The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Every week The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show brings the best and most up to date information on doing business in Japan. The host of the show, Dr. Greg Story is the leading expert on business in Japan and best selling author of Japan Sales Mastery and Japan Business Mastery.
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335 Servicing Your Buyers In Japan
01/19/2025
335 Servicing Your Buyers In Japan
Enterprise killers can include Customer Service. We know that all interfaces with the customer are designed by people. It can be on-line conversations with AI robots or in-store interactions, but the driving force behind all of these activities are the people in our employ. The way people think and act is a product of the culture of the organisation. That culture is the accountability of senior management. The common success point of organisations is to have the right culture in place, that best serves the customer. The success of senior management in making all of that work is a combination of their leadership, people and communication skills. This sounds infinitely reasonable in theory, but the reality is often so different. Senior leaders, ambitious, ever upward individuals, who themselves are not particularly people focused, expect their customer interaction designers and in store staff to be the epitomy of customer focused. They don't walk the talk themselves and what is worse, they don't see the contradiction. They haven't worked out yet that good customer service begins with good employee service. Love your staff and they will love your customers. Richard Branson is widely referenced with his philosophy of employees first, customers second. His idea is to produce the right mental framework for employees to then put the customer first. Our emotions lead our behaviors, which determine our performance. Fine, love all of that, but how do we get it right? Leadership has to be clearly understood by the leaders. It is not a function of education, rank or longevity in the organisation. Instead, it is a function of the degree of cooperation we can get from our team. We might believe things are rolling out beautifully, in a pre-ordained way, in relation to how we treat the customer. Sadly, the front-line customer experience with our service could be entirely different from how the leaders planned it and how they want it. As the leader, to get that employee cooperation to buy into what we believe is the correct way forward, we need to have well developed people and communication skills. We also need to make sure that our middle managers also have those same skills. We could be doing things really well up in the clouds, at the top of the organisation, but our middle managers may be sabotaging the culture we want to build and we just do not see it. If we want sincerity to be a function of our customer service, then, as an organisation, we have be sincere. If we want customers to feel appreciated, we have to appreciate our staff and do it in a sincere way. People can spot fake from a mile away. If we spend all of our time finding errors and faults, we may miss the things that are being done well, which we can communicate that we appreciate. Are you a “good work finder” or the opposite? We might want many things in business such as personal success, greater revenues, reduced costs etc. We can only achieve these things through others: either our own staff or our customers. They may however want different things. We have to find the means to appeal to our staff and customers such that they want what we want. This is not manipulation. This is well developed people and communication skills. In this way, the trust is created and we lead others, to also want what we want. As Zig Ziglar famously noted, we can get whatever we want in this life, if we help enough other people get what they want. To create that trust we have to be genuinely interested in others. This starts with our staff because we want them to be genuinely interested in our customer. When they do this, they build the trust with the buyer and a bond that is very difficult to break. If we don't demonstrate this genuine interest in our staff, we are not building the culture where they will naturally pass this feeling on to the customer. There is an old Chinese saying that, “a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”. Yet in modern business, we have plenty of people floating around who don't smile. It could be the very top executives who are too hard driving, bottom line focused and serious to smile at their staff. They set up a culture that is dry and remote, but expect that at the interface with the customer, there will be an emotional connection with the brand. They just don't see the double standards, miscalculation and self-delusion involved here. Are you self-aware enough? Bosses are often great order givers but poor listeners, who imagine that their front line staff are all doing an excellent job of listening to the customer. What if that is not the case? If the bosses want to create a culture of good listening habits, then starting with themselves is a reasonable idea. When we listen, we learn more than we already know. This is so important when dealing with the customer. We need to make sure we have a culture of good questioning skills to trigger the opportunity for the customer to talk to us. In these conversations we can better come to understand what would be best for the customer and how to properly service them. One of the frustrating things about training salespeople is the difficulty of getting them to stop focusing solely on what they want (bonuses, promotions, commissions) and concentrate on what the client wants (solve my problem). When they are talking to the client, the conversation is all about what the sales person is hoping for. We have to learn to change that dialogue and talk in terms of the key interests of the buyer. What is your sales team focused on? I was giving a keynote speech at an event hosted by one of our major clients, for their most important customers. Another speaker spent the entire time just talking about his own company! I really wondered what was the take away for the audience? Actually, I don't wonder, I know. It was a big fat zero. We can get caught up in ourselves and forget that everything we talk about with the buyer, has to be firmly focused on the client’s interests. The way we do that is by listening carefully to their answers to the brilliant questions we have designed for that purpose. When a customer encounters everyone of our touch points, we want them to like and trust us. Doing this on-line is a challenge but good navigation, intuitive processes and clear explanations all assist in this regard. In the face-to-face world, we need to start in a friendly way. The culture of this basic idea however springs from within the company and is guided by the outlook of the leaders. If the top management are a dour bunch, always serious, rarely smiling, stiff, cold and “businesslike” rather than friendly with their teams, then we have to wonder why the front line staff would not be influenced by this outlook? If we want our people to smile and begin in a friendly way with customers, then the leadership group needs to demonstrate that attitude themselves and show this in their own staff interactions. Are you doing this? Another challenge for bosses is to shut up. Often, because they are older, more experienced and time poor, they get into the “everything abbreviated” habit of firing out orders. They do all the talking. The same problem with salespeople, they talk too much. The key to satisfying both staff and customers is to let them do the bulk of the talking. This requires strategy and considerable discipline, but it is worth it because it creates a differentiated culture in the organisation and this flows out to the customer interactions. It is an obvious thing in sales to get customers to have a sense of ownership. We might describe the product or service and the situation after they have bought it. We regale them with the problem solutions we are bringing and the success platform we are going to create. We have a goal in mind – find the best solution for the client and get them to have ownership of this idea. We want them arriving at our preferred solution. With this in mind, we design the questions we will ask. It is our idea, but they reach the same idea on their own and in the process come to have ownership of that idea. The same thing is needed with our staff. We can tell them how to do their jobs in great detail, but it would be better if we could have them come up with them own conclusions. Preferably one that matches what we have decided is in the best interests of the company. Again, question design here is crucial and if we do this correctly, the staff arrive at their own conclusions and it fits in with the direction we are aiming for. This way there is no sense of harrassment or badgering of the staff. They got there by themselves and so their sense of ownership is very high We cannot be persuasive unless we can honestly see things from the point of view of the buyer. The aim in persuasion is to join the conversation going on in the head of the customer. This gets us on the same wavelength and our conversation will be in sync, because we are speaking about the things that are of greatest interest to them. Trying to stop seeing everything from only our own viewpoint and to see if from the client’s viewpoint, sounds tremendously simple, but it requires a strong effort. We need to do this logically as well as emotionally. We have to be understanding at the empathetic level, which means really understanding the driving ideas and desires of the buyer. Nevertheless we need to enable this discipline to apply if we want to be successful in convincing others of what we think will serve them best. If we want our staff to appreciate the business we can receive from the buyer, we need to build that attitude internally of praising staff and giving them honest appreciation. This is often missed in firms, where everything is rather cut and dried, black or white. Buying is an emotional activity which we justify with logic. We want our designers of the interface with the customer to have a sense of appreciation for the buyer. We want staff who are facing customers to do the same. If we are not giving our own staff praise and appreciation, we are not building a floor to ceiling culture that will work best when interacting with customers. It has to run on automatic, because we cannot be everywhere at the same time. We have to trust our people to deliver great customer service. The ability to ask questions instead of making statements is an important skill. It is easier to drive this skill throughout the organization, if this is part of the culture. Time poor bosses shooting out orders is a “tell” culture. If they automatically asked questions instead of giving orders, they would be building the right mentality for customer service. Our objective is to find out what the customer wants. To do that we need to be asking them questions. This is a mental frame around which the customer interaction needs to be built. When we ask questions, we can come up with solutions that the customer themselves realise are the best outcomes for them. If we are more concentrated on what is best for us, then the customer can feel that too. So we want to understand their needs, suggest solutions that we know will make them happy to follow our lead. Inside the organisation this is how the team should be managed. They should be doing what they are supposed to be doing and doing it happily. Their bosses have communicated in a way that the staff member comes naturally to the same conclusion, as being the best way forward. When we achieve this common level of understanding then everything moves forward very smoothly. Customer service becomes a differentiated enterprise builder, expander and business success driver. That is what we want isn’t it?
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334 Those Vital Few Seconds When You Start Your Talk In Japan
01/13/2025
334 Those Vital Few Seconds When You Start Your Talk In Japan
Don’t let your speaker introduction be a disaster. Usually when we are speaking we are introduced twice. Once at the very start by the MC when they kick off proceedings and then later just before our segment of the talk. The MC’s role is quite simple. It is to set the stage for the speaker, to bring something of their history, their achievements and various details that make them a credible presenter for this audience. This can often be a problem though, depending on a few key factors. How big a risk taker are you? Are you relying on the MC to do the necessary research on you? Are you sure they can properly encapsulate your achievements and highlight why you should have the right to stand up here in front of everyone and pontificate on your subject? Most people in the MC role are not expert or trained speakers. Usually, they are clueless about this MC gig and just happen to have control over you for this brief interlude. They are probably too busy to do better than a perfunctory job of preparing your intro and often they won’t appreciate what particular points need grander highlighting than others. Be warned. It is always best to prepare your own excellent introduction. Keep control of what is being said about you and the areas you wish to showcase. You can decide for each occasion which elements of your history or current focus are going to be most impactful for this particular audience and topic. Don’t make it too long though, because we are in the Age of Distraction, where audience concentration spans are frankly pathetically brief. I was recently organising a speaker for an event and his self-introduction was very long, a potpourri of his entire life. He obviously couldn’t discriminate between very, very high points, very high points and high points, so he cobbled the whole thing together as a single lengthy unit. I wasn’t the MC that evening, but the actual MC simply ignored the whole thing altogether, deposed their own role and just said, “you have seen his biography in the meeting event notice, so I won’t go through it now”. Well, yes, we may have glanced at it, but we were not remembering it in detail. Thanks to this lazy and incompetent MC, the chance to reconnect with what was in the flyer was no longer there for the speaker. As you can imagine, the person in the MC role can be difficult to handle for the speaker. They can choose to ignore everything you wrote and then give their own ad hoc version. Usually this is laced full of distortions, errors, exaggerations, serious gaps and miscommunication. Some MCs have pretty big egos too. They think they are the star of the show and that they can do a better job than any offerings from you as the speaker. What actually comes out of their mouth is usually an amazement to you, because you know what they were supposed to say. It is seriously late by then though and no repairs are possible. For this reason, my advice is to only feed the MC the key points. Completely deny them the option to seize hold of your reputation and background and pervert it into something totally unrecognisable or unsatisfactory. You only need them to set the stage and give you a chance to connect with your audience. When it is your turn to speak you can go freely into the details you want to highlight about your glorious career thus far. I would also not rush into your background immediately following on from the MC. We need a break and the biography is not the best way to start your speech anyway. The start of the talk has only one purpose. That is to stay the hand of every single person in that audience from secretly reaching for their phone, to escape from you, to the irresistible charms and siren calls of the internet. Take the first few seconds of your talk very, very seriously. Design a blockbuster opening that will grab the attention of the audience. Only after that introduce yourself, rather than the other way around. Starting with your history is too passe, too expected. It doesn’t get any excitement going. When you get to your self-introduction, rather than reading your resume, look for opportunities to tell a brief story that brings some highlights to the attention of the listeners. This is a more subtle way of telling everyone how fantastic you are. This also limits the amount of content you can share with the audience, ensuring it doesn’t get too long and too detailed. We will remember your story more than any other part of your introduction, so choose something that is highly memorable about you. Make it positive rather than negative. In other words, set yourself up for success. You can tell plenty of stories in your talk about how you suffered and eventually learnt through failure, but for the introduction, choose those incidents which portray you in a good light. This is what you want people to associate you with – success, ability, innovation, bravery, learning. Don’t allow your introduction by the MC just unfold like a train wreck, with you standing there as a horrified, innocent bystander. Grab hold of the key content and feed certain parts to the MC to allow them to do a proper job. Don’t miss this – tell the MC to stick to the script. Be insistent, because these are your personal and professional brands we are talking about here. Keep the really juicy parts of your intro for yourself, and so set the scene for your speech to be a great success. Prime your audience for what is to come. We don’t get that many opportunities in business to speak, so let’s go for the best outcome we can manufacture and not let anyone get in our way of achieving that. Be nice about it, but be bolshie about your protecting your intro.
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Dealing With Ambush Speaking Requests
01/05/2025
Dealing With Ambush Speaking Requests
Suddenly you hear your name being called upon and you are being requested to make a few remarks. Uh oh. No preparation, no warning and no escape. What do you do? Extemporaneous speaking is one of the most difficult tasks for a presenter. It could be during an internal meeting, a session with the big bosses in attendance or at a public venue. One moment you are nice and comfy, sitting there in your chair, taking a mild interest in the proceedings going on around you and next you are the main event. Usually the time between your name being called and you actually being handed the microphone can be counted in milliseconds. By the time you have heaved yourself out of your chair, your brain has well and truly started to panic. A mental whiteout is probably fully underway and your face is going red, because of all the blood pressure of the moment. Here are a couple of things we can do in this situation. Firstly, take a realistic look at the task at hand. The length of your talk will not be expected to be long. If you are a seasoned speaker, you could get up and wax lyrical for an hour without a problem. For everyone else, we are talking two to three minutes. Now two to three minutes seems rather short, except when you are suddenly thrust in front of a sea of expectant eyes of an audience. Once upon a time, I completely forgot my next sentence and discovered the pain of prolonged time. I was asked to give a brief talk and chose to speak in Mandarin to a crowd of around a thousand people, when I was Consul General in Osaka. It was a special event for the departing Chinese Consul General Li, who was heading to New York. Actually, I was going okay but I paused to allow some applause to die down – this turned out to be a major error on my part. I found when you suddenly go blank, a single microphone stand doesn’t provide much cover, up on a very big stage, with all the lights on you and everyone staring at you. That 30 seconds or so of silence, where I was totally lost and unable to recall what came next, seemed like a lifetime. So I know that two to three minutes can appear really daunting when suddenly called upon to speak. Begin by thanking whoever unceremoniously dragged you up the podium for the chance to say a few words. Try and smile at them, through gritted teeth if you have to. You have to say something, so take the occasion and put your comments into some form of context. You can use the concept of time as your ally. For example, this is where we were, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future. This past, present, future construct will work for just about any occasion and any subject. That is the type of ready to go format you need to be able to call upon when you don’t have much preparation time up your sleeve. Another good construct is macro and micro. Talk about the big picture issues related to the occasion, then talk about some of the micro issues. This is useful for putting the event into a frame you can speak about easily. There is always a big and small picture related to any topic. Again, this construct travels easily across occasions and events. We can use the weather, the location, the season or the time of the day as a theme. We can put this event into any of those contexts rather easily. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a long presentation. We can talk about people that everyone would know, who are related to the event. They might be present or absent. We can make a few positive remarks about our host. Then we can thank everyone for their attention, wish them our best and get off the stage. Let me give you a real life example. I was at an event for Ikebana International, sitting there calmly minding my own business, when I heard the speaker suddenly call me up to the stage to say a few words. I had the time from standing up to walk to the podium to compose myself about what on earth I would say. At the extreme outside that time gap was probably 10 seconds. I was going to need to speak in Japanese, so that just added another level of excitement to the challenge. It had been raining that day, so I miraculously dreamed up a water related analogy. I began by thanking the host for allowing me to say a few words, although I secretly I wasn’t so happy about being put on the spot. I mentioned that the stems of the Australian cut flowers that were being exhibited that day, contained water and soil from Australia, as they had just arrived that morning by air. I said that as a result here in Japan we had a little bit of Australia present and each of these flowers were like a floral ambassador linking the two countries together. I then wished everyone all the best for the event and got out of the firing line pronto. Probably not an award winning talk, but good enough for that occasion, with that amount of notice. And that is the point. You need to be able to say something reasonable rather than remarkable to complete your sudden duties. So always have a couple of simple constructs up your sleeve if you are suddenly asked to speak without warning. Don’t just turn up thinking you can be an audience member and can switch off or these days start immersing yourself in your phone screen. Imagine you were suddenly singled out for action and have your construct ready to go just in case. You may not be called upon, but everyone around you will be impressed that you could get up there and speak without warning. The degree of difficulty here is triple back flip with pike sort of dimension and everyone knows it. They are all thinking what a nightmare it would have been, had it been them up there in the firing line. You will be surprised how much a difference that little bit of preparation will make to coming across as professional, rather than uming and ahing your way through a total shambles of a talk. Your personal brand will become golden for the sake of a bit of forward planning. Now that would be worth it don’t you think.
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333 Real World Leadership
12/22/2024
333 Real World Leadership
Change is hard to create anywhere in the world. Getting things to change in Japan also has its own set of challenges. The typical expat leader, sent to Japan, notices some things that need changing. Usually the Japan part of the organisation is not really part of the organisation. It is sitting off to the side, like a distant moon orbiting the HQ back home. There are major differences around what is viewed as professional work. The things that are valued in Japan, like working loyally (i.e. long hours) even with low productivity, keeping quiet, not upsetting the applecart, not contributing in meetings, getting deep into the factional constructs of the organisation, are not seen as positive. Inefficiencies seem to beg for correction. Innovation seems to be a foreign concept in both senses of the word. Doing what we have always done, in the same way as we have always done it, has eliminated most of the opportunities for making mistakes, so why change anything? Doing things in a new way is inherently risky, because there is no reliable road map. We are going to have come out of our comfort zone to do that and we might make a mistake – not appealing whatsoever to the Japanese staff. Meritocracy is a given to the new expat leader and so personnel changes are a prime interest. People are where they are for many reasons and merit is not always the reason. Longevity, who entered the company first, who is your patron, always have a big determinant on whose who in the zoo in Japan. Talented people are supposed to keep in line and do what they are told. Showing too many smarts seems they are getting uppity before their betters and the hocho, that is the razor sharp Japanese knives, rapidly come out. The “nail” sticking out is about the get a good whack from everyone who can hit it hard. Nevertheless, ignorance is bliss, so our expat hero or heroine plunges in and starts shaking things up. Entrenched interests, who have created this current system to suit themselves, now feel threatened. They are not stoics. They make a very keen calculation. Can we outlast this clown, who is so rude, so ignorant about how to properly lead in Japan, so annoying and so dangerous to our vested interests. If the answer is “yes”, then a guerrilla war commences, where those most threatened band together to slow down progress, obfuscate the vital issues, hide key information, isolate out the new leaders pets to weaken them and look for petards on which to hoist the expat. If the answer is “no”, then it is a bare knuckle street fight. There are no rules. Classic weapons are looking for points of failure with new innovations to blow them up on purpose. Anyone close to the boss becomes a target internally and all sorts of societal pressure is brought to bear, to “turn them” into a spy for the “good guys” against this lunatic from outside. They are reminded that our hero won’t be here forever and the rest of us will be. “We will get you. You are going to be toast when the boss heads to the airport for departure to the next foreign assignment. You aren’t going anywhere sunshine, remember that”. Out of nowhere and nothing, headquarters starts to get anonymous communication about various crimes and misdemeanors that are pure fiction. Sexual harassment is a favourite, because they know Western companies are really sensitive to these types of allegations. Power harassment which was a preferred, traditional boss leadership technique, has now made it into the upper ranks of crimes, as this has become something flagged in Japanese society. Unsuitability for leadership in Japan. Ignorance of the market, clients, business practices, damage to the reputation of the firm locally are all trotted out to paint a dismal picture. The staff engagement survey for Japan is always the lowest score in the world and this shows what a miserable job our expat hero is doing. It is always the lowest in the world, but HQ isn’t usually that smart or well informed enough to know that. HQ is demanding Japan’s results improve, but are not happy to see any pushback when changes are introduced. The expat boss has to keep everything as it is, the exact same structure but produce greater results and they have to keep everyone happy about achieving that. The boss is on a hiding to nothing here. Welcome to Japan!
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332 Presentation Visuals
12/15/2024
332 Presentation Visuals
Last week we talked about when presenting, you need to transfer your energy to the audience. However don’t have your energy levels at the maximum volume all the time. That just wears an audience out and wears you out too. Instead, you need to have some variation. Very strong and then sometimes very soft. And I mean drop it right down. Remember to have that in the voice range. Sometimes say your point in an audible whisper. I remember when I gave a presentation in Kobe. It was at a university summer school for students who had graduated and were going back to their home countries. I was giving this uplifting talk about how they could use the experience they had in Japan back in their home country. It was powerful, a very powerful presentation. It was an urging my comrades to “man the barricades” type of speech. The speaker after me was a Korean professor. Maybe because of the way I presented, I don’t know, but he spoke very quietly. He spoke in a very soft voice throughout the whole presentation. It really forced you to lean in and listen to him, because you had to work a little bit harder to listen to him. So he got peoples’ attention by having a softer voice. At the time, I thought, “wow look at that”. That was very effective and I realized, ah, just operating at one power level all the time is not going to work. I need to have variety in my voice, so I should have times when I am very powerful and other times when I am very soft. So just watch yourself that you are not getting into too much soft or too much strong mode. Variety is the key. I said before gestures are very important. Be careful about getting your hands tied up with things. If you are saying one thing is important, hold up one finger. If it is the second thing, hold up two fingers. This is important. When you hold up your fingers like that, hold them up around head height. Don’t hold gestures around waist height. It is too low and people struggle to see it. Get your gestures up high in a band from chest height up to around head height. That zone is the key height you want for showing gestures. When you want to show a big point, open your hands right out. Don’t be afraid of big gestures. Use gestures that are congruent. Be careful about waving your fist at your audience though. It looks aggressive. It looks unfriendly and combative. Use the open hand rather than a closed fist. And don’t hit your hands together, slap them together or slap them on your thigh. That activity creating noise becomes distracting. Just use the gestures by themselves. As I said before, 15 seconds is probably at the maximum you want. You can walk around on the stage, but be careful about walking around too much, especially pacing up and down. That makes you look nervous and either lacking in confidence about your message or lacking control over what you are doing. Try and hold the main center point of the stage and move because you have got a good reason to move. Using the names of people in your audience is a great thing to do. If you get there early, meet some of your audience. Have a conversation with someone. It is a nice connector with the audience to refer to that person and say, “I was just chatting with Jim Jones over there before and he made a very interesting point about current consumer trends. In fact, Mary Smith made an addition to that point, when she said “blah, blah, blah…” Suddenly you have both people very much proud of being recognized and involved in your talk. They have been recognized by the speaker and they like it. The audience now feels that you have a stronger connection with those listening. Refer to people by name. It is very, very effective. Don’t leave it to chance, try and look for those opportunities to engage with your audience. Let’s concentrate on the basics. What is the point of your presentation? Who is your audience? What is the point? Be conversational and customize the delivery to your listeners. Have exhibits or have demonstrations or whatever that are custom-made to match that audience or match the point that you are making. Don’t just bring out a set off the shelf points you recycle for every presentation. You might have an existing basis for a presentation, but think about who are you talking to? What is the key point and then take it and re-work it, re-package it up, customize it. I have given 530 presentations in the last 20 years here in Japan. I have never given the same presentation twice, ever. Even with the slides, I will always have some small variation. Certainly the way I present it will be different every time. This keeps it fresh for me, as a speaker. And it also keeps it fresh for an audience. If I feel stimulated and interested in what I am talking about, then the chances are that is how the audience will feel about it too. They will feel stimulated and interested as well. Be wary of receiving the presentation pack. You often see the CEO had some munchkins out the back preparing the presentation for him or her. Often, it will be the first time that they have even seen the presentation. Sadly, it is obvious that it is the first time they have seen the presentation. They don’t know what’s coming next and they struggle through it. This is really killing the brand. It is killing the brand and the organization. It is killing the presenter’s personal brand. You don’t want that. Get it, customize it, make it yours, then present it. So there we have some ideas on how to present your visuals when you are giving your presentations which are based on our training called High Impact Presentations, where we teach people over two days how to become a high impact presenter and how to learn a number of different structures. It’s really the Rolls-Royce of the presentation skills. This is where Dale Carnegie started in 1912,teaching people how to be persuasive. If ever you have a chance, after listening to this, to do that particular course if you haven’t done it before, grab that opportunity because it is a powerhouse course. It’s a game changer of a training course. I have taken it myself and I strongly recommend it. So best of luck and remember, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Do not be consumed by the construction of the materials. They are secondary to you. But when you do construct your materials use these ideas, these hints and you will give a much, much better presentation.
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331 Ending Presentations Secrets
12/08/2024
331 Ending Presentations Secrets
This is a tricky part of designing and delivering our presentations. Think back to the last few presentations you have attended and can you remember anything from the close of their speech? Can you remember much about the speaker? This close should be the highlight of their talk, the piece that brings it all together, their rallying cry for the main message. If you can’t recall it, or them, then what was the point of their giving the talk in the first place? People give talks to make an impression, to promulgate their views, to win fans and converts, to impact the audience, etc. All weighty and worthy endeavours, but all seemingly to no effect, in most cases. What can we do to stand above this crowd of nobodies, who are running around giving unmemorable and unimpressive talks? The keys to any successful talk revolve around very basic principles. Vince Lombardi, famed American Green Bay Packers football coach would always emphasise that the road to success in his game was blocking and tackling – the basics and so it is with public speaking. Design must not start with the assembly of the slide deck. Yet this is how 99% of people do it. Instead start with designing the final closing message. In other words start with how you will finish. This forces clarity on you, drives you to sum up the key takeaways in one sentence and gets to the heart of what it is you want to say. It is also excruciatingly difficult, which is why we all head for the slide deck formation instead. Once we have sieved the gold nugget from the dross, grasped the key point of the talk, then we are ready to work on the rest of the speech. The main body of the talk will flow naturally from the close, as we assemble data, facts, examples, stories, testimonials and statistics to support our main point. We then array this vast army of persuasion ready for deploy at our summation. It must flow in a logical progression, easy to follow for the audience and all pointing back to support our main contention. The opening and close can have some connection or not. The role of the opening is very clear – grab the attention of the assembled masses to hear what it is we want to say. We can state our conclusion directly at the start and then spend the rest of the time justifying that position. Or we can provide some general navigation about what we are going to talk about today. Or we can hit the audience with some nitro statement or information, to wake them up to get them to listen to us. At the end there will be two closes, one before the Q&A and one after. The majority of speakers allow the final question to control the proceedings rather than themselves. If that last question is a hummer, a real beauty, right on the topic and allowing you to add extra value to your talk, then brilliant. How many times have you seen that though? Usually the last questions are a mess. All the better, intelligent questions have been taken, the best insights have been plumbed and now we have some dubious punter who wants a bit of your limelight. Their questions can often be off topic, rambling, unclear or just plain stupid. Is this how you want your talk remembered? The final two closes can reflect each other and be an extension of what you have already said or you can split them up and give each its specific task to make your point. The close before the Q&A can be a summation to remind your audience of what you spoke about and prime them for questions. Obviously recency, the last thing people will hear, will have the most powerful impact, so the second close must be very carefully designed. Be careful of the event hosts wanting to take over immediately after the last question and not allowing you the chance to make your final close. You might have gone overtime or they need to vacate the venue or face a bigger bill or whatever. They can be thanking the audience for coming and wrapping things up with their news of their next event, before you can blink an eye. You need to word them up at the start that you want to make a final close after the Q&A and then you will give them the floor. The other component of the close is the delivery. So many speakers allow their voices to trail off and allow their speaking volume to descend at the peroration. You want to be remembered as someone passionate about your subject, excited to be there to share it with this audience and a true believer of your message. That means you need to drive the volume up, hit the last words with a lot of passion and belief. Make it a rousing call to action, to storm the barricades and to change the world. That is how you want people to remember your message AND you as a speaker as they shuffle out of the venue and go back to work or home.
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330 Common Sense Needed More
12/01/2024
330 Common Sense Needed More
As the leader we have to work on the presumption that people know what they are doing. It is impossible to micro manage every single person, every moment of the day. By the way, who would want to do that anyway? The issues arise when things deviate from the track we think they are on or expect that they are on. We find that a process has been finessed, but we don’t like the change. We find that some elements have been dropped completely, but we only find this out by accident or substantially after the fact. We are not happy in either case. Why does this happen? Training can cover the basics, but there is always a wide margin of discretion in carrying out jobs. We need to allow this or the team become asphyxiated by the confines of the narrowly defined tasks we have set for them. We all own the world we help to create, so we need to allow people to be creative, if we want them to take ownership of their jobs. It is when things start to stray that we run into trouble. There is a margin allowed for doing things differently, but when the red line gets crossed, we get cross. Another seed of discomfort is when systems are changed, but you don’t know that. There might be a really great reason or a very bad reason for this to happen, but the scary part is not knowing the change has been made in the first place. Do we have to know about every single thing our staff are changing? Obviously no, so where is the line in the sand to be drawn here? This is tricky and there are no genius answers really. We need to remind our team that they are free to innovate, to be creative, to look for every kaizenopportunity. We also need to have them tell us if they make a significant change. Okay, so how do we define “significant”? This is a very grey area and this still won’t capture everything we need to know about, but it is better than having no clue at all as to what is going on. Our workplace is usually divided into specialty functions like sales, marketing, operations etc. Cross functional innovation is good, if both groups know about it and contribute. Problems start to arise when the changes are made in isolation and in secret. Not secret in the sense that anyone is trying to fool others, but secret in the sense that affected groups are not told what is going to happen. It just happens and you find out later – usually at the worst possible time. The changes can also reflect an uninformed view of how things work in reality. Not having in depth detail on the sales function, for example, can result in the operations team making some decisions which negatively impact the sale effort. IT may make changes that are completely rational from a geeky IT point of view, but which create results for other parts of the business which are not helpful. Undoing things always takes time and money and results in lost productivity. What can we do about these challenges? Having functional heads keep an eye for any negative changes, is a delegation task that must be done. The leader cannot get across that degree of detail. Educating the whole team about how the whole fits together is a good practice. We assume everyone gets it, but that is wishfull thinking. In team meetings, it is important that all sections report changes that will impact other parts of the business. Formalise this into the meeting agenda so that it never gets missed. When things do go off the rails, educate those involved about the big picture, so that it won’t happen again. No one is trying to destroy the business, so intentions are honourable, but the communication piece can be missing. Encourage staff to think about the ramifications of changes they may want to make and have them inform those likely to be affected before the changes are made. Surprisingly, even in small offices, this simple activity fails to happen because everyone is so time harassed doing multiple tasks at light speed. Japan has it horenso ( 報連相) mantra to fall back on when in doubt. Ho for hokoku or report, ren for renraku or contact and so for sodan or consult. This is a useful construct to reduce problems before they occur, especially for junior staff – report/contact/consult. Finally, don’t blow your top! Being the last to know about bad news is the lot of the boss. That is bad enough, but finding out randomly about bad news, that only you understand is bad news, is really, really irritating. The instant boss reaction to this type of thing is usually explosive. We have to remember the importance of encouraging everyone to innovate. The corresponding increase in risk of failure goes hand in glove with that effort. We have to remember to be using our communication and people skills, so that we don’t kill team motivation. Bite your tongue when things are revealed and start thinking of a positive way of encouraging everyone involved, as you correct the situation. If we can do this, we will be building the culture of creativity we want and over time we will diminish the outbursts of common sense collapse.
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329 Join The Buyer Conversation In Japan
11/24/2024
329 Join The Buyer Conversation In Japan
Life is busy, busy today. Communications has sped up business to an extent unthinkable even ten years ago. Every company is a publisher now, due to social media’s pervasiveness. Content marketing is driving original content creation and release. LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook are favouring live video, so we have to become television talents. Voice is the next big thing, so podcasting requires us to be radio personalities. If you are in business, your personal information is out there, easily searchable and found. We check out the buyers and they check out the sellers, before we meet. When you turned up at a client meeting eighty years ago, you came with some good jokes, some market information, some competitor intelligence, etc. You did this to break the ice with the buyer. Even if they were an established client, you needed to break the ice for that day. Buyers then and buyers now have a lot going on inside their heads when we turn up and almost none of it has anything to do with us and what we want. In Japan, meeting room space is always at a premium, so getting time with buyers has some automatic limitations placed upon it with certain companies. After thirty minutes you are given the bum’s rush, because that space has been booked for the next meeting and they are loitering with intent outside the glass wall waiting to get in for their meeting. That doesn't give us much time to carve out some mind space with the buyer, get into questioning mode, talk about the solution, deal with any objections and seal the deal. If the first part of the meeting isn’t well planned then there won’t be any result. We cannot let the first few interactions be random events. We need to plan in detail how we are going to establish some rapport with this buyer or reestablish some rapport if they are an existing buyer. We will have checked some of the media aggregation sites to see if there has been anything released in to the public arena about the client company, which we can then refer to. If it is a first meeting then checking the annual report is a must. There will be a glossy coverage of the CEO’s vision and strategy for the enterprise, with photographs in a swish corporate setting. We are looking for things we can ask about in this meeting. Our objective is to get the client talking as soon as possible. Most salespeople still cling to the idea that they have to dominate the airwaves, so they just keep talking, talking, talking. We don’t want that. We only have a limited amount of time, so we want the client talking as much as possible. When we do that, the client will have stopped thinking about all of the other things going on in their work and private lives. We will be concentrated on the business at hand and that is exactly what we need. We hopefully will be able to check whether some insight we have found is relevant to what they are doing. We deal with that industry vertical so we are picking up ideas across companies on what is working and not working. We share these ideas as a means of demonstrating we provide value to their enterprise. They may not go for it, but they will go for our intention to assist them to make their business more successful. A discussion with a drill manufacture company I called upon, prompted a suggestion by me that they copy Blendtec’s “will it blend” phenomenon, but for drills not blenders. Blendtec’s CEO Tom Dickson video’s the blending of iPads, golf balls, whatever and post it on YouTube and they get massive views. My idea was to copy this for Japan and create some buzz around the product line up. They didn’t go for it in the end, but I have no doubt that I have a closer relationship with the President today, because of my effort to think out of the box for them. I had his attention for our discussion. Getting the full attention of the buyer is no longer a given. They are permanently distracted today and we are competing with so much noise, more than ever before. We need to have a strategy to get their attention. We cannot leave it to chance or expect that, “of course they will be paying attention – we have an appointment”. That concept is way too indulgent. Ask well thought through questions to get them talking, bring insights and valuable market intelligence. Today, we have to do this every time, even if they are an established buyer. Just because we have a relationship with them, doesn’t mean we have automatically broken through all the completion for their attention. Start fresh every time as if it were the very first meeting. In this modern age this is the new normal.
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328 Dealing with Questions When Presenting In Japan
11/17/2024
328 Dealing with Questions When Presenting In Japan
Having an audience interested enough in your topic to ask questions is a heartening occurrence. 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 publically 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 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. The advantage of waiting until the end is that you remain in control of the order of the talk. You may deal with all of the potential questions by the end of the talk and the Q&A 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, we have at least gotten through what we wanted to say. We had full control of the proceedings. If we get into a torrid time with a questioner, early in the piece, it may throw our equilibrium off balance or cause some consternation or embarrassment to the audience, detracting from what we want to say. The atmosphere can turn unpleasant very quickly which pollutes everyone’s recollection of you as the speaker. Also, if we don’t know how to handle hostile questions, our credibility can crumble. A crumbling credibility in a public forum is not a good look. So my recommendation is for the seasoned pro speakers to take questions whenever you feel like it. For those who don’t present so frequently, err on the side of caution and take the questions at the end.
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327 Build Your Team In Japan
11/10/2024
327 Build Your Team In Japan
Teams are fluid. People move or leave and new people join. Targets go up every year. The compliance and regulatory requirements become more stringent, the market pivots and bites you, currency fluctuations take you from hero to zero in short order. Head office is always annoying. There are so many aspects of business which line up against having a strong sense of team. We can’t be complacent if we have built a strong team and we have to get to work, if we are in the process of team building. Sports teams are always high profile and successful sports coaches are lauded for their ability to produce results, especially when they are always dealing with tremendous fluctuations in the make up of the team. Vince Lombardi is one of those much heralded coaches and he noted: “Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another and of strength to be derived by unity”. Sterling stuff, but how do you do that? Vince had access to some of the most highly paid and motivated team members on the planet, but what about the rest of us? We often haven’t chosen the team. We have inherited someone else’s criteria and selection model. People come to us from different companies or different sections and so how do we address the issue of establishing a common purpose? We need to make sure each individual has a clear sense of the reason the team exists, their individual role and the importance of their role to the team effort. If you suddenly asked your team members about the reason the team exists, you might be dumbfounded to receive so many disparate answers. We assume everyone knows and that we all in sync, but we should check. And we should do it regularly, as the team composition changes over time and new people may not know. Establishing an agreed set of team values is an important glue to hold the whole team together. Whenever we do this exercise for ourselves or for clients, we always get a huge range of values being nominated. This is helpful but not particularly helpful. We need to do it in two parts, starting with our personal values and then do the team values. Ideally, each individual’s values will also be part of the team values so that the ownership factor is sky high. A team vision is the next stage and this is where many people start to weep. They are heartily sick of the word vision. So many vision consultants, articles, videos and podcasts covering this one little word. It bogs down and eventually all the fluff associated with the word, collapses under its one weight. Regardless, you still need a team vision, so get over it. Jack Welch pointed out, “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion”. A vision is a future picture of what could be and what should be, regardless of what is today. The vision is stated in the present tense, as if we were already at the final state of development and success that we are aiming for. The visualisation is positive and optimistic and the words both powerful and specific. We need a vision to define where we want to be, in order to work out how we will get there. Our mission is the other building block. It describes what we do and by definition, what we don’t do. Clarity around objectives and goals means counting out some shiny objects that are not core requirements for the team. The vision tends to last long, as do the core values, whereas we have to keep revisiting the mission. This is because things change and we may need to change tack and go in a different direction. In which case our mission has also flexed and we need to restate it. We do this so that everyone in the team has clarity around what we are doing and how we are doing it. Successful teams have achieved great clarity throughout the entire organization about what the team is trying to do. This is not an accident, but the product of good leadership work to establish a base and then good ongoing work, to keep the ideas alive and relevant.
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You Can’t Do It All By Yourself
11/03/2024
You Can’t Do It All By Yourself
The hero’s journey is for the very, very few. I did it my way, I slaved away in a garret and got to the top, I realised the American dream – all good stuff, but an illusion for most. The reality is there are more of us who need the cooperation of others, than those who can succeed despite others. The age of the “one” has been taken over by the age of the “many”. Hero teams are more powerful than individual heroes. The problem is although we may need the cooperation of others, we are not that good at getting it. We limit our scope through two key areas – how we communicate and how we react. We like what we like and we find affinity with those who like similar things. We like to speak in a certain way and we click with others who speak the same way. It might be a shared accent, denoting a similar background, and we are all pretty good at spotting the subtleties of dialect. That is okay, but it still doesn’t help us to go far enough. You might share a common accent, but that doesn't mean you get on with everyone from back home\ Reflecting the preferences of others is a much more effective way of building trust and cooperation. Does this mean being two faced and manipulative? No, it means being flexible and other focused rather than me, me, me focused. When we are speaking with others we notice the way they prefer to communicate. It will vary from very low energy to high output - softly spoken to plain loud. Neither side likes the other much. The loud person can’t hear the softly spoken person and feels annoyed, because they have to struggle to hear what they are saying. The softly spoken person is quietly upset, because they don’t like people who are loud and aggressive. The key here is to adjust ourselves to suit the situation and the other person, if we want to gain their cooperation. If you say, “well I am me, I have my rights and they should adjust themselves to how I like it”, then let me know how that is working out for you? We will need to increase our energy and volume when we speak with high output people. We may feel like we are screaming, but on their scale all we are doing is communicating normally. The opposite applies, when we have to drop the volume and the strength. We may feel like we are whispering and it is killing us, but the counterparty feels very comfortable chatting with you. Some individuals are really detail oriented, they are constantly seeking data, proof, evidence about what they are being told. When we interact with this group, we notice the micro focus immediately and so we need to start adding a lot more detail to our explanations or recommendations. We may feel this is too nitty gritty and frankly, massive overkill, but that is not how they see it. For them this is absolutely normal and unremarkable. The opposite preference is for big picture discussions. Don’t worry about the details, the practicality, the roll out - we will get to that later. They want to plot the future direction in broad brush terms. For detail orientated people this is painful, because everything seems fluffy and unrealistic. Don’t fight it – encourage them to go big and go with them. Put up some crazy ideas (judged crazy from your evidence based thinking point of view) of your own and don’t feel guilty. They will welcome all crazy ideas, including yours. When we hear something we don’t like, we often react first and think later. Bad approach! Instead, bite your tongue and hear them out – don’t jump in over the top of them with your counter idea, critique or cutting comment. Try ear, brain, mouth rather than ear, mouth, brain as an order of approach. Use a “cushion”, a sentence that is neither for nor against what they are saying. It is a neutral statement, used to simply break our usual pattern of too rapid intervention. It gives us crucial time to think about what we want to say and how we are going to say it. Before we comment or attempt to criticise them, we instead ask them why they think that or why they say that. While they are providing some background and context around their position, we are able to bypass our immediate chemical reaction and reach deeper down to our calmer second or even third, considered response. When we do speak we may even accept their position because the context made sense or be able to suggest a counter position. We can do this in a calm way, that doesn’t lead to an argument and bad feelings. These two actions on our part will build the trust and establish the lines of communication required to convince other to help us on our own hero team journey. Speak in a reflective manner and don’t react immediately to what you are hearing. You may think this is killing you, because it is so different to how you normally operate, but if you want to be effective with all types of people, this is the secret – adjust yourself first. Newtonian physics says for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Fine, but we don’t want that – we want a different and improved reaction, so let’s change our own angle of approach with others, so that we get a much better response. Action Steps Be flexible and be focused on those with whom you are communicating: If they are micro, you go micro If they are macro, you go macro If they are fast paced, then speed up If they are moderate in pace, then slow down When you hear something you don’t like use ear, brain, mouth Before you reply, use a cushion to give yourself time to craft your response
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326 When To Say "No" To The Buyer In Japan
10/27/2024
326 When To Say "No" To The Buyer In Japan
Normally, as the seller, we are getting told “no” in sales, rather than the other way around. When salespeople become desperate to hit their numbers, they start to do crazy things. They start telling lies to the buyer, they exaggerate the scope of the solution, they savagely discount the price, they overpromise on the follow-up, they agree to horrendous delivery dates, they become visibly agitated during the sales call. All bad. When we meet the client, our brain has to get into a specific gear. That means we are focused on how can we contribute to build the client’s business? What can we do that will grow the buyer’s revenues, cut costs or expand market share? That mental gear is entirely different to questions such as “how will I make my monthly sales quota?”, “how will I stop being fired?”, etc. The latter are solely focused on you and not the buyer and this impacts what comes out of your mouth. If we are doing a proper job of prospecting we will always have alternatives. When the pipeline is too thin, desperation sets in. The existing clients get worked over, to try and squeeze blood from a stone, because there are no other options. It is easy to talk to an existing client than go and find a new one, which is so why salespeople hate prospecting – it is hard and tough work. Nevertheless, prospecting and building pipeline are the keys to positioning ourselves as sellers. When we have a strong pipeline, we are not dependent on any one sale. When we are doing the questioning phase of the sale’s call we start to understand what the client needs. We may realise that what we have isn’t really a fit. When we don’t have pipeline, we start to think how we can make it fit anyway. This is desperate thinking and ultimately very damaging to our trust, brand and reorder possibilities. We are thinking single order, rather than the start of many orders. We may know that to take on this project is going to put a lot of pressure on the back office or the supply chain within our organisation. We have to keep in mind the opportunity cost that this deal represents, not just the income it will generate. We are impinging on other better quality work to do this deal. If the pricing for doing it was at a premium, it might be justifiable but that is usually quite rare. Or if the scale of the work is considerable and sustained over a long period of time, it might be viable. In fact, usually, a bad deal more often than not comes with other ugly lumpy bits attached to it that are not very attractive. We are better to say “no”. When deals come that are outside of our usual scope and therefore require a lot of work, the price needs to be high, to warrant doing it. If it is not, then get back to being busy building pipeline and let that deal flow to a competitor, who is either better suited to handle it or more stupid than we are. It hurts to give business away to a competitor, but that is the better choice than damaging your own operation. A deal came to me though LinkedIn and the buyer was a substantial company in Singapore, with a strong brand name. The details of what they wanted to do in Japan though, had potential grief written all over it for me. It was somewhat related to what we do, but just that bit off to the side, where we would have to do a lot of work to make the project work. The money mentioned was so, so and really didn’t cover the extra work that would be needed. I introduced the deal to a “frenemy” rival company and asked if they were interested. They said yes and so I connected them with the seller. I heard later, that they got hammered on the pricing, when they came to deal with the lower level operations people inside the company. A typical Singaporean business play where they are very tough on pricing, often known as the “squeeze all the juice out of the deal for the buyer” play. The “frenemy” took the pricing offered, rather than saying no or demanding more money and got smashed. It turned out to be a huge amount of work, sucked up a lot of their time and burned some of their contacts. This is exactly what I thought it would do to me too. I was glad I missed that bullet. Saying “no” was a very, very good choice on my part. It was also a one off deal, so there was no hope of repeat business. This made it less attractive, because I couldn’t see any return on the investment of time and effort. I didn't take it because I had pipeline, alternatives, other potential business. Say “no” to a bad or marginal deal and keep working on building pipeline to find better deals. You will spend the same amount of time, but the rewards are vastly different.
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325 Your Good Old Days Stuff Is Dull
10/20/2024
325 Your Good Old Days Stuff Is Dull
Gaining credibility as a speaker is obviously important. We often do this by telling 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 our audience. They are like lightening when it comes to escaping to the internet, to 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 skeptics. 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 experiences. 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 adventures. He was obviously enjoying it, but what did something that happened forty years ago in America have to do with the rest of us here in Tokyo? 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 question, they have to mentally go there themselves. It is much more effective than having the speaker try and drag them there. 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 them to identify with the situation being unveiled. This is better because they are 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 rather than 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. Talking about ourselves is fun 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 implant it when designing the talk. It is also very important to test this design during the rehearsal. Better to discover any issues in rehearsal rather than testing the content on a live audience. Sounds simple enough, but remarkably, 99% of speakers do no rehearsal at all. Doubt that statistic? How many speakers have you heard where you got the sense they had carefully rehearsed their talk? Case closed! In developing our attention grabbing cadence during the talk, rather than waiting to Q&A to deal with any pushback on our opinions, we can go early. We can anticipate what those objections might be and handle them during the main body of our speech. We pose them as rhetorical questions. Some people in the audience when they hear these objections will be thinking “yeah, that’s right”. We then use our evidence drawn from our experiences, our war stories, to demolish that potential objection and ensure we maintain control of the issue. This technique also engages the audience more deeply in our presentation, as they start to add perspectives they may not have thought of before. There is also a strong feeling of comprehensiveness about our talk too. It shows we are aware of different views, are not afraid of them and have an answer to remove them as a consideration.
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324 The Younger Generation Are A Handful
10/13/2024
324 The Younger Generation Are A Handful
We are on the cusp of a change amongst youth in Japan. Those already entered into the workforce have memories of the Lehman Shock and the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdown and the impact this had on the job market. They are looking for security of employ and family life, because of the fragility of both were exposed to them in September 2008 and again in March 2011. They saw the dire straights of those who slipped into the part-time employee hell of low wages, no prospects and everything tough, tough, tough. In 2016, only 6.9% of those in the 25-34 age group switched jobs. The September 2016 survey by the Japan Institute For Labor Policy and Training also found nearly 90% supported lifetime employment. This figure was only 65% in 2004. Of those in their 20s, 55% wanted to work for the same company right through. That same number was only 34% in 2004. There is a generation coming behind them though who will be different again. They were born around the time of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, have little recollection of the Lehman debacle in 2008 and except for those with close links to the Tohoku region, vaguely recall the ordeal of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdowns. They are going to graduate after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. They are going to see the part-time jobs market filled with Asian, mainly Chinese, students working their allowed 38 hours a week (more hours than the work week in France). They are going to see driverless electric cars, Artificial Intelligence breakthroughs, the ubiquity of voice commands, bumptious robots and the Internet of Things controlling their lives. Their demographic curve is in rapid decline, their numbers are dropping every year and will be half today’s figures by 2060. They are going to be in big demand. The current unemployment rate of 2.8% will sink even further. They will be free agents looking at multiple job offers and openings available to them. They will be the last juku or cram school generation. University entrance requirements will collapse. Except for the absolute elite institutions, a pulse and cash will be the only entry requirements. Tokyo is going to cap the numbers of students on campus, but the rest of the country will have no limits. Many universities will be hungry for fees and desperate to attract students. The Millennial’s successor generation, who some are calling Generation Z and for Japan, I am calling the “Olympics’ Generation”, will have an entirely different perspective on education. “Exam hell” will mainly disappear as a cultural construct for the 90%-95% who don’t aim for the elite universities. Mid-career hires are still an anathema for many local Japanese firms, but that is going to have to change. They simply will not be able to find staff. What to do with women is confusing for them, as their structures are built on the old post-war model of husband works and the wife raises the kids. That will have to disappear quite soon. This whole concept will have to change and they are going to have to learn to be more flexible about hours worked and leave. When the kids get sick, the husband is still unlikely to be dropping tools and heading off to the school to pick up junior. The working wife will need to do that and woe be tide to any firm who doesn’t cooperate, because others will and she will move on. Today, some domestic firms still look askance at employees having a profile on LinkedIn. This site started as a pseudo-job board, but it has become another source of useful information available for free. This will all add up to assisting greater job mobility. Recruiters will be poaching people right, left and center to satisfy firms desperate to find young workers. The wooing to move will be constant. We have seen an aberration of Economics 101 where labour supply shortages have not yet resulted in wages growth. That cannot last much longer. Certainly this Olympics’ Generation will enjoy the financial benefits of powerful labour demand. The key word for this Olympics’ Generation will be “mendokusai” （めんどくさい）or “bothersome” and anything duly defined will be resisted. Companies are going to struggle with leading this generation. The current Millennials may become their immediate bosses, but the cultural divide between them will be vast. Middle managers in Japan will be faced with the greatest challenges of any generation of Japanese leaders. Unless they are properly trained for this onslaught, it is going to be a nightmare. Their situation will simply outstrip the leadership answers usually tapped from OJT (On The Job Training). There is no roadmap for this eventuality, because this is all a brave new world of leadership. Is anyone in Japan thinking about this? I would say based on my discussions so far, the answer is “no”. You heard it hear first folks: “Winter is coming”.
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323 How To Reply To The Buyer’s “No”
10/06/2024
323 How To Reply To The Buyer’s “No”
What are the chances of getting a “no” to your offer in sales? Probably around 70% of the time, this is what we will get. Given that type of frequency and hit rate, you would think that salespeople would be masters of dealing with this type of response. You would be wrong. The chemicals kick in and sales people lose all reason. I was reminded of this recently when we were conducting sales training. It is hard to create a new habit for salespeople. They have egos and they are easily entrenched in less productive ways of doing things, because that is how they have always done it. Stupid, is what I would call that, unless you are really shooting the lights out with your results. The issue is when we see the body language signaling a negative response the fight response starts and then we hear the words and we go into overdrive. Our brain is on fire concerning the thousand good reasons that no should be a yes. We are delving deep into why the client is wrong and we are right. WE are rapidly processing our line of attack to counter the argument they have proffered. What a complete waste of time. Instead we need to get smart. Stop the chemical reaction from getting out of control. Throw the Breaker Switch, like we have with the electricity in our houses, if the power load gets too dangerous. Shooting your mouth off in sales is even more dangerous. That intervention comes in the form of a cushion. No, we don’t put a cushion over our mouth, so that no words come out. We put it over our brain instead. We offer a very neutral response to the buyer, that neither agrees with nor inflames the situation. The point of this neutral statement is to give us critical thinking time. Are we using this critical thinking time to dream up a killer response that will shut the buyer down in their tracks and turn that “no” into a “yes”? Nope. We use it to stop the chemical rush and regroup. We need to go into question mode. When we hear a “no” it is a headline, like we have in newspapers. A short form of reply that gives the key details and no more. We want to know what is in the article accompanying that headline. Why is it “no”? So we sweetly and gently ask, “May I ask you why you said “no”; or “your price is too high”; or “we are happy with our current supplier”; or “we have no budget for this”; or the thousand other dubious reasons buyers give us for declining our genius offer. Give me the article accompanying the headline, so I can understand how I am supposed to answer this rejection. Now we have to be patient. We hear the reason and again we are sorely tempted to go into counter attack. We know can tear that shabby reasoning apart and want to bombard the buyer with a million reasons why they should buy. Hold your horses there pardner. What if this isn’t the killer objection? What if a more vicious version is lurking in the long grass, ready to bite us at the first opportunity? We need to keep digging. After we hear that reason, we sweetly and gently ask, “Apart from that are there any other concerns for you?”. They will usually have another one. Again we don’t go into rambunctious reply mode. We ask why that is a problem for them, just like we did the first time. They tell us and again we must be patient. We must keep our power dry, hold the line, keep our nerve. Again, we venture forth on our seeker journey and sweetly and gently ask, “Are A and B your only concerns or do you have another? If they do, we still don’t rush in where angles fear to tread and blurt out our killer retort. We sweetly and gently ask, “You have mentioned A, B and C. Of these which one is the most pressing concern for you?”, and then we shut up and don’t even breath, let alone speak. They make a choice and now we open up both barrels and answer that concern and ignore the other two. Usually, if we successfully deal with the main concern, the lesser concerns fade away like the dew on a spring day. When we were doing some role play practice in the training, it was interesting that the person playing the buyer gave a reason for not buying and the seller was starting to jump in. We tied them up and physically restrained them so they couldn’t answer right then and there. Okay, that is an exaggeration. Actually, we just asked them to keep digging, to follow this procedure and not answer yet, until they know what to answer. Sure enough of the A, B and C reasons given, it turned out that it was C that was the concern of most import. “A” was price by the way and “C” was quality in this case. We don’t know what to answer until we know what to rebuff. Hold off on answering the pushback, until you know what is their key concern. Don’t be fooled by smokescreens, wild goose chases and other buyer subterfuges. If we do this we will be a lot more successful closing the sale and building a strong relationship with the buyer.
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322 Structure Counts In Presentations
09/29/2024
322 Structure Counts In Presentations
It is a bad sign when a presentation makes me sleepy, especially if it is at lunch time. It is very common to have speakers address a topic over a lunch to a group of attendees. After lunch, you might explain away a bit of the drowsiness, but during the lunch is a warning sign. The speaker had good voice strength, so nobody was struggling to hear him. He was knowledgeable on his subject having worked in this area for a number of years. He was speaking about what his firm does everyday, so he is living the topic. So what went wrong? Thinking back to the talk, I wondered whether his structure was the issue? When a speech doesn’t flow well, the audience has to work hard. Actually, they choose not to work hard and instead just drop out and escape from you. This was one of those cases. If we think about giving a speech, we have to plan it well. In his case, he had prepared slides, but the style of the lunch and the venue meant it was a no slide deck presentation. He had some side notes written down on his laptop screen to follow. That is fine for the speaker, because it aids navigation through the topics. The problem was that the points were not ordered or structured well. This made it hard to follow, as it tended to jump around, rather than flow. We design our talks from the idea spark. In one sentence, we need to isolate out what is the key point we want to make to our audience. This is not easy, but the act of refining the topic gives us clarity. We create the opening last, because its role is to break into the brains of the audience and capture their full attention for what is coming. The middle bits between opening and closing is where the design part comes in. Think of the sections like chapters in a book. The chapters need to be in a logical order that is easy to follow. They need to link to each other so that the whole thing flows. To create the chapters we take our central conclusion and ask why is that true? The answers will come from the points of evidence or our experiences. We need to get these down and then get them in order. It might be a simple structure like “ this is what happened in the past, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future”. We could use a macro-micro split. This is the big picture and here are the details of the components. It could be advantage-disadvantage. We investigate the plusses and minuses of what we are proposing. It could be taking the key points of evidence and breaking them down to make each a chapter in its own right. The key is in the sequencing. What is the logical flow here to move from one chapter to the next? We need a bridge between chapters to set up what is coming next and to tell our audience we are changing the focus. We need to constantly loop each chapter back to what is the central point. We can’t just put out evidence and leave it there, expecting the listener to work it out themselves. We have to tell them why this is important, what it means for them and how they can use it. Visuals on screen do assist in this process. It does make it easier to follow because we are hitting more points of stimulus with our audience. When we don’t have slides, we need to use word pictures to draw the audience into our topic. I am struggling to recall any stories he told about the topic, which is the best place to create those word pictures. So break the talk up before you go anywhere near the slide construction. What is the point you want to make? What are the reasons for that and turn them into chapter headings. Check that the flow of the chapters is logical and easy to follow. Then create a blockbuster opening to grab attention. If our speaker had spent more time on the design then the talk would have been more accessible to the audience. Get that wrong in this Age Of Distraction and you have lost them immediately.
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321 Servicing Customers Well
09/23/2024
321 Servicing Customers Well
All interfaces with the customer are designed by people. It can be on-line conversations with robots or in store interactions, but the driving force behind all of these activities are the people in our employ. The way people think and act is a product of the culture of the organisation. That culture is the accountability of senior management. The common success point of organisations is to have the right culture in place, that best serves the customer. The success of senior management in making all of that work is a combination of their leadership, people and communication skills. This sounds infinitely reasonable in theory, but the reality is often so different. Senior leaders, who themselves are not particularly people focused, expect their customer interaction designers and in store staff to be customer focused. They don't walk the talk themselves and what is worse, they don't see the contradiction. They haven't worked out yet that good customer service begins with good employee service. Love your staff and they will love your customers. Richard Branson is widely referenced with his philosophy of employees first, customers second. His idea is to produce the right mental framework for employees to then put the customer first. Our emotions lead our behaviors, which determines our performance. Fine, love all of that, but how do we get it right? Leadership has to be clearly understood by the leaders. It is not a function of rank or longevity in the organisation. Instead, it is a function of the degree of cooperation we can get from our team. We might believe things are rolling out beautifully, in a pre-ordained way, in relation to how we treat the customer. Sadly, the front-line customer experience with our service could be entirely different from how the leaders planned it and how they want it. To get that employee cooperation to buy into what we believe is the correct way forward, we need to have well developed people and communication skills. We also need to make sure that our middle managers also have those same skills. We could be doing things really well up at the top of the organisation, but our middle managers may be sabotaging the culture we want to build and we just do not see it. If we want sincerity to be a function of our customer service, then, as an organisation, we have be sincere. If we want customers to feel appreciated, we have to appreciate our staff and do it in a sincere way. People can spot fake from a mile away. If we spend all of our time finding errors and faults, we may miss the things that are being done well, which we can communicate that we appreciate. We might want many things in business such as personal success, greater revenues, reduced costs etc. We can only achieve these things through others: either our own staff or our customers. They may however want different things. We have to find the means to appeal to our staff and customers such that they want what we want. This is not manipulation. This is well developed people and communication skills. The trust is created and we lead others, to also want what we want. As Zig Ziglar famously noted, we can get whatever we want in this life, if we help enough other people get what they want. To create that trust we have to be genuinely interested in others. This starts with our staff because we want them to be genuinely interested in our customer. When they do this, they build the trust with the buyer and a bond that is very difficult to break. If we don't demonstrate this genuine interest in our staff, we are not building the culture where they will naturally pass this feeling on to the customer. There is an old Chinese saying that, “a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”. Yet in modern business, we have plenty of people floating around who don't smile. It could be the very top executives who are too serious to smile at their staff. They set up a culture that is dry and remote, but expect that at the interface with the customer, there will be an emotional connection with the brand. They just don't see the miscalculation and self-delusion involved here. Bosses are often poor listeners, who imagine that their front line staff are all doing an excellent job of listening to the customer. What if that is not the case? If the bosses want to create a culture of good listening habits, then starting with themselves is a reasonable idea. When we listen, we learn more than we already know. This is so important when dealing with the customer. We need to make sure we have a culture of good questioning skills to trigger the opportunity for the customer to talk to us. In these conversations we can better come to understand what would be best for the customer and how to properly service them. One of the frustrating things about training salespeople is the difficulty of getting them to stop focusing solely on what they want (bonuses, promotions, commissions) and concentrate on what the client wants (solve my problem). When they are talking to the client, the conversation is all about what the salesperson is hoping for. We have to learn to change that dialogue and talk in terms of the key interests of the buyer. I was giving a keynote speech at an event hosted by one of our major clients, for their most important customers. Another speaker before me spent the entire time just talking about his own company! I really wondered what was the take away for the audience? Actually, I don't wonder, I know. It was a big fat zero. We can get caught up in ourselves and forget that everything we talk about with the buyer, has to be firmly focused on the client’s interests. The way we do that is by listening to their answers, to the brilliant questions we have designed for that purpose. When a customer encounters one of our touch points, we want them to like and trust us. Doing this on-line is a challenge but good navigation, intuitive processes and clear explanations all assist in this regard. In the face-to-face world, we need to start in a friendly way. The culture of this basic idea however springs from within the company and is guided by the outlook of the leaders. If the top management are a dour bunch, always serious, rarely smiling, stiff and “businesslike” rather than friendly with their teams, then we have to wonder why the front line staff would not be influenced by this outlook? If we want our people to smile and begin in a friendly way with customers, then the leadership group needs to demonstrate that attitude themselves and show this in their own staff interactions. Another challenge for bosses is to shut up. Often, because they are older, more experienced and time poor, they get into the “everything abbreviated” habit of firing out orders. They do all the talking. The same problem with salespeople, they talk too much. The key to satisfying both staff and customers is to let them do the bulk of the talking. This requires a strategy and considerable discipline, but it is worth it because it creates a different type of culture in the organisation and this flows out to the customer interactions. It is an obvious thing in sales to get customers to have a sense of ownership. We might describe the product or service and the situation after they have bought it. We regale them with the problem solutions we are bringing and the success platform we are going to create. We have a goal in mind – find the best solution for the client and get them to have ownership of this idea. We want them coming up with our preferred solution. We design the questions we will ask, with this in mind. It is our idea, but they reach the same idea on their own and in the process come to have ownership of that idea. The same thing is needed with our staff. We can tell them how to do their jobs in great detail, but it would be better if we could have them come up with them own conclusion. Preferably one that matches what we have decided is in the best interests of the company. Again, question design here is crucial and if we do this correctly, the client arrives at their own conclusion and it matches the one we had previously reached. This way there is no sense of hard push sales or badgering of the buyer. They got there by themselves and so their sense of ownership is very high We cannot be persuasive unless we can honestly see things from the point of view of the buyer. The aim in persuasion is to join the conversation going on in the head of the customer. This gets us on the same wavelength and our conversation will be in sync, because we are speaking about the things that are of greatest interest to them. Trying to stop seeing everything from only our own viewpoint and to see if from the client’s viewpoint, sounds tremendously simple, but it requires a strong effort. We need to do this logically as well as emotionally. We have to be understanding at the empathetic level, which means really understanding the driving ideas and desires of the buyer. Nevertheless we need to enable this discipline to apply if we want to be successful in convincing others of what we think will serve them best. If we want our staff to appreciate the business we can receive from the buyer, we need to build that attitude internally of praising staff and giving them honest appreciation. This is often missed in firms, where everything is rather cut and dried. Buying is an emotional activity which we justify with logic. We want our designers of the interface with the customer to have a sense of appreciation for the buyer. We want staff who are facing customers to do the same. If we are not giving our own staff praise and appreciation, we are not building a floor to ceiling culture that will work best when interacting with customers. It has to run on automatic, because we cannot be everywhere at the same time. We have to trust our people to deliver great customer service. The ability to ask questions instead of making statements is an important skill. It is easier to drive this skill throughout the organization, if this is part of the culture. Bosses shooting out orders is a “tell” culture. If they automatically asked questions instead of giving orders, they would be building the right mentality for customer service. Our objective is to find out what the customer wants. To do that we need to be asking them questions. This is a mental frame around which the customer interaction needs to be built. When we ask questions, we can come up with solutions that the customer themselves realise are the best outcomes for them. If we are more concentrated on what is best for us, then the customer can feel that too. So we want to understand their needs, suggest solutions that we know will make them happy to follow our lead. Inside the organisation this is how the team should be managed. They should be doing what they are supposed to be doing, happily. Their bosses have communicated in a way that the staff member comes naturally to the same conclusion, as being the best way forward. When we achieve this common level of understanding then everything moves forward very smoothly.
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The Easy Way Of Selling
09/15/2024
The Easy Way Of Selling
The object of a sale is to exchange a good or a service for money. The degree to which that money can exceed the variable and fixed costs associated with delivering it, determines the success and longevity of the company. We all know that nothing happens in business without a sale. If that is the case then salespeople have a critical role to produce as much revenue as possible for the firm. There are prices set for goods and services. Goods are tangible items and plotting the costs and the margin of profit are relatively straight forward. Buy low and sell high is an old business maxim. Services are more difficult to price because they are intangibles. In both cases, the value proposition of the price against what is being delivered, is the communication piece that salespeople have to master in order to be successful. Imagine my surprise, as an expert in sales training, when I meet salespeople who have not spent even one second trying to master the bridging of the gap between value and cost. Sitting in the audience at a speaker event, next to a thirtyish Japanese sale’s guy, I was astounded by a few things he said as we discussed selling over lunch. I was interested in hearing what his sales process was. He didn’t really understand my question because he had no defined process. He had been selling for this firm for seven years so he was an experienced salesperson. He contacts a lead, gets an appointment, shows up and explains the service and submits a quote, he told me. Really? On the blank side of meal menu, I mapped out the elements of the sales process for him. Prepare for the meeting and focus your intention on one thing – getting the re-order, not just the solitary sale. Build trust through establishing rapport. Create interest by asking extremely well designed questions to understand the client’s needs. Now tell the client whether we can help them or not and if we can, explain the how of our solution. There may be points of insufficient clarity, concerns, hesitations or downright objections to what we are proposing. We need to deal with those before we proceed to ask for the order, and then we do the follow up to deliver the service or good. He was impressed by this structural approach to the sales call, as he should have been, because he was certainly doing it the hard way. Having a roadmap makes the whole process much easier for both buyer and seller. I then asked him what does he do when the buyer says, “too expensive”. With a cherubic mien, he told me he offered to “drop the price”. Incredulous, I asked “by how much do you usually drop it?”. He quoted 20% as the number. There were four other sales people in his team and if that is how they roll over there, then that is an expensive first response to client pushback on pricing. He was an experienced guy, but that was the best he could come up with. Why would that be? He didn’t have any other knowledge about how to deal with that type of situation. Do you think price comes up fairly regularly in sales conversations with buyers? Of course it does, so how could this continue like this, as if it were acceptable. He should have said, “why do you say that” when told it was too expensive? Was the price objection genuine, a ruse, sport negotiation, time bound, or irrelevant because they haven’t seen enough value yet to understand the price point? There will be one highest priority element in the too expensive objection. It might be the actual volume of cash involved, budget allocation timings, internal competing project competition concerns, etc. Which one is it – we need to know. I have been told “too expensive”, which I recognise is a short form summary of a host of reasons for not proceeding. When I questioned the why, it was a “budget issue”. Now as sale’s professionals we have to dig deeper, “why is it a budget issue?”. “Because that number will exceed our budget allocation for that quarter”. That means it is not too expensive after all. It is just too expensive if paid in one quarter, but fully capable of purchase if the payments are split across quarters. Except you would never know that, if your response was to drop your price by 20%. Would you be willing to help the client out and split the payments across quarters? I would guess you would prefer that to having to drop your price. The moral of this story is to take a very detailed look at what your salespeople are doing. Don’t confuse seven years of sales experience with one year of experience seven times. Also, don’t imagine that they have a process, that they know how to explain the value or to deal with objections. Based on what we see in our sales training classes and talking with clients, in Japan, the chances of that being the case are very low.
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The Power Of Rhetorical Questions
09/08/2024
The Power Of Rhetorical Questions
Questions in general are powerful tools for speakers. They bring focus to key points we want to get across. They are particularly useful in getting our audience engaged. They also have danger within them. Knowing when to use questions and what types of questions to use are things which must be worked out in the planning of the presentation and shouldn’t be done on the fly. If you want to get yourself into trouble then ask the wrong question, at the wrong time, in the wrong way and brace yourself for the reaction. There is a cadence to any talk or presentation and in the planning phase we can break the delivery down to five minute blocks. It doesn’t have to be five, it could be four or six, but five minutes is a long enough time to go deep with a thought, idea or imparting some information without losing the concentration of the audience. Actually, audience concentration spans are a nightmare today. They have become so short and everyone has become addicted to multitasking. Even if they are enjoying the presentation, they are scrolling through their screens right in front of you anyway, without any hint of shame. This is the new normal folks. We will face this problem forever and we are never going back to the good old days of people politely listening to us right through our presentations. This is why we need to be switching up the presentation every five minutes or so, to keep the audience intrigued with what we are presenting. This is where great information or insights really help. The audience access to something new or valuable will pry them away from their phone screens for a few minutes longer. We will need to be using the full range of our vocal delivery skills to keep them with us. Any hint of a monotone delivery and the hand held screens will light up and be blazing throughout the room. Questions are an additional assist to break through the competing focus for audience attention. By simply asking a well constructed question we can grab audience attention. Even a simple question can work. If I suddenly asked you, “What month were you born in?”, you will return your attention to me from wherever you were straying. In our talk, we may have been waffling along taking about some pressing issue or downloading some precious data, losing our listeners in the process. However, when we lob in a question, we magically get all eyes back on us. We have now gotten the audience thinking about the point we have raised. The downside with asking questions though is people in the audience want to answer them. They see the question as a great opportunity for them to intervene in the proceedings. They may have a counterview and enjoy the chance to debate with us. They may have their own personal agenda and this break in the traffic is perfect for them to weigh in with what they think. They may even get into debates amongst themselves and exclude us entirely. Within no time at all, the proceedings have been hijacked and we are no longer in control of the agenda. This is where rhetorical questions are so handy. They give us the ability to capture the mental attention of our audience on the topic we are discussing, get them engaged, but we maintain control. A rhetorical question and a real question are identical. The audience cannot distinguish one from the other. This is good, because we can keep them guessing. What we want them thinking about is whether this is a question they have to answer and are they ready to do that or is this a rhetorical question and all they have to do is listen? The difference between the two is the timing of the break before our next contribution. If we stop there and invite answers then they know it is time to speak up. If we leave a pregnant pause, but then answer the question or add to it, then they know they are not being required to contribute. The key point here is to design the questions into the talk at the start. In those five minute blocks we need to have little attractions to keep interest. They might be powerful visuals, great storytelling, vocal range for effect or rhetorical questions. The key is to have variety planned from the start. In a 40 minute speech, apart from the opening and the closings, there are going to be 5-6 chances to grab strong attention. At the start we can use vocal range and visuals but as we get to the middle and toward the end, we need to bring in the bigger guns as people’s concentration begins to fade out. We can’t flog the audience with a series of rhetorical questions and wear them down. We can maybe get in two or maximum three in a forty minute presentation. Any activity we repeat with our audience gets boring very fast. Anything that smacks of manipulation absolutely gets the wrong response. There is a fine line to be walked here. We do want to control the agenda, the debate, the timing, the attention of the listeners, without appearing controlling. Sprinkling a couple of well constructed rhetorical questions into our presentation will help us to maintain interest. We need to defeat our screen based, social media and internet addictive attention rivals. Get used to this, because this is the future for all of us as presenters and we have to lift our game to make sure we are in a position to have a powerful influence with our audiences. The alternative is speaker oblivion.
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Leaders Who Have R.E.A.L.
09/01/2024
Leaders Who Have R.E.A.L.
We love acronyms! Our workplaces are thriving with them such that we can hold extended conversations composed entirely of seemingly impenetrable codes. They are handy though and this one R.E.AL. is short and serviceable to describe best practice leadership attributes. It always good to have evidence around pontification. This summary of the great and the good tendencies amongst leaders is based on research we did in the USA, on what respondents thought leaders needed to do to be more successful. REAL is composed of these key elements – Reliable, Empathetic, Aspirational and Learner. “Reliable” is an obvious choice and though much upheld in principle, tends to break down in practice. “Managing upwards” is a buzzword for describing how to deal with one’s boss. It used to be called “sucking up to the boss” to get ahead. Climbing the greasy pole meant taking all the glory for yourself, Teflon-like blaming others for mistakes and stepping on the bodies of your staff, to elevate your own brilliant career. Reliable however is an attribute that leads to trust only when the staff observe that what is said is actually done, that promises are kept and that their own personal development is being given a high priority. “What is in it for me” is a common human frailty. Bosses who keep this in mind when making sure the organisation and individual goals of their staff are aligned, get more loyalty and more accomplished. Misunderstandings arise, usually traced back to poor communication. More work need by bosses! “Empathetic” is closely linked to listening skills. Taking the viewpoint of the other person is difficult if we don’t know what that viewpoint is. The Japanese expression kuki wo yomu or summing up the real situation, is a great phrase to explain emphathy. What is being said is important but more often, what isn’t being said is where all the insight is buried. Busy bosses though don’t have much time to get below the surface calm of the workplace. Some don’t care – just get me the numbers – or else! Using our position power works up to a point but we miss out on a lot of creative potential as the opportunity cost. If we want to know what is really going on and what people are really thinking, we have to spend time and work at it. Expressing we actually do care is also another orphan amongst communication skills. Successful bosses have good awareness and confidence to communicate they really do care about their people. “Aspirational” reflects ideas about grasping the bigger picture. Hovering above the melee of the everyday to see the vision to be realised on the far horizon. It means communicating beyond this quarter’s goals and placing each individual’s role in terms of their contribution to the bigger goal. The framed glass protects the vision statement, ceremoniously hung on the wall. While it may not fade in the sunlight, it fades in the collective memory. No one can recite it, let along live it, so it is as meaningful as the flower arrangement on the reception desk. Pleasant enough idea but ephemeral. The leader has to inject the ideas and concepts involved into terms that resonate with each person individually. This takes time, which is why so few organisations get any return on their investment in their vision statement. “Learning” gets nods of approval but many executives have had one year of experience thirty times rather than thirty years of experience. Their views are still locked away in a mental vault, for which they have lost the key. Too busy to learn. Busy, busy working in their business, rather than on their business. They are up to date on Facebook but way behind where the industry is headed and where their company needs to go. Well informed yet ignorant, because they lack perspective and acuity. If we aren’t prepared to permanently kill our darlings, our favoured ideas and concepts, we must be prepared to risk falling behind, trampled by our competitors. REAL, another acronym heaven dweller, is easy to remember and that at least is a start to actually realising its power. We know all of these things – we just forget or get too busy to do them. Let’s change that.
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Project Team Leadership
08/25/2024
Project Team Leadership
Projects are too common. Because of this we take them for granted, seeing them as part of everyday work, but we don’t approach them properly. We usually gather the team together and then dive straight into the details of the project, without really applying a professional approach. We certainly don’t apply as much planning expertise to the task as we should, as we wade straight into the mechanics of the execution. Why is that? Poor leadership and lack of skills make for dangerous dance partners, as the team launches forth rocking and rolling with no strategy and little expertise. Often, there is no existing documented planning process in place. This can be rather ironic because often the projects are repeated or very similar projects are undertaken. Templates and structure are missing so everyone just wings it, making it up as they go along, re-inventing the wheel. The goals of the project are often vague. This is a lack of direction from the top leadership to those tasked with doing the work. The project leader has to push back and manage upwards, seeking clear reasons for the WHY of the project and then make sure everyone involved in the team understands the WHY. Project scope creep is like a cancer that can kill the project, denying it success. The project begins with vague boundaries around what is to be done. In quick order, either external parties or the team themselves, become like Emus and are attracted by bright shiny objects. Very quickly the additional tasks multiply but the time frame and the resources committed to the project do not change. This never ends well. The implementation strategy regarding roles, budgets, timelines and follow-up is weak or non-existent. Well, when you are having fun and winging it, you are super busy getting on with the actual work, so no strategy needed. Later things go wrong because timelines were not clear nor properly planned. The resources do not turn up at the required timing or the sequencing of the work is found to be skewwhiff, so there are delays you cannot easily cover or resolve. You quickly find that people, rather than logistics, are the trickiest part of project leadership. All the coolest project management software and sophisticated systems in the world won’t save you from people problems. You may not have been able to match the project team resource with the skill sets required and you have to make do with what you have. There may be incompatible working styles in the team and you are now also chief psychologist, in addition to team project leader, spending a lot of time and energy dealing with staff or division conflicts.
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Minimalist Presenting
08/18/2024
Minimalist Presenting
Zen study is a way to strip out all of the non-essentials in life. The noise, the distraction, the things that are not so important. People sit around concentrating on their breath cycle or one word or any number of other methods to quiet the mind. They are seeking to get more clarity about themselves and what are their real priorities. As presenters, this is a good metaphor for when we are in front of people speaking. You would think with all those thousands of years of Zen in Japan, in art, in design, in temples, gardens, in history etc., that the Japanese people would be legends of simplicity and clarity when presenting. Not true! Presenting as an idea only came to Japan around 160 years ago. Fukuzawa Yukichi who founded Keio University and who graces the 10,000 yen bank note, launched public speaking in Japan in the Meiji period. There is still an enzetsukan or speech hall preserved on the grounds of Keio University, where presumably the first public speeches were given. Western society plumbs the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome, parliaments allowing debate and Hollywood for models on speech giving. Japan has no traditional home grown role model. If the authorities needed you to know anything in old japan, a notice board would have it written there for you. No shogunal oratory from the castle walls to the assembled masses. No Mel Gibson Braveheart style speeches before vanquishing the foe in battle. Japan bypassed all of that until Fukuzawa Yukichi decided this was another area of modernization that needed implementation in Japan, like wearing ties, boots, hats and petticoats. Of course there were no slide decks in those days, but Japan certainly was an early adopter of the technology for giving presentations – the overhead projector, the slide projector, the modern light weight projector, large screen monitors, electronic pointers, etc. Any venue you go to in Japan will be bristling with cool tech gear. Interestingly, the content on the speaker’s screen will also be bristling. There will be 10 graphs on the one page, lurid diagrams employing 6 or more vivid colours, numerous lines of text so small you could use it for an optometrist’s eyesight test chart. Where has the zen gone? To be an effective presenter, we don’t need any tech or screens or props or gizmos. We can just speak to the audience and enjoy being the full focus of their attention. As a result of this visual conflagration, many speakers are competing for attention with what is being displayed on the screen. Company representatives love to play the video of their firm or product or service. They can be quite slick, the joy of the marketing department. They are the pit into which a chunk of money was thrown for the production company, directors, designers, film and sound crew, talents and innumerable others who all got a slice of the pie. The question to ask though is does this video actually assist the speaker to make the key point under consideration. Often they are like eye candy, but are not on point to the main argument. Unless it strongly reinforces your message dump it. It will only be competition for you the speaker and it will suck up valuable time which could be spent better with you as the main focus. I saw Ken Done, a well known Australian artist, give a talk in Japan many years ago. He has a very unique visual painting style. He moved around from behind the lectern, stood next to it and just spoke about his art to the audience. It was very engaging because it was so intimate. The Japanese audience loved it. There was only one source of stimulation for the audience and that was Ken Done. This is what we want – to be the center of our audience’s world for the next thirty or forty minutes. Don’t use a slide deck unless there is something in that content and presentation on screen which really helps bring home your argument. If it is for information purposes, then that will work well. If you are there to persuade, then you will be so much more powerful if all the attention is concentrated on one point and that point needs to be you. In this case we have stripped away all the visual noise, so we have to fill the void with word pictures. We need to transport the audience to a place where they can see what we are talking about, in their mind’s eye. If you have ever read the novel after seeing the movie, you find yourself transported visually to the scenes from the movie, as you read the novel’s pages. This is the same idea. We have to usher the audience to a place, time and situation that we are describing in words, in such a way that visually they can imagine it. We don’t always have to have slides or visuals. We are the message, so let’s manufacture the situation so that we are the center piece of the proceedings and all eyes and ears are on us, totally focused on every word we say. We need to Zen our way to speaking and presenting success!
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Project Management Fundamentals
08/11/2024
Project Management Fundamentals
Projects have been around for a long time of course and in the modern era we have accumulated a vast amount of best practice on how to manage them. It isn’t usually that we don’t know what to do, it is that we don’t actually do it. We get into trouble when we just leap in and dig straight into the logistical entrails, without giving enough thought to a macro 360 degree view of what is involved. We see this tendency all the time. Any group of people given a project task go straight into the gruesome detail. In project planning, a pinch of planning goes an extremely long way. Having a common and clear set of rules helps to ensure we are all approaching the project in the same vein. Here are ten rules for ensuring that what needs to get done is completed on time and to expectations. Mind our business. Keep our eye on the ball, especially defining what is inside and outside the project scope. This often changes mid-steam so we need to be nimble and adjust accordingly. Know the customer’s requirements. Double check you have properly understood the detail, document it and keep checking against that documented record, especially if there are changes needed. Plan well. The plan will cover the scope, schedule, cost, approach etc. Involve task owners to gain buy-in and apply a strong reality check to what you have created. Strangely, the planning value comes from the creation process and not just the project outcome. It forces some hard thinking, tough prioritisations, player commitments, clear controls, smooth coordination and cooperation. Basically, the things at which most companies are usually rubbish. Build a great team with strong ownership. Motivation of the team is critical, so we need total clarity around the WHY, trust, communication, sufficient resources and mutually agreed deadlines. Track progress. Frequent reviews, wide visibility, broad communication and clear goals are needed. There are hard and soft aspects to most projects, so ensure we don’t overlook the soft skills needed to succeed. Use baseline controls. These are the fundamental building blocks against which we steer the project forward and against which we alter course when needed. Write it, share it, save it. Here is the Holy Grail of project management – write it down - if it isn’t written down it doesn’t exist. Document procedures, plans, evolving designs. Baseline controls are compared against the preserved records. Repeatable projects especially need this record, to which are added the fresh set of insights and learnings of the current project. Test it. Jumping into new territories with both feet can be high risk. Better to develop test cases early to help with understanding and verification of what is required to succeed. Resources and time are the most often underestimated elements, so an early testing helps to flush out the gaps. Ensure customer satisfaction. Make the customer’s real needs the prism through which everything is viewed. Undetected changes in customer requirements or not focusing on the customer’s business needs can in fact blow up in our face. Be pro-active. Be proactive in applying these principles and in identifying and solving problems as they arise. Review and search for problems, knowing there are people dedicated to hiding issues. Vigilance is a virtue we all need to practice when working on projects, especially anticipating trouble before it arises or becomes too explosive. Stop the same old, same old and take a fresh look at your methodology for approaching projects. It seems so simple, but it can simply go wrong so easily. You might be surprised at how loose and inefficient your current methodology is. We can always do better and these ten rules will help us on that journey.
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How To Provide Great Customer Service
08/04/2024
How To Provide Great Customer Service
Great service is so fleeting and illusive. You encounter it and then like the morning mist, the next minute it is gone. One company representative is so spectacularly helpful and then next one is seemingly possessed by evil spirits and demonic. As companies how do we get the angels inside our staff to engage with the clients, rather than having reputation destroying devils intrude. Good service, consistently delivered, is no accident and so it has to be made to occur. How can we do that? 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”. Carlson’s insights flooded back to me when I checked into a hotel in Singapore. By the way, the drive in from Changi Airport is a credit to the Singaporean Government, who spend millions every year to develop and maintain their landscaped, leafy, green, tropical thoroughfares. This is smart. You are already in a pleasant mood just getting into town. While going through the check-in process at the hotel, a waiter from the adjoining restaurant approached me bearing an ice-cold glass of freshly squeezed juice. Singapore is very humid and trust me, after a long flight, that ice cold beverage went down very well. I thought this is really well thought through customer service by this Hotel. One of Carlzon’s observations about customer service however was the importance of consistency of delivery. For example, visualise the telephone receptionist answering your call in a pleasant, helpful manner and you are uplifted by your exposure to the brand. The next staff member receiving the transferred call however, is grumpy, disinterested and unfriendly. Instantly, your mood and positive impression plummet. You are suddenly irritated by this company, who have just damaged their brand by their lack of an ability to sustain good service across only two consecutive touch points with the customer. How do you feel when you are given the run around from department to department? So back to my story. As I get to my room, in good spirits after unexpectedly receiving my ice-cold juice, I find out the television isn’t working. After a forensic search for the cause, including a few harsh words with the television controller, I discover the power is not on. There is a card slot next to the door that initiates the power supply to the room. Actually, I discovered the same system in the elevator, when I unsuccessfully tried to select my floor. Yes, I worked it all out eventually, but the thought occurred to me that the pleasant, busy young woman checking me into the hotel, failed to mention these two salient facts to me. Sustainability of good service has to be the goal if you want to protect or grow your brand. Let me mention a customer service breakdown I particularly dislike here in Japan. When you call just about any organization here, you get a very flat voice answering the phone saying in Japanese ,“XYZ company here”. You ask to speak with that very excellent and impressive member of staff, Ms. Suzuki whom you met recently. The flat uninterested voice tells you that she “is not at her desk right now” and then you are abandoned to stone cold motherless silence. The “may I take down your name and phone number so that she can call you back” bit is rarely offered. Instead, you are left hanging on the phone. The inference of the silence is that if Ms. Suzuki is not around, that is your problem buddy and you should call back later, rather than expect a return call. Again, to Carlzon’s point, these inconsistencies of customer service directly damage the brand. In this example, when I had previously met Ms. Suzuki, I was impressed by her and consequently I had a good impression of the whole organisation. I was projecting that positive vibe to the entire company. The person taking the call has just put that positive image of the brand to the sword. When you are the leader of your company, you presume that everyone “gets it” about representing the brand and that the whole team delivers consistent levels of service. You expect that your whole team is supporting the marketing department’s efforts to create an excellent image of the organization. After all, you have been spending truckloads of money on that marketing effort, haven’t you? But are all the staff supporting the effort to build the brand? Perhaps they have forgotten what you have said about consistent customer service in the past or they are a new hire or a part-timer who didn’t get properly briefed. I heard one of my recent hires in the sales team answering the phone with an unhelpful tone in his voice. He actually sounded like he was angry. He was in his fifties, so no boy, but obviously that had been his standard, ugly phone manner throughout his entire working life. A perpetual brand killer, client alienating, reputation destroyer right there. We have an open plan office, so I could hear this. If you are encased in the dark wood paneled corner executive crib with a tremendous view, then maybe you will never know what is going on in the engine room and therefore be unable to do anything about it. Leaders, we should all sit down and draw the spider’s web of how customers interact with us and who they interact with. We should expect that nobody on our team gets it about the preservation of the brand and determine that we have to tell them all again, again and again. So how about this for a starter for educating our staff to do a better job protecting and enhancing the brand: Answer the phone with a pleasant, happy voice. Be helpful and offer your name first, so the customer won’t be embarrassed that they didn’t recognise your voice. It also gives the caller confidence that a real person is going to take care of their needs. If you take the call and the person they are calling isn’t there, proactively offer to ensure they get a call back as soon as possible and guarantee you will get their message through to them. End with thanking them for their call and again leave your name, in case there is anything further the caller may need. First impressions count, but so do all the follow-up impressions, if we want to build a sustainable, consistent positive image with our customers. Consistency of good experiences doesn’t happen automatically. We have to look again at all of our touch points with our customers and ensure that everyone in the team understands their place in maintaining the excellent brand we have built up. Action Steps Draw your spiders web of client touch points and identify who needs training, including non-regular staff. Design the experience you want the client to have and train everyone around the content. Look at your systems for moving or transitioning the client through the organization, to make sure the client experience is consistently good. Always check to see what you think is happening is actually the case.
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Business Lessons Straight From The Karate Dojo
07/28/2024
Business Lessons Straight From The Karate Dojo
I have often thought there are so many lessons from the martial arts for our businesses. Here are my musings after 50 plus years of training in traditional Shitoryu Karate. Stepping on to the floor The dojo is the ultimate equalizer. Whether you arrived by chauffeur driven Roller or took Shanks’s mare, once you step on to that dojo floor only your ability and character separates you from everyone else. You have had all of your wealth, privileges, educational background, society status, connections stripped away and you are left alone to rise or fall based on your own abilities. In business, we forget this primary lesson and allow people to accrue titles, status and power unattributed to their abilities. We need to see beyond the spin and politics and ensure that people’s real abilities are recognized and rewarded. Starting The class begins with a short meditation interval. This is designed to focus the mind and separate the day from what is to come. Next everyone is bowing toward the front. The front of the class represents all who came before us. We are not here today based solely on what we have done. Others were here before us building the art and the organization. By bowing we acknowledge the continuum and our responsibility to keep it going. Now we bow to the teachers, respecting their knowledge and their devotion. Finally, we bow to each other expressing our solidarity as fellow travelers on a journey of self-discovery. How do we start the work day? Is there a chorei or morning gathering of the work group, to get everyone aligned and focused on the WHY we are there. In our office we review one of the Dale Carnegie Principles each day. We then share our scheduled meetings, our highest goals for the day, end with a motivational quote and a final rousing call to all do our best (ganbarimashoo!). Stretching We warm-up our minds and our bodies by going through a set routine to stretch our muscles to be able to operate at the highest possible levels of performance. If you are a sales team, are you beginning your day with role play practice and coaching or are you just practicising on the client? Basics We repeat the same drills over and over, every class, every year, forever. We are seeking purity of form and perfection of execution. We are aiming for absolute efficiency and economy of movement. We are preparing ourselves for a Zen state where we can react without pre-thought. A large amount of our work is routine, but can we improve the systems, the execution to bring in greater efficiencies and achieve higher productivity? Sparring There are two formats. Prearranged sparring dictates what is coming and the order in which it comes. Free sparring is one hundred percent spontaneous, ebbing and flowing with the rhythm of ploy and counter ploy. At a high level, this is like playing a full chess match in under one minute, but using our physical techniques with total body commitment. When we compete in the marketplace are we a speedboat or an oil tanker? Are we nimble, adaptive, on purpose and aware of market changes? Are we thinking steps ahead of the opposition, anticipating their moves and constantly outflanking them, applying our brains and speed over their brawn? Kata These are full power set pieces, representing a battle against multiple opponents. The forms are fixed and the aim is perfection. The form is set and so we can release the mind into a Zen state enabling us to go beyond the form. Are we able to keep reproducing execution pieces of our work that are perfected? Can we refine our actions for the maximum effectiveness? Can we eliminate mistakes, defects and rework entirely at all levels in the organisation? Strengthening and warming down Strength training is there to build the physical power and our mental perseverance. We do a final stretch to reduce stiffness and muscle pain by reducing lactic acid build up in the muscles. Are our training methodologies making us stronger than our rivals in the marketplace? Are we allocating sufficient time to grow our people? Are we seeing outcomes from the training time invested. Finish We repeat the bowing and this time we add our Values. We voice carefully chosen words which represent the value system of our dojo, (Effort, Patience, Moderation, Respect). These are the last things setting into our minds, before we go back to our normal routines. How do we end the workday? Do we set up for the next day by reviewing what we did today, what we achieved and what we need to work on tomorrow? Do we reflect on the quality of our performance and think about ways to do better? The system of the martial arts hasn’t changed all that much over the many centuries and for a very simple reason. It works. How about your company? Are you perfecting your systems for the ages?
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320 Client Contact Insights
07/21/2024
320 Client Contact Insights
Japan is merciless with salespeople. When you call the client’s company everyone is doing their absolute best to make sure you don’t get to talk to the boss. They won’t tell you their name, they don’t offer to take a message for you, the whole vibe is “get lost”. If you don’t know the precise name of the person you want to speak with, then the wall of steel descends very quickly. They will question you as to why you want to speak to the person in charge, tell you that the person will call you back. They never will. No one wants to take any responsibility in the Japanese system, so that is why they won’t share their name. They don’t want to get scolded by the boss, so that is why they won’t put you through. The boss is a salaried employee and they won’t take calls from people they have never heard of. They don’t think, “this might be a business opportunity that will help my company”. They think, “I don’t want to have to deal with people I don’t know, especially foreigners, because it is risky”. Risk aversion is a big thing here and the easiest way of never taking a risk is never doing anything new or different. It has worked for thousands of years here. So how do we break through the steel barrier. Many companies have meetings on Monday mornings, so invariably no one is around to take the call, even presuming you know their name. The last day of the month is also a very busy day for many companies, so that is another hard one. Days with a five in the date called gotoobi (5th, 10th,15th, 25th) are also busy days in Japan because they are cut off dates for invoice submissions, monthly invoice payments, salary payments, Government department submission dates, etc. If we want to call a company and we don’t know the person’s name, then we should try and do it before the gate keepers arrive for work or after they have left for lunch or for after they have departed at the end of the day. This is not fool proof, but the chances of talking with someone with a bit more authority goes up. Those tasked with taking general calls to the company or section, are usually female, young and at the very, very bottom of the hierarchy with no authority, except to make your life a misery. Companies don’t understand that these staff are the bearers of the brand to the outside world, so invariably they are not properly trained. They think their job is to screen out all salespeople and all unknowns. I called the new President of a major Italian brand here in Tokyo to say hello and thank him for his business, as we had been commissioned by his headquarters to provide training for them. I didn’t know his name because he had just arrived and that information was not public at that point. I could never get past the gatekeeper. She would always tell me he wasn’t available and that he would call me back. That never happened. I am the President of the company delivering training for his company, to develop his business, to help hit his targets. You would expect he would want to talk with me. No such luck. In the end, I got so frustrated, I just gave up trying to talk to him and left the training delivery logistics to my staff. I never did meet him in fact and he was posted to a new country. Here are some ideas. Even if you don’t know the name of the person send a package to their title within the company. This package might contain your company brochure or a small gift, but whatever it is, preferably make it slightly bulky to excite curiosity. Then, when you call asking for them, mention to the gatekeeper that you want to follow up on the package you recently have sent to them. That package, by the way, once received by the target will probably go straight into the waste paper bin sitting next to their desk, unread, possibly unopened, because they don’t know who you are. This “send the package then call” technique will slightly increase your chances of getting put through. Try to make the call before 9.00am, after lunch at around 1.10pm and again after 6.00pm. The junior people will usually arrive around 9.00am or 9.30am. They will have to man the phones from 12.00pm while all the important people go to lunch. This means you have a slightly better chance of talking to the boss when they are back from lunch and the junior person is not there. Companies are more concerned these days about junior, non-manager staff working overtime, so the junior people will be gone after 5.00pm or 5.30pm. The managers however are still there. Obviously the same considerations apply if you know the person’s name. Your chances of connecting will go up. If you have met them before, you can say that you are calling to follow on with them on that recent conversation you had. Or you are calling to follow up on that email that you have sent them. Or that you are calling to get an answer to your question in the email you sent to them. More senior staff will generally recognize you have a business connection established and are more likely to put you through. Why don’t they ever call you back? They recognize you are trying to sell them something and that means making a change in the supply arrangements. Change triggers a lot of requirement for internal harmonisation of a new supplier choice. They have to get the hanko seals stamped on the submission they will have to circulate to all those effected by the new decision. It will also probably require individual meetings with certain key people to secure agreement. It is a lot less work, trouble, time loss and risk to just ignore you in the first place. Yes, you can get through but it is not easy. You need to try some tactics to make it possible. Have these issues in mind before you reach for the phone. This will save you a lot of frustration and lost time.
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319 Nerd Presenter Errors In Japan
07/14/2024
319 Nerd Presenter Errors In Japan
I am sitting there with a crowd of people attending a presentation on blockchain technology. Some are very technical people active in the crypto currency area, some run their own tech businesses. Our presenter has amazing experience in this area, having worked for some very big names in the industry. He also has his own company to promote as well as himself as a leader in this field. He has some recommendations for us based on where he sees the industry moving over the next couple of years. The coverage of his subject was logical and easy to follow. It was clear he really knew what he was talking about. The slides by the way, overall, were excellent. Very professionally done by a designer and they reinforced the credibility of his company. Very clear, for the most part, with not too much information on each slide and plenty of white space. Some fonts were a bit smallish and if you were seated at a distance, probably rather impenetrable. Apart from that quibble though, they were well done. I was astounded though, by the way he presented his material. I calculated that during the entire presentation, including both the Q&A as well as the main body of the talk, he had eye contact with his audience for about 1% of the time. Where was he looking? He interspersed his eye contact between looking at the floor and behind him at the monitor he was using to show the slides. In fact, it was almost like some extremely primitive tribe living in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea, encountering a high spec, large form TV monitor, showing amazing scenes for the first time. They would be amazed by what they were seeing and their eyes would be glued to the screen. This describes our modern, urban, high tech presenter to a tee. He seemed hypnotised by the screen and just kept looking at it the whole time. Mercifully, he wasn’t reading the content to us, line by line, like some other dim presenters I have had the misfortune to encounter. He was transfixed though on the screen and just totally ignored his audience. Occasionally he would break free from the siren call of the monitor and amble around the front of the room, wandering to and fro, staring down at the carpet tiles. He did have good energy, was obviously expert in this area and had some passion for his subject. Unfortunately, he preferred to speak in a monotone, where every single word gets the exact some strength treatment and there was no vocal variety. I liked his gestures, although they tended to be held a bit low. It would have been better to get his hands up higher around shoulder height, so they would be more visible. He didn’t seem to be lacking in confidence. I spoke with him briefly before we started when I exchanged business cards. He didn’t come across as some nerdy, painfully shy techie, who wants to avoid contact with human kind as much as possible. What was going on here? I put this dismal display down to a lack of knowledge. He knows a lot about the tech but knows close to zero about how to explain it to an audience. He didn’t seem to understand that in order to convince an audience of your point of view, you need to engage them. Like a lot of technical people, he must have believed that by just putting the data and information up on the screen, the goodness and sanctity of the content would carry the day. He must have imagined that his personal part in the process was not relevant. Even during the Q&A, he completely ignored the source of the questions – the rows of people seated in front of him. He just continued to stare at the screen. By the way, the words up on the screen at that point were “Thank You”, so not a lot to look at. The basic rule of presenting is to use all the tools at your disposal. Eye contact with your audience is so powerful as a persuader. We wrap that up with our vocal variety, pauses, gestures and body language. Hold the gaze of one individual in your audience for six seconds. Longer than that it becomes too intrusive. Speak to one person, on a point while holding their gaze, then switch your gaze to another person. Don’t do it in any predictable order, because people will anticipate what you are doing and switch off , because they know their turn is not coming yet. Rather divide the room up into six sections. Front to the left, middle and right and the same for the rear half of the room. Then at random move your gaze around picking up people, making eye contact with them and converting them to your point of view on the subject. Our presenter missed a big opportunity to persuade his audience to use his firm. He failed to sway us with his point of view, because he under powered the persuasion bit. The quality of your content may be the best on the planet, but that does not remove your role in explaining it. Back up what you are saying with knowledge of presenting as well and unlike our speaker, become the total package.
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318 Be Both Busy and Organised In Japan
07/07/2024
318 Be Both Busy and Organised In Japan
Focus is under constant attack. The speed of business makes longer term planning a dubious endeavor. Projecting 5 years forward sounds reasonable. That is until you go back 5 years and look at all the changes that have taken place through technology, societal attitudinal changes, business realities and logistics. The leader is supposed to be defining the way forward for the team. The vision of the future is the guiding light on the hill toward which the troops are pointed. The relevancy of that vision is constantly being challenged by the market and by clients. The leader can no longer easily keep up with all of the demands on their time. Social media has become a major source of information and we are all drinking from the firehouse. Meetings are numerous and suck up time at a prodigious rate. Email comes gushing forth in relentless fashion and inboxes become archives. "I will get to that email" is a plaintive cry from the oppressed masses. If we are traveling across time zones, then sleep patterns are shattered and we enter a zombie like twilight zone but still have to function anyway. When we get finally back home we are still trying to assimilate with our usual everyday challenges, but in a jet lag induced vegetative state. We are not delegating enough. We know we should do more of it but we don't. We are holding on to too much control and this is ramping up our workload. In tougher times we had to jump in and keep things afloat. After the refloat though, we haven't eased off on the controls and are still doing too much ourselves. Where is the time to work on those things that only we can do? Projects are bright shiny objects that fascinate our minds. We already have a big bag of them to carry around, but we keep stuffing more into the same bag. Our intellect and our imagination make us constantly hungry to do more and more interesting things and we do. The hours of the day don't grow to match our hunger, so things start well and then drift. We pull back the edge of the carpet and there they all are - projects started but never finished. Stacked up there out of sight and out of mind because they have been replaced by a newer sexier beau. We never get to any perfect harmony with our team. The ones we want to keep, move on to greener fields, the ones we want to move on, we wind up keeping by default. The turnover means time and expertise is lost and we are in a state of constant starting again. This kills progress. The current candidate friendly market in Japan means that we are in a permanent recruit and retain mode. We have to put a higher value on continuity, than in the past, because the lag between losing people and hiring new staff gets longer. Hiring gets harder and more expensive. None of this looks like it is going to improve any time soon. The ability to deal with this level of complexity becomes more important. The agile yet focused will win in this game. A good leverage point is heightened self-awareness. Knowing what is important and then giving that time is a differentiator. We need to have a “true north” in mind, against which to align ourselves, or we will find ourselves adrift in a sea of confusion. The fog of busyness needs a clear counterpoint. We need to reestablish who we are, what we want and where we are going. This sounds simple. But if I ask you right now, can you pull out your written down game plan for your future? Can you articulate the steps needed to keep moving forward? Have you clearly nominated what success actually looks like. “I want 10 million dollars”, is too vague. What do you want it for, how are you going to use it, how does this translate into your personal happiness or satisfaction? The manic pace of the everyday can distract us and we forget about working on our personal alignment. Ironically, we need to slow down in order to speed up and get more done. We need to re-establish the point of what we are doing. We need to re-set the starting point and to fix a clear image of the finish line in our minds. We can then swim hard against the pull of busyness with a firm plan in place. The alternative is often being drawn along in the froth and fury of the storm tide. So stop what we are doing. Intervene in our busyness. Re-connect with who we really are. Reaffirm our direction. Define true north. Make a new plan and follow it.
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317 Sales Is A Process In Japan
06/30/2024
317 Sales Is A Process In Japan
Because the vast majority of people in sales have no idea what they are doing, they are making it up as they go along. Wouldn’t it be better to have a roadmap to progress the making of a sale? This roadmap will keep us on track and not allow the buyer to take us off on a tangent that leads to nowhere. Foundering around with no central direction wastes a lot of key buyer facing time and we don’t want to do that. We can’t expect unlimited access because of their busy schedules, so once we are in front of them we have to get all of the discovery process done in usually around an hour. The sale call roadmap starts even before the call. These days with so much information readily available, especially with the advent of AI tools, we can’t turn up and ask basic questions about the company. We need to have done some research beforehand on media reports, their website, annual report, social media and using LinkedIn where possible, to check on the individuals we will meet, before we meet them. Having done all of that, we are well armed to get the conversation off to a great start. We may have friends or contacts in common; or shared a similar working experience in the same company; or lived in the same town; or went to the same university or studied the same subjects. When we have done our research we will have an opportunity to try and find these little connectors. I was working with an American guy when I was at the Shinsei Bank. He was an absolute master at this. He had just joined the bank and I was supposed to brief him on the work my division was doing. We spent the whole time with him making connections between people we both knew. He did this to break the ice and establish rapport. I never did get to brief him on my division! This rapport building is important with clients. We know if we don’t get a good relationship going at the start of the conversation, then it is unlikely they will buy from us. Even if we don’t have much in common, we can use other techniques like bring some interesting industry data or intelligence to them. We might have seen something work somewhere else and we can introduce this idea to them. In this initial meeting process, we need to make a very important intervention. We need to get permission from the buyer to ask questions. When they are happy to meet us and having established some rapport, they are more likely to say “yes” to our request to ask questions about the inner details of what the company is doing and all the problems they are encountering. In other words, all the firm’s dirty laundry. If there was no rapport or trust created would you be keen to share that detail with strangers? Now in a western business environment, asking questions is no big deal, but with Japanese buyers it is crucial we do this. They are used to being hit with sales pitches, so the concept of them being questioned by the seller is not something they are used to. Having gotten that permission we should ask very intelligent questions, so that we can fully understand their needs. Now buyers sometimes don’t want to tell us their precise situation. We have to ask our questions in a way that gets around that reluctance. We are searching for an entry point where we might become useful to them, to solve a problem they have. If they don’t have a big enough problem or if they think they can fix it themselves, then we will have a lot of difficulty making the sale. We have to show why this issue is best addressed now, rather than after. And why they should leave it to us to fix, rather than trying to do it themselves. Left to their own devices and a hundred year time frame, businesses can solve their own problems and they don’t need us, which is why we have to emphasise speed and the urgency of time to get them moving. If we don’t deal with these issues up front, then no sale. Once we understand their needs, we move along the roadmap to the part when we present the solution. Now in Japan, this will usually take place at the second meeting. There will be a discussion about the technical pieces of what we will do, talking about how this solution will fit their company. We can’t leave it there though, because that is still too abstract. We need to talk about how they can project and apply these benefits inside their company, in order to get better results. This is where word pictures are very powerful. In most cases, we are selling a future that they can’t fully appreciate. So we need to explain how we can add to their business through increasing revenues, reducing costs or grabbing greater market share. If we have been able to uncover what the success of this project will mean for them personally, then we wrap that bit around the benefit too. The client naturally doubts what sales people are telling them, so we need to show evidence for them that this has worked for other companies. Once we have done that, then we can test the waters to see if what we have suggested is the right solution for them. We do this by asking a simple trial closing question like, “How does that sound”. We want to flush out any resistance to place an order. If they don’t have any problems, then we just ask for the order, “Shall we go ahead?”. If they have issues with what we are suggesting, then we need to confirm what these are? They may have problems with our pricing, payment terms, quality, delivery or schedule. It doesn’t matter what they mention, we shouldn’t answer it immediately. I know the emotional temptation is strong to jump in and correct their misunderstanding or their resistance but wait. Remember, we are only getting the headline, at this point and we need more information before we are in a position to answer their objection. Once we have heard the details of what they are thinking, we still wait, we don’t answer it. We keep digging. There may be other even more pressing concerns they haven’t mentioned yet and there is no point in answering a minor concern, if the big one is left unattended. Once we have gotten out their key concerns, we ask them about which one is the highest priority for them. And then we proceed to answer that item. Often once we have answered that one, the other concerns fade away. Finally we ask for the order. They may say they have to think about it and because of the consensus decision making system in Japan, they actually have to get the rest of the organisation behind this yes. That is fine but make an appointment right then and there for a follow up meeting to put a firm schedule behind getting that consensus. If you don’t, then it could drag on forever. You are better to push for a finite yes or no. Thinking you have something in your pipeline, when you don’t is false comfort. A clear no is better because then you have a better picture of deal flow and revenue projections. You can devote your full energy on another buyer who can say yes and go ahead. If we get a yes, next we do the follow up and deliver on what we promised. This roadmap is how we run the sales meeting with the client as opposed to Japan where, typically, the buyer hijacks the process and usually runs the meeting. We need to keep control and bring the buyer back to the roadmap to move along the rails or we will never get a sale. Winging it may be more exciting and appealing to your free spirit, but you won’t make as many sales. The path to the sale is clear and you have to keep it moving along that path, going through all the stages, to get to a yes.
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316 Inspire Your Audience
06/23/2024
316 Inspire Your Audience
At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has been completed. How about you? When people are filing out of the venue, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if you were able to eavesdrop on their conversation? Being clear is always a favourite and another high ranking popular desire is to be more inspiring. Now “inspiring” can be defined in many ways, but for the purposes of giving presentations, we can think of it as lifting people up, getting them to take action, to challenge new things, to push themselves harder than before. Actually that is a pretty tall order in a forty minute talk. Unless we are a professional motivational speaker, the majority of our talks will probably be focused on dispensing information and offering advice on how to solve business problems. What would a business audience find inspiring? It could be a tale of daring do, where great adversity had been overcome through the human will. Conquering dangerous elements of nature, one’s circumstances or fellow man, often come up in this regard. The problem is business people’s activities usually are far removed from conquering the poles, vertiginous mountain ascents or vast ocean crossing exploits. These are very specialist pursuits, which are out of our purview. The arc of the story of rags to riches is a popular trope. This works in business, because we are looking for hope in the face of tough odds. When we hear that others made it despite all the trials and tribulations, we take it that maybe we can do it too. It can be a personal story or it can the saga of a firm or a division and its imminent elimination, coming from back from the cusp of destruction to rise again and prosper. We are magnets to lessons on survival. We prefer to learn through the near death experience and ultimate triumph of others, than try it on ourselves. You might be thinking your life is rather dull, your industry absolutely dull and your firm perpetually dull. How could you liven up a talk with stories than were inspiring to others? Maybe you can’t. Perhaps you have to draw lessons from other industries or personalities and weave these into the point you are making in your talk. I like to read biographies and autobiographies for this reason. I enjoy interviews with outstanding people, telling how they climbed the greasy pole and got to the top. Strangely, obituaries are also a good source for this type of information. They are usually brief summaries of a person’s life. They often contain snippets of great hardship or success and frequently both. Don’t just skim over these heroic tales, instead collect these rich stories. These can be your go to files for greatness, when you want to introduce an idea that needs some evidence. There may be legendary figures in your industry or your firm. These are stories you can retell for effect, to drive home the insights you want illuminate. Okay it wasn’t you, but the audience doesn’t care that much. They like to learn and they love hearing about disasters, so the train wreck doesn’t have to be your personal catastrophe. Usually the founders of your firm went through tough times. There are bound to be tales in there you can use. Or you can draw on recent recessions, the Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown, the pandemic, to find episodes where all looked grim, but a legendary team battled on and survived, while many businesses around them disappeared. You may have some personal experiences that are also relevant. This can be quite hard, because you are sharing something quite personal with the world. As an introvert, it took me a long time before I was comfortable to talk about my own experiences. When I did though, the impact on the audience was immediate. I could sense the feeling of closeness with strangers, as they listened to my tales of error, overreach, miscalculation etc. I still have trouble with this, so I do prefer the woes of others to my own, but definitely my own stories are always so much more powerful. I just need the temerity to tell more of them. So pepper your talk with uplifting examples from others or from your own experiences, that justify the action you want them to take or boost the feeling of confidence you want to instill in your audience. The raw material is all around you. Just start looking for it and begin compiling it. When you hear something, you can use, capture it immediately for later employ. Dig into the vaults of your own experiences and draw out examples that will make you magnetic for your audience. Telling these types of stories is how speakers have inspired audiences down through the ages. The reason we still do it today is because it works a charm.
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