The Sales Japan Series

Salespeople's bad habits just migrate right across to the online world.  If you were just pitching your product before, hoping to snag a deal, you will be doing the same thing when staring at the client on screen.  It didn't work well then and it doesn't improve in the new environment.  For the more professional salespeople, who actually understand sales and the key role that questioning skills pl...

We now sell in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism.  When the client is talking to us online, they can be so easily distracted and can be secretly multi-tasking in the background, not paying any great attention to what we are saying.  There has always been a lot of client scepticism about salespeople claims, but with the "fake news" catch phrase being tossed around with wild abandon, bu...

When we meet people for the first time, we put them through a number of filters.  The easiest one is visual. How do they dress? What hairstyle do they have? Are they tall or short, fat or slim, beautiful, average looking or plain ugly?  The next filter is voice.  Where are they between having a deep baritone or a lilting soprano voice?  How fluently do they speak?  Do they have an accent?  Accents...

Online meetings with existing clients are a breeze.  The connection is there, the history, the trust has been built and the rapport building was done a long time ago. Basically this is a walk in the park.  Now the brand new client is a different matter.  You have never met, let alone even seen each other before and now you meet online for the first time.  This can be a daunting prospect. There is...

Meeting a potential new customer online is a daunting prospect for salespeople.  All of the skills we have built up have been tailored and refined for the face to face environment.  Being in the same room with someone allows us to really get their vibe, microscopically analyse their body language, clearly hear what they have to say and in turn, be heard by the customer.  The online world negates a...

I love dark chocolate.  One of the downsides of my chocolate proclivity is that the lift from the sugar is followed by a deep drop in energy. One answer would be to keep eating chocolate all day, so that there is no drop, but the dropping dead of a heart attack opportunity probably makes that an unwise choice.  Sales is similar.  We totally rev the buyer up.  We skilfully word picture them into a...

We have come to the final stage of the sales process, getting people to agree to move forward and place their order.  We have built the trust, understood the buyer's needs, matched our solution to those needs, cleared up any hesitations, so now we can ask for their business.  What could be easier than this after all that preparatory work?  In Japan, as with many things, it is not that simple. Sale...

We have moved along the continuum of the sales process, from making the cold call, getting the appointment, building trust, asking insightful questions to presenting our solution.  This is when the wheels can fall off and the sale gets lost.  Up until this point of the presentation we have been in control.  We have imagined we understand what the client wants, have amassed the materials to explain...

So far, we have dealt with making the cold call to get a meeting, building trust, getting permission to ask questions, using a four step structure to get information about what the client needs.  Now we deal with how to present our solution. In the face to face world, after asking all of these questions and deciding we can actually help this client, we would go back to the office and put together...

The Cold Calling On Zoom Salesperson - Part Three In Parts One and Two we looked at the early stages of the cold call, getting rapport established and then asking for permission to delve deep into the client's situation.  The initial questions we need answers to are either "what is your current situation?" or "where would you like to be with the business?".  We are searching for a floor and a ceil...

The Cold Calling On Zoom Salesperson - Part Two   In Part One we looked at how to get a meeting when you are cold calling and cannot meet the buyer face to face.  When working the phones, cold calling salespeople have a very low conversion rate of turning dials into actual meetings.  The same barrier stays in place because we still need to use the phone to speak to the buyer, to make a virtual mee...

The Cold Calling On Zoom Salesperson – Part One   Cold calling is always a subject of great debate and interest.  I have been doing podcasts for the last seven years and episodes which feature the subject of cold calling, always get a lot of downloads.  When I re-purpose these episodes as blogs on Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook these posts will certainly have people leaving comments.  Many buyers...

The Ubiquitous Meishi Exchange and Event Networking -  Are They Now Dead?   As the President of my company in Japan, it is almost impossible for me to cold call Japanese companies.  If a Japanese prospective client got a cold call from the President of another company, they would immediately be suspicious of that organisation.  Why does the President have to make cold calls?  What sort of company...

Presenting Your Sales Materials Remotely   Sitting in that tight, too cosy meeting room, opposite a throng of buyers, is now a figment of our fevered salespeople's imaginations.  We were able to whip out our brochures, flyers, catalogues, corporate propaganda with frivolous abandon. Today we are sitting at home or the client is sitting at home and now this is a one to one conversation.  We have be...

Covid-19 Triggers Tough Negotiations (Part 2)   In Part One we looked at some of the key basics in negotiating: Our Position The Client's Position Our Analysis What We Will Present How Will We Bargain What Should Be In The Agreement These are all the things we can control on our side but obviously we have to be ready for how the other side will approach the negotiation.  In business in Japan, the...

Covid-19 Triggers Tough Negotiations (Part 1)   Clients who are now suffering will shortly make you suffer too.  They will be much more price sensitive and cautious than before.  They are reading the same newspaper articles and watching the same news programmes you are, where it is all doom and gloom right now and the same prospect for going forward.  In 1929, everyone stopped spending and unfortu...

Salespeople Should Start Preparing For V-J Day   At what point will things get back to some semblance of normality?  It is a bit like trying to pick the bottom of the current stock market drop.  We won't know until after the event, but it will happen.  The Covid-19 numbers in Tokyo are gradually coming down, the lockdown in most prefectures has already been partially released.  We are not talking...

Covid-19 Or Not, You Still Have To Master Client Objections   Client hesitation or objections to buying from us are indicators we have failed in some keys areas in our preparation, questioning or solution explanation with the client.  We have not fully understood what the client needs, have not matched our solution with what they need, have not shown sufficient value from our solution and have not...

Typically we speak at 150-200 words per minute but we can listen at up to 600 words.  We have excess capacity and sometimes our concentration strays and we stop really listening to others.  We might be thinking instead about what we want to say or what point we need to bring up.  Have you noticed this about yourself?  We miss a lot of valuable information when we are not fully listening to others....

Covid -19 Sales University   Living in Brisbane, I would commute to and from work by car listening to audio tapes on business subjects like sales, customer service, negotiating, speaking skills, etc.  Moving back to Japan in 1992, I continued commuting to work and continued to turn my vehicle into a university on wheels.  It is amazing how much you can learn from listening to smart people, with ri...

Managing Client Expectations In Lockdown   Working from home is new and difficult for many of us.  Sales, in particular, as a profession is such a human to human, knee to knee, face to face business.  It is always hard work selling to existing clients, but the difficulty becomes much more magnified when dealing with new clients.  This lockdown will not last forever, but this staying at home, remai...

Presenting Your Solution On Line In Japan   When we sit down with a client for a face to face meeting there are a number of phases to the time together.  The initial stage is spent catching up over some small talk on what has been happening for them personally.  The conversation is then directed back to business and their current needs. Having heard that, possible solutions are introduced.  The cl...

What Can You Do In A Crisis When You Can't Sell?   Getting hold of clients has become very strained.  Normally, we have their work number and their email, but right now they are sitting at home with just their laptop and their mobile phone.  Getting hold of them can be tricky.  I was unlucky the other day.  I wanted to speak with the Vice President and had sent an email along those lines.  Silence...

Managing A Sales Team In Covid-19 Lockdown   Farmers and hunters in your sales team represent a type of harmony in peacetime.  But Covid-19 has us all on a war footing and that balance needs to be looked at.  Isolation of sales staff at home allows farmers to hibernate.  There is nothing happening and they just sit around in their pyjamas, going through the motions, waiting it out, expecting the c...

Selling From Your Home Office   Normally we lob up to meet the buyer in their office meeting room.  With the buyer and ourselves now working from home, we have to switch gears on how we interact.  Usually there are a number of people on the buying side for us to meet and there is no reason why we can't meet them all on-line.  The technology today can handle multiple people in the same virtual meet...