The Sales Japan Series

Designing Your Sales Conversation (Part 3)    With all of this preparation in hand (and it takes about a nanosecond to complete this, once you understand their role and their style), you are now ready to start asking the right questions.   A good place to start is to ask them where they would want to see the business. This helps to scope out the ideal outcome, so you need to be working on a soluti...

Part 2   Having built rapport, leveraged our credibility statement to receive permission to ask questions and having designed our questions with the buyers four key interests (Primary, Criteria, Other, Dominant) in mind, we are ready to apply the questioning technique.   Prior to that though, we still have two more filters to apply before we get into exploratory mode. We need to consider where the...

Designing Your Sales Conversation (Part 1)   Salespeople who don't have a framework for their sales conversation with their client, will wind up on the back foot following the buyer's purchasing framework. If we know what we are doing, we have built some good rapport, used our credibility statement to receive permission from the client to ask questions and are now ready to go deeper with our sales...

Keep Your Shtick To Yourself Buddy  Smoothly memorised shtick, elaborate glossy materials, sharp suits, large expensive watches, bleached teeth, the perfect coiffure are not important in sales. Yet, this is the image of the pro-salesperson. Most of us never meet many pro-salespeople, because the vast majority we run into are hopeless. We meet the great unwashed and untrained, the part-time and par...

  Sales Understanding   Price is always a big issue. We salespeople are very happy to drop the price, because we see this as the easy route forward with the client. Whenever there is a price increase, we immediately whine about it, because we see this as making our revenue task more difficult. We are permanently happy to discount, to win the business, even when our commissions are tied to the size...

Negotiation Fails   Former American President John F. Kennedy left us with a great quote: "Let's never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate". Actually, we do fear to negotiate though, don't we. We worry about asking for too much or too little. We usually imagine a "negotiator" as someone totally unlike ourselves, a tough individual with ice coursing through their veins.   Iron...

The Sales Success Environment     What are today's revenue results, how much is in the pipeline, when will we get paid by the client, what is the run rate, will we meet our budget - this is the lexicon of sales. The sales results are the end product of a series of processes. There is usually ample attention placed on sales processes but sometimes we need to step back from the detail, the mechanics...

Pricing   Salespeople don't set the price of what they sell.  This is usually an obscure outcome decided by someone else inside the machine.  It might actually be an elaborate process, where multiple variables are carefully calibrated, mathematical formulae are applied and a price is arrived at.  Or, it might be a slightly moist index finger boldly thrust skyward to come up with a number.  The lat...

Why Lawyers Can't Sell, But Need To   Lawyers have spent a lot of time studying to pass their bar exams. When they graduate, they are the white collar galley slaves, shackled to legal partner's teams, doing the grunt work for years, until they can be allowed on deck. As they move up the ranks they begin to interact with clients. After a few more years they actually have to go out and get clients....

Toxic Sales   Bullying, humiliation, ridiculous targets, rubbish goods, stress, shame – a toxic cocktail often suffered in the sales environment. We often get into sales by accident. There are no varsity courses in sales. There is training available by companies like ourselves, but often this is not offered by the employer.   The assumption is you look after yourself. We won't invest in you and we...

Presenting Our Sale's Materials   If we are presenting a brochure, flyer, price list, hard copy slide deck or any other typical collateral item, then we should adopt best practice for greatest success. Have two copies always, one for you to read and one for the client, unless you are a genius of reading upside down (which by the way seems to include all Japanese!).   At the start, put your copy to...

Creating Consistently Great Customer Service   Jan Carlzon many years ago published a tremendous guide to customer service. He had the job of turning around SAS airlines and captured that experience in his book "Moments Of Truth". I was reminded of Carlson's insights when I was recently checking into my hotel in Singapore.   By the way, the drive in from Changi Airport is a credit to the Singapore...

You Don't Want Sales    Clever, shallow, smooth as silk, glib, "rat with a gold tooth" salespeople are the scourge of the earth. They are focused on your money and how quickly they can separate you from it. There are no barriers to entry or qualifications to enter this field of sales work. Riff raff need not apply but quite often they do. Some will tell you anything, they live for today and like a...

Stop Sales Suicide   What we say and how we say it matters. It matters in life, in families and in business- especially in sales. Sale's talk is very semantics driven. By the way, the classic Hollywood big talking salesperson is an archeological artifact, a dusty relic, now banished to the tombs. Today, salespeople have to be articulate but not glib, concise not flowery, evidence based not barrow-...

The Negotiation Process     "Winning is not a sometime thing. You don't do things right once in a while…you do them right all of the time". This is a great quote from the famous American football coach Vince Lombardi and we can apply this idea directly to negotiations. Any business undertaking does better when there is a structure, a process that is capable of creating consistent outcomes. As nego...

What Successful Negotiators Do     Every sale is a negotiation. It might be centered around price but it could also be around delivery times, quantities, guarantees, return policy, quality assurance, legal liability, etc. We can't control the issues which arise during a negotiation or the attitude of the buyer, but we can control our own skill level and approach. The more we understand and manage...

Omotenashi : Real Japanese Customer Service   I am sure you have you seen notices explaining that this store location is going to close while the building is being reconstructed and that it will reopen at a specified date in the future? Given the increasingly stringent earthquake code here in Tokyo after 2011, we are seeing many businesses opting to re-build their premises. One notice however has...

Nasty Buyers   The customer is Kamisama (God) in sales in Japan. We hear this a lot here across all industries and sectors. Sometimes however, the buyer can more like an Oni (Devil) when they deal with salespeople. Bad behavior is bad behavior regardless of the source, but when you are trying to sell a company on your product or service, do you just have to suck it up? Actually no!   Unless you ar...

The Sales Valley of Death   Sales cannot run like a manufacturing production line. We are not making industrial cheese here. This is more like an artisanal pursuit, closer to art than science. Yet, every sales force on the planet has targets which are usually uniform. Each month, the sales team has to deliver a specified amount of revenue, rolling up into a pre-determined annual target. The constr...

  Let's Go For The Sale's Bull's-eye   Sale's solutions are what make the business world thrive. The client has a problem and we fix it, our goods or services are delivered, outcomes are achieved and everybody wins. In a lot of cases however these are only partial wins. Problems and issues are a bit like icebergs – there is a lot more going on below the surface than can be spotted from the captain...

Selling Ain't Telling   He slid effortlessly into the chair and before I knew it, he had popped open the oyster shell of his laptop and was pointing his screen menacingly in my direction. Uh oh! Powerpoint slide after powerpoint slide bombarded me with detailed data, specs, diagrams and text information. After 20 minutes he stopped the torture. "Wow", I thought, "he hasn't managed to ask me even o...

Principled Salespeople Win   In 1936 an unknown author, despite many frustrating years of writing drafts and receiving publisher rejections, finally managed to get his manuscript taken up by a major publishing house. That book became a classic in the pantheon of self-help books – "How to Win Friends and Influence People". Surprisingly, many people in sales have never read this work. Plato, Socrate...

Credibility Counts For Everything In Sales   Salespeople are carrying around a lot of baggage with them when they visit clients. The smooth talking, dodgy sales person trying to con us, is the folkloric villain of the piece. Reversing that doubt and hesitation is critical to gaining acceptance as a valuable business partner for the client. This entire problem is magnified when we meet the client f...

Sales Certainty   The hardest sales job in the world is selling something you don't believe in yourself. The acid test is would you sell this "whatever" to your grandmother? If the answer is no, then get out of there right now! It is rarely that clear cut though. The more important test is whether what you are selling solves the client's problem or not. Selling clients on things that are not in th...

You Can't Cold Call in Japan. Really?     The pressure for increasing results is not constant. It is just keeps surging "higher, faster, further". We in the sales team do work hard. We are polite, conscientious, quite customer focused. Great! So why can't we grow sales fast enough to meet our targets. What is the problem?   There are some simple reasons. Current customer numbers are too few. Curre...