Selling Year In, Year Out (Part One)

Journeymen salespeople are starting another year of selling.  Maybe their financial year is a calendar year or maybe the year wraps up in March.  It doesn’t matter, because there is a mental trick we play on ourselves that January 1st represents a new start, a new year.  Sales can be exhausting and 2025 will not go down as a bumper year for the vast majority of salespeople.  Yet, here we go again.  How do we get ourselves back up into the saddle on that bucking bronco that is the sales life? 

In Japan, very few salespeople are basing their livelihood on full commission sales.  Here we have either a base and bonus or a base and commission system.  That means that if we don’t sell much we can still eat.  So the economic pressure here is less intense than in other markets.  It is also tricky to get fired for poor performance in Japan.  The courts expect the employer to reassign the sales failures into other jobs more suited to their lack of talent.  So the downside of not selling is not that cut throat here.  Also, the vast majority of salespeople are amateurs, not properly trained in the profession.  Rank amateurs bumbling their way along is the norm here, so no need to feel any social pressure either.

In these circumstances it can be as if everyone in sales in Japan is sitting in a lukewarm bath – not too hot and not cold, but also not very exciting either.  “Blocking and tackling” was the basics of winning football games according to Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers.  So with sales, prospecting and closing are the basics of sales.  We have to be farmers and hunters.  Finding new buyers and treasuring our existing buyers, looking for the reorder sequence to kick in. 

Know, like and trust are the basics of sales.  The buyer has to know who we are.  If they have never heard of us or never met us, then they won’t be buying anything from us.  The internet is a godsend because buyers can find us to solve a problem they are having and we didn’t lift a finger.  All that finger lifting was done by the marketing department spending dough and presto, we get the leads. 

Okay, we get the lead but so what?  Will the buyer like a total stranger and even more importantly, trust a total stranger.  What did you parents tell you – don’t talk to strangers!  Therefore the initial touch with the buyer is critical.  It isn’t a one and done thing though, because there is bound to be numerous touches on the way through.  Jan Carlzon’s book “Moment of Truth” is a must read on the importance of every part of the organisation taking ownership and accountability for the customer.  This sounds simple enough.

In my experience, Japanese businesses don’t teach accountability to the entire team.  Salespeople are expected to be accountable and bend over backward to meet the buyer’s requests. The person picking up the phone though didn’t get the email about first impressions, accountability or ownership.  They got the email about if they transfer a salesperson through they will get severely scolded.  Because they don't know who is calling, they have found it is best to treat everyone as guilty until proven innocent and be as cautious as possible with strangers. 

If the buyer calls for you and you are not there, the person picking up the phone is not helpful.  They say stuff like “they are not at their desk now” and say nothing more.  This forms a negative impression about your company and its care for the buyer.  Your own team are killing the like and trust bit for you with the customer.  This was what Carlzon found.  You have to educate everyone to think differently about keeping the sense of ownership high and the like and trust part powerful.

Another part of the like and trust component are our communication skills.  If we sound like we don’t know what we are doing, then the client won’t like that.  If we say one thing but the truth proves to be something else, buyers definitely won’t like that either. I had a person I know here in Tokyo call me up about some animation sales tools.  I was interested and we had a conversation about it.  It turned out he was actually just fronting for the American firm and my next conversation was with someone from the headquarters.  What the local guy told me was different to what the American rep told me.  I immediately lost trust in both sides. I never went any further with the deal and I would never do business with the local guy ever again. This is another Carlzon nominated fail point.  As the conversation moves around through the organisation, there has to be integrity, consistency and truth. 

In Part Two we will continue to look at the other key basics, the blocking and tackling of the sales process.