The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

We don’t get the chance to do so many public presentations in business, so it becomes a hard skill set to build or maintain. The internal presentations we give at work tend to be very mundane. Often we are just reporting on the numbers and why they aren’t where they are supposed to be or where we to date are with the project. These are normally rather informal affairs and we are not in highly persuade mode when we give them. We should be clear and concise, but we probably don’t really get out of first gear as a presenter. Obviously, giving public talks is a lot more pressure than the internal weekly team meeting report. We need to be operating at a much higher level and the complexity index is much, much higher. This translates into pressure and often comes with a big dose of self-doubt. This is called the imposter syndrome. Should I be the one talking on this subject? What if they have questions I can’t answer? What if they don’t like it or me? What if I underperform as a presenter? What if I white out and forget what I want to say? The scenes of potential disasters are played out in our minds, as we talk ourselves into a panic. How do we stop that negative self-talk and get a more positive view on our potential to do a really first class, impressive, professional job? It is not a level playing field. We need to realize that the world of business presenters is full of people who are quite hopeless and boring, so the audience has been trained to expect very, very little. We don’t have to be a super star, we just need to be competent and we will automatically stand out from the crowd of losers murdering their presentations out there everyday. What does competent look like? It means we are well prepared. This doesn’t mean we have fifty slides in the slide deck ready to rumble. It means we have thought about our talk in the context of who will be in the audience and what level of expert knowledge they have of the subject, so that we know at what level to pitch our talk. It means we have designed it by starting from the key punch line we will deliver in the initial close and then we have worked backwards to select the “chapters” that will bring home that point we have selected. We have seized upon an opening that will grab the attention of our increasingly attention deficit audience They are all armed with their mobile phones, ready to escape from the speaker at any hint of unprofessionalism or potential boredom. It means we will have rehearsed the talk at least three times, to make sure it flows well and fits the time slot we have been allocated. We will make sure the slides are supporting us, not hogging all the attention and upstaging us. They will be so clear that our audience can deduce the key point of each slide in two seconds, because of how we are presenting the information. The slides provide us with the navigation of the speech, so we don’t have to worry about what comes next. We also have our talking points in front of us, if we need to refer to them as a backup, reducing our stress levels. It means we are not head down the whole time, reading from the printout or the laptop screen. We are eyes up and looking at some of the members of our audience. We are looking precisely at those who are either nodding approvingly or at least have a neutral expression on their face. This builds our confidence on the way through the speech. We are avoiding anyone who looks obstreperous, negative, hostile or angry. We do this to keep our mental equilibrium under control and positive throughout the talk. We keep all of our doubts, fears, insecurities and worries to ourselves as a secret. We definitely don’t show any of these to our audience. We are fully committed to the idea that the “show must go on”, no matter what unexpected things may occur during our speaking time. Those whom we have chosen to look at, are getting about six seconds of total eye contact concentration each time, as we make our points. We then move on to the...

We can speak to a group. Then there is another level, where we try to totally captivate our audience. What makes the difference? The content could even be the same, but in the hands of one person it is dry and delivered in a boring manner. Someone else can take the same basic materials and really bring it to life. We see this with music. The same lyrics, but with a different arrangement and something magical happens. This new version becomes a smash hit. Speeches are similar. A boring rendition is given a delivery make over and suddenly has the audience sitting on the edge of their seats fully enthralled. I am sure we would all vote for the enthralling version, so how to do we do that? The quality of the argument we are going to present is important. We definitely need to design two powerful closes, one for the end of the speech and an extra one for after the Q&A. It sounds counterintuitive, but we should start from the close when designing the talk. We work hard to clearly define what is the most compelling message we want to leave with our audience. Only then do we start to work backwards, structuring the rest of the speech from that point. Once we know what will really resonate with the audience, we begin gathering evidence to back that assertion up. We have to remember that broad statements are too easy to make. This is the Era of Cynicism, “fake news”, so the listener will need a lot of convincing. We now do a rough sketch of the key points and attach the supporting evidence. In a thirty minute speech, there won’t be so much time, so we might get through three or four of these key points and that is it. We must make sure that the evidence is super, super strong. We need really compelling proof, in order to build solid credibility for our argument. The next stage is vital, especially in this Age of Distraction. We have to wrangle a dynamite blockbuster opening. We have to compete with all the things running through the minds of our audience. The things they were doing before they got to the venue and all the things they have to do after this speech. The hand held device is a modern day siren call. It so silkily diverts their attention away from us, as they check email and social media. We have to smash through all that obstruction. We sweep all before us and clear a path so that the audience will actually hear our message. The first words out of our mouth had better be super compelling. If not, we will lose the battle for people’s modern miniscule attention spans. We need to carefully design what that will be, because it won’t happen by itself. We want our visuals on screen to be clear and instantly comprehendible within two seconds. It used to be ten seconds, but now we are down to just two, so really take a cold hard look at what you are putting up on screen. If it is taking the viewer longer than two seconds, then the slides are too dense. Let’s keep the colours to an absolute maximum of three. Photos are great with maybe just one word of text added or just kept as they are. This intrigues our audience to learn more. We can then talk to the point we want to make. If we use graphs, we should have only one per screen wherever possible. If we are going to use video, it had better be short and really, really hot. The transition from slide deck to video, back to slide deck must be seamless, so none of that tech fail we often see on display. Every five minutes we need to be switching the energy levels right up, to keep our audience going with us. This is key because they flag. Classical music has its lulls and crescendos and so should we. Naturally, we have tonal variety right throughout the talk, but we need to be hitting some key messages very hard, around that five minute interval. This should be synchronised with some powerful visuals on screen, to further drive home the point. This is not a result of chance, good fortune or fortuitous accident. We need to plan for this massive impact on the audience. We...

We have many images of negotiation thanks to the media. It could be movie scenes of tough negotiators or reports on political negotiations with lunatic led rogue states. Most of these representations however have very little relevance in the real world of business. A lot of the work done on negotiations focuses on “tactics”. This is completely understandable for any transactional based negotiations. Those are usually one off deals, where there is no great likelihood of any on-going relationship continuing between buyer and seller. This is false flag. The aim of sales is not a sale. The aim is repeat orders. If you want to be permanently in 100% prospecting mode, then transactional selling is fine. That gets tiring and is tough, as you have to spend all of your time hunting because you can’t farm. Now there will be some cases with buyers, where that is how it rolls and there is not much you can do about it. The majority of salespeople though are trying to strike up a lifetime relationship with the buyer, so that the orders keep coming rain, hail or shine. The style of negotiations for this business play are completely different to the one-off, transactional occasion. In this world “tactics” are only partially relevant. Going one up on the buyer, getting the better of them, isn’t sustainable in a continuing relationship. They remember what you did to them and they definitely don’t like it. They either dump you completely as the supplier or they even it up down the road. They don’t forget and they don’t forgive. Technique has a role, in the sense that there are certain best practices in negotiating, which we should observe. The philosophical starting point though is key. What are we trying to do here, what is our purpose? Are we trying to build an on-going business relationship where we become the favoured supplier or are we after a one–off smash and grab deal? If you highly evaluate the lifetime value of the customer and this is your main consideration, then you will have a lot of commitment to win-win outcomes. The consideration of the communication style of the buyer is another important negotiating consideration. How we communicate with the buyer will vary, that is, if we know what we are doing. Clueless salespeople will have one default mode – the way they personally like to communicate and that is all they have in their tool box. Professionals understand that if the buyer is micro focused, we go with them on facts, detail, evidence, testimonials, proof etc. If they are the opposite, then we talk big picture and don’t get bogged down in the smaller details. We describe what future success looks like. If they are conservative, self-contained and skeptical, we drop the energy level to match theirs. We don’t force the pace, we spend time having a cup of tea to build the trust in the relationship. We mirror what they like. If the buyer is a “time is money” hard driving, take no prisoners type, then we don’t beat around the bush. We get straight down to business. In rapid fire, we lay out the three key reasons they should buy, we get their order and then get out of their office pronto. With this analysis in mind, we prepare for the negotiation by analyzing the buyer’s perspective. We use what we know about them and their situation to build up a picture of what they will need from the deal we are negotiating. We match that with what we can provide and we amplify the value we bring to the equation. We now set out our BATNA – our “best alternative to a negotiated agreement”. This is our walk away position. We have analysed the potential of this client, by looking at their lifetime value as a buyer. This can have a big impact on how we see the pricing. When negotiating with a big multi-national buyer, I had to take a painful hit on my pricing. I only agreed to this though, because the volume in the first year was very substantial and the understanding was that this would be repeated annually. Now, it may not become annual,...

Sales people are always under pressure to meet their targets. In high pressure situations, this creates certain behaviours that are not in tune with the client’s best interests. We know we should listen carefully to what the client wants, before we attempt to suggest any solution for the buyer’s needs. We know that by asking well designed questions, we can possibly come up with an insight that triggers a “we hadn’t thought of that” or “we haven’t planned for that” reaction at best. At worst, at least they know whether we have a solution for them or not. Under pressure though, salespeople can temporarily become deaf toward the buyer. Even assuming they are smart enough to ask questions in the first place, they may fall over when it comes to carefully listening to the buyer’s answers. They can hear some buyer white noise in the background while they are thinking about their own interests. They are self absorbed and are not plumbing the depths of what the client is trying to achieve. In fact, they are ignoring the hints and nuances in the sales conversation. Well then, what are they doing? They are fixated on their own needs, their own target achievement, their own big bonus and their job security. The client may have outlined what they had in mind at this stage, but that won’t scratch because the salesperson needs a bigger sale to make target. They need to expand what the client wants, regardless of whether the client needs that solution or not. Upselling and cross selling are legitimate aspects of sales, but the purpose has to be very clear. It is not about making the salesperson more money. It is serving the client in a deeper way. The client may not have the full view of what is possible, because they will never know the seller’s lineup of solutions as well as the salesperson. They will also not have had deep conversations with their competitors. They won’t have been allowed behind the velvet curtain, to see what their competitors are doing and how they are doing it. They will not have had a broad exposure to what other firms and industries are doing in terms of best practice. This is the value of the salesperson, because they are constantly doing all of these things. They are like butterflies, skipping from one sweetly fragranced flower to the next. They are collectors of stories, problems, breakthroughs, successes and can connect many, many dots together. In this sense, they can see possibilities the client may not know exists or may not have thought of. This is where the cross-sell and the up-sell add value, because the salesperson can expand the client’s world and help them to become more successful. That is a long way from ramping up the number value of the sale, to make target.

It is rare to see a presentation completed well, be it inside the organization, to the client or to a larger audience. The energy often quickly drops away, the voice just fades right out and there is no clear signal that this is the end. The audience is unsure whether to applaud or if there is more coming. Everyone is stuck in limbo wondering what to do next. The narrative arc seems to go missing in action at the final stage and the subsequent silence becomes strained. It sometimes reminds me of classical music performances, when I am not sure if this is the time to applaud or not. First and last impressions are critical in business and in life, so why leave these to random chance? We need to strategise how we will end, how we will ensure our key messages linger in the minds of the listeners and how we will have the audience firmly enthralled, as our permanent fan base. Endings are critical pieces of the presentation puzzle and usually that means two endings not just one. These days, it is rare that we don’t go straight into some form of Q&A session, once the main body of the talk has been completed. So we need an ending for the presentation just given and we need another ending after the Q&A. Why the second one, why not just let it end with the final question? The pro never lets that happen. Even the most knee quivering, voice choking, collar perspiration drenched, meltdown of a speaker is in 100% control while they have the floor. The audience usually let’s them speak without denunciation or persistent interruption. Life changes though once we throw the floor open to take questions. At that point speaker control is out the window and the street fight begins. Now most Japanese audiences don’t go after the speaker, they are too reserved and polite. Western audiences are less docile and big bosses ask difficult and potentially embarrassing questions. When we get to the Q&A, the members of the audience are able to ask rude, indignant questions, challenging everything you hold to be true. They can denounce you as a charlatan, scoundrel, dilettante and unabashed poseur. Sometimes, they even launch forth into their own mini-speech, usually unrelated to whatever it was you were talking about. Or they move the conversation off to a new place, which has nothing to do with your keynote content. Suddenly your message is lost. The original topic of your talk is now a distant memory. That is why the pros ensure they bring it all back together with a final close to the proceedings. Let the masses wander hither and thither with their questions, the pro never worries. After the last question is done, the last word is now with the speaker, not some provocateur who happened to turn up to the event. Surprisingly, many speakers don’t claim this right and allow the last question from the audience member to set the tone for the whole proceedings. Don’t ever let that happen. There are a number of ways of bringing the speech home. In the first close, before the Q&A, we might harken back to something we said in our opening, to neatly tie the beginning and end together. Or we might restate the key messages we wish to get across. Another alternative is a summary of the key points to refresh everyone’s recollection of what we were saying. We might end with a memorable story that will linger in the minds of the audience, that encapsulates all that we wanted to say. Storytelling is such a powerful medium for increasing the memory of what has been said, you would expect more speakers would use it. When we do this wrap-up, we should be picking out key words to emphasise, either by ramping our vocal power up or taking it down in strength to differentiate from the rest of what we are saying. Speaking with the same vocal power throughout just equates the messages together. The messaging is not clear enough and makes it hard for the audience to buy what we are selling, Bland doesn’t sell. At the end of the final sentence we need to hit the power button...

Japan is a big small place. It is about the same size as the UK, but is covered in mountains, the latter making up 70% of the land area. We have very few of those horizon stretching field vistas like they have in England. This mountainous aspect has led to quite strong sub-regional differences here, especially reflected in language, customs and cuisine. England has these too, but I think Japan is more pronounced in this regard. These differences pop up when you are selling here as well. The following are my experiences having sold in all of these cites and having lived in Kobe/Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo and having made sale’s calls in other provincial centers. If we go from south to north and start in Kyushu in Fukuoka, there is a local dialect and basically everyone went to school there and graduated from the local colleges and universities. Foreigners are not calling on companies all that often down there, so there is still something of a rarity factor at play here. Back in the good old days, when companies had generous entertainment budgets, the local staff were really glad to meet you. This was a grand occasion to use you as the excuse to have a big night out on the town on the firm’s dime. My ego took a bruising when I finally worked out it wasn’t the Story charm, that was generating this great enthusiasm for a night out on the town. That big spending night out culture has gone by the wayside, but the rarity interest factor is still at play. Language is an issue though, because the English speaking capability is still underdeveloped in most of Japan. The local burghers are quite cautious and conservative too. It will take a lot of patience to do business here, but it can be done. It just normally requires a lot more time than your company’s leaders or shareholders are prepared to give you. Kobe was opened as an international port on April 1, 1868, so it is one of the most open minded towns in Japan regarding international business. They have had foreigners living in their midst for a very long time, so there is nothing special about us from a uniqueness point of view. Trade has meant dealing with the outside world and being flexible about it in the process. The denizens of Kobe often have a better level of English than other parts of Japan and they enjoy being seen as one of the most international cities in the country. I always found people there open to discussing business. Osaka is an ancient merchant town with a merchant mentality. It was the center of the great commodity markets in Japan for salt, rice and soy beans. One of the great things I like about this city is they will give you a “yes” or a “no”. Often, the reluctance to tell you “no” in Japan, leaves the whole decision piece dangling, without any clear idea of where we are going with this. Not in Osaka. If they like it, they will explore if there is a deal to be done and some money to be made. They are proud of their local dialect and this is a big divider between insiders and outsiders. As a foreigner, we are so completely outside of all consideration, that in a way, we are probably better accepted than their despised rivals from Tokyo. Kyoto I always found very closed. The aristocratic capital of Japan for centuries, it features a defined smallish city area hemmed in by mountains. The interconnectivity of the local people is pronounced. Their families have lived here for centuries, they know each other and they know who is a “blow in” and who isn’t. Even for other Japanese salespeople from out of town, Kyoto is a hard market. If you are from the outside, you are “out” for the most part. The area around Nagoya has produced the three most famous warrior leaders in Japanese history, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Tokugawa family Shoguns, closed the country off from the rest of the world. When I say “closed”, this was upon pain of death for entry or exit. This went on for hundreds of years. In my experience, Nagoya is still...

In business, we are asked to present as a team. We may be pitching for new business and the presentation requires different specialist areas of expertise. This is quite different to doing something on your own, where you are the star and have full control over what is going on. One of the big mistakes with amateur presenters is they don’t rehearse. They just turn up and fluff it. They blow up their personal and organisational brands. When in a team environment, you absolutely cannot neglect the rehearsal component. There will be many sessions needed before you are ready to face an audience, so you have to plan for this. Do not leave this until the last moment after you have all been diligently assembling your slide decks. The batting order is important. Don’t put the brainy nerd up front. They may be the legitimate expert, but unless they are the best presenter keep them in reserve. We want the best person to lead off, because this is how we create that all important first impression. They may come back for the close out or have another equally skillful person secure the positive final impression. The technical geeky people can be safely placed in the middle of proceedings. As mentioned, don’t allow all the available team time to be sucked up by creating slides for the presentation. This is the mechanical part and we need the soft skills part to be really firing. That takes time and repetition. Set deadlines for deck completion, well in advance of the event, so that the chances to get everyone together are created. Having worked out the order, do dry runs to see how the whole things flows. Practice little things like each presenter shaking the hand of the next presenter as a type of baton pass between the team. It shows you are a tight, united unit and connects the whole enterprise together. Also, make sure each presentation can be given by everyone in the team. People get sick, planes get cancelled or delayed, all manner of circumstances can arise. At the appointed time, you are down some key members of the team. In this case the audience expects the show to go on and for you to cover the missing person’s part. This cannot be the first time this idea has occurred to you,. You need to plan for this at the very start. As you all rehearse together you hear their section over and over, so jumping in and working through their part of the deck shouldn’t be an impossibility. The questioning part might be different, but the presenting part should not create too many difficulties, if you are organised. Have a navigator for the questions determined at the start. When questions land you want that process to be handled seamlessly. I remember being on a panel for a dummy press conference, during media training. One ex-journo in the audience asked us a very curly question and being amateurs, we all just looked at each other, having no clue as to who would take that infrared missile. Our work colleagues in the audience just burst out laughing, because we looked such a shambles. Pretty embarrassing stuff, I can tell you. Anticipate what likely questions will rise, nominate who will take care of which sections and if anything indeterminate hits the team, understand that the navigator will take care of it. The navigator, will also control the questions. If it is straightforward, then after thanking the questioner, they will just say, “Suzuki san will take care of this topic” and hand it over. If it is a bit tricky, tough or complicated and is going to be hard to answer, the navigator must control things. They need to build in a bit of thinking time for the person who is going to have to take this one. They need to “cushion” the answer. By this I mean they will say something rather harmless, but which buys valuable thinking time for the person. This allows them to brace themselves for their reply. It would sound like this, “Thank you for your question. Yes, it is important that the budget allocated helps to drive the business forward....

The Question and Answer component of talks are a fixture that we don’t normally analyse for structure possibilities. Having an audience interested enough in your topic to ask questions is a heartening occurrence. When we are planning the talk though, we may just neglect to factor this Q&A element into our planning. We may have considered what some potential questions might be, so that we are prepared for them, but maybe that is the extent of the planning. We need to go a bit broader though in our thinking about the full extent of the talk we are going to give. Should we accept questions as they arise or do we tell the audience we will take their questions at the end? What are the main considerations for each structure? Q&A in Japan can be a bit tricky though, because people are shy to ask questions. Culturally the thinking is different to the West. In most western countries we ask questions because we want to know more. We don’t think that we are being disrespectful by implying that the speaker wasn’t clear enough, so that is why we need to ask our question. We also never imagine we must be dumb and have to ask a question because we weren’t smart enough to get the speaker’s meaning the first time around. We also rarely worry about being judged on the quality of our question. We don’t fret that if we ask a stupid question, we have now publicly announced to everyone we are an idiot. Some speakers encourage questions on the way through their talks. They are comfortable to be taken down deeper on an aspect of their topic. They don’t mind being moved along to an off-topic point by the questioner. The advantage of this method is that the audience don’t have to wait until the end of the talk to ask their question. They can get clarification immediately on what is being explained. There might be some further information which they want to know about so they can go a bit broader on the topic. This also presents an image of the speaker as very confident in their topic and flexible to deal with whatever comes up. They also must be good time managers and facilitators when speaking, to get through their information, take the questions on the way through and still finish on time. In today’s Age Of Distraction, being open to questions at any time serves those in the audience with short concentration spans or little patience. Not everyone in the audience can keep a thought aflame right through to the end, so having forgotten what it was they were going to ask, they just sit there in silence when it gets to Q&A. Their lost question may have provoked an interesting discussion by the speaker on an important point. Having one person brave enough to ask a question certainly encourages everyone else to ask their question. The social pressure of being first has been lifted and group permission now allows for asking the speaker about some points in their talk. On the other hand, the advantage of waiting until the end is that you remain in control of the order of the talk. You may have done an excellent job in the preparation of your talk and have dealt with all of the potential questions by the end of the talk. The Q&A then allows for additional things that have come up in the minds of the audience. It also makes it easier to work through the slide deck in order. The slide deck is alike an autopilot for guiding us through the talk, as we don’t have to remember the order, we just follow the slides. Of course, if we allow questions throughout, we can always ask our questioner to wait, because we will be covering that point a little later in the talk. Nevertheless, the questions at the end formula gives the speaker more control over the flow of their talk with no distractions or departures from the theme. Time control becomes much easier. We can rehearse our talk and get it down to the exact time, before we open up for questions during the time allotted for Q&A. If we have to face hostile questions, this is when they will emerge. Prior to that,...

During the “bubble years” of surging economic growth, Japan could not keep up with the supply of workers for the 3K jobs – kitsui, kitanai, kiken or difficult, dirty, dangerous undertakings. The 1985 Plaza Accord released a genie out of the bottle in the form of a very strong yen, which made everything, everywhere seems dirt cheap. Japanese people traveled abroad as tourists in mass numbers for the first time. They often created havoc in international destinations, because they were so gauche – a bit like we have been experiencing with mass Chinese tourism. Companies bought up foreign companies and real estate at a rapid clip. French champagne and beluga caviar was being downed at an alarming pace. Finding Japanese workers became difficult, so the Japanese government turned to immigration. We had a very special immigration however. Countries with oil like Iran were allowed to send their citizens to Japan without requiring visas and suddenly we had an influx of Iranians, a bit like we have had with Nigerians. Brazilians of Japanese decent were encouraged to come and work in Japan. They rarely spoke Japanese being third and fourth generation, but they did have Japanese blood coursing through their veins. Somehow Japanese bureaucrats decided that would compensate for the fact that culturally they were 100% South Americans. With the collapse of the bubble economy many of these Brazilians went home as their jobs here in Japan dried up. We are again facing a shortage of workers in the 3K industries because of the declining population. We are scheduled to lose around 800,000 people every year. This has an impact on consumer spending because we have less people around to buy goods and services. Uncertainty over the future has played to Japanese risk aversion and native conservatism. People are not spending, preferring to leave their money in the bank at microscopic interest rates. In a deflationary economy at least you were not losing money, but that has changed now we have inflation. We are seeing Chinese and other foreigners working at convenience stores. Students can work up to 38 hours a week, which surpasses the work week in France. The Japanese government is adding immigrant workers without openly calling it immigration. Is immigration really needed when we have such low white collar productivity and low wages? Do we need to bring in mass immigration to maintain or expand the population levels? Wage growth has not occurred yet, despite companies hoarding massive cash surpluses under their corporate futons. Also, somehow the laws of supply and demand have not kicked in yet. There is a shortage of staff for child care facilities, but wages are not attractive enough to staff them. Nurses are in short demand, but salaries are not moving up much yet. Delivery workers are in short supply and there needs to be a substantial wage increase to fill the vacancies more easily. Japan is looking to robots to help cover the staff shortages. This plays to Japan’s love of robots and their technological might. What would be more impactful would be to free up the latent capacity of white collar workers. They have very low productivity because of the culture of work here. Spending long hours as a tatemae or superficial show of devotion and loyalty is not helping. The amount and quality of work being produced is more important. There is a slow rhythm of work in Japan. In the big cities like Tokyo, people are tired in the morning because of the late nights and long commutes. Working long hours is tiring and as Parkinson noted “work expands to fit the time”. Just hanging around the office to show your devotion is nice, but not all that helpful. This is the exact opposite of a productive work culture focused on outcomes. Work from home has freed up people from commute torture, but from what I can see, there doesn’t seem to be any increase in productivity as yet. Staff lifestyles are better, but company results are not being positively...

We believe in our product and we are very knowledgeable about the facts, details, specs, etc. We launch straight into our presentation of the details with the buyer. Next, they want to negotiate the price. Do we see the connection here, between our sales approach and the result, the entire catastrophe? The reality is often salespeople are slogging it out, lowering the price, hurting their positioning of the brand, lowering their own commission. Unfortunately, in Japan, once we have established a discounted price for the product or service, it is very difficult to move it up thereafter. What is missing? The conversation isn’t hitting the high notes on value and instead is a boring pitch based on the details of the product. Do you think you are unique in the market with this type of solution? Japan isn’t the only place where this is an issue. Despite all of the resources available to American salespeople and the long history of consultative selling there, they are failing massively as well. According to a study by Accenture, called the “Death Of the Salesman”, buyers are not seeing the value of the proposition. In 77% of cases, the buyer found no value in the offer during the sales call. In a separate study by Forrester, they found that from the buyer’s judgment, 92% of salespeople didn’t understand their business. These are pretty miserable figures, no matter which way you look at them. I haven’t seem any similar numbers for Japan, but based on my experience with salespeople here, I would guess they would only be worse. “Pitchpeople” is how we should properly term Japanese salespeople in my view. They are not asking the buyer questions and are zeroing in only on the details of the product. As the Accenture and Forrester studies show we need to know our client’s business and we need to counter price objections by showing value. Excellent advice Greg and just how do we do that you might be thinking? Knowing the client’s business these days is unbelievably more easy than in the past. AI can whip together an unbelievably fast summary of what is happening in the industry and may have details on the company you are talking too as well. Listed companies very nicely put up their annual reports on their websites. We can gain an understanding of the strategy and direction they are going and what are the major initiatives that are so attractive, we will part with our hard earned cash and buy their shares. Not that many Japanese are on LinkedIn, so this is a more difficult resource to use here, than in the West. There will be press coverage of companies, which we can search easily through Google and AI. Even if we can’t find specific information, we may have other clients in the same industry and can probably assume many of the issues will be the same. Even if we can’t get much publicly available information, we can ask the client. Now in Japan, this is thought to be verboten, so Japanese pitchpeople don’t ask any questions of the buyer. The reason is the buyer is GOD in Japan and GOD won’t answer our questions, because we are impudent minks for having the temerity to ask anything. Well it is verboten if you play by God’s rules, so that is not a wise choice. Instead, we can give our Credibility Statement and get permission that way. What is our Credibility Statement? Here is an example, if we take Dale Carnegie Tokyo, we could say “Dale Carnegie is a global corporate training company, which leads the field in soft skills training. An example of this would be XYZ company where we trained all their sales staff. They told me they got a 30% increase in sales as a result. Maybe we can do the same thing for you. In order for me to know if that is possible or not would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”. Another approach might be, “Mr. Client, prior to this meeting I spent quite a bit of time researching your business, so that our talk today would be valuable and efficient. To my surprise it was very hard to find any publicly...

Gaining credibility as a speaker is obviously important. We often do this by sharing our own experiences. However, having too much focus on us and away from the interests of the audience is a fine line we must tread carefully. When we get this wrong, a lot of valuable speaking time gets taken up and we face the danger of losing the attention of our audience. They are like greased lightening when it comes to ignoring us and escaping to the internet, so that they can go find things they feel are more relevant. We must always keep in the front of our mind that whenever we face an audience, we are facing a room packed with critics and sceptics. We definitely have to establish our credibility or they will simply disregard what we are saying. The usual way to gain credibility is to draw on our track record. A great way to do this is telling our war stories. The focus is usually on things that are important to us, so we certainly enjoy reliving the past. In fact, we can enjoy it a bit too much. We begin telling our life story because we are such an interesting person. We are certain everyone will want to hear it, won’t they. Actually, their own life story is much more fascinating for them. So, we should be trying to relate what we are talking about to their own experiences and their realities. When we want to tell our stories, we have to be committed to keeping them short and to the point. As soon as an audience gets the sense the speaker is rambling down memory lane, they get distracted, bored and mentally depart from the proceedings. I was listening to a senior company leader giving a talk and he went on and on about how he started in sales and all his exciting adventures. He was obviously enjoying it, but what did something which happened forty years ago in America have to do with the rest of us here in Tokyo? It came across as self-indulgent and self-serving rather than inspiring and adding to his credibility for the market we are in today. A good way to keep the audience engaged and focused on themselves is by asking rhetorical questions. These are questions for which we don’t require an actual answer, but the audience don’t know that. This creates a bit of tension and they have to focus on the issue we have raised. The focus is now on the same points the speaker wants to emphasise. Because of the rhetorical question, they have to mentally go there themselves and think about the issue. It is much more effective than having the speaker try and drag them there against their will. Rather than just telling war stories, we can ask them to compare the story we are going to tell with their own experiences. In this case, the speaker’s example is just a prompt for the audience to identify with the situation being unveiled. This is better because they are now relating the issue to their own reality. They can take the speaker’s example and either agree with it or disagree with it. Even if they disagree with it, their different stance will be based on their own facts and their own track record rather than simple fluffy opinion. We might say, “I am going to relate an incident which happened to me in a client meeting. Have any of you had this experience and if so what did you do? Listen to what I did and see if you think I made the best choice or not”. We have now set up the comparison with their own world. This gets their attention in a natural way, rather than me banging on about what a legend I was in the meeting with the client and how I scored the big deal. Talking about ourselves is fun and personally fulfilling, but it is dangerous. How should we incorporate it? As we plan our talk, we have to work out the cadence of the delivery to include our war stories. If we are talking too much about ourselves the audience may lose interest and mentally escape from us. If we have designed in content which will involve them, we can keep them with us all the way to the end. This doesn’t happen by itself. We have to carefully insert it when...

Japan seems to be going in opposing directions at the same time, when it comes to the supply of internationalised staff suitable for foreign companies. The statistics show a peak in 2004 of 83,000 Japanese students venturing off-shore. This dropped to a low of 57,500 in 2011 and since that point has climbed back above 60,000. Just to put that in context, Korea has over 117,000 students studying overseas but has half the population of Japan. Today, with many international companies looking to hire English speaking, internationalised Japanese staff, the supply situation is looking grim. Some Japanese domestic companies are becoming strong competitors because they need more international Japanese as well. These firms are branching out overseas because they fear the decline in the Japanese consumer population will stunt their future growth. Once upon a time, this meant shipping Japanese expats off overseas to be forgotten for five years, before sending the next one. The shortage of staff in Japan makes this proposition harder these days, because they are needed here as the boomer generation retires. Also with the increasing integration of overseas enterprise purchases into the Japanese mother ship, the internationalisation of the local headquarters staff is also becoming more important. So we have less Japanese youth going overseas and an increasing demand at home for those with good English and international experience. Previously the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) had been attempting to address this shortage. In 2013, the Japan Revitalization Strategy announced a government target of doubling the number of students studying abroad to 120,000 by 2020. There have been previous programmes introduced such as the “Reinventing Japan” project (2011), the “Tobitate!” (Leap for Tomorrow!) study abroad campaign (2013), and the TeamUp campaign (2015). Looking at the numbers though, none of these has had much impact to date. The current Government target of increasing the overseas Japanese student varsity population to 150,000 by 2030 sounds like an education bureaucrat’s wild fantasy, but at least there is an effort being made to address the shortage. I won’t be holding my breath in anticipation that their programmes will be producing the numbers needed in the immediate future. Why aren’t this generation heading overseas to study? A British Council study found four key reasons: 1. Don’t have the language skills 2. Too expensive, 3. Unsafe and 4. Courses abroad are too difficult. There has been a lot of discussion also about the inward looking nature of this generation. The Lehman Shock put loyal staff out on the street and shook up their kid’s assumptions about following the same lifetime employment path of their fathers and mothers. Consequently, like Millennials elsewhere, they seem very focused on themselves. They don’t have much patience for things which are mendokusai or troublesome. That particularly includes studying English and dealing with pesky foreigners. The 3/11 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear reactor core meltdown refocused everyone on family, staying close (kizuna) and personal safety. Going overseas doesn’t really fit into that picture. Having said that though, the British Council study concluded that the interest in studying abroad is still strong. The interest may be there, but their actions are not matching the needs of business here. The risk aversion of the Japanese mentality also operates against going overseas. Their perfectionist qualities also make the mastery of English seem like the impossible dream. Getting a job when you get back is an issue because of the inflexible nature of Japanese company hiring practices. Being older than your sempai (seniors) who entered the company before you, is confusing for the company hierarchical culture. Fitting in is also harder because now because they no longer think the same as everyone else. They...

Japan loves the Devil they know over the Angel they don’t know. Change here is hard to achieve in any field, because of the inbuilt fear of mistakes and failure. This country takes risk aversion to the highest heights in business. There are no rewards for salaried employees to take risk. There are massive career downsides though, if things go wrong, due to an initiative they introduced. Personal accountability is not very popular here. The decision-making system here is also a nightmare in this regard. Who is the decision-maker? Probably no single person. The meeting we attend may have one to three people present in the room, but they are the tip of the iceberg. An iceberg we will never fully get to meet by the way. Behind the walls of the office, sit their other colleagues who will have to sign off and agree on the change. The checks and balances of Japanese organisations guarantee a few things. One is it makes for good communication internally. No one faces an unpleasant surprise. I have found most Japanese, as individuals, are not good at dealing with the unexpected. The sudden emergence of something that had not been previously factored in, has these staff rushing for emergency exits in fear. The other thing this system supplies is the opportunity for all the vested interests to have their say. Fast action is not viewed as a plus. Reaching a consensus is very important in Japan and people expect to have input into any new arrangements. The ringisho piece of paper suggesting the change physically moves around the section head’s desks and each one applies their hanko or stamp to the document, indicating they are okay with the change. Nothing will happen until all of those stamps are there. Turning up as a salesperson and finding the buying team are already quite happy with their current supplier, means a lot of work has to be done internally by the people we are meeting, to make a change away from the known and established order. Who wants more work? No one in Japan, that is for sure. When you are dealing with small to middle size firms the supplier arrangements can be even trickier. They often have a strong CEO owner running the show – the famous One Man Shacho . They make a lot of the key decisions and then everyone else does the execution of the decision. You may not get to meet with the supreme dictator directly. In many cases, the current supplier company was supplying their grandfather who started the business. Many a good time was had on the golf course, being entertained in the Ginza by geisha and visiting expensive cabaret clubs together in the good old days. Gifts flowed thick and fast as well, over decades, to cement the relationship. The current generation of the heads of the respective businesses may have been at school together, have marriage links between their two families or belong to special clubs as members. I see these connections at my very exclusive Rotary Club here in Tokyo. These are successful families who move in the same circles. The third generation of family business heads have deep links together built up over the last generations. Why would they change their trusted supplier to you, a stranger, a Johnny Come Lately? Be it a big corporate or a smaller concern, there are a lot of barriers to change in supplier relationships in Japan. Frankly, we have few levers at our disposal as a result. The one thing that companies fear in common though is getting left behind by their competitors. The globalisation of business has meant these harmonious relationships between supplier and buyer are getting shaken up. Just explaining the details, benefits, quality and pricing advantage of the solution you provide are not enough. We need to lob some dynamite into their current cozy little supplier arrangements, by bringing up their exposure to being blindsided by a competitor. We need to remind them that the best solution will win in the market or at least reduce their market share. We need to point out...

Speech contests and debating contests are usually for younger people at school or university. It is not often you see the most senior people from major corporations going head-to-head in a public setting. I was at an event where there was a vote to take place for some prestigious seats on the board of a non-profit. If the number of applicants equals the number of seats, then it is a perfunctory competition where the winner’s names are just announced. In the case of more hopefuls than places, then things hot up. Each person had two minutes to make their pitch. Now remember, these are very experienced and senior people, in some cases heading vast organisations. I was fascinated to see how they would fare. With one exception, English was not their native language. However, they have been in international business their whole lives and many have lived in numerous foreign countries running the local business for the multinational parent company. Language skill wasn’t even a factor. As you might expect, some were better presenters than others. However, overall they were pretty underwhelming, given the types of big jobs they were holding. They knew for many weeks that this day would arrive, that they would have to speak and compete for places with each other and that they only had two minutes. They had the opportunity to prepare, to rehearse what they would say. This was not a spontaneous idea on the part of the organisers suddenly thrust upon a bunch of innocents. The first thing I noticed was how poorly they had all prepared. Talking about your resume and how big your big corporate is, is fine, but there was no thought given to what the audience wanted to hear. Everything was presented from their own point of view. A few minutes spent planning and preparing would have come up with a fine list of audience expectations of this board. They would have identified which hot buttons they needed to push. This is not hard stuff folks. They will represent our interests on the Board and so what would our member interests be? Having divined that, we should then craft our message to present about how our experience, organisational muscle and personal attributes will deliver for the members. We only have two minutes, so that means we have to prune hard to fix upon the most high impact points which will resonate with the audience. We then need to rehearse to make sure we can get this inside the strict two minute limit. We don’t want to be rushing it or confusing our audience with too many varied points. If we rush it, they have no hope of keeping track of what we are on about. Now when we deliver our talk, we have to engage with our audience. We will be going one after another, so we have to break through and override the message of whoever preceded us and implant our message, such that our successor speaker cannot root it out. Sadly, none of this was happening and they were not engaging their audience at all. What are they like when addressing the troops back at the office I was wondering? Going by this effort not much chop! The common thing I noticed that was missing from all the speakers was eye contact. They were not using their two minutes to physically engage with enough people. Using six seconds of one-on-one eye contact, we can directly engage with at least twenty people in the audience. Toward the rear, because of the distance, the people sitting around the target person also believe the speaker is talking directly to them as well, so we can increase that twenty number quite substantially. Delivering your resume in a monotone means you are missing the opportunity to hit key words for greater effect. Now when I say hit, I mean that in the sense that you can choose whether to add voice strength or withdraw voice strength to gain variety in your delivery. Our gestures are another way to bring power to what we are saying. It creates energy and that is what we want to transmit to the audience – we are a person of energy who can get...

Business is more fast paced that ever before in human history. Technology boasting massive computing and communication power is held in our palm. It accompanies us on life’s journey, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, everywhere we go. We are working in the flattest organisations ever designed, often at home on our own a few days a week or in noisy, distracting open plan environments. We are also increasing thrust into matrix relationships with bosses, subordinates and colleagues residing in distant climes. We rarely meet them face to face, so communication becomes more strained and difficult. Milestones, timelines, targets, revenues, KPIs are all screaming for blood. We are under the pressure of instant response and a growing culture of irritation and impatience. If our computer is slow to boot up, or if a file takes time to download, we are severely annoyed. Twenty years ago we were amazed you could instantly send a document file by email from one location to another. Oh, the revolution of rising expectations! Imagine our forebears who when working internationally, had to wait for the mail from headquarters to arrive by boat and then would wait months for the reply to arrive there and then more months for the subsequent answer to come back. Super snail mail ping pong. Life was a wee bit more leisurely then and people had a lot more independence through necessity. Not today. We want it and we want it now and look out anyone who gets in our way. We have unconsciously designed a system guaranteed to produce more conflict in the workplace. Technology speeds everything up and internal expectations also keep rising. Time is in permanent short supply and the stresses and strains of modern business are inescapable. Not everyone is keeping up and criticism is swift to follow. The pressure is on and that means that civil discourse can be truncated and communication becomes more direct. All of this can increase the frequency of conflict in the workplace. What can the leader do to deal with this upsurge in people problems between staff? Let’s analyse the issue in more depth. We can break the conflict touch point issues into five categories for attention. Process Conflict – is this what we are dealing with? How much control do we have in this particular issue we are facing? We need to analyse the root cause of the problem and talk to the process owner. They may not be aware that their process driven actions are causing problems for others. We need to diplomatically raise it with them, get agreement it needs to be resolved and come up with a joint action plan to fix it. Role Conflicts easily arise in flat organisations. What is our perception of our own role in relation to others involved in this issue? We can’t expect others to be making the effort to clarify our role, so we have to take the lead to do so. This is hard, but we have to be prepared to change our perception of what our actual role is. We should take the macro view and see where we need to be flexible around our perception of our own role, to make sure the organisation is moving forward. This may require some changes and we have to see change as an opportunity for growth and improvement (easily said!!!). Interpersonal Conflicts are the tough ones. We are confronted by the actions, behaviors and word exchanges which have taken place and the reported versions from others around us. We need to take a step back and ask, “to what degree are my personal biases and prejudices affecting this relationship”. Are people telling me things to suit their own agenda and stirring me up for no good reason? There are key things we can do to improve the situation and we usually know exactly what they are, but we don’t want to do them. However, we have to commit to making those changes, as difficult and painful as that may be. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the other person to change – take action yourself. This may mean having a direct conversation with your counterpart on the...

The release of 5G or fifth generation mobile networks was launched in Japan in March 2020. Our old phones ran on a 4G standard and 5G faster is significantly faster than 4G. So what does that mean for salespeople across all industries? The capacity to upload heavier files, to be sent at lightening speed, grabs your attention. What are some of the heaviest files at the moment? Video! YouTube is already the second largest search engine after Google. It is true too. I have noticed myself that I prefer going straight to YouTube to find out how to do something, rather than wading through all the links and ads on Google. The union of content marketing with blinding connection speeds, means the search function for YouTube will overtake Google in the next few years. AI will probably overtake everything for search in the future. Nevertheless, are you prepared to be found by buyers as the star of your own video? Now this is not to say that the importance of audio is going away. Podcasts are also a key way of getting value by turning up in front of buyers. That is why I am releasing six ever week. People are multitasking these days like they have been possessed by demons. They want to listen to audio, while they are at the gym or walking the dog. Don’t miss the implications of audio access to our information from all of these devices like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Home, etc. We will be tapping into information through audio, to a greater extent than now, but today I want to feature more on video and 5G and what it means for us in sales. Producing video content and uploading that to YouTube will become a more important aspect of “know, like and trust”. Video gives a very strong impression about us. How we look? How we sound? Are we trustworthy? How we relate to the audience? Are we authentic? As some of my friends have unkindly remarked, “Greg, you have a good head for radio”, meaning I am not very photogenic. True. Consequently, we may be shy to video ourselves, thinking that we are not handsome or beautiful enough, or smooth enough in front of the camera, or attractive enough on tape when a microphone is involved. Forget all of that. This will be the age of discovery by buyers, before they ever meet us. This is how they will be searching for experts to bring solutions for the problems they face. They will be able to “try us before they buy us” by watching our video, to see if we have the goods or not. What if we are not attractive enough for video, won’t that work against us? Well, I wish I was more handsome, but there is not much I can do about that. My parent’s DNA contribution has spoken. I have to go with what I have got and so do you. I am releasing three video shows every week. I don’t have a great sounding voice either, because it sounds husky, from all that shouting or kiai I did, in my 53 years of karate training. Can’t do too much about that either. One of our Dale Carnegie trainers in America is DJ Thatcher, who has a voice you would die for. Very deep and melodic. I can’t become DJ Thatcher, but I can control what comes out of my own mouth. So despite how we look and how we sound, are we providing actual value? Our videos have to show we know something special about our subject and that we can be useful to the buyer. Don’t think you have to hold the “best bits” back either and keep them secret. You have to go the other way and provide strong expert authority in this environment and do it for free. Put your best stuff out there. You might sorry, “won’t my buyers become sated on my free video offerings and not need more from me?”. I don’t think this is a concern. When they need more than what they can get from a video, you are the one they will select over everyone else you are competing with. By the way, if a video can fix their issue that simply, then there probably wasn’t a substantial engagement involved anyway. Won’t my competitors steal all my best ideas? The old style control function of buyers by...

Obviously we all have some trepidation when it comes to Q&A, but Japan is quite far behind the rest of the advanced countries when it comes to public speaking. Let me put it on the table. The level of presentations here is abysmally low and excuses abound. People here talk about a “Japanese style” of doing public talks. This is their excuse for not being at the global standard for communication skills and it allow them to get away with amateur hour presentations. What they actually mean by “Japanese style” is they speak in a monotone, with a wooden face, use no gestures, make no eye contact, employ no pauses, Um and Ah with gay abandon, engage no one in the audience and are supremely boring. They kill everyone in the audience with their unprofessional slides - 8 point sized font, four different font types, five garish colours. They turn their slides into a psychological weapon of warfare which decimates their audience. Because everyone is so bad, this is thought to be a “style”, obviously different from “Western” presentations. It isn’t a style. It is just plain bad. Not being properly educated in how to give professional presentations, the trickier bits like Q&A are even scarier territory. For any speaker, once the bell sounds for Q&A, the struggle is on. As the well-known American philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face”. Relatively speaking, Japan is a kindergarten for Q&A compared to Western audiences. The ferocity of questions here is kids stuff. So you would think that everyone would be very chipper about handling the Q&A, but that is not the case. Here are some areas of the concern we found, when we polled our Japanese students of presenting. 1. If the audience is not familiar to us we get nervous The reality here is that strangers are confronting for Japanese. The chances of having a lifetime of speaking to familiar audiences would be statistically impossible, I would say. The inference here is that it is less daunting to speak to a “tame” audience who, because they know us, won’t unleash fury upon our heads during the questions component of the talk. Unfamiliar audiences should be the considered the norm. I have delivered over 550 speeches so far and I cannot recall every giving a talk to the same audience twice. The way to deal with this “unfamiliarity” is to be well prepared and to have thoroughly rehearsed beforehand. This is a tell. I would guess 0.001% of Japanese presenters have ever rehearsed their talk. 2. I am not sure if I can understand the question properly and also not sure if it is okay to ask them to repeat the question Japanese society is very polite, so that is why until recently, you would be lucky to get any questions at your talk at all. The thinking has been that it is impolite. The nuance is that by asking a question, you are implying the speaker wasn’t clear enough in their oration. Also I don’t think any Western audiences would even consider the possibility that it isn’t allowable to ask the questioner to repeat their question. In Japan, that request implies the questioner wasn’t clear enough the first time and so is a veiled criticism. Because the request for the repeat of the question is made in public, there is the possibility that the questioner will lose face and we can’t have that. My advice - politely ask the questioner for clarification on their impenetrable question. Japan is a polite place, so ask politely and put yourself at fault and not the speaker. You might say, “Thank you for your question. I really want to answer it correctly, so would you mind repeating it once more for me?”. 3. Not clear on how to answer the question This will happen to all of us. In my case, I do a lot of public speaking here in the Japanese language and I always find the Q&A the most difficult. This is not for the ferocity of the questions, but because of the fog of the language. Japanese is a highly circuitous language and vagary is a prized...

The Spa magazine in Japan previously released the results of a survey of 1,140 male full-time employees in their 40s, about what they hated about their jobs. The top four complaints were salaries have not risen because of decades of deflation; a sense of being underappreciated and undervalued and a lost sense of purpose. Salaries are a function of deflation and commercial success, as well as the tightness of the labour market. Feeling unappreciated and underevaluated though are both boss failings unrelated to the economy and cannot be esily dismissed. This outcome is the direct result of decades of neglect of the soft skills of leadership. How do we improve on this situation? We need better leader eduation. The feeling of being valued by the boss and the organisation is the trigger to producing high levels of engagement for your work. Japan is renown for always scoring poorly on international comparative engagement surveys. APAC as a region usually trails last across the world and Japan is usually situated at the very bottom for engagement scores in APAC. The global study on engagement by Dale Carnegie showed that feeling valued was the key factor. The results for Japan were the same. Good to know that we have the answer at hand to improve levels of engagement. By the way, disengaged or hardly engaged staff are not going to add any additional extras to their work or be motivated to come up with a better way of doing things. Innovation requires some sense of caring about the organization. So work productivity and innovation both need higher levels of engagement to help us get anywhere. In any competitive business environment, the abilty to out innovate your rivals has to be a very high value to the firm. Fine, but so what? How do we get leaders who were raised in a different world of work – the bishibishi(relentlessly super strict) school of leading to now switch to becoming more warm and fuzzy? Telling them to do so is an interesting intervention by senior management that will go precisely nowhere. This requires re-education on what we need from our leaders. The most widespread system of education in corporate Japan is OJT (On The Job Training). How does your bishibishi boss change mindset alone? They can’t. That is why training is required to better inform bosses about how to gain willing cooperation from subordinates, instead of just pulling rank on them to drive their obedience. In the modern era, young people have all become free-agents, like the baseball stars. In their parent’s time, staff were fearful of being able to get another job, if they strayed from the beaten path and quit where they worked. Not today. There is an army of hungry recruiters scouring firms to lift people out and place them in another company. They can click the ticket for 40% of the first year salary on the way through this change of employ. By the way, the individual recruiter gets 50% of the fee. It is a highly lucrative profession and relatively young, unremarkable people make a lot of money so the incentives to take your people and place them somewhere else is super high. In this circumstance, there is no need to make it any easier for the recruiters by treating your staff badly. How to deal with mistakes is a key to the future in a society that hasn’t worked out that mistakes are the glide path to learning. Japan is a mistake free zone and this is a big disincentive to experiment, to try the new. Locating oneself in the middle of your comfort zone makes the best sense, so you want to avoid all change efforts. Here is the contradiction. If you want innovation, progress, creativity, then change must be embraced. That also means embracing risk - the risk of error. If the internal evaluation process for promotion is used to focus all the failings and insufficiencies of the staff - the dreaded HR little black book of staff mistakes - then don’t expect your shop to become a hotbed of innovation anytime soon. What should we be doing? Leaders...

Riffraff inhabit all corners of the business world, but the sales profession suffers more than many others. Bankers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Stock brokers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Real estate agents tell one version of the truth to buyers. Government officials purloin our money. Everywhere you look, someone is ripping us off. However, these industries and institutions do not get blanket smeared with the failings of the few, like in the case of salespeople. We are our own worst enemy in many ways. There is a taint to the profession, an odious odor, scandalising the hallways. Desperate people do dumb things and tell lies to buyers. There are no common standards of conduct being adhered to in the sales profession. You just become a salesperson by dint of putting your hand up for a sales job. After that point, you are free to unleash your reign of terror and destruction on all around you. “I am not like that” you may say, but how would the buyer know that? They have been trained to expect to be ripped off by salespeople. It is one of my pet hates with the profession. Lo and behold someone called me up with a lie. A lie? How could anyone be that stupid, you might be wondering? Well, have you heard this one before, “Hello Mr. Story, how are you today? I am from XYZ company and we handle a range of investment products. One of our representatives will be in your area and so are you available for a meeting next week?”. This industry of selling investment products is tricky. I know, because I oversaw the sales of these products at the Shinsei Bank and the National Australia Bank here in Japan. What makes them difficult is you can’t hear, see, touch, smell or taste these intangibles. Investment products are abstract ideas. The buyer will have no idea if the decision to buy was a good one or not, for many months and in some cases, many years. So the obvious thing we are all buying is the trust that what we have been told will in fact happen. Given the trust element is so vital, how could the leadership at XYZ company come up with a sales script like this one, totally built on a lie? Amazingly, this is the first thing coming out of their mouth. Reality check: their representative won’t be in my area. That is a total fabrication, a complete lie. Why? They think that somehow this will convince me to see that person. I don’t put up with is unprofessionalism and I go after them. When they call, I ask them which area their representative will be in. They panic, look at the suburb address on their screen and blurt out “Akasaka”. So, because I am unrelenting with such idiots, I ask, “Well given Akasaka is quite a big place, which exact part of Akasaka will they be in next week?”. More blustering and panic, because now we have gone completely off piste. Let’s step back and take a look at the big picture inside the sales profession. Japan is a very honest culture. This means though, that when people tell lies, they never readily admit to it. They never want to take any accountability. Instead they will tell you anything, in order to not admit that what they told you was crap. They try and move the blame back to you, by claiming you misheard or misunderstood what they were saying. This honest culture can blind us to this quaint trait to lie. So when we are leading our salespeople, we can’t just assume because everyone is so honest in Japan, that our salespeople won’t lie to the client. This is also a culture where the buyer is GOD and whatever the buyer wants the salesperson will make happen. This can include lying, breaking the rules, over promising and being disingenuous. The back office delivery component of the company cannot easily deliver on salesperson over-promised goodies. Now we have a new set of problems to deal with, as sections within the company start to feud amongst themselves. Or they agree to a deal that is bad for the business. Being truthful with clients also means delivering bad news...

Like a lot of people, I subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc. The following morsel popped into my inbox the other morning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care–Anonymous”. Wow! What a powerful reminder of the things that really matter in our interactions with others. This piece of sage advice should be metaphorically stamped on to the brain of every single person involved in sales. Don’t miss it - selling stuff is a tough gig. Rejection is the normal response to our spiffy sales presentation and follow up offer. You have to be tough to survive in a sales job. You need other things too. Product and technical knowledge is important. Total command of the detail is expected by clients. However, we need to be careful about what we focus on. Are we letting the product details and features confuse us about what selling is really all about? Some salespeople I have encountered remind me of an icy Siberian mammoth trapped in a time warp from the past, still trotting out the product brochure and seeing if I will go for one of their goodies? You don’t like that one, well then how about this one, or this one, or this one, ad nauseam? I want “blue” but they keep showing me 50 shades of “pink”. They are playing that pathetic, failed salesperson game named “process of elimination”. I want to buy, but are they really showing me they are focused on understanding me? Are they demonstrating to me that they foremost care about my benefit? Are they communicating to me that, “in your success Greg, is my success”? Or do they come across not with stars in their eyes, buy $$$$ signs? I can recall seeing them sitting across the table from me, mentally salivating at the thought of the big fat commission this sales conversation is worth? I can sense they have already bought the 3 series Beemer before the ink is dry? The quote at the beginning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care” reminds me of a great Japanese word, which should be embraced by everyone in sales - kokorogamae(心構え). It can be simply translated as “preparedness” but the Japanese nuance goes much deeper than that. Anyone studying a martial art or a traditional Japanese art (道) will immediately be on my wave length, when they hear this kokorogamae term. I would prefer to translate it as “getting your heart in order”. Sounds a bit woo, woo doesn’t it. Well it is sound business sense. This means to really hark back to your most basic principles of true intention. What we can call True North – the purity of our intention. What is the spark in our heart driving our behavior? Is it the money or is it the serving? Is it what you want or what the client wants? Is this going to be a long-term relationship or a fleeting transaction? Salespeople need to start by searching their heart for their true intention. Huh? There I go again. Does this sound a bit too “let’s all hold hands around the a tree” California emotional for you? Why do I recommend searching your heart? Because clients can sense your motivation isn’t centered on their best interests and therefore they won’t buy from you. Even if somehow you do manage one sale, you will miss the key objective – the buyer’s re-order Of course, there are the exceptions – the Hollywood image of the “smooth talking” salesperson who could sell you anything and will certainly try to. They are like skyrockets that initially blaze through the night and then explode! They are here for a good time not a long time and they give the profession of sales a bad brand. Wolf of Wall Street ring a bell here. That dude went to jail, which is where he deserved to go, for ripping all of those punters off and stealing their savings. He is out of jail now and is a sales trainer – the mind boggles at the thought. This is why people don’t trust salespeople. We have to prove we are different because we are judges guilty from the outset. The best Japanese...