The Sales Japan Series

What would the buyer’s agenda be, during the sales call? “Don’t take too long, because I am busy”, “Don’t waste my time with stuff I don’t need”, “Don’t erode my cash flow”, “Don’t rip me off”, would probably be the most prevalent. Our clients often tell us one of the biggest problems they have with their sales teams, is the buyer runs the sales meeting. Their own salespeople just sit there, nice and sweetly and do whatever the buyer wants. “We are paying them, but we feel they are working for the buyer not for us”, is another common complaint. This is all very fortunate or we would have nothing to do!

“Always be closing” is an old saw in sales and is partially correct. As salespeople, we have no idea if what we do or what we have is going to be relevant for the buyer. From the buyer’s point of view, they are not sure if we or our company are the right people to do business with. We need to build trust from the very start, before we even think about closing the buyer. How do we do that?

Trust is hard to build in sales. The image of salespeople is high pressure, lots of smooth talking and duplicitous attempts to get a sale. This would be a great set of descriptions for failing salespeople, who will shortly be ejected from the profession. We do not want to get smeared with that brush, so we need to make it clear to the buyer we are real professionals.

We present ourselves in a manner which says, “this is a solid person, who looks professional”. Buyers initially only have our outward appearance to go by, when they meet us. We must make that winner. For men, that means no food stains on the tie, no crumpled suit or one which doesn’t fit properly, no scuffed, worn down shoes, clean ironed shirt, etc. In my experience, women have better common sense about how to dress for business and don’t have these types of problems.

What comes out of our mouth has to be clear, articulate and confident. That means no umming and ahhing. If we don’t sound like we know what we are doing, the buyer is certainly not going to feel they can trust us. We start by explaining four things: 1. Who we are, 2. What we do, 3. Who else we have created success for and 4. our suggestion that maybe, we can do the same thing for this client. This should be concise and clear, in order for the buyer to decide to invest more time listening to us, rather than getting back to more pressing matters.

Next, we map out the meeting. We do this so that we are in control of the agenda and don’t allow the buyer to take us off course or highjack the sales call. This might be a prepared piece of paper for the buyer to look at or we might just go through the items verbally. We start with the benefit to the buyer to have this meeting with us. Next we ask how familiar they are with our company and what perceptions they may have. Why would we ask about perceptions? Aren’t we setting ourselves up for trouble with that type of question, you might be thinking.

Now in the rough and tumble of business, competitors may be spreading false information about our financial situation or this client may have had trouble with one of the salespeople who preceded us, who has long since left the company, but not the memory of the buyer. We need to draw this resistance out early and deal with it, because if we don’t, it will sit there as a blocker to building trust with the buyer. If the perception is so bad, then we won’t be able to make a sale anyway, so we are better off to meet it head on and early.

If the buyer says, “I remember one of your company’s sales reps and he was useless and unreliable, so why should I deal with your company?”. We can reply, “Mr. Customer, if you had a member of your sales team, who was not reliable and you received complaints about him from customers, what would you do?”. The buyer will probably say, “I would fire him”, or “I would move him out of a sales role”. At this point we say, “That is exactly what we did, which is why I am here today, to serve you and make sure my company provides you with real value”.

After getting through the perceptions bear pit, we move on to suggest we look at their current situation and where they would like to be in three to five years. We also add we will look at any challenges which may be impacting the company’s ability to get to those five year goals fast enough and the implications therein. There is a small detail here which is important. We don’t just talk about getting to their goals. Given 100 years, they could probably do it on their own without any assistance from us and there would be no sale. Instead, we inject the element of speed to reaching their goals which gives us some leverage to talk about how we can speed up the solution achievement from our side.

We then talk about addressing how we might be able to assist the company, based on our solution lineup. Importantly we then ask, “how does that agenda sound and do you have any item...

Why “Okay, Send Me Your Proposal” Is A Bad Idea In Japan

Getting to the request for a proposal stage is usually thought of as significant progress in Japan. This means there is an interest. Or may be not. Japan is a very polite society so a direct “no” is difficult to deal with. Over centuries, the society has found all sorts of clever ways of saying “no” indirectly. When you get this request you have to know if this is “no” or not. We are all super busy people, so slaving away to craft a proposal is a big waste of our very precious resource – our time – if it is just a polite means of giving us the bum’s rush out the door.

To understand if this is real or fake we can answer “yes, I can send you a proposal and in fact I can help you with determining if there is a match for your budget by explaining our pricing while we are here together”. This relies on the assumption you can offer a price on the spot. Generally we know what will be involved in the solution for the client, so we should be able to talk about pricing or a major part of the pricing required at that point. If there is a budget issue this will help to flush that out.

Being Japan, we can’t expect any agreement whether we talk pricing at that point or not, because the person we are dealing with will need to gain a consensus in support of the offer from their colleagues who are unseen, sitting behind the meeting room wall in the office. We can however gain some insight into whether we are going to be a contender or not for the business. Their body language is a key indicator we should be studying when we start talking price.

They may still want to see a proposal because they need to show something in writing to the other members of the team. Or they may prefer to say “no” in your physical absence because that is less stressful and embarrassing. We can always rely on Japanese buyers to take the path of least resistance.

I was listening to Victor Antonio’s podcast The Sales Influence on how he does it for American buyers. In his case, he tries to inject some sense of guilt with the buyer around him having to spend hours on making the proposal. The idea is that he wants them to clearly say no they are not able to go ahead right there and then or say they are interested, but not sure.

This wouldn’t help much in Japan, because the buyer is going to avoid any possible confrontation over a “no” answer and will always go for the interested but not sure possibility regardless of the reality. The Japanese concepts of tatemae and honne are fundamental to polite society here. Tatemae means the public truth and honne the real truth. Often Western businesspeople encountering tatemae for the first time will feel like they have been lied to.

We shouldn’t get too moralistic about this because we do it too in our own societies. We dress it up as a “little white lie” which is actually tatamae under a different flag.

If your family member or friend has been trying to lose weight and actually look like they have gained even more weight and ask you how they look, we don’t go for honne and say “Man, you are even fatter than before”. We bald faced lie and say they look like they have lost weight and look better, because we don’t want to hurt their feelings or discourage them. Japan is the same but on a grander scale and it is more institutionalised here.

So in Japan, we do have to give them a proposal but we should never “send” it. By this I mean we should always present it in person whenever possible. If we send off our proposal by email the document arrives alone and undefended. We need to be there to explain what it means so that there is no mistake. I can’t count the number of times I have been presenting a proposal and the client has misunderstood what I was trying to say. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. The key is to be there to clear up the issue. Whenever we get a proposal where do we look first? Straight to the numbers – how much is this going to cost? All the value explanation is in the front part of the document, but their view has been tainted by that big number at the back.

We need to control the physical document and walk them through the value explanation, checking all the while that we have successfully understood what they need. We can answer questions, make clarifications and shepherd the buyer through the value detail to the number section, which should by now have a tremendous amount of context wrapped around it. So make a proposal but always take it, never send it in Japan. If you do that, you will have much more success, by taking it with you.

"Your Price Is Too High" - Your Reply Is?

When your client hits you with 'your price is too high" what do you say? Are you flustered, wondering how to reply? Is your brain freaking out, as you flash possible answers through your mind. Or are you straight off the blocks and into an argument with the buyer? Are you telling them why it is not too high and why they are wrong, wrong, wrong? By the way, how is that working out for you so far?

Rule number one is don't be stupid. That means don’t argue with the buyer. Because the “your price is too high” comment immediately triggers a chemical reaction in our brain, we have to short circuit what is going on and regain control. To do that we need to have a circuit breaker, like we have in our houses if there is an electricity overload. We have this so that we don’t burn down our house. Same with sales, we don’t want to burn down the deal.

We insert a cushion. This is a non-descript sentence that neither inflames the disagreement with the buyer nor agrees with what they are saying. It would sound like this, “yes, budgeting is important in all businesses”. In the few seconds it takes us to say that sentence we don’t allow ourselves to kick off an argument with the buyer about why their comment is totally flawed, incorrect, ludicrous and ridiculous. It gives us enough breathing time to remember how a professional handles objections from clients. After they tell us our price is too high, we very softly ask “why do you say that?”.

This pushing back process is like reading a newspaper. We see a controversial headline splashed across the front page. It grabs our attention. But to really understand what the headline is saying, we need to read the accompanying article. That is where the detail is and we need to know it before we know how to answer their objection. Our combativeness with the headline is pointless. We need to know is their pushback just plain wrong, because they don’t have the correct facts? Or wrong because they have misinterpreted something we have said? Or is it correct? Our price may in fact be too high for the current value it brings to their business in their mind.

We have no idea of how to answer “your price is too high”, until we have more information. Here is the professional’s next step, after we have discovered the reason behind their statement – we keep digging for other issues. We park the first one and move into asking, “apart from X are there any other concerns you have?”. Objections are also a bit mysterious because the client may not be giving us their primary concern upfront. There may be a hidden objection we don't know about and we merrily go about answering the first objection and wonder why they didn't buy. There was a bigger problem, but they didn't share it and we didn't ask. Always ask.

After they give you the second objection, ask if there are any other concerns. Keep doing this around three to four times maximum. “Are X, Y and Z then your major concerns or is there another?” We have to dig these out before we even attempt to answer any objections from the buyer. Once we have them out then ask for some guidance on which of the three or four is the most problematic for them. “You have mentioned X,Y and Z as issues for you. Of these three which one do you feel is the most pressing?” It is very important to stop speaking at this point. Don’t add anything or qualify anything. The question leaves a certain amount of tension in the air, but let it hang there, don’t relieve the tension by saying anything further. If you have another person with you, tell them before the meeting that when you ask a question and it creates tension with the buyer to sit there and shut up. Don’t release the tension.

We need to hear from them, so that we can concentrate our efforts answering their key concern. Once we know what that concern is, then we bring all our weight to bear on the value we provide with our rationale, statistics, data, testimonials, evidence, proof, etc. to show why the price is just fine and dandy.

Usually, once we have answered the ley concern the minor concerns drop away. If we have done all of this and they still don’t want to proceed, then it means there is still a hidden issue we need to surface, so we can deal with it.

If we haven’t done a good job of building the trust, the client may be reluctant to tell what they are really thinking. This reinforces the importance of the sales cycle to build trust first, ask brilliant questions to uncover needs, tailor the solution to exactly the key points they have raised before we ask for the order.

Jealousy, Envy and Spite In Sales

Sales is a tough enough job without having additional complications. Clients can be very demanding, often we depend on logistics departments and production divisions, to get the purchase to the buyer. We can’t control the quality, but we have total responsibility, as far as the client is concerned. There is the constant pressure of revenue results, with bosses always pushing hard on the numbers.

If we are successful and we are doing well, you would think that life would be good. We know the emotional roller coaster that is the sales life and you are only ever as good as your last deal. So, with a little bit of success should come some respite from the turmoil of hitting the numbers. No such luck!

Our colleagues, by definition, cannot all be equally successful. The Pareto Principle says that the top 20% of salespeople will account for 80% of the revenue numbers. So that means the other 80% of the team are scrambling around for the remaining 20% of the sales. People come into sales from different backgrounds, with different levels of experience, with degrees of motivation and they join at certain points in the annual results cycle. This means that some will be in the top group, a chunk will be in the middle and the rest are at the bottom.

In the West, the usual way sales teams are managed is based on the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest. Those who can’t cut it are cut loose. Those who can continue to produce get to stay. If they can survive a couple of recessions, they may even be moved up into management positions. This means that those at the bottom are basically on their own. This should spur them on to greater efforts to move up the sales ranks and to strike for the top position in the sales results table. Yet often this doesn’t happen.

In Japan, most salespeople are on a salary and bonus structure, rather than salary and commission. Almost nobody is on 100% commission arrangements. This means the financial ambition to get ahead in sales is not as strong as we see in the West. Often the base salaries are large by foreign standards and so people can live on the base.

In some cases, there can be pushback against the top salespeople, by those failing, because the successful are making everyone else look bad. Snide comments can be made, negative inferences drawn and a host of other petty signals that says “we don’t like you”. This is driven by jealousy and envy. This is their “the way to build the tallest building in town, is to tear down all the taller buildings” approach to greatness.

In a small sales team this can be very uncomfortable. There is a degree of mutual cooperation involved in sales teams and this is usually where the disputes arise. Who owns the client, who owns the deal, and how is the revenue going to be split up?

If the sales politicians in the firm get going they can really do damage to the morale of the organisation. These people are usually excellent at whining, gathering whiners together and hosting whine parties. They use their energy to pull down those who are successful, instead of trying to become a success themselves.

When you are the top performer or if you are in the top ranks, you can feel you have become a target. Instead of just worrying about getting sales done, you now have to waste precious energy walking around on egg shells, to avoid criticism from your colleagues. This is kept below the radar, so the boss is often unaware of what is really going on. However, often they don’t care anyway. They are looking for numbers and they don’t want to have to deal with sales soap operas in the office.

If the bosses are any good, they would be sorting out the toxic few, but often they don’t. The top salespeople are razor focused on serving clients and doing all the hard yards needed to get the sale, so they are not politically minded. The whole mess gets made worse because in the current climate, organisations are looking at their salesperson retain strategies. They do this because they know they cannot recruit enough salespeople replacements. This means the internal war goes on for much longer that it should. We lose sight of the external competition and fight amongst ourselves.

Bosses – sack the toxic! If you don’t, you will find the whole organisation will start failing as the wrong culture takes command. For top salespeople, insulate and isolate yourself from losers. They don’t work as hard or as long, so there is plenty of opportunity to get into the work, without having to engage with them much. Winners start early and concentrate on their Golden Time – 9.00am-5.00pm.

This is when we can see clients for meetings and create business. All of the administrivia needs to be fitted in around those hours. Writing proposals, holding sales meetings, collecting data, putting together sales information, recording activities in the CRM, etc., are what h...

“I like talking with people, so I want to be in sales” is a terrifying conversation to have with one of your staff. They are not doing so well in their current role, so they imagine they will just glide across to sales to have an easier time of it. They may try and do it internally as a switch of roles or they may quit their current job and go and try to get a sales job somewhere else. Given the shortage of salespeople in Japan at the moment and from now on ad nauseum, there is a strong chance they will be picked up by a competitor or another company quite easily.

They are partially correct. Yes, it helps if you like people as a salesperson. Also, having good communication skill is a definite requirement. Talking to someone and persuading them to hand over their hard earned cash is a different equation. What do we talk about, how do we talk about it, when should we be silent, when should we speak up? These are important questions about which they are ignorant.

When I hear people say they like “talking to people” that sets off an alarm in my head. One of the biggest issues with salespeople is that they talk too much. I am guilty of it too. I am passionate about helping people to grow their businesses and their careers, so I bring a lot of belief and energy to the conversation. That is all good, but it is also dangerous. If I am doing all the talking, I maintain possession of what I already know but I don’t gain any additional knowledge of the client and their problem.

Sometimes, I catch myself and realise the only noise in the room is me talking, so I should ask the client a question, shut up and get them talking instead. I want them to tell me about their current situation and where they want to be. In Japan, you can’t do that. Clients are passively expecting your pitch, so they can destroy it and assure themselves this is a low risk transaction they are considering entering into. So, the first thing out of our mouths here has to be a question seeking permission to ask questions. People who like talking will have no problem with this traditional pitch approach. In fact they will probably be happy, to get straight into the pitch.

Fine all around except for one small thing. What are you pitching to the client? How do you know what solutions from your line-up will best match the client’s need? What normally happens is the salesperson blunders on, talking about things which are irrelevant to the client. They completely squander their client facing time and leave the meeting with nothing. This is not good.

Get permission first, then ask those first two questions – where are you now and where do you want to be? We are trying to gauge urgency on the buyer’s part. If they think they can bridge this gap, then they will try and do it themselves and not involve any external parties. That means no business for us and we are wasting our time to continue sitting there chatting with them, no matter how much we enjoy a good chat.

If they can’t do it by themselves, then we want to know why? There is no point going straight into solution mode at this point, talking, talking, talking. We should ask that exact question: “if you know where you want to be, why aren’t you there now?”. What a pearler of a question. In this answer lies our raison d’etre. Maybe we can’t do it for them. That is good to know, because we have to high tail it out of there and go and find someone we can help. No point hanging round for more chatting with a business dead end in front of you. Another other issue is talking past the deal. When the buyer agrees, only talk about the follow up and stop selling. People who like talking get themselves into trouble by saying too much and opening up a Pandora’s box of deal breakers.

If we are doing our job, we are hardly talking at all during the meeting, except to ask a few clarifying questions. “Liking to talk with people” is a mirage, would-be salespeople see about what is involved in a professional sales life. This is their uniformed illusion about the job. Instead, I want to hear, “I like asking people questions”. In all my years in business though, I have never heard that lucid comment emerge as a precursor to a life in sales. If you want a career in sales, now you know what to say to a prospective boss to get them interested in hiring you.