THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo, Japan

I hear some people say translating terms like “nemawashi” into English is difficult.  Really?  I always thought it was one of the easier ones.  Let's just call it “groundwork”.  In fact, that is a very accurate description ,from a number of different angles.  Japanese gardeners are superstars.  There is limited flat space in this country, so over centuries gardeners have worked out you need to move the trees you want, to where you want them.  They prefer this approach to just waiting thirty years for them to turn out the preferred way.  It is not unusual today to see a huge tree on the back of a big truck ,being moved from one location to another and presto instant garden.  The roots of that massive tree will be wrapped up in cloth to protect them.  That wrapping process is called “nemawashi”.  In business, it means being well prepared for the business meeting – doing the ground work beforehand. In a Western context being well prepared for the meeting will mean assembling all the data and analysis in order to make an impassioned plea for your idea or suggestion, to be accepted by the big bosses.  We all get to the meeting, listen to the different approaches and we make a decision in that meeting.  What could be more time efficient and logical?  They never do it that way in Japan. Concepts of time efficiency differ for a start and throwing massive amounts of overtime at a problem is not problem in Japan.  The meeting is also a ceremony, because the decision has already been arrived at beforehand and the gathering is just to formalise the outcome.  This happens in the West too.  Whenever you see global leaders delivering their joint statements or signing agreements,  they didn't arrive at the wording during the meeting. That was all worked out by their minions beforehand, over many hours of debate, negotiation and discussion.  The TV cameras just capture the big guys and gals inking the document, after all the “groundwork” has been completed. I was talking with a Western businessman recently and he was relating how hard it was to get the team behind his ideas.  The issue was, he was trying to get it all agreed to, at the key meeting and hadn't invested the time to do the groundwork.  What he needed to do was go to see all the key people, the influencers, the stakeholders with a vested interest and explain the idea. Get their input and agreement and then rinse and repeat with the rest of them.  By the time the meeting happens, everyone will recognise parts of their preferences and ideas in the submission.  Agreement flows easily in these cases. In sales, we will probably not have direct access to all of the decision makers, influencers and stakeholders.  Our primary contact has to become our champion for sheparding the agreement through the internal nemawashi process.  Asking them directly who are these hidden decision makers is insulting.  It says, you are a nobody, but I still need your help.  We need to be more considerate of their “face” and ask in a way that enhances their face. Once we have established the trust, have uncovered their needs, shown we can help and have dealt with any hesitations they may have, we are ready to marshal our forces for the final push through to a “yes” to the sale.  We explain, we understand that many people will be interested to know about this change in the delivery of product or services.  We also know that they will be tasked to explain it to others who cannot join our meetings.  We ask how can we help them?  This is a rhetorical question because we want to get into the detail of who are the players.  So we go straight into asking who do they think would have the most concern about the change and why they would be concerned?  We keep repeating this process until we have fleshed out the people who will have the most interest in saying “no”.  The next stage is to arm our champion with the tools to deal with the pushback.  We try to understand the concerns and then arrive at creative ways of overcoming those concerns.  This is what we mean by nemawashi or ground work.  Is it time consuming – yes!  Do we have to invest the extra time – yes!  There is an internal  logic to the way decisions are made in Japan.  There is no point railing about how the Japanese business decision making process should be Westernised, so it is more familiar for us.  That is never going to happen, so we need to be better and more flexible to understand the system and then become a master of influence within it.  We need to become the nemawashi maestro!  

Minato-ku or the “Port Area” is a central part of Tokyo, which used to be harbourside for goods being delivered to the capital in ancient times.  My three barbers' stories are tales of customer service opportunities gone astray, in a country where customer service is the envy of the rest of the world.  Each story brings forth a reflection on our own customer service and how we treat our buyers.  My apologies to Gioachino Rossini for lifting the title idea for this piece from his famous opera. Barber Number One worked in a men's barber shop in the Azabu Juban shopping street which I frequented (and took my son too), for fifteen years.  During that time a number of different barbers there took care of my hair as they came and went. One day, while trimming the hair on the back of my neck, the electric razor must have had a fault, because he cut my skin where he had been shaving my neck.  My wife, being a typical demanding Japanese consumer, was appalled by this poor customer service and went there to complain about how they were treating her husband.  Me being a laid back Aussie, I didn't raise a fuss myself, but that didn't stop my missus from wading in. The youngish barber decided to argue the point with my wife and wasn't immediately forthcoming with a  satisfactory apology.  My wife showed the offending damage on the photos on her phone and wasn't backing off. One of the more senior barbers intervened and made the apology on behalf of the shop.  Did that satisfy her? Not in the least.  Why?  Because she didn't feel it was a sincere apology. She told me I should never attend that establishment again.  The lifetime value of a regular customer is high, especially in a crowded market.  There was a management issue there because the service culture wasn't correct.  The interesting thing I understood was that barbers are hard to recruit these days, because not so many people want to join the trade.  They felt they could afford to lose me as a regular over fifteen years or more but they couldn't afford to lose the barber.  The point though is where do you draw the line around the culture of your service?  What are you saying is acceptable behaviour to the other staff?  When things go wrong, this is when the real culture of your organisation is revealed. Barber Number Two belonged to a well known chain of successful barber shops and was introduced by my wife as an appropriate alternative to the previous bloodthirsty razor wielding maniac she disapproved of.  I wasn't all that keen on this Roppongi establishment, once Covid-19 hit, because it was a rather confined space.  In the centre of Tokyo, a lot of companies are using what were once apartments as business premises, so the layout and size can be quite small.  Having trained this young guy on how I like my hair done, I persevered, Covid or otherwise.  I called to make an appointment only to be told he had been transferred to one of their shops on the outskirts of Tokyo.   Staff movements happen, but how we handle them is another matter.  Did my barber call me and introduce his successor?  No.  How expensive would that have been? Again, no one was thinking about the lifetime value of the customer here.  I had invested in educating him about what I liked and so I would not switch easily unless I had to.  This is another management failure, where handovers are not being properly choreographed.  Customer continuity has a distinct value to it. Barber Number Three is my new barber and belongs to a shop which has been continuously operating on that same spot for the last 203 years, again in the Azabu Juban area.  It must be the oldest barber shop in Japan and probably the world.  The young guy cutting my hair showed me to the chair and started asking me about how I liked my hair done.  Red flag there.  He didn't introduce himself to me, and I had to ask him for his name.  Why would that be the case? I asked him about the history of the shop and it was clear he didn't know much beyond it was 203 years old.  He didn't know if they had famous people over that time as customers.  I asked him how they traditionally cut hair in Japan, before western scissors arrived in the Meiji era – he had no idea.  So, this was really just the same as any other barber shop, because the management has not educated their staff about the heritage value of their offer.  I was a new client, so here was the chance to make me a permanent client.  In a sea of so many competing establishments, I thought what a waste of an opportunity to differentiate themselves, beyond just having a sign in the window, that says they are over 200 years old.  There was no narrative around that fact, no great stories attached to it, no buzz, no particular vibe.  The common theme across these stories is how to differentiate your service in highly competitive industries.  There were also poor levels of understanding about the lifetime value of a customer on the part of the staff.  These were leadership issues and the solutions were basically cost free and simple, yet they couldn't pull it off.  So, let's take another cold hard look at our staff's service provision and particularly at the service culture we have created.  Are we all doing what we are supposed to be doing?  Do the staff understand these concepts or are they just doing their daily job?  We often presume our people know these things, but perhaps we need to remind them more often.  

There is no doubt that the pandemic has made it very fraught to find new clients in Japan.  The new variants of the virus are much more contagious and have already overwhelmed the hospital infrastructure in Osaka, in just weeks of the numbers taking off.  Vaccines are slow to roll out and so extension after extension of lockdowns and basic fear on both sides, makes popping around for chat with the client unlikely.  We forget how much we give up in terms of reading and expressing nuanced ideas through not having access to body language.  Yes, we can see each other on screen, but it just isn't the same. In this situation, which looks to be scheduled to last until early 2022, we have to work on new skills. We know about storytelling, word pictures and refined word selection for better communication.  Knowing about it and doing it though, are ridiculously different.  I know, because we teach this stuff.  I can explain the formulas and the methodologies and the class participants get it, but doing it is often a struggle.  Obviously practice with strong coaching is the cure. We will be beginning our conversation with a client online and this could be a new client or more likely, a new person down at the client's company, as every April the wheel of fortune is spun and the HR department nominates who goes where.  The explanation of who we are and what we do and why you should deal with me (and by extension my firm) is a critical juncture.  Jumping straight into the product catalogue tour is dumb.  This made little sense when we were sitting knee to knee, but makes absolutely no sense when we are screens apart. Instead, we need to get their permission to ask cogent questions, which will ultimately unveil needs.  There is a simple formula for doing this, so there is no excuse why every salesperson should not be doing this.  Firstly we need to explain who we are and what we do.  This is a great opportunity to build your firm's credibility with the client.  We shouldn't forget to weave our history into the narrative and make it personal.  This is not a history lesson on the company but a base on which to build trust and we have to make sure we are represented in this part of the storytelling. For example, “We are global soft skills training experts and Dale Carnegie launched the company in New York in 1912.  The fact that ninety percent of the Fortune 500 companies use us, shows that the most discerning firms recognise the value we bring.  We have stood the harsh test of time globally and in Japan too, since we established operations here in 1963.  We are way beyond all of that ‘it is American so it won't work in Japan' stuff, as we have localised the content and 80% of our delivery in in Japanese.  I have been with the firm for the last eleven years and have seen the impact our training has across all industries”. In this forty second burst we have packed the content to the gunnels with credibility statements and emotive words. This initial reference point tells the buyer we are a safe option.  “Nobody got fired for choosing Dale Carnegie Training” type of idea.  Next, we tell a story about a client.  They had a certain issue, preferably one we think might be shared by this client and we explain the solution applied and the result achieved in a very micro and brief manner.  We emphasise the pain this problem was causing for a particular decisionmaker inside the company, someone in a similar position or role to our interlocutor.  We briefly explain what we did and then we dwell on the perceived value of the solution formed from the client's point of view.  We should bring back pieces of their dialogue with us, to fully express their happiness that the problem was fixed, so that the buyer we are in front of on screen, will have confidence in our suggestions.  This is a reference point for the client that we can help them. Finally, we say, “Maybe we could do the same for you.  I am not sure, but in order to find out, may I ask a few questions”.  And then we say nothing.  Wait until they speak – don't add, or clarify, just sit there in total silence until they give an answer.  Once we have their permission, then we can dig in and see if we have a solution for their problem.  This is a reference point that says the buyer is now willing to share a lot of confidential information with us. If we don't get a match between what we do and what they need, then no slamming of the square peg into the round hole – we get off that call and we hold another potential business discussion with another buyer. The pandemic has made the whole art and science of selling more complex, but there are some fundamental basics we have to get right or nothing will go our way.  Business is hard to find at the moment, but never find bad business – the money won't be worth the trouble and you only tarnish your personal and professional brands.  There are plenty of clients who have problems we can help them with, so we need to be concentrating our efforts right there.

Japan is a very hierarchical society.  I am getting older, so I appreciate the respect for age and stage we can enjoy here.  Back in my native Australia, older people are thought of having little of value to say or contribute.  It is a youth culture Downunder and only the young have worth.  “You old so and so, you don't know anything” is reflective of the mood and thinking.  As a training company in Japan, we have to be mindful of who we put in front of a class and in front of clients.  If the participants are mainly male and older, then it is difficult to have a young female trainer or salesperson allocated to that company.  That young woman is going to be talented and effective as a trainer because our trainer development system is so demanding. She is also going to be highly skilled in sales, because we teach sales. It doesn't matter. The HR people or the line manager complains, because the class members don't feel young people have anything to teach them or are qualified to sell them anything.  I was reminded of this recently when trying to allocate trainers and salespeople for certain companies.  We have a lot of internal trainers and salespeople who are under 35 and a few who are over 45 and so there is an imbalance.  One of my senior guys has suddenly quit.  He was performing both functions, so it is a double loss.  As our older team members age, they have seen their kids leave the home and then have their aged parents to worry about.  The life of a small business owner is always like this.  There is never an equilibrium or a period of extended stability with staffing.  Just when you think you have it working like a smoothly oiled machine, in goes a wrench and the whole thing comes to a shuddering halt. The transfer of responsibilities for clients between staff is not that easy.  It goes both directions too.  We have staff who build strong personal relationships with counterparties and then their interlocutor is moved to another function and a replacement appears.  Often, this can mean the end of the relationship with that firm, as the new broom have their preferred suppliers and you are not one of them.  You also imagine that within the client big firms there is a seamless transfer between their staff for that part of the business.  Not so.  I was dealing with a big multi-national and to my amazement the new person had absolutely no knowledge of what we had been doing for them in terms of training.  Obviously there was no hand over of the tasks and things have been going less smoothly as a result. Normally in Japan, we try to recruit younger people, however we have to also be flexible and look to hire older staff, the venerable grey hairs who can gain the respect of the clients.  Trying to maintain the right balance between the generations is not that easy.  Also, anytime we have to replace someone as a salesperson, then we can draw a big red line diagonally across each month of the calendar for the next 18 months.  They will not be particularly productive for that period of time.  Learning the business, really understanding the products and our methodology takes a lot of time.   They also have to build their own client base and that doesn't happen in a hurry. It takes about the same period of time to see someone make their way through the Dale Carnegie labyrinth of trainer certification.  It is an arduous, challenging process and not everyone is suited to become a trainer.  The skills for selling and training have similarities but there is also that X Factor of personality needed to become accepted by clients. The infamous and elusive Plan B needs to be dusted off and then we can move into action.  The problem is we don't spend any time thinking about negative circumstances that require a Plan B. Also, the mix of possibilities across the range of staff is so complex, how can you effectively anticipate what happens next.  Nevertheless, I quickly realised I need multiple Plan Bs ready to go, in case of changes in the team complexion.  I usually spend a minus amount of time thinking about those myriad possibilities, because I am too busy doing other things in the business. I will need to do better in this regard and have an update process scheduled throughout the year, rather than leaving it to surprise announcements of staff departure, to stir me to action.  How about your case?  How are your multiple Plan B development scenarios going?  

When we read commentary about how we should be recruiting A Players to boost our firm's performance, this is a mirage for most of us running smaller sized companies.  If you are the size of a Google or a Facebook, with massively deep pockets, then having A Players everywhere is no issue.  The reality is A Players cost a bomb and so most of us can't afford that type of talent luxury.  Instead we have to cut our cloth to suit our budgets.  We hire C Players and then we try to turn them into B Players.  Why not turn these B Players into A players? This is a contradiction isn't it, because we always striving and thrusting for the best possible results.  If we invest and take a B Player to A Player status, there is a very strong likelihood someone else will admire our handiwork and poach them from us.  We have all heard that truism about “what if I develop my people and they leave”, countered with “what if we don't invest in them and they stay?'.  This is correct up to the point of your cash flow reserves.  We are not talking about having useless people staying on, sucking up our cash resources. B Players are very capable and are worth investing in to become even more capable.  The additional investment to turn them into A players though, if they have that capability in the first place, may be a case of over investment. Having large portions of your revenue centered around a very small number of clients is recognized as a very dangerous position to be in.  In the same way, having one or two people accounting for a disproportionate amount of firm income or expertise is also dangerous. When the top performers leave it can be very disruptive. Most bosses do not sufficiently explain their departure to the remaining staff.  In this vacuum, the other members of the team worry about what the A Players know that they don't.  Is the firm going down and are those most capable of getting another job jumping ship?  Will an exodus of A Players introduce fragility into the business? The loss of the contribution of A Players is bad enough, but their departure can be interpreted by staff in ways bosses would never imagine.  That is why no matter who leaves, leaders always need to carefully reassure everyone else, that the firm is fine and this was a personal choice by one individual.  Don't allow rumours, imaginings and guesswork to creep into the equation.  We need to own the narrative every time. I have a very carefully designed spreadsheet which allows me to track my sales team's performance.  It includes all of their costs and related costs, to give me a clear picture of what each sales person's contribution to the company actually is.  This allows me to see the amount of leverage they represent. I want to know what is the multiple of their revenue return against their total cost.  The bigger that multiple the better, up to a point. If the multiple is fantastic, but the overall income volume generated is too low, then we can go broke in short order.  So there has to be a balance between raw volume of funds coming in and the effectiveness of return on their efforts.  This is where B Players can excel.  They produce multiples which work for the business and generate a positive profit result.  The A Players can have bigger numbers, but their multiples may not be that outstanding.  They also point to their big numbers and say rude things like “I want more money”.  That pay rise to keep them will hammer the attractiveness of their multiple pretty quickly.  A Players are like an oasis in the desert.  The vision through the heat haze can lure small business owners to invest, when that may not be the best idea.  It can be better, over time, to build the ranks of the B players from the within the ranks of the C Players.  This is the classis bootstrap approach to building companies.  We all do it at the beginning don't we, but then with some success comes hubris and we start to imagine we can extrapolate our genius.  Before you know it, the multiples have swung in the wrong direction.  For this reason, it is wise to track the multiples down to the last cent and determine to keep on tracking.  When you are small, love your B Players and hold them close.  Invest in them, but don't over invest.  Where is that elusive line of demarcation?  Experience watching newly minted A Players, who were once your B Players, heading for the exits and more money, helps to establish it in your mind. Monitoring the multiple components will create an algorithm indicating how much is enough and how much is too much.  We won't always get it right, but we can get pretty close if we pay careful attention to the issue.  Remember this is art, but with big servings of science tossed into the mix.   

If we try to hide the bad news for the buyer will that work?  How long with it work for?  Bernie Madoff died in prison, his wife left in a perilous state, one son dead from suicide and the other from cancer.  I call that family devastation.  He got away with his lies and cheating for quite a while.  He offered modest, but steady returns.  He told people he had no capacity to take their money, then rang them back at a later stage to say there was an opening.  They were grateful for the chance to give him their money.  The 2008 recession showed who was “skinny dipping” in the markets, as Warren Buffet termed it and Bernie could no longer sustain the fraud. If we are loose with the facts and the truth with our buyers, how will that go toward fostering the re-order culture we want to create?  The usual ploy is to downplay the costs by offering the best case example and not offering the most realistic case.  I was reminded of this the other day, while watching a video from the President of this particular organisation.  He wanted more money, a lot more money for this project.  Let's park the fact he was a hopeless advocate for his case, bumbling his way through his pitch.  The examples he offered were very carefully culled to make the pain look miniscule.  The obvious problem with that though was the vast majority of the stakeholders did not fit into that minimum damage category. He was trying to avoid the pain, but that came across as dodgy and duplicitous.  We have to reach for our financial calculators and work out the damage for ourselves and we are left to our own conclusions.  It would have been much better to meet the elephant in the room head on and explain why the bigger number was a good decision.  That way the seller controls the narrative, not the buyer.  Call out the number, then justify the living daylights out of it.  Talk about the long term benefits and the opportunity costs if we take no action now.  Pile on the value of the proposition in the context of the number.  Trying to talk about the value proposition unrelated to the number doesn't fly.  We need to connect them together as we explain the value.  We unveil the ugly number but wrap the pain up in the value to come, to the glorious future, to the sunny uplands, the better days hereafter.  Context is everything here.  Our hero didn't do that and I believe he missed a great opportunity to get people to back his proposal. When we are selling there is a number attached to the service or good.  Actual tangible objects are easier to understand from a pricing point of view.  Services though are nebulous.  I was selling some training to a major corporation and the people I was dealing with were HR folk located outside Japan.  If you live here, you understand the cost of living and all the relativities which apply around pricing. If you are in Hong Kong or Singapore you don't.  Living in these low tax, low cost environments makes Japan's numbers look stratospheric.  They told me our pricing was much higher than this Hong Kong located from who delivered for them in English speaking countries in Asia.  I asked them why they didn't use them for Japan.  Of course, they didn't know Japan, had no capacity to deliver here in cultural and linguistic contexts, so that is why they were talking to me.  Yet the expectation was my pricing would fit in with this other vendor, based in Hong Kong.  Who were these people?  I checked them out and they are nobodies.  They are not global, they don't have 109 years of credibility or 60 years on the ground in Japan. In the end, I had to do a demonstration of what we would deliver. It blew them away because the value proposition was so much greater than the other firm.  Now the cost, the higher price, the bigger ask, that larger number made sense.  I didn't fold on the price for two simple reasons.  I know our value and I know what companies here will pay for the value we generate.  Yes, it is Covid and yes it is perilous for training companies at the moment, but you have to believe in your value based pricing and you have to be prepared to fire the client. Don't run away from the hard conversations.  Instead find ways to demonstrate and show your value.  Keep honing your persuasion skills to sustain the narrative about why they should buy from you and buy from you now and keep buying from you.  

If we try to hide the bad news for the buyer will that work?  How long with it work for?  Bernie Madoff died in prison, his wife left in a perilous state, one son dead from suicide and the other from cancer.  I call that family devastation.  He got away with his lies and cheating for quite a while.  He offered modest, but steady returns.  He told people he had no capacity to take their money, then rang them back at a later stage to say there was an opening.  They were grateful for the chance to give him their money.  The 2008 recession showed who was “skinny dipping” in the markets, as Warren Buffet termed it and Bernie could no longer sustain the fraud. If we are loose with the facts and the truth with our buyers, how will that go toward fostering the re-order culture we want to create?  The usual ploy is to downplay the costs by offering the best case example and not offering the most realistic case.  I was reminded of this the other day, while watching a video from the President of this particular organisation.  He wanted more money, a lot more money for this project.  Let's park the fact he was a hopeless advocate for his case, bumbling his way through his pitch.  The examples he offered were very carefully culled to make the pain look miniscule.  The obvious problem with that though was the vast majority of the stakeholders did not fit into that minimum damage category. He was trying to avoid the pain, but that came across as dodgy and duplicitous.  We have to reach for our financial calculators and work out the damage for ourselves and we are left to our own conclusions.  It would have been much better to meet the elephant in the room head on and explain why the bigger number was a good decision.  That way the seller controls the narrative, not the buyer.  Call out the number, then justify the living daylights out of it.  Talk about the long term benefits and the opportunity costs if we take no action now.  Pile on the value of the proposition in the context of the number.  Trying to talk about the value proposition unrelated to the number doesn't fly.  We need to connect them together as we explain the value.  We unveil the ugly number but wrap the pain up in the value to come, to the glorious future, to the sunny uplands, the better days hereafter.  Context is everything here.  Our hero didn't do that and I believe he missed a great opportunity to get people to back his proposal. When we are selling there is a number attached to the service or good.  Actual tangible objects are easier to understand from a pricing point of view.  Services though are nebulous.  I was selling some training to a major corporation and the people I was dealing with were HR folk located outside Japan.  If you live here, you understand the cost of living and all the relativities which apply around pricing. If you are in Hong Kong or Singapore you don't.  Living in these low tax, low cost environments makes Japan's numbers look stratospheric.  They told me our pricing was much higher than this Hong Kong located from who delivered for them in English speaking countries in Asia.  I asked them why they didn't use them for Japan.  Of course, they didn't know Japan, had no capacity to deliver here in cultural and linguistic contexts, so that is why they were talking to me.  Yet the expectation was my pricing would fit in with this other vendor, based in Hong Kong.  Who were these people?  I checked them out and they are nobodies.  They are not global, they don't have 109 years of credibility or 60 years on the ground in Japan. In the end, I had to do a demonstration of what we would deliver. It blew them away because the value proposition was so much greater than the other firm.  Now the cost, the higher price, the bigger ask, that larger number made sense.  I didn't fold on the price for two simple reasons.  I know our value and I know what companies here will pay for the value we generate.  Yes, it is Covid and yes it is perilous for training companies at the moment, but you have to believe in your value based pricing and you have to be prepared to fire the client. Don't run away from the hard conversations.  Instead find ways to demonstrate and show your value.  Keep honing your persuasion skills to sustain the narrative about why they should buy from you and buy from you now and keep buying from you.  

The buyer is King.  This is a very common concept in modern Western economies.  We construct our service approach around this idea and try to keep elevating our engagement with royalty. After living in Japan for 36 years and selling to a broad range of industries, I have found in Japan, the buyer is not King. In Nippon the buyer is God. This difference unleashes a whole raft of difficulties and problems. My perspective is based on an amalgam of experiences over many decades and I am generalising of course. Not every buyer in Japan is the same, but those foreigners who know Japan will be nodding their heads in agreement. The most intelligent sales approach the West has come up with is “consultative sales”.  This basic term gets bandied about, in different ways and at different times, but the fundamental concept is to uncover the buyer's needs through asking insightful questions and then determine if you can satisfy that need or not.  By definition, if you use this methodology, you are intelligent.  If you were going to sell to buyers from the world's third largest economy, where 50% of young people are University educated and is known for its advanced technology, then intelligent consultative selling is bound to be your “go to” model.  You will fail because GOD doesn't approve of your funky Western ways. Pitch Momentum Predominates In Japan In Japan, GOD expects a pitchfest.  GOD does not brook questions from low life salespeople.  Instead give your pitch, put it up, so that the buyer can slam closed the two barrels on the shotgun and then blast your pitch to pieces.  Japan is a very conservative business climate where failure is not accepted and mistakes are not allowed.  The Western CFO sharpening the pencil and working out that a 5% defect rate is the most profitable construct, will get a big bonus and a promotion.  Going to a zero defect rate is deemed too expensive and unnecessary.  GOD doesn't accept any defects or mistakes in Japan and to achieve that the science of risk aversion has been taken to the ultimate heights of human possibility. The Japanese buyer wants to hear your pitch, then viciously attack it to satisfy themselves that they are eliminating any possibility of future problems from this supplier.  I was working with a company exporting bark to Japan as part of the gardening boom.  It had to be clean - no pebbles, sand or twigs, just pure bark.  The foreign supplier breezily rang to tell me the shipment had missed the boat, but “no problems, it will be on the next one”.  GOD was apoplectic.  Storage costs in Japan are expensive, so the “just in time” idea of holding little in the way of stock and delivering at the right moment, is well accepted.  Our buyer had just burned all of his buyers down the food chain, because the foreign supplier had missed the boat.  The Japanese buyer's trust, built up over many years with his client base, had been broken. In Japan that trust is almost impossible to rebuild. You Need A GOD Approving Credibility Statement Pitching is a daft idea.  How on earth do you know what to pitch?  Imagine your favourite colour was blue and I turn up to sell you my awesome range of pink.  I am warbling away like a morning lark about the wonder of my pink and you haven't the slightest interest, because you want blue.  If I had asked you a question about your colour preferences, then knowing you wanted blue, I would have only spoken about our range in blue. This is pretty simple.  So, why don't Japanese salespeople ask GOD some questions about what is needed?  Well GOD is a deity too high for that type of inappropriate familiarity and base rudeness.  Consequently, everyone is pitching into the void.  The cunning antidote to this GOD induced pitch problem is to have a well crafted credibility statement.  For example, “We are experts in soft skills training for adult learners.  We recently helped a client's Tokyo leadership team raise their Japanese staff engagement scores by 30% and their New York headquarters was very happy to see that rapid improvement.  Maybe we could do the same thing for you.  I have no idea if that is possible or not, but if you would allow me to ask a few questions, I will soon know if it is a viable option or not”. Switch From The Pitch To Consultative Sales Once GOD acquiesces and allows us to ask questions, then we are out of the pitch business and now immersed in the consultative sales flow.  When asked this way GOD does allow questions in most cases.  Sometimes we will get a stern GOD who says “just give me your pitch”.  We comply because you cannot deny GOD, but mentally we know we should down the lukewarm, cheap, bitter green tea and head for the door, because there won't be any sale here today. Knowing what a client needs is the key enabler to craft a sales presentation tailored to that particular buyer which resonates, excites and satisfies.  GOD just needs some nudging to get religion about consultative sales.  When you have your next sales meeting with a Japanese buyer, mentally picture you are sitting down with GOD and act accordingly.  Be comfortable with formality, silence, hierarchy and sit up straight.  Politely pull the velvet curtain back on your beautifully polished and well practiced credibility statement and wait for “yes, you may ask me some questions”.  Don't say one word after you ask your question, even if it is killing you.  Sit there in silence until you get an answer.  GOD likes to think about it and is in no hurry.    

Confidence sells.  We all know this instinctively.  If we meet a salesperson who seems doubtful about their solution or unconvinced it is the right thing for us, then we won't buy from them.  The flip side is the con man.  They are brimming with brio, oozing charm and pouring on the surety.  They are crooks and we can fall for their shtick, because we buy their confidence.  They are usually highly skilled communicators as well, so the combo of massive confidence paired with fluency overwhelms us and we buy.  We soon regret being conned but we are more cautious thereafter every time we meet a salesperson.  By the way, there is a good chance we are that next salesperson. So how do we navigate the rapids and the rocks here of coming across as confident and being skilful in describing our solution, without tripping the client's internal con man alarm system”?  Ultimately it comes down to your kokorogamae. This Japanese compound word can be translated as our “true intention”.  What are we on about with this sales lark?  Who are we showing up for – ourselves or the client's best interests? With con men it is always their self interest. They keep moving like a shark, swimming around constantly in motion, always looking for something to devour.  If we sit down and examine ourselves we can make a decision.  Are we in sales as a profession – yes or no?  If the answer is no, then please get out of sales immediately. Go. Do something else, because the rest of us, who want to be professional, don't want you polluting our waters.  If the answer is “yes”, then examine what does “professional” actually mean to you? We can get caught up in the finer points of sales technique, but what I am asking is please look at sales and ask what is my true intention here?  If it is to serve the best interests of the buyer then we are getting on the right track.  If the answer included to serve the buyer forever and to be aiming for the reorder, rather than the sale, then go to the top of the class.  That mentality is the antithesis of the con man who knows they have to leave town after the sale, because they have cheated the buyer and can't expect any further business – ever. There is a successful businessman I know, who told me a story about his early days in sales.  He sold an inferior product and the client would only come to realise that reality following the purchase, when the product itself was consumed.  He had to have a big territory from his company, because he could never go back to a town he had sold into.  I had liked him but after hearing that story I liked him a lot less.  He knew the product was inferior and was not matching the claims he was making.  He was confident and fluent. In other words, he was a con man.  His kokorogamae was incorrect and I am wary of him because I am not sure about his mentality in business today.  Maybe he has reformed, but I am in no hurry to find out at the cost of my own personal business.  If our true intention is correct, then being confident and fluent come into their own.  The way we think about the business changes.  We see the lifetime value of the business rather than a transaction.  That means the effort we make to serve the client changes.  The follow up is done in a different and superior way.  The client feels our commitment to their success.  We obviously ask particular questions which would only be of interest to someone who was committed to serving the buyer.  We are thinking as if this was our business and we are looking for ways to build it higher.  The questions around that aim are a lot different to discussions of the features of the widget and the needed logistics to supply it.  We are thinking and talking beyond the initial sale. So ask yourself – what is my kokorogamae?  What types of questions am I asking – are they transactional or long term oriented?  Am I communicating well enough my commitment to help this buyer succeed or am I only operating at a very superficial, order taker level?  Am I thinking about potential buyer problems down the track and how to fix them? Have I wrapped my confidence up in truth?  Record your presentation and have a good listen to it.  Are you coming across as (A) a very basic provider of transactional solutions (B) a con man or (C) a true sales professional who has sorted out their kokorogamae?  If the answer wasn't (C) then there is a lot of work to be done on you by you!    

Buying from people we like and trust makes a lot of sense.  Sometimes we have no choice and will hold our nose and buy from people we don't like.  Buying anything from people we don't trust is truly desperate.  So when we flip the switch and we become the seller to the buyer, how can we pass the smell and desperation tests?  How do you establish trust and likeability when you are on a virtual call with a new potential client?  What do you do about those new buyers who won't even turn on their camera during the call? The best defense against buyer scepticism is to be professional.  You will be well presented whether face to face or online.  In the latter case, you will have a background that advertises your firm and hides the background of your home, because this reduces the distraction factor.  You will use gestures which are in front of your body, so that your arms are not suddenly cut off by the fake background.  You will be sitting up straight in your chair and looking straight at the lens on the computer camera, which you have cleverly arranged to be at eye level. In a face to face meeting, we are communicating quite a lot through our body language, so we are going to be sending out messages of confidence, credibility and trustworthiness.  We are going to be well dressed for all meetings regardless of the medium.  That means put on your business battle dress, which means a jacket and tie for men in the online meeting as well, so that we are not looking too casual. We are going to be precise and clear in our language, with no filler words like ums and ahs diluting the message and annoying the buyer.  Online, the body language factor can be tricky, especially if we are showing any documents or slides on screen. In these cases, we are reduced to a tiny box on screen and so is the client.  The lesson here is to not show too much information on screen such that the size of the faces is maximized, so that we can each read as much body language information as possible.  What about those Japanese clients who only turn on the sound?  We are now at the equivalent of a phone call, except that they can see you and you cannot see them.  We have a couple of choices.  I don't match them with turning my camera off to even out the stakes.  I still want to exude credibility and the camera gives me more scope to do that, than the audio only.  We have to grab the opportunity of the sales call and we, not the buyer, have to run the meeting. Right from the start, I ask them to turn their camera on.  This is difficult for our Japanese staff to do, because for them the buyer is God. If the omnipresent deity doesn't want to reveal themselves to mere mortals, then what right has the lowly supplicant salesperson to demand that of God?  Nevertheless, we have to train them on how to do that.  We need to say to the buyer, “Thank you for your time today for this meeting, I appreciate it given I am sure you are very busy.  Over the last few years, I have done a lot of these meetings online and they always seem to be more productive for both sides, when we both turn the cameras on, so let's both turn our cameras on today for this brief meeting”.  Now what comes next is the key component.  Shut up and do not say one word, no matter how much awkward painful silence ensues.  Sit there and wait for them. Isn't this risky?  In my view, if they won't even come on camera, how successful do you imagine you are going to be selling them something?  By definition they are not a buyer and you are better to go find someone who can turn their camera on and can buy.  What happens if they say they prefer not to turn their camera on?  Mentally reduce the prospects of a subsequent positive outcome to a substantial negative integer and carry on as best you can.  A non-buyer is a non-buyer, online or in person but in sales you often have to grit your teeth and just plough on.  All very depressing isn't it. To just to end on a real downer, let me relate a recent story from the sales trenches here in Tokyo.  My salesguy cold calls a company here.  The person answering the phone says, “we do not deal with people we are not already dealing with”.  Being the supreme optimist from sunny Australia, I encourage him to go once more into the breach and call again at a different time.  Potentially he might encounter a different person and hopefully receive a better reception.  He did just that and he got exactly the same response from another member of staff, “we do not deal with people we are not already dealing with”.  As we say here, “welcome to Japan!”.  

Is selling telling or is it asking questions?  Actually, it is both.  The point though is to know what stories to tell, when to tell them and how to tell them.  We uncover the opportunity through asking the buyer questions about what they need.  Once we know what they need, we mentally scan our solution data base to find a match.  This is when the stories become important, as we explain why our solution will work for them.  What we don't want is having to scrabble together stories on the spot and then make a dog's breakfast of relating the details. These stories have one purpose and that is to give credibility to our solution.  The content should have elements of the context of the solution and evidence of where this has worked for others.  Buyers may not be familiar with your company in detail, so the background of the company told in two to three minutes is a micro story we need ready to go.  Longevity or fresh innovation are the two spectrums.  Either we have stood the test of time and you can trust us or we have come up with something new, that will be a game changer and you need it. Often though salespeople don't know the detail of the company or even if they do, they have never spent any time weaving this into a brief narrative for the buyer.  This requires practice to ensure the micro story is kept tight and packed with credibility.  We cannot go on and on about our own company or the buyer will switch off with disinterest.  They are only going to listen if the background of the company has some strong relevancy for them.  This is why we have to craft that story specifically for them, before we talk to them Our systems, products or services all need explanation about how they will help the buyer.  Just leafing through the five kilo, tome like product catalogue is not enough.  Pitch salespeople will do this.  They will go through the catalogue hoping to snag some buyer interest by using this shotgun pitch approach.  When I had my first sales job selling Encyclopedia Britannica door to door, that is what were taught to do.  We all learned a canned twenty minute walk through the pages of the book, introducing all the cool features.  Not recommended! If we have asked the right questions, we know exactly which few pages in the catalogue to show or which sections of the flyers we need to introduce.  This is where we want our micro story about how this solution was created, including legendary moments of daring do by the R&D team or genius manufacturing breakthroughs or whatever that sounds amazing and clearly differentiates us from the competitor rabble. These have to be short, sharp and terrific.  That means delivery practice. They have to be customized and then memorized for the best content and cadence for that particular buyer.  There are often too many products in a catalogue though, so being able to remember all of them may be unrealistic.  Over time however, there will be a smaller group most important to most buyers and so we can work on remembering the stories associated with these products or services. We definitely need to include client stories there as well.  Telling the buyer what the widget will do is not enough.  What are the benefits the widget will bring to their business. How have other buyers applied the benefits of the widget and what were the results.  Often salespeople never get beyond the widget features and yet we all know we don't buy the features, we buy the benefits, but that doesn't stop a lot of salespeople dwelling on the wrong thing.  The story needs to have included the location, season, characters involved, some drama around an issue the buyer needed to fix and the triumphant outcome resulting from our solution.  We need the context placed in the perspective of the prospective buyer.  What is the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer and how can we meet them there through our narration of our brief story. Sales raconteurs were part of the furniture in the pre and postwar periods, prior to the modern switch to consultative selling. We have moved on from just telling amusing stories and jokes to entertain the buyer.  We have also gone beyond pitching products. Contemporary selling skills means asking clients excellent questions.  This is now a high tech, time poor world and the buyers are busy, busy people.  Our stories are important because they grab the attention of those with short attention spans, by adding some colour to the solution explanation.  Relevant, well delivered stories help us to deepen our engagement with the buyer.  Today we all need to master the art of micro storytelling.  Does your sales team have their micro stories ready to go?  

Japanese salespeople really care about their clients.  This is good, except when it isn't and that is usually when they are prioritizing the client over the firm which employs them.  Japan is a relationship driven, risk averse business culture, where longevity is appreciated.  This often translates into the salespeople being captured by a type of “Stockholm Buyer Syndrome” where they identify with the interests of the buyer, over those of their boss.  Going to bat for the client is admirable because the salesperson is their representative inside the organisation.  It can create problems though, when perspectives become skewed. Price rises, stock shortages, quality issues, staff allocations can create a divide in the priorities of the buyer and seller.  Where does the typical Japanese salesperson plonk themselves down?  Right in the buyer's camp.  They become advocates for the buyer's interests over the firm's interests and this can create tremendous friction inside the organisation. As we know, in Japan the buyer is not a royal, an aristo or a King.  The buyer is a deity, a God and that changes things up considerably.  As the boss, you can hand out the orders but that doesn't mean the salespeople are going to compromise their relationship with the buyer aka God, to keep you happy.  They are thinking about their bonus or commission and the lifetime value of that client.  In that equation, the boss's views and interests are mildly interesting, but not arresting.  So boss orders are issued like confetti and then the Great Obfuscation commences.  Delays, excuses, detours and ninja like silence start cropping up.  The sales staff can always rely on the boss to get distracted and be so time poor that they never get around to following up at all, or at least for some considerable time.  With multinational firms, with any luck, the boss will get transferred or fired and the coast will be clear again.  Or the market shifts, or the currency moves and the whole point becomes moot. The salesperson rule is keep your helmet pulled down tight and low and dig a bit deeper into the foxhole, waiting for the boss order barrage to die down. So as the boss, how do we navigate between ensuring the salespeople take brilliant care of the client, without sending the firm to the edge of bankruptcy?  We have to become much better time managers, because that is the key to following up and keeping track of the change you have initiated.  We need to keep a note somewhere of what was discussed, what was requested and then some milestones to check against for progress.  It could be electronic reminders or something analog, it doesn't matter, as long as it works for you, but do it. Coaching is one of the victims of tech today.  Tech is supposed to give us all more time.  It hasn't. Everyone is so busy, including the boss, that the time is not created for coaching sales staff.  If we want the salesperson to go down there to the client and deliver some distasteful news, they may need some help on how to handle that interview.  Imagine asking a Japanese salesperson who has spent an entire career agreeing to everything the client wants, to head over to the buyer's office and tell them “no” or the new price has been increased to “x”.  They are just not trained for that and have no clue how to do it.  This is where they need help and the busy, busy bee boss has to pony up the time for them to help have that difficult negotiation. Depending on the situation, it may be time for the boss to go and speak with the client.  Hierarchy is important in Japan and having the more senior person turn up, is a mark of respect which the buyer in Japan will appreciate.  It won't make them any happier about the bad news, but at least they feel their due was given.  The salespeople will appreciate it too, because it allows them to keep their relationship with the buyer and heap all the blame on their mad dog, crazy, gaijin boss. The answer is simple and complex at the same time -  encourage a sharp client focus by the salespeople, but keep that tempered within the interests of the firm, by making your time available to follow up, coach or intervene.  

Luck is the nexus of hard work and persistence.  Salespeople need some luck, even if they have to create it themselves.  That old blues refrain “If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all” can't apply. We have to make our own luck and here are seven luck creation principles we can start using immediately to help us get there.  No fancy varsity degrees or puffed up IQ scores needed.  Common sense that morphs to common practice is all we need to change our luck in sales. Arouse in the other person an eager want Salespeople are consumed by what they want and it is usually getting enough commission to be able to eat.  Buyers don't purchase for any other reason than getting what they want.  Our job is to communicate in such a way the client realises they have a want they didn't recognize or give sufficient import to previously.  Opportunity cost is a measure which shows that taking no action is not a zero cost option.  Clients are not in a static market, their competitors are still alive and hungry for market share.  Talk in terms of the other person's interests We have to show that taking action today is needed and that argument has to be based around a good understanding of what the client needs as opposed to wants.  If we honestly have the buyers interests foremost in our minds we can build the trust needed to secure the business. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it Salespeople arguing with buyers is the silliest thing in the world.  Nevertheless, there are legions of salespeople out there trying to slam square pegs into round holes and make a deal fit which should never even be a consideration.  Trying to overpower the buyer to drive them through force of will to buy is ridiculous, has always been ridiculous and will remain ridiculous. Some salespeople don't learn however. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking Talkative salespeople lose a lot of potential business.  Being good in sales means being a tremendously good listener.  Understanding what the client needs is critical to providing a match that works between what you are selling and the gap in the clients business which they need to fix.  When I realise I have violated the 20/80 ratio of salesperson to buyer occupying the airwaves I shut up and ask a question to get them talking.  We all need to be alert to our proclivity to love the sound of our own voice. Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view What are the buyer's fears, headaches and aspirations?  If we don't know these answers then we are not doing our job as salespeople.  Force feeding our pitch down the buyer's throat is stupid, but so many salespeople do just that.  They launch straight into their widget pitch without finding out what the buyer needs.  Something so basic, but so commonly missed in sales. Ask questions instead of making statements If I say it, as a salesperson, it might be true, but if the buyers says it, then it is 100% true without any doubt.  Our communication skills are called upon to make sure we ditch every opportunity to tell the client something and rather replace that statement with the same information, but now reconstituted as a question.  For example, “we have overnight delivery” is statement.  Rather than trotting this out, we say instead, “would having overnight delivery be of value to your business”.  If they say yes, then we can talk about how we do that.  If they say “no”, then we keep fishing for what is of value to them by asking questions Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest We want action.  We want the order right now, without delay. We don't want buyers to think about it or worse, agree in principle and then do nothing about it.  We need them motivated to buy.  What will success mean for them in their business?  What can we do to help them become even more successful?  If we can wrap our sale up in those flags of self-interest, then they will buy and will they buy right now. Keep these principles in your mind when talking to clients.  They are not complex to remember, but are complex to execute.  Well, that is sales and that is the requirement.  Get on to them fright now, delay no more and make sales today.  

An ideal work week for salespeople would start everyday with sales role play with colleagues.  When we do serious exercise we warm up to get into prime condition for becoming better at our activities.  It is the same with sales, we need to warm up before we interact with clients.  We need to get our communication vehicle into top well maintained condition.  By practicising what we will be saying to the client we will be so much better when we come face to face or face to screen with the client.  Yet, how many people do this every day?  How about a couple of times a week?  How about never?  Sadly the “never” answer would be the overwhelming majority.  Clients don't need any preparatory work to say, “your price is too high”.  Buyers are all given this facility at birth, so they are always ready to go.  Salespeople on the other hand, have to work hard at setting up the context for the client, so that the “your price is too high” missile is never launched.  Given this reality why aren't profession salespeople working hard to perfect their skills before they are interacting with buyers? Too busy would be the typical excuse.  Really?  What about between 8.00am and say 8.30am in the mornings?  Probably everyone has this slot open to them.  No one to lead the session is another cop out.  What leadership does it take to buddy up and go through different aspects of the sale's call?  None.  Every sales team could self regulate and practice with each other.  All that is needed is to tell your partner what they were doing well in their role play and then tell them how they could make it even better.  We can also make sales role plays fun.  We can set up some variables for variety.  We can allocate different personality styles to be played out as the buyer.  The Driver – time is money types, “tell me what you want and then buzz off buddy, I'm busy”.  The Amiable – “let's have a cup of tea together and get to know each other better”.  The Analytical, “can I get the data to three decimal places?”.  The Expressive, “let me grab the whiteboard marker and outline for you why we are going to have a spectacular year this year. Later let's catch up for Happy Hour and have a few drinks”.  The buyer in the role play practices adjusting their communication piece to deal with the different types of buyers. Another game is the pushback variable game.  We have different types of objections written down and placed in a container. Like getting an evil fortune cookie, the role play buyer pulls out the objection and the salesperson has to deal with it on the spot.  A few rounds of this and probably most of the typical pushback conversations will have been covered,  the random nature of the  selection means we have to think on our feet.  We can also have another bowl and draw out which personality style is giving us the objection and start coming up with different combinations.  For example, the Driver says your delivery reliability is not any good with an aggressive snarl.  Are you ready for that and how will you handle it? The next one is the Analytical, so you need to go data, evidence and proof heavy, are you ready for it? Your get the idea. The storytelling game is another angle.  It might be the story of your firm in Japan, or the story of your products.  The buyer selects the story theme from the bowl and you have to tell that story in under 2 minutes and thirty seconds.  Why this short time frame? We need enough length to get the story pumping , but short enough that we are not boring our audience.  Three minutes or more in length and we are pushing things with the listener's patience.  Now here is an interesting question?  Do you have your company Japan story ready to go?  What about an individual story about particular products?  People don't keep data in their minds, but they are able to retain interesting stories.  When I was a kid growing up in Brisbane, I remember the radio DJs telling a bunch of trivia related to my favourite bands.  I always thought to myself, wouldn't it have been more beneficial if they had told stories with something more advantageous to the country, than some rock legend's doings.  The point is we can use stories to make sure the buyer remembers us when they are looking around for a solution.  Storytelling is a powerful arrow in our communication quiver.  

In Part One, we talked about Jan Carlzon's insights into the importance of consistent service  being provided to clients.  The buyer mantra is know, like and trust in sales. We also talked about the basics of sales – prospecting and closing. Now are we going to continue the errors, shortcomings and mistakes of last year into the new year or not?  Are we going to just continue doing what we have always done year in, year out or are we going to improve?  We tend to get into a groove in sales, which is perfectly fine, if it is the correct groove.  We start again this year, but are we adding years of sales experience or are we just duplicating the same dubious experience of last year?  We have to make the decision that we are going to become better in all aspects of the basics of selling and build a professional career. As mentioned in Part One, a big element of sales success revolves around our communication skills. These days it is made even more difficult, because we are probably doing this, while selling remotely.  How do you like someone you have never met before in person and only interact with on a small screen during an online call?  In this environment, what we say and how we say it become vital.  Did you know that we lose about 20% of our pep when we are on screen. We have to lift our energy just to get back to parity, let alone start to impress the client with our energy and passion to serve them. You will have noticed what dead dogs a lot of people are when on screen.  They are lifeless and low power. If you are the buyer, they are probably not the type of person you want taking care of your business.  You want a powerhouse who will run through brick walls for you, who will leap tall buildings in a single bound to do the best deal, someone who will take a bullet for you on the pricing. This means the same old, same old, year in, year out sales boogie doesn't function properly and we will lose the customer and the sale.  We have to refine our onscreen communication skills further just to tread water, in order to stay where we are right now. These are the new basics of sales.  However, are salespeople leaping out of bed ready for the day and seeing it as a new day in sales, that requires a set of different skills from last year?  How are we doing with understanding and mastering the new basics for this coming year? Understanding clients seems the most obvious basic skill, but that is a rarity.  You have to wonder how that could be the case?  In Japan, the reason is simple. The communication flow is one way.  The seller is trying to “convince” the buyer to buy.  To do that they trot out their widget catalogue and describe it in vast detail. The problem with this “no questions asked” approach is you don't know enough information. Does the buyer need that widget in pink or blue?  Waxing lyrical about the bountiful aspects and many wonderful attributes of your blue widget is ridiculous and pointless because the buyer needs the widget in pink.  You need to know that and the way to find out is to ask the buyer questions, rather than blindly pitching into the dark. The Japanese client is a problem too.  Over time, they have trained salespeople to offer up their pitch, so that they can cut it to shreds.  They do it this way in order to satisfy themselves this is a low risk purchase.  They prefer the “smash the walnut with a sledgehammer” approach. Risk aversion is fair enough and nobody wants to make an incorrect purchase or waste resources.  Pitching is a total waste, however salespeople and buyers haven't woken up to that fact yet.  A Japanese salesman who came to see me promptly sat down and immediately went through his entire slide deck adding his commentary.  He didn't ask me one teensy-weensy question about my business or what was the problem I was trying to fix.  I teach sales, so I was amazed and wondered how long it would be before he would ask me a question.  Well he didn't.  He just pitched and pitched and pitched.  We wasted twenty five minutes of that meeting going through stuff of no value or interest to me the buyer.  I wanted pink but he kept talking about blue the whole time. If he had taken a few moments to ask me some questions, he could have zeroed in on the two slides that were pertinent to me, in that whole massive deck. We could have had a much more meaningful and fruitful conversation.  He didn't get the sale and no wonder. Whether we are selling online or selling when person to person, we need to ask questions.  Japan being Japan, we need that mezzanine step of first getting permission to ask questions and that is not difficult.  Are you or your colleagues asking for permission?  Salespeople in Japan need to start the new year with a new realisation that pitching is inefficient and basically self-defeating.  Let's start the new year reflecting on the true basics of selling.  Then we can put those basics into practice, in order to get the results we need.  The equivalent of football blocking and tackling is what we need in sales.  If we salespeople don't get it, then this will be another year of opportunity which has slipped by, eluding our grasp.  We simply cannot afford that year in, year out business anymore.  

Journeymen salespeople are starting another year of selling.  Maybe their financial year is a calendar year or maybe the year wraps up in March.  It doesn't matter, because there is a mental trick we play on ourselves that January 1st represents a new start, a new year.  Sales can be exhausting and 2025 will not go down as a bumper year for the vast majority of salespeople.  Yet, here we go again.  How do we get ourselves back up into the saddle on that bucking bronco that is the sales life?  In Japan, very few salespeople are basing their livelihood on full commission sales.  Here we have either a base and bonus or a base and commission system.  That means that if we don't sell much we can still eat.  So the economic pressure here is less intense than in other markets.  It is also tricky to get fired for poor performance in Japan.  The courts expect the employer to reassign the sales failures into other jobs more suited to their lack of talent.  So the downside of not selling is not that cut throat here.  Also, the vast majority of salespeople are amateurs, not properly trained in the profession.  Rank amateurs bumbling their way along is the norm here, so no need to feel any social pressure either. In these circumstances it can be as if everyone in sales in Japan is sitting in a lukewarm bath – not too hot and not cold, but also not very exciting either.  “Blocking and tackling” was the basics of winning football games according to Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers.  So with sales, prospecting and closing are the basics of sales.  We have to be farmers and hunters.  Finding new buyers and treasuring our existing buyers, looking for the reorder sequence to kick in.  Know, like and trust are the basics of sales.  The buyer has to know who we are.  If they have never heard of us or never met us, then they won't be buying anything from us.  The internet is a godsend because buyers can find us to solve a problem they are having and we didn't lift a finger.  All that finger lifting was done by the marketing department spending dough and presto, we get the leads.  Okay, we get the lead but so what?  Will the buyer like a total stranger and even more importantly, trust a total stranger.  What did you parents tell you – don't talk to strangers!  Therefore the initial touch with the buyer is critical.  It isn't a one and done thing though, because there is bound to be numerous touches on the way through.  Jan Carlzon's book “Moment of Truth” is a must read on the importance of every part of the organisation taking ownership and accountability for the customer.  This sounds simple enough. In my experience, Japanese businesses don't teach accountability to the entire team.  Salespeople are expected to be accountable and bend over backward to meet the buyer's requests. The person picking up the phone though didn't get the email about first impressions, accountability or ownership.  They got the email about if they transfer a salesperson through they will get severely scolded.  Because they don't know who is calling, they have found it is best to treat everyone as guilty until proven innocent and be as cautious as possible with strangers.  If the buyer calls for you and you are not there, the person picking up the phone is not helpful.  They say stuff like “they are not at their desk now” and say nothing more.  This forms a negative impression about your company and its care for the buyer.  Your own team are killing the like and trust bit for you with the customer.  This was what Carlzon found.  You have to educate everyone to think differently about keeping the sense of ownership high and the like and trust part powerful. Another part of the like and trust component are our communication skills.  If we sound like we don't know what we are doing, then the client won't like that.  If we say one thing but the truth proves to be something else, buyers definitely won't like that either. I had a person I know here in Tokyo call me up about some animation sales tools.  I was interested and we had a conversation about it.  It turned out he was actually just fronting for the American firm and my next conversation was with someone from the headquarters.  What the local guy told me was different to what the American rep told me.  I immediately lost trust in both sides. I never went any further with the deal and I would never do business with the local guy ever again. This is another Carlzon nominated fail point.  As the conversation moves around through the organisation, there has to be integrity, consistency and truth.  In Part Two we will continue to look at the other key basics, the blocking and tackling of the sales process.  

There is a process to sales.  Amazingly, most salespeople don't know what it is.  They are either ignorant, because they haven't been trained or arrogant, arguing they won't be entangled by any formulistic wrangling.  They say they follow their muse and let the sales conversation go where it may, because they are “spontaneous” creatures, residing in the “here and now”.  Both answers are rubbish.  There are professional salespeople and there are dilettantes. Let's be professionals and master the sales process.  We are going to go deeper into the sales process and look at some of the inner workings. Gluing the whole process together are seven bridges to move us through the sales continuum Bridge number one is the move from casual chit chat at the beginning of the sales meeting to a business discussion with the buyer.  When is the best time to make that move and what do you say?  The opening conversation will flow to and fro, as various small talk questions are answered and everyone becomes comfortable with each other.  Let the buyer finish their point.  Pause to make sure they have actually finished and are not about to expand their point.  Then we simply say, “thank you for your time today”.  This signals, now is the time to get into the sales conversation proper. Bridge number two comes after we have explained our agenda and after checking if they have any extra points, we start to move through the points we have chosen.  The agenda gives the sales call structure and helps to control where the conversation will go.  We must ask the buyer if they have any points of their own. This is important because it gives them control over what we will discuss and that makes them feel better about owning our agenda. Bridge number three is when we ask for permission to ask questions.  We have outlined the agenda and now it is time to get down into the murky depths of their business.  Never forget we are “blowins” off the street, the great unwashed. They are about to be asked to open up the kimono and share all of their mysteries and secrets with a total stranger.  We need to point to some evidence showing where we have been able to help a similar company, in the same industry.  We then proffer, “maybe we could do the same for you.  In order to understand if that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”. Bridge number four is what we say after hearing all of the answers to our questions.  We are now in a position called the “moment of truth”.  We have to make the decision for them concerning if they can buy and what they should buy.  We know our line-up of solutions in depth, to a degree they never will.  If we decide we don't have the proper solution for them, we should fess up now and then hightail it out there, to find the next prospect.  If we can help them, then we need to announce it clearly and loudly. We need to reference some of the things they told us in the questioning phase.  They mentioned to us the key thing they are looking for and also why achieving that is important to them personally.  We now wrap our “yes we can do it” answer around those two key motivators for the sale. Bridge number five comes after we have gone through (a) the facts, (b) the benefits, (c) the evidence and then (d) the application of the benefit.  This will be news to a lot of salespeople in Japan, because they have never gotten beyond (a), the detail, the spec, the nitty gritty of their widget.  After we have told the story of how wondrous things will be for them after purchasing our widget, we then ask the trial close question.  It is not complicated and anyone can memorise it.  Here it is, “how does that sound so far?”. Bridge number six comes after the  buyer answers our trial close with an objection.  There has been a gap in our process located in the questioning component. We have not flushed out their concern and dealt with it already, so that is why it pops up here at this point.  We ask why it is an issue for them and we keep asking if there are any other issues.  We need to do this in order to know which key concern we need to answer.  Once we have prioritised their concerns, we then give our answer to the major objection.  We then ask, “does that deal with the issue for you?”.  We do this to check we don't have any residual resistance preventing them from giving us a “yes” answer when we ask again for the order.  We just say, “shall we go ahead then?”, or “do you want to start this month or next month?” or “do you want the invoice sent to you by post or can we send it by email?”. Bridge number seven comes after they say, “yes” they will buy.  We must be very careful what we say next. We must bridge across to the delivery discussion of how and when they will receive their purchase.  Under no circumstances keep selling at his point.  Random things blurted out after receiving their “yes” may sidetrack them to a concern they hadn't thought about. Or it may get them confused about whether now is the time to buy or should they wait until a bit later?  Rather, get deep into the detail of the next steps immediately and stop selling. Salespeople need to know the sales process and the glue that holds it all together.  That is the mark of the professional and the path to sales success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been in sales since 1988, with a slow, then fast migration of skills.  I started my own small one-man consultancy in 1988 in Brisbane to assist businesses wanting to create revenues with Japan.  I moved into commercial real estate in 1989, then into market entry in 1992, retail banking in 2003 and then selling soft skills training in 2010. I began my personal study of sales around 1990.  The company didn't provide any sales training, so I had to source it myself.  I attended Tom Hopkins two-day Sales Seminar in Brisbane and that considerably boosted my understanding.  The organisation I worked for in Japan brought in a sales trainer and I worked with him as his assistant for delivering sales training through N.E. Asia.  When I joined Dale Carnegie I undertook the sales training they had and that further refined my skills to the point where I was able to certify as a sales trainer. If there is one area I see as a weakness in myself and for most people in sales it is asking for referrals.  Japan shouldn't make any difference when it comes to asking for referrals so I don't think there is an market specificity preventing us from doing it. I had an uncomfortable experience when someone supplying me with personal services did a hard sell to me on referring him to other potential buyers.  I had bought from him a few times, so there was a relationship there, but I always felt a bit wary about him.  He is clearly focused on the money and fair enough, but I shouldn't be feeling that.  So when he pushed me hard on getting new business from him I didn't like it at all.  It felt dirty and unnecessary.  Why do I owe him anything and have to introduce my contacts to him to grow his business.  What had he ever done for me to grow my business - a big fat zero?  He presumed that because I was a client, he had the right to ask me for referrals, but I didn't feel he had won that right at all. So where is the line where we can comfortably ask the buyer for introductions to other people to get new business?  I think the personal relationship is important, but they don't have to be your bosom buddy in order to ask.  Of course, if that is the case then it is easier. Firstly, we have to have built the trust with the buyer by delivering value for them.  I try to make the buyers my friends, but that doesn't happen in every case.  The buyer becoming a friend shouldn't be part of the qualifying process to be to ask for a referral.  As long as we have delivered value we have a starting point. The way of asking is critical.  The person I referred to, asked me in an extremely aggressive way and I didn't like that at all.  One of my failings is if people become aggressive with me, I instantly respond in kind.  As I get older though, I am getting better at dealing with this flaw and when he was aggressive with me I didn't say anything, so that is progress. The takeaway for me was never ask for a referral in an aggressive to too assertive fashion. Keep in mind the buyer doesn't owe us anything.  We need to remind them of the value we have provided. With this platform we can ask for their help.  We should never ask a very broad request such as , “Do you know anyone who would benefit from our training?”.  We have just opened the floor gates for them and they have so many possibilities they can't fix on any that are helpful. It is like those consumer experiments where counterintuitively they have found reducing the number of choices on the shelves helps to move more product. We need to zero in on some choices for them to make from a limited number of people.  We can say, “You have mentioned to me that you felt you received value from the training we provided.  I wonder amongst your circle of family, friends, colleagues or business contacts, you can think of someone who would equally get value?”. We have reduced the entire Universe of people down to four buckets.  We want them to be able to see the faces ion their minds eye so that the process is controllable.  If they are struggling then we zero in on one of the buckets to see if we can spark some recognition of who might benefit.  If they have someone on mind, we have to make the follow-up super easy and a light touch for them.  If we ask them to call that person for us, while we feel this is perfect,  they will feel that is too much.  After all, they don't work for us.  However, if we say, “would you mind if I mentioned that we did some training with you and you thought they might also benefit from the same training?”.  That is a light touch and easy for them to agree to.  We might also ask them for the contact details of the person they have in mind and again that is an easy ask. We can copy them in on the email if we send an email and then that tells the person we are contacting that we have permission to make contact. If we do it by phone then we need to drop the name of the person who gave us the referral to add trust to the basis of the call.  My parents thought the flow of Philip Gregory Story was better than Gregory Philip Story, so they made that choice as my official name order and had always called me Greg.  I have had the experience of people calling me up saying, “Hi Phil, XZY suggested I give you a call”.  I instantly know they are lying to me and cannot be trusted. Most people won't have that handy device available, so we have to assure the person that the referrer did genuinely make that suggestion. In my case, I would say, “Tony Smith was in my High Impact Presentations class last Thursday and Friday and he really made some great progress in just the two days of that programme. It was clear to both Tony and me how much he gained from the training. I asked him if there were others he thought might equally get value for the course and he gave me your name, hence the reason for my call”. By being so specific it is easier for the person I am trying to sell to, to know this is genuine. If we deliver value for the buyer, then we should make that extra effort to see if there are others we can help, who they know.  Not everyone will want to do that, but even so, if we ask in a gentle way, we won't create doubt and destroy the relationship. The worst thing we can do is to continue not asking.  There are simple ways to do this and we should start doing them – including me!!!

Storytelling is usually associated with novels of hundreds of pages, movies lasting two to three hours, television drama series fifty minutes long per episode.  In sales in Japan we get a mini window to the buyer that, hopefully, in the first meeting will last an hour.  During the second meeting, to present the solution, we will also get around the hour the buyer has allocated for the meeting with us. In both cases, we have to make sure the buyer, rather than us, is doing most of the talking.  That is especially the case in the first meeting, because we don't actually have any clear, in depth idea about what they need.  The time should be spent in two phases – one establishing credibility and trust and the second phase devoted to asking questions to uncover their needs.  The main opportunity for telling micro stories in phase one is around our background and experience.  The buyer wants to know who they are dealing with.  They want someone who knows what they are doing, someone who can help them and we need to fill in those details for them.  We have all had the experience of buying something, we ask a question and the clerk says, “one moment please” and then disappears to ask someone else the answer.  This is never a confidence builder.  We immediately recognise we are being served by the clueless.  That is the danger for us in sales in B2B situations, where we have to answer their questions without having to get the answer from someone else. We need to tell stories which will assure the buyer we are an expert in this field and we can give them concrete and valuable assistance to solve their complex problems. Usually, there is a rapport building phase at the start and this is where we can package up a mini-bio of who we are.  Remember, we are a stranger to the buyer, yet we expect them to unveil all of their corporate problems and challenges.  Recall what your parents told you: “don't talk to strangers”, yet here we are trying to sell them something and they don't know who we are. In Japan, in that rapport building phase, I am often asked about why I came to Japan.  I have a plan for that question and so should you.  I mention I came for two years to study Japanese at Jochi University as a Japan Education Department scholar and this has turned into 40 years.  This gives the listener a lot of confidence that I know Japan and that I am an “insider” not just a gaijin or “outsider”.  I also make a subtle point that actually the real reason I came to Japan was to study traditional Shitoryu karate.  This reinforces for the listener that I know Japan at the deepest level having trained in the martial arts here – one of the last bastions of old style traditional culture. Establishing my Japan credentials isn't enough though, because the issues at hand are commercial and I need to demonstrate that I know what I am doing so that I can help them.  Having a strong brand like Dale Carnegie is helpful because I always mention that we started the training in Japan in 1963.  This tells them we have a lot of experience in Japan, so we can understand their problems. I give them a very brief bio of Mr. Mochizuki, who launched Dale Carnegie in Japan, to personalise the point. In the second meeting, when presenting the solution, it is vital to have stories of how other buyers succeeded with the solution.  These don't have to be long stories, but they need to do three things: one, put flesh on the bone of what the solution does for the buyer in application; two, explain how that buyer was able to adapt the solution to their business specificities; and three, talk about the success they had with it. We may not be able to mention the name of the other buyer, for confidentality reasons, and we should definitely point that out.  No buyer wants to hear all about the juicy details of another company and then hand over the details of their own company to you, knowing you have such a big mouth and will go around telling everyone about their secret business, if they do business with your firm.  We just have to make the point it is a company very similar to the current buyer. We should talk numbers, best expressed as percentages of growth, or speedy turnaround or major cost reductions, etc.  Japanese companies rarely want to be the first mover because of their risk aversion.  They prefer others to trial it first and then they can study the results to see if it is for them. We don't have that much speaking time with the buyer, so we need to have micro stories we can draw on to bolster our credentials as a reliable, trustworthy partner.  We also need to allay their fears that what we have won't work for them, by telling micro stories of where it has worked for other buyers.  These stories can't be just pulled together out of thin air in the moment.  We need to have worked these up for meetings with clients before we meet them, so that they are lean and pared down for easy, yet fast retelling. Stories need data and data needs stories in sales.  We should never forget this golden rule when selling in Japan.  

Bosses love hunters. They beat the bushes and find new clients for the business. Usually, they love the thrill of the hunt and wrestling the buyer down to do the deal. CRM systems, paperwork, boring follow-up detail—not so much. This is the preserve of the farmer. That person you can entrust the client to, knowing that they will be well taken care of. The follow-through will be well executed and, in a fair wind, will remain a repeat buyer. I'm a hunter and easily bored with the mundane aspects of sales. I'm also the boss, so I know how we need both hunters and farmers operating at peak performance levels. Here are some aspects of the farmer we need to perfect. 1.        Building and Maintaining Strong Relationships Trust based on a track record of reliability and predictability is crucial. This calls for clear, frequent, and transparent communication with the buyer's side. Omotenashi—service—means anticipating and exceeding the client's needs. Client needs change, their internal structures change, and we must be on top of those changes in order to remain relevant.Farmers are good at the detail and at scheduling regular contact. Hunters have already moved on to the next exciting deal. 2.        Deep Understanding of the Client Every industry and every sector is different, and every firm is unique. So the ability to tailor services specifically for that buyer is needed. That means keeping up to date with changes in the industry, economic growth rates, currency rates, inflation rates, supply chain, etc. The farmer knows who the players are on the buyer's side and what interests and concerns them. The key decision-makers can also change. Farmers keep abreast of these changes, always sensitive to wind direction fluctuation, which could eject them from the ongoing business. They know what their counterparts' KPIs are and how they are measured and rewarded. They have to know what the personal interests of the buyer are in order to provide a holistic solution for them. 3.        Strategic Account Planning Design-in is the holy grail in manufacturing. It means your component or service is designed into the product or process from the start. To get to that stage, we have to know the client's plans, objectives, timelines, milestones, quality thresholds, price points, etcetera. To keep the relationship humming along, we have to stress the value we bring and accommodate the needs of the buyer from the point of view of lifetime value and not this month's sales quota. Not always easy, though. Headquarters mandate cost-cutting, and things go south very rapidly. That agreed deal is now shattered on the rocks, and the details are now flotsam and jetsam being pounded by the surf. We serve a lot of folk in the automobile sector, and we have had two major clients really pull back on their spending. They're being hammered by their Chinese EV competitors. One recently celebrated the appointment of a new CEO and promptly ceased all training and froze their programs. Ouch. The other recently informed us that the next contract will be decided by Dutch auction. The last thing you want to hear in a sales negotiation is the phrase "Dutch auction." The new contract bid starts at zero and goes up, and whoever raises their hand first gets the deal at that price point. There's no differentiation here for a quality-versus-price comparison. It is a very unsophisticated methodology but highly in favour of the low-price buyer. Procurement department buyers, who see all items like nuts and bolts—basically undifferentiated—love it. If you're in the service sector, where there are vast differences in quality provision, you are not going to love this way of thinking. Ouch. 4.        Collaborative Problem-Solving The farmer sees themselves as an extension of the client's firm and gets involved to help solve their problems. They do this through the prism of their product or service. They become an outside consultancy looking for areas where they can add value. Often, as salespeople, we see across many industries. Companies in industry A hardly ever mix with companies in industry Z, but we do. We see what works and doesn't work across the range of our clients and their problems. We can bring in things we've seen work well elsewhere and help the buyer achieve the goals they have set. Let's remember that farmers are important in any sales team. Hunters may be very flashy, flamboyant, and exciting, but they often create chaos and despair. They often lose repeat business because of their lousy follow-up and poor personal organisational skills. Farmers can glue the customer to us and keep that flywheel turning. Bravo to the farmers out there.      

I received this note following my attendance at a networking event run by one of the foreign Chambers of Commerce here in Tokyo. “Dear Greg Story , I hope this message finds you well. It was a pleasure meeting you, and I truly enjoyed our conversation and the valuable insights you shared. Please feel free to reach out if there is anything I can assist you with. I would be delighted to stay connected and explore potential opportunities for collaboration. Thank you again for your time, and I look forward to speaking with you in the future. Best regards,”. Frankly, I was shocked to get this note.  It was from a Japanese businessman, so bravo on the quality of the English.  It was sent that same afternoon, so well done on the cadence.   My shock was induced by the fact that we didn't have anything even faintly resembling an insightful conversation.  Our conversation, such as it was, can be recorded as relatively brief. This note, upon receipt, came across as a “canned” response which felt as if he probably sends this out to every man and his dog, so totally non-tailored or personalised and therefore a comprehensive fail.  He was in the property management field, he told me, and he made no effort to filter me to see if I was a prospect who could become a client.  Yet he bothered to send me this note.  What was the point?  Honestly, when we are networking, we need to do much better than this. In my case, I only send follow-up notes to people who are high possibility prospects.  How do I know that?  I filter them during our conversation.  I only need a few pieces of information to work out if there is any potential gold in this conversation for my business.  Their meishi or business card is the first filter. What is their position inside the company?  Are they a decision-maker who can buy my training?  For me, the second filter is company size.  If they are under thirty people, then the chances of us doing any in-house training delivery is slight. The modest numbers of staff make it hard to justify the expense.  However, they could be a candidate for sending even just one person to our public classes – a light and inexpensive option.  If they have over thirty, then in-house delivery is a possibility.  The next filter is, do they have any need? On the back of my card, I list the following information:  “Soft skills” training, so that it is clear we are doing corporate training.  I have these categories: Leadership, Sales, Presentations, Communication, DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and Executive Coaching, all prominently displayed.  On the spot, I go through these with the person I have just met explaining what we do. In a light-hearted manner, I then ask them if they need any of these?  But I am deadly serious about trying to unearth any hints regarding what would help them grow their business.    Some people flippantly say, “we need all of them”.  That is okay, because I am not so easily deflected. I then push them for which one in particular would be the best for their people. I am trying to filter to see if there is a real need there or not.  If there is, I will tell them I will get back to them after the meeting and mention “let's get together”.  I am conditioning them to have no surprise or resistance when my email turns up trying to set a time and date for our meeting. If my filters eliminate them as a potential client, then I am pleasant, but I move on and try and find someone who is a buyer. Some people say to me they find they get stuck at networking events and spend the whole time talking to one person because they don't know how to break off the conversation and meet other people.  Here is how I do it: “It has been a pleasure chatting with you.  Why don't we try to meet some other people while we are here?  I look forward to catching up again in the future” and I shake their hand and simply walk away. For networking and follow-up, the process has to be well organised and congruent.  There is no point sending a follow-up email to someone who is clearly not a prospect.  There is no point sending a follow-up email unless you have already set it up that you will do so, rather than doing it out of blue like this gentleman did with his all weather template. I have used the example of my training company for the filters, but take your own industry sector and work out what you need to know to succeed in your business.  What would be some relevant filters you can apply to strangers to know which basket to place them in? People who don't make their living selling, hearing this brutal clarity, may feel this seems mercenary.  Trust me, they have no idea they are alive.  Sales is a rough and tough profession and a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll. Our most important tool is our time and how we use it.  We cannot be dilettantes and swan around in a daze, like most people I meet at networking events.  We have to be laser focused on getting new clients and we must let nothing distract us from that pursuit. When civilians criticise me for this hardheaded businesslike approach, I just ask sweetly, “how do you find new clients when networking?”.  I then ask whether they think their own salespeople are strong enough in finding new buyers, and are they committed enough to growing the company by finding new clients?  Finally, I ask “what would be the impact if your salespeople adopted this approach and used their networking time as effectively as possible?”.  They go very quiet in response and cease their uneducated critique of this pro-salespeople's hard won expertise, as they should.   

“Thank you for submitting your proposal for our capability development project.  We appreciate the time and effort your team invested in preparing the proposal.  After careful consideration, we have decided to proceed with another vendor whose proposal more closely aligns with our current needs and strategic direction.  This decision was not easy, given the high quality of all the submissions we received.” I have stopped crying now, but this is the response I got from the buyer. Obviously, I have looked back on this deal and have tried to fathom what went wrong.  They contacted us, so that means they were a hot prospect looking around for possible providers.  I met with them face to face to ascertain what they wanted.  This proved to be a little tricky because they were a bit vague on what they actually wanted.  As is often the case with HR people, they are casting a broad net to see what they can drag in, because they themselves don't have a lot of expertise regarding possible content. I duly took copious notes, suggested some things during that first meeting to see if there was any interest.  There was interest, but looking back, I wonder now if that was only because they didn't have a clear idea of what they wanted, so everything sounds good in that case. I didn't just send them the proposal by email.  I organised a second face-to-face meeting to walk them through the proposal, so I could gauge their body language and deal with any issues on the spot if they were unclear or uncertain about the contents.  All textbook stuff. I left that meeting feeling like I had the winning formula for them, so I was devastated when I got this rejection. Was it the money?  It could have been, because my pricing was 16% higher than what they spent with another company for the previous year's training.  I didn't think that was outrageously different though, and I tried to assuage the price rise with loading on the value we provide.  When the HR people see the training supply as a commodity, however, with no differentiation, then price becomes the easiest tool to wield. I could have just matched the price with what they paid the previous year, but if you believe in what you are doing, you have to defend the quality, the brand, and the differentiation you bring to the equation.  It is a risk and in this case, it didn't fly. Was it the content?  This is hard to say because their needs were open and broad.  They didn't really have a clear picture of what they wanted, which was good and bad.  Good, because it opened up a lot of possibilities and bad because it opened up too many possibilities.  We all have our limitations as suppliers and our areas of strength.  We tend to work within certain frameworks, because that is the content we are most familiar with and most confident in.  It is always better to have a buyer who is very specific about what they want, and there is the downside that you don't have it at all.  That is okay, because that at least tells you why you failed to get this deal.  It is that buyer vagary which is frustrating, because you could have made the deal but you are never really sure at the end as to why you didn't. Was the chemistry not there with the buyers?  I would say in this case I was too confident about the chemistry.  I thought I did a good job in both meetings with connecting with the two HR representatives.  One of the problems with chemistry, though, is that it isn't a huge differentiator and it is easy for a rival to match you in this element.  Salespeople, by definition, are good with people, good communicators and we are all the same in that regard. Maybe my successful rival was equally charming and engaging and what I was doing wasn't a big enough differentiator to make a difference in the end.  One thing which on reflection may have been a mistake is we spoke in English.  We could have chosen either language, but one of them seemed to want to speak in English and the more junior person in Japanese.  It may have been better for me to speak in Japanese with them.  There were no communication issues with our conversation, but it may be a comfort factor which I could have paid more attention to.  This was a multinational company so English is expected by people in their roles, but we are still in Japan. I don't believe this was a deal breaker at all, but it is something to consider.  The argument can both ways also that speaking in English with a multinational company emphasises your suitability for them over a pure Japanese domestic supplier.  It is not definitive, but something I will pay more careful attention to going forward. Can I get a clear answer as to why the deal didn't get done?  Basically no.  The buyers don't want to get into justifying their decision for you. They have taken it and they have told you there were multiple options and they chose another one rather than you.  In these cases, I just write back and say, “thank you for letting me know.  I look forward to the next opportunity to work together with you”.  I leave it at that and accept the umpire's decision and move on. Getting rejected has a negative psychological effect on all of us in sales, so we have to be very careful we don't let it impact our confidence or self-belief.  In my case, I always say to myself, “they are stupid not to take my offer”. I reflect on what I did and what happened, but I always put the blame on the buyer.  This may seem irrational and delusional at one level, but it makes a lot of sense for when you fall down seven times and need to get up the eighth and keep going.  My psychological equilibrium in sales is more important than accuracy about who is to blame for this failure.  Sales is rough and mean and we have to protect ourselves because most times we don't get the deal. We cannot allow that to impinge on our optimism that we will get the next deal.  

n the West, we often emphasise that inaction doesn't necessarily mean safety for the buyer, and there is a real cost to taking no action. We talk about the “opportunity cost” of doing nothing. A buyer's competitors aren't stagnant; they're actively seeking new advantages with something better or more advanced. The market is never still either, as it's always shifting, and companies need to be agile to keep pace. Economic conditions are equally unpredictable, with movements in currency, oil, gold, agribusiness etc., and other factors creating constant change. In this volatile environment, companies can't afford to stand still. Innovation, adaptation, and flexibility are essential. Any opportunity to strengthen an offer relative to competitors must be seized and maximised. The ideal outcome is one where our offer can't be easily compared to what salespeople know as the “Matrix from Hell.” This matrix, favoured by procurement departments, lists items to be purchased down the vertical axis and supplier names across the top on the horizontal axis. Prices are then compared, and the cheapest option is chosen. We don't want our offer to fall into this pricing matrix. Instead, we aim to differentiate our offer so that it defies easy comparison. We need to add value beyond price alone. If our offer lacks the necessary depth, we need to think creatively about what we can provide to stand apart, avoiding price reductions or loss-leader tactics. Our goal is to create “apples to oranges” comparisons, making it impossible for price to be the only factor in the buying decision. As a result, we constantly highlight the downside of inaction to the buyer. In this VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous), how can any company feel confident doing things as they have always done them? The ground is shifting beneath our feet, and companies need to be capable of responding. As salespeople, we represent something new and different for the buyer, offering them a lifeline to navigate the daily VUCA challenges. Do Japanese buyers see it this way? Unfortunately, they don't. Change in Japan is a double-edged sword. Intellectually, it's acknowledged as necessary, but buyers instinctively resist it. They closely associate change with risk. Culturally, Japan emphasises group dynamics, partly to disperse any risk among all members, so no individual is held accountable if things go wrong. Japanese salespeople, for instance, prefer bonuses over individual commissions, as they feel more comfortable being rewarded as a group. Buyers share this perspective. They don't want to be singled out over a purchasing decision. Collective agreement to change suppliers or add a new supplier feels much safer. The ringi seido system of collective decision-making perfectly suits this desire to spread accountability. By obtaining the seals or hanko of all key decision-makers on a proposal, the potential blame is shared if something goes wrong. A salesperson parachuting in with their shiny idea about the opportunity cost of doing nothing quickly finds themselves in a thorny position in Japan. No one here is likely to get fired for missing an opportunity. Buyers fear mistakes far more than they fear a lack of urgency. With no pressure to act, talk of “missing out” seems quaint. Here, doing nothing isn't equated with loss; in fact, it's often praised, as it avoids risk and keeps the enterprise safe. This cultural inertia partly explains Japan's relatively small venture capital market, the lack of unicorns, and the many “zombie companies” that neither thrive nor disappear but manage to survive. Everyone involved seems determined to make no changes, ignore opportunity costs, and look away from change, hoping it will pass them by. If you're passionate about motivating buyers to embrace change or realise the consequences of opportunity cost, be prepared to feel like you're talking to yourself. Japanese buyers see no upside to making changes and plenty of downsides, so they tend to hold their ground. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but we should avoid making opportunity cost our primary “hail Mary” play to close the deal.      

One of the worst combos in sales is a virtual meeting online and the buyer says, “send me your proposal” or even more insane, you volunteer to send it. Even if you managed to sit down face-to-face with a buyer, do not under any circumstances finish up the meeting with this sentence, “I will send you my proposal”.  Sale is hard enough as it is, so why do salespeople decide they are not living on the edge enough and make these types of ludicrous statements? We usually get one hour in the first meeting to go through the first part of the sales cycle: build rapport with small talk, get permission to ask questions, ask questions to understand 1. where they are now, 2. where they need to be, 3. why they aren't there already and 4. what will it mean for this individual if it all goes swimmingly? This requires that as the salesperson, we shut up and let the buyer do most of the talking and that we take very good notes. One handy note taking technique is to divide the note page into four quarters representing these four questions and then write the answers in the corresponding quarter of the page.  If you have missed something, it becomes immediately obvious, because there are few or no notes in that quarter. In our proposal, we will outline what we have understood is their need. We will then outline what we suggest is the best solution to deliver on this need and then explain what it will cost.  Of course we never ever use words like “price”, “cost”, etc and instead we only refer to the “investment”. This sounds infinitely simple, but have we understood their need?  Have they actually been totally forthcoming about the full gamut of their need?  Are they holding back key information we need to know in order to provide the best solution for them?  Why would they not share that critical information with us?  We assume they want to buy something.  Maybe they have a vague interest.  We have managed to blag our way into a meeting with the buyer, but their motivation isn't high. They may have a mild dose of curiosity or they may be a psychopath who loves to torture poor, unsuspecting salespeople. Salespeople generally have poor listening skills.  They are often not really listening completely, because they hear one piece of the puzzle and their brain inflames with an internal conversation about the clever next thing they are going to say. At this point, they actually stop listening to the buyer.  Or they may hear an objection and the brain goes into overdrive with what they are going to say to destroy that objection. They stop listening to all the other vitals hints from the buyer about what they need, in order to concentrate on their sparkling riposte. Consequently, what they regurgitate in the proposal may have missed the mark or more likely, missed key bits which the buyer needs to hear about in order to organise the Purchase Order. Given this likelihood, imagine what a disaster it is to send the document off and allow the buyer to sit there and silently think, “I am dealing with an idiot who has not understood fully what we need”. Here is Dr. Story's iron discipline sales requirement.  When wrapping up the meeting, grab your schedule and make them open theirs and find a date and time for the next meeting. In that meeting, you will bring the proposal and go through it with them to make sure you have correctly and fully understood their needs.  Get into their diary right there and then, because trying to do it later can be difficult and sometimes it never happens at all. If they say, ‘just send it to me”, under no circumstances accept that statement. Instead, say “I will need to show you something, so let's find a time for me to do that”.  Do not dilute the power of what you have just said by adding to it with more justifications.  Keep the strength of that bold statement intact, break eye contact, hold your pen at the ready, look down at your diary, and suggest dates and times. We want to be sitting right across from them when we go through the details to read their body language reaction to what we are outlining.  We want to make sure we have properly understood their needs and that our solution is attractive to them.  We want to tease out any doubts so that we can deal with these spiky porcupines on the spot.  

Hunting for new clients is difficult and expensive.  Marketing tries to drive people who are seeking our solution to our door through the website, advertising, search words and SEO.  That all costs a lot of money and the success ratio can be quite low.  We attend networking events and these usually cost money too. Now our most fundamental sales goal is not a sale.  We are desperately looking for the reorder. If we can get that, it means we don't have to spend any more money on getting this client on board. We can amortise the acquisition costs across a stream of orders which brings our per buyer acquisition costs down substantially. Another source of clients are clients.  These people have bought from us in the past, but the trail has gone cold.  Maybe they stopped and never resumed because of an internal crisis around money and they had to cut costs.  Perhaps our champion got moved and their replacement has their preferred list of suppliers and we are not on their list.  Maybe we screwed up an order and got cut.  There are so many reasons to have lost touch with a buyer in Japan. It is made more difficult here because of the rotation of staff through different sections of the company, as they try to create an army of generalists. Trying to get back on the bronco after having been bucked off is extremely tough.  The people there now may not remember us at all.  In effect, this becomes a cold call and we have to start again.  We need some powerful tools to get back on their buying list. Hopefully, we have a good record keeping system and we can pull up what we supplied previously, how long they were our client, who we were dealing with on their side etc. We will need to reference all of these details to gain credibility as a supplier. If they have never done any business with us, then there are many hoops to jump through, whereas being a previous supplier clears a lot of those hurdles. We may have introduced a new product or solution since we last communicated.  Often, we may have numerous solutions and they only selected one, when in fact we can solve a broad range of issues for them.  This is the time to introduce any new products and also the range of existing products to them.  What wasn't required before may now be of interest.  Perhaps a rival supplier isn't doing a great job and we turn up as an alternative. If we have something we can demonstrate or show as a solution that is helpful. In our case, as a training company, we can offer free refresher classes for their staff who are our graduates.  The price is right, they know who did the training previously and in most cases those same people will still be working there.   As we rerun what we previously supplied the people involved recall how good our solution was.  They are possibly in more senior roles now and they may want this solution for their team.  They may also be stimulated to look for what else we can do for them, as they recall their satisfaction with us a supplier. If it happened that we screwed up previously, there may be a chance that the people who recall those details are no longer there and we can start with a clean slate.  Japan, however, is pretty good at record keeping and our beautiful name may be mud and still listed on their blacklist of people to never use again and the conversation will go nowhere. I called on the same company after a couple of years break. The people I met were new, but I was amazed when they consulted their records and perfectly quoted what had been discussed in the previous meeting.  Don't underestimate Japanese record keeping prowess. If they have a good memory of us and we have developed something new, then that can often be the hook to get us the meeting.  They may be curious about what we have come up with and be prepared to hear us out.  It is not easy, but it is easier than trying to blag our way into a meeting with total strangers, who have no knowledge of us and what we do. We all have buyers who have fallen by the wayside and it is worth the effort to rekindle those relationships and try and restart the business. We could be leaving a lot of money on the table by not trying to reconnect. Chasing new buyers is expensive and hard so let's get out our records and go back and touch base again and try and get some deals going.

We know that there are a lot of salespeople who are totally untrained.  They have cobbled together bits and pieces of the sales process but they don't have the whole picture in their brains.  I remember when Dave Stearns, a Carnegie Master Trainer came to Tokyo to certify us a Sales Trainers. He started with the top right hand corner of the whiteboard and then he slowly outlined every single aspect of the sales process and the flow filled the whiteboard from top to bottom, from left to right.  It was an amazing tour de force from someone who is a real master.  At the time, was sitting there thinking that I could never do that. Well today I am using our sales process and doing the exact same thing in my head when I sit across from the client. The only difference is that in Japan it is rare to get through the whole process in one sitting.  Here it is more likely we get up to the point of the questioning model and the explanation of the solution comes in the next meeting as we present our proposal.  At this point we go into handling any objections and then closing the sale.  Again in Japan, that closing of the sale part of the process may not trigger an agreement, but it will set off an internal process to look at what we are suggesting.  The decision-making process here is complex and glacial with many actors involved.  Most of the key decision makers we will never meet, and it is up to the people sitting in front of us to become our champions and push the deal though.  This internal harmonisation process though takes a lot of time and we have almost no leverage.  Telling our champions to “speed it up” is a like a sick joke, because they don't have any capacity to do that as they seek internal agreement to move forward. In the Ringi Seido decision-making system, the Section Leaders and Division Heads who will be impacted by the deal though the changes it will trigger attach their hanko or seal on the proposal document to signal agreement.  When there are enough of these achieved the document gets elevated to the Directors level and usually they rubber stamp approve it because they know all the due diligence has been completed down below. To bridge between the questioning component and to be invited to propose our solution, we have to move into the suggestion phase.  There is no great detail required at this point.  What we are doing here is to try and make sure that what we are thinking will be a good fit for what they are after.  We have heard their story, we know what they want to achieve and mentally we are rummaging around our magic solutions box to see if we have what they need. We explain in rough terms what would be involved and check to see if that sounds directionally correct. If we do get it right, then we talk in general terms about the outline of the possible solution and see if they think that is a match for what they want.  If it is and they think that will work then we are invited to submit our proposal along with the other potential rival suppliers they are talking to. The Proposal will go into much greater depth and detail about what is involved and how it will work in practice.  It may not be precise enough, but if we are most of the way there, we can still refine it further according to their feedback and we are not out of the running yet.  Naturally pricing has to be attached and it we are higher than our rivals, which hopefully we are, because our quality is better, then we submit and see if they go for our ideas. This is important because at this point they are just ideas and until we get the business and can execute, the buyer has to take our word for it that we can do what we say we can do and at the quality level we say we can provide.  There is a lot of trust included at this point. This is why the way we present has to be very well executed.  We have to be making suggestions and constantly checking back to see if there is a match.  If it isn't we need to know that information early and redirect to something else we think may.  The level of confidence we have and the degree of detail we can provide off the top of our head, without referring to any materials is important.  It sends a message to the buyers that we know what we are doing, we have done this before and we know they results we can deliver.  Mentioning previous projects for other clients is important because it means we are not using them as the test bed.  Japanese firms don't want to be the guinea pigs for anything.  They want to know that it works already. We may not be able to drop the names but when we describe what we did and what happened they are relieved to hear there is a track record of successful implementation already. The way we describe it is so key. We have to do it with supreme confidence, belief and knowledge to demonstrate we know our stuff.

Basically, we know that a third of the potential buyers we meet will never buy from us, another third will buy, but not right now and the remaining third are ready to go, if they can be convinced to take action right now.  The issue though is when we meet them for the first time, we don't know which bucket they fit into and we can waste a lot of time and energy thrashing around before we work it out. The knowledge gain process is not straightforward and there are a lot of traps and feints ahead of us, as we make our way forward into the impenetrable jungle. Is there a faster way?  Perhaps if we can plumb the depths of our experience and identify some buying or non-buying signals this will help us speed things up. Being salespeople, buying signals are difficult for us because we don't take “no” for an answer.  We will push for the meeting even in the face of resistance.  Our sales exploits have informed us that the buyer who assures us he has absolutely no more than fifteen minutes to meet with us, will spend ninety minutes talking to us if we have what they need.  We also know that “no” isn't a permanent feature and things can change, so we never give up hope.  It also means we go up a lot of dead ends and have to extract ourselves for the waste of time, black, smelly, squelchy bog we have become trapped in. Let's look at some loser situations we will encounter, when meeting potential buyers, as warnings to weight up the investment of our valuable time with them. I had a great lunch with the ebullient foreign President of this firm, which had been bought by a very large Japanese enterprise a few years earlier.  He was excited about bringing our training into the firm to strengthen the sales team and to deliver the sales numbers the headquarters wanted. His Japanese CFO had been sent in from the mothership. That snippet of information should have sounded a warning bell for me.  The lunch went well, he was excited and I was excited to get things going, so I ignored that deadly little trip wire. That ebullience I should have realised was built on a foundation of sand within his own organisation and that the Japanese CFO actually pulled the strings not him. The lesson here is that when you know the firm has been purchased by a larger entity, or is a joint venture of some type, definitely check who has come across from the mothership and what positions they hold.  Look at the President you are talking to through that lens and ask some subtle but important questions about how decisions are made.  What I should have done was to ask about how he was going to get the people to whom he reported to okay the purchase of the training I was proposing and then settle back and very carefully analyse his answer.  I needed to strip his ego and bold front out of the equation and take a good look behind the velvet curtain to try and get a sense of who had the real power. In the end, despite our conviviality at lunch, he just kept peppering my follow-up attempts with a string of excuses and stalls.  The penny dropped eventually and I realised this deal was never going to happen, because he couldn't convince his CFO to okay the expenditure.  His ego can't allow him to admit to me that he has little or no power within his own organisation, despite have the grand title “President” on his business card. Another President who I have been chasing after for a long time now, tells me he wants our training, but my follow-up emails and calls never get a response.  When I collar him at an event, we are both attending, he pleads he is so busy with this or that and so couldn't get back to me, but he is still interested.  Here it the conundrum.  Yes, he is interested, but can he translate that interest into a deal with his firm? I know his industry is in turmoil and although the technical changes don't directly affect his business, the overall industry direction does. The chances of a deal happening seem slim, but the price of a regular follow-up email is not high. However, I shouldn't invest any emotional energy into him whatsoever because only pain is in that future. What I don't want though is he eventually gets religion about doing the training and wanders off with a competitor, because they were the last contact he had from a provider.  That would really hurt if that happened. Things can change rapidly in business, but we just don't know enough about the buyer's internal situation to know when. Can you imagine if I finally corner him at some future event and he says, “Oh yeah, we did the training with XYZ company”.  Would that be grounds for justifiable homicide?

I am a great fan of Victor Antonio, who writes books, gives lectures and training on sales.  I listen to his Sales Influence Podcast and he has a lot of solid, credible advice. In a recent episode he spoke about not using “weasel words” in sales and being more directive and certain with the buyer.  Weasel words are defined as “words or statements that are intentionally ambiguous or misleading” and in sales would include words such as  “perhaps”, “maybe”, “could”, etc.  I was thinking about how this would apply in Japan. The culture here of modesty, humility, not standing out, not being openingly directive is the exact opposite of the culture in the USA, where you have to be more aggressive.  As a consequence, if I started being more assertive with my buyers, I believe they would dismiss what I was saying as American style push selling and reject both me and my solutions. I have lived here for 40 years in total now, so over those three sojourns, I have adapted my Aussie self to fit in with the way things work here.  In sales, when I first started trying to convince buyers to buy, I was using consultative selling methodologies.  That meant asking questions to understand the buyer needs.  However, I am sure when I got to the solution explanation part, I was being very strong and forthright in my recommendation that they buy what I was offering. Having sold here for many years now, I have changed that method to be less strident in my recommendations and I do use a lot of what Victor calls weasel words in the sale.  I have found that being too pushy with the buyer doesn't go down well.  Being too assertive isn't viewed positively and the buyer feels they are being pressured to purchase.  Deals don't get done as a consequence. If it was black and white, that would make things easier, but where is the line between strongly believing in your solution and being too pushy.  I know I really believe in what we sell.  We see the results from our training and how it changes people's lives, so we are all true believers. The problem is the buyers have to buy it, before the results are delivered and they have to take our word for it that what we are saying is true.  We know for certain but they are not sure. We also know that confidence in the solution does sell.  If we are too hesitant, too unsure, too circuitous in our explanation, then the buyer may not receive enough confidence from us, that what we are proposing will do the trick.  How much is too much confidence and how much is too little?  As I say – where is the line? I have found that the key is to be humble about what we say will happen after the sale, in terms of what they will receive in terms of results, and then pile on the evidence.  We can be very sure, passionate and enthusiastic about what we have seen work for someone else.  We can speak with total belief about what we have observed.  We can speak with authority of one who has witnessed the changes and the improvements.  In our explanation of the results from our training, the total certainty is there because we have seen it with our own eyes. When we speak about whether this will automatically transfer across to this particular buyer's situation, we have to be more conservative.  Having perfect knowledge of the buyer's situation internally and externally, is unlikely for us. We cannot say, “well this worked for XYZ company, so it will definitely work the same for you and you will get equal or better results”. This is where the weasel words are needed.  If we are too strong in our recommendation we will be doubted.  Every buyer is concerned that what they buy won't work as advised, and that internally they will be blamed and scolded for their selection of supplier.  They like the passion we show for our belief in the solution, because this gives them more confidence in the possibility it will work.  By not trying to push the sale through, we also show our respect for their position.  We need to say something like, “this worked well for XYZ company, so given your situations are very similar, there is a strong probability it will  work the same for you too”.  When we say it with these caveats, we sound more reliable to the buyer, because we are not giving any 100% guarantees, which may or may not be worth anything. We sound more honest too, because we are introducing the possibility it won't work for them, but that we will make a 100% effort to see that it does work.  That small sense of doubt gives the buyer confidence that what we are saying isn't salesperson blarney and that we are honest and can be trusted as a partner.  We are telling the buyer that we are not here for a sale. We are here for the repeat order and we will do everything we can do to make sure it works so that more orders flow and we build a solid trusted advisor partnership. What we say and how we say it matters in sales and semantics are crucial in getting the deal across the line.

The denizens of the upper floor, quiet, luxurious C-suites with expensive wall hangings and deep pile carpets, determine the changes the organisation needs to make to survive or to do even better. They expect everyone below to get behind their dispositions.  Deep down in the engine room of the sales team, these changes are communicated by their boss.  Usually, sales leaders become the boss because they lasted through two consecutive recessions and were the last one left standing or they were the star producer and were kicked up to management, many years ago.  Invariably, they received no leadership training on the way through, so they are constantly making it up, using trial and error as they go along.  They may just bluntly tell everyone how it is and expect the salespeople will snap into line and obey the new direction.  Sales is an emotional rollercoaster of constant rejection, with hard sales targets and permanent instability.  Somewhere in that firefight, the salespeople have carved out their own little world and cobbled together a construct, held together with string and adhesive tape, which allows them to survive or possibly thrive.  Then the big bosses turn up and tear a hole in that neat little safe and sound world.  Suddenly, the salespeople have to make changes to what has always worked and their sales leader is no help.  What happens to their motivation? Salespeople are already world class, gold medal winning whiners.  It is always someone else's fault as to why they can't make their targets.  The system requiring them to make this latest change has just handed out the ultimate all-weather, all season excuse for missing the numbers.  Finding the path of least resistance is how most people operate and salespeople in particular, because they are permanently time poor.  They cut corners and shave off service quality to ensure maximum speed. Change means slowing everything down and recalibrating what needs to be done.  These changes will often impact their clients and particularly in Japan, salespeople hate having to bring any changes to their buyers, which will affect their operations. How can salespeople adjust to change? Decision One is whether to continue with this company or not?  In Japan, there is a dearth of salespeople, so job mobility is at world recording breaking highs.  Taking your clients and moving is super easy today, so their response to the changes is “goodbye big bosses, I am leaving with all my business cards, to work for the opposition”. What about for those who choose to stay?  First order of duty is to not rely on the boss for how to make the adjustment. Expect they won't be much chop when it comes to this type of thing, as they are totally untrained for it.  Salespeople have to work it out for themselves.  Once that reality is accepted and the change is confronted directly, then some analysis is needed. In any change, there are pluses and minuses and salespeople must run the ruler over where these are located.   Are there any advantages to the buyers with these changes?  If this is the case, then that is always going to be a great conversation and one the salesperson can look forward to initiating. More likely, how can the negatives of these changes be minimised for the buyers?  Ultimately, the salespeople have to be agnostic about what they think about the changes and be fully focused on what they mean for their clients.  If the changes are a pain for the client, what can they do the reduce the amount of pain or what can they do to counterbalance the pain? Maybe they can't do anything and they consequently lose that client.  Well salespeople lose clients all the time, so there in nothing unique in that.  They also know how to find new clients, so they have to get busy with that activity and find clients for whom the changes are not an impediment to doing deals.  Salespeople have to be resilient or they cannot survive in the rough and tumble of the sales life, so adjusting to the new is built into their DNA.  They won't necessarily welcome or like the changes, but they can make them work because they are experts in adaption.   

Salespeople turn up in Japan and expect things to be pretty much the same as where they have come from.  After all, sales is sales right? Wrong.  Japan, as usual, is quite different. If these newly arrived salespeople had received training on how to sell, then they are probably going to try a consultative sales approach.  This is absolutely what they should be doing, except it doesn't work in Japan. The consultative approach at base has a very sensible and basic idea – ask the client what they want and then give it to them. Simple stuff. The issue in Japan is the client won't open up and tell you what they need. Buyers have been trained by crap salespeople here to expect a pitch of what you have to offer, so the buyer can lean back and shred it, trying to sort out the risk factor. If you come to the buyer and start asking questions about their firm's current situation, they don't see this as a means of better understanding their situation, so that you can provide the most relevant and effective assistance.  They see it as prying, as exposing their dirty little, embarrassing secrets to strangers and therefore to the broader world, broadcasting all of their failure points and weaknesses.  We may start with our consultative sales approach and hit a wall on our first question: “What is the current situation for your company?”. This sounds innocuous enough, but that is not how the buyer interprets it.  They feel, “I can't answer this salesperson's questions, because I don't know them well enough and the trust is not sufficiently built yet”.  That is a big gap from the get go.  At this point they usually segue into “Tell me about what you do and about your products”. This is bad.  We are now throwing mud at the wall and praying something will stick, which is not much of a sales strategy. How can you get the pitch right if you have no idea what they need.  Most of us come to client sales meetings with numerous products and solutions, but which one will hit the mark? In the West we are very logical.  If what the salesperson is genuinely interested in what we need and if what they are saying seems to make sense, then we are prepared to look at buying.  The Western buyer is not terrified of making a mistake.  They are not fearful of sharing information with strangers.  They are not dubious about foreigners selling them stuff. They are looking for ways to help their firm do better in the market, for methods to outfox their competitors and gain an unfair advantage in the hand-to-hand combat of business. The Japanese buyer is very conscious that if they introduce something new, like a new supplier and anything goes wrong, they will lose face and will suffer in the internal future promotion stakes.  They are not focused on helping the firm to do better, because they are driven by their own personal self-interests.  They have also discovered that the safest path is the one of doing nothing new. I was talking to the HR Manager of a car dealership about some sales training for their firm.  They have had sales training before, but the results were not impressive.  My angle was “try us as a new approach, bring in something fresh and differentiate your salespeople from all the competitors”.  I thought that was pretty conclusive and convincing.  Weeks later I was told they went with another firm who specialises in sales training for dealerships.  This is what they had been doing in the past and not getting the change they wanted, but the safest path forward is always to do what you have always done in Japan and take no risks with anything new.  They will get the same results they have always gotten but everyone will feel safe and no one will lose their job. In Japan, we need to set up the consultative approach with getting permission to ask questions before we launch forth.  In the West we never have to so this step because every gets it.  Not Japan though.  Here is the simple, quick formula: explain who you are; explain what you do; talk about who else you have done it for and the results; suggest you could possibly get similar results “but to know if that can happen or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”.  In 95% of cases this works and I get permission to dig into their dirty laundry and find out their problems.  There are still those buyers though, who just brush that effort aside and say “give me your pitch”.  I really want to cut my losses and leave right there, down my cheap, bitter, horrible green tea and depart, because I know that without understanding their needs, I have little chance of talking about the things of most value to them. I don't do a runner because that would be abrupt and considered rude in Japan. I soldier on, fully understanding every minute with this buyer is keeping me away from a buyer who will buy. Consultative sales can be done in Japan, but it needs some modifications to allow for the pitchfeast mentality on the part of the buyers. Once we understand where they are coming from we can work our way around the resistance and get to the heart of their issues and hopefully we have a solution that will work.  If we don't, we shouldn't waste our time or theirs and we should go find a buyer we can help.

“There are no excuses for failing in sales”, is a common ideological position. However, is this really true? There is no doubt that sales is a very macho environment for men and women.  There are set quotas, targets, numbers to be hit and if they are not hit, then that person is deemed to be failing. There are no hiding places in sales.  You make your target or you don't.  Now, if we fired every salesperson who failed to hit their target, we wouldn't have many people in sales.  Japan makes this especially fraught because the declining population translates into a shortage of salespeople. This also means that the quality of salespeople in the market is only going to decline.  Whether we like it or not, we will be looking for anyone with a pulse to hire because we need warm bodies.  Targets smargets in this case. In sales anywhere, we know a couple of things.  The majority of people in the business are untrained.  Companies want off the shelf top earners who they can cut loose and let them go forth and bring in the dough.  That is an epic delusion in this day and age in Japan.  People who can sell are not moving because the company is doing its best to keep them.  That means the ones who are mediocre, or worse, are mobile.  Even this supply will dry up as companies become more and more desperate for salespeople and will keep their underperformers because they at least know something about the product lineup and have met a few customers. We also know that at any point in time, a third of people we meet who we hope will become clients will never buy from us.  There may be many reasons for this, to do with budgets, decision-making, ideology around self-sufficiency, stupidity, etc.  Another third will buy, but unfortunately not according to our monthly sales quota driven schedule.  In Japan, especially, it is exceedingly rare to meet someone and then immediately get a sale.  The dispersed decision-making process in business here ensures that there are many voices to be consulted about a new decision to buy from an unknown supplier.  This internal harmonisation can take a long time to come to fruition.  The best way to think about is like this: “the buyer is never on your schedule”. The remaining third will buy, and the question becomes why will they buy from you? The “you” is important here because firms don't buy from other firms.  They buy from the individual they meet, who is sitting across from them in the meeting room. They make their decision on that basis.  Is the chemistry there between buyer and seller emanating from a solid foundation of trust?  Where does this trust come from?  The biggest part of the trust equation is from the seller's kokorogamae.  This Japanese word can be variously translated, but in this context, “true intention” is the best version.  True intention means what is really driving the salesperson?  Is it desperation to keep their job by making their monthly sales target?  Is it greed to score a big commission or a promotion?  Is it to do the right thing which is best for the buyer?  If it isn't the latter, then we have a problem.  Correct kokorogamae is often defeated by the culture of the firm.  Doing the best thing for the buyer is not a smash and grab activity designed to yield immediate returns.  The focus of correct kokogamae is to get the repeat order, not a single sale.  That mentality is very specific and the time frame is long.  If the sales manager is pushing everyone for immediate sales revenues, then the needs of the buyer get tossed out the window and the salespeople will do and say anything to get the sale.  In fact, everyone is working hard to dismantle the brand and destroy the client trust for short-term gains and this is driven by the leadership.  Is it the fault of the salespeople that they are working for idiots? Companies have to do much better by their salespeople.  Target expectations need to be realistic and have attached timelines which make sense.  Training is an absolute requirement, in particular, how to ask questions in order to fully understand what the buyer is trying to achieve. Pitching a solution makes no sense if you have no idea what the buyer needs, and this activity has to be replaced by intelligent questioning skills.  The aim has to become the repeat order, because farming is a lot less expensive and more efficient than hunting all the time. Just hiring people and then firing them is an option that is no longer able to be enjoyed by companies in Japan. Given that the quality of those recruited will just keep going down, these individuals have to be encouraged and developed.  That requires time and treasure, but there is no alternative.  

Most of the sales jobs in Japan require the ability to sell in Japanese.  That usually means native speakers of Japanese or foreigners who can operate at a highly sophisticated language level.  There will be exceptions, but they are not that numerous.  Probably the bilingual recruitment industry is one of the main employers of foreigners who can't speak Japanese and English-language schools.  One could argue that today neither requires any real sales skills.  Recruitment, in particular, is at an inflection point where the demand definitely exceeds the supply, so anyone with a pulse can match a candidate from the database and invoice the firm looking to hire staff. Be they Japanese candidates for sales jobs or foreigners, what should we be looking for?  Some might look for a track record of sales results.  That is one indicator, but often not all that useful.  Is the methodology in your shop teams doing sales and being rewarded as a team with salary and bonuses? Or are there individual targets and commissions attached to the sales?  This is such a different construct, it depends on how you are configured.  Japanese salespeople, in my experience, love a salary, bonuses and team accountability.  They are reluctant to take individual responsibility for their sales results.  The money is obviously better when operating as an individual, but most Japanese salespeople feel overly exposed to the harsh realities of the sales life in this situation and prefer the comfy team embrace.  So expecting rocketing individual results from a salesperson who has been operating within a team is overly optimistic.  Despite that, I always favour personal accountability for results and work on gluing the team together, even though they are focused on getting their own numbers. How have they been trained is also a strong indicator?  Very few salespeople anywhere on the planet have been given formal sales training.  In Japan, it is usually on-the-job training or OJT where they go with their boss or more likely, with their senior to client calls. Japanese salespeople turning up on their own is rare in Japan. Usually they travel in pairs, as one is the understudy to the other, until such time that they become the senior in their own pair.  Ideally, we either want properly trained salespeople or we want to be able to train them formally, rather than rely on the Japanese system of intergenerational mediocrity. In some cases, the salesperson needs a degree of technical background for their work.  Japan though has a weak connection between what they study at University and the jobs they wind up doing, so often there is no direct match.  In many cases, the engineers may have the required technical training, but no formal sales training, so they are reliant on the OJT system for developing their sales abilities, which is at best a hit and miss affair. In general, broad skills are required and, in particular, communications and human relations skills are needed. Technical people can often be duds at both, so they need to be developed.  In other cases, the person has these key skills but is weak technically.  The Unicorn is always hard to net.  When I first worked at the retail bank in Shinsei, the hiring criteria was maths skills for salespeople selling investment products to wealthy individuals.  A rather dubious idea, I thought, so I changed it to put more emphasis on people and communication skills.  Naturally, the results vastly improved immediately. The other element we need to think about is our brand.  Does the person we are looking at hiring fit our brand or can we teach them how to fit.  If I see a sales guy with some of the things we are looking for, but has scruffy, poorly shined shoes, I know that I can teach him how to fix that issue.  If his haircut is a disaster, we can fix that too.  The point, though, is the individual has to submit to the brand and fit in with the company's thinking.  In today's environment where getting a sales job is super easy, maybe they don't want to change themselves to match the brand and expect things to flow the other direction.  In my case, I would always think long-term and want to defend the brand, because it is bigger than one salesperson. There is no doubt that we are all facing a lot of difficulty finding suitable salespeople based on our preferred criteria.  Whether we like it or not, we have to be flexible and the best idea is to train the people we hire to get them to the level we need.  Expecting they will come fully outfitted from the get-go is now a fantasy.  Times have changed and we need to move with the changes.  

I have been coaching a founder client here for quite a while now and his emotional reaction to his clients not buying on his schedule always surprises me.  I keep telling him, “it is business; it is not personal”.  We know that there are some customers who will just never buy, some who will buy now and some who will buy in the future.  We just don't know which is which until we get rejected.  When I get rejected in a deal, they are not rejecting Greg Story.  They are rejecting my offer, in its current construction, at this point in their cash flow cycle, within the bounds of their strategic direction, in relation to what my competitors are offering and a whole bunch of other stuff I will never even know about. Does it still hurt?  Yes, of course it does.  I get super annoyed and upset like everyone else.  The difference between me and my client, who I am coaching, is I never pass that emotional reaction on to the client, who said “no” to my stupendous offer.  He does pass it on because he feels so upset and frustrated. I keep telling him to chill.  Write the email if you must, to get your hurt feelings out, just never send it.  My advice isn't working as yet, but I will continue to counsel him to not take it personally. I had my own rejection case the other day.  I was doing an RFP for a client and they came back and said they went with a rival firm who specialises in sales in their industry.  What was my initial thought?  “They are idiots” was the first reaction. This was followed by “why are they just doing what all of their competitors are doing? Why not use another more differentiated approach with something more fresh?”.  What did I reply?  I didn't mention any of that.  By the time the decision has worked its way through their internal decision-making system, there is no going back. Telling them they are stupid may make me feel good, but it won't alter their course of action.  I wrote what I always write, “thank you for letting me know” and that is that.  I don't bother with appeals for consideration in the future. I just accept their idiotic decision and move on to find someone smarter, taller, better looking and who bathes and who can do a deal with us. Now I also put them on my follow up list, because not every deal works out. Their situation can change and maybe my competitor is useless and what they provide doesn't work.  So I keep in touch and ask them if they have any needs that we can help them with, and I do this regularly.  The initial interval is around six months.  That is long enough for them to realise they made a huge mistake by using my competitor and that they got nothing from that ridiculous solution they chose instead of mine.  After that, I follow up every three to four months, because business is fluid and what wasn't on the table is now in play.  How long should you follow up for?  Ryan Serhant, who I follow and who started his own successful real estate brokerage in the US, says “keep following up until they die”.  I am not that pushy, because I figure there are reputational costs to being too pushy and too insistent in Japan.  Tokyo is big, but it is also a small village in many ways.  We sell to Japanese domestic firms and foreign multi-national companies.  Our reputation as Dale Carnegie, a business based on being able to get on well with all different types of people, has to be careful how we are perceived in the market.  If we say one thing, but do another, then our brand consistency will suffer and so will our sales. Where is the line between persistence, which is admirable, and being too pushy, which is frowned upon here?  It is not always clear, but if I feel that there is no interest, then after about four follow-ups with no reaction stretched over a twelve-month period, I will shelve that firm for a while.  The people may change in the future and maybe someone smarter will be the person to talk to or maybe their business has changed and they are now more open to our solutions. Regardless of what the client does, we can control how we react and we must keep cool, calm and collected in the face of failure and rejection.  Is that easy?  No, but the choices are few.  My client hasn't quite gotten to the point of handling the rejection in a calm, non-emotive manner yet, but I will keep working on him until he gets there. I am constantly working on myself, too. I have found that no one is a clear genius with this stuff and we are all a work in progress.    

This is Part Three and is the conclusion of our series on how to provide superior customer service. 1.    Go the extra mile Time is always short and we all tend to cut corners and look for anywhere we can save time.  On the receiving end of the service though, we are looking for as much personalised attention as possible, so there is a natural tension between these two aspirations.  Training staff to think beyond the natural limits of time challenged customer service is the start.  We can all do more. If we think of things from the customer's point of view, we can extrapolate what would delight customers. I visited the café of a well-known business to enjoy a hot chocolate.  This was a small outlet, which had one table for customers to sit down. There were no other clientele, so I decided to sit there and drink my brew, before heading off.  There were two staff working at that time and when the beverage was ready, the male staff member brought it to the counter.  He could just as easily have brought it to my seat, which was a metre away from the counter, but he chose not to.  There was no time pressure on him, but his mind was in basic service mode and not in “go the extra distance” thinking.  I am also guessing, given his age, that he was the manager of that small store, so you can see the problem with him in charge supervising others. 2.    Using 3rd parties as proof points No one in Japan wants to be experimented upon or be the Guinea Pig.  They want proven, established, reliable, repeatable, high quality service.  Years ago, I was with my family in a Korean Barbecue restaurant in the Azabu Juban. I noticed on the wall they had a hand written list ranking the most requested dishes.  I thought that was a smart idea for a Japanese audience, who want safety, rather than novelty or adventure.  The next day, I brought this up at the Shinsei retail bank, where I worked and suggested we do the same and list our most popular financial products.  We did that and it gave that third party seal of approval, making the purchasing decision that much easier. 3.    Master first impressions We are all quick to judgement and often we base it on what we see, before what we hear.  Just looking at how someone is dressed influences what we think about who they are.  A lot of firms have uniforms for that reason, to standardise the image they want to project and to control the branding. The way we dress matters, so we have  to work on that and make sure it is communicating the image we want. In the customer service sector, it might be voice first or it might be visual first.  Either way, we have to be mindful of how we come across to the customer. The sound of our voice should always be friendly and helpful.  I had some lower back issues recently and went to a clinic which specialises in that area.  The first doctor I met welcomed me, looked at me, gave me his name and listened to my problems.  I had to go back again after a week and this time, because of the day of the week, I got a different doctor.  Same clinic, but this guy was well overweight, slumped down in his chair, staring at his computer screen. He didn't offer his name, look at me or seem happy to see me and my money.  We are facing a major population decline here in Japan, so these doctors really need to hang on to their patients and the competition is only going to get more intense. Same firm and two entirely different impressions.  Getting consistency is a matter of awareness and training. 4.    Cross and upsell Selling should always be with the best interests of the customer.  We need to have that in mind, rather than ramming more sales down the gullets of the buyers or selling them stuff they don't need.  Cross selling is there to open up options for the customer, to give them more of what they need.  Upselling is to upgrade the quality of what the client has already bought, to give them a better experience.  Both have to be done in the customer's interests and the customer has to feel that is the case. I used to go to a dentist in Azabudaidai but I never felt my interests were upper most in his mind.  I always felt he was seeing me sitting here in his dentist chair, visualizing his new Tuscan Villa, paid for by the additional dental work he was always suggesting.  I stopped going to him because I didn't feel he was trustworthy.  There is a massive over supply of dentists in Tokyo and there are plenty of choices, so his greed was a very shortsighted measure. 5.    Able to deal with different personality types We have some people who are very detailed oriented called Analyticals, while others are the opposite and massively big picture, “don't bog me down in the weeds” types known as Expressors.  Others are fast paced and hard driving as they push, push, push called Drivers.  The opposite types are Amiables - quieter, considered and want to have a cup of tea and get to know us before they will do business.  In customer service we have to know who we are dealing with, because that will change the form of communication we choose. We have our own preferred personal style and that is fine, but that means there are three other styles who are different from us and they demand a different approach in order for us to be successful with them.  Generally, we can tell from the way they speak, which group they fall into.  If they are confident, strong, assertive they are going to be Expressors or Drivers. If they are quieter and more reserved, then they are likely to be Analyticals or Amiables. Just knowing this enables us to strengthen out voice or soften it, when we deal with them.  That alone means we are doing a good job of matching how they like to communicate and they will feel more comfortable with us. 6.    Skilled in conflict management The service sector is bound to have conflict issues between what the customer wants and what the firm wants.  In customer service roles, we often get very irate people talking to us and they are difficult to deal with.  The usual breakdown is they want something and we don't have it, or we won't do it.  How we communicate that is everything.  We just covered different personality styles so that is the first line of response.  We try and understand who we are dealing with.  We may need a very detailed explanation as a result or can just be brief.  Naturally, we have to be super polite all the way through.  Being gruff with a Driver type is incendiary, so I don't recommend that, but we can be direct and they won't be offended. We need to be looking for empathy, win-win solutions, practical alternatives, context and background explanations and of course lots of flexibility.  I remember when I was in trade promotion, we had sold a new buyer on purchasing garden bark from Australia.  It had to be just bark, with no twigs or pebbles or sand.  The day the ship should have departed, the supplier called us to explain they missed the ship but “don't worry, it will be on the next one”.  When we relayed that vital piece of information to the Japanese buyer, I could hear the anger coming out of the phone, being held by my staff member seated three metres away. It was so intense, such red-hot rage.  He had promised his customers bark and now he couldn't supply it, so we were burning his business, by not living up to our side of the bargain.  That was the end of that business on the spot and no more orders.  There was no wiggle room in that case, but wherever we can, we should be looking for solutions to alleviate the problem for the customer. Over the last three session we have covered off a large number of things to think about in customer service. Information is good, but execution is the key.  Often the issues we face are structural or the consequence of legacy systems.  We need to keep upgrading our internal approaches to become better at servicing customers, so that we can outmaneuver our rivals in the marketplace.    

In Part One, we looked at some of the elements we need to be working on in providing excellent customer service, and so now let's continue. 1. Friendly This would seem to be a very basic requirement in customer service, but often the wrong people are placed in these roles and many of them don't like people.  Even those who do like people can suffer brutal invective from irate customers and this can impinge on their joy for the work.  In Japan, the land of the “customer is God”, we now see legislation against harassment of workers by customers.  Dogeza is where you get down on your knees and bow by putting your head on the floor and is the ultimate sign of apology in Japan.  In Chinese culture, we know it as the ‘kowtow”.  Angry customers have been known to force staff to do the dogeza to apologise for the unsatisfactory service they have provided. It would be very hard to be friendly after being put through that experience.  Japan is catching up in this regard and these types of outbursts will reduce as the system stops tolerating unbridled rage by customers. 2. Develop loyal fans This is related to being friendly. The idea is to not just provide a great one-off service, but to enroll the customers as repeaters and make them loyal fans.  All sales should have this as the goal.  In Japan, though, we receive aloof, but polite service.  Those serving see their role in the dimension of providing the good or service, and that is it.  There are very few cases where the person serving is trying to establish a connection with the customer and encourage them to come back.  Maybe they think that is the job of the marketing department and nothing to do with them. There are many instances where I frequent the same establishment, but the service is never personalised.  It is efficient and polite, but impersonal. I am treated just like everyone else, and there is no recognition that you are a regular.  Notable exceptions would be Ali Bab and Lindo near my office in Akasaka, Shinsen Hanten in Nagatocho and Elios Locanda in Hanzomon, but they are rare cases. How hard is it to recognise regulars?  Not very.  All the staff have to do is say “thank you for coming back, what can I do for your today”.  I love Princi from Milano in T-Site in Daikanyama, go there very regularly and five years later, I am still waiting for the day they recognise me as a loyal customer. Obviously, in most cases, there is no training or guidance for this, so it is always by the manual and we the customer are left feeling flat.  3. Immediately responsive Customers are all busy all the day long and they hate wasting their valuable time.  Service provision, which is slow or late, is particularly a problem in this high-speed world we inhabit today.  When there are problems, we want them fixed fast because we are losing time by not having the good or service work as we expected.  I ordered some deodorant on Amazon and was contacted by Japan Post to tell me the package was wet, which meant there had been some interior damage.  I went online and registered a problem and I was very happy to immediately hear from the supplier that they would refund my money and they told me to not accept the package.  I was mentally bracing for trouble, prevarication, quibbling, and fudging, but their instant response was better than my low expectation. I was very happy, and that is the same with all of us – we want things fixed and fast. Staff need to be trained to provide it 4. Never combatative I hate one thing in particular and I have hated it my whole life, and that is being told “no”.  I am sure I am not the only customer who is like that.  One of the great ways of telling a customer “no” is to reference third parties.  When I was at the Shinsei Bank, sometimes the customers would want us to do something which was not possible.  Banking, by the way, is a highly regulated industry with tomes of rules.  If we said “no, we can't do that”, then to someone like me, that is a red rag to a bull and I will tell you the thousand reasons why it has to be a “yes”.  Instead, we would firstly agree that we could do it.  Then we would pause, reflect in an obvious way and then ask the customer what do we do about the Financial Services Agency (FSA) rule that prohibits that action.  Now we have said “yes” at first, so they are relieved and their guard is down. Next, we have made it a problem between them and the FSA and not with us.  Third-party direction works well if you can access it. 5. Seeking win-win outcomes Win-win is an obvious best solution, but many systems are not designed that way.  This forces the staff into confrontation with the customer and it creates unnecessary tensions.  Staff training will not easily overcome a structural problem.  Take a good look at your internal rules and systems and see if they are designed in a way to be a “lose” to the customer and a “win” to the firm. Change them or improve them if possible. 6. No excuses Highly litigious cultures like the US are hard wired to never admit guilt or responsibility, which can drive the customer nuts.  There are also some personalities who cannot admit being wrong and will try some mealy-mouthed lingustic gymnastics to avoid taking accountability.  I hate these types of people in any form.  As the customer we don't want excuses. We want soutions, compensation or retribution.  We want you to fix the problem and we want it now.  Again, this is about how we train and empower people.  The Ritz-Carlton Hotel chain is famous for giving staff a certain amount of money they can right off to keep the customer happy. It works, as I have experienced firsthand.  I was staying in their Washington DC property and I went down for breakfast at the 6.30am opening time but the waiter apologised that they were not ready yet.  I said “no problem, I will just sit by the window over there and read my paper”.  He later came and told me they were now ready.  When I went to pay, the waiter said “complements of the Ritz Carlton because we have inconvenienced you by making you wait”.  That was service, I thought, and here I am telling all and sundry about it, for them, years later.  In Part Three will wrap up this look at Outstanding Customer Service.  

Elements Of Outstanding Customer Service In Japan (Part One) Customer service in Japan is pretty good by comparison with most other countries.  To me, it is polite yet impersonal.  The status gap between those serving and those being served is quite rigid.  In my own country of Australia, those serving are quite happy to have a conversation with the customer. They don't see themselves as inferior in status and treat customers as equals.  In Japan, there is no such equality.  The language and the culture both reinforce the buyer as God, and those serving are mere mortals there to do God's bidding. Let's look at some elements of excellent customer service over a three-part series. The sad aspect here is that what I am going to describe is totally obvious and will garner a “so what” reaction.  I urge you to go beyond that initial first blush and use this as a measuring rod to calibrate how your organisation deals with customer service problems and check if you are operating at the right level of service or not.    1.    Totally professional This is fairly obvious, but that professionalism comes from a combination of attitude, experience and training.  Even if you don't have much experience, if your attitude is that you want to provide the highest level of service, then good things will flow from that starting point and we gain experience over time.  If properly trained, then the whole process gets sped up. 2.    Knowledge Surprisingly, a lot of people in the service sector have very little knowledge of the inventory, systems, ethos and values.  When you ask a clarifying question, their face fills with panic and they have to go seek the answer from someone else.  This is a failure of leadership.  If they were properly invested in, then they would know the answer without having to run off and find the answer. 3.    Highly personalised service  Manualised or formulistic service is the norm in Japan.  Companies try to reduce all complexity down to one way of doing things and for the majority of clients, that will be fine.  To lift above the great unwashed competitors, we need to be able to provide a more personalised service. I was reminded of this recently when I brought a pocket square online from Massimo Pirrone in Antwerp. The item arrived in a nice box and additionally, he included a short note and a very nice pen as well.  It felt very personalised and I became an instant fan. 4.    Take Ownership Japan is very good when order and harmony prevail.  Chaos, the unexpected disasters – not so much. The nature of customer service is that there is always going to be a high frequency of the unexpected occurring.  The key is how we react to the changing situation.  When things go wrong, customers want the issue solved and solved instantly.  They expect the person they are interacting with to make it happen, regardless of the degree of difficulty.  Japan has a nasty edge to it when customers exploit their expectations too far and start bullying staff, because the customer is God. If the person serving the customer takes ownership of the problem, they will keep pursuing the solution until resolution.  That is the mentality the supervision and training need to reinforce. 5.    Anticipatory Omotenashi is the high point of Japanese service and a big element is the person serving the customer to anticipate what the customer needs before they voice that request.  On a hot day, being served some iced water as you enter the business is a nice touch, completed without you have to place an order. This is an attitude of service that drives behaviour.  With the right leadership, this can be taught. 6.    Proactive This is similar to anticipatory, in the sense that we are not adopting a passive stance. We try to arrange things well before the need arises by being well prepared.  We are always looking for faster and better ways of doing things.  We are making suggestions for the client, for their best interests, rather than expecting them to have complete knowledge of what we can do for them.  They will never know our business to the depths that we do and so we have to be thinking ahead and bringing up possibilities which wouldn't necessarily occur to them. We will keep going with our list of things to think about in terms of the service we currently supply and how we supply it in parts Two and Three. Do you need to sell more?  Is your sales manager stressing you about making your monthly sales quota? Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources. There is a perfect solution for you- to LEARN MORE click here (https://bit.ly/43kQpsN ) To get your free guide “How To Stop Wasting Money On Training” click here ( https://bit.ly/4agbvLj ) To get your free “Goal Setting Blueprint 2.0” click here (https://bit.ly/43o5FVK) If you enjoy our content then head over to www.dale-carnegie.co.jp and check out our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules and our whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. About The Author Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training greg.story@dalecarnegie.com Bestselling author of “Japan Sales Mastery” (the Japanese translation is "The Eigyo" (The営業), “Japan Business Mastery” and "Japan Presentations Mastery".  He has also written "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training" and the translation "Toreningu De Okane Wo Muda Ni Suru No Wa Yamemashoo" (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのは止めましょう) and his brand new book is “Japan Leadership Mastery”. Dr. Greg Story is an international keynote speaker, an executive coach, and a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. He leads the Dale Carnegie Franchise in Tokyo which traces its roots straight back to the very establishment of Dale Carnegie in Japan in 1963 by Mr. Frank Mochizuki. He publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter Has 6 weekly podcasts: 1.     Mondays -  The Leadership Japan Series, 2.    Tuesdays – The Presentations Japan Series Every second Tuesday - ビジネス達人の教え 3.    Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series 4.    Thursdays – The Leadership Japan Series Also every second Thursday - ビジネスプロポッドキャスト 5.    Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show 6.    Saturdays – Japan's Top Business Interviews Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube: 1.     Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show Also every Second Thursday - ビジネスプロTV 2.    Fridays – Japan Business Mastery 3.    Saturdays – Japan Top Business Interviews 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, become a 39 year veteran of Japan and run his own company in Tokyo. Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate (糸東流) and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.      

Watching Joe Biden destroy himself during the debate with Donald Trump was painful.  He was appealing to the American voting public, that is to say, around 68% of voters based on the 2020 numbers, a then record turnout. This type of debate is similar to closing the sale in business.  We have to outline why what we are doing is good for the client and why they should choose us over the alternatives. Polling, surveys, focus groups etc., provide politicians with insight into the needs of the voters and they construct their close on that basis. We do the same, except that we do research on the firm, the industry sector, the individuals we are meeting to build up a picture of who we are dealing with.  By the way, in today's world, they are doing the same to us.  Are you satisfied with what they will find out about you?  I digress.  We then ask a series of questions to better illuminate what the buyer needs.  Once we have zoomed in on what they require and have internally confirmed we have what they need, then we explain our proposition and go in for the close to get their agreement to make us their preferred solution provider. Joe Biden couldn't close the sale because of the way he communicated his message. His low energy didn't convey conviction or confidence.  In sales, we have to be careful to not come across as a pushy salesperson, hell bent on getting the required revenues to make our monthly targets. We have to have conviction, energy, confidence without it being pushed too hard.  Japanese buyers do not react well to being pushed. One reason is that they are rarely the sole decision maker and harassing them to buy is pointless. The decision will go through many people before it is resolved one way or another. What we can do though is to communicate the details of how the solution will work well inside their company and the benefits they will get which they are not enjoying today.  There is a line between enthusiasm and pushy and we have to tread on the correct side of that line.  Sales is the transfer of enthusiasm is an old saw and it is true.  We need to convey the belief that what we are offering will be the best thing for this buyer. If we can fire up our interlocutor, they will be primed to sell our ideas inside the company and bring on board the other sections who will be impacted by this buying decision.  We will probably never meet these people, so our champion has to be our communication mouthpiece to spread the good word about what we are proposing. One way to fire up our champion is to provide them with a lot of data, proof, statistics, testimonials, etc.  Japanese buyers are, I would say, the most risk averse group on the planet, so we have to come packing evidence if we expect them to go to bat for us. I think Biden should have destroyed Trump in that debate, because he is the incumbent and has the numbers to support the policies he has introduced.  When I see video of other politicians like California Governor Gavin Newsom or Senator Bernie Sanders in action, they are machines on the numbers and that is what Biden should have done as well. In our case, when we are talking to buyers, we have to come with numbers too.  “Claims are easy, but where is the proof” is what the buyer is thinking and we have to provide that answer. Storytelling should be seated on top of the numbers.  Buyers have trouble recalling stats, but we are all pretty good on recalling stories.  Being able to assemble the numbers and then weave them into a convincing story is one the key skills in sales.  That story should feature where the solution has created value for another client, very similar to this one.  Being able to explain how the other client converted the solution we provided into tangible benefits is what the buyer wants to know in Japan, because no one wants to the be the guinea pig. They like to see others take the risk of the new and then they can safely follow in behind and get the value, without the fear of it turning out to be a dud. Biden blew the close and as salespeople, we have to make sure we are not replicating that meltdown.  We need to understand how to communicate value in a way which is easily accessible to the Japanese buyer. My own failures as a salesperson can usually be traced back to poor ability to muster a compelling and convincing argument as to why they should stop just using their current suppliers and start using me as well, or preferably instead.  We see a Biden failure replay, but do we reflect well enough on ourselves and our own communication abilities in sales? It is always a good practice to go back to the basics, back to the drawing board and rework what we say and how we say it for the buyers.  Just doing the same old, same old, is what got Biden into trouble.  He needed to rise to the occasion, but he couldn't.  What about us?  Let's make sure we are fully prepped and capable of delivering a powerful, convincing message to convert buyers into lifetime clients.        

I belong to Dan Slater's Delphi Network and every week his newsletter contains unattributed quotes from CEO conversations he has heard at his recent events.  One of them caught my eye about sales.  The anonymous contributor was saying that selling in Japan has to be no selling, a bit like a zen approach – “the sales of no sales” type of approach.  I found that interesting and was wondering what on earth this CEO was talking about? The inference was that in Japan you can't try to sell company representatives to buy your solution and you need a much more tangential angle of entry. I thought to myself, well that doesn't gel with what I have been doing here.  I definitely sell companies on the idea of buying our training and have zero hesitation about doing so.  What is the difference?  I may be creating a straw man here to make my point and risk misinterpreting what this CEO said, but I think they know little about sales. They are probably imagining that sales is all hard sell.  We enter the gladiatorial arena and we brow beat the buyer in submission. Relentless with our 50 closes, we never take no for an answer.  We push and push and keep trying to jam the square peg into the round hole, regardless that it will not fit. That is not sales to me and it certainly is not an approach which will yield revenues in Japan. When I first got here doing sales in the late 1980s, I tried to use “consultative selling” techniques which I had studied from American sales gurus.  It was very distressing to find that these techniques were not working at all here. I would get straight into the sales conversation and start asking them detailed questions about the condition and status of their business. To my confusion, they wouldn't answer my questions.  Instead, they would ask me questions about myself and my company and they wouldn't buy.  Looking back, I now realise that I was so naïve and an idiot. I turned up for a first meeting, they didn't know me or my company from a turnip and they got grilled on the inner sanctum questions about their business, from a total stranger, and even more exotically, a foreigner to boot.  No wonder they wouldn't answer my slick well-honed consultative sales questions. I had built no trust and, worse, was in a hurry. Business trips are expensive and I had to justify the cost of getting me to swan around Japan for weeks at a time to my Aussie bosses back in Brisbane. The buyers in these cases were actually non-buyers, and trained me on what I needed to do.  I realised I needed to spend more time talking about who I was, who my firm was, what we had done so far and establish a foundation of understanding and work toward building trust. I am a slow learner, so for many years the sales meeting was basically run by the buyers rather than me, the sales guy.  I actually can't recall where this idea came from, but at a point in time, I realised I needed an entry point which would allow me to be able to ask my questions and to be able to follow the consultative sales approach. My formula was and is very simple. I describe who we are, what we do, who else we have done it for and the success they have had and suggest that MAYBE we could do the same for this buyer.  I then say, “In order for me to know if that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”. The MAYBE bit is very important in Japan.  In other parts of the world, salespeople will no doubt be very bolshie on the fact that they are the perfect partner, that their firm can do the whole shebang.  Here we need to introduce some softness into the equation, some muted tones, indirect assertions which don't come across as pushy. Not every buyer here will accept this approach and some, a tiny minority, will insist on hearing my pitch. I do it, but what I want to do is stop the meeting right there, pack up my gear and leave.  I have no idea what on earth they need, because I haven't been able to ask any questions, so what am I pitching against?  I am flying blind and there is a zero possibility this conversation will lead to a client or a deal, so I should reduce my losses, leave and go find a client I can help.  Obviously, that is too confrontational in Japan, so I give my pitch, trying to make it broad enough that it might jag some point of interest.  It rarely succeeds. Getting permission to ask questions is the key to the door of getting deals in Japan and if this step is not achieved, then you are trapped in mindless pitch hell.    

There are farmers and hunters in sales and both are needed in organisations.  The hunters are energised by landing the deal and bored with the paperwork and administrivia required after the sale.  The farmers are not much chop at landing new clients, but they are genius at taking care of existing clients and keeping them as repeater clients. I am a hunter. I realise about myself that I love finding new clients, discovering what they need and then helping them to achieve their goals and aims.  There is the thrill of getting the deal, manufactured from nothing because you had to go out there and beat the bushes.  Now, not every effort results in a deal. Sadly, a number escape, some go with a competitor (ouch), some ghost me and do nothing.  I always take all three of these outcomes badly. It sounds trite to say it, but I really believe that what we have can help the buyer and if they don't take the offer, they are missing out.  I believe that 100%.  Now, the emotional roller-coaster of sales means we need to have a safety net when we stumble.  We can't always land the deal, so there are going to be more failures than wins.  How do we keep our confidence and certainty intact to allow us to get back up and try again?  Part of this is how we rationalise failure. I always say to myself that the buyer made a mistake to not buy from me.  I recognise I can always do better as a salesperson and that I am not perfect, but beyond that I don't blame myself.  I analyse what I did and didn't do, but I don't allow any negativity into my brain.  Sales is so emotional, I feel I have to isolate that side of me from the results.  When I land the deal, I don't start leaping about the place in unbridled joy either.  I feel a quiet pleasure that I can now help to transform this company's business. That is what we do, and we have seen it happen with our own eyes, so we know it is true and not just marketing pap. Those moments of success have to the leaven out all the failures.  Recently, I spoke about having a very depressing week where one deal after another either fell over, was lost, or was postponed.  That was hard and coming one after another, you begin to doubt yourself.  In sales, it is never about the big deals you have done in the past, it is always about what are you doing right now.  This is the reality of sales, which is why we have to insulate our minds from fears of inadequacy and failure. For hunters, the finding of the client and then transforming that relationship into a deal and a client is what keeps us going.  I attend a lot of networking events and I have my pattern of behaviour.  I always arrive early and stand at the table with all the name badges.  The staff hand me my badge and then can't work out why I don't buzz off, get out of the way and go inside.  I keep standing there and I carefully scan every name.  I am looking for people I already know so that I can use their name when I see them, in case I may have forgotten it.  I look for companies who could be prospects and I look for people I have wanted to meet, but have not managed it so far. When I finish that, I stand right in the doorway and start meeting people who come in. Often they mistake me for one of the hosts of the event but I don't mind that, I want to meet them. I exchange business cards with them and ask them about their business and how many people they have.  That information is enough for me to make a judgment about how we can help them.  If they have few people, then it is hard to organise training and our public classes are perfect for them. If they have over thirty people, then they can possibly do an in-house class. Following that, I work the room and try to meet as many people as possible.  In sales, I have to kiss a lot of frogs before I can find the beautiful princess.  I was doing just that at the New Year's party for the American Chamber.  I had been there, standing around for hours already and had met a lot of people.  I bumped into an older Japanese gentleman who I didn't know and exchanged cards.  Next month we are delivering Leadership Training For Managers in-house, for all of his senior managers.  That is creating a new client from nothing but my time and effort to attend the event and work the room.  Obviously there were many meetings after that initial meeting but I got the deal and we will get paid for the training.  These successes help to balance out the failures like that big Japanese Pharma company who recently told me they went with a competitor – did I mention ouch.  The wins are important to keep us hunters going, because it is tough duking it out in the market.  We need to be resilient and unemotional, both about the failing and in the winning.  We are constantly living on the edge of winning and losing, and that is where the thrill of the chase is determined.    

I had a meeting with a client I have been chasing for business for the last ten years.  They have had the same President right throughout and we get on very well, but this has not resulted in any business coming my way.  Over the years, I had been introduced by him to his various HR people, and that is where it has always floundered.  Maybe they had their own internal solutions and didn't need us or the HR people didn't like me or didn't like the President trespassing on their turf.  Actually, I have no idea why we have never been able to crack the code, but finally, I thought we were getting somewhere.  I was to have yet another meeting with the President from last year and it kept getting postponed and postponed.  Finally, we had our meeting in January and he said wait until June and we will continue the conversation. I was somewhat surprised when his assistant reached out to me to have that June follow-up meeting before I did the follow-up from my side. I expected he would be in the meeting with the new HR head he had recently hired, but he did not appear.  They had three executives there for the meeting, including one based outside Japan who was visiting.  Naturally, I had notes for the January meeting and I was working off the basis that this meeting was a continuation of the previous meeting direction with the President.  So, I get straight into outlining the solution for them based on my understanding from my previous discussion with the President at our January meeting.  That was a mistake.  I assumed he had briefed them on our talk, but it gradually dawned on me that wasn't the case.  My approach was wrong. What I should have done was to first ask them what they understood the situation to be around what the President wanted.  I didn't do that and so wasted a lot of time and effort early in the meeting barking up various wrong trees. I could see this genius, transformational idea of mine, wasn't going anywhere. They kept asking me rather tactical questions. This totally confused me because the President had been operating at the strategic level.  In the course of them getting frustrated with me not getting the picture, they explained the problem from their point of view.  I was floored.  The things they wanted were the most basic requirements.  I couldn't initially get my head around what I was hearing, because it didn't correspond with the image I had in my mind. This firm has been around a long time and they have been very successful.  They have many branches and, therefore, I assumed, they had all the basics well and truly nailed down.  Their ducks were in a row, I thought, but not true. Being a 112-year-old training company and being here since 1963 in Japan, I have a huge curriculum resource  at my command and can operate at the most basic or sophisticated levels.  In other words, I could give them what they want once I understood it.  I was reflecting on why this meeting was initially so hard.  I see that I had a direction for them in my mind based on the meeting with the President and I forgot to do the sales basics with them. I assumed we were advancing on a previous conversation going on to the next level. I was operating above the fluffy white clouds and they were down a deep mine shaft.  What I should have done was to expect that the busy President had not briefed them at all or not to a very distinct degree.  I should have ignored what I thought was happening and should have dealt with what I had in front of me – three people I didn't know and should have assumed that I had no idea what they wanted.  I wish I had been that smart. If I had started that way, it would have been obvious to me that I needed to focus down on the basics for them.  This hand it over phenomenon from the President to the working level staff is a common enough thing in business for busy senior executives.  I will make it my rule from now on to ignore what I think is happening and check to see what they think is going on and what they need to fix their issues. I promise to do better.  

I don't like doing RFPs in Japan.  We are translating concepts and intangibles into text in a document, which a lot of people we will never ever meet will be reading and making decisions about us.  I prefer to work on my champion and have them marshal the approval through their byzantine internal processes to get the agreement to go ahead.   It feels more in control than launching a bunch of words into space and hoping for the heavens to align. I had a case like that recently.  I had met a person from the company at a networking event and when I followed up they directed me to the person who would become my champion.  I met them, understood what they wanted and came back with some alternatives from which they could choose.  They made a selection and asked for a simple proposal, with pricing, which I put together. Unbeknownst to me, someone higher up in the hierarchy didn't like what they had selected and said they should have a demonstration training first before committing to the delivery of the option they chose.  I could tell my champion was annoyed by this, but we did the demonstration more as a fig leaf to get approval to move forward as planned. In the case of an RFP, the champion receives it, but it is a much more formal process, no doubt involving procurement, compliance and a host of other entities who will need to scrutinise the document.  None of these people will have had a chance to get the necessary “passion” inoculation from me about how this will be so great for their company.  It is a very dry affair all round. Because so many people we will never meet will be looking at the content we have to really lay on the detail. Anytime we write something down, there is the danger of misinterpretation or lack of understanding of what they are reading.  We are experts in our business, but often the people behind the scenes are not experts and they don't know the lexicon or the content or the concepts.  Often, what we are covering is quite complex as well, which makes it hard for them to gauge what they are reading to weight it up against rival submissions. There is the danger we produce something so complete, so water tight, that it is impenetrable for them and they go for a competitor application because it is much less sophisticated and less complex, allowing them to make a decision.  Where do we strike the balance between full details and a lighter version with enough data to get a yes.  We have a varied audience, so some will prefer a light version and others want every detail. Creating a version within a version could be the answer.  We can have the executive summary bit and we can have the heavy details as well. In this way, the reader can choose to skim or do a deep dive.  Japan always skews toward wanting more detail, so by definition a Japanese RFP will be relatively dense. Supporting documents are always a good idea. Often we have Flyers or catalogues or white papers or whatever, which we can attach to the submission.  No one may have the time to read it all but it does show a depth of command of the subject and that your firm is well organised on this topic.  We should never underestimate the Japanese preference for risk reduction, which usually translates into a desire for ALL the information they can get their hands on. Somehow, by collecting a lot of information, they feel immunised from making a mistake through a lack of knowledge or perspective. The RFP evaluation process results in a yes or a no and when you get the no, it is perplexing to understand why you were not selected.  In Japan, there is no mechanism for sharing with you why you missed out because the system doesn't want to get into a debate about the decision.  Therefore, it is very hard to learn from the process and it becomes a bit of a black box procedure.  Was it the content, was it the money, was it the timing – what was it?  Did our competitor offer something we don't have or didn't think about?  You can lose a lot of sleep trying to parse what happened and it usually leads nowhere. If you can get together with your champion unofficially, it is worthwhile trying to get some insight.  They may be reluctant though to do that because there is no upside for them and they don't want to compromise the organisation's decision or decision-making processes.