The Sales Japan Series

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.

Closing Sales In Business In Japan You would think that asking for the order would be the simplest thing in a sales job. Not the case here in Japan. Surprisingly a lot of salespeople here in Japan never ask directly for the order. They get to the point where they should ask but they choose not to. One of the reasons is they fear rejection, getting a "no". They job of sales is an emotional rollercoaster all around the world, so preserving your self-esteem and self-belief is critical. There is nothing like getting rejected in selling to knock your ego around. Japanese salespeople have found a way to avoid that regretful eventuality by not actually asking for the business. It is left vague, sort of hanging there. They usually lack skills in selling, so the steps which they should have completed in a professional manner, haven't been done, so in fact they have no right to ask for the order. If you have built the trust, have asked well designed questions to fully understand the client's needs, presented the correct solution, dealt with any hesitations or objections, then you can confidently ask for the order. The way of asking doesn't have to aggressive or hard sell. Actually, that won't work in Japan, so let's forget about that idea. We can simply ask , "shall we go ahead?". Or we might offer an alternative of choice, such as, "would you like to start in January or would February be better?". The selection of either of those months means that you are accepting the business and will go ahead with the deal. Another soft variation that works well in Japan is using a minor point. We can ask, "Shall I send you a hard copy of the invoice or is an electronic copy okay?". Either answer means "yes", we have an agreement. Most often in Japan the answer is "we need to discuss it" or "we need to think about it". In American sales training they have a harder edge and go after that statement, "What do you need to think about?' or "How long will you take". That type of pushy sales technique just won't work in Japan. Here they do have to think about it and they do have to discuss it. The person you are talking to is usually not the final or sole decision maker. They have the ringi seidosystem here where all the stakeholders have to attach their chop or seal to the recommendation to show they have been informed and that they agree. That means there is a lot of consultation required internally, so it is hard to make any commitments to the salesperson immediately. No manner of bullying the buyer is going to change that situation. We have to be thinking how can we help our champion sell the idea to the other colleagues. We have to provide the arguments and show the value to make their persuasion job easier. We also need to find out who are the primary people who need convincing inside the company and we need to find out what issues might be important to them. Knowing this, we can help our champion address any potential pushback that might occur behind the closed doors of the client company, on our behalf. We need to ask for the order to flush out any objections we may not have dealt with well enough in the earlier part of the sales cycle. Maybe we didn't do a good enough job designing questions to fully understand the needs of the buyer. Maybe our solution wasn't a good enough match for what they needed. Perhaps we didn't handle the objections which arose well enough. Sometimes the objections we were told were just a smokescreen and the real objections haven't emerged yet. We need to get these out in order to deal with them. If we don't ask for the order we won't get the business and we won't get to find out why we are not getting the business. If they do bring up an issue, don't fight it. Say, "Yes I see and why is that a problem for you?". Any answer you start with words like "no", "but" or "however", will be guaranteed to have the buyer stop listening to you and go into combat mode to argue with you. We need to ask them why this is an issue to get more detail on the table so we can deal with it. Remember objections are like headlines in a newspaper and we need to get access to the full article explaining what the headline means. So we must dig for more detail. If we can't deal with the objection, then don't waste any more time, get out there and find the next potential client. When closing in Japan do not use aggression, force of will or tricky closing techniques – none of that will work. Use soft sell here. Expect they will need to think about it, so you are prepared to help them sell the idea internally.

Handling Buyer Objections In Business In Japan You would expect that salespeople would hear a lot of objections from buyers, particularly the same objections and therefore would be pretty good at handling them? Well that actually isn't the case. In some cases, the salespeople imagine they can drive the process by force of will and by pushing the buyer to change their mind. This is ridiculous anywhere, but especially so, here in Japan. Or they want to argue with the buyer, outmaneuver them, outwit them, some how trick them into buying. Again ridiculous. Japan is a very risk averse culture and the objections are important to the buyer, to get a surety of making a low risk buying decision. The buyers are salaried employees who don't want to see any decision they make, coming back to haunt them and negatively impacting their ride up through the ranks. The easiest way to do that is to take no new decisions (like buying from you). An objection is like the headline in a newspaper. It is very concise, but there is a long article explaining what that headline is all about. When we hear that objection headline, we need to get the full story in order to be able to successfully deal with that objection. There is no point hearing the objection and then answering what you second guess the point may be. It is a bit like at school, when you get the essay topic and you write your answer only to discover that is not what the teacher was after. We have to be sure what the buyer is after before we attempt to answer the objection. Don't answer what you think might be the problem, ask them before you say anything. I was at an event recently, sitting next to a Japanese Sales Director and I asked him how he handled objections. His answer nearly had me falling off my chair in shock. He said whenever he meets an objection, he drops the price by 20%. I was mentally calculating what that meant, because he had told me there were ten salespeople in the team. So ten people, dropping the price by 20% every year, for 5 years amounts to a diabolically large number. There is no need for that, I told him, which was a new concept in his case. He was dropping the price because he didn't know what to do. What he should have been doing was questioning the objection. He should have been asking the buyer why they held that view? If they say the price is too high, we need to ask them why they think the price is too high. Remember, the price is too high is only the headline – what is in the main body of the article? In another example, I had that exact reaction from a client. When I questioned why they thought the price was too high, they said because the amount exceeded their budget allocation for training for that quarter. So I asked what if we could spread that investment over two quarters, would that help? They said yes, that would be fine. So the real objections was timing, not price, but if I had just dropped my price by 20%, I would never have known that. Also when people give their objection, we have to be thinking, is this really the objection? It is like the iceberg metaphor. What they say is the bit above the waterline, but the real objection is out of sight, underwater. We do this ourselves when we are out shopping. We see a nice suit, check the price, then take a deep breath because it is too expensive for us. When the clerk asks us about buying the suit we don't say, "well I have been too unsuccessful so far in my career to be able to afford an expensive suit like this one". No, we talk about that bit above the waterline. We don't like the colour or the pattern or whatever, but not the real reason. So when we get an objection, we need to keep asking if there any other points and keep asking if there are any other points, until we have flushed out some of the issues. We then ask them to rank these issues in priority order and the most pressing objection is the one we answer. Often all the others disappear, once we handle the main one. If the objection is a game breaker then that is it. You can't force the buyer by force of will and badgering them to buy. Leave that sales call and go and spend time with someone you can properly serve, don't waste your most valuable resource – time. Don't argue with the buyer because they may not be a buyer today, but one day they may buy. Leave the door open. You may find that you can do a deal in the future, so don't burn your bridges over one deal and don't be remembered as a pushy pain.

Explaining The Application Of The Benefits To Buyers In Business In Japan Japan loves data and detail. All good, but it can be a trap when you are here trying to make sales in Japan. In a Western sales model there is a defined process to go through and the buyer is also trained on how that works as well. In the Japanese case there is a love of detail bias. This will take you down the wrong path, if you let the buyer control the sales call. Which is what happens to all the Japanese salespeople here, by the way. The buyer loves the detail, the spec, the features of the product. They can't get enough of that stuff. The problem is we don't buy the features, we buy the outcomes, the benefits. In sale's training we often use the example of buying a hand drill at a DYI Center. There are tonnes of detail on the drill – weight, speed, power source, battery life etc. We are not buying a drill, because what we are really after is a hole of a certain diameter in brick, metal, concrete or wood etc. The drill's features are not what we are buying, but that is often all the salesperson talks about. So here in Japan we have to be careful, because the buyer can drag us down into the morass of the detail and features of the product or service. We have to control the sales call and redirect the conversation away from only the detail on the spec and move on to the outcomes, the benefits these features will provide for the buyer. Generally speaking, most salespeople around the world get to the feature bit and only a tiny minority elevate the conversation to cover the consequent benefits from the features. Japanese pitchpeople have trained the buyers here to focus on the spec, the detail, the data. We need to get to a higher level of discussion. We need to be drawing word pictures they can see in their mind's eye. We need to be describing all the future benefits they will get from this purchase. This requires telling stories, talking about outcomes and results. Having done that we need to show some evidence that what we say works. The series of statements coming out of the salesperson's mouth is not counted as evidence by buyers. Salespeople like to talk a lot. We can do this, we can do that or we have this, we have that. So what? We need to be referring to the cases where we have helped other companies. We need to provide data to back up what we are saying. We need to be showing the application of the benefits and where this has worked elsewhere. This makes the whole sales call more credible. This has to be real – you cannot make this stuff up. If you want to lie to the buyer, then get out of our profession, we don't want you polluting the waters. It has to be authentic, real, something that you can prove to the buyer if they want that level of detail. Then you have to move into a trial close to see if there are any areas of concern. Is there anything we haven't covered in sufficient detail. Did we miss anything, are there any objections to what we have said? The Japanese pitchperson doesn't get to any of this level of sophistication. They are bogged down in the detail of the features. Remember, the buyer has been trained to only expect the pitch. They will keep you there and keep asking detailed micro questions. They do this because they are risk averse and they want to make sure there will no issues with your solution. That is fine but we can't stay there for the whole sale's call. You have to move them out of the minutiae, up the ladder to the next sunny uplands of benefits, application of the benefits, evidence that this works and a trial close. This is a structure and the Japanese pitchperson doesn't have any structure. We need to reeducate buyers on selling here. We have to guide them along a different path to what they are used to. It isn't easy but if you want to make sales in Japan this is the requirement.

Buyer Personality Styles In Business In Japan We usually think in terms of cultural differences with the West when we are dealing with Japan. In fact, personality style differences of the buyer are much more important. Cultural factors form a base and on top of that are the idiosyncratic differences between Japanese buyers and ourselves. This becomes very key in communication terms. We won't be changing our personality style or that of the buyer any time soon, but we can vary our communication style. For example, imagine a horizontal axis. On the far left are people we would understand are low in assertion terms. They do not state their opinion openly, they keep a low profile and they are spending much of their time watching others doing, rather than doing themselves. The right side of the axis are people who are highly assertive. They state their opinion and seem to have an opinion on everything. They can be pushy, loud and aggressive. When we meet someone for the first time we can pretty much pick where they fall on this horizontal axis. Now picture a vertical axis cutting through the horizontal axis. The top of the axis are individuals with a strong people focus. They are very much interested in helping other, they are concerned with how people feel. They often refer to the importance of people issues. At the other end, the bottom of that axis are people who are outcome, result, KPI focused. They don't care that much about the people as they care more for the results. They are totally focused on the numbers and getting the numbers is all that counts. If the buyer is in the high end of assertion and outcome driven we call them a Driver personality type. This style transcends their Japanese cultural traits. They are much more direct than other Japanese. They are often the founder/owner of their own business. They are "time is money" types, who don't care much about having as cup of tea with you and want to get straight down to business, because they are always time poor and super busy. When we are communicating with this type of person, we need to raise our voice loudness levels and pump up our energy levels in our body language. We can get straight to the point with them, telling what they should do and the three good reasons that makes sense. They are interested in how you can deliver results for them and little else. They don't want a relationship with you, they want outcomes. They will make a decision on the spot without consulting anyone and will then want to move on. This cuts through a lot of typical time wasting to get to a consensus so they can make a decision in Japan. The down side is they will just say no and that is it, there is no going back to revisit the decision. Their opposite number drives them nuts. The low in assertion/people orientated style are called Amiables – a sort of everyman type. As the name suggests they want to have a cup of tea and get to know you before they will be happy to get into a business relationship with you. They are people who speak quietly, display small amounts of energy or body language and who like to listen rather than do all the talking. They are slow to make a decision, because they need to make sure everyone is happy with what is going to happen. They are often the glue on the organization, going around to those who got sunburn from the Driver types in the meeting, to make sure they are okay. Drop your voice and energy when you speak with them and emphasise how people will feel really good about the decision you are asking them to take. The other assertive personality style is the Expressive who is similar to the driver, but has a greater people orientation. They tell jokes, smile a lot, have a lot of energy, like to party. They are often salespeople, trainers, actors. They like being around people and they love the macro, big picture. They grab the marker pen and are brainstorming on the whiteboard in a flash. They are thinking about the future, the vision, the great things that are to come. Increase your energy when with them and expect to be invited to parties, dinners and events. They hate worrying about petty detail and just about all detail qualifies as petty for them. The typical salesperson hates filling out the CRM after the sale's call, even though the marketing department is tonguing for the detail and data. Talk big picture with them and spare them the data and evidence – they don't have much interest. Their opposite number is the Analytical. They are fine with three decimal places when dealing with numbers. They love detail, clarity, precision, evidence, testimonials, data, statistics, numbers, proof etc. They are often accountants, engineers, scientists, lawyers. Come armed with detail for them. They cannot get enough of it so don't ever worry you will be maxing them out with data. They don't like unsupported statements by salespeople and all they believe is what they can see which can be proven. They are not interested in all that fluffy vi

Asking Buyers Questions When Doing Business In Japan In the West, we have all been trained in consultative selling for many decades. The buyers are used to salespeople turning up and asking a lot of questions to find out if there is some way they can help the buyer, through providing their solution to solve buyer problems. The act of asking questions is never even thought about, because that is how it is done. In Japan, they don't really have professional salespeople, because here they have pitchpeople instead. They ask no questions, just turn up and give their pitch. They roll out the flyers or the brochures and go straight into the nitty gritty of the detail and the spec. They want to throw enough mud at the wall to see if any of it sticks. This is what the buyers have been trained to expect as well – no questions, just a pitchfest. If you are coming out of the Western sales environment, you are going to be using consultative sales techniques and start asking the buyer a number of questions. This is a problem. In the West, we say the buyer is King. In Japan, the buyer is not King, but God. By the way, God doesn't brook any questions from impertinent salespeople. They are insulted to be asked questions. God is used to getting the sales pitch and then destroying it, to make sure the risk factor has been fully minimized. You can ask questions of the buyer in Japan, but you can't just blunder your way in there and start blasting forth from the get go with probing questions. Fully boned up on American style sales methods, I remember applying these questioning techniques in Japan, in my early sales career here. I was met with stone cold, motherless silence by the buyers. In short order they were changing the subject and calling for my pitch. To ask questions in Japan, you need to set it up first. Here is how you do that. You begin with a bit of chit chat to break the ice at the start of the meeting. Next you describe what it is that you do. Then give an example of a similar company's case where you have helped them improve their results. Suggest that "maybe", you could do the same for them. Then say, in order for you to know if that is a possibility or not, could you ask a few questions? For example, "Dale Carnegie Training is a global specialist soft skills training company. We help people to develop in their careers and develop businesses to get the outcomes they are after. An example of this would be XYZ company, where we trained all of their Hotel staff and they found the client feedback really got a lift and repeat bookings definitely improved. Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure, but in order for me to know if this is possible or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?". There is your request for permission to ask questions, as opposed to going straight into the questioning format. You will notice we say "maybe" rather than we can "definitely" do that for you. In the West, we might say "we can definitely do this for you" as a statement. We say "maybe" in Japan and we do this to make it soft and less aggressive. We only ask for permission to ask a few questions. If there is no match, well there won't be many questions, but if it is a match and there is interest, there may be many questions – we won't know that until we ask the first few questions of the buyer. We ask well designed questions of the buyer and are simultaneously mentally running through our library of solutions, to see if we can help them. If we can't, we shouldn't be wasting everyone's time. We should be off finding a buyer we can actually help. When it comes to the solution provision part, we know what they are after, so we can link our product or service to the solution provision they need. In Japan, it doesn't work like that. The pitchperson here turns up and skips straight past the questioning stage, plunging headlong into the detail of the solution. They do this, not even knowing if it is the appropriate solution for the needs of the buyer or not. The buyer has been trained by these pitchpeople and are simply not able to encompass the concept of questions for God. You turn up with your professional Western sales approach and start asking questions. Normally, what you will get then from the buyer is total silence. They just don't respond and it feels very awkward. This is because they can't accept God getting questioned by a nobody. As I mentioned, they will just change the subject and be asking for your pitch. Trust me, you don't want to go there. You have to set it up and get permission to ask questions. If you do that you will be successful in Japan. If you want to be pitchperson instead, let me know how that is working out for you. I don't think it will go too well. Much better to be a professional salesperson and ask well designed questions to uncover where you can be of service to the buyer. Remember, with questioning buyers in Japan, always get their permission first.

Respect In Business In Japan Respect in Japan may be more similar to concepts in European countries rather than new world countries like the USA, Canada or Australia. Age and stage probably carry more weight in older civilisations than in these bold new upstarts. In Japan, a low ranking minion in a big company can have more status than the President of a small company. The President will show a lot more respect than what we would associate with the status of the person working for the bigger player. The individual has position power, purely on the basis of the company name. This is especially the case when the smaller company is a supplier. The small company President will be very differential to everyone in the buyer team, no matter their rank. Inside large companies there are many aspects of the power relationship that spill outside of the corporate headquarters. Staff are living in subsidized company housing and there is a complete hierarchy amongst the wives based on their husband's rank. Often the section head's wife will be the Queen Bee bossing the other wives around. I guess this is probably a bit like the military in many countries, where families live on base. Rank and power are institutionalised in Japan and we should understand that, when we are doing business here. Position power in Japan is often disconnected from actual personal capability. The higher ranked person may in fact not be particularly competent, but they are shown respect anyway. In a country where you are promoted on the basis of age and stage rather than performance, this is bound to happen. In societies which have a performance basis for moving up through the ranks, then age counts for little in terms of respect. Actually, in youth culture societies like my own Australia, age is seen as a minus. Only the young know anything and the elderly are not given much respect or credence. Japan is the exact opposite. In Japan the position is respected. Even if you are not shooting the lights out in performance terms, people will still show respect because of the position you hold. In our cultures, the respect is shown for personal ability rather than age or stage. The Japanese language also has a form of polite honorific language which is carefully calibrated to handle all of these different levels of status. You get that wrong and there will be trouble. When I was studying here in Japan the first time in 1979, I was talking with an older lady who was a Professor at my university. I wasn't using the correct keigoor polite language to respect her status above mine. Actually at that time, I was happy to be able to string a sentence together in Japanese. How did I know I wasn't using the correct keigo? The way she replied to me, while absolutely correct, was dripping with ice and her body language joined in, to school me on my impertinence. I knew I had said something the wrong way, even if I wasn't quite sure just what that was. In business, Japanese buyers don't expect you to have any Japanese, so if you try and you are not using the correct honorifics, they won't be mortally offended like my good Professor. The truncation of ability and status in Japan means you have to keep your wits about you. If you are in a meeting and there are some younger bright sparks there and they are really engaging with you, don't ignore the older people sitting there saying very little. They will be senior, respected and will be consulted. You can't ignore them thinking you have the ear of the decision makers. Especially be careful of giving the fluent English speakers too much credence. They are seen as language technicians by the hierarchy and often have no decision making power at all. If you are going to a meeting with the client, be respectful toward the receptionist. In the hierarchy between your two companies, she may rank above you. The young woman, and in Japan it is usually a young woman, who brings in the coffee or tea to the meeting room is another one you should show respect to. Do not imagine that you are some big shot from overseas, who is pretty important and you can ignore the underlings like you do at home. In Japan, and actually everywhere, show respect for people doing their job, regardless of their rank and what you perceive as their status power. You will do better here if you do, because it is noticed. Longevity is respected in Japan, so someone who has spent their whole life devoted to the company is shown respect regardless of how capable they may be. By contrast in our cases, we are zigging and zagging our way up the ladder, trying to get to the big job. In the West, if you spend longer than five years with a company, the question is raised - what is wrong with you? People wonder if you are a dud. If you had any ability you would have moved to a higher position in another company by now. Not the case in Japan. If you mention you have been with the same company for many, many years that will be seen in Japan as a good thing, as a pos

Formality In Doing Business In Japan Formality in Japan is linked very closely to what is perceived as being polite. European countries may feel more familiar with Japanese style formality, but for countries like the US, Australia, Canada etc., this level of formality is not the usual. There is a sense of formality here in Japan that is unexpected and sometimes hard to fathom for most foreigners. The most formal meeting I have ever attended in Japan was when I met the current Emperor in his palace. When every new Ambassador arrives in Japan, they go to the palace to present their credentials. This was the case with Australian Ambassador John McCarthy, while I was Country Head for Austrade at the Embassy. The Ambassadors don't go to the palace on their own. They have their entourage of senior officials from the Embassy with them and I was in that group. There is a special waiting room for you at Tokyo Station and then you are taken by horse drawn carriage with a mounted escort to the palace. A senior Japanese Cabinet member attends you, in our case, the Minister of State for Financial Services Heizo Takenaka. There are numerous points of protocol when greeting the Emperor – how you walk, stand, move, speak, sit etc. Formal beyond words is how I would describe the atmosphere. The second most formal meeting I have been to in Japan was with some fishmongers in Osaka. I was introducing Australian Ambassador Dr. Ashton Calvert to various importers dealing with Australia. This seafood business was a large one and a big customer of Australian produce. They had the entire echelon of senior management turn out for the meeting with the Ambassador, it was a very stiff affair, a complete ceremony in itself. The formality was quite breathtaking. I never expected that fishmongers could be that formal, but it was a very serious affair, because of the "above God" status of the visiting Ambassador. There are levels of politeness here with the accompanying formality. Even simple things like how you sit. I had an embarrassing experience when I was attending a senior Australian government official making the rounds of calls in Osaka. The Governor of Osaka was unavailable that day for the meeting, so we met the Vice-Governor. Picture this scene. The Vice Governor is sitting ramrod straight in his chair, with a 10 centimeter gap between his spine and the back of the chair. Roman patrician style – very formal and upright. My Aussie VIP visitor by contrast, was sitting there with his legs kicked out in front of him, lounging back in his chair, like he was on his couch at home watching the footy. The contrast in informality and formality was stunning. The formality-politeness construct comes straight into play here. Is lounging around in a formal meeting polite in a Japanese context? Was my VIP showing any respect for the Vice-Governor? I don't think so. After the meeting, I tried to breach the subject of required formality in Japan with my visitor in a subtle way, but I failed. The cognition gap was too big to straddle. When we are in business, always think that Japan is more formal. When you go into the meeting room, there are these massive big chairs with solid wooden arm rests. These are big units and must weight about 50 kilos. They are also set at quite long distances across the room, so you are quite separated from the other side. It is very, very hard to build up any rapport when you are sitting that far apart in such a formal atmosphere. If you are a training business like we are, you want to show things to the buyer. Well you just can't do it at that distance, so you have to get up and go sit closer. Of course you have to apologise for breaking protocol to do that, but otherwise you have no chance of introducing your solution with any impact. Now a Japanese visitor is unlikely to ever attempt to alter the seating arrangement, which is why being a foreigner is an advantage sometimes in business in Japan. We can break through the formality, but you have to know when it is appropriate and when it is not. We are dealing with Presidents of companies or very senior people and it is great chance to go straight to the top and get them interested in what we can do for them. In the typical Japanese setting among Japanese, they are going to find that hard to do, because of all the formality attached to the meeting. We are in this room as a sign of respect. They have lots of other meeting rooms which are a lot less formal and where you can do business across the table more easily. The formality of the meeting room reflects the degree of politeness being shown to the visitor. Because of your rank you go into the big, formal, impersonal, almost impossible to do any business meeting room But it is a strong sign of polite respect and we should be extremely appreciative of that indicator. So what happens when we flip it around and you are receiving visitors – what degree of respect are you showing them? Do you walk them out to the elevator

Nemawashi Or Groundwork In Business In Japan Nemawashi is a very important word in Japanese. It is made up of two words "ne" which means root and "mawashi" which means to wrap around. Or wrapping up the root. A good translation however is "groundwork", usually associated with a decision or a meeting. In Japan they can move 15-20 meters trees from one location to another. They dig down, cut the tap root, bind up the root ball, get a big crane, put the whole tree on a truck and transplant it to another place. Quite amazing. That nemawashi represents preparation before the tree gets moved. In business the same things apply. We want a certain decision to be taken so we prepare to influence the direction that decision will take. We might be dealing with a client or within our company. Japan doesn't leave anything to chance. Prior to the meeting, you meet with the other people who are going to attend the meeting and you try to get their agreement with what you propose. In this way, the decision is taken before anyone gets in the room. The meeting itself is just there to formally approve what has been decided beforehand. In a Western context, we would make the decision in the room. Everyone would turn up expecting that there will a discussion, some debate and final decision will be reached during that meeting. In the Japanese case, they will already have made the decision, so if you want to influence the decision you have to start early. It is no good leaving it until the meeting itself, because that will be too late and the decision will have already been taken. If it is a client company, you need to work with your internal champion to get the decision makers to agree with what you want to happen. Usually the decision you want is that the client uses your product or service. As an outsider you won't be in the meeting, but you have to help your champion to be persuasive with everyone when doing the groundwork or nemawashi. Give them the data, the evidence, the testimonials, whatever it takes to make the case solid when presenting it to the people who will be in the meeting. Don't leave it too late, because it takes time to get around everyone and have those discussions before the meeting is held. Are the other people in the meeting who want a different decision or outcome doing their own nemawashi? Yes, absolutely they are. This is why you have to prepare your champion to be effective making the argument in your favour. They can get the meetings, but they need your help to be persuasive. The quality of the preparation has a big impact on the final result of course. You need to get them to nominate who is in the meeting and get an idea of what will encourage them to be in agreement with the decision you want. Your champion should have a game plan for each person and that should be put together with your help. If you understand nemawashi represents the idea of preparation, then be well prepared. As pointed out, don't leave this process to the last moment. You need to give yourself time to allow the nemawashi system to work in your favour. You also need to anticipate the arguments of the other side and head those arguments off at the pass. You are working through your champion, so the preparation becomes even more important in these cases. Does it mean you will always prevail. No, you will win some and lose some, but you will place yourself in the best possible situation to get a win. If you had no idea about nemawashi you can probably begin to understand why the decision you wanted went against you. From now on though become part of the Japanese decision-making process and exert influence from within. 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 dalecarnegie.comand 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 moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan. A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts "THE Leadership Japan Series", "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four crit

Networking When Doing Business In Japan There are two varieties of networks here for me - the Japanese speaking and the English speaking. With regards to the Japanese speaking groups, there are a few things which are a bit different. Japanese people are raised not to talk to strangers and guess what, they carry this idea over to networking events as well. In a typical Japanese event, it goes like this: if I know you and I meet someone else I know, I will introduce you to each other. I won't walk up to a complete stranger and start introducing myself. This is how it is done here, but it is pretty limited in terms of how many people you can get to meet. In our case, with my team, we bowl straight up to strangers at networking events and introduce ourselves. If you are going to create a contact point with someone new, you have to make it happen. You have to be polite and reasonable, but you also have to break through the barriers. As a foreigner, the social rules are not as strict for me, as compared to my Japanese team members. Often I am the battering ram, to walk up to groups standing around in a semi-closed circle and break in. I then introduce my staff member to everyone and away we go. I just keep repeating this all evening and we get to meet a lot of new people and some potential clients. At English speaking events there are two varieties again, those who are Japanese and those who are foreigners. The Japanese always get there early and they will go straight to the tables and sit down, uninterested or unable to meet anyone. I don't let that little detail stop me. I walk straight up to them and introduce myself, "May, I meet you? My name is Greg Story" as I extend my business card to them. They are usually a bit taken aback, because they thought they were safe from having to meet anyone new or speak in English, but after starting the conversation they warm up. If you go to networking in pairs or groups, my rule is don't sit on the same table. How are you going to meet anyone if you sit together. This happened the other day. I was at a networking event and two representatives from a foreign embassy, who are involved in furthering commercial relations with Japan, were all poised to sit down together. I was in that business for twelve years for Australia, so I suggested that was plan was not possibly the best use of their opportunity and that they should "work the room". I don't think they quite managed that bit, but they at least sat separately and met many more people My Dale Carnegie Training Japan rule is we divide the room up. I will take this half, you take the other half and we will get back together at the end and exchange notes on who we met at the event. This sounds simplistic, but so many times I meet people sitting together who are from the same company. Why would you do that? I also start with the people sitting down at other tables and leave my own table until last. I walk around meeting everyone at the other tables and then finally at my own table, because I will have a chance to engage with them over lunch. The organisers sometimes provide a list of who has signed up to attend the event and this is very handy. If they haven't done that, it is always a good practice to get there early and check the name badges. This allows you to put a face to the name of those people you have already met and to identify some people you may want to meet. It is also a good practice to ask the organisers to introduce you to people you want to get to know or at least point out who is who, so that you can go and introduce yourself. I position myself right near the door, so I can meet people as they come in. I recommend you always have a couple of key questions which will help you to know if this is a potential client. If they are not a potential client, then move on because time is tight and time is money. I see some people getting trapped and they manage to spend all the time speaking with just the one person. I do this parting very politely and say, "thank you, I am going to meet a few more people today" and move on. I am there to find clients and this is not a social activity for me whose main purpose is to chat with new people over lunch. I do that too, but that is not why I am there. I want to build my contact base and find buyers. That is the point of networking. To know and to be known. In our ancient Western fairytales, the wicked witch turned the beautiful princess into a frog and she can only be released from the spell, if the frog is kissed by the handsome prince. That is all the potential client networking guidance you will ever need right there. You have to kiss a lot of frogs, before you find the beautiful princess. You don't know which of these people at the networking event is going to be the next client for you, so start kissing as many frogs as possible, from start to finish, if you want to build your business in Japan.

Gaining Buyer Trust When Doing Business In Japan Trust is a big issue in Japan. The people we deal with in companies are salaried employees, who have probably been with that same company their whole career. There is an escalator system here that carries you upward over the many years of your career. "Steady as she goes" is the mantra. They are primarily interested in gradually moving up inside the firm by making no mistakes. The best way of not making a mistake is to do nothing new or risky. Their aversion to risk precludes trying anything that might have a negative impact, even at the expense of denying the company significant business opportunities. There is little reward inside companies in Japan for risk taking and a big downside if things go wrong. Everyone knows this, so everyone operates the same way – very cautiously. So when we approach a Japanese company, we have to think about how we can take away the risk for the individual we are dealing with. It might be testimonials from happy customers, statistical evidence, money back guarantees, warranties, escape clauses, etc. This timid buyer attitude toward doing new things is summed up by the saying that Japanese buyers "prefer the devil they know to the angel they don't know". By definition you are the angel they don't know, because you are offering a new product or service or an alternative to what they are using now. And you are foreign. In the distribution system in Japan, there is a very complex food chain to work through. There are many layers and if you don't deliver, as you said you would, when you said you would, you endanger the whole interlocking food chain. Space is at a premium here, so there are not the massive warehouses full of inventory being held, as maybe we see in other more spacious countries. Everyone is trying to get by with as little inventory on hand as possible, but with the backing of a stock supply system that is totally reliable and highly efficient. No Japanese company want to see their distribution system set on fire by a new player, they don't know well. The people they are dealing with now, whom you wish to supplant, have shown they can supply when needed and all present and correct each time. Therefore buyers are very conservative about introducing a new, untested supplier. You imagine you have a strong price point advantage, which will tip the scales in your favour and help you to muscle your way into the market. Not always true, because price is only one point of comparison being made by buyers, when weighting alternatives. For example, when you are competing in the marketplace with the big Japanese trading companies, they take the risk away by providing very long payment terms. They will have a much higher price than what you can supply, but their offer is less risky. The company can land the product, sell it and then pay the trading company later. Your discounted price requiring immediate payment can't compete with that risk free arrangement. You are in a hurry to get the Japan business going. There is a lot of expectation back at your HQ and you are the one designated to make this happen. Sadly, deals rarely get done in one meeting in Japan, so expect multiple meetings. That may mean multiple trips to Japan if you are not based here. Bosses back home don't get that. "What do you mean you didn't do a deal while you were in Japan? You just wasted the firm's monies on that trip, with no result, except for some nice sushi meals you had while you were there swanning around on the company's dime". The bosses may not get it, but things take a lot longer here, because companies have to gain consensus internally, about making a change to their supply arrangements. They are risk averse remember and doing nothing is the safest course of action. It might take years in fact, before the buyer is comfortable to give you a try. This happens in my own training business here all the time. Companies we met four years ago, finally send one person to trial the training. It can drive you nuts, but this is how it is and if you want to play, then you have to pay. Western companies being driven by quarterly earnings and the stock price, have a hard time with Japanese long play timeframes. Gaining trust is done step by step. Ask for a small piece of their business to show your credentials. Make it as low risk as possible. They can test you and few times and then if they like what they see they can increase the volumes. That is a much better proposition than an all or nothing approach of we went for it but we didn't get the order we wanted. You may not like it or agree with it, but slow and steady does win the race in Japan. And nobody cares what you think sunshine. 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 enjo

Customer Service When Doing Business In Japan Japan is probably the leading country in the world for customer service. These are seriously picky, picky consumers here. If you are dealing with consumers then you had better have your quality act together. They will not tolerate poor quality. Their expectations are extremely high and they will complain vigorously if those standards are not being met. It is often hard to understand. I grew up in Queensland in Australia and it is famous as a production center for tropical fruit, like mangoes. I planted and grew a mango tree in my yard and it produced beautiful mangoes. What you would pay for an entire box of mangoes is what you will pay here for one Miyazaki mango. But that Miyazaki mango will be perfect, absolutely perfect. No blemishes, no marks, perfect symmetry and the taste is sublime. That coming from a proud native Queenslander is high praise, I can assure you. Now in Japan they will pay for quality and this is the difference. In the rest of the world people are more concerned with volume. In Australia, they would rather have the box at that price point, than the single perfect mango. So our concepts about what constitutes quality are fundamentally different. Remember that most Japanese rent or own their very small apartment, so they can't actually acquire lots of stuff, because there is no place to put it. So you want to have the best of what you can afford, given the space limitations. And there are few parks or sporting facilities, so they have selected two major leisure activities - eating and shopping. They are well prepared to spend money on both. They are quality conscious and demanding as a result. So the consumer quality expectation transfers across to service provision as well. Service in hotels and restaurants must be conducted at a high level. If you are in the B2B area, then there are so many layers of distribution that the relationship between the layers become very important. They don't hold a lot of stock each so the replenish part must be working well. Everything is "just in time", like the Toyota system of car production. If you delay delivery then you are disrupting the whole system and everyone will complain vigorously up the food chain until it gets to you. You don't want that. The mutual dependencies here work because everyone understands the importance of quality and timeliness. The level of quality provision is so high that the buyer expects to receive more than they are paying for. They expect to be getting advice, very fast follow-up, that you be available all the time to answer their questions, etc. So speed of reply to emails and phone calls become more important. In many countries if you send an email and you don't get answer until the next day or the one after, most people are okay with that. In Japan if they send an email to me in the morning and there is no reply, they are ringing me to find out the information. This is again that interconnectivity phenomenon. Everyone has promised something to someone else down the food chain. They have to keep reporting that everything is on track. In this regard Japanese buyers have an insatiable appetite for information and reporting. Ironically when they come to make a decision, they take an age to get there. Things drag out interminably, nothing seems to be happening, time passes, we grow old and then suddenly the decision is reached and all hell breaks loose. Now everyone wants everything yesterday and they expect you to provide that level of service. We tend to be "less is more" in the West and Japan is "more is better". They like to keep in touch to a degree we can't imagine. For example, we get gifts for Oseibo at the end of the year, gifts for Ochugen during the middle of the year. They send me X'mas cards, new year cards, start of summer cards. They do this to keep in touch and remind you that they are there to serve you. I am expected to be doing the same to my buyers as well. People will drop in unannounced without an appointment. One of my staff will come to me and say so and so is here to see you. I think to myself "did I forget an appointment", so I check my diary and there is no appointment. They are just dropping by to say high and remind me that they are here to serve me. They expect this as well from me with my buyers. This is not how we do business in the West, so it is quite a different expectation here about what it means to have a business relationship. Japan sees Western business as "dry" and they prefer "wet". This is the contrast between efficiency and empathy in business. They are higher on the importance of EQ than they are on the IQ. This is all very time demanding in a time poor world. But that is the expectation and you have to understand the point. You cannot over communicate with Japanese companies. Their tolerance for communication is very much higher than ours. If you create a problem for the buyer you better get down there with a gift and a deep bow of

Networks For Doing Business In Japan In business the ability to develop a strong network is critical. There is nothing better than getting to know buyers through these networks and establish a personal connection. Japan is the premier nation on the planet for networks. When I first came here in 1979, I was taken to a ryokan- a traditional inn with a hot spring bath. That evening we could hear this raucous party going on next door in one of the restaurants. It turned out to be the annual reunion for the graduates of their local elementary school. I was thinking I hadn't seen anyone from my elementary school in decades and had lost touch with them. Not here in Japan though, they are much better organised. The Middle Schools, the High Schools, The Universities have excellent capability for getting everyone together for reunions. Probably unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. There are also so many formal business organisations. The Keidanren, the Japan Business Federation or the Keizai Doyukai, the Association of Business Executives are big and powerful bodies. However, you won't even get a look in to joining those, unless you are a major company. The Keieisha Kyokai or the Employers Association may be a better possibility, as we have been able to join it. There is also the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce, which will be easy to join. Rotary clubs in Japan are also very business oriented in the sense that Japanese business people comprise the membership and there are lots of clubs. You can also visit other clubs, so you are not restricted to just the one group. My own club the Tokyo Rotary Club, has 330 members and is full of big hitters. There are a number of private business clubs like the Tokyo American Club and the Tokyo Club where I am a member, and the Kojun Club, the Kobe club, International House of Japan, Roppongi Hills Club, Ark Hills Club, Tokyo Lawn Tennis Club, the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club, For Empowering Women Japan (FEW), College Women's Association of Japan (CWAJ) etc., which are sometimes hard to get into, but have lots of influential members. There are also many, many friendship associations like the Japan-British Society, the Japanisch-Deutsche Gesellschaft, the Australia Society, the Tokyo Canadian Club, etc. These tend not be business oriented, but you can still meet business people socially. If you have children here in Japan and are sending them to International Schools, then the PTA is a great place to meet people. You will find that the captains of industry are sending their children to these schools and you can meet them through that avenue. I am the President of the Parent Faculty Advisory Board at my son's school and I meet many leading business people through that connection. Then there are all the various Chambers of Commerce - we are or have been, members of the American Chamber, the British Chamber, the French Chamber, the German Chamber, The Australia New Zealand Chamber (of which I am Emeritus President), the Italian Chamber, etc etc. All of these chambers are full of people you would want to meet to expand your network here in Tokyo. Every major country has a chamber and like us, you can join multiple chambers. These chambers are holding regular meetings and events, especially the American Chamber, so there is no shortage of things to attend. By way of example the American Chamber is probably holding two to three events every week, with speakers talking on different topics of interest. Actually forget the topic, if you want to meet people, then pick a popular subject regardless of your personal interest and go. You will find 150 business people in the room ready to meet you. Some of the international chambers also have regional equivalents as well and there will be local Japanese Chambers of Commerce for that region. Obviously the greatest concentration is in Tokyo, but if you are outside of Tokyo, you can still find plenty of existing networks you can join. There are also benkyokai or study groups. I belong to a CEO Insights group, an Entrepreneur group and the Foreign Corporate Communications (FCC) group. There are many, many more that I don't belong to, like the infamous Beef and Burgundy Club (The B&B), the Carbine Club, the Good Grub Club, the Chicken and Chablis Club, the Tokyo Women's Club, the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ), etc. And there are probably many others I have never heard of or have forgotten about. These are great opportunities to build your connections and networks of people across a broad spectrum of industries and sectors. They usually meet regularly have guest speakers and allow you to mix with other leaders in town. So there are lots of networks already well established and all we have to do is join them and become active. The foreign and local chambers have the largest companies active here as members and this is a great way to meet the leadership. If you can speak Japanese then there are mind boggling number of benkyokai available

Getting Paid In Business In Japan Nothing happens in commerce without a sale being made. Great to know that, but what about being paid for the sale? Now, in some countries this can be an issue. We find ourselves swimming with sharks who are transactional in their thinking and have no hesitation in ripping us off. Fortunately, Japan isn't in that category. We have rule of law here in Japan, plus a very healthy moral code. Japanese people abide by the law, they line up nicely for trains and buses, there is hardly any road rage, they consider others and they don't take other people's belongings. You are not going to get your bag or phone stolen by some expert Japanese gang who have the lift sequence down pat. You see those videos from foreign countries, where they work as team, one distracts you, one lifts the bag off your shoulder, one then receives the bag and makes off with it, one scouts for the constabulary. This isn't a fear here in Japan. If you drop your wallet, the chances are the wallet, cash and credit cards etc., are all intact at a police box because it has been handed in. I have had that experience. Or you might find it sitting on a ledge, in a prominent position so you can easily find it when you go looking, after discovering you have misplaced it. I dropped some a key holder near my house and sure enough, even a few days later it was still sitting there for me to find. Now this is not a nation of 127 million saints. Yes there are yakuza, petty criminals, housebreakers, con men and other assorted scoundrels operating here. However, it is a lot better than most other places and this spills over into the way business is conducted. We have been operating our business now for ten years and have never had a bad debt. You will get paid in Japan, unless you are particularly unlucky. The issue here isn't so much about getting paid, as it is about when you get paid. Cash flow is always of strong interest to small and medium sized companies and the timing can be crucial at different times. If sales haven't been all that great and the expenses are as high as ever, not getting the payment when you expect it, can put pressure on the cash flow. Run out of cash and you are out of business pretty promptly. Reputation for reliability in business is very important here. Lose that and people won't work with you ever again. You are toast. Counter intuitively, the worst payers in Japan are the biggest players. The giant multi-nationals have clever CFOs who have worked out they can screw the small guys and make them wait for 60 days or more before they have to pay them. This is might against right and you have to take it, if your want to do business with them. We take it. Japanese major corporates pay you in thirty days for the most part. Japanese domestic companies sometimes have tricky conditions though. If your invoice isn't received by the 12thor the 15th of the month, then it won't get paid until the end of the next month. Or they will not accept an invoice, until the goods or services have been received, so no payment in advance possibility. Or they find a minor mistake in the way you have captured the company name or the name of the person on the invoice is wrong and the accounting department won't accept the invoice. You have to re-issue it and the whole payment process timings starts from that date. Very picky at times, but all of this adds up to delays around when you get the money. So when starting a business relationship with a buyer you have to ask the key questions: do you have any protocols about advance versus subsequent payment; do you have any specifications about by which date in the month the invoice has to be lodged; how long are your payment terms? You need to know these things for your own cash flow planning. The good news is you will get paid in Japan and the bad new is you may not get paid as fast as you need it. 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 dalecarnegie.comand 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 moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan. A committed lifelong learner,

Salespeople, Money and Motivation In Japan Salespeople are motivated by money and the more money they can make the more motivated they become. Except in Japan. Here salespeople are looking for stability, regular income, without the trials and tribulations of a commission sales life. Actually, what they really want is a steady salary regardless of how much they sell. The next preference is for a regular salary and some bonuses if they do well. The less palatable constructs involve commission sales. Total 100% commission remunerated salespeople are very rare in Japan and usually doing something nefarious. When sales are not going well, the management thinking is to increase the incentives to get people motivated. Obviously, if we make it more attractive to produce then people will get behind this direction and support the effort to grow market share. Nothing happens and the leaders are perplexed. When you dig down to the root cause, you often find that the base salaries are too high. The at risk part is not significant and so people stay in their lane. By law you can't suddenly force people to take a massive salary drop and be switched over to a high commission structure. This limits the levers to pull, to get greater production. In the current competitive climate, there is increasing pressure to raise base salaries in order to recruit new salespeople. Putting increased pressure on salespeople to sell, sees them heading for the door and being welcomed in by their new employer, because having a salesperson on staff is better than not having one. When hiring salespeople is hard to pull off, it becomes a retention game. Money, money, money sounds good but it doesn't motivate in Japan as much as elsewhere. This is why most incentive schemes don't work well. The base salaries are usually too high, so everyone is in cruise mode. You notice it when you up the ante on the commissions, thinking that this will stir up some action. What happens instead is they slacken off, because now they are earning what they want, without getting out of first gear. The pressure on recruiting new salespeople means we are all going to be forced to pay our salespeople more just to keep them, so money isn't going to trigger a massive effort in the sales team. There are other ways we have to think of to get people more focused on results. One of those ways is to get more self-awareness going. We see very few salespeople with a written down vision statement. This is a handy document to have because it captures a future success state. We write it in the present not future tense. "I am…" not "I will be…." It will include revenue targets but will also have other aspirations. We don't care what they are as long as they are motivational for the salesperson. Getting people to step up starts with getting them to think differently about what they are doing everyday and how they do it. Once we set the vision, then we can help the salespeople to back fill with how they can realise that vision, that they have nominated is important to them. We help them setting goals and establishing milestones. In Japan this would probably be a first for 99.99% of salespeople. They will have had quotas, sale's targets etc., but a vision for themselves and their families is an entirely different beast. It is an important process though if we want to generate internal self directed motivation. Pushing people to realize the company's goals doesn't have quite the appeal of realising your own tightly held goals. Usually companies only think about the firm's goals and don't do anything to integrate the salesperson's goals with the company goals. This is where taking time away from selling, to go through a visions statement crafting exercise is so important. The key is to put it into a future frame, as if it were already achieved. Secondly, it is important to revisit the vision after a few weeks, because people's thinking about what they want starts to become clearer. It would be a rare individual, who never having set a vision, completely nails it perfectly for themselves in their first iteration. So we get one away and then we get them to come back and revise it. The second revision is powerful, because it will be more specific than the first one, because they have had time to think about it further in the intervening period. So money is important. However, it is not the only lever that can work in Japan, to improve the motivation and commitment of the team to hit the sales targets. We need to be looking for multiple touch points to gain the engagement of the team. Their own vision statement is one of those key touch points.

Educate Yourself In Sales There are almost no sales courses at Universities. Maybe, in the USA somewhere, a University is offering something on selling, but it would be a rare bird amongst the academic ivory towers. By the way, who would be teaching this course and what do they know about the real world of sales? We can graduate with a bachelor degree, a masters degree or a Ph.D. in a wide range of business related subjects and never do one course on how to sell. Why is that? Selling is a process enveloped in a philosophy. You can teach that. We know, because as a training company, we do just that. Okay, so you didn't get any courses at varsity on selling. What about inside your company? Nothing happening there either? Are you in a Darwinian survival of the fittest environment, where it is up or out? The company won't invest in you and you won't invest in you either? The key path for being excellent in the professions is study. Doctors, engineers, architects, dentists etc., all have to keep brushing up their knowledge, even though they spent many long hard years at university to become qualified. "Nothing happens in business until a sale is made" underlines the importance of the profession of selling in society. Just like there are charlatans in any profession, there are fakers in selling as well. They won't be around long, so let's concentrate on the honest salespeople who are just not as skilled as they need to be There is no excuse for we salespeople not to be on top of our game. The first thing to do is to take responsibility for ourselves. The onus for professional development is placed squarely with us and we are not beholden to some outside force, like the company we happen to work for. Today we have access to the greatest collection of readily available knowledge on sales in the history of the planet. Tremendous books, magazine articles, blogs, videos, podcasts - the list goes on and on. Yet so few access this cornucopia of wisdom and experience. Up until 1939, if you were in sales, you could only get sales training from within your company. Dale Carnegie launched the first public classes for salespeople in that year and now there are thousands of providers all around the world offering help. We have no shortage of gurus touring the globe holding sales rallies to pep up the troops and get them fired up to do better. We don't lack for information. The problem is you need to have the smarts and the desire to want to access the information and then more importantly, to want to apply it and adapt it to your own situation. We can read the books and watch the videos etc., but we need practice to make it part of us. We have colleagues in the sales team we can be practicing with, doing role plays in the morning before seeing clients. Yet so many don't take the chance to do that. Knowing a questioning structure is great, but mastering the semantics and cadence of how to ask those questions are quite another thing. Every major sports star warms up before the match. Ikebana masters strip the flower stems themselves to get their mind into the right frame. Shodo masters grind their own ink for the same reason, rather than delegating the task to their underlings. The karate master meditates before starting training. This is part of their mental preparation. Salespeople also need good mental preparation, but they are not taking advantage of all that is available to them. If we want to be great then we need to polish our craft. We also need to be searching through newspapers, magazines, web sites, social media for relevant information that a client would value and we should be offering this as part of our service as a partner in seeing the buyer's business succeed. What surprises me are salespeople who are failing to meet their targets who won't come to the office early to study sales together with their colleagues. They turn up at work at the appointed time as usual and then flounder through the day, making no or few sales. They repeat this process year after year, always hoping to land a whale, that they hope will solve all of their sales quota issues. Whale obsession has been a sickness amongst some salespeople, who haven't worked it out yet that skill acquisition and luck are polar opposites. One you can control and the other you can't. They prefer the one they cannot control and then whine about the lack of results. When your whale is not landed you are left with nothing. Building skills builds the lead pipeline, which in turn leads to better conversations with buyers. The solutions presented are better, the client hesitations are handled more smoothly and the order is always asked for. None of this is rocket science but it is difficult and it needs practice to make it work. We need to commit to make the time to study, to do the role plays, to keep pushing ourselves to become better at serving our clients. That is what it means to be a professional in sales. The path to professionalism starts from within. When

Where You Sit Determines How You Buy In Japan Every role in a company has its own priorities, perspectives and functions. When we are selling to individuals inside the company we need to make sure we really understand who we are talking to. When we are out networking at events, we meet a broad sway of people from different industries, companies and functions within the companies. Fortunately with the business card system here in Japan, we can quickly tell what section and role the person we have just met is playing. I find that it is always a good practice to check the kanji on the Japanese language side of the business card. Sometimes the English translation is a bit misleading. Knowing the role helps us to gear our sales talk toward focusing on the key interests they have. Presuming we have been able to flag their interest in whatever we are doing, we are able to get an appointment to meet with them This is where we really have to be on the ball and fully understanding where they are coming from. If they are the CEO, then usually they are focused on the strategy for the enterprise. How to get the whole thing to move from A to B. They have a number of drivers influencing them. They are tuned into the overall direction of the enterprise. They know what are the current key themes being stressed inside the company. They are very aware of the quality of the people working for them. Equally they are also very aware of the gaps and inadequacies. They have a need to leave a legacy for themselves. To create a "dint in the universe" as Steve Jobs said. They want to use this opportunity to take themselves to the next level. They want to make sure their vision is realised and that everyone is getting behind the effort to make it happen. So with the CEO we had better have already read the company's annual reports to know what the company is planning. If they are not a listed company, we need to see if there is any media reporting on their plans. We don't want to waste a CEO's valuable time with dumb questions like, "what does your company do?". We need to be asking questions which show we have done our homework and that we are here to help the CEO make their goals a reality. Does the CEO want to partner with a company when the rep hasn't bothered to do any research prior to the meeting and obviously takes the company so lightly. Is this the type of person a CEO is going to want to entrust part of the realisation of the vision to? No, never! The CFO on the other hand is interested in the impact of the payment on this month's cash flow. The CFO's job is to keep the business safe, efficient and effective. They want to make sure the investments are paying off to warrant the expenses. They will want to know what are the payment terms and timing? Can this item be moved into the balance sheet as an asset? How can we push the price down further? They like numbers to three decimal places, love data, proof, testimonials, evidence, etc. If the money spent can bring in more money through business expansion or through cost reduction, then they are all ears. We had better be talking in terms of the returns the buyer will get though partnering with us. The technical buyer is concerned that the specifications will be met. They want to know the standards, the detail, the measurements etc. They are well trained in their field and need to justify the spend against the return. That is usually measured in greater efficiencies and cost savings. The existing system may not be fully maximized and if there is a way to squeeze more out of the existing system, then they want to hear about it. If there is a new and better system, then they prefer to hear about that. They love new things, complicated things, expensive things. They need to be well armed by us to fire the arrows internally to get the CFO and the CEO to go along with investing more in the business. The User buyer is worried about ease of use, functionality, who to call if things go wrong. This buyer is rarely the final decision maker, but they can have a big influence on upper management. They need arrows to fire to convince others in the company they need this so that they can be more effective. We need to be trying to set some measurements or milestones which will show the investment is worth it. This is where evidence from other similar users is so powerful. The money people inside the company want proof and that usually involves numbers. Come armed with the data and proof, to help them get internal support for the purchase. When we understand that the buyer's role has a strong bearing on their areas of interest we can better hone our questioning skills and our ability to present our solution in the best possible light.

Selling To Buying Teams In Japan it is rare to be selling to one person. Even if we only meet one person, there will be others who have to be consulted and have an influence over the buying decision. It is often the case that we meet teams of buyers in the meeting. We may have our champion helping us to become a provider for the client company, but there may also be blockers who attend the meeting to make sure nothing happens. When the numbers increase, the complexity of getting a positive decision goes up. When we are dealing singly with our champion, we have to arm them sufficiently to run through the blockades within the firm. They need to be given the right arguments to deal with the naysaysers inside the company. There will be different executives involved, with different agendas and we have to give our champion the bullets to fire off, when they hit resistance. During the meeting we are facing a mixture of viewpoints on the buying decision. We need to run the ruler over this group and decide who we are dealing with and what are their buying perspectives. Generally there are four different types of buyers apart from our champion. The Executive Buyer will be the CEO. They tend to take a long term viewpoint and are driven by strategic value and growth opportunities over time. The Financial Buyer is usually the CFO and they have shorter time frame in mind than the CEO. They are driven by costs because they are looking at the cash flow situation of the company and the debt burden. They are interested in payment terms – usually long ones – and flexibility around the conditions associated with the purchase. The Technical Buyer can be the functional specialist, the accountant, scientist, engineer, doctor, HR specialist, etc. They tend to be driven by efficiency, practicality, capacity. The User Buyer has direct application of the purchase and are concerned with the features, the ease of use, the reliability, the warranties etc. Giving a one size fits all presentation to a buying team made up of people with different perspectives is going to be insufficient to the task. The presentation needs to be structured so that the tasty bits are presented to each perspective, in a way that they can identity with it. We should prepare on the basis that all four buyer types will be in the room and then vary our presentation according to who actually turns up. There is no guarantee that concentrating on the President is going to bed down the deal. Often the President will have delegated the final decision to the person who has the biggest stake in the decision. They may be trying to empower their staff and won't overrule them, even if they personally hold a different view. Japan is also a classic for ignoring any women in the room because they are not perceived as having any say in the final decision. This is old style thinking. I was at networking function and met a very attractive, smart young businesswoman who had a big title on her business card. I guessed correctly that she was a family member of the majority owners of that company. I didn't go and see her, but sent one of my very capable female consultants to do the follow up meeting. Don't assume that because they are women, you can concentrate on the men and still do business with that company. Those days are over. Also don't just address your remarks to the English speakers in the group. They are rarely the decision-makers. When you talk make eye contact with everyone in the group and include them in what you are saying. It doesn't matter if they understand the English or not, but they will understand you recognise their importance in the group. You may have experienced the reverse situation. The buyer only talks to your Japanese staff member and ignores you even though you are the boss. This can happen even when you speak Japanese. It is very annoying. So don't do the same with your buyer group, involve everyone in your remarks. Just to make the whole picture more challenging, there is another layer of complexity we need to add to the meeting. Each of the people present on the buying side, will have a particular personality style which will impact on how they like to communicate. Those who are Drivers are very task and outcome driven and are strict time-is-money types who will make a quick decision and want to move on to the next project. Get straight to the point with them and be direct, they won't be offended. Their opposite style are the Amiables who like to get to know who they are dealing with, so that the right element of trust is established. They are not in a hurry and don't like pushy salespeople. Be subtle and soft in tone and body language. Analytical styles are logical, data and proof driven. They love numbers to three decimal places and having all the ducks in a row, arranged nicely. They dismiss all salespeople statements which are not backed up by fact as pure fluff. Talk numbers and logic. If you want to make a statement, then wrap it up inside a

No Sale's Questions Please, We Are Japanese I was visiting the office of one of my multinational corporate clients and we were talking about the issues he was facing with his Japanese sales team. His product is given the "yes" or "no" purchase decision by the business owner. In this industry the business owners have very little time available so getting an opportunity to speak with them is gold in itself. There are also lots and lots of competitors in this business, so the buyers have no shortage of choices. The sales team are experienced salespeople and have been selling this range of products for a number of years – they are veterans. And yet they haven't come to grips with one of the most important precepts of selling – ask well designed questions of the buyer. Japan throws up all sorts of interesting challenges in the selling field. One of them is social hierarchy. This can be pedigree – coming from an elite social group, who tend to marry within their own ranks and who tend to inherit the business. It can be based on education. The name of the elite institution you went to, puts you into a very small circle of the best and the brightest in the land and everyone knows it, including you. It could be the faculty you attended within that elite higher education organization, that marks you even further apart as an expert. It could be the title on your business card, that tells everyone you are a formidable person who has risen to the top of the tree in business. It could be the size of the organization you work for, a massive machine of vast power and scale, a behemoth bristling with power and influence. The lowly Japanese salesperson calling on one of these elite buyers is fully conscious of their own inferiority and the low rung they occupy on the totem pole of influence. Unless they are properly trained they can be on the back foot from the start and never get in control of the sale's conversation. This was the problem I was discussing with my client. His salespeople are telling him they cannot ask questions of their elite buyers because of their own social inferiority and position as salespeople. Nonsense. This is a lack of sale's ability not a business barrier erected to keep the hoi polloi at bay. As in all cases in Japan, the buyer is GOD. Note: they are not king as in the West but GOD, regardless of their background. When they are part of the super elite, then they are a bigger GOD. You don't just start interrogating GOD, you get permission first. Now this would seem a relatively straightforward process, except that few sales people in Japan have any well defined process for the activity of sales. The first thing we need to do in setting up the permission to ask questions is to design our Credibility Statement. It is not complex. Tell the buyer what it is you do, but do it in a succinct way. Do not ramble and do not go into super detail – just the broad brush of what your company does. For example for my company we would say, "we are global experts in training soft skills". Four key words there – global, experts, soft skills. That is enough for the buyer to clearly understand what it is we do and to make an initial judgment of whether that is relevant or not to their business. Next we give a relevant example of where we have provided our service or product for a similar buyer and had success for them. We know that buyers doubt seller's claims as fluff, unless there is some evidence to back it up. It is not always possible to come up with a similar case. However we should try to get as close as we can, even if it is a different industry but a similar echelon of scale – for example, very boutique or gargantuan, start up or 19thgeneration, foreign or domestic. "We recently did some work for an asset management company to improve their people's pitch quality, they made it to the final round and won the billion dollar pitch". Here we are proving evidence that what we do works, that we have the skills to make a difference securing the client's desired outcomes. Finally we make a suggestion, but not a bold claim. In America a bold claim, actually a super bold claim would be de rigeur but not in Japan. We need to be subtle so we say, "Maybe, we could do the same thing for you. I am not sure, but in order for me to find that out if that were possible would you mind if I asked you a few questions?". It is showing respect for the buyer, saying that we are not presumptuous or arrogant enough to think we know what they need, without discussing it with them first. We don't say we are going to spend the next twenty minutes drilling down on your needs and finding out all the issues of your company, going deep and personal. We just say we want to ask "a few questions". Every client will think a few questions is better than an interrogation. However, because our questions are very well designed, we will have them thinking more deeply about their own business. In this case, they will not have any hesitation to continu

Totally Ineffective Sales The phone rings and a magazine wants to interview me for a series where they feature companies located in suburb of Minato-ku, in central Tokyo. I had never heard of this magazine, but am always grateful for any media exposure, so I say "Yes" to the interview. The date and time are fixed. One twist to the interview was that it would involve an interview by a Japanese actor, who I had never heard of. Fine, because what do I care, as long as the media exposure is there, I don't care how they do things. So the cameraman, the actor and the journalist all turn up and away we go. It turned out the actor didn't ask me any questions at all, but was primarily there for the photo opportunity. The journalist was actually conducting the interview. The cameraman and actor depart and I am now getting an explanation on the magazine from the journalist. Despite what was written on his business card, it soon becomes apparent that the journalist was actually the sales guy. Well we are straight into the details of the pages of the ads in the magazine and the different configurations. Ad sizes, locations, colour, black and white, pricing etc. This takes some time to go through and I am sitting there thinking to myself, "Is this guy going to ask me any questions? Is he going to explore where the gaps are in our marketing? Who is the primary audience we want to reach? What are the issues we are facing?". Now fascinatingly, these areas did come up in the interview phase, as I outlined some of the things I wanted for the firm and where I felt we were being challenged. Did he follow up on any of these leads or plumb them for more information and greater depth? No. He just ploughed straight into the features of the magazine. I asked him how long he had been in sales and he told me 18 years and had been with this one company his whole career. It was obvious he had never received any sales training in that time with his employer. Here is the immense irony. He is here in my office calling on the President of a corporate training company, that specialises in soft skills training in the areas of sales, leadership, communication and presentations. We teach sales! He had no professional sales skills. It was also obvious during the interview, that no research had been done on our business or on me. Given I thought this was a media interview, I was not perturbed by that, because they were here to ask me a bunch of questions for the article. Once I realized this was a sales call, I thought that is pretty poor preparation on the part of this sales guy. He could have done a very simple search on us, checked out our YouTube channel, looked at my LinkedIn profile, looked at my Facebook, checked me and the company out on Google search. He could have come to the meeting well armed, to engage me in the buying process. He had done nothing. Being a patient, generous soul, I went to the rack of flyers and brochures and pulled out the Japanese version of Sales Advantage, an eight week course we teach on selling. I then proceeded to explain to him about the sales cycle. Research the buyer prior to meeting, gain trust, explore client needs, tailor the solution to those needs, deal with any hesitations or concerns, ask for the order and do the follow up. No rocket science here but there are a lot of very effective structures present in the training for each part of the cycle. I particularly pointed out that he asked me no questions at all, but proceeded to try and sell me a solution, when he had no idea what I needed. That just cannot work because it is madness and yet this is the shtick of so many salespeople everywhere around the world not just in Japan. Until he knows what I want, he shouldn't even be bringing up solutions. I told him to keep his magazine and price list on the chair next to him, well out of sight of the buyer. Don't even refer to the details, until you know which details will be relevant. All that should happen first is to build the trust through gaining some rapport. This can easily be based on information uncovered in the pre-meeting research. I am a traditional Shitoryu Karate 6th Dan and that is fairly unique for a foreigner in Japan. He could have engaged me on sports, because he was pretty big guy himself and maybe a sportsman as well. If he had been a rugby player (he had that type of size), we could have talked about my Brisbane Broncos hometown rugby team. The possibilities of creating something in common are endless. He did nothing. After establishing rapport, we need to ask well designed questions to uncover the needs. Only then get involved with the solution. That magazine had many pages and many possibilities, but he should only have been directing my attention to the few areas where I have the strongest need. I don't need a tour of the magazine, we are all time poor and he should be sensitive to that. He should only show me the areas which are going to light up my strongest interest. I also sugges

Do Your Homework When Selling I take the phone call and I noted they were asking for me in particular, rather than to speak to the boss. That tells me they know who I am, but I don't recognise the company name when my assistant is transferring the call. I get a blast of words strung together down the phone line which I cannot quite catch. I ask them to tell me the name of their company once more. I still can't get it, so I request "could you please spell it for me?". This is when I realise the person calling from their investment sales company is totally mispronouncing the name of their own company. Okay, how about that for a first impression in a sales call! I explain to the caller, whose name by the way, I never caught either, that she is mispronouncing the company name in English and I model for her how to say it correctly. After we get through the mini-English language class on the phone, we move on to the point of the call. She tells me she saw my profile on LinkedIn and that I am big shot in town, hence the call. My doubts are rising further as we progress with this conversation. She then says the snapper, "You are an American aren't you". I ask her why she thinks I am American? She says she read that in my LinkedIn profile. I tell her that would be an impossible assumption if she had actually read my profile. "Why did you think I was an American from my profile?". "You went to an American university", she tells me. Now I realise I am dealing with an idiot. I challenge her about whether she really did read my profile? She assures me she did and I tell her I am not an American. In my profile it mentions that I did stints at Harvard Business School and Stanford Business School as part of Executive Courses, provided by my previous company. I also studied at Jochi University here in Tokyo, but no one thinks I am Japanese. It gets worse as the conversation unfolds. I ask her how long she has been in sales and she says a year. I ask if she has ever had any sales training and she says she has had some. I ask who trained her? She can't deal with this line of questioning and I can hear the panic starting to build. Of course this call went nowhere and it should have gone nowhere. I always take these types of sales calls though, because I want to see if the caller is any good and if there is anything I can learn. If they hopeless I try and be helpful and suggest they go get some sales training. The caller had obviously done a very poor job of researching me before the call. In this day and age there is simply no excuse for that. Her boss is also a dud, if this is how he or she trains the team. The callers company's products are high end investments, which often pay a very high commission rate to the broker – usually 5%-8% and the deals involve large sums of money. I am the President of my company and so I am a good prospect for them, who could potentially be worth a lot of money to the broker. You would think that doing good research would be an obvious requirement to land a big fish. It begs the question as to why salespeople are not spending their time better researching the client before they call or meet? We know that today buyers are checking out the sellers on-line before the meetings, to a much greater extent than ever before. It is natural because there is so much readily available information out here, only a few clicks of the mouse away. I am active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. There is a huge amount of publically available information on me and yet she blew it for no good reason. Company annual reports are brilliant because they have glossy pages of the President sitting in some cool office and talk in depth about the direction the firm is going, refer to major initiatives they are involved in and give a host of other key details from other senior executives in the firm. It can be skimmed through pretty quickly and we can grasp some of the key issues for the company. If we go to the social media accounts of the executives we are going to meet, we can gain a lot of useful information. When we are in the initial stages of the rapport building stage of the sales call, these are great entry points to start the conversation and start building the relationship. In our non-business social life we are looking for people who have similar interests to us, so that we can hang out together and have things in common to talk about. Business is not that different. Check your staff are doing the research on the clients before their sale's calls. We might assume this is happening but it may not be. The amount of time this takes is really minimal, so it is not such an impost they don't have time to do it. If you want to see how wide of the mark she was, go check out my LinkedIn Profile. Next ask your salespeople about the background of the person they are going to meet. You will know immediately if they are doing a proper job of doing their homework before the calls.

Sell The Sizzle Not the Steak I recently saw a documentary sponsored by Salesforce called The Story of Sales. There were 8 chapters in this documentary: What is sales; the evolution of sales; educating salespeople; what makes a great salesperson; making a connection; technology's impact on sales; the future of sales and sales is great. It was very comprehensive and featured a number of American gurus on the subject. In one part, they showed an old movie of a sales trainer talking about "Sell The Sizzle Not the Steak". We have all heard this mantra before, but is it true today? I was thinking about that sizzle part. Which bit is the sizzle? Who thinks it is sizzling? Is there only one sizzle? In sales, we can wax lyrical about the steak, its quantity, quality, provenance and we can get enthusiastic about the sizzle. The problem with all of this though is we are making some major assumptions. What if they don't eat meat? The whole sales construct is out the window right there. Did we ask them at the start if they were predators or herbivores? Did we find out if they eat steak? Maybe they prefer lamb or game or seafood – did we check? Or did we just launch into our fluent, dynamic, convincing, extremely well polished and attractive pitch? Now talking about the sizzle makes a lot of sense, because this is the application of the benefit of the features. The features would be the cut of the steak, the number of grams, the degree of fat marbling, whether grass fed or grain fed, the origin and safety of the beast. We could talk about the cooking pan, the barbecue grill, the mechanics of the timing of turning over the steak, the relishes we can use, the balance of flavors, the degree of salt used, etc. The benefits describe the taste, the aroma, the protein contribution, the iron content in the diet. The application of the benefits talks about no longer being hungry, enjoying the occasion with friends, the bonhomie created through matching with excellent red wines, the visual scene of the meat being heated up, the sound and scent of the sizzle. However, did we know whether they like the steak cooked in a pan in the controlled environment of the kitchen or outside on the barbecue grill? Do they like their steak turned over once so it is rather rare or do they like it well done? Do they like to add salt and pepper? What sauces do they prefer – ketchup, barbecue sauce, home made sauce, Worcestershire? Do they drink red wine, like the smell of steak cooking or the sound of the sizzle? Sell the sizzle sounds easy, but all roads lead to Rome in sales and that always leads back to the quality of our questioning skills. The documentary on Sales had everyone hammering home this point, everyone in furious agreement, yet at the same time trying to carve out their little expertise niche on the subject. Fair enough, that is how you sell books, training courses or software. Today, the internet brandishes our websites, stuffed to the gunwales with key information about us, our company, our products and services. Buyers can find out a lot about what they are seeking before, we even get to talk with them. The problem with that though is we cannot possibly anticipate all of the questions, concerns, doubts and hesitations they will have. Our websites are always going to be inadequate. In the case of most B2B sales, we need to meet the buyer. We need to dig deep into questioning them about all the assumptions we are packing. We need to be skilled at linking their answers to the solutions we provide. We need to be strategic in our thinking and good at analysis. We need to be asking questions that trigger insights they had not considered about their business. We need to be dressing up statements, as questions to check for agreement and at the same time differentiating ourselves from the hoi polloi of our competition. We need to sell to their emotions and help them justify their decision with a wall of logic. Do you think AI empowered robots can replace us and do a better job of handling that little list of goodies? Not yet! So the sizzle is a bit more complex than it looks at first blush. Asking questions sounds easy too but are they the right questions, the best questions, the most impactful questions? We do a lot of sales training here in Japan and the quality of the questioning is always a problem. Salespeople skip from one question to another, ignoring hints from the client that are worth a fortune. We have to stop doing that. We all need to take our assumptions apart and have a good look at them. What is your equivalent of "sell the sizzle" simplicity in your organization that is costing you money through lost sales? We all have it, some accepted truth, dubious ancient wisdom, powerful precedent, established policy or groupthink. We have to be more vigilant to better analyse what we should be doing and how we should be doing it instead. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your b

Business Contracts In Japan Aren't Worth The Paper They Are Written On A friend of my mine has started his own consulting business recently and does Facebook Live updates to his growing band of devotees. I was watching one broadcast the other day when he was talking about always enforce the contract. He had signed a contract with his client, the situation changed and the client wanted to change the arrangement. Naturally, we are talking about the client paying less money than originally agreed. It was within the scope of the contract that the originally agreed money should be paid, because the changes fell outside the time limit for any alteration to the signed agreement. My friend did relent and allow the buyer out of the contract, because he was told he would get looked after the next time. The person making this promise promptly left the company in short order and the replacement CEO brought in his own suppliers and my friend was out of pocket. Subsequently, his advice to his followers is always stick to what has been agreed and don't let the buyer off the hook for the money. I was thinking about whether I would agree with that advice for Japan? Western society, particularly the American business world is very litigious and so contracts become the income source of the numerous law firms there ready and able to enforce the contract in a court of law. I signed a contract to supply training services with a foreign corporation, where to my astonishment in the fine print it said I would agree to forgo the settlement of any disputes in a court of law. I thought lawyers were smart, but whoever drafted that clause was on drugs. Should we have a dispute, I wondered, how will they handle it, if we don't agree? Pistols at 20 paces? Japan is a country where domestic contracts are pretty much relative. If the buyer situation changes, then they expect the seller to recognise that and adjust the agreement accordingly. This usually means the seller getting less money or no money and having to wear it, to maintain the relationship with the buyer. Is everyone here in Japan ethical and won't take advantage of you? No. Of course some companies will use this loose arrangement to suit themselves and say "to hell with the seller's interests". Of course Japanese companies who operate internationally are used to contracts being enforced, because they have deal with foreign entities who will go to court and so they have learnt to do the same thing. If we take the big picture view, for the majority of cases, companies are ethical in Japan and they will not try and dud you for a short term gain. There is the problem of people moving around within the company every few years, as they rotate through the organisation. Your earlier flexible attitude may not be known to the new guy or gal and that creates a problem. Generally speaking though, Japanese companies are pretty good at doing handovers. Even if that vital piece of business intelligence was missed in the handover, the person you had the relationship with can usually be relied upon to reach out to their successor and put them in the picture. My fear with my friend's advice is that if you take a Western legalistic approach, rather than a more holistic approach, you will get paid for that one deal but that will be the end of the relationship. Japan is a country full of obligations. Japanese business people see business as a partnership and requests for the seller to be flexible for the buyer, are part and parcel of that world. Now there are plenty of countries where you would never dream of providing that flexibility, because they will skin you alive at the first whiff of weakness. Japan isn't one of them. The other side of Japan is you do get paid here. Yes, someone may not pay you at some stage in Japan, but it is very rare in mainstream business. Most terms of trade are thirty day payments and Japanese companies stick with that agreement. The slowest payers in Japan by the way are some of the biggest multi-national companies on the planet. These are major brands sticking it to the little guy because they can. You either take their 60 or 90 day terms or don't do business with them. I hate this approach. If you are playing a long game in business and we should all be playing the long game in Japan, then my advice is to be flexible and preserve the relationships above being strict on the terms of the agreement. You might get caught, but the chances are slight and the risk on the other side of the ledger is much higher. We talk about "buyer beware" but "seller beware" is also good advice. Judge the scope of the business potential over the long term. What we call the lifetime value of the buyer. If you see that some flexibility now will result in a continuous streams of orders, then it makes good business sense to agree to their requests. I am dealing with a huge multi-national company's Japan team. They violated the terms of the agreement over cancelling scheduled, agreed training.

Most Difficult Part Of Business? People! Cash flow, market movements, competitor pricing, buyer budgets, seasonality, etc., there are many things which making business hard. I was listening to a podcast recently and the point was made that "people are the hardest part of running a business". The point they were making wasn't related to just the labour costs or turnover. They were thinking about the impact an individual has on a firm. The degree to which they identify with the enterprise, their level of engagement is a key concern. This flows straight away to customer service, productivity and quality control. Now in a perfect world we would only be hiring the best people, the most committed, self-motivating, most highly engaged individuals. That would be good, but that isn't the reality or if it is, it isn't the reality for very long as markets move. The hairdressing industry in Japan has trouble getting staff. Barbers and hairdressers are in short supply. When customer service isn't what it should be the owners have to bite their tongues and carry on. They are not in a position where they can easily fire people. I know this because of an incident recently with where I get my hair cut in the Azabu Juban. Now I have been frequenting this same barbers for 17 years, around 4-5 times a year. My son also, up until recently, went to the same place for about 10 years, until his mother decided he needed to look more glamorous and took him off somewhere else. At the end of the cutting session, the barber used an electric razor to do the final trim around the back of the neck below the hairline. At the time it felt painful but being a stoic Aussie male, I just put up with it because it wasn't for such a long time. When I got home my wife noticed I had these bright red ridges where the razor has been working and the skin was terribly inflamed. Being a typical Japanese consumer, she photographed the wounds on her phone and went there the next day to remonstrate with the barber. He is a youngish guy and he was in total denial mode. Finally, one of the more senior barbers apologized. Was my wife satisfied with this treatment of the long term customer – no! I can guess that the owners will do nothing about this because they can afford to lose me as a client more easily than they can lose the young guy working for them. Now why didn't the young barber apologise and take full responsibility? I have been going there much longer than he has worked there, but his thinking is to avoid all accountability. He is thinking about himself and not about the business. What they should have done was apologise, immediately check that razor because there is some fault with it and make sure this doesn't happen again with another client. I doubt they have done that, because no one has contacted me after the incident. If they didn't check it, that is very unprofessional. If he did check and subsequently found out he was wrong, that the razor was faulty and then he still didn't contact me, the mistake is even further compounded. The culture and training in that team is not on the mark is it. In a small organisation like that, they probably invest very little in soft skills training and spend all their money on hard skills around the actual job of hairdressing. All organisations need to do both. Getting the client care culture right must the top priority of the leadership because if they don't get that correct, the business will fail. Easy to say but check your own situation. Is the thrust of the training on the hard skills? Has the right client service culture been created? This is Japan, so these types of incidents really stand out because generally here the level of customer care is higher than in most other societies. Even if we make a mistake, if we have a strong culture, we can recover because the staff will go the extra mile to correct the problem. What training have we given our people for when problems and mistakes arise. Often, this may have been left vague. It is a good idea to go back and review what we are doing. Is there a standardised approach that everyone knows? One of the issues in Japan is people hiding mistakes and not taking accountability because there is such a bias against making any errors. We have to create a strong culture that says a mistake is not fatal to your career, but hiding it, not fixing it or not taking responsibilty will be fatal. Will I go back to that establishment? My wife is absolutely clear that I shouldn't. I don't know. I run a small business too, so I know the difficulties are mainly concentrated in the people employed, so I empathise with the owner's dilemma. I will have to make a decision in about three months time I guess. 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 en

Handling Sale's Meltdowns Sales is a tough gig. Sometimes the whole sale's meeting turns out to be a disaster. I had one of those today. The majority of my personal sale's leads come directly through networking. We get leads off our SEO, through ad words and our general marketing activities. These all go to my sales team for follow up. We also do cold calling but as the President of the company, this is basically out for me. If I cold call someone as the President it comes across as a bit desperate and creates some doubt in the mind of the recipient of the call. They wonder why does the President have to cold call potential clients, what is wrong with this company? It just doesn't set the right frame for establishing a relationship. Networking is far better for me and trust me, I do a lot of it, to create opportunities to meet new companies. Recently I had met a representative from a foreign multi-national company, who was not actually the right person to sell to, but who I asked to introduce me to the buyer. I always do this, if I think there is some potential and sometimes they do help out and sometimes they don't. This duly happened in this case, the appointment was made with the buyer and I turn up on time. I am sitting in the meeting room waiting, when the door opens. A solid wall of vast negativity hits me as the buyer comes in to the room. Was it a bad day, is every day a bad day for them, were they unhappy that I had extracted a meeting through my contact? Who knows what the issue was, but it was definitely a big issue. I was reflecting later that it has been quite a while since I have had such a totally negative sales meeting. Of course many don't buy and many never answer your emails or return your phone calls, but that is part and parcel of selling. What do you do though when you realise from the body language and attitude that this is going to be hard or even impossible? Well you need to do your best. Unsurprisingly, the buyer insisted that I do my pitch rather than go through any discovery process around potential needs. This is always a very, very bad way to start a sales presentation. Handing over your solutions when you don't know what the problems are is a methodology designed to fail. Almost every time this happens for me there is no sale. It wasn't looking good. Today's respondent was not cooperative in the answers, as I tried to dig down and find some potential needs. You can't control that, but you still need to ask. The meeting is going badly, you know it and so you need to start thinking about extracting yourself because you realise there is no value here and no possibility of this time and effort amounting to a sale. One of the things you can do after the meeting though is get someone else in the company to be the contact point, given you found you were radioactive, as far as this buyer was concerned. In my case there was a narrow chance to do some follow up by sending some links with more information. I asked one of my Japanese salespeople to do that and took myself out of the picture. As it turned out, the response she received was "we have no interest", written in a very negative tone. You still have to try regardless though. In sales, there is no such thing as "no". It is only "no" at this moment, to this offer, while that person is there. I also suggest that we all mark our calendars and do follow-up with the company in a few years time. The buyer told me they were two years into the job, so I probably expect that in around two years time they will have been replaced by someone a lot nicer and a lot less difficult to work with. Either they move on or the company will move them on. So keep them on your mailing list for updates from your newsletter, but also check to see if they opt out. I am fully expecting this will be the case in short order. The other important thing is to keep your confidence intact. Having a really bad meeting like that can sap your belief in yourself. Sales is a rollercoaster of emotions. Elation with a sale and deep depression with a rejection. To keep ourselves intact we need to face rejection in a way that we can pick ourselves up again and go back out there and try again. In Japan, they have a saying, "shichi korobi, ya oki" or fall down seven times, get up eight. That is sales in a nutshell. In my case, I always think that buyers who don't buy from me are idiots. It sounds harsh doesn't it. But I know that what we offer is high value, has a proven track record and will get results for their organisation. I see this buyer as doing a very poor job for their company. In fact, I see them damaging their own firm. Now, this is just a mental trick I use to keep myself positive in the face of failure. Of course we should all reflect on what we could do to improve our sales presentation, but if we did our best, it was professional and they were a pain, then don't hesitate to protect yourself emotionally. Without hesitation, lay the blame at the feet of the buye

Growing Existing Account Sales You call on your client at their downtown office and you are ushered into one of those typical Japanese meeting rooms. The client joins you and together you enjoy a coffee or green tea and chat about the business. The discussion is about the last sale and the possible next sale. It is usually a discussion about more of the same solution though, rather than a broad ranging talk about all the other possibilities available to the buyer. We all know that it is much cheaper and more effective to sell to an existing client than to run around and find a new one. Knowing this and doing something about it though, are not the same thing. We make a big effort to grow our databases of people we know. The real issue is not so much who we know, as who wants to know us. Think about it. Who amongst your current clients wants to know you? Existing clients know us, trust us, like us, and will do business with us. We are the problem though because we pigeonhole our clients into existing narrow bands of business and we never realize the full potential of the relationship. We only supply a small part of the range of solutions we have on offer. We only engage with our clients to a certain not complete extent. What can we do about changing that? Obviously whatever we have been doing isn't working particularly well in terms of broadening the sales relationship. Using an Opportunity Chart we can map our existing business with our clients and we can also map potential business with non-clients. On the "y" axis of a chart we can list the solutions we provide to customers. Each separate line on the "y" axis nominates one of our solutions which we currently sell to buyers. One the "x" axis in each separate column we list up buyers or potential buyers for our range of solutions. Inside the matrix we have created, we can nominate the current state of the relationship. We use the codes A, B and C to differentiate the chance of a sale taking place. "A" indicates they are already buying from me now, "B" indicates there is a good opportunity here to make a sale and "C" indicates there is a marginal chance of making a sale. This very simple exercise quickly points out a couple of things. It shows that there are new sales opportunities because we have the solution a potential buyer needs. Often they will be in the same industry facing the same problems of our existing clients. The experience we have already gained with that particular industry gives us insight into the key issues and usually the issues are very common. The starting point of our conversation can be very much better informed and more pointed. If we are making a cold call for example, during the course of that call we might say, "We have been spending a lot of time with people in your industry and they tell us that retention of good staff is becoming more of an issue than it has been in the past. In fact, they are telling us that it is hurting their ability to grow their businesses. We have been able to help them with this issue and it really has made a big difference. If this is an issue in your company, maybe we could do something similar to help you. I am not sure if this is an issue or if we can help but what do you think? Shall we get together and explore if there are any best practices which will be of assistance to you in your company?". This Opportunity Chart is a very frustrating idea. It is very annoying to discover that you are only selling a one or two solutions to the existing buyer, when in fact you could be selling a lot more. Why don't we sell all of the range of solutions we have now? Part of the reason is we get into a groove, where we are comfortable and the buyer is comfortable and we tend to stick with what we have always been doing. Once you start to branch out, more complexity is released. More people inside the company become involved in the decision making process, there will be additional sign-offs required, additional budgets needed, etc. This same Opportunity Chart works well with "orphan clients". These are buyers, who for whatever reason, have stopped buying. We are all busy and if a client doesn't buy we tend to move on to find the next buyer. If there was a change in personnel on the buyer's side, the existing relationship may have been compromised by the new staff member. Maybe we did it to ourselves when one of our team left and the client was either not followed up, not followed up well enough or the right chemistry wasn't there between our substitute staff member and the buyer. The Opportunity Chart shows the logic of our ability to serve the client and we should try and reclaim the relationship. It may be that the trail has run cold and any existing rapport has been lost or diminished. That is too bad, but we should just treat the client as if they were a new buyer albeit one we know quite a lot about. When we are dealing with existing clients we usually have one strong contact inside their company. This is our C

Extracting The Truth From Buyers Sales as a profession requires the skills of the sleuth. There is no information, false information, incomplete information, low value information and actual stuff worth knowing to parse. The buyer has what we want and hopefully we have what they want. We need to go through a dance like phase first, as we shadow box around the subject, before we can start to go deep in search of the truth. The truth may be that we are not the solution for the buyer and a lot of valuable time gets wasted before we establish that reality. We need to be better at getting the real facts on the table faster. The selection of a buyer is where the trouble starts. Salespeople are so desperate to get a conversation with a potential buyer, they are willing to overlook all the false flag indicators. In the modern business life, your phone calls made to absent buyers wither for a return. Those emails you have sent are like a fiction that never existed. Silence screams back at you as you wonder why you can't get in contact with the prospect. This creates a tension around skimpy sales funnels and looming deadlines. Getting an appointment is felt to be better than getting nothing. Somehow that gives the salesperson the hope they can wrestle the buyer to the ground and extract a sale out of them. Any buyer qualifying process applied may result in a non-starter. The potential deal is dead before we even get going and we can't live with that thought, so better to meet and worry about the non-sale possibility later. Which is better, seeing a bevy of non-buyers or one buyer? Obviously the one qualified buyer is going to be better use of our time, than hanging around wasting everyone's day with a non fit between buyer and seller. We all have the one or two killer questions that indicate if a deeper conversation is either needed or not and we should be brave and ask. All we have is time, so the more efficiently we spend our time with well qualified buyers the better, no matter how desperate we may be feeling about needing to speak to buyers directly. Having properly qualified the buyer, what do we do about the buyer not being forthcoming with information? In a Japanese context, just wading in asking very detailed questions about all the weak points, failings, flaws and shortcomings of their firm is guaranteed to be met with stony silence. We need to set up the questioning phase. As part of our credibility statement we mentioned what we do, what we have done to help other companies and suggested we could also do something for this buyer. We do this in a halting, uncertain way: "maybe we could so the same for you?". The next sentence is vital. "In order for me to know whether that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?". Without getting that permission, we will get nothing. Even when we do receive permission, it doesn't signify that the floodgates of freely flowing information have opened up so that we can do our job. The issues we hear about may just be the tip of the tip of the iceberg. We are usually not being made privy to the whole scenario. We hear part of the story but not the whole thing. This is a pain. We are on a wild goose chase now for solutions which won't fully match the need. We don't know that of course, so we confidently push forward looking for gaps we can fill and issues we can solve. It is always a good policy to assume that what the buyer is telling us isn't everything and that we are potentially fooling ourselves if we think we have a clear picture of the problem. The temptation however is to go straight into "helpful" mode and start deriving solutions to the stated problem. Especially so when you have been struggling to get appointments with qualified buyers and are feeling a bit desperate. Better to hold our fire until we have dug deeper and have double checked what we are being told. We should ask follow up questions about what we have been informed. We should also assemble a number of issues raised and then have the buyer tell us which ones have the higher priority for them. No point trying hard to solve something which is of marginal value to the buyer. We have to accept that perhaps we need to spend more time building trust with the buyer, in order for them to feel safe and comfortable to release the type of data we need, so that we can be helpful. The idea of doing the deal on the first meeting is basically an illusion in Japan. It so rarely ever happens. There is always going to be a need for a number of meetings and we should be prepared for that and be happy about it. The more trust we can build, the more clarity we will receive about the issues the buyer is really facing. We need to be harsh with ourselves when doing buyer qualification. We need to assume the buyer doesn't trust us enough on the basis of one meeting, to share all the dirty laundry of their firm. We need to dig deep and double check our assumptions made on the basis of what we have been t

In Sales Don't Soldier On Sick We are experiencing the highest outbreak of influenza in Japan this year. The winter daytime temperatures have dropped well below zero in Tokyo which is pretty unusual. We still have a lot of snow lying around from last week, which was the largest snowfall since 2014. Everyday, staff are reporting in sick with colds, the flu, headaches etc. What happens to your sales output during these physically demanding times? Growing up in Australia we were all taught to "soldier on" when we got sick. Maybe this was a leftover mentality from Victorian England or maybe it was a product of the pioneer society, but being ill was something you pushed through. The reality though is that we are all working in a much more complex business environment today and just "soldiering on" won't cut it. Watching illnesses being passed from staff member to staff member, really reinforces the sense of the fragility of teams. The last thing we want is for the whole team to get taken down because of the overwhelming sense of loyalty and work ethic of one sick individual. Japan has its own version of soldier on and that is called gaman or perseverance. This means turning up to the office wearing a mask, but still working when you are sick. The problem of infecting others is still there, mask or otherwise. There is also the question of the damage to the health of the individual. Something which could be dealt with in a few days, now stretches into weeks, because the initial recovery period wasn't long enough. There is also the question of the quality of how well you can work when you feel miserable. It is a bit like Japanese staff working longer than necessary hours, at minimum productivity levels, to demonstrate their devotion. In both cases everyone is much better to go home. Japan has a strong sense of not letting the team down, so turning up sick is the proof of commitment to the cause. The idea that someone in a sales job could go and call on clients while sick is completely out the window. The client won't appreciate one of our team turning up to wipe out their team. This is felt to be selfish, inconsiderate and basically pretty dumb. So if you are sick that means you are restricted to working in the office. Why do that, when we have so much excellent technology allowing us to work remotely today. Better to stay nice and warm at home and work there if you feel you must. If there are some really urgent matters then handle them from home. But must you work when you are ill anyway? Well some simple things can be dealt with by email while at home. Meetings already arranged will have to be reset and the client notified. Follow-up items won't be followed up as promised because the time has slipped out and that has to be informed to the client. The sales numbers are going to take a hit. This might happen immediately or it may show up in a few months time, depending on the business you are in. What do we do about it? The idea that we can push our people through their ill health to create the quota numbers is a crazy idea. Not an idea though that doesn't occur to owners and sales leaders who have responsibility for the production of results like cash flow. We need to consider how short-term and crazy that actual thought is. In this environment, your people are everything. Their well being is everything. Transactional thinking around squeezing out the results, no matter what, is an organization destroyer. The sense of being valued by the organisation is the key driver for engagement with staff. When everything is humming along smoothly, there is no stress test of the company's actual, as opposed to stated values and the boss's real commitment to the team. Staff are taking careful note. There are more jobs out there, than salespeople in this market. When you pressure your people to keep pushing for targets, you will drive them out the door. They realise they are expendable in your eyes and they will leave. They are thinking "show me the love". Instead of expecting everyone to harden up, encourage your people to rest. One of Dale Carnegie's stress management principles is to rest before you become tired and this is a very sound idea. Staff illnesses will eventually disappear and you are left with how they felt about how they were treated by you, when they needed your support. Keep those with major flus away from contact with everyone. Give them sufficient time to recover, because these modern malaises really take it out of you. Lead from the front. Stay home yourself when you get sick and model the type of behaviour you want in your staff. Forget the revenue numbers in the short term. A highly engaged team will catch things up, as much as it is possible. The ability to keep the team together is more important than one or two month's revenue results. Be generous with your people and they will understand your true intention is to care for them. Only when you show that, will they be motivated to show they care for you

Sale's Case Studies Getting client cooperation to create sale's case studies in Japan is tough. Japanese companies are very careful about how much information they let outside of the firm. When you are thinking to yourself "we did a really great job and this would make a great case study", get ready for rejection. Not everyone in Japan says "no", but the percentage is very, very high in this country. When you think about it, this is a great opportunity gone begging. What can we do, to get around this problem? Well the "no" usually means exactly that and companies do not relent in their negativity toward the idea. Our persuasion powers always fall short because this tends to be a company-wide policy issue and the people we are dealing with can't change the policy. When you ask them why we can't turn this magnificent triumph into a case study, they say annoying stuff like "if we do it for you, we have to do it for all the other providers". Or, "the other providers will feel we are favouring you". As a foreigner you are inclined to think "oh yeah, so what?" and want to question why any of this would be a problem. Well it is a problem, it isn't going away anytime soon, so we have to be more creative. We can create two types of case studies – the verbal and the print variety. The format can vary but if we think about how time poor everyone is today, clarity and brevity are virtues in both cases. We should start with the outcome, the result. Why begin at the end? We want to keep people reading or listening, so we need to break through all of the competing distractions and grab their attention. Extolling the wonderful and extensive outcomes of your solution gets them interested to see if the same pixie dust magic can be sprinkled on their enterprise. We are also showing our credibility. The outcome must be a relevant example that the potential buyer of your services or product can mentally extrapolate to themselves in order to have real meaning. After dangling the goodies in front of the client, we now talk about the issue we solved. This is best delivered in the form of a story. Just going into the mechanics of the issue is boring and not likely to motivate the listener. If we can describe the people involved and the pain the issue was causing, we can start to ignite the listener's emotional connection with the story. We can say things like, "The pressure from our client's senior management had been intense. From last spring the section manager Shimada san was so stressed by the pressure for delivering the results on time, that he was developing an ulcer in his stomach. He even started to take time off to go to hospital. His whole team were worried because they felt they would not be able to get their piece of the project done in time. They saw a potential big loss of face because their colleagues would feel they had let the rest of the company down. They were all working hard but were concerned they were getting nowhere". Now we have put some flesh on the bone. We have counted the human cost of failure. This is much easier to identify with than numbers in a spreadsheet cell coming up short. We have introduced a situation the buyer can mentally visualize in their own frame of reference. Next we describe the solution we provided to fix this gap. This is the "how we did it" part of the story and again it shouldn't be a simple mechanical telling of how what happened. We need to combine the solution description with the impact it had on individual members of the team. We talk about the features of the solution but we have to link those to the benefits we delivered to the company, how they took those benefits and applied them. We can say something like this, "The XYZ software we installed used a combination of our big data and artificial intelligence capability to isolate out the critical steps to meet the deadline. We saved hundreds of hours of team time and the additional efficiency actually delivered the project pitch perfect and ahead of the deadline. Shimada san could finally stop his ulcer medication and the team were regarded as the heroes of the hour. We were invited to the celebration dinner and what a phenomenal night of major partying that was. Everyone was ecstatic with what we had done together and they really thanked us for saving them". Even if you cannot reveal the client's name, get these type of rich episodes into print and in front of potential clients during meetings. There is the dry rendition version – avoid that one. Instead use storytelling to emotionally involve the listener. If you do, then the story brings the key points alive and makes the buyer identify with the scenario in a way that they care what happened. This is powerful and we do not do enough good storytelling in our sales work. The irony is we are all dripping in rich and valuable detail, have plenty of scope to do this, but we don't pull all the parts together. Find your hero stories. Collect the details and turn them into tales t

Story San, We'll Think About It In Japan, this "We'll think about it" response is often the result at the second meeting with the client. In the first meeting, the salesperson is establishing trust and credibility. They are trying to identify if they can actually be of assistance to the client or not. There will be permission sought to ask questions to better understand the buyer's needs. In the second meeting, the proposal is presented, objections are dealt with and the seller tries to gain a client agreement to buy. Actually this is all fantasy and not what happens. In reality, the Japanese salesperson gets straight into their pitch and starts bombarding the client with all the nitty gritty features of the product or service. They get to the end and then wonder why the client doesn't buy and all they hear is "we'll think about it". In this case, the clients are using this answer to get rid of dud salespeople. Sadly, even if you are a pro and were following a proven sale's process, where you did all the necessary steps, you will still often get this response of "think about it" in Japan. This is usually because we have not gotten enough clarity during the questioning process. Sometimes we have misunderstood the client or they have not been clear enough themselves. It could be that there was a hidden objection they are reluctant to share with us and we have failed to address that concern, so no purchase can be made. What do we do about this? We can certainly accept that they do need to think about it and we need to set the date for the followup meeting right there on the spot. We can try a formula from Victor Antonio, where we don't accept that simple headline answer and we dig deeper. We can say, "when someone tells me they need to think about it, they means one of two things - they are not interested or are interested, but not sure. Which is it?". If they say interested but not sure, then we question further about whether the purchase is a fit, whether the functionality is all there or not, or is it a question of finance? The idea being that if the problem is anyone of these three reasons, we drill down further in order to understand how to handle it. If it is not a fit, why not? If the functionality is not there, what is missing and can we overcome that issue? If it is the money, then we look at how we might arrange the payment terms to allow them to make it in this budget cycle or spread it out over a few cycles. In a Japanese buyer context, this line of questioning would be considered very aggressive and obnoxious. The buyer isn't King in Japan – the buyer is God and it is not the place of pipsqueak salespeople to question God as to why they need to think about it. The group decision-making process in Japan almost ensures they really do need to think about it - together. The person receiving the sales call may be on board and may have been satisfied with the proposal, but they are rarely the sole decision maker. Inside the company, the buying decision will impact on various sections and the views and concerns of those groups need to be smoothed off, before anyone can make a final affirmative decision. Trying to pressure the buyer during the sale's call is meaningless, because that person still has to gain the internal alignment of the group on the next steps. It would make more sense if the seller instead addressed the issue of pushback toward the other internal parties who may have a problem with the decision to buy. In this case, rather than asking the person in front of us these aggressive questions, we could ask about other players involved. For example, "Sometimes there are concerns from other interested parties about the appropriateness of the fit between our solution and your company's needs. Do you foresee any internal concerns in this area? What about functionality – do you anticipate any difficulties with the functionality of our solution from within the other sections involved? What about the finance aspect, do you expect any resistance to what has been proposed?". In this way we can indirectly ask the buyer about the concerns without appearing to be questioning what they have just told us about they need to think about it. We can also take the opportunity to again provide antidotes to any concerns, because our interlocutor will be "our voice" during the inside meetings where the proposal will be discussed. We need to lead the witness, so to speak, to prepare for internal pushback. So when you hear "we will think about it" and you know you have done a good job of understanding the client's needs and your proposal will help their business, just relax. Still definitely make that appointment for the follow-up meeting right there and then and get into their schedule but don't keep pushing or you will hurt the trust you are trying to create. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and org

Admitting Wrong In Customer Service Sometimes things go wrong. Mistakes are made, errors pop up, best laid plans are laid low. Stuff happens. How we deal with these incidents makes the big difference. Some societies are legalistic, litigious and phalanxes of lawyers are lined up telling us to deny everything. Japan isn't one of those cases, so we expect a different way of doing things here, admitting that blame can be accepted, as long as it is handled appropriately. Troublesome word "appropriately". It is a bit like "common sense" which often proves to be very uncommon. What we may think is appropriate isn't shared by others. This is where things get murky in the service sector world. When things go wrong what is the appropriate response by both parties? The aggrieved party can completely lose it and let go with both verbal barrels, tearing strips off the offending service provider. Given nearly 30% of the Japanese population is over 65 these days, we can all look forward to various short fuse jichans or granddads exploding with rage, when some level of service is not delivered at the "appropriate" level. Those long Japanese life spans, combined with ever shortening tempers and easy irritation from others creates an explosive service sector cocktail. A friend of mine was lamenting some poor service provision in the IT area. The project was 9 months late and when it did finally come on line it didn't work properly at all. We all know that everything in IT takes longer than promised and always costs more than expected, but at least it is supposed to work. There can be many reasons for this. The brief may have been unclear, the execution could have been the problem, there may be extenuating circumstances, maybe it was basic incompetence? When I was working at one of the retail banks here a very, very large amount of money had been carted out to sea and set on fire, in the form of a new internal operating platform not working well at all. It was launched then immediately scrapped. The autopsy of why it didn't work, became one of those failure orphans, where there was no one responsible. No one lost their job and no lessons were learnt. It was like it never happened, as it was swept quietly under a rug and forgotten. Anyway, back to my friend who was rather perplexed by the reaction of the IT service provider, who was not at all responsive. Magically, the perpetrator of this grief managed to switch the tables around and blame my friend for being the problem. Now this reaction is puzzling? Why would you take that path? Not answering the plaintive emails, texts and phone calls gets aggrieved people worked up. They feel slighted and frustrated at the same time. So lesson number one is make yourself easy to reach out to the solve problems. Is your name there on your website to be contacted, if people have an issue with your service and they want to complain directly to the boss? Our Japanese staff are all ninjas at hiding trouble from the boss, so always expect to be the last to know what has occurred, until usually when it is absolutely too late. Also don't be mealy-mouthed about the problem. If you didn't deliver from the buyer's point of view, then admit it, because the beauty or otherwise is in the eye of the beholder here. Perception is the key and that is to say the perception of the client. There is money involved obviously, but there is something much more valuable involved and that is trust. If you want to try and wriggle your way out of your responsibilities, as was the case on this occasion, then expect bigger ramifications down the road. My friend is very well connected and will not be speaking highly of the services of this provider to any and all who will listen. That will become an invisible cost line in the P&L ,where revenues are being negatively impacted by reputation damage. You cannot see it necessarily but you can be assured it will be there. I am reminded of another case, where a very "sharp" businessman I know has quite a big following on the Internet. Various people who feel they have been duped, have created some scintillating reading on the internet, whenever you Google his name. When people are looking to do business with you, this type of prominent, smelly baggage will hurt you forever. It is surprising how some people don't take any responsibility for poor service. My son had a bowl of sauce spilt all over him at a ramen shop in the Azabu Juban recently. The waitress was Asian, not Japanese. To everyone's astonishment she did nothing, just stood there looking quizzical, seemingly wondering to herself "now how did that happen?" No apology, no frantic provision of towels to soak up the sauce, absolutely nothing. The Japanese manager was busy apologising, eventually providing the towels and wiping up the catastrophe. The guilty party just went back to grilling some meat like nothing had happened. Maybe she didn't speak Japanese or English or was just stupid? Who knows what was going on ins

Don't Blow The Solution Presentation To The Buyer Finding clients is an art and so is building trust and credibility that you can help them solve their business problems. We might be very charming when we first meet the client, sending out a competency vibe that the client relates to. They are open to our inquiries into the current state of their business, where the gaps are located and the urgency of filling those gaps. So far so good. We are now working off a trust base sufficiently large enough to allow the client to pull back the velvet curtain and reveal all the difficulties and problem nuances they are actually facing, as opposed to that pristine image the marketing department has been publically propagating. Dragging out the dirty laundry for outsiders to see is not something clients are going to do if the trust has not been established, so good job and well done getting to that point in the sales cycle. Presumably you are skilled and have refrained from suggesting any possible solutions, until you have done a proper job of digging deeply into the real issues facing the client. You have not leapt in with your off the shelf product or service, the one size fits all, cure all snake oil. No you are a pro. You have been asking well designed questions, which have been helping the client come to their own conclusion that what you have is the solution to their needs. And the real beauty of this skill set is that the client, as yet, doesn't even know what you have ready to help them. Your questions have guided their thinking about the types of solutions they will need and hey presto, your solution is a perfect match. Now we come to the unveiling, the drum roll, as the solution is presented. This is the time for capitalizing on all the good work that has been put in beforehand. We cannot get to this point and then blow it with a mediocre solution presentation. We can't start by only ploughing straight into the details, the guts of the solution, the spec, colour, size, weight, dimensions, timing, guarantees etc. These are all plebian features, dross, mere detail compared to what we should be presenting in its entirety. Firstly, we need to have our capability statement ready to go. In this statement we clearly explain that we have exactly what the client needs and we have the capacity to deliver it. Now if we don't, then we should state that plainly, drink our green tea and get out of there pronto. Trying to slam the square peg into the round hole simply because you have invested all this time with this client and you need an outcome to meet your quota is stupid. This is not a match, they are not a client and this effort to force it is wasted. Get off to the next client who will be a match and spend your time there instead. If they are in fact a match, we bring forward our capability statement to communicate we can in fact help them. We do match our spec with what they need and we do go through the key features. But we don't just stop there, like the vast majority of amateur salespeople. We take each of those key features and we illustrate how these features bring benefits to the client. We don't just stop there either, we keep going, we keep climbing higher up the value chain. We take that benefit and then we explain how that benefit when applied in their business will help them to succeed. Now clients are always doubtful about what they hear from salespeople, so there is always going to be some residual skepticism. They have been burnt in the past by idiots, so we have to deal with that negative legacy. After extolling the virtues of the application of the benefits of the features of our solution, we bring forth evidence of where this has worked elsewhere. This is the package we need to be delivering at solution presentation time. Then to test the waters to see if we have left anything out, not explained everything fully, we ask a trial close question. This might be something as gentle as "how does that sound so far?" This is low pressure and designed to draw out doubts, problems, additional information they may not have shared as yet. We want to hunt down any possible objections to buying from us at this stage, so that we can get a deal done now. When we are talking about all of these features, benefits and applications we should be weaving these together in a story. Storytelling is easy for the client to remember and fleshes out the key points in a way that is most readily accessible. Talk about a particular client in a similar situation and describe the who, what, where, when and how of that case. The more vivid we can make the word pictures in the telling, the more compelling is the story we are sharing. When we put all of this together, the client's "yes" decision is made that much easier for them. That must be our object and we use our sale's skills to ensure we create the best possible outcome for the client. This is not about getting a single sale, this effort is totally aimed at getting the reorders.

Widen That Buyer Gap Or Else Having a buying need and doing something about it can often be quite disparate ideas. There are many things we would all like to do in business to grow our companies. The constraints are usually money and people. The lack of resources holds us back and so we persevere, always hoping that somehow, we will be able to bridge that gap between where we are now and where we want to be. At the CEO level, we are always focused on the strategy for the company and the future goals. This is something that occupies a lot of thinking time. Once you get below that level, the intensity drops off. The CFO is thinking about this quarter or this year. Worried about the finances, the cash flow, the ability to find the funds to invest, the analyst reports, etc. If we are talking about line managers, they are concerned with meeting their targets and keeping their good people and getting rid of the not so good people. HR has a very curious take on all of this. Basically, they don't care all that much. They have a functional role here in Japan and are the rule police. Sometimes they have to respond to internal demands and go and source resources in the form of people or training, but generally they are passive. When the buyer is looking at the gap between where they are now and where they want to be and they judge it is pretty close, they don't feel any urgency or need to buy. They will have certain drivers pushing them along in their role in the business, but this gap perception component is key in selling to buyers. If we can't show that the opportunity cost of no action is too high, then they are not inspired to do anything. Doing nothing or doing what you have always done are the easiest decisions for any buyer. They are always time poor and a purchase decision usually comes wrapped in other tasks that will need attention, as a consequence of making that buying decision. Not buying isn't always about the money. Often it can be hesitancy around the Pandora's Box of extra workload this buying decision will trigger. It could be the lack of resources to make the most of the benefits of the purchase and this is what is also holding them back. We have to draw out the implications of taking no action, of doing nothing. When and how do we do that? In the questioning stage, we can draw attention to the size of the gap. Now if we say "that is a pretty big gap you have there and you should fix that", they doubt us. We are salespeople, so the buyer is always mentally dismissing everything we say as fluffy sales talk. We need them to tell us the gap is big and needs attention. Also that it needs attention right now. When we are discussing the Should Be question - where they want to be in the future we need to add a little question to this process. We ask where they want to be and then we follow up their answer by asking them, "What happens if you can't get there fast enough?". It is not useful to ask them what happens if they cannot get there, because as far as they are concerned, they can get there by themselves. No, instead we draw their attention to the speed factor. No one ever gets there as fast as they want, so it automatic opens up the idea of a gap that needs addressing. Also the current speed they are traveling at, will always be their maximum speed, so we are there to help them speed things up. When we are asking about the Barrier Question along the lines of "if you know where you are now and you know where you want to be, why aren't you there yet", we have another chance to emphasise that they need our help to achieve their goals. We find out what is the obstacle holding them back and then we ask the gap widener - "What happens if you cannot clear that obstacle?" Again we are trying to demonstrate that maybe they cannot do it all by themselves or do it fast enough and they need us in that equation to make it work. When we ask about the personal payoff for them if we are successful, after their answer we need to get them to reflect on the downside for them personally if it doesn't happen or happen fast enough. We ask, "so if the targets are not met, what does that mean for you personally?". In Japan, buyers rarely ever attach any personal gain to success and will talk in general terms of the group. In this case, we need to reference what will it means to the team if the goals are not met? It is the same idea but just asked in a different way. If we try to point out these aspects which won't work we won't be believed. We have to get them to tell us it won't work, under their own steam, at the current pace, with the current resources and investment. Once we get them thinking about that gap we can start suggesting when we present the solution that we are the cure for all their ills. We have the ability to help them get where they want to be faster and more smoothly. Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We tea

Handling Buyer Objections None of us like to hear "no". We are raised with this word from our parents and we didn't like getting it then and we don't like getting it now. We have something in our mind about how things should go and this little word means we are going to be denied. The irony is that in sales this is a very common answer to our offer. For something so prevalent, you would think that salespeople would be real experts in dealing and overcoming this comment. Not true. Instead, often the first reaction to hearing no on the part of the salesperson is to go harder. They somehow imagine they can force the buyer to buy. They imagine that if they have some tricky technique they can reverse that declaration. The immediate impulse is to go straight to the answer to counterpoint the objection. This is exactly the opposite of what we should do but that doesn't stop salespeople from trying it. This is mainly an emotional reaction based on the adrenalin flooding the brain with the fight response. We need to stop that process. How do we do that? We need a circuit breaker. We need an interruption between our hearing the word "no" and going in for the rebuttal. That is where the cushion comes in. A cushion is a short sentence which is quite neutral and won't inflame the situation with the negative buyer. We are told no because it is too expensive. Instead of plumbing the thousand good reasons why it is in fact not too expensive, we go to a cushion such as: "It is important to get the budgeting process working well in any company". The 5 or 6 seconds which it takes us to say that sentence gives us time to mentally regroup before we try to respond to the client. We have to override the chemicals pushing us to fight, to engage the brain before we speak. The only thing we should have running through our mind while using the cushion is "ask why it is too expensive?". Answering straight away exposes us to a big danger. That occurs because we are possibly not answering the right question. We hear "it is too expensive" but this is a headline. We need to read the full article the get the background before we are in any position to respond. The headline may be a fake news headline as well. Perhaps they say that initial response to us, just to hide the real reason. We do this when retail shopping, don't we. We can't afford the item we are looking at when we see the price tag. Do we tell the clerk we are paupers who can't afford such an expensive good. No, we say something else, such as the colour isn't to our taste, or we are not sure about the size. When we hear that headline from the buyer we need to ask why that is a problem. We also cannot just go down one layer. We have to dig right in for the deeper reasons. We also need to get these out and even when we think we have exposed them all we should ask, "are there any other reasons why you wouldn't go ahead?". We need to uncover the hidden objections. Once the list is completed we now need to have the buyer prioritise which one is the main deal breaker for them. Funnily enough, if we can answer this one to their satisfaction the other objections fade away. Once we hear the main reason holding them back we have to check if this is a legitimate objection or not? It might be constructed on false information. When I was selling Australian products into the market here, I found that Japanese competitor salespeople would have no hesitation in spreading false rumours about the rival Australian supplier. They would say the supplier was in financial trouble and would be going out of business shortly. None of this was true but that didn't seem to matter. In such cases where there is a misunderstanding or some incorrect information floating around we have to go in hard and show why that is absolutely not the case. A statement to that fact is not enough – we have to come armed with proof to have any real credibility. If the objection is true, then we should admit it. It may be that our delivery time is slow because it takes longer to create that level of quality. We explain the background and try to find a way around the timing of supply issue. It may be that we reverse the objection. If they say they cannot afford to buy because business is bad, we can point out that we are the solution to turning the business around. They are where they are today because they didn't have us as a partner helping them improve their business. We can answer the objection but we need to know we have our ladder up against the right wall before we embark on a reply. We need to have the breaker in there to get us to a series of why questions to dig down to the highest priority item worrying them. If we can solve their objection then fine, if we can't fine. We just move on a find another client we can serve. 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. Wa