the big man himself. Actually, I don't want to work with his company. They can keep the money. He is the issue as to why they are having such significant staff turnover. He has a "plug and play" mentality with people. When you find a problem, you just hire someone in to fix it and then go back to running around like a headless chicken as before. In this case, the leader is the problem. ' His expectations are unrealistic with the current state of the market. He thinks we are still back in the old days, when there wasn't the same amount of job mobility and where people tended to stick around, because it was hard to get another job. He had key people jump and rather than try and fix the problem, starting with himself, he just wants to throw another body at it. There are three areas where we need to audit ourselves and our expectations. Are we sure of what we are looking for in our salespeople when we hire them? If we hire a farmer and they don't hunt, we fire them. Whose fault was that? Ours not theirs. We need to know at the very start are we bringing in another farmer here or a hunter? In Japan, farmers are much more numerous and so the chances of getting a farmer on board are statistically higher. How can we tell which is which, in the interview process? Ask the candidate about their current client base. Where did those buyers come from? If they say through the marketing team's efforts generating leads, the pool of "orphan clients", their boss or from departed colleagues, then that tells you they are farmers. If they talk about how they recruited new clients, by beating the bushes and finding them then, you have a hunter there. This is not to say one is better than the other, but that in Japan you are more likely to wind up with a farmer than a hunter. Once you know that, you adjust your expectations and know you need to get busy feeding them. Another case is how fast we expect people to get up to speed. When the months roll buy and the numbers don't role in, we get frustrated. We need revenues and we need them now. The costs in salary, insurances and expenses flow out like a flood and the revenues from new salespeople comes in like a trickle. Where do we get our expectations from? Are they rooted in numbers, experience or hope. Often it is the hope component, followed by our personal experience and rarely are any comparative numbers involved. It is always dangerous to judge others through the lens of ourselves. "I did it, so they can do it too", makes sense at one level, except when you uncover that very few other salespeople are like you. A better analytical tool is performance. Take every salesperson who has worked for your organisation over the last five to ten years and trace them all back to Day One when they started. Track their revenue production monthly. In this way you can compare like for like. There will be some averages you can apply to give you a measuring stick, against which to gauge their output. If you have a sufficient number of people to look at, you can take out the worst and the best performer and form an average from those left. If you don't have enough people, then a straight average is enough. This gives you quarter by quarter, what, on average, you should expect from your people after they join. This has nothing to do with what you did and so is a more objective means of defining performance and tempering your expectations. The third thing to look at is your sales incentive scheme. American style 100% commission systems are not much in evidence in Japan, except in very dubious occupations, closely associated with skulduggery. Usually salespeople are on fixed salaries with bonuses. This is not a great system and so try to change it. A better case is where the base salary will be lower and a percentage of sales as commission is paid. If your scheme is mainly to benefit your pocket, then don't be surprised if people don't get excited about it. I have a friend who is mean, when it comes to paying salespeople and has tremendous turnover, wondering why. I keep telling him why, but he is too greedy about getting the money and not spreading it around with his team, so he refuses to change. I jus

Presenting Manufactured Products Industrial products are rarely sexy. They tend to be very technical, specification heavy and chunky. They are normally being presented in a catalogue of products. The pricing, quality and the after sales service tends to be the differentiator with the rival suppliers. The salespeople presenting these often boring, utilitarian products, are also usually do so in a boring, functional manner. Not much pizzazz going on. This flies in the face of what we know though about buyers buying us, buying our confidence and being injected with our belief in the product. We don't have to present these types of products in a dull way. The features of the product are usually a mass of measurements. This can be dry as a subject for getting buyers excited. However what about the benefits of the product? This is where we should be able to shine in our presentations. Intellectually, we all know we don't buy the product. We buy what the product will do for us. Describing that part of the occasion is where we can stand apart from our competitors. The problem is we forget about this bit and we just drone on and on about the spec. Talking about the benefits of the product purchase are absolutely fundamental in sales. However, rather than just talking about the benefits of the product, we need to be outlining how the benefit can be applied in their company. Having a benefit and doing something with it are not the same thing. We need to be drawing out word pictures of how our product can help them in their business. Usually it is through better efficiencies around life of the product or better quality, leading to fewer maintenance issues. It might be the ease of use of our product when compared to others or the ease of instillation. Whatever it is, this is where we need to capture the attention of the buyer. By taking the discussion beyond the spec, to the integration into the customer's systems, their staff's daily interactions with the product, the their customers happiness with the finished item, then we can bring a dry subject alive. Numbers lend themselves to comparisons very easily, so we can contrast our product with the alternatives. We can break the cost down, amortised over a long period of time. The lifetime of a lot of industrial products can be quite long, so long range number crunching works well. It has to be related back however, to today though. We need to provide context about how this long term saving will translate into financial benefits today. There may be some speed of delivery elements creating savings on inventory or storage costs. Improved quality deliverables may create benefits for the customer, which allow them to pass on savings and gain market share. Tax savings and investment costs amortization allowances may in fact save money. The key is to find things which can be applied to today's bottom line. If there are less maintenance issues, then we can calculate the labour costs and down time savings that it brings. If it is easier to install, then we can talk about the diminished disruption to overall operations, the lesser need for technical specialists or the speed of installment leading to cost savings. Finding creative ways to express these differences is one part of the equation and the other part is the way we present the information. Charts and graphs are basic but good visual clues for our buyer to see the difference for themselves. These days we can have video delivered via our iPads, which can tell the story of how great this will be for the buyer. Seeing is believing and it doesn't have to be all spreadsheets, still photos and matrices. This is particularly so around marshaling evidence to prove what we are saying. Seeing the product installed and operating gives a better sense of reality to the buyer. Interviews with happy customers and them talking about the advantages is very compelling. The humble blender became a viral social media sensation in the hands of some creativity. Blendtec, like many manufacturers, producers blenders. To demonstrate the toughness of their blender they hit upon the genius idea of shooting a video called "Will It Blend". Twelve years ago they started blending mobile phones, iPads, glow sticks, hockey pucks and other unlikely items. The one on glow sticks got 12 million views on YouTube and the iPad video got 18 million views. Tom Dickson, the President, is dressed up in a lab coat, has the industrial glasses on and away he goes. Today they are still getting hundreds of thousand of views of their videos. Everyone else is just making blenders. My point is industrial products don't have to be boring in the hands of a skilled salesperson. Yes going through the spec is critical, but that is not enough. By the way, is that all that your salespeople are capable of doing? Are they fully boned up on describing the benefits to the buyer. Can they then take those benefits and integrate them into the client's business and show how when applied t

How To Use Sales Progression Bridges With Clients We have a defined sales cycle in our interactions with our clients. We build the trust, ask the key questions to understand need, present the solution, deal with pushback and ask for the business. Of course, there is the pre-meeting preparation and the post meeting follow up, but the actual sales call runs through this cycle. Between these key phases there are bridges we need to put in place to make the sales talk flow run smoothly. What do you do now? Do you have defined phases or is it looking like spaghetti, rather than a road map? One of the key bridges is the very start Of the conversation. In Japan this usually starts in the lobby or their office, as you wait for your buyer or when they enter the meeting room their staff have shown you to. Many Western countries have gone all modern and dispensed with business cards or meishi but what a gold mine they are in Japan. I usually receive the meishi English side up, facing me, because that is the polite format in Japan. I read the English side and then flip it over because the Japanese side will have better information. If the kanji for the name is a bit on the rare side, I will mention that and ask if their family comes from a particular region where that name is more common. This is handy because it shows them I can read Japanese, I know about Japan well enough to know their name is rare and it gets them talking. Or I might just ask them about the position they hold inside the company. Japan is pretty good at small talk before we get into the main business. That is not how we do it in the West. I remember meeting a high powered, foreign President of a major multi national here recently, who had just arrived from the US for his Japan posting. I started with some small talk, got about five seconds into it when he announced, "Let's get down to business". I was fine with that but I was also thinking he was going to have a tough time in Japan, because he doesn't understand the niceties of Japanese social interaction. Having hopefully built up a convivial atmosphere with the buyer, we get into the sales conversation proper. Japanese salespeople won't ask the buyer questions because it is considered rude to ask the buyer, aka GOD, questions. This means they go forth blindly delivering their pitch. We have 155 training modules in our line up, so how would I know which ones to focus on, if I didn't ask some questions first? Pitching is a sure formula for rejection in my experience in Japan, compared to finding out what the buyer needs. So we need to get permission from the buyer to ask questions, as the next bridge in order to move the conversation forward.' We do this by saying, "We did XYZ for ABC company. Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure, but in order for me to know if that is possible or not would you mind if I asked a few questions?". Or, we could say, "I have never been to the American Congressional Library, but I imagine it with books running from floor to the ceiling five stories high. I have the same thing in my brain, regarding not books but solutions for client problems. We have such a huge line up. In order for me to select only the most relevant, pin point solutions for your issues, would you mind if I asked a few questions, so I can narrow down what I should talk about?". Having been able to ask our questions, we now make the decision for the client as to what they should buy. We only introduce those solutions and no more or we have the danger of overwhelming the client with so much detail, they can't buy anything. Before we get into the solution, we need to use a bridge to inform them that we can help them. We might say, "Thank you and now I understand clearly what you are looking for. The specification, quality and speed of delivery required are all with in our capability. Allow me to take you through the details". Or, "Having listened to what you need, I have refined our range, down to the best solution to fit your needs. Please let me take you through it". At the end of the solution presentation process of feature-benefit-application of the benefit- evidence, we go into a trial close, as a bridge to the next stage of the sales cycle. We say, "So how does that sound so far?". We are trying to flesh out any further questions, clarifications or objections. When we face an objection such as "your price is too high", we need a bridge to be put in place before we attempt to answer it. We should always smile sweetly and say, "Thank you. May I ask why you say that?". And then shut up, add nothing more, make no interventions, just sit there in silence until they answer us, even if we have to wait until hell freezes over. At the end of our explanation dealing with their concerns, hesitations and objections, we just say, "So how does that sound, have I answered all of your concerns?". We want to know if there are any hidden objections or sticking points preventing the deal from going ahead.

The Mental Game Of Sales There are two players in this mental game of sales. The buyer and the seller and they are playing with entirely different strategies. For the buyer, the idea of a salesperson symbolises risk. Can they trust this person? Their experience and a variety of media images, have coalesced to ensure buyers are always sceptical about people trying to sell them stuff. As we say, "We all love to buy, but none of us want to be sold". That is why all that American style hard sell, tricky closes, tie downs etc., fall flat on their face here in Japan. I enjoy watching Grant Cardone's sales videos but that aggressive style of selling will never work here in Japan. Buyers everywhere are cautious when it comes to dealing with salespeople, but ever more so in this country. Risk aversion is super powerful in Japan. This is not the country of declaring bankruptcy then making a stunning comeback with your next company. This is fail once then you disappear forever. The credibility is gone and with so are you. There are no second chances in Japan. This applies inside companies too. The sizes of the salary packages for Japanese executives would seem a joke in America. This means that all the way down the line the rewards are not that huge. The salaries are good but not spectacular. The upside of taking risks is small and the downside huge so the clear lesson in Japan is "don't take risks". Again, by definition dealing with a new supplier is risky. The unknown in Japan is fearsome. The tried and trusted are always preferred over the unfamiliar and untested. This is us though – the untested, the new seller. We are always going to be unknown to the buyers at the start. So as salespeople we begin below the waterline and have to work our way up. We have to demonstrate to the buyer that we can be trusted. We can do this by employing referrals from satisfied customers, starting small with some demonstrations, small tests, trial periods, free samples, limited orders etc. We need to establish a track record that reduces the fears of the buyer about making mistake. The mental game on the seller's part is about confidence. We are all mainly failing in sales. We don't get every order. We don't get every appointment. We get rejected more often than when we get an agreement on a deal. Now Japan is a country of face. Losing face is a big deal here socially, so everyone is hell bent to make sure they don't get themselves into situations where they will lose face. Asking for the order may mean you lose face if they say no. Ergo, don't ask for the order. Just leave the end of the sales call vague and don't try and close the deal. Walking up to strangers at a networking event and introducing yourself may result in your being rejected and losing face, so better to only talk to the people you already know. The fact you don't meet many new people is fine because you didn't lose face. Not asking the buyer any questions and just launching straight into your pitch is fine, because you won't lose face. The fact that you are flying blind and have no idea if anything in your pitch is relevant or interesting to the buyer is better than being rejected and losing face. The buyer is God in Japan, so better not to annoy God with any questions. The upshot of all of this in Japan is that salespeople are very strong with existing buyers and very weak regarding getting new clients. We hear this all the time from company Presidents. They cannot get their sales teams to focus on expanding the size of the business by finding new buyers. They don't want to do cold calling because of the difficulties associated with at. They don't like networking, because of the difficulties associated with that too. They don't ask their existing buyers for referrals because they don't want to lose face in case the customer says no. The Japanese world in sales is small. So when we put these two mental games together, where the supreme sceptic meets the timid, not much happens. We can't do too much about the sceptic but we can do a lot with the timid. We can give them the means to break out and become much more professional in their sales life. They are woefully undertrained and so are wandering around clueless, just aping what their seniors have been doing. Here is the bad news. The seniors are also clueless, so it is sad cycle of despair in sales in Japan. Action Steps Mentally place yourself in the mind of the buyer with all their fears about salespeople Definitely ask God, the buyer, for permission to ask questions before you present any solutions If the buyer says NO, we don't lose face because the buyer isn't rejecting us, just our offer, at this time, in this construct, with these terms, in this budget cycle

Keep Selling After The Sale The sales agreement is followed by the delivery of the product or service. In some cases they are immediate and in others there is a time delay. It is often the case that after the agreement to buy has been achieved we move onto the next deal and a new client or opportunity. In the prospecting phase we can become extremely busy running around town beating the bushes and trying to conjure up some revenues to meet our targets. The delivery of the product or service is usually done by someone in the back office, down at the factory, an agent or a contractor and not by the salesperson. Schedules get booked up and there is the danger we have not made a sufficient effort to get ourselves into the diary of the buyer, after they have received the goods or service. We may have moved on to the next deals and are fully preoccupied with them. We have received our commission and are happy. Bad move. We should without fail, always arrange to see the buyer after delivery. We want to know a number of things. If it was a product was it in the format and at the quality standard that they expected. Better to know this earlier rather than later because then we can fix it immediately. In Japan, speed is key and there are so many interlocking pieces in business here. Storage costs are high, so everyone gets by with minimum stock and expect regular top ups, as the business demand increases. Those down the line in the food chain becoming very irate when they have promised something to their own buyers and we cannot deliver it because of some logistical mess or quality issues. We need to be there on the spot to rectify the situation and quickly. We also need to be there to get feedback on the degree of satisfaction in play. We promise a lot as salespeople and we can be very sold on what we are selling, but sometimes the buyers are less enthusiastic. We want know to what extent that are still sold on the product. In some cases it will be because there is the reorder prospect and in others a chance to cross sell or upsell. The best time to talk about any of these things is upon delivery, when the client has had a chance to gauge the reality, against what we told them. If the two coalesce then we are in a good position to talk further business. Japan likes to test the seller. Often we are given a smallish order, to see how we perform. Everyone is concerned about mistakes or problems and their risk aversion meter is always finely calibrated in this country. If we pass the test, then there is the possibility of more business. The next time there will be a slightly larger order. This keeps repeating itself, if we show we are able to provide a consistent, reliable level of service to the buyer. Similarly the client may have many needs, some of which they didn't mention in the first meeting. Something may have happened in the market or the business since that first meeting or they may just be waiting to see how much they can trust us. Fortunately we are sitting in the meeting room across from the buyer to find out if there is a greater need. If we are still chasing down new buyers, we may be missing this chance to build a deeper relationship with this specific buyer. We have a matrix we use in our sale's training for account development. Across the bottom we attach the name of each client for that column. Down the left side we list the name of each product we deal with for each row. We place an A for products or services we currently supply, a B for items which have high probability or interest the buyer and a C for those with less scope for success. What is always horrifying is how many additional opportunities exist to further sell to the buyer, which we do not realise. We get stuck in a rut with only a few possibilities when there are actually many more chances to become a key partner for that firm. This is how hard it is, "I am very pleased to hear you are so happy with our service. May I ask you if there are other needs you currently have, with which we may be able to assist you?" The trouble is we don't take the time to seize the opportunity of a satisfied customer, to ask for more business when there is a heightened state of happiness on their part. This is also the time to ask for a referral. "Do you know anyone…" is a disaster of a question, because if we leave it too broad and wide ranging, they have to process the entire known universe and it is too much for them. We need to narrow it down. "Thinking of your golf group, can you think of someone who would also benefit from the solution you are enjoying today?". This is much tighter and easier to answer as they see the faces of the members of the group in their mind. Busy is good, but sometimes we become too desperate and too busy to close the next deals that we neglect the money left of the table from further business or from great referrals to new business. Action Steps Always schedule in time for the buyer after they have received the product or serv

Be Careful Of Friendly Fire When Selling Sales is usually a solitary life. You head off to meet customers all day. Your occasional return to the office is to restock materials or complete some processes you can't do on-line. Japan is a bit different. Here it is very common to see two salespeople going off to meet the client. If you are selling to a buyer, it is also common to face more than one person. This is a country of on the job training and consensus decision making, so the numbers involved automatically inflate. Even in Western style operations there is more of a tendency to send more than one person to the sales meeting. Often, there is a need for a technical person or someone with highly specialised knowledge to attend the buyers meeting. This can present some issues if there is no plan for the meeting. I was coaching a salesperson recently who related a horror story to me. The person in question is relatively new to sales, so still finding their way. A more experienced salesperson from a different division was joining the meeting. The intention was to provide more than one solution to the buyer. Without any prior discussion, the accompanying salesperson offered 70% off the pricing in exchange for a volume purchase, in order to grow the relationship. Hearing this, I was so shocked, I nearly blew my coffee out through my nose. There are so many things wrong with this vignette. These are both salespeople on a base and commission arrangement. One salesperson is hacking into the commission of the other, for a product line-up they don't represent. This is outrageous behavior. If you are in that meeting and your partner blurts out a combustible like that, you cannot reel it back or reduce its lethality. It is stated, out on the wild now and you have to live with that statement having been uttered by your side. This was first meeting too, so the damage is even worse. Now the client automatically discounts any rack rate or stated pricing by 70%, because that is what you have trained them to do. When you are in a first meeting in Japan, it would be reasonably rare to even get into pricing. The first meeting has some fixed requirements. The first is to build the trust with the buyer. They don't know you so they are suspicious. They are not sure if your word can be trusted, whether you are smart enough to deal with them or if they like you. This takes a good chunk of time to achieve. You also have to understand if there is any point in talking at all. Do you have what they need. In order to make that judgement, you need to be asking them questions. What are they doing now? Where would they like to be? If they know that then why aren't they there already? What will it mean for them personally if this goes well? We have to be running a scanner over them to understand their needs and then match it up with our catalogue of solutions. All of this takes time. We usually only get an hour with the buyer in Japan, so we need to grab as much information and insight as we possibly can and then high tail it out of there. Back at the lab we brew up the perfect solution and craft it into a killer proposal. Now we go back and present the solution. They may want us to email it to them, but with every fibre in our body we resist that option. We never ever want to be sending an unprotected proposal to the buyer. It needs us right there alongside it, to underline the value attached to the pricing and deal with any questions or misunderstandings which may emerge. We only talk price in the second meeting and we never start with a discount. We offer the set price and this is the anchor that sets the terms of the discussion. We may drop the price in exchange for a volume purchase but by 70%? That is the stupidest thing I have heard in a while in sales. As it turns out, I know the guilty party in this case, so it is even more shocking. They should have more common sense. The problem is they state it and there is nothing you can do. Common sense is not common. The horse has bolted for our hero in this story but we should all take note. Don't expect that the people accompanying you to have common sense, especially if they are selling a different line of product from you and they have no skin in the game concerning a heavily discounted sale of your offering. Before the meeting, set the ground rules, just in case. "When we get to my line-up explanation, I will be the one making the offer and that includes pricing. When I state the price, absolutely do not speak. The number will generate some tension in the room. Do not release that tension by adding a comment or a justification or anything else. Be silent as the tomb". Fix the way you will both handle the components of the meeting before you get anywhere near a client. Be very direct with what you want. This is your livelihood derived from your commission we are talking about here. Don't let an uninterested party destroy your pricing arrangements. Once they shoot their mouth off it is t

Storytelling In Sales For Fun And Profit Salespeople are brilliant on telling the client the detail of the product or service. When you think about how we train salespeople, that is a very natural outcome. Product knowledge is drummed into the heads of salespeople when they first join the company. The product or service lines are updated at some point, so again the product knowledge component of the training reigns supreme. No wonder they default to waxing lyrical about the spec. These discussions however, tend to be technical, dry, unemotional and rather boring. We know we buy on emotion and justify with logic. If we know that, then why are we spending so much time on the logic bits? Finding relevant stories to wrap the product or service up inside is the answer to getting clients emotionally involved. For example, I could say, "Dale Carnegie has an excellent sales programme that is very complete and comprehensive". All true but very dry in the telling. Or I could say, "In 1939 Dale Carnegie decided to revolutionise sale straining. In those days, if your company provided sales training you were trained but if they didn't, you had to work it all out for yourself. Dale Carnegie introduced the first public training classes for salespeople. He created the material with Percy Whiting, one of the top securities salesmen in America at that time". The second telling is a story and more engaging. It adds impressive elements about Dale Carnegie's thought leadership about sales training, his partnership with an expert salesman to create the programme and the longevity of the training methodology. These are all USPs or unique selling propositions wrapped together in a story. In this way they are more easily absorbed by the listener. We think in pictures, so we need word pictures to be employed in our storytelling. When we read books we tend to best remember the stories being told. We all grow up listening to stories so our brains are hard wired to remember them with just one exposure. A famous American sales trainer Charlie Cullen in the 1950s was one of the first to record his sales training on vinyl LPs. His recommendations on what salespeople should do, were all backed up by examples conveyed through stories. In more modern times, Zig Ziglar's whole approach to sales training was telling a series of parables for sales. Growing up in America's Bible Belt, perhaps lessons communicated through parables came natural to him because of the culture of bible study in those regions. Brian Tracy, another great sales trainer is constantly mixing science and psychology with story telling to get his point across. Gary Vaynerchuk the modern marketing guru is a master story teller. They are almost exclusively about himself, but that is his style – supremely confident, self-opinionated, self-absorbed and constantly drawing on his own experience. He has a huge following of fans, including me. What he teaches is easy to follow because of the way he employs stories to get his key messages across. So look into your line-up of products or services and pick out the stories that go with each item. It may come from the history. Or it may be the technology. It may be client stories about users and we relate what happened to them. We need to look for an angle that will make the story interesting for the buyer. It should bolster the USPs of the offering and project pots of value. We don't necessarily need a Hollywood production here in the storytelling. It doesn't have to be War and Peace either. Let's keep them brief and to the point. If we can engage the listener's emotions and bring them into the story, then we are succeeding. This takes some work and some creativity. This is why it is often a good practice to involve everyone in the sales team to work together to brainstorm some great stories. There is no doubt stories work. When I record my own sales talk I realise how many stories I am employing. When I listen to the gurus of sales training their whole underpinning platform is built on stories. They work, so let's start creating them and using them with our buyers.

Customer Service: Problems and Solutions Things go wrong. Deliveries don't turn up or are incorrect. Dates and deadlines are missed. The quality promised doesn't eventuate or live up to the promise. Internal communication isn't working well so the coordination of the delivery of the service is confused. One part of the organisation oversells the deal and the other bit cannot deliver on the inflated promises. Customers complain. Japanese customers in particular, really complain. Most of this society is rather muted but they let it all hang out, when they are unhappy about some service or product delivery gone wrong. PRIDE is the problem. This is an acronym for the usual five suspects causing the issues. Process This is the accumulation of how the organisation has divined how to best operate. This involves communication and aligning the features and value of the product or service with customer expectations. Roles Who does what in the organisation? This includes agreement on tasks and responsibilities and holding people accountable to these. Japan is genius at making sure no one takes responsibility for anything. The consensus decision making system means we are all responsible, so none of us are individually responsible. Interpersonal issues How well do the customer service personnel get along with each other and with other departments. This includes such things as attitude, teamwork and loyalty. Marketing hates sales, sales is hated by the back office, everyone hates IT. Because mistakes are so seriously frowned upon in Japan, everyone tries their hardest to shift the blame elsewhere. This leads to internal feuds, strife, vendettas and internal guerrilla warfare. Direction How the organisation defines and communicates the overall and departmental vision, mission and values is critical. Japan is curious in that those at the bottom can quite wilfully ignore what those at the top want to happen, if they don't agree with it. Poor performance and not following direction won't get you fired in Japan, so in a way, the troops are in constant state of rebellion. Senior management imagine that middle management is making sure everyone is on board with the direction of the company. Not true. The "what" is communicated and the "how" is worked out, but the "why" has often gone missing in action. External pressure The resources available to the customer service department such as time and money can be insufficient. There may or may not be capacity to control your own destiny. Okay, so what can do about all of this PRIDE coming before a fall? We need to get consensus and collaboration about solving the issue. We begin by involving people from each section to form a project team to look at the root causes of the issues. Putting a band aid on the wound doesn't deal with why the wound was there in the first place. We craft a statement of the problem. We need to define exactly what is the issue we want to deal with. There may be a lot of noise surrounding the problem, but we need to cut through to the essence. Having identified what the issue is we now need to look for the drivers, the causes. We need to trace back to the source of the problem. If that is not forthcoming then that tells us that our systems are weak and unclear. Using brainstorming techniques we now look at possible solutions we could apply. There are no dumb ideas at this stage and no evaluation taking place. We want to be awash with ideas and we will sort them out in the next step. Taking the ideas, we attach priorities to them, to isolate out which ideas are the strongest. We now attach names, milestones, budgets, evaluations, etc. to the plan, to put the solution in place. We monitor it and make changes where needed. We need excellent communication about what is happening. We need to make sure the key people are involved and that everyone is committed to fixing the issues. Despite all of this excellent planning, future issues will arise. We have to be vigilant and ensure that we can take quick action, employing this system immediately. Making modifications on the way through is way better than having to build everything from scratch. Keep this template handy and roll it out whenever major incidents pop up. We never lack for challenges in business so there will always be plenty of scope for refining our skills through opportunities to practice.

Why Everyone Hates Salespeople We don't deserve it, well most of us don't deserve it, but there is a very strong negative perception of salespeople. Pushy salespeople, dishonest salespeople, bait and switch salespeople, disappearing after the sale salespeople, the list goes on. We only meet that client once, but they have met so many dodgy salespeople in the course of their careers. They have seen the worst of everything in sales by the time we get to them. We might be sweetness and light, but those who have gone before have muddied the waters. We start from underneath the water line in terms of trust and have to rise up into the fresh air, to show we are here to help the buyer succeed. Stereotypes about salespeople abound and like me, I think you will struggle to come up with one that is positive. We have to show we are different. The good news is that surveys show that buyers still look to salespeople for advice and information on their purchases. This is natural because hopefully the seller will have deep and expert knowledge on the suitability of the product or service for the buyer's needs. We do this ourselves when we are out consumer shopping. We ask the clerk about the product we are going to buy and we can tell immediately whether they know what they are talking about or not. When we are being "sold" by a salesperson an alarm bell goes off in our brain. We must remember that everyone loves to buy but nobody wants to be sold. Listening skills are always a struggle in sales. Our brains are very concentrated so we are constantly filtering what we hear, searching for signs of interest or signs of resistance. We race ahead of the conversation, start tuning the buyer out and put all of our brainpower into the wondrous comment we are going to make. If they waffle on too much, we might lose our thread or they may change the subject before we can inject this gem, so we cut them off and talk over the top of them. We need to let them be heard, check for understanding to make sure we really have got it, before we begin introducing our solution. It is natural to talk about ourselves, our company and our products and services. What happens from Day One of joining the firm? We are taken through the hard core details of the product, because product knowledge is considered a foundational stone in building a sales career. This is all true, however some organisations don't venture beyond this. They get stuck on themselves and neglect to teach their salespeople about spending time understanding the customer. The customer needs to know their needs are understood first before we can even try to build the trust. If we begin our discussion like this, "Thank you for your time today, let me tell you about us and what we do", then that is pretty average and sadly somewhat standard. It would be better to start, "My only role here today is to help you grow your business. I would like to know if that is possible and the way to do that is to clearly understand your business and what you need. In the process I will show, if it makes sense, where we can fit into the picture". Which conversation would you prefer with your buyer hat on? When I started selling encyclopaedia's door to door, my first job out of High School, we had to memorise word perfect, a twenty five minute sale's pitch, coordinated with leafing through the gorgeous product pages. Many salespeople are following a script today as well. It might be those dreadful pitches we get over the phone, where you can hear from the cadence that they are reading it off a screen. Or it might be the pitch of a thousand deliveries. The salesperson has given this so many times they are bored with it. The lifeblood has been drained from the words and phrases and it is dead on arrival. If you are hearing too much of just your voice, ask a question and shut up. Get the buyer talking, because that is where all the useful information you don't already know is located. Flailing arms, wild eruptions of energy, piercing eye contact, loud delivery, exaggerated body language all point to a salesperson out of control. Their enthusiasm for what they are doing has trumped their common sense. Perky is good in some cases. Overly perky is not and there is a clear line between the two. The problem is what is the preferred style of the buyer? Are they conservative and see all this excess energy as childish. Are they shy and retiring and want to call for sunglasses, because of all the radiation glare coming off the salesperson? We need to channel our energy effectively and appropriately depending on who we are sitting in front of. The failing salesperson has one calibration, no matter who they meet. Everyone gets the same treatment. I might like overly perky myself, but I might be a small minority of buyers, so what happens to the others? They all get put off by you and you get put out the door. Remember to tailor your communication style to what the buyer likes and you will find it much easier to make

Why Japanese Salespeople Won't Question The Buyer Consultative selling, value selling, insight selling, etc., all rely on one crucial factor to be successful. That is the use of questions to get enough information to make sure the buyer hears what they need to hear, in order to choose that salesperson to buy from. This problem is not exclusive to Japan. There are failing salespeople scattered all around the world, because they are making the most basic mistakes. There is an astronomical amount of free and paid information available today about the best practices of selling. There is always a big swathe being cut right through the middle of this output devoted to asking the buyer questions. Despite all of this goodness, the majority of salespeople never study anything and so fail to drink from the sale's fountain of youth. Whenever we teach salespeople in our sale's courses, we invariably find their questioning skills are either non-existent or very shabby. Once they get the structures and the practice, we see them become much more professional in sales. In other words, they can do it. So what is it with Japanese salespeople that they won't ask the buyer questions? During a recent sale's training session the following reasons were offered up by the Japanese salespeople taking the programme. Here are seven reasons why salespeople here say they won't ask the buyer questions during the sales call. They worry about angering the buyer Somehow the buyer is perceived to be quick to temper, anger and unhappiness if they are questioned. The idea is that this is not the behaviour the buyer is expecting and a frosty sales call is in scope immediately if questions are asked. They fear they will be insulting them There is the fear that the salesperson might ask a question which the buyer can't answer and the buyer will lose face. This is insulting and a guarantee that the salesperson will never do any business with that company ever again. I have experienced this myself. We deal with a lot of HR people who are looking for training on behalf of line managers. When I asked the HR team certain needs based questions they clearly had no idea, because they weren't briefed or had no insight. They said they wanted my pitch. I resisted that option. Instead I innocently asked if I could talk directly to the line manager, to find out what I needed to know. I was immediately bundled straight out the door. They feel it is being too direct The types of questions needed to be asked are quite specific and quite direct. What are you problems, what is not working, where are you failing, why aren't you fixing it, etc. The whole culture here survives through indirectness, vagaries, tonnes of grey. Ambiguous conversation is a well refined art in Japan. Asking direct, pointed questions upsets the social harmony, so this must be avoided. Concerned the quality of their questions may be too poor Asking a dumb question is also a fear. That would be embarrassing and show a lack of professionalism or a lesser intellect. It reveals poor research before the meeting and so a cavalier attitude toward the buyer. You have to know the industry well to hone in on pertinent issues. Failure to ask smart questions says you are clueless and not to be taken seriously. Better to keep that dirty little secret to yourself, by keeping your mouth shut. The buyer will feel you are trying to snag the company's internal secrets Asking about the current state of the business, the firm's plans, strategies, pricing, delivery quantities, activities etc., is usually confidential information and it is highly presumptuous and arrogant to be asking for this forbidden data. They just get straight into their pitch and don't think to ask questions Because salespeople are mainly trained by the untrained, that is to say, their seniors, who were trained in the same sad way by their seniors too, the bloodline of question asking ability ran out decades ago. Pitching without having any clue what the buyer needs, never even registers in the salespeople's mind as an issue because they think their job is to turn up and go through the flyers or the product catalogue. They think, "Questions? Who needs questions, when I am here to tell the client everything about the product, so they can buy it". The buyer is God and God is too high in status for a salesperson to be asking for anything I remember when I first got to Japan, I noticed that very low ranking people in very large companies, were treated as superior by the Presidents of much smaller firms. Social hierarchy is very defined here by both the size of the company and the rank of the individual. By definition the buyer always outranks the seller. The buyer's point of view is that the salesperson will pitch their offer and the buyer will tear it to shreds and reject it. No questions brooked, entertained or tolerated when God is involved in the sale. Therefore salespeople are in no social position to be asking anything to God, the buyer.

What To Do When You Screw Up The Delivery Sales is the front of house part of business but often the delivery of the product or service is done by someone else. They say that the real measure of the service culture of a company is the decision by the guys on the loading bay not to drop the customer's package. They are not highly paid, the job is pretty dull, boring and thankless. If you can get the people at the bottom of the hierarchy to buy into the vision, mission and values regarding customer service then you are a rare bird. Most of the time the disconnect between what the suited denizens of the executive floor, with their thick carpet, tasteful, expensive paintings and carefully selected executive assistants are thinking is taking place and what is really going on, are light years apart. Sales is often a hotbed of exaggeration. Wild and fanciful promises are made to secure the sale at which point the back office gets involved. Production deadlines are totally unrealistic, the pricing is a sad joke that won't stack up, the quality level promised cannot easily be achieved. Bad things start to happen because now the system is being subject to trauma. The delivery is entrusted to the lowest common denominator for reliability and performance. The "care factor" hovers close to zero. The customer's promises are vaporised and they are not happy. In Japan the blame game is well established. Mistakes are not acceptable in Japan, so first order of business when making a mistake is to take zero responsibility for anything. The second order of business is to hide the mistake if possible. Absolutely no early advice to the boss that there is a problem. Keep it under wraps in the hope the boss never finds out at all. If that doesn't work, then deny everything. Failing that, blame somebody else. The group accountability system here is genius in avoiding individual retribution. We are all responsible, so none of us are responsible. Perfect. Does the customer just roll over and accept this. Absolutely no way. They go on attack and are relentless on getting justice. Knowing this you have to wonder why the guilty parties don't fess up and accept the blame? In litigious societies like the USA, no one accepts blame for anything, because they know they are going to court against a fired up lawyer looking for their percentage of the judgment. Well in Japan, they do eventually take responsibility , but only after being given a thorough tongue lashing by the buyer. Japan is great for turning up bearing gifts, usually some food items like expensive biscuits, cakes or fruit from a major Department Store, like Takashimiya or Mitsukoshi. A lot of deep bowing is also required while repeating set phrases like "I am sorry, I have no words…". It sounds better when expressed in Japanese, but that is the raw translation. At this point the unhappy party berates the offender for their failures. If it is a serious enough problem, then the top brass get rolled out to atone as well. This is usually a last resort though. What do we need to do? Creating the right culture in the company is key. Make sure the WHY is understood by everyone. Also, there needs to be the right approach to handling mistakes. If the team know they are not going to be executed for mistakes, then the chances of finding out early go up. Bosses going apoplectic when problems arise and publically balling out the errant, ensures a culture of keeping problems a secret. We don't want that because if we can get on to the problem early, we can usually limit the damage. The boss has the money and power to fix things, so the sooner they get involved the better. It also pays to get the boss bowing to the customer from the start, rather than resisting this. By wheeling in the big boss, we can demonstrate our sincerity in how seriously we are taking this issue. There was a problem with some business in Kobe. The amount of money involved wasn't much. Nevertheless, I got on the Bullet Train went down there, did a lot of bowing and saying sorry and then came back to Tokyo. That blew off my whole day. However, if you want to establish the right culture about customer service, then you must lead from the front. The staff member who created this problem wasn't publically humiliated or blasted. They were spoken to in private and assured there had better not be a repeat performance. They were allowed to live on and fight another day. The British Admiralty in the early twentieth century had a simple strategy. Build the biggest ships, get there first, sink everything. Not bad advice for dealing with mistakes. Send in the big boss, act immediately and keep apologising until they have no more to say.

Attribute Selling For Salespeople We all know that selling ourselves is the first key sale we have to make in order for the client to buy our services or products. How do we do that without being boorish, a windbag or coming across as if we are desperate? Selling ourselves requires subtlety and nuance. We have to weave this into our sales talk with the buyer in a way which is not obvious or obnoxious. How do we do that? Clients are primarily interested in a few key things about salespeople. Can they be trusted, are they reliable, do they do what they say they will do? Before we get into a sales discussion with the client we should list up the personal attributes we have, which we think will be of greatest relevance for this buyer. Buyer by buyer, the point of focus will be different, so we want a long list of sterling attributes we possess which we can talk about when needed. Depending on the client and the flow of the conversation, we can dip into this reservoir of goodness and draw out some key descriptors about us. Telling the client these words is not particularly effective unless they are wrapped together tightly with proof. The best evidence is from actual experiences, cases and examples. We should have a list of these prepared to match with each attribute. If we felt our important attribute was reliability and this was key for the buyer, then we need to bring this up in the conversation in a subtle manner. For example, "I know that in this industry, there are many distributors downstream who depend on surety of Just In Time supply, because they don't have extensive storage facilities for holding stock. I take it as a point of pride that none of my clients has ever experienced a delay in supply of the product and we have always been able to meet their schedules". Here we are noting our understanding of the issue, our commitment to serving the client and our peerless track record of achievement. All the while not sounding like we are boasting or puffing ourselves up. If we feel there is a concern about trust on the part of the client, we can say, "I believe that good business is built on a foundation of trust. My clients do trust me and I know that because of the repeat orders and consistent business we get from them". So without bragging about how great I am, I provide evidence on my trustworthiness though the flow of repeat orders. These demonstrate that the clients favour our company as a reliable supplier, who services they value highly. The reference point is not us and what we say, it is what the existing customers are saying. Where possible we should reference actual buyers by name. "Mr. Tanaka from XYZ company became my client ten years ago. We have been continuously supplying his company every month like clockwork. We have become an extension of his firm as a trusted supplier who partners with their company to help them grow their market share". Trying to tie these things into the sales conversation spontaneously on the fly is a hit and miss activity. Before we get to the buyer, we need to have prepared this cross link of attribute and evidence and have it ready to go. We need to have prepared our examples and be able to dip into the specific case that matches this client and their business. We need to be saying how great we are through the experiences and feedback of the existing buyers. We talk about what mattered to them and how we supplied that. In this way we are able to blow our own trumpet without seeming to be doing that. The evidence part is the key and it has to be real. If the client wants to talk to Mr. Tanaka, then everything we have said has to be true. Preparation is vital to making this subtle and convincing. Anyone running around saying how great they are invites doubt, distain and skepticism. If the existing client is saying it however, then that makes it all true. We need to have worked up our attributes-evidence construct for the meeting, so that it is ready to roll out when we see the chance. No matter which direction the client takes the conversation, we need to be ready with a story that illustrates we have that requirement and they should rely on us as their trusted business partner.

Emotional Selling "We buy based on emotion and justify with logic". We have probably all heard that before, but when we are selling what do we do about it in practice? Actually, we spend the vast majority of our sales interview time with the client, focusing on the logic bit. If we are hopeless as a salesperson, then we are pitching the product straight away, with absolutely no idea what the client actually needs. Nevertheless, the pitch is constructed on a logical basis, going through the nitty gritty of what we do and what it entails. If we have a clue, we ask questions to uncover client need. Again we are immersed in a world of logic. We are asking intelligent questions to get to the facts. So where is the emotion part in this sea of logic? Building rapport and trust with the client is an emotional idea. Of course, there is a logic component around talking about business relevant topics, rather than spending all of our time rehashing the football game played on the weekend. We are business focused. The way we are business focused though, is to impart we can be trusted. We are appealing to the emotional side of the buyer. The way we speak and what we say are important, to build a connection with the client. We are warm, considerate, charming. We ask questions to get them talking, as we know this usually relaxes our interlocutor. We look for connections to build the trust, be it shared educational experiences around the school brand or similar faculties where we studied. We look for common hometown or similar residential experiences, mutual friends, colleagues or acquaintances. When I worked at the Shinsei Bank, I was to brief a newly hired section head on what my section did. He ignored all of that and started a process of divining who we knew in common. We spent the whole time talking about other people we knew and he never did find out what my section did. But this was his way of building trust and rapport, and he went for the emotional rather than rational approach. Spending all of our time on this with the buyer would be too much, but establishing something in common is important and is constructed through emotional triggers. Another prime place for emotion is when presenting the solution to align it with the clients needs. It is fine to go through the benefits, the application of the benefits, provide evidence and head into a trail close, but it doesn't have to be all logic. When we talk about the application of the benefit, we can look for emotional anchor pieces which will resonate with the buyer. This is where storytelling is powerful because it allows us to paint a word picture that outlines how people felt or will feel, as a result of buying our widget. Yes, the spec part will be dry, but we should be aiming for a more human touch in the "application of the benefit" part of the solution presentation. For example, a new faster internet connection can talk about a lot of logical, technical stuff to do with IT. We can also talk about results. What that increase in speed does for our team and their clients. We could mention, "We know that 5G will increase connection speeds by 100 times. The power of this will make video calls unbelievably powerful. The client can see your every facial expression change and can hear the tone of your voice emphasing key words. This will be in real time with fantastic screen clarity and connection stability. This will create a supreme personalisation of business being done remotely. This is new, it hasn't been possible until now. With this level of engagement, you will feel so close, like you can almost reach out and touch them. The typical cold tyranny of distance will be replaced with warmth and familiarity. Imagine the power of seeing each other smiling, laughing and engaging in real time. For highly valued existing clients, this will open the door to more agreements signed, no travel time lost and no loss of the personal touch". In this example, we are trying to focus on the human interaction component of the increased connectivity speeds and not just on the tech of how this is made possible. We are moving the discussion to the outcomes the technology provides and not just focusing on the spec detail of how it does that. We can also extend the emotional bridge to how happy the team will be with the new arrangements. "Your team is going to feel a new lease of life. They will start striding around the office with increased confidence and purpose, because now they can reach many, many more clients everyday, more than was ever thought possible. They can now reach them with a very high level of human touch, even though they are connecting remotely. As the deals roll in and their commissions get paid out, you will see that look of pride and satisfaction in their faces. A new energy will become felt, optimism will replace doubt, negativity and fear. Success builds further success and now the 5 G flood gates have been opened". We are focusing on how people will feel, what

Product Knowledge In Sales It is an obvious thing that we need good knowledge of our product to instill confidence in the buyer, underlining that we are a reliable partner. We need extensive product knowledge so that we can mentally sift the right solution for the buyer, from amongst the many possible alternatives which exist. Actually, we make the product purchase decision for the buyer. It may seem that the buyer is choosing, but in reality, the seller is choosing. This is based on what the client has told us about their situation and their needs. Salespeople who just launch willy nilly straight into their pitch get themselves into trouble. They can't make a good decision about what the client needs, because they don't know. They don't have any information yet. They are using the "throw enough mud up against the wall and some of it will stick" process. Basically they are idiots. As salespeople, we will always have a much more in depth knowledge of our product lineup than the buyer. This is obvious. We need to make the decision for the buyer and then lead them to arrive at an acknowledgment that our selection is the best one for their business. To understand the buyer however, is not always so straightforward. They may be reluctant to share all their dirty laundary with a relative stranger, an outsider. They may not always have a clear idea themselves about what actually is the problem. In our own case, we deal a lot with HR Directors, who are looking for training on behalf of other divisions within the firm. This means we are often getting the information second hand, which can lead to gaps in understanding. Hard to hit a target which is vague. The skill of the salesperson is to have experience with similar problems. To be able to offer solutions which have a track record of success. The grey areas for us are where we don't have that much experience with a particular solution and we don't know the solution in that much depth. Often salespeople have a very large catalogue of solutions and it is very difficult to know all of them thoroughly. Again using our own example. We have 155 modules from which to teach broken into two hour classes. It is basically impossible to hold 300 hours of that much detailed information in your brain. Naturally there will be some solutions which are more called upon by clients than others, so we get to become more expert on these. The danger is we become too reliant on knowing the core products and don't invest the time to know other solutions in the line up. This requires time to be allocated to study the full line up. Clients understand that we cannot be fully expert with every solution in a big catalogue, but they expect us to be able to find the information quickly. This means we need to have a system that allows us to plug in quickly to the product line-up in order to search for best solutions for the issue. Fortunately in Japan, it is rare that we will ever get a deal done in one meeting. What usually takes place is we have the first meeting and collect information. We then go away, use that information and create a proposal on the solution we recommend. At the second meeting, we go through the details and convince the buyer that this is the best course of action. This allows us to comprehensively research our line up for the best offering to the client. By consistently making time to study the lineup of solutions, we are better able to draw on the full resources of our company to help the buyer. In a busy world though, making that time is easier to imagine than to pull off. Nevertheless, we need to keep updating our knowledge of existing solutions and add in the new ones as they emerge. One of the issues we should be careful of, is to also work on how to present the solution to the client. The product itself should be integrated into the sales training system, so that the sales training delivery is always in context. Each solution in the product line up has its own benefits and we need to draw in the application of those benefits, the evidence of where this has worked before and then move smoothly into a trial close to see if we have fully dealt with any issues the client may still have. This means we need to devote time to studying the products in the context of how we will present the best solution to the buyer.

Taking A Hit On The Price We all hate having to take a hit on pricing. We establish a price based on the value we provide. Clients however can take no great notice of that and just plunge right in, demanding a big discount. The rationale behind the requirement for a discount is often related to what they think it should cost or is a negotiating ploy to drag you down into the mud and blood of haggling. Of course the biggest pushback on pricing comes at the precise time you are the most desperate for some business, any business. Like sharks, some buyers can smell blood in the water and want to take a big bite out of your sale's price. Our pricing is a benchmark related to our positioning in in the market. We set our prices with the aim to reflect the quality of what we do. Well that is what we think. Our buyers may have a different take on the value or may have alternatives, which are much cheaper, with little perceived difference in the value. This is what happened to Starbucks in Australia. This is the one country where they basically failed. The alternative product and service from local coffee shops was perceived as having a cost to performance advantage over Starbucks. They had to close most of their outlets. We have to make a choice. Do we suck up the discount to get the business or do we walk away. If we want to defend our positioning, then we may have to walk away. If you believe you provide a value of service, that is superior to the competition, then you need to defend the pricing by rejecting attempts to drag it down. You need pipeline of other buyers who will happily pay that amount to get away with this. If you are desperate, you will probably have few options but but to take the business and the pain. Once you start down the slippery slope of discount pricing, the buyers start beating you up on price every time. For some, they enjoy a nice game of sports negotiating, where they have the winning hand all the time. They want see how much blood they can get out of you, by offering ridiculous numbers to determine how desperate you actually are. I was coaching salespeople from a firm where they would have to ring around offering discounts to get orders to make the monthly quota. They would get smashed by tough negotiators playing games with them. This was killing the sales team's motivation. You need to jump out of these types of toxic discussions and call someone else. This sports negotiating dead end destroys your confidence and hits your motivation hard. You plunge into a vicious cycle of negativity and despair. Don't go there to titillate the nastier side of the buyer. The effort is not worth it. Look for more professional, ethical business partners instead. If there is further business in the offing, then we are often persuaded to take the hit to get the other piece of the pie. The tricky part though is when the additional business is just that, "in the offing" and not nailed down and fixed yet. We can try and bake these in together, to get an agreement that we are pricing the first one at a discount, because we are getting the second piece of business. Buyers tend to resist this though, because they don't want to commit. So it comes back to where is your walk away point and how capable are you financially, of actually walking? In Japan, taking a hit on the price at the point of entry dooms you forever to be set at that price boiling point with the buyer. No matter how much you may want to lift the price back up, the buyer now has you slotted in at that low price forever. I have had this happen to me over and over again and I hate it. So going in with a discount to get more business is a deadly game here of lock in to permanent low profit margins. Walking is painful because you are giving up business, with no replacement there to make up for it. Your mind is plagued with thoughts like "well a little bit of business is better than no business". The impact on your positioning, your belief in the value of what you offer is very negative. Instead, put forward a credible number and if they don't buy it, then you walk. The crazy thing is one buyer's "ridiculous" price from you, is considered "quite reasonable" by another buyer. These two reactions have happened to me in the same day. After one meeting you are down in the dumps, then the later meeting has you back up again, with a spring in your step, instead of dragging your feet around. Don't allow the buyer to drag you down, because sales is tough enough anyway, without having more negativity piled high on your head. If it isn't right, then walk and find yourself another buyer.

Helpful Selling As salespeople, we can become very focused and tunnel vision like, when it cones to dealing with our clients. This is especially the case when they are existing clients. We get into very narrow territory, when we discuss possible solutions to help them achieve their goals. This process continues for many years and then one day you hear they bought a service or product you have, from a competitor. That hurts big time. That happened to me recently. The client bought leadership training from a guy I know who only specialises in sales training. I was really shattered to hear that news. I was thinking ,"why would you do that". I realised I had not followed up enough with the President on what he needs. Painful lesson right there. We have an exercise we do in our sales training, where we get a blank spreadsheet ready. Across the top, in the columns section , we write the names of our existing clients. Down the left side, in the rows section, we write down the various solutions we have to offer clients. Then in the cross section cells between the two, we mark with a letter Y for "yes" if they are already buying, or P for "possible", if they are not yet buying. It is a shocking exercise, because you are always amazed at how many of your solutions your clients needs, but they are not buying from you. Why is this? Mainly we get into a rut with our buyers. We only talk about the existing business. In effect, we become order takers. We never go back and investigate if the needs have changed, or if there are further needs. Maybe we tried to have those broader conversations in the past, but they didn't have any interest. We therefore assume that subject is closed. This is why finding out they bought from your competitor really kills you. You have been calling on them regularly, but had no idea there was a possibility to sell them other things in addition. We have to keep our eyes open too. There may be a change in the market that will make our offering more attractive and now possible, when it didn't generate any interest previously. Or we might raise a new idea that hasn't been discussed previously. I was calling on a client recently and had that experience. We had been talking about sales training for his team of new recruits. This was a follow up session to one completed a few months earlier and now the new recruits were on board, so we could get down to the details of when, where, who etc. I happened to have seen him on video talking about a collaboration they had with a foreign chamber of commerce. I noted he was on camera making some remarks about the tie up. Here is the interesting thing. I didn't jump in with a statement, "hey, I saw your recent video with X Chamber, you really need to do our High Impact Presentations Training, because it is a such a phenomenal course". Like all serious salespeople, I asked him if he was likely to do more such videos? I was probing to see if there was a new and regular need emerging. We had never discussed High Impact Presentations before, because we were focused only on sales training. He told me he was doing more and more of these types of things. So I asked, was there a need to do this at a high level, as the face and representative of the brand? He said "yes". I asked, if I had something that was perfect for taking these types of skills to the highest level, would that help him in what he doing with the brand promotion? He said, "Yes" and that is when I introduced the High Impact Presentations Training. Now if I hadn't seen that video, I would have had no idea that there was a possibility of selling presentations training, as well as sales training. The point is we all get trapped into narrow gauge conversations discussing the detail of what we have done in the past and can become blind to possibilities for the future. What should we do about that? We need to be disciplined to ask about new or different needs every time we contact the client. We don't have to come across as desperate, grasping or pushy. We can just say, "I know we have been discussing X for some time now. Business is in constant movement though and needs change and new needs emerge. We haven't had a discussion for a while on whether what we are currently doing is fully matching all of your needs. Have there been any changes to your business which may have created some needs we may be able to help with?". This is a good closed question, which clarifies if there is or there isn't a need. We want to know one way or the other. If it is a "no" we just park that information and make a note to ask on the next occasion, if there has been a change or not. And keep asking, every time. These things are not difficult, but sometimes our habits defeat us. Having a mouthful of the bitter ashes of defeat, after finding out your competitor got there first, makes this type of exercise more compelling. There is no penalty for asking, provided you do it in the right way. So ask. Every time.

Breaking Into The Mind Of The Buyer Life is busy, busy today. Communications has sped up business to an extent unthinkable even ten years ago. Every company is a publisher now, due to social media's pervasiveness. Content marketing is driving original content creation and release. LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook are favouring live video, so we have to become television talents. Voice is the next big thing, so podcasting requires us to be radio personalities. If you are in business, your personal information is out there, easily searchable and found. We check out the buyers and they check out the sellers, before we meet. When you turned up at a client meeting eighty years ago, you came with some good jokes, some market information, some competitor intelligence, etc. You did this to break the ice with the buyer. Even if they were an established client, you needed to break the ice for that day. Buyers then and buyers now have a lot going on inside their heads when we turn up and almost none of it has anything to do with us and what we want. In Japan, meeting room space is always at a premium, so getting time with buyers has some automatic limitations placed upon it with certain companies. After thirty minutes you are given the bum's rush, because that space has been booked for the next meeting and they are loitering with intent outside the glass wall waiting to get in for their meeting. That doesn't give us much time to carve out some mind space with the buyer, get into questioning mode, talk about the solution, deal with any objections and seal the deal. If the first part of the meeting isn't well planned then there won't be any result. We cannot let the first few interactions be random events. We need to plan in detail how we are going to establish some rapport with this buyer or reestablish some rapport if they are an existing buyer. We will have checked some of the media aggregation sites to see if there has been anything released in to the public arena about the client company, which we can then refer to. If it is a first meeting then checking the annual report is a must. There will be a glossy coverage of the CEO's vision and strategy for the enterprise, with photographs in a swish corporate setting. We are looking for things we can ask about in this meeting. Our objective is to get the client talking as soon as possible. Most salespeople still cling to the idea that they have to dominate the airwaves, so they just keep talking, talking, talking. We don't want that. We only have a limited amount of time, so we want the client talking as much as possible. When we do that, the client will have stopped thinking about all of the other things going on in their work and private lives. We will be concentrated on the business at hand and that is exactly what we need. We hopefully will be able to check whether some insight we have found is relevant to what they are doing. We deal with that industry vertical so we are picking up ideas across companies on what is working and not working. We share these ideas as a means of demonstrating we provide value to their enterprise. They may not go for it, but they will go for our intention to assist them to make their business more successful. A discussion with a drill manufacture company I called upon, prompted a suggestion by me that they copy Blendtec's "will it blend" phenomenon, but for drills not blenders. Blendtec's CEO Tom Dickson video's the blending of iPads, golf balls, whatever and post it on YouTube and they get massive views. My idea was to copy this for Japan and create some buzz around the product line up. They didn't go for it in the end, but I have no doubt that I have a closer relationship with the President today, because of my effort to think out of the box for them. I had his attention for our discussion. Getting the full attention of the buyer is no longer a given. They are permanently distracted today and we are competing with so much noise, more than ever before. We need to have a strategy to get their attention. We cannot leave it to chance or expect that, "of course they will be paying attention – we have an appointment". That concept is way too indulgent. Ask well thought through questions to get them talking, bring insights and valuable market intelligence. Today, we have to do this every time, even if they are an established buyer. Just because we have a relationship with them, doesn't mean we have automatically broken through all the completion for their attention. Start fresh every time as if it were the very first meeting. In this modern age this is the new normal.

Saying "No" To Buyers Normally, as the seller, we are getting told "no" in sales, rather than the other way around. When salespeople become desperate to hit their numbers, they start to do crazy things. They start telling lies to the buyer, they exaggerate the scope of the solution, they savagely discount the price, they overpromise on the follow-up, they agree to horrendous delivery dates, they become visibly agitated during the sales call. All bad. When we meet the client, our brain has to get into a specific gear. That means we are focused on how can we contribute to build the client's business? What can we do that will grow the buyer's revenues, cut costs or expand market share? That mental gear is entirely different to questions such as "how will I make my monthly sales quota?", "how will I stop being fired?", etc. The latter are solely focused on you and not the buyer and this impacts what comes out of your mouth. If we are doing a proper job of prospecting we will always have alternatives. When the pipeline is too thin, desperation sets in. The existing clients get worked over, to try and squeeze blood from a stone, because there are no other options. It is easy to talk to an existing client than go and find a new one, which is so why salespeople hate prospecting – it is hard and tough work. Nevertheless, prospecting and building pipeline are the keys to positioning ourselves as sellers. When we have a strong pipeline, we are not dependent on any one sale. When we are doing the questioning phase of the sale's call we start to understand what the client needs. We may realise that what we have isn't really a fit. When we don't have pipeline, we start to think how we can make it fit anyway. This is desperate thinking and ultimately very damaging to our trust, brand and reorder possibilities. We are thinking single order, rather than the start of many orders. We may know that to take on this project is going to put a lot of pressure on the back office or the supply chain within our organisation. We have to keep in mind the opportunity cost that this deal represents, not just the income it will generate. We are impinging on other better quality work to do this deal. If the pricing for doing it was at a premium, it might be justifiable but that is usually quite rare. Or if the scale of the work is considerable and sustained over a long period of time, it might be viable. In fact, usually, a bad deal more often than not comes with other ugly lumpy bits attached to it that are not very attractive. We are better to say "no". When deals come that are outside of our usual scope and therefore require a lot of work, the price needs to be high, to warrant doing it. If it is not, then get back to being busy building pipeline and let that deal flow to a competitor, who is either better suited to handle it or more stupid than we are. It hurts to give business away to a competitor, but that is the better choice than damaging your own operation. A deal came to me though LinkedIn and the buyer was a substantial company in Singapore, with a strong brand name. The details of what they wanted to do in Japan though, had potential grief written all over it for me. It was somewhat related to what we do, but just that bit off to the side, where we would have to do a lot of work to make the project work. The money mentioned was so, so and really didn't cover the extra work that would be needed. I introduced the deal to a "frenemy" rival company and asked if they were interested. They said yes and so I connected them with the seller. I heard later, that they got hammered on the pricing, when they came to deal with the lower level operations people inside the company. A typical Singaporean business play where they are very tough on pricing, often known as the "squeeze all the juice out of the deal for the buyer" play. The "frenemy" took the pricing offered, rather than saying no or demanding more money and got smashed. It turned out to be a huge amount of work, sucked up a lot of their time and burned some of their contacts. This is exactly what I thought it would do to me too. I was glad I missed that bullet. Saying "no" was a very, very good choice on my part. It was also a one off deal, so there was no hope of repeat business. This made it less attractive, because I couldn't see any return on the investment of time and effort. I didn't take it because I had pipeline, alternatives, other potential business. Say "no" to a bad or marginal deal and keep working on building pipeline to find better deals. You will spend the same amount of time, but the rewards are vastly different.

Three Keys For Sales Success Know, like and trust are critical components for success in business. The "know" bit hopefully is being taken care of by your marketing efforts and your personal brand. What about the like and trust elements? If the buyer doesn't like us, then the chances of getting a sale becomes so much more difficult. What makes you likable? If they don't trust us, then the business won't advance. How do they know we are trustworthy? This whole frame of reference is especially important in the case of creating a new client. Most Japanese salespeople love their clients. That is to say, they love their existing clients. They are not so keen to do the work to go out there and create a new client. It may be the case that at your scale you don't need any new clients, so bully for you. For the rest of us we need them. Old clients drop out and must be replaced. We also want to grow our business, so we need more from the clients we already have and we need to add new clients to do that. If we are calling on a new client there are a lot of difficulties involved around being liked and trusted. They do not know us. We have a very small window in which to connect with them in the right manner. How we look, how we carry ourselves and what we say, become make or break equations. Everyone is super busy today, so when we meet them they have a lot on their mind about what has happened so far in the day and what must happen later in the day. We have to break through all that internal noise. We might bring some useful information on the market or the industry. We might start with a question to get them talking. We have to be careful with small talk though. If they have a really impressive office and it has a special feature, do you think you are the first person they have met who has commented on it? After the first week of moving in they have heard the same comments from everyone who has visited them. We need to ask a question that relates the impact of the new office to their business. We might say, "This is a beautiful office. I am sure everyone is very proud to work in this environment. Have you noticed a change in staff morale since you made the move?". This gets them talking about their business and that is what we want. Get the focus off us and on to them. We need to become excellent listeners. This combination of them talking and we are passionate listeners builds likeability. It also allows us to gauge what type of personality style they have and their preferred communication preference. During this phase we need to tell them about what we do and gain their permission to ask questions. In a Japanese context, almost all Japanese salespeople are scared to ask questions of the buyer, which is why they get stuck giving their pitch and then having it torn to shreds by the buyer. Asking for permission is not hard, if you know what you are doing. "Dale Carnegie is a global corporate training organisation specializing in soft skills training. An example would be XYZ, where we have been helping their engineers with their presentation impact skills. They have noticed a big improvement when they put these engineers in front of the clients compared to before. Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure, but in order for me to understand if that would be possible, would you mind if I asked a few questions?". Once you have permission now you can start to uncover what the clients needs. The way we ask the questions communicates to the buyer that we have their best interests at heart and that we are trying to find the perfect match between what we have and what they need. To do this, the questions have to be well designed. "What do you do?", isn't one of them. We have done our homework prior to the meeting. A better question would be, "Your global president has set down a growth target of 12%. Does that number get spread equally across every market or does Japan have a higher number?". What a great question. Hopefully it is a higher number, because we are here to help them reach it. By asking excellent questions we uncover what they need and then we have made a decision. We know if we can help them or not and if we can't we leave. We don't try and jam the round peg into the square hole. We go find someone we can help. They appreciate the honesty. If we can help them, then the solution we provide will be perfect for what they need. They will understand that we have heard them and we have found the match between their need and our solutions. This builds trust. We have our aim front and center, which is to become a key partner for them to grow their business. We communicate this in the way we operate and by what we say. So to be liked we need to be well planned with the first impression with a new client. We need to say things that make them feel good about us. We need to ask questions in order to understand what they need. When we deliver the solution they see that this works for what they need. This builds the tr

How To Deal With The Dog Days Of Sales Nothing goes in a straight line in sales, does it. That order we received gets canceled, suddenly, inexplicably and mercilessly. The client disappears from the face of the earth and despite initial interest, is now permanently incommunicado. Appointments are not coming your way, as we learn that everyone is too busy, not interested, already have it, the brother-in-law is the supplier, etc. Meetings go badly, as the buyer demands our pitch, then opens up the 12 gauge shotgun and proceeds to blow it to shreds, with all the things which are thought to be wrong with it. Depressing. This series of disasters, coming on top of each other, one after another, eats into our self-belief and confidence. We doubt whether we can actually sell anything anymore. The pipeline is high and dry, there are scanty meetings planned and time weighs heavily upon our shoulders. The boss is a maniac, beating down on us with heavy expectations and threats of elimination. The money isn't flowing and our spouse isn't understanding about the lack of dough. "Whatever was workin before sure ain't workin now". What do we do to climb out of this funk? We need to look at our original strategy. Perhaps we had too much at stake concentrated with too few clients, so that as they dropped out, the cupboard became bare. We may have neglected to keep prospecting as we were servicing our orders. We need to get busy and stop focusing on what we can't do and switch mental gears to what we can do. Get out a large sheet of paper. Make a column of existing and previous clients on the left, noting the industry in the adjoining column on the right. Taking the list of clients, start calling them and ask for referrals. Don't say something useless like, "Do you know anyone who would be interested in our widget?" The answer will be "no" because you have now confronted them with the entire world and they can't think of anyone. Narrow it down to a group of people whose faces they can see in their mind's eye. For example, "Thinking about your fellow chamber of commerce members, would there be some in that group who are having similar issues to what you have had and who similarly would benefit from finding a solution?". This is easier for them to come up with possible candidates. Ask them to introduce you by connecting you both on email, so you can follow up with them. Back to our strategic planning. Continuing with our chart, in the next column, again to the right, start listing up lookalikes. These are companies in the same industry who are not already clients. We have some degree of experience with one company in the industry and all of their problems. The chances are high that other companies in the same industry are also suffering from similar problems. This gives us better insight to suggest reasons why we should have a face to face meeting. Start calling them. You will hit the ubiquitous gatekeepers, whose only joy in life is ditching pesky salespeople trying to talk to the boss. Call before 9.00am, when the boss is likely to be there and the lowly gatekeeper won't be there. Call just after 1.00pm, when the gatekeeper is at lunch and the boss will be back, and call after 6.00pm when the gatekeeper has tootled off home. The chances of talking to someone a bit more senior, who will better get the value of the call goes up. Grab another big sheet of paper. In the first column start listing up ideal clients you would like to target. In the adjoining column on the right list up any contacts you have, who can introduce you to decision makers in that company. Start calling them. Be prepared for tonnes of rejection in Japan, because this country is not geared up for dealing with unknown companies and individuals. Nevertheless, work on crafting a great credibility statement. It should start with a brief statement of what your company does, then immediately transition into an example of where you have done something wonderful for another client, including concrete, verifiable numbers or percentages, and suggest maybe you could do the same for this company. Immediately state however, that you are not sure if that was possible, but that it would be worthwhile to have a conversation to find out and segue into whether this week or next week would be better to get together. It might sound like this, "My name is Greg Story from Dale Carnegie Training, we are global soft skills training experts, with a long history of over 100 years in operation. Recently we did sales training for XYZ company and they registered a 30% increase in sales as a result. Maybe we could do the same thing for your company, I am not sure. In order to find out if that is possible, would you be available this week or is next week better, for us to get together?" Are these strategies guaranteed to strike success. Of course, not. However, by getting into action, good things start to happen. The chances of getting meetings with clients goes up dramatically. These mee

"Your Price Is Too High" - Your Reply Is? When your client hits you with 'your price is too high" what do you say? Are you flustered, wondering how to reply? Is your brain freaking out, as you flash possible answers through your mind. Or are you straight off the blocks and into an argument with the buyer? Are you telling them why it is not too high and why they are wrong, wrong, wrong? By the way, how is that working out for you so far? Rule number one is don't be stupid. That means don't argue with the buyer. Because the "your price is too high" comment immediately triggers a chemical reaction in our brain, we have to short circuit what is going on and regain control. To do that we need to have a circuit breaker, like we have in our houses if there is an electricity overload. We have this so that we don't burn down our house. Same with sales, we don't want to burn down the deal. We insert a cushion. This is a non-descript sentence that neither inflames the disagreement with the buyer nor agrees with what they are saying. It would sound like this, "yes, budgeting is important in all businesses". In the few seconds it takes us to say that sentence we don't allow ourselves to kick off an argument with the buyer about why their comment is totally flawed, incorrect, ludicrous and ridiculous. It gives us enough breathing time to remember how a professional handles objections from clients. After they tell us our price is too high, we very softly ask "why do you say that?". This pushing back process is like reading a newspaper. We see a controversial headline splashed across the front page. It grabs our attention. But to really understand what the headline is saying, we need to read the accompanying article. That is where the detail is and we need to know it before we know how to answer their objection. Our combativeness with the headline is pointless. We need to know is their pushback just plain wrong, because they don't have the correct facts? Or wrong because they have misinterpreted something we have said? Or is it correct? Our price may in fact be too high for the current value it brings to their business in their mind. We have no idea of how to answer "your price is too high", until we have more information. Here is the professional's next step, after we have discovered the reason behind their statement – we keep digging for other issues. We park the first one and move into asking, "apart from X are there any other concerns you have?". Objections are also a bit mysterious because the client may not be giving us their primary concern upfront. There may be a hidden objection we don't know about and we merrily go about answering the first objection and wonder why they didn't buy. There was a bigger problem, but they didn't share it and we didn't ask. Always ask. After they give you the second objection, ask if there are any other concerns. Keep doing this around three to four times maximum. "Are X, Y and Z then your major concerns or is there another?" We have to dig these out before we even attempt to answer any objections from the buyer. Once we have them out then ask for some guidance on which of the three or four is the most problematic for them. "You have mentioned X,Y and Z as issues for you. Of these three which one do you feel is the most pressing?" It is very important to stop speaking at this point. Don't add anything or qualify anything. The question leaves a certain amount of tension in the air, but let it hang there, don't relieve the tension by saying anything further. If you have another person with you, tell them before the meeting that when you ask a question and it creates tension with the buyer to sit there and shut up. Don't release the tension. We need to hear from them, so that we can concentrate our efforts answering their key concern. Once we know what that concern is, then we bring all our weight to bear on the value we provide with our rationale, statistics, data, testimonials, evidence, proof, etc. to show why the price is just fine and dandy. Usually, once we have answered the ley concern the minor concerns drop away. If we have done all of this and they still don't want to proceed, then it means there is still a hidden issue we need to surface, so we can deal with it. If we haven't done a good job of building the trust, the client may be reluctant to tell what they are really thinking. This reinforces the importance of the sales cycle to build trust first, ask brilliant questions to uncover needs, tailor the solution to exactly the key points they have raised before we ask for the order.

What To Say When You Get A "No" In Sales What are the chances of getting a "no" to your offer in sales? Probably around 70% of the time, this is what we will get. Given that type of frequency and hit rate, you would think that salespeople would be masters of dealing with this type of response. You would be wrong. The chemicals kick in and sales people lose all reason. I was reminded of this recently when we were conducting sales training. It is hard to create a new habit for salespeople. They have egos and they are easily entrenched in less productive ways of doing things, because that is how they have always done it. Stupid, is what I would call that, unless you are really shooting the lights out with your results. The issue is when we see the body language signaling a negative response the fight response starts and then we hear the words and we go into overdrive. Our brain is on fire concerning the thousand good reasons that no should be a yes. We are delving deep into why the client is wrong and we are right. WE are rapidly processing our line of attack to counter the argument they have proffered. What a complete waste of time. Instead we need to get smart. Stop the chemical reaction from getting out of control. Throw the Breaker Switch, like we have with the electricity in our houses, if the power load gets too dangerous. Shooting your mouth off in sales is even more dangerous. That intervention comes in the form of a cushion. No, we don't put a cushion over our mouth, so that no words come out. We put it over our brain instead. We offer a very neutral response to the buyer, that neither agrees with nor inflames the situation. The point of this neutral statement is to give us critical thinking time. Are we using this critical thinking time to dream up a killer response that will shut the buyer down in their tracks and turn that "no" into a "yes"? Nope. We use it to stop the chemical rush and regroup. We need to go into question mode. When we hear a "no" it is a headline, like we have in newspapers. A short form of reply that gives the key details and no more. We want to know what is in the article accompanying that headline. Why is it "no"? So we sweetly and gently ask, "May I ask you why you said "no"; or "your price is too high"; or "we are happy with our current supplier"; or "we have no budget for this"; or the thousand other dubious reasons buyers give us for declining our genius offer. Give me the article accompanying the headline, so I can understand how I am supposed to answer this rejection. Now we have to be patient. We hear the reason and again we are sorely tempted to go into counter attack. We know can tear that shabby reasoning apart and want to bombard the buyer with a million reasons why they should buy. Hold your horses there pardner. What if this isn't the killer objection? What if a more vicious version is lurking in the long grass, ready to bite us at the first opportunity? We need to keep digging. After we hear that reason, we sweetly and gently ask, "Apart from that are there any other concerns for you?". They will usually have another one. Again we don't go into rambunctious reply mode. We ask why that is a problem for them, just like we did the first time. They tell us and again we must be patient. We must keep our power dry, hold the line, keep our nerve. Again, we venture forth on our seeker journey and sweetly and gently ask, "Are A and B your only concerns or do you have another? If they do, we still don't rush in where angles fear to tread and blurt out our killer retort. We sweetly and gently ask, "You have mentioned A, B and C. Of these which one is the most pressing concern for you?", and then we shut up and don't even breath, let alone speak. They make a choice and now we open up both barrels and answer that concern and ignore the other two. Usually, if we successfully deal with the main concern, the lesser concerns fade away like the dew on a spring day. When we were doing some role play practice in the training, it was interesting that the person playing the buyer gave a reason for not buying and the seller was starting to jump in. We tied them up and physically restrained them so they couldn't answer right then and there. Okay, that is an exaggeration. Actually, we just asked them to keep digging, to follow this procedure and not answer yet, until they know what to answer. Sure enough of the A, B and C reasons given, it turned out that it was C that was the concern of most import. "A" was price by the way and "C" was quality in this case. We don't know what to answer until we know what to rebuff. Hold off on answering the pushback, until you know what is their key concern. Don't be fooled by smokescreens, wild goose chases and other buyer subterfuges. If we do this we will be a lot more successful closing the sale and building a strong relationship with the buyer.

When Is The Best Time To Call A Prospect In Japan? Japan is merciless with salespeople. When you call the client's company everyone is doing their absolute best to make sure you don't get to talk to the boss. They won't tell you their name, they don't offer the take a message for you, the whole vibe is "get lost". If you don't know the precise name of the person you want to speak with, then the wall of steel descends very quickly. They will question you as to why you want to speak to the person in charge, tell you that that person will call you back. They never will. No one wants to take any responsibility in the Japanese system, so that is why they won't share their name. They don't want to get scolded by the boss, so that is why they won't put you through. The boss is a salaried employee and they won't take calls from people they have never heard of. They don't think, "this might be a business opportunity that will help my company". They think, "I don't want to have to deal with people I don't know, especially foreigners, because it is risky". Risk aversion is a big thing here and the easiest way of never taking a risk is never doing anything new or different. It has worked for thousands of years here. So how do we break through the steel barrier. Many companies have meetings on Monday mornings, so invariably no one is around to take the call, even presuming you know their name. The last day of the month is also a very busy day for many companies, so that is another hard one. Days with a five in the date called gotoobi(5th, 10th,15th, 25th) are also busy days in Japan because they are cut off dates for invoice submissions, monthly invoice payments, salary payments, Government department submission dates, etc. If we want to call a company and we don't know the person's name, then we should try and do it before the gate keepers arrive for work or after they have left for lunch or for after they have departed at the end of the day. This is not fool proof, but the chances of talking with someone with a bit more authority goes up. Those tasked with taking general calls to the company or section, are usually female, young and at the very, very bottom of the hierarchy with no authority, except to make your life a misery. Companies don't understand that these staff are the bearers of the brand to the outside world, so invariably they are not properly trained. They think their job is to screen out all salespeople and all unknowns. I called the new President of a major Italian brand here in Tokyo to say hello and thank him for his business, as we had been commissioned by his headquarters to provide training for them. I didn't know his name because he had just arrived and that information was not public at that point. I could never get past the gatekeeper. She would always tell me he wasn't available and that he would call me back. That never happened. I am the President of the company delivering training for his company, to develop his business, to help hit his targets. You would expect he would want to talk with me. No such luck. In the end, I got so frustrated, I just gave up trying to talk to him and left the training delivery logistics to my staff. I never did meet him in fact and he has probably been posted to a new country by now. Here are some ideas. Even if you don't know the name of the person send a package to their title within the company. If you do even better. This package might contain your company brochure or a small gift, but whatever it is, preferably make it slightly bulky to excite curiosity. Then, when you call asking for them, mention to the gatekeeper that you want to follow up on the package you recently have sent to them. That package, by the way, will probably go straight into the waste paper bin sitting next to their desk, unread, possibly unopened, because they don't know who you are. This "send the package then call" technique will slightly increase your chances of getting put through. Try to make the call before 9.00am, after lunch at around 1.10pm and again after 6.00pm. The junior people will usually arrive around 9.00am or 9.30am. They will have to man the phones from 12.00pm while all the important people go to lunch. This means you have a slightly better chance of talking to the boss when they are back from lunch and the junior person is not there. Companies are more concerned these days about junior, non-manager staff working overtime, so the junior people will be gone after 5.00pm or 5.30pm. The managers however are still there. Obviously the same considerations apply if you know the person's name. Your chances of connecting will go up. If you have met them before, you can say that you are calling to follow on with them on that recent conversation you had. Or you are calling to follow up on that email that you have sent them. Or that you are calling to get an answer to your question in the email you sent to them. More senior staff will generally recognize you have a business con

Sales Call Roadmap Because the vast majority of people in sales have no idea what they are doing, they are making it up as they go along. Wouldn't it be better to have a roadmap to progress the making a sale? This roadmap will keep us on track and not allow the buyer to take us off on a tangent that leads to nowhere. Foundering around with no central direction wastes a lot of key buyer facing time and we don't want to do that. We can't expect unlimited access because of their busy schedules, so once we are in front of them we have to get it all done in usually around an hour. The sale call roadmap starts even before the call. These days with so much information readily available, we can't turn up and ask basic questions about the company. We need to have done some research beforehand on media reports, their website, annual report, social media and using LinkedIn where possible, to check on the individuals we will meet, before we meet them. Having done all of that, we are well armed to get the conversation off to a great start. We may have friends or contacts in common; or shared a similar working experience in the same company; or lived in the same town; or went to the same university. When we have done our research we will have an opportunity to try and find these little connectors. I was working with an American guy when I was at the Shinsei Bank. He was an absolute master at this. He had just joined and I was supposed to brief him on the work my division was doing. We spent the whole time with him making connections between people we both knew. He did this to break the ice and establish rapport. This is important. We know if we don't get a good relationship going at the start of the conversation, then it is unlikely they will buy from us. Even if we don't have much in common, we can use other techniques like bring some interesting industry data or intelligence to them. We might have seen something work somewhere else and we can introduce this idea to them. In this initial meeting process, we need to make a very important intervention. We need to get permission from the buyer to ask questions. When they are happy to meet us and having established some rapport, they are more likely to say "yes" to our request to ask questions about the inner details of what the company is doing and all the problems they are encountering. In other words, all the firm's dirty laundry. If there was no rapport or trust created would you be keen to share that with strangers? Now in a western business environment, asking questions is no big deal, but with Japanese buyers it is crucial we do this. They are used to being hit with sales pitches, so the concept of them being questioned by the seller is not something they are used to. Having gotten that permission we should ask very intelligent questions, so that we can fully understand their needs. Now buyers sometimes don't want to tell us their precise situation. We have to ask our questions in a way that gets around that reluctance. We are searching for an entry point where we might become useful to them, to solve a problem they have. If they don't have a big enough problem or if they think they can fix it themselves, then we will have a lot of difficulty making the sale. We have to show why this issue is best addressed now, rather than after. And why they should leave it to us to fix, rather than trying to do it themselves. If we don't deal with these issues up front, then no sale. Once we understand their needs, we move along the roadmap to the part when we present the solution. There will be a discussion about the technical pieces of what we will do, talking about how this solution will fit their company. We can't leave it there though, because that is still too abstract. We need to talk about how they can project and apply these benefits inside their company, in order to get better results. This is where word pictures are very powerful. In most cases, we are selling a future that they can't fully appreciate. So we need to explain how we can add to their business through increasing revenues, reducing costs or grabbing greater market share. If we have been able to uncover what the success of this project will mean for them personally, then we wrap that bit around the benefit too. The client naturally doubts what sales people are telling them, so we need to show evidence for them that this has worked for other companies. Once we have done that, then we can test the waters to see if what we have suggested is the right solution for them. We do this by asking a simple trial closing question like, "How does that sound". We want to flush out any resistance to place an order. If they don't have any problems, then we just ask for the order, "Shall we go ahead?". If they have issues with what we are suggesting, then we need to confirm what these are? They may have problems with our pricing, payment terms, quality, delivery or schedule. It doesn't matter what they mention, we shouldn't a

Technical Salespeople Must Be Good Presenters Too Knowledge of the specifications, functionality, inner workings are all fine and dandy but not enough anymore. Increasingly technically specialised people are being asked to deal with people other than their normal counterparts. Once upon a time, the engineers spoke with other engineers on the buyer side and that was about it. A nerdy lovefest of specs. Today there are broader spectrum buying teams. These "civilians" are often the key decision-makers and are not technical in the traditional sense. This means the technical person has to be able to communicate and present to them in a way that they can understand. Communication skills have always been low on the totem pole for technical people. At High School they hated English and thrived on Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry etc. At University the key focus and preference was on technical subjects. In fact these technically oriented people were creating problems in the workforce to such an extent, that Universities had to create a new programme for them. This was the basis for the origination of the Masters in Business Administration. The aim was to teach technical folks the non-technical sides of running a company. I was reminded of the big gap in fundamental presentation skills recently at a presentation I attended. It was a big crowd and the speaker had a star studded resume. He had a Ph.D. in his technical field and was a Corporate Officer in his very, very large, global firm. He was a big deal in that world and someone often called upon to give technical presentations, representing the firm. When he started his presentation proper, I was shocked. I couldn't believe that someone in his position, with his experience, in that role, with that amount of responsibility for the brand, would be making such a basic, basic mistake. The first slide went up and it was all densely packed with text. I thought it was the typical compliance required disclaimer statement that usually goes up first. No, no, no. This was his first slide of the actual presentation. To make it really exciting, he had made the text in ten point sized font, so it was almost impossible to read. To add insult to injury the bottom quarter of the page was blank, unused white space. He proceeded to basically read the slide to us. The next slide was even worse. Same ten point font, but this time about half of the bottom of the slide was tantalisng white space. After that ordeal by tiny text, we got on to a series of line graphs. This was a relief ,except that a lot of the graph text descriptors were impossible to read too. I was sitting there thinking WOW. In the 21stcentury, how could this be possible? A High School student would do a better job than this gentlemen of presenting the information on screen. The snapper is that he is in a role where he would be giving these types of presentations a lot. He is highly technically trained and often graces the boardrooms of major companies, who are clients of his firm, giving this and similar presentations. He has been doing this a long time. He is one of the most well recognized public faces of the company, after the President and Chairman, because his role is to promote the technical expertise of the company to grow the stock price. After the slide deck shock, I started zooming in on how he was delivering the presentation. There were a lot of numbers involved, so it was a rather dense talk. Pointedly, there were no stories to bring the ramifications of the numbers to life. These were just dry, dull data points that were not thought to need any elaboration. The audience however were a mixed industry bunch, so there were varying levels of technical expertise in the room. Pulling out experiences with similar numbers in the past, would have been great pointers to what we might expect in the future. Dry numbers can come to life when wrapped up in an interesting example. Also, we are much better at remembering stories, than acres of data points. He did look toward his audience, but somehow managed not to look at the people in his audience. You have seen this one before too, I am sure. He moved his face from left to right and back again, sort of rapidly scanning the room, but not actually making any eye contact with anyone in particular. This precluded his ability to make a stronger connection with the people in the room. In the time he had allotted, he could have connected with each one of us individually and directly, if he had tried. We know that around 6 seconds of eye contact works very well. It is not too intrusive, yet allows us to engage with individuals one at a time. His voice was soft and even throughout. It hung perilously close to a monotone. This habit is deadly for a presenter, because it robs us of some key tools to add luster and strength to our argument. When we give each word an equal emphasis in a sentence, then we miss the CHANCE to highlight particular key words for our audience. In that las

No Value, No Sale We believe in our product and we are very knowledgeable about the facts, details, specs, etc. We launch straight into our presentation of the details with the buyer. They want to negotiate the price. Do we see the connection here, the entire catastrophe? Often salespeople are slogging it out, lowering the price, hurting their positioning of the brand, lowering their own commission. In Japan once we have established a low price for the product or service it is very difficult to move it up thereafter. What is missing? The conversation isn't hitting the high notes on value and instead is a pitch based on the details of the product. Japan isn't the only place where this is an issue. Despite all of the resources available to American salespeople and the long history of consultative selling there, they are failing massively as well. According to a study by Accenture, called the "Death Of the Salesman", buyers are not seeing the value of the proposition. In 77% of cases, the buyer found no value in the offer during the sales call. In a separate study by Forrester, they found that from the buyer's judgment, 92% of salespeople didn't understand their business. These are pretty miserable figures, no matter which way you look at them. I haven't seem any similar numbers for Japan, but based on my experience with salespeople here, I would guess they would only be worse. "Pitchpeople" is how we should properly term Japanese salespeople in my view. They are not asking the buyer questions and are zeroing in only on the details of the product. As the Accenture and Forrester studies show we need to know our client's business and we need to counter price objections by showing value. Excellent advice Greg and just how do we do that you might be thinking? Knowing the client's business these days is unbelievably more easy than in the past. Listed companies very nicely put up their annual reports on their websites. We can gain an understanding of the strategy and direction they are going and what are the major initiatives that are so attractive, we will part with our hard earned cash and buy their shares. Not that many Japanese are on LinkedIn, so this is a more difficult resource to use here, than in the West. There will be press coverage of companies, which we can search easily through Google. We may have other clients in the same industry and can probably assume many of the issues will be the same. Even if we can't get much publically available information, we can ask the client. Now in Japan, this is verboten, so Japanese pitchpeople don't ask any questions of the buyer. The reason is the buyer is GOD in Japan and GOD won't answer our questions, because we are impudent minks for having the temerity to ask anything. Well it is verboten if you play by God's rules, so that is not a wise choice. Instead we can give our Credibility Statement and get permission that way. What is our Credibility Statement? For example, if we take Dale Carnegie Japan, we could say "Dale Carnegie is a global corporate training company, which leads the field in soft skills training. An example of this would be XYZ company where we trained all their sales staff. They told me they got a 30% increase in sales as a result. Maybe we can do the same thing for you. In order for me to know if that is possible or not would you mind if I asked you a few questions?". Another approach might be, "Mr. Client, prior to this meeting I spent quite a bit of time researching your business, so that our talk today would be valuable and efficient. To my surprise it was very hard to find any publically available information on your company. Before we go any further, would you mind helping me to better understand if I can actually help you or not, by asking a few questions about your business? Once we know what their issues are, we can make a judgment on what is the best solution for them from our lineup. We may in fact conclude that we are not a match for them. If so, we should not waste anyone's time and we should go find someone we can help. If they are a match, then having identified the issue we explain our solution. When doing this, we need to go beyond just the product spec. We MUST explain how these facts transform into benefits for them. That is not enough. A benefit applied is where they will understand the value to their business. If we leave this step out, they may not be convinced we can help them. They next need proof of where we have done this for another client. Salespeople talk a lot, so clients have learnt to be skeptical of salesperson blather. After providing evidence we now ask them "how does this sound?", to draw out any residual concerns, issues or related questions. If we do this, we will be in the top 1% of successful salespeople in Japan without a doubt. We bring value to them and we show we understand their business. As the surveys have shown, this is what buyers are looking for. Let's give it to them.

How To Handle "We Are Happy With Our Current Supplier" Pushback Japan loves the Devil they know over the Angel they don't know. Change here is hard to achieve in any field, because of the inbuilt fear of mistakes and failure. This country takes risk aversion to the highest heights in business. There are no rewards for salaried employees to take risk. There are massive career downsides though, if things go wrong, due to an initiative they introduced. Personal accountability is not very popular here. The decision-making system here is also a nightmare in this regard. Who is the decision-maker? Probably no single person. The meeting we attend may have one to three people present in the room, but they are the tip of the iceberg. An iceberg we will never get to meet by the way. Behind the walls of the office, sit their other colleagues who will have to sign off and agree on the change. The checks and balances of Japanese organisations guarantee a few things. One is it makes for good communication internally. No one faces an unpleasant surprise. I have found most Japanese, as individuals, are not good at dealing with the unexpected. The sudden emergence of something that had not been previously factored in, has these staff rushing for emergency exits in fear. The other thing this system supplies is the opportunity for all the vested interests to have their say. Fast action is not viewed as a plus. Reaching a consensus is very important in Japan and people expect to have input into any new arrangements. The piece of paper suggesting the change physically moves around the section head's desks and each one applies their hankoor stamp to the document, indicating they are okay with the change. Nothing will happen until all of those stamps are there. Turning up and finding the buying team are already quite happy with their current supplier, means a lot of work has to be done internally by the people we are meeting, to make a change away from the known and established order. Who wants more work? No one in Japan, that is for sure. When you are dealing with small to middle size firms the supplier arrangements can be even trickier. They often have a strong owner running the show. They make a lot of the key decisions and then everyone else does the execution of the decision. You may not get to meet with the dictator directly. In many cases, the current supplier company was supplying their grandfather who started the business. Many a good time was had on the golf course, being entertained in the Ginza by geisha and visiting expensive cabaret clubs together in the good old days. Gifts flowed thick and fast as well, to cement the relationship. The current generation of the heads of the respective businesses may have been at school together, have marriage links between their two families or belong to special clubs as members. I see these connections at my very exclusive Rotary Club here in Tokyo. These are successful families who move in the same circles. The third generation of family business heads have deep links together built up over the last generations. Why would they change their trusted supplier to you? Be it a big corporate or a smaller concern, there are a lot of barriers to change in supplier relationships in Japan. Frankly, we have few levers at our disposal as a result. The one thing that companies fear in common though is getting left behind by their competitors. The globalisation of business has meant these harmonious relationships between supplier and buyer are getting shaken up. Just explaining the details, benefits, quality and pricing advantage of the solution you provide are not enough. We need to lob some dynamite into their current cozy little supplier arrangements, by bringing up their exposure to being blindsided by a competitor. We need to remind them that the best solution will win in the market or at least reduce their market share. We need to point out that in a competitive industry, no one cares about the depth of the existing relationships, because they are fully focused on their survival. Rivals will make key supplier changes and these will trigger changes across the industry, as everyone else has to adjust accordingly. By getting ahead of the curve, they can win time to adjust and win market share for themselves, vis-à-vis their rivals. Price and quality differentials only become meaningful in this light in the current market. Just talking about price or quality in isolation won't move the buyers to make any changes. The effort to make new or change supplier arrangements needs a strong reason in Japan or else everyone just defaults to a "do nothing" stance. This requires we come armed with examples of where a change in supplier arrangements wiped certain companies out. The best option is relating changes in their industry, but even if we don't have that, we need to show evidence of how dangerous it can be to avoid change. The drivers of change are plain to see: globalisation changing supply opti

Selling In The Coming 5G World The release of 5G or fifth generation mobile networks is only a few short years away, probably around 2020. There is a lot of controversy at the moment about the reliability of different providers, but the real story hasn't been grasped yet. Our phones currently run on a 4G standard, which provides a certain connectivity speed. Interestingly the move from 4G to 5G, isn't a simple speed doubling process. Reports are that the difference is 5G will be 600 times faster than 4G. Wow! What does that mean for salespeople across all industries? The capacity to upload heavier files, to send at lightening speed, grabs your attention. What are some of the heaviest files at the moment? Video! YouTube is already the second largest search engine after Google. It is true too. I have noticed myself that I prefer going straight to YouTube to find out how to do something, rather than wading through all the links on Google. The union of content marketing with blinding connection speeds, means the search function for YouTube will overtake Google in the next few years. Are you prepared to be found there staring in your own video? Now this is not to say that the importance of audio is going away. Podcasts are also a key to getting value in front of buyers. That is why I am releasing three ever week. People are multitasking these days like they have been possessed. They want to listen to audio, while they are at the gym or walking the dog. Don't miss the implications of audio access to our information from all of these devices like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google Home, etc. We will be tapping into information through audio, to a greater extent than now, but today I want to feature more on video and 5G and what it means for us in sales. Producing video content and uploading that to YouTube will become a more important aspect of "know, like and trust" than we have at our disposal today. Video gives a very strong impression about us. How we look? How we sound? Are we trustworthy? How we relate to the audience? As some of my friends have unkindly remarked, "Greg, you have a good head for radio", meaning I am not very photogenic. We may be shy to video ourselves thinking that we are not handsome enough, smooth enough in front of the camera, or attractive enough on tape when a microphone is involved. Forget all of that. This will be the age of discovery by buyers, before they ever meet us. This is how they will be searching for experts to bring solutions for the problems they face. They will be able to "try us before they buy us" by watching our video, to see if we have the goods or not. What if we are not attractive enough for video, won't that work against us? Well, I wish I was more handsome, but there is not much I can do about that. My parent's DNA contribution has spoken. I have to go with what I have got and so do you. I don't have a great sounding voice either, because it sounds husky, from all that shouting or kiai I did, in my 47 years of karate training. Can't do too much about that either. One of our Dale Carnegie trainers in America is DJ Thatcher, who has a voice you would die for. Very deep and melodic. I can't become DJ Thatcher, but I can control what comes out of my own mouth. So despite how we look and how we sound are we providing value? Our videos have to show we know something special about our subject and we can be useful to the buyer. Don't think you have to hold the "best bits" back either. You have to go the other way and provide strong expert authority in this environment and do it for free. Won't my buyers become sated on my free video offerings and not need more from me? I don't think this is a concern. When they need more than what they can get from a video, you are the one they will select over everyone else you are competing with. By the way, if a video can fix their issue that simply, then there probably wasn't a substantial engagement involved anyway. Won't my competitors steal all my best ideas? The old style control function of buyers by suppliers, through exclusive, high value, proprietary knowledge, still exists, but only just these days. Almost everything is out there today. There are not many secrets left anymore. You have to jump in because everyone else is. Now, they can copy you, but they can't be you. I could order a big truck right now and send all of our training manuals to my competitors, but it wouldn't help them. They don't know how to deliver it the way we do, so all they get is an empty shell. This is the same with your competitors. They can't replicate who you are, your company culture, your approach to clients, quality, reliability, plus all the human interaction pieces which are the sum of all that you are, down at your firm. As an example, I recently did the recordings for the audio version of my book Japan Sales Mastery. Anyone could have read the text but no one would emphasised key words the way I did. This is because I wrote it, I know what I

Selling Yourself First Selling yourself first can have two dimensions. One is selling yourself on the product or service, so that the client feels your integrity when you recommend the purchase. The other aspect is that the buyers buy us first and then they buy the product. They are related, because our belief in what we are doing shines through and the client feels they can trust us. Conmen will fluff themselves up, look pretty, be honey tongued and ever so charming. They will make one sale and then have to find a new mark, because they can never go back. I don't mean this type of "selling yourself", where it is all skullduggery intended to fleece the buyer. I am referring to the real objective – securing the re-order because the trust has been built. How can we sell ourselves in an ethical way? We can start with having the client's interests firmly in the front of our mind. The kokorogame concept or starting with our true intentions, is the basis for all that we do. This concept defines how we approach the client and the sale. Their success is our primary aim because in that success is wrapped up our re-orders, testimonials, positive word of mouth and referrals. The clients can feel if you have your hand in their wallets pulling out cash like a pirate or if you are working hard to make them super successful. We often hear motivational terms like "Ten X" your business but the client wants to hear how you can help to "Ten X" their business. Sincerity is revealed by the way we conduct the sales call. We are dressed professionally. The smallest details are taken care of, to reinforce "you can trust me to be a quality provider to your company". That means being on time, every time. It means shoes gleaming, heels properly shed, no food stains on ties or scarves, colour combinations matching, hair neat and tidy, properly shaved, make-up perfectly applied. These days it may mean business suits or something more casual, to match the client's world. The clothes must fit, not looking like you are wearing your younger siblings gear, that you are too big for. The way we have done our homework before the call, tells the client a lot about how serious we are about getting the business. Asking low level, basic "duh" questions shows arrogance or stupidity. A classic is "what do you do?". Clients are not keen on stupid questions. Bringing valuable information is appreciated by the client. "Ms. Client, we have seen a pricing formula which works very well for our other clients, perhaps this might be of interest to you too?". Even more impressive is asking insightful questions which cause the client to have an "ah hah" moment. This possibility stimulation is pure gold. For example, "Mr. Client, how do you know if the current pricing is optimum for your business. You have kept the same pricing for a long time and so is there now an option to raise prices and improve profit margins? We have seen companies similar to you raise their prices and see no drop off in demand. I wonder if this might be a possibility for you too?". We all get into ruts. Insightful questions might trigger thoughts we have not previously considered. This is how salespeople can be useful to buyers, rather than asking, "tell me about your business?". Telling the client you can't help them is real trust building. It sounds ridiculous to tell the client you can't help them and forego sales. We are talking about the long game here. If what we have isn't the best thing for the client, then we should never try and slam the square peg into the round hole. Better to tell them that what they want isn't something we can do and direct them to someone else who can help them. That type of honesty gets remembered. Maybe they will never be our client because we are not a fit for them. However, your good reputation is established within their circle of business contacts. When people ask about you, this non-client will sing your praises as a trustworthy person. Under promising and over delivering has taken a beating as a sales execution approach. It sounds manipulative, false and deceitful. If we are told that something cannot be delivered by Friday and it promptly arrives on the Monday of the same week, we are happy, but also suspicious. We were told that Friday was the earliest that the delivery could be made and we believed that statement from the salesperson. It arrives much earlier. Now we realise that they were sandbagging the timing all along. Yes we received the delivery faster, but we also feel we have been lied to. The salesperson has not been transparent with us. If it came late afternoon on the Thursday, well that would be acceptable, we can understand that. But almost a full week early says that either, they were trying to con us or they are disorganised and can't control their scheduling of work. Be realistic, transparent and honest with clients about the execution of the fulfillment of the order. Use showmanship wherever you can. I don't mean a full vaudevil

Lying Salespeople Riffraff inhabit all corners of the business world, but the sales profession suffers more than many others. Bankers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Stock brokers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Real estate agents tell one version of the truth to buyers. Government officials purloin our money. Everywhere you look, someone is ripping us off. However, these industries and institutions do not get blanket smeared with the failings of the few, like in the case of salespeople. We are our own worst enemy in many ways. There is a taint to the profession, an odious odor, scandalising the hallways. Desperate people do dumb things and tell lies to buyers. There are no common standards of conduct being adhered to in the sales profession. You just become a salesperson by dint of putting your hand up for a sales job. After that point, you are free to unleash your reign of terror and destruction on all around you. "I am not like that" you may say, but how would the buyer know that? They have been trained to expect to be ripped off by salespeople. It is one of my pet hates with the profession. Lo and behold anyone who calls me up with a lie. A lie? How could anyone be that stupid, you might be wondering? Well, have you heard this one before, "Hello Mr. Story, how are you today? I am from XYZ company and we handle a range of investment products. One of our representatives will be in your area and so are you available for a meeting next week?". This industry of selling investment products is tricky. I know, because I oversaw the sales of these products at the Shinsei Bank and the National Australia Bank here in Japan. What makes them difficult is you can't hear, see, touch, smell or taste these intangibles. Investment products are abstract ideas. The buyer will have no idea if the decision to buy was a good one, for many months and in some cases, many years. So the obvious thing we are all buying is the trust that what we have been told will in fact happen. Given the trust element is so vital, how could the leadership at XYZ company come up with a sales script, built on a lie? Amazingly, this is the first thing coming out of their mouth. Reality check: their representative won't be in my area. That is a total fabrication, a complete lie. Why? They think that somehow this will convince me to see that person. When they call, I ask them which area their representative will be in. They panic, look at the suburb address on their screen and blurt out "Akasaka". So I ask, "Well given Akasaka is quite a big place, which exact part of Akasaka will they be in next week?". More blustering and panic, because now we have gone off piste. Japan is a very honest culture. This means though, that when people tell lies, they never admit to it. They never take any accountability. Instead they will tell you anything, in order to not admit that what they told you was crap. They try and move the blame back to you, by claiming you misheard or misunderstood what they were saying. This honest culture can blind us to this quaint trait to lie. So when we are leading our salespeople, we can't just assume because everyone is so honest in Japan, that our salespeople won't lie to the client. This is also a culture where the buyer is GOD and whatever the buyer wants the salesperson will make happen. This can include lying, breaking the rules, over promising and being disengenuous. The delivery component of the company cannot easily deliver on salesperson over-promised goodies. Now we have a new set of problems to deal with, as sections within the company start to feud amongst themselves. Or they agree to a deal that is bad for the business. Being truthful with clients also means delivering bad news too. Salespeople in Japan have to be guided to do this, because of their own accord, they will avoid it every time and prefer to sow chaos internally. It is important to state and keep re-stating what should be obvious – don't lie to buyers. We have to explain we would rather forego a deal than get it by lying. This gets harder when their bonuses and commissions are linked to the sale. Also, a hard nosed selling culture will force people into positions where they will compromise their personal and the firm's integrity to do the deal. Suruga Bank has been a very aggressive lender in the market. They are now reaping the whirlwind of negative media coverage, because of all the lies told by the bank staff to get loans written. Wells Fargo had a similar issue with staff creating fake accounts to meet aggressive quotas. The real cost of those episodes play out over many years. We may have our own aggressive targets too, but we also have to ensure that we are guiding people along the correct path of how to make those targets. If we all agree that trust of the buyer is key, then we can start to build that trust by ensuring that our salespeople are never lying to the buyers, in order to make a sale. We have to remind salespeople of

Client Need Clarity Do we have a clear understanding of what the client's needs are? These can vary beyond the obvious of increased profitability. It might be more important to gain market share, than drive profits. Or, it may be that profits are not as much emphasised, as investing in further growth. How do we seek to understand their needs and at the same time differentiate ourselves from every other salesperson, equally raring to go with their interrogation of the client's needs? What does intelligent client question design look like? If we access the client's website and they are a listed company, we can find out a lot of basic information about the firm's business, strategy and direction, from the annual reports there. If they are an unlisted company, we can do a media search on their activities to get an understanding of how they are positioning themselves in the market. Failing that we can use our industry knowledge to make some insightful comments about where the market is at the moment and ask them how they see it. Turning up at the client's office and simply asking "what does your company do?" is pretty pathetic, but very common on the part of unprofessional salespeople. We would be better off asking things like, "I see that your global CEO is calling for 15% profit growth in the annual report. Is that also the number for Japan or have you been allocated a higher number?". Hopefully the answer will be 15% or a higher number. This will mean they are challenged to meet the targets and maybe, we can be of assistance. If they answered 15%, then we would ask, "So how realistic is that target in the current economic conditions in the market here?". We are trying to get a feel for their confidence to achieve these targets by themselves. Of course, we want to know where they are now in their business and where do they want to be, so we can gauge the size of the gap and their appetite for change. The worst sales conversations are with client's who don't see any big gap, that they can't close on their own. No matter how whiz bang our question design, if they feel they are close to where they want to be, they won't be seeing us as adding any value beyond what they can do internally. What do we do in this case? We have two levers to pull – opportunity and fear. There might be some opportunities they haven't thought of. In sales, we see many companies and what they do. We have the ability to take a successful idea from industry "A" which could be applied to industry "Z". The people working in those distant industries never mix, but we do. We can see applications for ideas across industries and we should be playing a positive role to make these suggestions to help grow their business. A recent example was when I was calling on a foreign manufacturer, who amongst other things, makes industrial drill bits. I asked the President if he had ever seen Blendtec's "Will It Blend" videos on You Tube. These are viral video sensations by an American company making food blenders aimed at consumers. They are very strong blenders and to prove it, the President, wearing a white lab coat and protective goggles, blends iPads, mobile phones, hockey pucks, you name it, captures it on video and posts it up on YouTube. I told the Japan President, "what about a "Will It Drill" local version in Japanese, hosted by you because you speak Japanese, to highlight the strength of your product?". Blender companies and drill company's representatives are unlikely to ever meet, but we salespeople can be great connectors. There will be many such opportunities where we can prove ourselves useful to the client and we should be constantly thinking of how to do that. Even if nothing comes of "Will It Drill" as an idea, I have been able to differentiate myself from every other salesperson coming through his door. This is what we all want. Often, not taking action is thought to be a safe option by clients, but it also has a cost – an opportunity cost. Our job is to open up the client's thinking to taking the opportunity to aid their business in the future, by taking action now. We might say, "You know we talk about saving up for a rainy day, don't we. Well in business too, we know there are up and down cycles the economy passes through and the worst situation is to face a downturn and run out of cash. You have mentioned you feel confident about the current situation of the business, but have you factored in dealing with a downturn in the next few years? We know it will come, we just don't know exactly when. What if we were able to take the opportunity now to position ourselves to deal with that eventuality, would that be helpful for your business?". We are trying to move the clients thinking from "I am okay and don't need to do anything" to "maybe I am not okay and need to do something I haven't planned for yet". The other option is fear. We know our own situation and we have knowledge of our business, but we are not alone. We have competitors who c

"Never Forget A Customer; Never Let A Customer Forget You" This is an old saying in sales and one we forget at our cost. We might have made the sale and then we keep moving forward. We get wrapped up in the intricacies of the getting other customers to commit and in the logistical details of delivering our previously sold service or product. Our schedule fills up quickly and we have filled it with the present and future, not the past. That customer we sold to gets forgotten in this busy life and they return the compliment and forget about us too. We know that creating new customers is more expensive on an acquisition cost basis and that selling again or selling more to our existing customers is easier than making a new sale. Why then don't we do a better job of developing further business with our existing customers? We usually do a good job in the immediate post sales service period, but the key word there is "immediate". We don't schedule in the "just checking in " contact, because we are too busy chasing down the new contacts. Now that the customer has had the benefit of our product or service, we don't call back and ask, "How has it been going? Are there any subsequent issues that have arisen that we can help with or fix?". A good rule to apply is always make the time to connect with the buyer. They will either be happy and we can see if they know others, who would also benefit. If they are unhappy, we can fix the issue for them. Silent, unhappy customers are not what we want, because we are killing our brand and our reputation without even knowing it. Clients may have cyclical needs when there is a certain cadence to their buying. Upgrades or replacements require follow up. When these are scheduled into our diaries, we can make sure to re-contact the client. It may be that there is no sequence logic and so we have to create a schedule, so that they don't forget us. There are few things more disheartening then contacting an existing client to find they did have a need and they filled that need with our competitor's solution. I really hate having that conversation. We can add the client to our email mailing lists and they get updates. The problem is that they don't read them or even notice them, so a "set and forget" idea is a bad idea. We have to be able to cut through all the clutter and noise of daily life to reach out to them, so that we stay top of mind. This is harder today, more so than it has ever been. There are so many emails, so much social media, so many meetings, no wonder our buyers get swamped. Trying to get anyone on the phone these days is mind numbingly hard and it is like a miracle if you succeed. No one calls you back anymore either. Japan has a set pattern of seasonal gifts which are sent to clients for the express purpose of reminding them that they have not been forgotten. Depending on how many clients you have, this can become expensive and is probably easier for larger firms. A hand written thank you note on the anniversary of the business conducted with the client is not expensive and because hardly anyone gets postal mail anymore, it will stand out. Even though you can't get people on the phone so easily, don't just hang up. Don't expect to get called back either but always leave a voice message, so they hear your voice and understand you have been thinking of them. Some of my business contacts here tell me that their millennial employees avoid the phone like the plague, much preferring to text. It doesn't matter, young or old, leave them a voice mail anyway. Sending relevant White Papers, books, reports, media clippings are always good ideas, but you can't leave this to chance. It is a good discipline to be looking for these items, with specific customers in mind. When you see something that will resonate with them, this is when you have to be disciplined to send it. This doesn't have to be every month of course, but probably twice a year is a good practice, on top of the email blasts and newsletters that existing clients receive anyway. Making appointments with yourself, is one of the best ways to make sure we actually do the immediate and the sustained follow up. Good intentions are terrific, but planned, disciplined contacts are better. Choosing electronic or analogue systems is not the issue, the real key is having a system that delivers the updating, reminding process to the buyer. If we don't have a system then we need to create one and the best time to start was yesterday.

Join The Conversation Going On In Your Prospect's Mind We have all had the experience of talking at cross purposes with someone. We are both having a conversation that makes sense to ourselves, which is logical and congruent, but which baffles our interlocutor. After a while we realise we were both talking about unrelated things. This is not the type of conversation we want to be having with buyers. We want to be on song, on topic, right on the button with what we are discussing. There is no point in solving a non-issue or a minor issue for the buyer, because we had misunderstood what the real issue actually was. Great and all good. However, how can we be sure we are understanding the critical issue for the buyer. Part of this is structural, in the sense of how we construct the conversation with the buyer. Part of this is linguistic, our ability to parse the language being used. Part is our communication skillset, to fathom the nuances, perceive the unstated pieces of the puzzle, read the body language. Structural here means how good a job did we do in building the foundations for the meeting. What research did we do prior to meeting? How much time did we allocate for thinking about how the conversation might flow. How much effort did we put into designing the questions we would ask, in order to understand where they are now and where they want to be? The buyer has two conversations going on in his or her mind. We need to join both of those conversations. One is the conscious conversation. This is based on their present awareness of the issue, the scale and scope of the problem. The other is the subconscious conversation that has been crushed by the weight of the world's current dilemmas requiring immediate, total attention. The issues are there, they are just mentally superseded by other dramas that are grabbing their more immediate attention at the minute. They have something worrying them and we need to know what that is. We do this by asking questions about the business. If we have arrived at the meeting with a mental list of what questions we need to ask in order to find out what the key requirements of the buyer are, we will do much better. What normally happens though, is the salesperson just turns up and gives a pitch or if they do manage to ask a question, it is too spontaneous and isolated to be really effective. It is much better to have mentally worked out the flow chart of questions like those you often see in project planning diagrams. If the answer is "yes", then we go to this next question or action. If it is "no", then we to to this next question or action. It is our flow chart of the sales conversation, constructed before we get into the meeting. Obviously, the client conversation never follows the exact path but our job as salespeople is to bring the discussion back on track, so that we can gain the answers to the questions we are asking. The client has some self talk around the business. There are things that are concerning them. They are plagued with what has happened in the past, as they replay those events in their mind and are fearful of a repeat performance. There are issues in the future they fear will unfold to their detriment. They are hazy ideas at this point, but there are always dark clouds on the horizon in business. There are a tonne of conversations going on in the conscious and unconscious minds of our buyers, so we don't lack for opportunities to find a connection. The point is we want to connect with those particular conversations around issues we can fix for them. To increase the chance of that happening, we need to have planned out the conversation before we get there, looking for hooks and triggers to help us to connect. We need to be designing well structured questions, which will get the client talking. When they talk at length, we receive a lot of valuable information, and guideposts to help us to, in turn, help them. We are not doing this is in a cold, hard, bright lights in their eyes, interrogation fashion. We are doing it gently, with the highest of purposes in mind– to make their businesses thrive. We need to be very circumspect on asking the questions. It cannot be blunt or hard or harsh or too intrusive. This is our advanced communication skill on display now. We have to be able to phase a question in a way which is easy and comfortable for the client to answer. This is how we join them in the conversation they are having in their own mind and when we do that we will be on their wave length and on point. This is how we can tailor our presentation to suit them. To introduce our solution in a way that is totally relevant and makes sense to the buyer. What we are offering is exactly what they are looking for and this is no accident. It is the sum total of our efforts in planning and plan execution to hit the bulls-eye – that is to solve their biggest problem.

The Successful Salesman and Saleswoman Has A Plan "We don't plan to fail, we fail to plan", is an old saw that is still true today. Despite an avalanche of tools to help us plan well, we still manage to do a lousy job of it. Another oldie goldie is "a good workman doesn't blame his tools" and so this applies perfectly to the tech panoply we have at our fingertips. Having tools available and using them at all, much less effectively, is the bugbear of most sales organisations. The firm buys the tool or the monthly subscription, spends a lot of money on it, only to see the salespeople barely engaging with it. The information stays in their head or on loose bits of paper, perhaps in a notebook or in an organiser. Anywhere but where it needs to be, to be of any assistance to the marketing effort, to properly segment and go after specific, defined markets. Salespeople like people and they like talking to clients. This is relatively easy. Keeping records of those conversations is another matter. Getting those records into the Client Relationship Management (CRM) system is a different ask. Setting up the meetings is a process which can be very poorly done in the hands of poor salespeople systems. The timing of meetings should be done with a mind to geography, so that you are not traipsing across town over long distances. You need to be grouping the visits together, so the time lost travelling is kept to a minimum. There is a funny commercial you can see on the monitors in taxis in Tokyo about selling in Japan. A new guy is being welcomed to the sales team and one of the tanned veteran sales guys enthusiastically shakes his hand, but then notices the newbies calf muscles are puny. Mr. Suntan and the other veterans proudly show off their super muscular calves, built from going door to door to see clients and deride the new guy. The point of the commercial is that this is old style sales and you can use computer programmes much more effectively to reach clients today. To make appointments needs a prospect list. A prospect list comes from leads coming in through SEO, your website, pay per click ads on Google etc., also existing clients, prior clients who have gone cold, networking, referrals, inbound phone contacts or highly selective cold calls. There are new clients to be targeted and this requires real research and effort. Today in Japan, you can't easily buy client lists anymore. There are so many restrictions now around privacy of information and getting permission to connect. Getting simple information is much harder today than it was even five years ago, so we need to allocate sufficient time to do the research. If you don't know the name of the person you are calling, then the staff taking the call are all pros at getting rid of you. They make sure you never get through to the person you seek, who is always in a meeting by the way and who never returns your call. No one is thinking "let's all make sure the wheels of industry are turning faster and faster and let's grease the wheels to make sure that happens". They are in full shield wall defensive posture of protection and denial to invaders from outside. So you at least need the name of who you want to contact to get on the first rung of arranging a meeting. Keeping track of how many people you are contacting, how many you are actually reaching, how many appointments you are winning, how many deals you are concluding and the average size of those deals, is critical for the well organised salesperson. This provides us with success ratios and norms around how much activity is required to generate new business. Yet how many salespeople know their one ratios, know how many calls they have to make to achieve their monthly budget? When we do meet the client, how good are the notes we are taking? Are we talking notes or leaving it all to our ironclad memories? Remember that the faintest ink is vastly superior to the best memory. Write it all down. If for some reason you can't take notes during the meeting, get it all down immediately thereafter. The next step is to get the key bits into the system. This way your notes are kept safe, can be accessed from anywhere and can easily be shared. When you are looking for case studies of success these notes are goldmines. They usually describe the client's problem in detail, the proposal you put together talks about the solution you provided and the P&L provides the results. When we know how many contacts have to be made to meet budget, have the prospects identified to pour into our sales funnel, we can use our excellent time management skills to make sure we are doing our tasks in priority order and that we are doing the most productive thing at every given moment. None of this happens by itself. We have to plan our activities carefully and plan our days fully. Record keeping is boring but for those salespeople who get it, they know that is where the gold is buried. What are you doing about all of this?

Forensic Sales Questioning Skills The idea of asking questions of buyers during sales calls is actually ancient. For at least eighty years, we have known this is the most effective way of getting agreements to our offers. If this key insight has been around for so long, how come there are so few salespeople who have discovered it yet? Salespeople turn up to see clients and launch forth straight into their pitch. They do this without having asked even one question about what the buyer wants, needs or has some interest in. "You can't easily hit a target you are not aiming for" is obvious. If the target is a sale, there must be a need the client has in place, in order to convince them to hand over their money. If you are not aiming your conversation with the buyer around their need, then you are not aiming for the target, which will trigger the buyer action. Conceptually the idea of asking buyers questions is not complex. Japan throws up the curve ball that asking questions of buyers is considered rude here, so salespeople decline the chance and go straight into their pitch instead. This is a religious difficulty here. The buyer is GOD in Japan and GOD brooks no questions from mere mortals. The buyer will answer them though and willingly, if we ask them the right way. We simply use a four step approach: (1) tell them what we do in general terms. (2) note a specific case where we have provided value to a buyer, with concrete numbers attached. (3) suggest that perhaps we could do the same for them. (4) mention that in order for us to know if that was possible or not, would they mind if we asked them a few questions? Yes, there may be some rare holdouts among Japanese buyer Gods who demand our pitch, but for the vast majority of cases the permission to ask questions will be granted. Okay, so now we have been granted permission to ask questions, where do we start? In fact, we start way before the actual meeting, when we are planning the call. Planning the call? Again, for some strange and mysterious reason, there are many salespeople who don't plan their calls. I guess if you are just presenting your canned pitch, then not much planning ahead is required. If you are going to be successful in sales, then planning your call is a must. You need to do some hard thinking about the client and their business before you turn up at their door. Research the industry, if you are not that familiar with its details, first find out who are the major competitors and what do they offer. Look at the on-line annual report if it is a listed company. If it is unlisted, do a search on them to see what information is available from the public domain. None of this should take massive amounts of time. We are just trying to get an idea of what things we need to ask the buyer during our meeting. For example, in the annual report there will usually be glossy photos of the President in the corner office. There is usually an accompanying article on the leadership's strategy and vision for the enterprise. This is useful because we can ask about how the global strategy is working out here in Japan, or what changes they had to make to the global strategy to fit the Japan reality? In the case of an unlisted company, we may have trouble finding out any concrete information, but we can ask about their competitors. They may be listed firms or maybe not. It doesn't matter. We can ask how these rival companies are affecting the buyer's business? This is a nice oblique question to help us gain intelligence on what is going on with this company at this moment. What we are trying to do is get the buyer to tell us key details about the current state of play in their company. This is the "As Is" question to gauge their current reality. We need to know this because we want to find out where they would like to be going forward, or what we call the "Should Be" question. Unless there is a nice big gap between where they are now and where they want to be, we may have no hope of making a sale. Small gaps are bad news. They may feel they have enough internal resources or time or manpower to get to where they want to be, without our help. The way we find that out is by asking the "Barrier" question. We ask what is stopping them from achieving their vision? Finally, we ask the "Payoff" question about what success would mean to them individually, so that we can personalize our solution presentation later in the conversation. The key in the questioning process is to keep going and dig deep. When we teach sales training to our class participants, I notice that many skim over the questions part. They ask a question, get an answer and then simply move on to the next question. They have often just passed up a golden opportunity to go much deeper. Asking a further "why" question when we are told things by the buyer is a great way to better understand what they are thinking. By this I mean asking more than just one "why" here. We need to keep going with asking why, why, wh

Read The Air When Selling There is a saying in Japan, Kuki wo Yomu, which means read the air or be aware of the atmosphere or subtexts in the meeting. In sales, we need to be on high alert all the time for what is the atmosphere prevailing with the buyer at this moment. What are any changes we are noticing during the meeting and what sort of changes do we want to see. I was talking to a salesman about a call he and a colleague had made on a buyer. The buyer was an existing client and this was just a meet the new guy introduction meeting. There was no need to pitch, as they were already a buyer. My friend had briefed his colleague that no pitch was required, as it was a meet and greet occasion. That didn't stop the colleague though, as he ploughed in trying to sell the already sold buyer. The reaction on the part of the client was surprise and a touch of incredulous confusion. The brand of the seller was not advanced on that occasion, as the buyer wondered, "what is wrong with these people?". Why didn't the colleague get it? Why did he pitch, when there was no need? Is this issue something you can fix through training? That is a good question and to some extent it is similar to the question "can you fix stupidity through training?". Probably not. This same colleague has a track record with this type of behavior apparently, so he is obviously not learning as he flits along, from one disaster to another. If you do not seem intelligent to the buyer then they don't want to know more. Basically, they won't buy from dumb people. There will always be a portion of any population who are dim. Some of these dim people wind up in sales. From the buyer's point of view, we salespeople are all tarred with the same brush, until they can differentiate us from the dim people. There is not too much that can be done about dim people in the sales profession, except to try to keep them away from buyers as much as possible. The other issues however relate to ourselves. We may be dim at times as well. We may be missing signals during the meeting and also be barging in, with both barrels blazing, when we shouldn't be. How can we successfully read the air and better align ourselves with what the client is thinking? This is especially tricky in Japan, because often the buyers are master poker players, hiding or minimizing their body language and facial expressions. They become very hard to read. We have to be really watching them like a hawk and look for any telltale indications that they like or don't like something we have said. Easier said than done by the way. We can get caught up in what we are doing, when we are in the moment of presenting our solution, we can miss these important signals. If our brain is on fire with what we want to tell them, we may imagine we are listening to the buyer, but it may be self delusion. We may only have what we want to say in our own mind at that moment and therefore may not be concentrating enough on the people in front of us. Are we listening with our eyes as well as our ears? There are things called "tells" in poker games, where the opponents peg a certain behavior indicator with a line of decision making. The idea is to work out the "tells" of your opponent, so that you can predict their actions. For example, they may have a habit of rubbing their left ear when they are bluffing. They may not even be aware of it but you will want to know that if you want to call their bluff. There are "tells" in body language, breathing, eye line, posture, etc., that can give us a hint on how our buyers are reacting. If you don't know Japan well, at first, these signals may be lost. I am not talking about the obvious ones like sucking the air through the back teeth, which clearly indicates what you are proposing is a difficulty or an impossibility for them or drumming their fingers on the table with impatience to see you out the door. I am talking about more nuanced and subtle signs that can be simply missed. Even if they are missed in the beginning, at least start practicing trying to link up what you see in front of you, with how things are going in the meeting. Over time, the connection between all of these "tells" and the results start to collide and you get a better idea of what you are actually witnessing. The key point is everyone has certain habits, which are linked to how they are thinking or feeling. When we are dealing with buyers, we need to be scouring their reactions to give us early warning signals of resistance or doubt. We need to read the air in the meeting, especially when we are dealing with a buying group. There will be different stakeholders in that meeting, who will have different views on how attractive your offer is to their self interests. You need to be watching very carefully for internal resistance, so that you can assist your champion inside the buyer company to prevail against any possible opposition. None of this is a walk in the park in Japan, but we have to raise our sensitiv

Building Expert Authority With Buyers "You are who Google says you are" is a quote from Timbo Reid, the host of the "Small Business Big Marketing" podcast which I follow. His point is people check us out before they meet us, using search engines like Google. In sales, buyers will also peruse our company website, search us out on Google and probably look us up on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. What are they going to find there? Are we in photos on Facebook, doing something stupid, fully fuelled by copious amounts of alcohol? Are we conscious enough of how our personal brand is being perceived? Have we got business enemies who are posting damming claims about how we didn't pay them or how we ripped them off. Our lives in sales today are open books. We can't miss the point that we need to control what gets written in the pages of that book. If you have Facebook posts that are not consistent with the professional image you want to portray, then delete them all. If it is really bad, delete the whole thing and start again. When we look at the photos of you in your profile page, is it you with a straw hat and a cocktail in hand, in some sand and surf setting, rather than you in a suit? Is your LinkedIn profile some pathetic job resume? Are you raging against the other political party on Twitter, upsetting the other fifty percent of the population, including your buyers? Personal branding in sales is gold. Before we even get to have the meeting with the client, we want to create an image in their mind of someone who is serious, trustworthy, reliable, expert, credible, friendly and easy to work with. This will create itself and morph into something we don't want to project to clients, unless we step in and take control of our public image. The rule in sales is to avoid subjects like politics and religion. This is obvious, but we may have firm views on these things and our public record is there for our clients to see. We may be losing business opportunities because of our very privately held but widely, publically broadcast ideas on these subjects. Have you done an audit on yourself lately? Do a search on your own name, using a number of popular search engines and see what it throws up. Take a good look at your Facebook and LinkedIn pages and see what you are projecting to the world about you, as a potential business partner for buyers. It shouldn't just be from a defensive posture. What can you do to project expert authority to buyers, by what you present on social media etc. Post blogs about your area of expertise, offering good insight and advice to buyers of your product or service. It doesn't have to be hundreds of blogs, but it should also not be a barren wasteland of nothing. Extended blogs can become articles which may be suitable for publication in magazines. These can get picked up in your Google search and they add to your personal brand as an authority in this area. You can push the articles out through your weekly newsletter to clients or through your social media. If you produce enough blogs, these may become an eBook or a hard copy book. Again your expert authority is being highlighted and you are going to be seen as an expert in your field. You may not like to write or maybe you are not very good at it. You can always record what you want to say, get a transcript of it and work on editing that. If you need to, there are plenty of editors and ghost writers available to help you polish it up. I remember seeing an article written by a fellow I know and it was very good. I was surprised because he never seemed that articulate. I found out later I knew the guy who had ghost written it for him. It doesn't matter. People don't care that much, they take what they see in front of them and it is either good or it isn't. You are still making these points and it all supports your personal branding. You can also use audio for podcasting. This is not for the faint hearted because once you start, you have to be committed to keep going. You also have to release episodes with reliable regularity. You can tell the client on one hand that you are a reliable supplier and then have show episodes released at crazy intervals, that show zero ability to be consistent. Not good. You may prefer video and that is cheap and easy today, compared to years ago, when you needed lots of equipment, a camera crew, a sound crew, video editors etc. Today you can broadcast using Facebook Live and have no crew and no editing. If you want to be a bit fancier, buy a device holder that screws into a tripod, buy an external microphone and set you phone or iPad and just hit record. You may not even bother to edit out the bits of you pushing the start and stop button or get someone else to push them for you. Video is good because it shows you in action and attracts more trust. We can see your eyes and read your body language, to gauge if we can trust you or not, before we bother to meet you. It allows us to demonstrate our expertise

Sales Poor Performers Are you failing in sales or do you have sales staff who are not making their numbers? Sales is a brutal, metrics based activity where there are no hiding places or at least none that can be sustained. Eventually, the numbers show if you are making it or you are not. What happens then? In the West the usual next step is you are fired and a replacement is found. Japan is a bit different. The social and legal bias is against firing people for poor performance. In the case of large companies, the management is expected to move that failing salesperson into another job, where they can do better. Smaller companies don't have that same pressure, because the courts know that survival can be impaired by underperformers. The herd must unite together to survive, even if it means releasing one of the number. Nevertheless, internally, the other members of the team expect that the failing salesperson be given some sort of vague chance to right their ship of sales. They don't like seeing heads lopped off, because they always feel that "but for the grace of God there go I". Whether it is you who are failing or one of your staff, then what should you do? The issue usually lies with the work style of that person. What they are doing today is the product of what they have been doing for a long time and so they expect that to work. The issue often arises that when you shift companies or even industries, what worked before is no longer working. As human beings we are sometimes so programed to keep repeating what we know and what we think will work, that we become blind to the reality. In smaller companies and in gaishikei(foreign multinationals) the whole age and stage hierarchy gets mixed up as well. Suddenly you find your boss is younger than you or oiks, a woman or both! For older men, this requires a level of flexibility that they have never had to find in their previous work life. If the old dog can't learn some new tricks the gaishikei bosses will be quick to disappear them. We have to develop higher levels of self awareness and understand that what we think is correct may not fit this situation and therefore need to find a new truth that works for us. Smaller companies don't have other spots to move failing salespeople around to, so usually it is one last chance or imminent departure. In the current market, where it is very hard to hire salespeople, especially English speaking salespeople, then a degree of patience is required on the boss's part. Even if this person is not performing well enough, they are knowledgeable about the products and the clients and so have a base from which to improve. Once the sale's problem child is fired, then we have the difficulty of finding a replacement at all or finding one who is actually better than the last. In a tight market you tend to take what you can get and hope you can train them to be better. Do you actually have the means of doing that though? Who will train them? What amount of onboard training will they get. In small firms everything is lean so the training component tends to be Spartan. If there are age and gender issues then the salesperson has to realise they have to suck it up and get used to this brave new world of work, which is not how it was back in the day of their long departed youth. So what. Either learn to fit it or it will be out on your ear. From the boss's side, at least giving people a chance to come back from the precipice fits in well with social values in Japan and the rest of the team will prefer that to casting them into oblivion. The retention of your other performing team members is a key job of the boss in this 1.68 jobs for everyone looking world, in Japan. People observe how you handle poor performance very minutely and forensically. No easy answers anymore, to the poor performance conundrum in Japan. The bad news is that is isn't going to ever improve, so we all have to navigate our way around these issues in more creative ways than before. The failing salesperson has to reinvent themselves and we bosses have to do the same. The market punishes those who are not able to move with the times and find the flexibility needed to thrive and survive. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected] If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.enjapan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules. About The Author Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years. In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has

We Give Added Value. No You Don't! The chocolate on the pillow, the fruit bowl or the wine bottle and glasses in your hotel room are often cited as examples of good service, adding extra value to the client. We may be doing something similar in our business, from our side for free, that we imagine is adding extra value to the buyer. The idea is cute but the thinking is a bit fuzzy. I am on a diet, so I don't appreciate the chocolate. I don't drink, so I can't enjoy the wine. Perhaps I have an allergy to certain fruit, so I can't eat the fruit provided. Value is perceived value and also is only value when it corresponds with the interests and desires of the buyer. There is the rub. We need to know more about our buyer rather than just shotgun the possibilities. We need to laser beam around their interests. In the hotel example, we have to book and often we do this on-line. Our preferences could be plumbed right then. Or we have to turn up and go through a check-in process. Our desires could be plumbed then and there. Yes, it takes away the surprise factor, but an unhelpful surprise isn't adding very much value is it? The secret is how can we know our buyers better, so that we can surprise them or at least delight them? Today, there is so much information floating around about us on the internet. I have a Facebook account (in fact I have two), a LinkedIn account, an Instagram account and a Twitter account. If you take a look at my Instagram account, I often post photos of empty wine bottle's labels and few short comments about what I thought of that particular wine. So you could not only anticipate that I like wine, you could even provide me with one of my favourites. My LinkedIn account has my profile and also over 1460 blogs, each with a Bio that talks about what I have done in my career and a bit about my background. You would know that I do traditional Shitoryu Karate, so I have an interest in martial arts. The hotel may have some martial arts themed movies in their line up. A small note in my room pointing this out would be a simple, but nice touch and may get me to buy the movie. "Welcome Greg, there is a great Jackie Chan movie playing in our movie lineup, which you may enjoy to watch while you stay here with us. If there is anything else we can do to make your stay a truly great one, please let me know. Jan (ext. 4077)". Now that is not hard to do, but it only works if you bother to know something about me. Now to be fair, it is always easier to point out the shortcomings of other suppliers than our own. Hotels do their thing and we have our own clients and customers to serve. What can we do for them? The great book "Moments Of Truth" by Jan Carlzon, describes how he went through all the touch point that SAS Airlines had with their customers. He and his team looked for ways to make sure at each touch point the experience was excellent. We all need to be doing the same. I have an open office plan layout, so I sit amongst the troops. My desk is easy to find, it is the one with all the papers piled high upon it! Anyway, I can hear my team on the phone. Sometimes I can hear that the quality of the staff's voice toward the client isn't friendly enough. They sound very "business like" but I want them to do better than that. I want them to sound happy, upbeat and friendly, even if none of those things apply in reality on that day. It doesn't matter if you kicked your toe this morning, you have to come across to the client as a positive, helpful friendly person. This is especially so if the client is not sounding like any of those things themselves. Another pet peeve of mine is when I call companies. The style in Japan is to only say the company name and not your own name. So I call the number, ask for Suzuki san and get "This is Suzuki". How do I feel? Am I really happy I got Suzuki san on the first go? No. I feel guilty and bad because I didn't recognize Suzuki san's voice. I teach my staff to always answer the phone by stating the company name and then their own name and do it in a friendly voice. This eliminates any potential embarrassment to the client of not remembering our voice when they call us and starts the conversation off on a positive note. What is the cost of this? Nothing. However, we have to be thinking about these things in the first place and in a busy life we can get stuck in doing things in a certain way without any time taken for reflection. In a few days we will be having an internal systems audit. We have many, many systems in our company, but we have not really looked at them altogether in total, with a mind to making them more efficient or more client friendly. I am sure when you look at your own business, you will realise "wow, we have a lot of procedures around here". Are they the best procedures, does technology now allow some of these to be automated, how is the client's impression of your company as a result of being on the receiving end of these procedures? So break down the to

"We Don't Have Any Budget". Yes You Do! In the profession of sales, this is one of the most widespread pushbacks on our sterling offer. It also a false flag as well. We should never believe it when we hear this, because they certainly have budget. What they really mean is they are not prepared to allocate any of their budget for this product or service. Why would they be that crazy and not make the allocation? The issue is with us, we salespeople. We have not provided enough value to warrant any change in the current allocations. This is me too, when I am the buyer. If I get hit up for some expenditure and I am not convinced that at that price point I am getting sufficient value, then I reject the offer. I don't say it directly though. I try to be gentle and nice and just say "it is not in my budget". Well that is crap actually. My budget, like everybody else's budget is a set of random numbers in cells in spreadsheets. On the left side is written some words describing the topic. Things like salary, rent, marketing. On the right side on that line, under the column for the current month there sits a figure attached to that topic. Where did that figure come from? It was an assumption at the start of the year of where the money would be likely be spent in the next twelve months. In reality, though we overspend in some areas and underspend in others. If we are motivated enough, we can find the money. We just take it out of one cell and transfer to another. So "I don't have any budget for this" is simply buyer BS. Fine, but what can we do about it? The value failure is due to a number of factors. We may not have fully understood their business or their needs, so we have been suggesting the wrong or a weak solution. They don't find this convincing enough. Maybe our questioning component of the sales interview was insufficient in scope or maybe they didn't open up to us and tell all. Remember that often this is the first or second meeting with a client and the first full sales call. We are a relative stranger to them. Yet here we are as bold as brass, interrogating them within an inch of their life, like one of those a hardened detectives on a rough beat, that you see in movies. If the trust hasn't been established then they may not want to expose all their firm's dirty laundry to a new face. Or maybe we did understand but the solution we presented didn't grab them. This can be the issue of the gap between where they are now and where they want to be, being too small. I had this recently. I went through the solution in detail but I could sense this wasn't pushing any excitement buttons. I failed to explain well enough how the solution I was proposing for the money sought, was going to improve their business results. Reflecting on that meeting later, I realised I hadn't done a good enough job of drawing out word pictures of how things would be different inside the company once they had our solition. I didn't describe in enough detail how the people would be changed and really firing. I was operating at 30,000 feet and needed to get down on the deck more about the positive differences we would bring. They felt they could get where they wanted to go under their own steam, without my invaluable help and assistance. That failure to make the sale was on me. In other cases, it might be a timing issue on budgets. The person we are talking to has to justify the number to someone in the windowless basement room downstairs, who are wearing green eye shades, shirt arm bands and counting the money. The sacred budget created at the start of the year doesn't include this allocation and now we want to make a change. This is where we have to get creative. We need to look for payment timings that won't trigger alarm bells in the accounting section. Maybe we split the payments across months or financial years, to make it easier to get through the bean counters. Maybe we deliver the service or product now and get paid later? In many countries you wouldn't dream of doing that but Japan is different in that regard because you are unlikely to get ripped off. This timing issue came up recently. I had made a full solution proposal and the local team liked it. Headquarters in Europe however had a meltdown. Well they would wouldn't they! Anytime you take that miserable EU peso and put it into yen, the currency calculations boggle their old world imaginations. Never mind that this is a totally different economy. Or that their own local staff salary bill here in Japan is totally vast, compared to what they are facing in Europe for the same level positions. They conveniently overlook these realities and can't get their head around spending such a huge sum of money. Fortunately, we were able to come up with some solutions that enabled the local Country Head to move one set of numbers from one cell to another and do the business. This was worked into this year's and next year's budgets. They had the money all along. It was just a question of bei

Regional Differences When Selling In Japan Japan is a big small place. It is about the same size as the UK, but is covered in mountains, the latter making up 70% of the land area. We have very few of those horizon stretching field vistas like they have in England. This mountainous aspect has led to quite strong sub-regional differences here, especially reflected in language, customs and cuisine. England has these too, but I think Japan is more pronounced in this regard. These differences pop up when you are selling here as well. The following are my experiences having sold in all of these cites and having lived in Kobe/Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo and having made sale's calls in other provincial centers. If we go from south to north and start in Kyushu in Fukuoka, there is a local dialect and basically everyone went to school there and graduated from the local colleges and universities. Foreigners are not calling on companies all that often down there, so there is something of a rarity factor at play here. Back in the good old days, when companies had generous entertainment budgets, the local staff were really glad to meet you. This was a grand occasion to use you as the excuse to have a big night out on the town on the firm's dime. My ego took a bruising when I finally worked out it wasn't the Story charm, that was generating this great enthusiasm for a night out on the town. That big spending night out culture has gone by the wayside, but the rarity interest factor is still at play. Language is an issue though, because the English speaking capability is still underdeveloped in most of Japan. The local burghers are quite cautious and conservative too. It will take a lot of patience to do business here, but it can be done. It just normally requires a lot more time than your company's leaders or shareholders are prepared to give you. Kobe was opened as an international port in 1868, so it is one of the most open minded towns in Japan. They have had foreigners living in their midst for a very long time, so there is nothing special about us from a uniqueness point of view. Trade has meant dealing with the outside world and being flexible about it in the process. The denizens of Kobe often have a better level of English than other parts of Japan and they enjoy being seen as the most international. I always found people there open to discussing business. Osaka is an ancient merchant town with a merchant mentality. It was the center of the great commodity markets in Japan for salt, rice and soy beans. One of the great things I like about this city is they will give you a "yes" or a "no". Often, the reluctance to tell you "no" in Japan, leaves the whole decision piece dangling, without any clear idea of where we are going with this. Not in Osaka. If they like it, they will explore if there is a deal to be done and some money to be made. They are proud of their local dialect and this is a big divider between insiders and outsiders. As a foreigner, we are so completely outside of all consideration, that in a way, we are probably better accepted than their despised rivals from Tokyo. Kyoto I always found very closed. The aristocratic capital of Japan for centuries, it features a defined smallish city area hemmed in by mountains. The interconnectivity of the local people is pronounced. Their families have lived here for centuries, they know each other and they know who is a "blow in" and who isn't. Even for other Japanese salespeople from out of town, Kyoto is a hard market. If you are from the outside, you are "out" for the most part. The area around Nagoya has produced the three most famous warrior leaders in Japanese history, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Tokugawa family Shoguns, closed the country off from the rest of the world. When I say "closed", this was upon pain of death for entry or exit. This went on for hundreds of years. Nagoya is still back there in a time warp – still closed off. The local mentality is not open to foreign business and there isn't much English going on around there either. I said that in Osaka you get a "yes" or a "no" and that this knowing where you stood was attractive. In Nagoya they do the same thing and the answer is always "no". The pride of businesspeople in Nagoya is to have an exceptionally humble looking headquarters, with lousy office furniture, stained, aging carpets and everything very much down market, but to also have a huge pile of cash sitting in the bank. They are extremely tight with their money too. It is the only place I have seen, where when a new shop opens and they put those decorative flower arrangements out front on the street, that passersby will shamelessly take handfuls of the flowers away with them. They justify this on the basis that it is a waste to see them die and it is much better to have them home at their place. It is a rough and tough market. In a word to the wise, they have one little commercial idiosyncrasy that will kill yo

What Is Kokorogamae And Why Does It Matter In Sales In Japan? Intention in life is key. Are we living an intentional life or are we a buffeted bystander of what is happening around us? We have our personal vision, aspirations, goals, targets or maybe not. Sales is one area of professional pursuit where intention is everything. Assertion is key in sales, but it is assertion with a Smiley Face not a grimace. Of course, salespeople need to have superb people and communication skills. The point though is toward what end? What is the intention behind everything that is being done? Is it to make a lot of money, to be the big dog in the sales team, to own lots of luxury goods? This is what kokorogamae is all about. This is a compound word. Kokoro itself has a number of meanings, one is heart, another is spirit. Kamae undergoes a phonetic change when joined together and becomes Gamae in the compound word. It means to take your stance and we use it in karate, when we talk about the different opening postures we use. In the Dojo, when you hear the command kamae everyone knows to go into their fighting stance. So all very interesting Greg, but what has any of this got to do with sales? If I translate kokorogamae as true intention, then perhaps it makes more sense than "spirit stance". We have a starting point with our intention in sales. The infamous Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort's kokorogamae was to rip off as many people as possible and make himself super rich in the process. Wikipedia lists him as "an American author, motivational speaker, and former stockbroker". They left out the "heinous criminal" descriptor. After coming to an agreement with the prosecutors to rat out his partners, he spent only 22 months in prison for his fraud scheme. He now does speeches and runs training clinics on sales. As an Aussie, I say to myself, "that is America isn't it", where the notorious can still make money regardless of how many people they cheated out of their life savings and how many families they destroyed. But this is not what I am talking about. Dale Carnegie talks about not being a good salesperson, but being a good person in sales. There is a tremendous difference between the two. I hate people like Jordan Belfort, because they pollute and poison our sales profession with their toxic mentality. They should have left him in jail forever, rather than let him run around giving public talks on how to do sales. We all have an obligation in sales and that is to win the trust of the buyer and then honour that trust. These criminals like Belfort or Bernie Madoff, who ran a huge Ponzi investment scheme for years until he went to jail, where unlike Belfort he is serving a life sentence, make the skepticism nerve in buyers run on a ragged, raw edge. The kokorogamae question is which one are you? Are you in sales to serve the client and make the client successful or to make yourself successful at the client's expense. There is nothing in the middle. There is no grey area involved here. One of my sale's heroes is Zig Ziglar. He was a door to door pots and pans salesman, who became a highly successful trainer of salespeople. He is also a Dale Carnegie graduate by the way. One of his great quotes is, "you can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want". This is the correct kokorogamae in my book. We have a job to do in sales and how we approach it makes all the difference. If we want to have a long and successful career in sales, our kokorogamae will determine the degree of success and longevity. There is a Japanese four character saying that I like, "shin shi kei shuu" which means to have integrity from start to finish. If this is your north star, guiding light, beacon on the hill in sales then you are on the correct path. Well, this all sounds good in theory. The problems arise when salespeople become desperate and start ramping up the buyer, to get more revenue to make their targets and keep their jobs. They are making decisions based on their own interests and not the interests of the client. They recommend solutions that pay a higher commission or yield a bigger profit, regardless of whether that is the best solution for the client. I was speaking with an American sales guy once who related how he could never make sales calls for his product in the same town twice in his territory. This was because the consumers would have discovered after the purchase, just how poor the quality was of what he was selling them. Another example was from a friend of mine who was being interviewed for a job as a recruiter. The scenario was that your candidate had been offered another job which was perfect for them, but from a rival recruiting firm What do you do? My friend said she would advise the candidate to take the other firms job and not hers, because the other job was the perfect job. The interviewers replied, "No, your job is to make the candidate take the job you are offering". Where

What Is Different About Selling In Japan? This is a pretty big subject, so I will pick up a few of the more noteworthy differences. In the West, salespeople, for the most part, are involved in an occupation for which they have received no training. They are thrown into sales, to sink or swim. If they don't sell, they don't eat, because of the sales commission structures. Total commission based remuneration is a normal thing in most countries or at least the pay structures will have a very high "at risk" component. In many cases, this drives desperation and salespeople saying anything to get a sale, in order to last another week in the job. Cold calling potential clients is a big part of finding new buyers and a lot of attention is placed on prospecting and pipeline building activities. Japan is quite different. There are very few salespeople here in 100% commission sale jobs. The simple reason is because they don't have to. Anyone on that type of pay scale is in a very low level job and are usually pretty young people who not very well educated. The touts you see on the street outside clubs in Kabukicho in Shinjuku or in Roppongi or Akasaka will no doubt be on high commissions and very low base salaries. The societal status attached to those in commission sales is also very low and so it is very hard to find anyone who wants to do it. In Japan, you don't want your daughter to marry one of them. Like the West, most Japanese people have no training in sales apart from a perfunctory On The Job Training exposure. I say exposure because it is rather more cosmetic than concrete. Your boss or one of the more experienced salespeople, will take you with them to visit a few clients and then bingo, you are out there on your own. Your boss and the others in the firm went through the same process, so no one thinks anything about it. This is a brilliant system for reproducing mediocrity, generation after generation. In both cases of untrained Western and Japanese salespeople, they notoriously launch straight into their pitch without asking any questions of the buyer. They immediately go into the dark pit of details, the facts, the spec, the brochure, the flyers, the powerpoint, etc. In the West, commission based salespeople can have ultra short professional lives in sales. Most people, with little or no training, have simply no idea what they are doing and so they just fail. In short order, they are sayonara out of sales. The Darwinian penalty for failure is sales oblivion. In Japan, sales people are usually on a salary and bonus arrangement or base salary and commission, with the base being fairly high. For some of my followers living outside of Japan, it may be news to learn that because of the labour laws here, incompetence is not an acceptable reason to fire people in companies. We are predominantly talking about the mid-sized and big companies now, because in smaller firms that bias is not so pronounced. Nevertheless, in Japan, the failing salesperson would get a good dose of verbal abuse from the boss, on a regular basis. If they can't take that, then they will quit or if they can take it and won't quit, they will be transferred to another non-sales role elsewhere in the company. Fairly useless salespeople are tolerated here, much more than in the West. Japanese larger companies are "generalist", rather than "specialist" production machines. Everyone is expected to migrate their way around the different parts of the company, picking up experience along the way over the course of their long career. One of those rotations may be into the sales department. Strangely, there is very limited activity applied to prospecting, especially cold calling. Japanese salespeople rely on their firm's brand to do the bulk of the selling for them. If you aren't very good at hunting, getting new clients, then no problem, you are assigned to become a farmer taking care of existing clients. Basically your job is to turn up and clip their ticket for the next regular order. For all Japanese salespeople, you must be totally subservient and uber obedient to the buyer. You must do whatever they say, be available 24 hours a day and put up with large amounts of crap to keep the buyer happy and loyal. And trust me, Japanese buyers are incredibly picky and demanding. If you make a mess of even this in the lesser demanding role of farmer, then you will get moved out and into another department. You won't get fired. In the West, we are trained to persuade the buyer, to counter whatever they say, to have a comeback immediately. We say the buyer is King, yet we need to get their royal agreement to buy. There are lots of tactics used to get this "Yes". Salespeople can be very aggressive and terrier like about this process. They will argue with the buyer and try to convince them to reverse their opposition to purchasing. For example, if the buyer says "I will think about it", then the salespeople will ask them, "what in particular do you need to think

"Send It To Me" – Uh Oh! How I hate those four words – "send it to me". I get that heavy feeling in my stomach and around my shoulders. I know we are now on the path to sale's hell. I particularly hate it when I hear that request after I have tried for the second time to secure a meeting to go through things face to face. After you have requested the meeting and they push back, you can go back again and try for the meeting. However, when they push back twice in a row you have nowhere to go, you have to send it or you come across in a bad light, as someone who is either stupid or socially tone deaf. Neither are attractive to buyers so we best avoid plunging ourselves into those negative brackets. The "send it to me" request usually refers to sending basic information such as brochures and flyers or it might be around content and pricing. The latter is usually a quotation or a proposal. The reason the buyer normally puts forward for not meeting you is that they are too busy to see you. If you have had one meeting already and it is time to propose the deal, you can send the document by email and not meet. The chances of them buying though are substantially reduced and you may as well post it to yourself for all the good it will do. Those flyers and brochures you diligently sent in response to their request will soon be winging their way to the waste paper basket, to be forgotten immediately. I struggle with this "send it to me " request. I know I have to do it, if I have exhausted my chances of a face to face meeting. However, I know this is a dead duck. I often meet senior decision makers who will request I send the information so they can share it with the "team". What does that look like? If it is a physical entity it will just be sent to the designated person with very little explanation. Now I may have spent an hour with the senior company representative going through chapter and verse of the innumerable benefits and marvelous advantages of our widget. This gets compacted down to "take a look at this" when passed down the line. The end receiver in Japan is often indignant that anyone is intruding on their turf and they have that "not invented here" histrionic approach. If they didn't know about it already or they didn't find it for themselves, then it can't be any good. The people who need to get involved vote with their feet and end the process right there. You are left high and dry with nowhere to go. You don't get to meet them. When you follow up, the big boss tells you the team has had a look at it and decided they are not going forward with the information. Where do you go? Basically you go and find another buyer because this is a train wreck. Next time though you should apply a different approach. Ask the senior person to introduce you to the people down the line, who will do the actual work. Now they may refuse to do that for whatever reason, but you should always ask. And ask in a way that is hard for them to say no. For example, "Suzuki san, what we have found is that when we present our materials to people who often carry out the actual tasks, they see many more possibilities than we can imagine, because they are at the coal face. Would it be beneficial for your company to be able to generate innovative ideas and new possibilities if I was able to take your team members through the details, rather than just passing on materials which by themselves, provide insufficient context?". Now that is a question carefully designed to elicit a "yes" response and this is the type of question we need to insert at this point. When it is a proposal document, we are normally sending it to the senior person we met previously. Remember this a false dawn. They are going to go straight to the back of the document and will see only costs and no value in the pages presented. Without us there to explain the associated value of the investment, they cannot rationalise the two together, very easily. We know our product or service much better than they do, we have broad experience of where other buyers have benefited from it and we can answer any enquiries they may have right there on the spot. When we send it, we are sending the proposal out naked to the world, with no protection from the harsh glare of buyer skepticism. The proposal is like the headline of a magazine article. To really understand what is going on, we have to read the article itself, to get the proper perspective and context involved. When we don't get that chance we are sending our sales hopes into oblivion. I had one of those "send it to me" requests last week and I sent the proposal with the numbers knowing full well, this was a guaranteed suicide mission. When the buyer decides to not make the time, then they haven't been sold enough on the value. I had one prior meeting, but obviously I didn't do a good enough job on explaining the value of what we do. The leadership team over there will look at the numbers and will say to themselves that it is out

Busy Bosses You Need To Go With Your Salespeople To See Clients Many of us are player/managers. We run the sales team and we also do our own sales. This means we are pretty busy bees, buzzing around trying to cook up some deals for ourselves, as well as keep the various sales team noses to their respective grindstones. One of the dangers though is we start to leave the business of sales to the salespeople entirely. Especially so when they are seasoned regulars and highly experienced. We feel we don't have to do much for them and we can concentrate on our own sales. The folly of this approach was drawn to my attention recently when my boss visited town. Because he is based in New York he is in no danger of wearing out his welcome in Tokyo. We only see him every few years, as he tours his 100 plus country global empire. He was in town recently to celebrate our 55thanniversary of being established in Japan, which is a pretty big deal. In the course of his visit we took him to see some clients. This is when the penny dropped. We were sitting there having green tea and chit chatting with this medium sized Japanese company, when one of the Japanese executives said something that really grabbed my attention. We have been delivering training for this company for the last four years as regular as clockwork and have built a really strong relationship with their HR team though the efforts of one of our sales guys. The thing is though, that we only deliver one solution for them and it is always the same solution. You don't have to be a genius to work out what is wrong with this picture. At some point we will have worked our way through the entire staff with this solution and will run out of things to do for them. This is when the money stops flowing in and life gets harder. So there I was sitting next to my boss, safely sipping my green tea, when I heard the senior Japanese executive talk about the fact the company needed to make some major shifts around employee mindsets. That is just what we do and we have an awesome solution for that problem. This course is known as the Dale Carnegie Course: Effective Communications and Human Relations. Here was one of the leaders of the company talking about an issue and we have been training them for years without ever managing to introduce this solution for them. Well that is not quite true, because we recently had one of the HR team do the course with a view to having them test it, to see if we could roll it out throughout the rest of the company. Nothing had happened since then, even though the HR person was impressed with the programme. This is where we get stuck. We are talking to the HR people and they don't have the knowledge of what the senior ranks are thinking or they have no authority to bring these types of suggestions to the leaders. The occasion of my boss visiting meant we had him, me and our sales guy there in the room with the top brass. Usually our sales guy wouldn't get past the HR team but this time we had leverage in the shape of the big shot visit. I did a follow approach to one of the executives who made that remark about mindset change and it looks like we might get to start doing some testing of the programme next financial year. I was reflecting on how the meeting unveiled with my boss and noted to myself that we didn't require him to fly out from New York, to be there, to get access to the top people. I am the President in Japan and I can also get access to the higher ups. But I don't do that so often. Why? Because I am too busy doing my own sales calls to my own clients and leave the rest of the team to get on with it. Japan is a place where we can get trapped in the lower echelons of the organisation, where the power is limited and leverage even less so. As the boss, we have to use our vice-regal prestige, status and power to get in front of the senior executives and find out what is on their minds, about advancing their business. When we do this, we can uncover some hidden gems and can make our potential sales solutions come to reality. So bosses, let's allocate some regular client visit time for our sales staff high potential clients and see if we can flush out some great additional business.

No Pain, No Gain In Sales Baby When you contemplate this title you are probably thinking about heroic sales efforts, massive privations, sacrifice, striving, discipline, patience and forbearance. Actually I am not talking about any of that mighty stuff. I am talking about your client. The really irritating thing about sales is trying to get someone to buy who doesn't need what you are offering. You know they should have it, but they don't know. That makes it really hard to persuade the buyer to activate. We know we should be running the sales conversation along the railway track progressing through the sales continuum. Build the trust, get permission to ask questions, uncover needs, perfectly match solutions, deal with any push back and ask for the business. When we get to the discovery part, there is nothing so painful as finding out they don't have any significant pain. The client is happy with their current supply arrangements. They can't see the need to encompass dealing with the angel (you) they don't know, when they are comfortable and safe and sound with the devil (your competitor) they do know. We can try all manner of things to break in, such as suggesting some form of trial, or some other very low touch start to the relationship. We can try and introduce something better at a small scale to try and pry open the jaws to new business. Japan is a place where once you get in, the client tends to want to stick with you, because you are a known factor and so the risk element has pretty much been homogenised and dealt with. A new supplier is painful for the buyer because now they have to go through that whole risky process from the start. They are super risk averse, so it is easier to say "no thank you". The other pain point is no perceived need. We deal with a lot of large companies, particularly multi-national companies who have devolved their own internal solutions. This is a big pain. The local boss feels there is a solution that works already in play. So there is little pain requirement there to elicit any change or to introduce something additional. This is the point. When they don't feel any pain you can't gain the new business. I was speaking to a potential client and knew they had an internal solution. The reason I knew it is because I have been trying to break into their company for a number of years. Every time I saw the boss, I would hit him up about doing something together. I had a very steady response rate: no, no and no, for the last eight years. Well that old boss just retired and bingo we have a new face running the show. So of course, I am thinking here might lie some pain relief against this permanent rejection I have been suffering. Valiant efforts to excite the new broom on the possibilities were made, but that spark of interest wasn't burning in his eyes. I am dangling tasty morsels in front of him, but he is not salivating in anticipation. His eyes are dull and disinterested. He is polite, which I like, but I can't see any buying signals, which I don't like. Why? I can see that what I am offering, in the way I am offering it, is not demonstrating a big enough pain gap between where they are now and where they want to be. This is always an issue with industries which are booming. The money is rolling in, so the idea of doing anything new or different isn't a contention. Ironically when things go bad, they are trying to cut costs, so they are hell bent on reducing supply of various external solutions. So when is the happy time to make the sale? I was thinking about what could I have done better, to demonstrate the differences our solution could have brought. I had tried a few well tested ideas that have sponsored some interest previously, in other similar situations, but the eyes were not shining. I could see the passivity inside the mind. I wasn't hitting anything interesting enough to inspire a test or trial or any of the usual door openers. Sometimes the gap is not big enough to squeeze through. The amount of pain being experienced, is being dealt with sufficiently from within. They have invested in a solution already, it works, so "if it ain't broke, don't fix it baby" reigns supreme as an ideology. I think I didn't do a good enough job on painting the word pictures of what the brave new world with us would look like. Reflecting on the conversation, I was mightily aware of the sunny uplands of our solution, but I failed to get that image into words that inspired action. So unless your client feels pain or is shown that pain is coming, there will be no gain for the salesperson. We have to keep trying and we don't always hit the ball out of the park but we have to keep swinging.

Pitch Request Recovery Stony motherless silence unleavened by a stony face. That was the reaction to my questions from this Japanese buyer and other subsequent buyers. I had studied the American sales guru's sales techniques. I was a devotee of "consultative sales" and here I was in Japan trying to sell stuff and failing. In those days back in the early nineties, I was primed to ask my questions using the American guru sale's models. Find out if they are the decision maker, if they are ready to move right now, what they like about what they have now, what are the things that aren't fully satisfying their needs, etc. This is all well and good and today we are still doing consultative sales. We sometimes call it solution selling or whatever, but essentially it is the same basic premise. Find out what they are doing now, find out what they would like to be doing, discover why they are not doing it already and then provide the pain point relief. This makes a lot of sense and should work in Japan too. Like a lot of imports into Japan, that have been successful overseas, there is often an adjustment or two needed to be made to meet the needs of the local market. When I met the buyers and went through a little bit of chit chat, I would move straightinto questioning mode. To my chagrin, the buyer sat there motionless. I would repeat the question, but nothing was coming out of their mouths at all. They were as silent as the tomb. Not being great with those long Japanese silences in conversation, this made me very uncomfortable. I wasn't sure what on earth I should do. I had just asked the same question twice, about their current situation and was getting a very cold, unfriendly reaction. Not a brilliant buying signal!!! After what seemed an age, the buyer just requested I tell him about our product. Well that was progress, I thought and went ahead with a glowing rendition of the finer points and wonderful attributes of this product, a crowning triumph in the modern era. The buyer then filleted my presentation like he was going to work on a tuna fish in a sushi shop. He was carving up my argument about my product's suitability for Japan and for his business. Well I gave it the old school try to win back some credence for what I was offering, but left that meeting with my tail firmly tucked beneath my legs. This would happen all the time. I started to wonder why I kept getting this pitch request and wasn't being allowed to be a consultative salesperson in Japan. Gradually, I realised the problem was that I was launching into my questions, without receiving permission to ask questions first. I wanted this person, to whom I was a complete stranger, to fork over the most intimate details of all of the company's failings, weak points, gaps, holes and shortcomings within three minutes of meeting him for the first time. What could possibly be wrong with this picture! I also realised that the reason the buyers were tearing my presentation apart was for them to satisfy themselves that this decision to buy would be an extremely low risk idea, that would not feature any blowback on them in the future. They were reveling in their risk averse natures and shooting my argument full of holes. This was their way of getting a comprehensive view of the risks. So I came up with the addition of the extra step in the process, to seek permission to ask questions first. All good and it works – most of the time. Incredibly though, some buyers will wave that away and insist that you give your pitch regardless. They have been so well trained by pitchpeople, masquerading as salespeople, that they can only comprehend a sales conversation as a pitch, critique then reject continuum. Well then give your pitch but study their faces like a hawk. As soon as you see them start to disconnect and lose interest, you need to jump back in there and try to get your questioning model going. Say to them, "I wonder if what I am saying is of any interest? I get the sense that I may not be highlighting the key things you are interested in. May I ask what you would rather hear about?". This allows us to get out of pitch mode and bridge across to questioning mode, so we can find out if we have what they need or not. Once we get to this point, then sales will start to happen, as we better match their needs with our solutions. If you get pushed into pitching, see if you can pivot back to the questioning model. After all, you have nothing to lose, because your pitch rarely results in a sale.

Follow Up In Business In Japan There are two elements of follow up in Japan. One is when you have concluded the deal and it is time to effect the delivery of the service or product. Prior to that, there has usually been a long drawn out process going on, where the buyer side have "been thinking about it". Actually they have been thinking about it because they need to get consensus internally on whether they should do the deal or not. They are trying to ensure they have minimized any risk, that they have all the checks and balances in place. So this can take a lot of time and it is very frustrating for the seller. However, when they have finally gotten everyone on board then they strike the deal and now they expect everything to be done by yesterday. The demand for speed on the execution of the deal is always there in Japan. Now in the West we tend to be the polar opposites. We are fast to strike a deal and slow to effect the delivery. Be aware in Japan that once the gun goes off, then things have to be primed to spring into action. That means we have to have the logistics side of our delivery ready to go and at speed. The other art of follow up here is a bit trickier. We have lots of meetings with clients, they are thinking about it and we keep seeking out new clients. We can't sit around waiting for a decision, we have to keep moving forward. The problem arises that we lose touch with people we spoke to some time ago, because we have moved on. We are looking for the next potential deal and we keep adding these potential deals to the list. We need to have a good system of follow up. They said they would think about it and we need to set a cadence for the follow up to see how they are tracking internally. We need to work out the frequency of follow up. That requires a good tracking system for clients we have met but who have not yet bought from us. They also benefit from the follow up because they also drift. After they have met us they get swept up in work as well, and trying to get people together internally to discuss the arrangements can take time and they also get distracted. Remember it is very rare that the buyer will ever experience any urgency about buying anything. As the volume builds the capacity for our memories to deal with all the complexity gets challenged. This is where client management systems and alert systems are needed. We need to set this up to help us keep up with all the many things we are doing. Someone you met six weeks ago may be a distant memory and you can barely remember what you talked about. What is worse you have become totally distracted by clients you are talking to now and you have not been doing a good job keeping in touch with that buyer as they work their way through the deliberation process. It happens pretty easily if you are busy working on leads. As an example, in just a two day period this week, I had a lunchtime networking event, another one that evening, one at breakfast the next day and then another luncheon after that breakfast. I collected a wad of meishi or business cards, some can just be filed into our CRM system, but others need to be contacted to arrange a meeting. So you send off the email to get together. The trick today though is that nobody answers your email and nobody is ever there to answer your follow-up call, so people go into the Bermuda Triangle of Sales Follow-up – they disappear. Unless we have a good system of dealing with all of this we will be wasting a lot of energy and opportunities to do more business. So follow-up in Japan has its own peculiarities and we have to be ready to deal with them. Speed in response to a go decision and keeping in touch with potential buyers through the long journey to a "yes" is absolutely required for success here.