Episodi
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âThere are no excuses for failing in salesâ, 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 donât. Now, if we fired every salesperson who failed to hit their target, we wouldnât 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: âthe buyer is never on your scheduleâ.
The remaining third will buy, and the question becomes why will they buy from you? The âyouâ is important here because firms donât 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 sellerâs kokorogamae. This Japanese word can be variously translated, but in this context, âtrue intentionâ 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 isnât 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.
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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 canât 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 companyâs thinking. In todayâs environment where getting a sales job is super easy, maybe they donât 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.
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Episodi mancanti?
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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, âit is business; it is not personalâ. 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 donât 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 ânoâ 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 isnât 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? âThey are idiotsâ was the first reaction. This was followed by âwhy are they just doing what all of their competitors are doing? Why not use another more differentiated approach with something more fresh?â.
What did I reply? I didnât 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 wonât alter their course of action. I wrote what I always write, âthank you for letting me knowâ and that is that. I donât 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 doesnât 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 wasnât 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 âkeep following up until they dieâ. 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 hasnât 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.
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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 customerâs 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 âgo the extra distanceâ 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 didnât 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 donât 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 customerâs 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 didnât 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, âdonât bog me down in the weedsâ 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 wonât 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 donât recommend that, but we can be direct and they wonât 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 âdonât worry, it will be on the next oneâ.
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.
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In Part One, we looked at some of the elements we need to be working on in providing excellent customer service, and so now letâs 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 donât 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 âcustomer is Godâ, 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 âkowtowâ. 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 âthank you for coming back, what can I do for your todayâ. 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 â 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 ânoâ. I am sure I am not the only customer who is like that. One of the great ways of telling a customer ânoâ 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 âno, we canât do thatâ, 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 âyesâ.
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 âyesâ 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 âloseâ to the customer and a âwinâ 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 donât 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 âno problem, I will just sit by the window over there and read my paperâ. He later came and told me they were now ready. When I went to pay, the waiter said âcomplements of the Ritz Carlton because we have inconvenienced you by making you waitâ. 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.
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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 donât 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 Godâs bidding.
Letâs 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 âso whatâ 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 donât 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 â 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 wouldnât 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.
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About The Author
Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training
Bestselling author of âJapan Sales Masteryâ (the Japanese translation is "The Eigyo" (Theć¶æ„), âJapan Business Masteryâ 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" (ăăŹăŒăăłă°ă§ăéăçĄé§ă«ăăăźăŻæąăăŸăăă) and his brand new book is âJapan Leadership Masteryâ.
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 â The Presentations Japan Series
Every second Tuesday - ăăžăăčéäșșăźæă
3. Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series
4. Thursdays â The Leadership Japan Series
Also every second Thursday - ăăžăăčăăăăăăăŁăčă
5. Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show
6. Saturdays â Japanâs Top Business Interviews
Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube:
1. Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show
Also every Second Thursday - ăăžăăčăăTV
2. Fridays â Japan Business Mastery
3. Saturdays â 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 (çłžæ±æ”) and is currently a 6th Dan.
Bunbu Ryodo (ææŠäžĄé-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.
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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 todayâs 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 couldnât close the sale because of the way he communicated his message. His low energy didnât 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. âClaims are easy, but where is the proofâ 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 couldnât. What about us? Letâs make sure we are fully prepped and capable of delivering a powerful, convincing message to convert buyers into lifetime clients.
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I belong to Dan Slaterâs 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 â âthe sales of no salesâ 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 canât 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 doesnât 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 âconsultative sellingâ 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 wouldnât answer my questions. Instead, they would ask me questions about myself and my company and they wouldnât buy.
Looking back, I now realise that I was so naĂŻve and an idiot. I turned up for a first meeting, they didnât 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 wouldnât 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 canât 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, âIn order for me to know if that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?â.
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 donât 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 havenât 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.
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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 donât 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 canât 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 donât blame myself. I analyse what I did and didnât do, but I donât 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 donât start leaping about the place in unbridled joy either. I feel a quiet pleasure that I can now help to transform this companyâs 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 canât work out why I donât 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 donât 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 Yearâs 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 didnât 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 â 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.
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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 didnât need us or the HR people didnât like me or didnât 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 wasnât 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 didnât 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, wasnât 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 couldnât initially get my head around what I was hearing, because it didnât 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 â three people I didnât 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.
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I donât 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 didnât 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 âpassionâ 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 donât 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 doesnât 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 â what was it? Did our competitor offer something we donât have or didnât 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 donât want to compromise the organisationâs decision or decision-making processes.
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Recently, we had a negotiation with an existing buyer. They had severely cut back their purchasing quantities under direct orders from the European Headquarters. A new President had arrived and looking at the global training bill, decided he could save a lot of dough if they did it all themselves. The first salvo was to reduce the amount of previously scheduled training while they sorted it out. Actually, his local team just cannot do it from a time perspective and on the talent front.
Anyway, they came back to us with a request to resurrect one of the cancelled classes. That was good. They also wanted some materials supplied which we had not previously supplied. The salespersonâs job was to ask for payment for the production and supply of those new materials.
I told him that when he puts forth the number, he should then shut up and not say another word. When we mention a big number or, in this case, a new number, we create tension in the room. For some salespeople, this tension is too much. They suffer from âimposter syndromeâ and begin to doubt their worth, their solutionsâ worth, their companyâs worth and a myriad of other doubts crop up. They feel the overpowering need to lighten the mood. They want to reduce the tension by adding more explanation or by trying to pile on more value.
This misses the point. You want the tension. The buyer feels the tension too and they now have the stress, not us. Now they have to justify why the thing you are asking for is not possible. Usually, they donât have a well thought out reason, so they are struggling internally with how to deal with our proposal. When we jump in and start babbling, we reduce the pressure on them to justify the number they want. This is their escape route. We have given them enough time to come up with why they canât accept our offer. We have just handed them to keys to the door to escape from the tension we have built up. Invariably, we donât get what we wanted because we sabotaged our own efforts, by speaking when we should have kept stony silence in play as our weapon.
Asking for the order is another stressful crossover point in the conversation with the buyer. We were delivering a demonstration class recently for a very large insurance company. The original plan was for a suite of trainings for their managers. The HR team was well on the way to getting this going when someone in senior management questioned the content.
The certain deal now became highly uncertain. HR asked us for a demonstration class to prove the content was suitable and so we naturally agreed to do that. To my delight, they said they would pay for the demonstration, rather than forcing us to do it for nothing. The money wasnât the issue. It was an open competition with other firms for the business and I recall the HR person commenting to me that he thought our fees were cheap. After hearing that, I think I should raise our fees!
So we did the demonstration class and it went very well. We had the senior director in the class checking on the content, the actual direct boss of the HR person I had been dealing with. At this point, I could have asked for the business very directly by saying âso, are we approved to do the actual class for the managers now?â. For many salespeople, especially in Japan, that is too direct. In fact, a lot of Japanese salespeople wouldnât have said anything and just left it to the buyer to tell them they had the business. The reason for this is simple. They abhor rejection and being told ânoâ and buyers too donât like it either. Japan is a very civil society and confrontation is frowned upon, so a direct and clear ânoâ is avoided.
Rather than just leaving it up in the air, we can ask for the order in a very low stress way. In this case, I used a âminor pointâ close. The original intention was that if the demonstration class went well, we would do the real class with twenty managers in the following month. I simply asked, âSo next month there will be twenty people in the class?â. If there is to be no class, then this question is irrelevant. When they affirm that is the case and it will be twenty managers, they are indirectly saying we have the business and we proceed as planned.
I could have used an âalternative of choiceâ close. Here I would say, âare we still thinking about the next month for the class or are we thinking in two monthsâ time?â. This is not a âyesâ or a ânoâ answer. It is a âyesâ answer across two distinct possibilities.
I could have used the ânext stepâ close. In this case, I would ask, âso the next step is to confirm the date we spoke about earlier for the class for the managers. Shall we lock that date in?â. If they say, âyes, lock the date inâ, that means the class is going to go ahead, and they have accepted our proposal and we have a deal.
All of these techniques are smooth, low or no pressure and easy to put forth. They donât create a lot of tension with the buyers, because the approach is tangential. If they were not going to go ahead, then they would likely say, âwe will get together and discuss the demonstration class and get back to youâ.
Having said that, in many cases that would be legitimate here, because in a consensus broad based decision-making system, there are people who are not in the room who need to be consulted before a concrete decision can be made. It is also a way of not telling you ânoâ to your face, which can be stressful for both sides. They just send you an email later telling you they have âtaken another pathâ or some other code words for ânoâ.
We can use tension when closing, to help us get a result. We can also ask for the order in a stress-free way and overcome our fears of excessive tension in the sale. We just need a clear preconceived plan, sales technique and guts.
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I am having a bad run in sales at the moment and it is depressing. I am a constant networker attending events to meet potential clients. The leads we get to our website go to my sales team and so I have to hustle and get out there and make it happen. I do that and I follow up with the prospects to try to get a meeting or at least an introduction to a decision-maker.
Like everyone else, I get ghosted a lot of the time, but that doesnât prevent me from following up again and again until there is no more point. I actually cannot recall anyone ever criticising me for my following up activities. If they ever did, I have my riposte ready to go. Would you like to hear it? Here we go. âYes, you are correct. I do keep following up with potential clients. Your organisation has salespeople too, and wouldnât you expect them to be following up with potential clients for your companyâs growth and development? Well, that is what we do and by the way we teach sales and equip you salespeople to be better at the follow-up to win more business. Isnât that something your organisation would value?â.
Amongst the clients I have been able to visit, there are the seeds of some potential training for them. This takes time and often they tell me to wait a little until they are ready to go. Naturally, I take note of that and I get back to them later to check in. I have had some clients on that cycle for over a year now.
It is very depressing though when they get back to you after you have followed up and say, âwe are doing nothing this year and we wonât be spending anything on training until 2025â. When you get one of these, it is bad, but lately I am getting a number of these one after another. It is also leavened with this refrain, âour headquarters has put a freeze on hiring and training for the foreseeable futureâ. Ouch!
What do we do when we get slammed with these rejections and delays? If they come at reasonable intervals, it is one thing to deal with them. However, when you are pushing hard on the follow-up, you are lifting rocks to find poisonous spiders, centipedes and scorpions and have to deal with the product of your tenacity. I have been getting failures day after day for over a week now and I am constantly tasting the bitter ashes of defeat.
In this situation, we forget about our previous successes and abilities and focus on our current emasculation and inertia. This is dangerous because what we think determines our future success. We need to switch our mindset to the positive. It is a good idea to call past clients at this point, especially those happy clients, and ask how things are going.
For a start, they are going to take your call and will be happy to speak with you because you have built the trust and have provided value. It also reminds them that you are there. We tend to make a sale and then move on to the next sale and forget about keeping in touch with satisfied clients. There is a slight chance that they have a new need and bingo, we call them and this triggers some action on their part. At the least, it changes our mood to something more positive than the depression we are feeling about getting no new sales.
âNana korobi, ya okiâ is a Japanese saying I like, which means âfall down seven times, get up eightâ. It is a bit like that advice to the cowboy who gets thrown from a bucking bronco, to get back up in the saddle immediately. This is important because if we think about it too much about it, we will talk ourselves out of getting back in the sales saddle.
So, get out there and attend networking events, call prospects and try to get a meeting. Call past clients and stir the embers of a possible deal. Dwelling on the failure component of what we do in sales will take us nowhere. We have to be positive and get on the front foot all the time, no matter how hard we are being driven down and pushed back. There is a success psychology in sales. It is based around self-belief. When that wall cracks, there is no going back and people drop out, never to return.
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I started my first podcast âThe Japan Leadership Seriesâ on August 2nd, 2013. Shortly after that, I discovered Content Marketing and got better educated on the subject thanks to Joe Pulizzi and Robert Roseâs podcast âThis Old Marketingâ, launched on November 20, 2013. The premise at the time was revolutionary. You put up your best stuff for free and donât protect your IP. This was a radical idea and few went for it. I didnât think of my podcast as âContent Marketingâ, but I soon realised that was what I was doing. I now release six podcasts and three TV shows every week and drive my Content Marketing hard.
Content Marketing combines well with SEO as a mechanism for getting clients. I have 3300 articles each on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter, 2060 podcasts on Apple Podcasts, over 2500 videos on YouTube, have published seven books, so I am all in on Content Marketing. It is coming to a shuddering halt.
AI is bypassing the content we are all putting out there and scraping our IP. Its search function homogenises what is globally and freely available on a subject and in thirty seconds provides the answers we are seeking. With Google search, you had to go to the links and my stuff would come up, with my name and my ownership of that content made quite clear. AI just bypasses all of that attribution. You get the answer, but it is not clear who it came from. We are becoming anonymous and even more invisible.
I remember a long time ago when clever people made the point that we content producers were all media companies, even though we may not have thought of ourselves in that way. I have produced a massive amount of media on three subjects â Leadership, Sales and Presentations, because that is what we mainly teach. I want people to look at what I produce and conclude they need Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training to come and help them solve their problems.
I donât write books to sell books. The market is too niche for me. You have to be interested in Leadership and Japan, Sales and Japan, Presentations and Japan. We could hold a meeting in a largish phone booth to accommodate the denizens of these niches. We do sell copies, but we mainly hand over our books to potential clients for free and use them as textbooks for our courses.
If AI can get the answer without going through us, then how do we get to the client and get them to buy our solutions? This is the nub of the problem. What we had available to us through Content Marketing is going away rapidly, but I wonder how many people have twigged to the issue. What should we do?
At one level, we can stop shovelling coal into the Content Marketing furnace, because the client will get the answers they want without us making the effort to stoke the fires. The number of people seeing our content will diminish, so why are we doing it?
Credibility is still important though and I believe that personal branding will become the path forward. We are already doing that, but as Content Marketing drops out as a conduit from clients to us, then we need alternatives. Search will continue to work to find suppliers of specific solutions. With SEO, there are known means of enticing the spiders to find you, but what about AI? How can we spice up the AI search algorithms? That is certainly unclear at this point. Well, it is certainly unclear to me, so if you have a good idea on this point, then let me know!
Through traditional SEO, or search where you pay to place your ads, clients will find you and then what? This is where Content Marketing may still have a role. Buyers will check us out before they make contact. Ask yourself, what are you putting out there to display legendary credibility, so that they select you for follow-up rather than your rival? Our company brand is important, but our personal brand is also going to be important. Japanese clients are notoriously risk averse and want to know who they are dealing with before they go too far.
My LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads and TikTok posts are just full of content â endless and substantial and this is no accident. I want to influence the minds of the buyers, to see me as THE EXPERT in my core areas. I want them to taste what we have and know that we can solve their issues.
The end of Content Marketing may mean that clients donât find us anymore when they are searching for an answer to their question about their problem. For example, if we ask AI âhow can I get more innovation from my team?â we will get a lot of answers. What do you do with all of this theory which pops up, though? You get the answer and then have to apply the knowledge yourself. Not that many companies are capable of doing that at a high level. If they are looking for an expert to deliver the solution, they have to do a different type of search and there is a chance they will discover us. They will then want to evaluate who is the biggest, safest and best provider. This is where having a substantial body of specialist work on their area of interest will hopefully pre-select us for follow-up.
Accept that the traditional way of being found through Content Marketing is going away and prepare for a brave new world, which is changing by the second. Nevertheless, try to control what clients will find out about you, as they do their due diligence on suppliers of solutions to their problems. None of this is going to get any easier, so buckle up for the ride.
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Have you ever had this experience? You cannot get on the same wavelength as the client. I remember an HR Director at one of the major fashion brands and I was always confused during our conversations. I was never sure where she stood on any number of issues about us delivering training for them. Yes, she was very pleasant, but also very obtuse and hard to corral. I would leave the meetings unsure of where we stood with this deal, if in fact there was a deal in there at all. Because no one in Japan wants to give you a straight ânoâ, they get tied up in Gordian knots of obfuscation and you are often left marooned.
Sometimes for me it is a language issue. Japanese is so difficult and my level of understanding can really vary depending on who I am talking to. I can have one client meeting and I get everything they are saying and I am on top of the conversation. A few hours later, I am sitting in another meeting room across from a potential client and I am struggling to get what they are saying. Not every native speaker is a fluent commander of their own language. Not every native speaker is smart, succinct, clear and logical in their speech. When you are not a native speaker and you are getting this barrage of poor communication skills, it gets bewildering very fast.
I have been having a series of back and forth emails with a potential client about arranging some training for them and the language is Japanese. It isnât necessarily the linguistic aspect which has been giving me trouble. These days, tools like Google Translate do a phenomenal job if I need help. The issue is the person writing the email is a very poor communicator. Basically, she doesnât have great skills in her own written language. This requires me to keep clarifying what she is trying to say, because it is not clear in the least.
Expectations can be an issue. We find we are both operating with different expectations and often we havenât communicated what they are, because somehow we imagine the other party understands our position.
Japanese people suffer from this amongst themselves. So much is left unsaid in Japan and the idea is that each party fills in the blanks and coalesces their understanding of what happens next. It doesnât always work though and they find they have completely misunderstood each other. Throw a foreigner into that mix and things can get very exciting, very quickly.
As a training company, we have to be careful of the message getting confused or mistaken between the salesperson and the trainer who will deliver the class. As a rule, we really want the trainer to meet the person contracting us, so that they can get a direct download of what is expected. Of course, we can pass on our understanding of what they want, but getting it directly from the horseâs mouth is a much better idea. Can you do something similar in your industry with your team who will execute the deal?
It is always interesting too, to find out that what you are hearing in this meeting is different or additional to what you heard in your own meeting with the client. Uh oh.
They may have moved their expectations in the interim or we just got it wrong, or we may have asked a different question this time and uncovered some hidden or previously uncommunicated needs.
This happened to me recently when we met the CEO. In that conversation, new requirements emerged which were not revealed or discussed in my first meeting. Either these were not tapped well enough by me in the first instance or they had subsequently emerged or the CEOâs own thinking had progressed since our original meeting.
It is always humbling when this happens. You have to question your own competence with asking clientâs questions and taking notes in the meeting. It very important to catch these misunderstandings early, so that they can be corrected before the deal progresses too far down the track.
Getting things in writing is good for clarity. However, in most cases in Japan, the contracts are not proscriptive and do not carry all the very detailed aspects, especially in the service sector.
Usually, busy salespeople donât want to summarise their understanding of the meeting and send it to the buyer, because they want to move on to the next client and the next deal.
Having a clarity meeting is part and parcel of the way things are done here and that is a good thing. We might want to skip that meeting and just get busy on the delivery, but Japan has found that such additional meetings to make sure we are all aligned work well in a country where communication is vague, parsimonious and confusing.
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Japan loves detail. A lot more detail than we expect in the West. I remember a lecture I attended at an academic conference on Sino-Japanese relations here in Tokyo in the early 1980s. The Professor was making this point about the Japanese love of detail by relating how a Zen metaphor had been imported into Japan from China. In the Chinese telling, there was a bucket to draw water from the well and there was no great attention placed on the apparatus, but instead on the broader philosophical Zen point. This was the main objective of the telling of the story.
In the Japanese version, there was a lot of minute detail about the circumference and depth of the well, how it was dug out and reinforced, the construction of the bucket and the rope and a host of other statistics, somewhat diluting or even obscuring the broader philosophical Zen point.
The takeaway for us in sales is that the Japanese buyer has an insatiable need for details. This is cultural, but also a defensive posture to help them ensure they donât make a bad decision to entrust their companyâs fortunes to us. The idea is that the more information they can assemble, the greater the likelihood they wonât get into any trouble in the future.
Usually, we will have corporate brochures, flyers, catalogues etc., to show the client. We should make a point of emphasising how long we have been in operation and, in particular, how long we have been here in Japan. Longevity in Japan is its own proof of acceptance by the market and therefore validates risk reduction to take us on as a supplier.
When we start outlining the scope of our services, we should be prepared to go into a lot more detail than we would normally need to bother with in a Western context. If you ever look at Japanese local websites, they are exploding stars of massive details and the screen is saturated in text. I donât think we need to go that far, but we do need a balance.
There are some busy people who will just scan the content and be satisfied with that and others who will want all the detail. We can cater to both by using headlines and summaries and other pages or resource sections for packing in the gory details.
We are all busy and social media is training us to have shorter and shorter concentration spans, so the first sentence in any paragraph has to be well constructed. We want to plant a hook in that opening volley which captures the curiosity and intrigue of the buyer to keep reading. Donât start with boring bumf and expect to have your content consumed by the reader. We need to keep repeating this hook idea every paragraph.
Most Japanese companies do not want Minimum Viable Products tested on them or to be a pioneer in their industry. These things work in the West, but Japan expects the product or solution to work perfectly from the outset and to have no problems and no defects. Adjusting the solution based on buyer feedback isnât an option once you have sold the solution. It has to work from the get go. Testing something new is not attractive to the buyer, because the risk is felt to be too high. Therefore, it is always good to come armed with case studies about other clients who have benefited from your solution.
This is not that easy in Japan, because clients often wonât allow you to promulgate that they are even a client, let alone share what you did for them and what happened. Clients would tell me they couldnât allow us to mention they were a client because it wouldnât be fair to our competitors! Huh? But this is Japan, and this is how they see these things. Corporate secrets are well guarded here, so getting a case study together is no snap.
Always make sure you have information about yourself and the company's history. The buyers want to know who they are dealing with. You will need to include basic details about the company like who are the executives, the headquarter address, your main bank, the amount of capital you hold, etc.
In my case, I always refer to myself as âDr. Storyâ, because I have a Ph.D. and that is a big differentiator with my competitors in the corporate training market. Do you want to be taught by a guy with a Ph.D. or some bozo with no credentials? I will also sometimes mention I have a M.A. from Sophia University here in Tokyo, because that says âl am a localâ to the Japanese buyer.
I will often mention I am a 6th Dan in traditional Shitoryu karate, because that tells the buyer I am really serious about Japan and have deep knowledge of the culture and language. When I have the chance, I will also reference the 9 books, three in Japanese, I have published and the multitude of podcasts and videos I have released, because that is a massive form of credibility building. It says I am a serious expert in my field and you should use me rather than someone else who doesnât have any of these proof points.
We need to think carefully about what we hand over to the buyer and what we put up on our website. With their distributed decision-making system, many people we will never meet will be taking a look at us. We have to anticipate their questions and concerns and cover those off in our materials.
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Usually in Japan, we are granted an audience with the buyer for an hour for the meeting. Sometimes with Western buyers, they want to restrict the time, so we only have thirty minutes, which makes things very difficult. We also know that if we can capture their interest, that thirty minutes can magically become much longer.
We also know that there will be more than one meeting, so we donât have to try to squeeze everything into that initial conversation. One point though â in the case of a second meeting - always have your diary there and set it while you are with them in the same room. Donât leave it or you will get crushed in the competition for their time by other competing forces.
That first hour should be concentrated on building rapport and trust with the buyer at the very start. We need to establish our credentials and our trustworthiness. In most cases, they donât know us at all and we turn up expecting them to share their deepest, darkest corporate secrets with a stranger. Remember your parents told you, âdonât talk to strangersâ.
This first meeting requires good communication skills, centered around our choice of the content and the way we express it. Stumbling, bumbling speech patterns are automatically assumed to show we are an incoherent idiot, unprofessional, unreliable and best stayed away from.
Japanese buyers are trained to hear our pitch and then completely destroy it, as a defence mechanism against making a bad decision. We donât want that. Instead, we need to get their permission to ask questions during that first meeting, so that we can avoid pitching into the void. If we donât know what they need, how on earth do we know what to pitch? If they want A and we keep talking about B, we will not get the business. We have to know they are interested in A and not B. To find out what they want, we use a simple four-part structure:
I. who we are
2. what we do
3. who we have done it for and what happened
4. suggest we could possibly do it for them too
I say âpossiblyâ because we still donât have enough information to know for sure. We are better to say we donât know if we are a match and make the point that, âif I can ask some questions,I will have a better idea if we can help or notâ.
The temptation in Western sales techniques is to start enthusing about what a great help we can be and how we can do everything regardless of what they need. We are an omnidirectional wunderkind who can magically solve all of their corporate ills, because we are so awesome. This wonât work in Japan because it comes across as boasting, sounds like a lot of salesperson hot air and we should be avoided.
Once we get permission to ask questions, we can start with either where they are now or where they want to be. It doesnât matter where we start, but we need to know the answer to both. We need this so that we can gauge the distance between the two points. A client who is really close to solving their problem internally believes they donât need us, because they can do it themselves. We need to disabuse them of that idea if we can. Sometimes we canât do that. In that event, we have to pack up our stuff up, get out of there and find someone we can help.
Once we know where they want to be, we need to find out what is preventing them from getting there. Hopefully, the reason we uncover will help us to position ourselves as the solution they cannot generate internally. The issue with knowing the blocker is that it is not enough. Most deals never happen because the buyer doesnât have enough urgency attached to benefiting from the solution. If we just respond by saying we have the solution, that wonât be enough.
We need to explore the timing and the importance of speed. If we donât do that, we will be left in limbo waiting for the buyer to get around to taking action. This is where pointing out the opportunity cost of no action is important, because clients assume no action has no cost. We canât leave them thinking like that.
We will need to dig deep with the questions to understand their requirements, motivations, fears and concerns in this first meeting. In the next meeting, we will explain how our solution will take care of what they want. This is where we get into the nitty-gritty details of the solution and walk them though how it will unveil inside their company.
Just talking about the mechanics is not enough, because we need to connect the details of the solution to the benefits they will enjoy. That is also not enough because we need to describe what that benefit will look like inside their organisation. Buyers are sceptical of salespeople, so we need to lay out the proof of where our solution has worked elsewhere and preferably for a client very similar to them.
Finally, we ask them a question which is very mild but deadly, by saying, âhow does that sound so far?â At this point, we donât add or explain or dilute the tension we have created with that question. We just sit there with our mouth shut and listen for the answer. If they have an objection to our solution, we donât jump in to defend it. We just ask sweetly, âwhy do you say that?â Again we shut up and hear them justify their statement. Once we have enough information from their answer, we will know how to deal with the pushback.
Maybe we can overcome that objection or maybe we cannot, but this is the process which works best. If we can answer it, we ask again âhow does that sound?â, and wait to see if we have a deal or not. All of this closing in Japan is very soft and low key. Hard sell is impossible here, so donât even bother going there.
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Aussies are a casual people. They prefer informality and being chilled, to stiff interactions in business or otherwise. They canât handle silence and always feel the need to inject something to break the tension. Imagine the cultural divide when they are trying to sell to Japanese buyers. Japan is a country which loves formality, ceremony, uniforms, silence and seriousness. Two worlds collide in commerce when these buyers and sellers meet. My job, when I worked for Austrade in Japan, was to connect Aussie sellers with Japanese buyers. I would find the buyers and then try to find the Aussie suppliers. I noticed some distinct cultural differences in the sales process.
It was always better when the Japanese buyers didnât speak English. This stripped out the ability of the Aussies to directly communicate with the Japanese buyers. You would think that was a disadvantage, but in fact it was the saviour in a lot of cases. Unable to access their own language in direct communication with the Japanese buyer, they were forced to give up on some mainstream linguistic idiosyncrasies of Aussie interactions.
Formality is a given in business in Japan and when, as the seller, you are forced to communicate through an interpreter, you are reduced to a staccato flow of thoughts and ideas. There is a delay in the communication and the Aussies had to sit there and wait to hear what the buyer said. They were forced into a more formal style of interaction which prevented them from free styling. This was good, because the Japanese buyers prefer the more formal approach.
When the buyers could speak some English, the Aussies ran riot. They were freed from the chains of formality and immediately lapsed into casual interactions, with which they felt more comfortable. Humour is a big part of the Aussie male culture and they bring it with them wherever they go, including to the very much stiffer, buttoned up Japanese business world.
The problem is you have to be another Aussie to get in sync with the humour. Self-depreciation is part of Japanese culture too and here it is more about being humble rather than putting yourself down. Aussies are also pretty humble people and self-depreciation is a male signal to other males that you are not trying to get above everyone else and that we are all equal. This reaction against the English class system in Australia has made fairness and equality basic building blocks of the culture down under.
The problem is self-depreciation is very hard to translate. When we speak foreign languages, we are constantly translating what is being said in the other language into our own. Japanese buyers always had trouble trying to get the point of the self-depreciative attempts at humour by the Aussies. When it bombed, did the Aussies regroup and go in a different direction? No. They just doubled down harder to try to make the point, which meant they just kept digging a deeper hole for themselves. Hint to the wise, when selling in Japan be humble, but donât make self-depreciative remarks about yourself â it wonât land the way you want it to land.
Sardonic humour is a close cousin to the self-depreciative remarks. We Aussies got this from the English, because they love sardonic humour too. Again, it is very hard to translate and for Japanese to understand. Japanese communication is rather circular and vague. Sardonic humour is angular. You make comments at an angle to what had been said and hit hard on that angle to make a dark point, which is witty.
Japanese buyers are fabulous at never making a direct point if they can avoid it, so no angles to leverage off. I notice this with my Japanese wife when I say something sardonic and it just goes absolutely nowhere. They donât have that angle in their own language, so it is a hard one to grasp in a foreign language. Hint number two: forget attempting sardonic humour, because only you will get the joke.
Sarcasm is a close relative to the sardonic humour category. Aussie male culture means growing up under a constant barrage of sarcastic remarks and one-upmanship. You have to learn how to be tough and take it and how to hand it out, to defend yourself. The speed of the riposte and the lacerative edge to the comment are being judged as a sign of wit and intelligence. No one gets sarcasm in Japan, in my experience. Trust me, I have tried it many times, only to see it fall as flat as a pancake. Hint number three: remove all efforts at sarcasm with Japanese buyers, they simply will have no idea what you are talking about.
Irony is another Aussie favourite in the humour stakes. Like sarcasm, we males grow up navigating our way through ocean waves of irony smashing into us all the time. It requires a very high level of understanding of the language and the cultural context. Most Japanese buyers just donât have strong enough English to even get close to understanding the point of the ironic comment. There is also an edge, a sharp blade attached to the irony too, which is usually used to wound others in Aussie male culture. Japan is about harmony and getting on together, so there is no need for irony in their culture, so it is a totally alien concept.
It sounds like a mean comment to a Japanese person and doesnât create a good impression. Aussie males may salute the cleverness of the biting ironic comment and brush it off as a flesh wound when on the receiving end, because they have grown up with this verbal street fighting. However, for Japanese it doesnât come across well. Hint number four: no ironic comments to the Japanese buyer because you will look like a mean, nasty person.
If you want to be humorous, become a professional comedian. If you want to sell something to Japanese buyers, be charming, nice, cooperative, considerate and honest. You will do much better that way.
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Blarney, snake oil, silver tongued â the list goes on to describe salespeople convincing buyers to buy. Now buyers know this and are always guarded, because they donât want to be duped and make a bad decision. I am sure we have all been conned by a salesperson at some point in time, in matters great and small. Regardless, we donât like it. We feel we have been made fools of and have acted unintelligently. Our professional value has been impugned, our feelings of self-importance diminished and we feel like a mug.
This is what we are facing every time we start to explain to the buyer why they should buy our widget. We are facing a sheer, vertiginous rock wall of climbing difficulty. The cure for all of this caution, disbelief, doubt and fear is honesty.
I talk about understanding our kokorogamae or true intention in sales. Are we here sitting in front of the buyer to make a bigger bonus, higher commissions, keep our job or there to help them succeed in their business? If our true intention is anything other than trying to help the buyer do better in their business, then we are never going to be able to continuously scale that rock face of difficulty.
Yes, we might get one deal done, because we are a silver-tongued sales monsters who can snow the buyer. The object for the vast majority of us is never a sale, but always the reorder. Yes, there are some smash and grab businesses where they grab the loot and never see the buyer again. I know one salesman here in Tokyo who told me when he was selling meat in the US, he always had to find a new town, with new suckers to sell to, because once the buyer received the meat, the quality was poor and he could never go back.
The difference between us is that I would never have taken that job because it offends my fundamental values and professionalism as a salesperson. I donât want to be that guy who has to run away from the buyers and be afraid to meet them again. I can honestly say that I have never sold anything to anyone that would cause me to be ashamed or fear meeting the buyer again. That is the sales life I want for myself, not one where you are forced to live in the shadows and fear being outed as a crook. I can say that after he told me that story, I lost all trust in him and would never buy anything from him. His basic human values are doubtful to me and I donât want spend my time with people like that.
Realistically, though, there are few cases like this and for most of us in sales, we are looking for an ongoing relationship with the buyer. We want to build the trust and get the repeat business forever. If we have the best interests of the buyer firmly at the front of our mind we are fearless. We can walk into any networking event full of strangers and meet new people without trepidation and search for new buyers. We can walk into that first meeting safe in the knowledge that we know what we are doing. We understand that in that first meeting we are there to find out what they need and make a judgement as to whether we have it or not. If we donât, then we donât waste their time or ours and we move on to find the buyer we can help.
I liken this to if you were a researcher who found the cure for cancer, you would be fearless to bring this to the attention of the buyers. There would be no hesitation and you would try to find as many people as possible to help. For an introvert like me, walking into a crowded hall full of businesspeople is overwhelming. Walking up to total strangers and introducing yourself is not the norm in Japan. I have to overcome my fear of this moment to find who are my potential buyers in the room. It is never easy for me and most people who meet me assume I must be an extrovert. Not true, but I am in sales, so I have to become more extrovert in public.
One of my sales heroes is Zig Ziglar and he put it beautifully, âyou can get everything you want in this life, if you help enough other people get what they wantâ. That is the true sales mantra and the one I follow religiously. It steels me against my introversion, my fears of the strange looks I get when networking, the rejections and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune which come as part of this sales life.
If we have the buyerâs best interest firmly in the front of our minds, we will find the right words, the proper explanations, be able to answer the difficult questions fluently and in general, exude a vibe of total confidence, which the buyer picks up on. They are not just reading our words. They are searching for a holistic answer to this questions: can I trust this person?
The only answer can be âyesâ and if our kokorogamae is correct, then that is the answer they will be feel and receive.
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