The Sales Japan Series

Almost 100% of presentations that I see in Japan are one directional. The audience sits there passively and the speaker presents to them. There is no interaction with the audience. I was watching an interview with Clint Eastwood in his approach as a movie director. He was talking about his famous Western “The Unforgiven” and talking about how he shot some key scenes, such that the faces of the actors were in the shadows and not fully revealed. I can’t remember exactly how he expressed it, but he said you don’t have to show the whole face with full lighting, because the audience is intelligent. They can fill in the gaps. I thought that was a good metaphor for presenting. As the presenter we don’t have to show everything in full lighting from our side. We can create some gaps and allow the audience to fill in the blanks themselves from their imaginations and their viewpoint. We do this to some extent already when we use rhetorical questions. These are questions which we pose to the audience but we are not actually asking them for an answer – we provide that after a suitable hanging pause. What about if we actually make it a real question and source the answer from the audience? Now we cannot be doing this every five minutes, as that will be massive overkill, but we can drop some questions into our talk. We might plan to use these questions to overcome flagging energy and declining interest from the audience. This is why you never want to be lowering the lights when you are presenting. You want to be able to study the faces of the people arrayed in front of you for any signs of distraction, boredom, or tiredness. When I did my TED talk, the audience was in complete darkness because all the lights were blazoning away hitting me up on stage and making it impossible to read any reactions. It was very unnerving, especially when you are used to being able to study the audience reactions to what you are saying. Now when we ask a question to the audience here they are confused. Firstly, they are not trained for this and they are not sure if this is a rhetorical question, which we will answer or whether they actually have to answer. The next line of confusion is who amongst the audience should answer this question. In Japan, no one gets any prizes in life for going first, so it almost guarantees that everyone will be holding themselves back. The third line of confusion is fear. They worry if they get the answer wrong, they will look like a fool in front of everyone. They also fear that someone else will come up with a much more intelligent answer than theirs and they will look stupid. So casting a question before an audience here is bound to get no immediate answer. We have to help them by setting it up. Just blasting forth with a question is a bit shocking, as this is not how things are normally done. We need to say something like, “In a moment, I am going to pose a question, because I am very interested to get your experiences and ideas on the issue”. Now we have fired off a warning shot, so that when the question is unloaded, no one is surprised. We help them even further by using our eye contact and gestures to indicate to an individual or a group of individuals that we want to hear their answer. By holding out our hand gesture palm up, it is very unthreatening. If we used a pointed finger instead, that is very aggressive and will drive a shudder of fear into an audience with its power. We simultaneously use our eye contact and look at a member of the audience we are indicating to, thus requiring an answer. It is always good to pick those who were seated on the same table as you, if it were a luncheon or breakfast event, or someone you were chatting with at the start, as you will have established some rapport. Depending on the relationship, we can call out their name as we ask the question, “So Suzuki san what has been your experience with….”. We should immediately thank them for contributing and start applauding and...

Aussies are a casual people. They prefer informality and being chilled, to stiff interactions in business or otherwise. They can’t 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 didn’t 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 don’t make self-depreciative remarks about yourself – it won’t 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 don’t 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...

Blarney, snake oil, silver tongued – the list goes on to describe salespeople convincing buyers to buy. Now buyers know this and are always guarded, because they don’t 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 don’t 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 don’t 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 don’t 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 don’t, then we don’t 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, “you can get everything you want in this life, if you help enough other people get what they want”. That is the true sales mantra and the...

We are slowly emerging from Covid, yet a few leftovers are still hanging around, making our sales life complicated. One of those is the sales call conducted on the small screen using Teams or Zoom or whatever. These meetings are certainly efficient for the buyers, because they can get a lot of calls done more easily and for salespeople, it cuts out a lot of travel. Efficient isn’t always effective though. In my view, we should always try to be in person with the buyer. Some may say I am “old school” and that is quite true. Old school though has a lot of advantages when selling. Being there with them, we can take the client through the materials much more easily and we can read their body language in depth and minutely. Buyers are always sceptical about salespeople, because everyone is risk averse and concerned about getting conned or taken for a ride. When we are in the room together, they can get a better sense of who we are. They can read our body language to make sure our words match up with the intentions we are spruking. I had a sales call with a new client and, being in the room together, I could hand over the training manual and take him through it page by page, explaining the content of what he would be buying. I could easily control what page he was on so that we were in synch. We have to be careful when handing materials over that we are on page five and so are they, rather than they are racing ahead of us to page twenty. The commentary coming out of our mouth has to line up with what they are looking at in the materials. It happens that they race ahead of us, so we have to be aware of that danger and control what the buyer is looking at very carefully. I had another new client sales meeting, this time online and with three people on their side. They degenerate into three tiny little boxes on screen and it gets worse once you start sharing documents online. It is very hard to read three people’s reaction when you are in the room with them let alone trying to do it remotely. As we know the current systems aren’t as good as teleprompter technology. You can look into a camera lens on a teleprompter and read the text appearing on screen at the same time. With these various virtual platforms, the camera is located on one part of the computer screen, usually at the top and the people you are talking to are located way down below. You have to make a choice – look at the camera and not at your audience or look at your audience and not at the camera. The teleprompter technology eliminates that choice, but it hasn’t been applied to the virtual world as yet. In this situation, I look at my camera and give up trying to read the reaction of the buyers online. This is a big give up, by the way, and most unsatisfactory. I do it this way, because what they see is me speaking directly to them, making eye contact all the time. From their screen angle, they see me staring straight at them. This creates the sense of trustworthiness. On screen, I can keep staring at them intensely, without it creating any tension, as would happen in Japan if we were in person. Japanese culture avoids too much direct eye contact. This is why people look at our chin or throat or forehead. On screen, though, we are safely removed and so if we look down the barrel of that lens, we can keep applying the eye contact without it becoming intrusive. It allows us to connect with the viewers. Yes, we cut out the travel time and the costs to get to the client, but we are giving up a lot more in return. Being there is so much better and more valuable. Yes, it may take three hours there and back to hold the meeting and only one hour to do it online. But that one hour in person enables us to be so much more persuasive. We are also better able to recognise pushback or reluctance. It is almost impossible to read the vibe going on between the attendees on their side. When you are together in the room, you can see if there is any difference of opinion amongst the...

Getting a deal done in a single meeting is an extremely rare event in Japan. Usually, the people we are talking to are not the final decision-makers and so they cannot give us a definite promise to buy our solution. The exception would be firms run by the dictator owner/leader who controls everything and can make a decision on the spot. Even in these cases, they usually want to get their people involved to some extent, so there is always going to be some due diligence required. In most cases, the actual sale may come on the second or even third meeting. Risk aversion is a big thing is Japan, so everyone is very careful to make sure their decision is the right one and that there will be no blow back on them, if things go bad. I met the owner of a very successful accounting business at a networking event. It was a very crowded affair and as is my want, I will just shanghai strangers and introduce myself. “Hi, my name is Greg” as I extend my hand to shake theirs, followed in short order by my reaching for my business card. I followed up to set up a meeting, which we had, and it went quite well. He invited me back to meet his team. The people I met were quite well established in the company and focused on the administrative side of things. He was obviously thinking about the training arrangements and logistics and that is why he wanted me to explain what we will do to these two staff members. He was the decision maker, but we still had to involve other members of the team to get the internal buy-in. We had a third meeting with just him and I, to sort out the final arrangement and set dates, etc. In another case, I met an insurance company representative at an event and followed up for a meeting. He directed me to one of the staff who takes care of HR and I had an initial meeting to uncover their needs. Following that discovery meeting, we had a second meeting where I presented our options to solve their issue. There was a competition with other suppliers of training to see who they would choose. We then had a third meeting, and he brought a colleague from their department and I explained what we do and what we do for them in that meeting. Again, the decision had been taken as we had won the competition and now he was harmonising the next stages internally, to get it to become a reality. Because the steps are elongated, I often don’t even bother to bring any Flyers with me to the first meeting and spend the whole time trying to best understand their needs and wants. This way, the full hour of time usually allocated can help me clearly ascertain if we have what they need or not. It is always a good idea to set up the next meeting at the end of the first meeting, because everyone in Tokyo is so busy you need to get into their schedules fast. Once I have done that, I bring the materials to the second meeting to support my recommendation and we go through them together. It is not uncommon to have to come back a third time and go through specific elements once more, to help them gain a clearer understanding of the contents and its suitability for their situation. Once you understand the cadence of doing business here, you are not getting exercised by how slow the process is or by trying to cram everything into one meeting and driving for a “yes” decision. That is very unlikely, and we need to be thinking in terms of three meetings rather than one. If we can get it done in two, then magic, but don’t expect that to happen. Risk aversion and team decision-making ensure that things will move slowly. No one is in a hurry to buy anything we have to offer and we have to keep that thought firmly in the front of our minds. No one gets fired for being overly cautious in Japan and risk taking is not well regarded as a concept. Patience and a full pipeline are the requirements for doing business here. If you are desperate, then you will have a rocky time because no one is on your timeline and frankly, they don’t care. We have to adjust...

We often hear that people buy on emotion and justify with logic. The strange thing is where is this emotion coming from? Most Japanese salespeople speak in a very dry, grey, logical fashion expecting to convince the buyer to hand over their dough. I am a salesperson but as the President of my company, also a buyer of goods and services. I have been living in Japan this third time, continuously since 1992. In all of that time I am struggling to recall any Japanese salesperson who spoke with emotion about their offer. It is always low energy, low impact talking, talking, talking all the time. There are no questions and just a massive download of information delivered in a monotone delivery. As salespeople, our job is to join the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer. But it is also more than that. The buyer’s mental meandering won’t necessarily have the degree of passion we need for them to make a purchasing decision. So we have to influence the course of that internal conversation they are having. This is where our own passion comes in. I always thought Japanese people were unemotional before I moved to Japan the first time in 1979. The ones I had met in business in Australia were very reserved and quite self contained. They seemed very logical and detail oriented. After I moved here I realised I had the wrong information. Japanese people are very emotional in business. This is related closely to trust. Once they trust you, they have made an emotional investment to keep using you. No one likes to make a mistake or fail and the best way to avoid that is to deal with people you can trust. How do you know you can trust them? There is some track record of reliability there, that tells you the person or company you are dealing with is a known quantity that will act predictably and correctly every time. The problem with this approach though is that you will only ever be able to sell to existing accounts. What about gaining new customers? You have no track record and no predictability as yet. When you meet a new customer they are mentally sizing you up, asking themselves “can I trust you?”. Naturally a good way to overcome the lack of track record is to create one. Offer a sample order or something for free. This takes the risk out of the equation for the person you are dealing with. To get involved with a new supplier means they have to sell the idea to their boss, who has to sell it to their boss, on up the line. No one wants to take the blame if it all goes south. A free or small trial order is a great risk containment tactic and makes it easy for all the parties concerned to participate in the experiment. The other success ingredient is passion for your product or service. When the buyer feels that passion, it is contagious and they are more likely to give you a try to at least see if there is some value to continue working with you. When he was in his mid-twenties, my Japanese father-in-law started a business in Nagoya and needed to get clients. He targeted a particular company and every morning he would stand in front of the President’s house and bow as he was leaving by car for the office. After two weeks of this, the President sent one of his people to talk to him to see why he was there every day bowing when the President left for work. When he heard that my father-in-law wanted to supply his company with curtain products, he told him to see one of his subordinates in his office to discuss it. That company eventually became a huge buyer and established my father-in-law’s business. Was that a logical decision, just because some unknown character is hanging around your house everyday like a stalker? No it was an emotional decision. What my father-in-law was showing the President was his passion, belief, commitment, discipline, patience, seriousness, earnestness and guts. That is a pretty good line-up for a new supplier in order to be given a chance. We need to remember that buyers are wanting to know our level of...

I recently launched a new project called Fare Bella Figura – Make a Good Impression. Every day I take a photograph of what I am wearing and then I go into detail about why I am wearing it and put it up on social media. To my astonishment, these posts get very high impressions and a strong following. It is ironic for me. I have written over 3000 articles on hard core subjects like sales, leadership and presentations, but these don’t get the same level of engagement. Like this article, I craft it for my audience and work hard on the content and yet articles about my suit choices get a lot more traction. What I take away from this is people are interested in how we present ourselves in business. The thesis of Fare Bella Figura is that first impressions are so important. In sales, people judge us hard based on how we look, before we even have a chance to open our mouths. If we don’t get that initial visual interaction correct, then we can be playing catchup to correct an unhelpful first take on us. “Clothes maketh the man” is an old idea and is related to this first impressions equation. The other thesis of Fare Bella Figura is that I dress for the meetings I am going to have that day, rather than some random selection of what is back from the dry cleaners. We are going to make an impression with the buyer one way or another, so I want to be in control of that impression as much as is humanly possible. I believe there is a direct link between how we present ourselves and the degree of credibility we can instil in the client. If we make a mess of the fabric and colour combinations, we are screaming “unsophisticated”. I do not recommend for men to ask their wives for advice. Study this “dress for success” topic for yourself and become the master of your own universe. If we are turning up with ancient stains on our tie, or our suit, it is interpreted as sloppy and there is now a strong doubt about our quality consciousness. If our shoes are scuffed or not displaying a high shine finish, it says we are lazy, not detail oriented and unreliable. The term “down at heel” means “poor” and it comes from the fact that the back of the heel of the shoe has worn down and has not been repaired. Either we are too poor and obviously not a success in the sales profession to be able to repair it, or too indifferent and either way, it is a bad sign for the buyer. If we are wearing a brown or tan belt with black shoes or vice versa, it says “hick” and someone who lacks common sense. The exact matching tie and pocket square colour combination is another faux pas these days. Would we want to accept these types of salesperson as our “trusted advisor”? I doubt it. I certainly wouldn’t take their advice on anything if they can’t even dress themselves correctly. Suits too large or too small are another bad indicator. They have either lost a lot of weight, but haven’t bothered to get their suit taken in, or they are getting chubbier and haven’t had the suit taken out, because they won’t spend the money. It isn’t that expensive to alter an existing suit, and the difference is total. If the suit trousers are too long or too short, it looks off – go and get them altered or replace them. Style and fashion are difficult to navigate. Suit jacket lapels get skinnier, ties get wider and then get narrower, trousers get slimmer and then get fuller, socks get discarded when wearing shoes – all sorts of temporary fashion trends take over the dictates of what is appropriate. Suits can last more than one fashion trend and you have to debate with yourself whether that wide lapel is still going to present the right image with the client when everyone else is wearing a narrower lapel these days. I struggle with this. I have a favourite double breasted Versace suit from years ago and because the style is dated; I don’t get to wear it much or at all and that seems a waste. However, if I am dressing for my client, then the answer is simple – leave it in the wardrobe...

Public speaking spots are a great way to get attention for ourselves and what we sell. This is mass prospecting on steroids. The key notion here is we are selling ourselves rather than our solution in detail. This is an important delineation. We want to outline the issue and tell the audience what can be done, but we hold back on the “how” piece. This is a bit tricky, because the attendees are looking for the how bit, so that they can apply it to fix their issues by themselves. We don’t want that because we don’t get paid. We are here to fix their problem, not for them to DIY (Do It Yourself) their way to a solution. All selling is public speaking and presentations skills. However, very few salespeople are trained as speakers or presenters. This is incongruous, isn’t it? We need to be able to present to the one person in front of us or to hundreds of prospects all gathered together at an event. First of all, we are selling our personal brand and then by extension the solution we are representing. That is the correct order and just jumping to the solution won’t work. Buyers buy us first and then what we sell. We all know we can’t do good business with a bad guy or gal and our talk is a due diligence process to see if we can be trusted. The dumb way to sell from stage is to provide all of the content up front and then come in at the end with the shiny sales pitch. There is a discernable break in the flow and the audience braces themselves for the pitch. This isn’t the way to do it. We need to be interspersing our pitch throughout the talk, so there is no discernable shifting of gears by the speaker. This way, there is nothing to brace against or push back on. The way to do this is to determine what are the key problems and fears confronting the audience. We have the fix for these and can be a trusted partner for them. Once we have determined what are the key problems, we construct our talk to address all the most high priority needs in the time allotted. The talk is broken up into specific chapters, rotating around the key issues. We need to create hooks, which will grab the attention of the listeners. In each chapter, we outline the downside of not doing anything about fixing the problem we have raised. We also talk about what needs to be done to fix it, but we don’t reveal how to fix it. To get the point to register with the buyers, we pose rhetorical questions about what will happen if they don’t take action to deal with it. We are painting a dismal picture for them of the future ramifications of leaving the mess as it is. The fact that we understand the problem in detail tells the audience we are an expert in this area. If we have some visible proof of our expertise, all the better. We might point them to our books, blogs, podcasts or our video shows. Today, all of these things are much easier to pull off than ten years ago. For example, Amazon prints my books one at a time if I request it and so no garage is full of unsold books, which used to be the reality for most authors. Today, creating blogs and pushing them out through social media gives us credibility at almost no cost. The same with podcasts and videos. There might be some small cost to recording the shows and hosting podcasts on a platform like I use with LibSyn, but really the cost is marginal. YouTube hosts my videos and it is free. Our mobile phones provide amazing quality for recording video and video editing software is not prohibitively expensive. Editing things yourself is possible in a way it wasn’t before. This means we can project our expertise beyond the physical limits of the stage. Let me give you a case study. Please go to LinkedIn and find my page. You will see I am posting all the time on three subjects – leadership, sales and presentations. If you scroll down through the feed, you will just see over three thousand posts. My prospective buyers don’t need to read them all, but they can see there is a substantial collection of my expertise...

Finding clients is expensive. We pay Google a lot of money to buy search words. We pay them each time someone clicks on the link on the page we turn up on in their search algorithm. We monitor the pay per click cost, naturally always striving the drive down the cost of client acquisition. If we have the right type of product, we may be paying for sponsored posts to appear in targeted individuals’ social media feeds. This is never an exact science, so there is still a fair bit of shotgun targeting going on, rather than sniper focus on buyers. If we go to networking events, we may have to pay the organisation membership fee to be able to access the event and the fee for attending that meeting. Or we may pay a usually very expensive amount to attend as a guest. If we do old style advertising, then we pay for the ad and it has a very brief shelf-life before it is discarded, usually unseen and unread, despite our best wordsmithing efforts with the copy. Given how difficult and expensive it is to get a client, you wonder how we could be so crazy as to lose a client we have already spent time and treasure on acquiring? It usually happens for a number of reasons. Our solution fulfilled a need they had at that time, but that need is a one off or not a consistent feature of their spending. It might be a seasonal spend, so there are limited time during the year to interact with the buyer and the connection isn’t as strong as it needs to be. The company may have run out of dough because of the market, currency exchange rates, wars disrupting supply chains or a pandemic killing millions of people and disrupting the entire global economy. Maybe our quality slipped up or our consistency of delivery wasn’t where it needed to be and the buyer punished us by going to another supplier. Perhaps the buyer got moved around inside the client firm or quit and a new person has appeared. The new broom has their own ideas and wants to mark out their territory by bringing in their own preferred suppliers and we are now out in the cold. Or we have had a change of personnel. The person responsible for that firm has left the organisation and a new salesperson has to take over the account. The chemistry is not there and the buyer moves their business to a rival firm. Client bonds are very fragile and so many things can destroy the continuity of the business. Even if you get on well with the buyer, they have bosses and maybe they have a different idea about how to move forward. This travels all the way to the top of the organisation back in headquarters. So many times the boss of the global business changes and a few months later you find yourself out on the street, because the purchasing has been centralised or rationalised or right sized or whatever and you are out. I have seen so many deals fall over because someone up the decision-making tree has decided to override the decision of the buyer I am dealing with. There is a policy change and now hiring is frozen, expenditures are reeled in and suppliers are cut loose. A lot of this is beyond our control and we just have to accept the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in business. When we make the change, we can do a better job of controlling the transition from one salesperson to the next. Unless we have fired the individual and they are out the door quick smart, there is usually a month period of notice that gives us the time to glue in the new person to the buyer. Japan as a formalised cyclical redistribution of jobs every few years, so firms here are used to people moving. This should give us time for the existing client salesperson to take their replacement for them to meet the buyer and do the handover. What happens after that is the critical piece. If the new representative doesn’t work on creating their own connections with the buyer, then the business continuity can be at risk. This requires time together and busy salespeople may feel they are already maxed out taking care of their own...

Salespeople are good talkers. In fact, they are often so good, they decide to do all the talking. They try to browbeat the buyer into submission. Endless details are shared with the client about the intricacies of the widget, expecting that the features will sell the product or service. Do we buy features though? Actually, we buy evidence that this has worked for another buyer very similar to us, in a very similar current situation in their business. We are looking for proof to reduce our risk. To get us to the proof point, we make a big deal about how the buyer can apply the benefits of our solution inside their company. Is that what happens in reality though? In Japan, judging by what our clients tell us and by the raw material we find attending our training classes, it would be a miracle if the salesperson went through these critical five phases of the explanation of the solution: 1. feature 2. benefit 3. application of the benefit 4. evidence and 5. trial close. Most Japanese salespeople are absolute experts on the most intimate details to do with the features. However, they completely forget to expand that information to elucidate the benefits and beyond that, they have no clue what is supposed to come next. In fact, finding a similar client in a similar situation in the current market is usually a stretch for us in sales. Even if we had such a rare case, often we are precluded from talking about it because of certain clauses in the contract or by a Non-Disclosure Agreement we signed. How do we prove what we are saying then? This is where a trial session or a demonstration comes in handy. We can talk as much as we like about how great we are and our solution, but seeing is believing. If it is equipment, then running the machine can show whether the output will satisfy the demands of the buyer. If it is a service, we may have to recreate the situation and show how we do things. Recently we did both. We had a request from one of Japan’s biggest financial institutions to run a sales training session, to see if we have what they want for their 3000 person sales team. In any trial, we have to make a decision on what we will choose for the content? My advice would always be to choose the most difficult content. Isolate out the areas where everyone really struggles. This is usually the most relevant content and also the content which they currently have the most trouble with too. If the content is too easy, then they will think they can do it themselves and therefore they don’t need us. In the services sector, this also raises the bar on the delivery side of things. Complex content needs a lot of expertise to deliver it professionally. If they are thinking to bring it in-house, they may watch the session and decide that they do not have the right resources to pull that off by themselves. Ergo, they have to buy from us to eliminate the gap they are facing between where they are and where they want to be. In a demonstration, similar to a trial session, getting the participants to get their hands dirty is critical. Theory is fine, but doing it for real is a totally different thing. I was teaching a module on “How To Disagree Agreeably” to the leadership team of one of the 5 star hotels here in Tokyo. We went through the theory and then we had the role play practice. It was revealing how much they struggled to replace their old habits with what they had just learnt. It really brought home the importance of not just understanding things intellectually, but the importance of getting it to gel inside yourself and make it your own. When we run a session or a demonstration, the client can see the content relevancy for their need and our expertise to deliver it to the team. We can usually customise the content further, if it is not quite where they need it. The delivery part shows our professional standards, our ability to relate to the team and whether we can be trusted. We have talked up a big game in the first few meetings...

I am very active networking here in Tokyo, scouring high and low for likely buyers of our training solutions. I attend with one purpose – “work the room” and as a Grant Cardone likes to say, find out “who’s got my money”. I have compressed my pitch down to ten seconds when I meet a possible buyer at an event. My meishi business card is the tool of choice in this regard. Most people here have English on one side and Japanese on the other. I was like that too until I got smarter about selling our services. Typically, I would hand over my business card - Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training. The recipient would then ask me “what do you do?”. I realised I needed to have a better organised approach to that frequent question. Knowing that we do better remembering things we hear and see at the same time, I created two cards – one for English and one for Japanese. On the front of my card is all the logistical information – title, location and contact details. On the rear of the card is the pitch deck. On that side, I note we are experts in “soft skills” training, we have been here in Japan for 61 years and around the world for 112 years and that we cover five main areas – communication, sales, leadership, presentations and diversity, equity and inclusion. At this point I ask them which one of these they need the most at their firm and then I shut up. In ten seconds, I have them telling me their needs. This opens up the opportunity to visit them after the event and go through what we might be able to do for them. It is not the right occasion to attempt to have that conversation in a busy networking event. By the way, if they say, “all of them”, I still ask them which one is of the most interest. I need to get them to prioritise otherwise, it is left too vague and the conversation cannot advance. Naturally, I write to them immediately and try to set up the appointment. Most people ghost me and don’t reply. I know everyone is busy, so I also know I have to keep following up until they consent or tell me to buzz off. Those who agree to meet will answer my questions and listen to what we have. At this point, things slow down as they work their way through the labyrinth behind the meeting room wall, where their decision-making colleagues sit – out of my sight and touch. They need to reach a consensus internally, to do the training and pay the dough. The problem is they are never on my timetable with their decision-making. Don’t they know I have a monthly target to hit? Don’t they know we need money now, not later? Aren’t they aware we don’t like 60 and 90 day payment terms, because that is grossly unfair to the little guy? So often when we complete a deal and I look back at the spark of that deal, going from the initial ten second pitch deck networking event chance encounter, to the time of payment, it can be six months or more. If you have a cash flow issue in your firm, that is a big problem. Yes, you can discount fees to speed up payment and you get less, but you get it faster. The better approach is to keep stacking your funnel with deals, so that if one is slow to fruition or falls over, you are not wiped out. Deals falling over is super painful. You have spent a ton of time marshaling this payday through their elaborate and baroque system. Everyone is ready to go, the contract is agreed by their legal beagles and then “someone” intervenes and scuppers the entire enterprise. That payday may happen or it may not happen, but if that is all you have on the go, then you are naked and alone in a harsh world of pain. I am reminded of watching a show on television when I was a kid. A performer was keeping plates spinning on top of cane sticks. As one would falter, they would leap in and wobble the cane stick to get the plate back to maximum speed. It was always fast-paced and frantic. I am sure it must have been incredibly stressful for the artist. That is the sales life to me. We are busily spinning the plates to...

Access to social media has really democratised salespeople’s ability to sell themselves to a broader audience. Once upon a time, we were reliant on the efforts of the marketing team to get the message out and, in rare cases, the PR team to promote us. Neither group saw it as their job to help us as a salesperson, and they were more concentrated on the brand. Today we have the world at our beck and call through social media. We can promote ourselves through our intellectual property. We can post blogs on areas of our expertise. We can do video and upload that to YouTube, one of the biggest and most powerful search engines. There are so many paths to the mountaintop, and they are all free. Of course, the platforms are looking for money and so they shaft us and only show our stuff to a minute section of our followers, but the price is right. I was making this point in a recent speech to the American Chamber here in Tokyo, which you can see on YouTube. One question following my recommendation to salespeople to get out there and promote theirexpertise and experience, was “what about the haters?”. It is a good point and if you are delicate and sensitive, then social media could be a bruising encounter for you and your content. Or like me, you can just ignore it and work on the basis that people who get it know you are an expert, because they consume your content and they will ignore the haters as well. Let me provide a real life case study for you. I was recently involved in a thread on LinkedIn responding to a post by the author about promoting your credentials when speaking in Japan, otherwise the audience won’t trust what you say. I didn’t agree with the way this was characterised by the author and so added my “expert” comment. Most people just ignored what I was saying, because they had what they wanted to say as their main interest and fair enough. One person though said, “master trainer and executive coach coming in to bash an entire 125 million people country as non-professional in a single comment and blatantly disregard any suggestion on how to customize the message to appeal to a specific audience. Excellent communication strategy! 笑”. So what would you do with this type of criticism? We can ignore it, as I suggested during my AmCham speech, or we can choose to expose it. On this occasion, I decided to expose it. This was my reply, “tell us your experience and share your insights. I am relating mine based on my experience here since 1979 and over 550 public speeches in Japan. Your comment doesn’t match with what I am suggesting from what I can see. What do you suggest that is diametrically opposed to what I am saying? I have published 373 blogs on LinkedIn on presenting in Japan and the same number of recordings for my podcast The Japan Presentations Series and published my book Japan Presentations Mastery as well as teaching the High Impact Presentations course. How about you - tell us what you have done?”. As you see, I am heaping on my own credibility in my reply and asking the critic to pony up and tell us their credentials. I chose this route for a simple reason. I have a very high profile here because I have published 7 books, including three best sellers, and release six audio podcasts and three video podcasts a week. I also pump out four additional videos a day through LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram and Threads. You may not have this type of onslaught happening and can simply ignore the irritation. I didn’t plan it this way, but I also drown out any critics, because of the constant flow of content I keep posting every day. Their previous negative posting gets pushed down the fold in the screen and just disappears. It remains high in their postings on their page, but is crushed by my new posts on my page and is soon forgotten. In my reply, I made a special point of not criticising the person making the negative comment, but challenged them to put up and tell us what they would recommend. This reply...

Japan is facing a serious shortage of staff in many industries. The job-to-applicant ratio rose to 1.28, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare announced recently. The ratio means there were 128 job openings for every 100 job seekers.The figure has not yet reached the pre-pandemic level of 1.6 in 2019. The hospitality sector in particular, lost a lot of part-time staff during Covid and they haven’t returned in numbers sufficient to match the needs of employers. Hotels are getting back to pre-Covid occupancy rates, but they worry they don’t have enough staff to clean rooms and run the Hotel at the standards they adhere to. In July, the Japan Times noted 75.5% of surveyed hotel operators said they face shortages of regular employees while 78% said they lack part-time and other nonregular workers. The Immigration Services Agency recently announced the total number of foreigners in Japan has topped 3 million for the first time. The Japanese government has created a new skilled workers No. 2 visa category, just for the construction and shipbuilding industries. The Nikkei Asia in April quoted the Japan International Cooperation Agency estimates that, given Japan’s labor shortage, reaching the government’s economic growth target for 2040 would require nearly quadrupling the number of foreign workers to 6.74 million. This is a profound change for Japan, which as a society highly values conformity and harmony. No “melting pot” for Japan. Foreigners in large numbers may threaten that harmony, because they don’t appreciate how things work here. The Government is facing that labor shortage head on though and creating more visa availability for foreign labourers to enter Japan and do the jobs locals don’t want to do. In the white collar world, the language barrier and the weak yen, both guarantee that there won’t be a rush of foreigners coming here to take up jobs. That means that for most multi-national companies, there will continue to be a war for talent for Japanese staff. If you require English as well, the pool of talent available becomes tiny. If you are a large corporation, you will have deep pockets and can offer large base salaries to attract people to join you. If you are a small to medium size business, then the nightmare has already started and will only get worse. The Council for the Creation of Future Education, chaired by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, has the goal for Japanese students studying abroad to reach 150,000 students seeking to earn degrees by 2033. The Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengō) conducted a survey in 2022 which showed 30% of new employees quit their jobs in the first three years. This more mobile younger group, called the Dai Ni Shinsotsu (second stage fresh graduates) will be attractive to target, especially those with international exposure, better English and a few years of work experience. They will still need extensive training, though. In the world of sales in Japan, the picture is very grim. If you need English speaking capability, the pool of talent available is very shallow and we are all competing fiercely for a limited resource. In my hiring experience, I have noticed over the last seven years that salespeople are becoming more expensive and certainly very expensive relative to their ability. The vast majority of salespeople everywhere are untrained and they are working it out by trial and error. Japan is just the same. Assuming that someone knows what they are doing after working for a number of years in sales is too optimistic in my experience. Bosses need to accept that they will need to give these salespeople training to get their skills to the levels required. We teach a lot of salespeople here and we notice some common trends. They need particular work on asking questions to fully understand the buyer’s needs rather than just delivering their pitch. Also, they need help on handling pushback from the client on pricing in Japan. The typical response here to drop the price...

Sales people are in massive competition today, with all the distractions that are out there for the client’s attention. We want to get our message across about how we can help build the client’s business, but it is a tough row to hoe because of all the competition we face from meetings, emails and social media. There are so many things that are occupying the minds of our clients and our buyers before we get to talk to them. We have the appointment, we have their time; we turn up on the day. But inside their minds, there’s a lot going on about what has already happened in the day and what is going to happen in the day. They are thinking about many things, but not about us. There’s a great little acronym, C A R E S cares, which will help us break through some of that competition we have for their attention. C stands for compliment. When you go to someone’s office, there might be something there that’s really spectacular or something that’s very impressive, so pay them a compliment. But don’t pay them the sort of compliment that every other salesperson coming through the door is giving them. There’s a company here who have a very beautiful foyer entrance wall. It is a very spectacular wall feature. Now, I know every single salesperson who goes there will say, “Oh, what a spectacular wall feature”. We have to do better than that. We can go in say, “You have a beautiful office. Have you found that it has really impacted the motivation of the team since you moved here?” We have to say something a bit more intelligent. We are now asking about the impact of the feature on their business. Importantly, we are now on a business topic. A is for Ask. We ask a question. It might be something like, “how have you found things going with the prospect of a rise in taxes. Is your company confident that this is not going to have a big impact on your business?” So we get them into a business discussion straight away about where their business is going, getting them to talk about how they see the future. This is good for us, because we get an idea, a glimpse, into where they’re going. R is for referral. Now a referral could be someone who’s introduced us to them or someone that maybe we know mutually. “I was talking to Takeshi the other day and he said you guys are doing a great job over here. He suggested, maybe I should come and talk to you, and so here I am today. I’d like to really find out a bit more about your business. Let’s see if there is any possibility where we we can help you take your business even further”. We can say something like that to get into a business discussion. We break into what they have been thinking, to move them to where we can go with our conversation today. E is for educate. Now as salespeople, we often turn up, and we have this great questioning model. We want to ask a lot of questions. We want to find out about their business, where they want to go with it, what is stopping them, what is it going to mean for them if we can see some success, etc. The problem is, this is all very much one way traffic in our favour. It is more important that we can come in and talk about something which is really valuable to them. We can share some information we’ve picked up in the market, something we have seen in the media or something we have seen that is relevant to their industry or their sector of the industry. We can talk intelligently about these topics because when we are in sales, often we are dealing with a very broad range of industries and companies. We will see something working in another industry which might have some good benefit to them in their industry. When we connect the ideas together, they see a benefit in talking to us because they are being provided with some information they didn’t have to help grow their business. Lastly S is for startle. Now this is a technique where you can break through all the competition going on in their minds, which is conflicting with our delivery of the message. We need...

Our circle of friends will usually be people with whom we share a lot of commonalities. Our viewpoints merge, our interests are similar, we like the same types of things. We get on easily. Life however throws us many curved balls, as meet new people who are not like us. Often we struggle when dealing with them. There are nine tried and true human relations principles we can use to improve our ability to get on with everyone, rather than just a select few who are more like us. I am going to analyse some different types of people we are likely to run into and align the principles with each type. This will create a handy guide on how to do better with people – all sorts of different people. Some of these principles in the wrong hands can stray into manipulation, but that is not the goal here. We want to be able to form a good relationship with people who are different to us, so that means we have to make some changes to how we communicate with different types of individuals. You can have one mode of communication and be great with people like you, but you lose all of the others and we don’t want that. The easiest type for me to deal with is the “time is money” type because that is how I am wired. This type is busy, businesslike, interested in outcomes, results, revenues, tolerates no excuses and is driven hard by their own standards and self-expectations. Don’t ever whine to them about anything, because they don’t care and they hate negativity. Don’t bother giving them appreciation because they sense flattery and doubt it. They don’t care what you think. They are driven by their running theirown race and your opinion is irrelevant. They are perpetually interested in doing better, so we can arouse in them an interest in doing new things which will get them to their goals. You can try and become genuinely interested in them, but actually, they don’t care because they are totally self-contained. Smiling is good, but they don’t tend to do a lot themselves because they are serious people, focused on winning. Using their name is good because they like to hear that magical sound, but don’t overdo it or they will think you are conning them. Be prepared to listen to them pontificate and tell you what they think. Don’t interrupt them, cut them off or finish their sentences – they hate that when they are talking. Your role is to sit there quietly and listen. They have a lot to say so get them talking, especially about themselves. Talk about the things they are interested in and despite how busy they are they will make time for you. You are warned beforehand that you only have fifteen minutes, because they are so busy. In fact, you spend ninety minutes talking with them because you found a topic which excites them. You don’t have to say anything to make them feel important – they already know they are and don’t care what you think. The opposite type is the most difficult for me to deal with and these are the quiet, thoughtful, reserved people who border on timidity. They like to have a cup of tea to get to know you before they can open up to you. My energy overwhelms them, so I have to really tone it down when dealing with them. They like people so don’t criticise others to them because they want to see the best in everyone. They do enjoy honest appreciation, so share that with them. They are interested in people, so if you have something in mind which benefits others, they will become interested in learning more. Smiling is good because they like to smile too. Using their name is good but again don’t overdo it. Be a good listener and get them talking about themselves. They enjoy sharing their experiences and insights. Let them to do most of the talking because they feel comfortable when they are in control. Talk about the things they are interested in and they will grow close to you, because they feel the simpatico. Make them feel important but do it sincerely, honestly. Everyone is an expert with flattery so don’t go there. Find...

In the first two parts of this three part series we have gone deep on how to become known and liked by buyers. That is all very well, but if they don’t trust us, they won’t buy our solutions if they can avoid it. If you are in an industry where the supply side is totally restricted and the buyers have to compete for supply, then lucky you. I have never had that luxury and I would guess 99.9% of salespeople are in my boat. How do we get buyers to trust us? The answer is in our kokorogamae. This is our true intention. What is in our hearts as salespeople? Are we focused on what we get, our commissions, our new car, our benefit, making our targets to get the Sales Director’s jackboot off our neck? Or are we focused on the buyer’s interests. Is our success wrapped up inside the buyer’s success? One of my favourite sales trainers is Zig Ziglar, whose famous insight is: “you can get everything you want in this life, if you will just help enough other people get what they want”. Zig has passed away already, but he hit on a profound building block of gaining buyer trust with his philosophy. Speaking of which, do you have a sales philosophy? Have you set out your approach to sales, to establish the guardrails and boundaries of your actions and behaviours. Of course, a wonderful sales philosophy is easy to embrace. Remember though that everyone has a plan until they are punched in the mouth. In sales, that means not selling and if you are on 100% commission that means not eating. Even if you are not on 100% commission, it means getting fired and having to find another job. Are you pushing certain solutions to buyers because they are the group with the highest commissions for you? Are you putting your personal interests ahead of those of the buyer? When things are going well, then all of these issues can be eliminated, but when you are hungry and can’t support your family, then your own rules get thrown out the window and you become desperate. There is nothing worse in the business world than a desperate salesperson. They will damage two brands in perpetuity. One will be the company brand. They will create distrust of their company because why would an honest, reputable, reliable company tolerate dodgy salespeople? The other brand is their personal brand as a businessperson. I remember a salesperson relating to me how he had to keep going to new towns in the US to find new clients, because the quality of his solution was bad and once the buyers discovered that fact, he couldn’t show his face in that town again. That was a companywide issue, but I silently asked myself why did he keep working for that dodgy company? What was his kokorogamae as a salesperson? In another case, we were talking with a well-known businessperson here in Tokyo, about a possible collaboration, when up popped this note in my social media feed; “Has anyone seem Mr. X, because he owes me money?”. Wow! I knew the author of this social media post, so I went online and checked Mr. X out a bit more thoroughly and what a tangled mess I found. So many accusations of no trust and broken trust that it was scary. Needless to say, we stopped the talks with him immediately. What was his kokorogamae? His reputation never recovered from this incident. My point of view is that if you are not making it in sales, then get out and leave the profession to the rest of us, who know what we are doing and who have the correct kokorogamae. All that bad actors do is pollute our profession and make it that much harder for the vast majority of us to win the trust of our buyers. When you have the interest of the buyer at the forefront of your approach to the deal, then you will always make the right decisions. Your will take the long term view and try and build up a reputation of being trusted and always dealing fairly with everyone. That personal brand is worth a fortune and only an idiot would do anything to destroy it. It takes a lot of consistency to build it and this is where...

In Part One, we went deep on the KNOW Factor in sales and today we turn to why we need to be likeable. Actually, do we need buyers to like us? Maybe not in every case, but it doesn’t hurt does it? As a buyer yourself, would you rather deal with someone you like, rather than a person you didn’t like? We will all prefer to work with people we like, but what makes us likeable? Some clients we get on with like a house on fire and others not so much. In my case, I want to turn all of my clients into my friends, and I want a lifetime relationship with all of them. Does it always work out that way? Of course not, but that doesn’t mean I should stop trying for that outcome. We tend to be most comfortable with people who are like us, who have similar interests and who are easy to talk to. To get on well with others we need to know how they work. None of this is an accident, by the way. We are constantly sorting through the people we meet to find those who are the most similar to us. This is the easiest group for us to deal with. The problem comes from dealing with the rest of the population, who are not like us. There are four basic personality styles we need to be aware of, to help us understand how we should communicate and work with different types of clients. We want to capture all of the business available and not just a share based around our comfort. What if we can make buyers who are nothing like us feel quite comfortable in dealing with us? Won’t that open the door to doing more business and isn’t that what we want? To do all of this we have to make two decisions when we meet buyers. The first decision is to place them on a horizontal scale of whether they are highly assertive or not. If they are assertive we place them on the right of that scale. If they are not assertive, we locate them on the left side. How do we tell? If they have strong views on a subject and readily state their opinion, they are assertive. If they rarely venture their opinion and seem passive, then they are less assertive. The other decision is on a vertical scale, regarding whether they are outcome driven on the bottom of the scale or more interested in people on the top of the scale. How do we tell which one they are? If they talk about KPIs, ROI, targets, goals, etc., then they are going to be results oriented. If they talk about how to get the team to work well together and how to build a strong culture etc., then they will be people oriented. This locates them on the top of the scale. This gives us a four-quadrant frame to understand better who we are talking to. Amiables are top left. They are less assertive and very people oriented. When we meet them, we should be talking about how the solution we are offering will positively impact their people. We should take our time, have a cup of tea and reduce our voice strength and body energy when we are with them. I was supposed to give the new guy a brief about my Division, when he joined the firm. I started out explaining the detail and he immediately diverted me to talk about people we both knew. I never did brief him on what my division did, because he spent the whole time talking about people – definitely an Amiable. Smile when you talk to them and be friendly. Give them honest, sincere appreciation. Make it real and not flattery. If you mention some positive attribute back it up with proof, so that they know it is real and not some dodgy salesperson snake oil. We should not cut them off or finish their sentences when they are talking and we should encourage them to do as much talking as possible. Try to be genuinely interested in them. We should use their name when we are talking to them - just don’t overdo it. The direct opposite type is bottom right in the frame - the Driver, with which I am very familiar! They don’t care about your smiles, because they are results and outcome oriented and have little time for small talk. They want to get down to business and hear about the outcomes they...

We have all heard this bromide about Know, Like and Trust in sales, but have we really deeply explored what it means in today’s post-Covid business climate? Over the next three contributions, I am going to go deep on these three aspects of sales. The Marketing Department will work on promoting the brand, but it very rare that they ever promote individual salespeople. Let’s assume they won’t be spending any money on us and so we are on our own. Grant Cardone is a really hard driving, hard core American sales trainer who I like, but who I know would be a disaster in Japan. Nevertheless, he makes a very good point when he says in sales we are all invisible. This is the “know” problem. How can people buy from us, if they have never heard of us. During Covid, the entire networking apparatus just broke down. Participating in online events, we could see people trapped in their tiny little boxes on screen, but we couldn’t connect with them. What a frustrating time that was in the sales profession. Fortunately, networking at live events is now back in fashion. Are you making the most of this opportunity? This is such a great chance to meet people and make a personal connection directly with buyers and allow us to set up a sales call with them. Within ten seconds you should be able to tell if this person is a prospect or not. If they are not, then go find someone who is. It is time to get back out there and “work the room”. Cold calling was a nightmare too. The decision-makers were camped out at home and we didn’t have the foresight to collect their mobile numbers prior to the pandemic. That meant a call to the general number was the only alternative. Astonishingly, many firms I called hadn’t mastered the logistics of remote work. They had a central phone number, but no one was picking up the phone. What a mess. Even if you rang the central number and managed to speak with a human being, they were savage beasts, hell bent on getting rid of salespeople. They are still savage beasts post-Covid and getting through to buyers is still tough, tough, tough. Target the person you want to connect with and send them a package by mail and that same junior person who was blocking your call from getting through will diligently place that parcel on their desk for you. Existing clients are always the backbone of most sales efforts, because finding new clients is so difficult. That doesn’t mean we should give up on cold calling though. As I said, we should carefully target who we think we can help and sniper-like, focus on connecting with them. Social media is another dimension where we can become known. Where is the attention focus in Japan for your buyers? Finding out this type of general information would be straightforward you would think, but across the various sources, the discrepancies in reported numbers are just astonishing. I honestly don’t know who to believe, but according to humblebunny February 2023’s 8 edition, the order of ranking of monthly users in Japan is YouTube (102m), Line (92m), Twitter (59m), Instagram (49m), Facebook (26m), TikTok (18m), Pinterest (9m), and LinkedIn (3m). This is where your clients potentially have their attention, but do you know which platforms they visit? Also, what about you - where can you be found? Are you using the same platforms as your buyers? Think about who is your target market, which platforms are they using and most importantly, what is your presence on those platforms? Are you just a consumer of other people’s content and not a creator for these platforms? Does that demarcation make any sense, if you want people to know who you are? As a creator, which mediums are going to get you in front of your potential clients. Can you produce text content which marks you out as an expert in your field? Can you get your text content on to platforms to distinguish yourself from your competitors? Even if you cannot do this easily, AI has the capacity to assist and it is very fast. The danger is that...

AI has opened the floodgates to allow any idiot to create content. If content marketing is an important vehicle for promoting your credibility in business, then be concerned. Most content is currently created by people who are literate, that is, they can write the pieces themselves. One notable exception is Gary Vaynerchuk and I am a big fan. He is a prolific creator of content, including best-selling books and readily admits he cannot read or write well. However, he is really able to talk and as we say in Australia, “he can talk under wet concrete with a mouth full of roofing nails”. He has others transcribe his comments and clean up what he says. This then becomes his output in text format. A funny irony is that he doesn’t read his own text when he records the audio versions for his books. He basically speaks the book again, so that the two versions are never the same. Anyway, his “speaking” idea to create content is not a bad one, if writing is not your forte. There are no longer barriers to entry for text content because of AI. At the moment, anyone can command the machine to produce content for them and they can upload this as their own work. Well, we had this before didn’t we, when people were using ghost writers. I remember reading a really good article by an Aussie guy I knew here in Tokyo. Let’s call him Mr. X. I was surprised by the quality. Frankly, I didn’t think he was that smart or that articulate. In fact, he wasn’t. He paid a professional to write the piece for him and then he put his own name on it. The difference with AI is it is cheap, fast, prolific and good enough to pump out standard content. Now, if you are trying to show potential buyers that you are an expert in your field, by uploading relevant text content to social media, expect that all of your rivals will be able to do exactly the same thing using AI. In fact, expect a flood of new content into social media by your rivals. How can we differentiate ourselves in this frothy “red ocean”? The bad news is that AI can produce generic content at scale and speed. The good news is that your rivals are all tapping into exactly the same sources for their content, so they cannot easily differentiate themselves as a consequence. It is going to be mass plagiarism on a grand scale. To stand out from the crowd, the missing secret sauce here is “you”. When creating content, you must inject your ideas, experiences, insights, feelings, observations and examples into the text. AI cannot do this. It cannot be you at the creation point. Yes, it can write content in your style, but it still isn’t you. It didn’t see what you saw today or experience what happened to you today. Basically, it comes down to not just our writing ability, but more importantly our storytelling craft. The stories we can tell will be what will differentiate what we are saying from the grey blob mass of AI generated sameness polluting our creator world. Perhaps you are not used to sharing things about yourself publicly. Get over that idea. We all need to personalise our content much more and that means injecting ourselves into the picture. It is easy to pontificate. I know, I do a lot of that on the subjects of leadership, sales, presentations, communication and DEI. Apart from preaching what we believe, we need to insert our stories into the content to ward off AI derived competitor pontificating. They may be our own stories or stories from other people’s experiences. It doesn’t matter, as long as the content reflects a personal approach, something which is not generic in the slightest. This requires us to start working on collecting our stories, rather than just moving forward in an orderly manner every day. Things are happening around us all day long and we need to spend some time to capture them for use in our creative work. Gary Vaynerchuk was very clever. He realised he was a not going to sit down and write stuff out, so he decided to capture what he was doing every day and turn...

Sale’s solutions are what make the business world thrive. The client has a problem and we fix it, our goods or services are delivered, outcomes are achieved and everybody wins. In a lot of cases however these are only partial wins. Problems and issues are a bit like icebergs – there is a lot more going on below the surface than can be spotted from the captain’s bridge. The salesperson’s role is to go after the whole iceberg and not just the obvious bit floating above the waterline. The standard sales interview is based on two models comprising the outer circles surrounding a bull’s-eye. The extreme periphery is the “telling is selling” model. This ensures the salesperson does most of the talking. The client is subjected to a constant bombardment of features, until they either buy, die or retreat. The second model, the inner circle adjoining the bull’s-eye, is the solution model of providing outcomes that best serve the client, based on what the client has understood is their problem. The latter is a much better tool and is in pristine condition because so few salespeople use it. The rapid fire of features at the client, rarely provides success because of the randomness of the proffering of alternatives. Welcome to the “toss enough mud at the wall and some is bound to stick” School of Sales. Aligning the fix with the client need in the solution model is the mark of the semi-professional. There is nothing wrong with this model but what are the rock star sales masters doing? They are zipping up their wetsuits and diving into the icy water under the iceberg, inspecting things closely and really understanding the full scope of the situation. They are on a mission to try and find what nobody else is seeing. Their ability to deliver previously unseen, unconsidered insights is pure gold for clients. Mentally picture our big red bull’s-eye at the center of a series of concentric circles. Stating the features of a product or service is the first level, the very outer circle. Our solutions constructed around what the client knows already is the next inner circle. The highest level is providing solutions for problems that the client isn’t even aware of yet. A truly magical client statement would be: “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that or allowed for it!”. Think about your own experience. Anytime we have been a buyer and have uttered those words to ourselves, as a result of insight from the salesperson, we have experienced a major breakthrough in our world view. Now that is the bull’s-eye we want right there. The salesperson who can provide that type of perspective, alerting clients to over-the-horizon issues, provides such value that they quickly become the client’s trusted business partner. Be it in archery or business, hitting the bull’s-eye is no easy matter. Insight can’t be plucked from the air at will. Plumbing one’s experiences, sorting and sifting for corresponding relevancies and then diving deeply into the client’s world looking for alignment are the skills required. In a way, ignorance is an advantage. Paraphrasing Peter Drucker, our success can come by asking a lot of “stupid” questions. A salesperson has an outside perspective, untainted and pure. There is no inner veil obscuring the view, no preconceived notions or ironclad assumptions clouding judgment. Counter intuitively, the fact that we don’t know, what we don’t know, becomes our strength. Ignorance allows us to question orthodoxy in a way that insiders can’t because of inertia, group think, company culture or the internal politics of the organization. When salespeople serve numerous clients, be it in the same industry or across industries, they pick up vital strategic and tactical commercial intelligence. Researching various client’s problems, experiences, triumphs and disasters is valuable – but only if you know how to process the detail. In all of our companies, we can only see clearly what we are doing ourselves. We all exemplify that Japanese saying: “the frog...