The Sales Japan Series Dr. Greg Story

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 th

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 y

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

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 w

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 d

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