77 Sales Delusions - a podcast by Dr. Greg Story

Sales has been coopted by Hollywood, creating a stylized version of reality.  Sharp suits and conman ways are portrayed as the profession.  The truth is more prosaic, fundamental and involves simple basics.  Understanding buyer need and supplying it, isn’t that hard, but salespeople say and do dumb things instead.  Today we will look at some simple things every salesperson should be doing and some things they should definitely be avoiding.

Welcome back to this weekly edition every Tuesday of "THE Cutting Edge Japan Business Show"

I am your host Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and best selling author of Japan Sales Mastery. We are bringing the show to you from our High Performance Center in Akasaka in Minato-ku, the business center of Tokyo.

Why the Cutting Edge? 

In this show, we are looking at the critical areas for success in business in Japan.  We want to help advance everyone’s thinking so that we be at the forefront, the Cutting Edge, of how to flourish here in this market.

Before we get into this week’s topic, here is what caught my attention lately.

In a recent government survey   six    hundred  and  thirteen   thousand people in the  forty  to  sixty  four  age bracket were found to be recluses who rarely leave their homes.  This is even higher than a previous survey, that found there were five  hundred  and  forty  one thousand in the  fifteen  to  thirty nine age bracket.  Known as hikikomori in Japanese these recluses number over a  million today.  Seventy  six  point six  per  cent were men. Nearly  fifty  percent have lived that way for at least  seven  years. In  thirty  four  percent  of cases these hikikomori relied financially on their parents.  In other news, Japanese are working longer and not retiring. The ratio of people with jobs amongst those in the  sixty  five to  sixty  nine bracket is now  forty  four percent.  The elderly accounted for nearly  twelve  percent of the nation’s workforce compared to only  seven  point  eight per  cent  in two  thousand  and  six.  Of those aged  sixty  five to  sixty  nine, seventy  two  percent were hired as irregular workers and their pay has been reduced to  fifty  to  seventy percent  of what they used to earn as full time regular workers.  In a Cabinet Office survey,  forty  two percent of people said they wanted to keep working as long as they can. Finally, SMBC Nikko Securities has launched a service for customers to advise on investment in Japanese stocks using artificial intelligence.  They have teamed up with AI technology developer Herzog.  The free AI based service will show stock prices expected a month into the future.  It will propose the best portfolios according to the client’s risk appetite.

This is episode number seventy seven  and we are talking about  Sales Delusions     Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going.  Smoothly memorised shtick, elaborate glossy materials, sharp suits, large expensive watches, bleached teeth, the perfect coiffure are not important in sales.  Yet, this is the image of the pro-salesperson.  Most of us never meet many pro-salespeople, because the vast majority we run into are hopeless.  We meet the great unwashed and untrained, the part-time and partially interested, usually in a local retail format.  The slick sales dude is what we see in movies or is a received image from urban myths. Hollywood pumps out  Wall Street,  Glengarry  Glen Ross,  Boiler Room, The  Wolf  of Wall Street and we get sold an image of what high pressure salespeople look like.

Japan is fascinating, in that it throws up some doozies.  Rotting blackened stumps for teeth, disheveled clothing, scuffed worn shoes, ancient food stains on ties – you encounter this low level of personal presentation here with salespeople.  It is almost the opposite extreme of the extravagent American movie image.

Rat with a gold tooth or rat with a rotting tooth – neither appeal very much.  What we buyers really want is someone on our side.  We want help to solve issues slowing us down, holding us back or preventing us from growing as we would wish.  There are  six  steps on the client journey with salespeople:   know you, like you, trust you, buy from you, repeat buy from you and refer you because they are a believer.  This sounds simple, but salespeople get confused about who they are working for. They think they are there to work for themselves and get their commission or bonus or promotion and the client is just a tool in that process.  This is really, really stupid.

I coach salespeople but am amazed at the dumb things they say and do.  Some want to jam the square peg in the round hole and then argue with the client about why it will fit when it clearly doesn’t.  When they get pushback from the client they then try to overwhelm the objection by strength of will or force of personality.  This is really, really stupid too.

The salesperson jumps into the slide presentation on the laptop from the get go.  Or they are pulling out their shiny flyers or expensive brochures or whatever and are launching forth with their memorised shtick. My first sales job was early evening door to door Britannica encyclopedia sales in a poor working class suburb in Brisbane.  Before we were unleashed on an unsuspecting, semi-literate public, we had to memorise, word for word, the entire twenty-five minute presentation.  It wasn’t great then, but it is unacceptable now.  Some people are still back in the nineteen seventies with their sales efforts.  I get sales prospecting calls even today telling me “so and so” is in my area etc. I can actually hear the cadence of them reading it off a script in front of them!  Pathetic.

Find out more when we come back from the break

Welcome back Let me introduce a couple of coming opportunities to you.  On April 22ndwe will run the One Day Sales Booster Course Part One.  If that is too early for you we will run it again on November 11th.  Now Part Two of Sales Booster will run on August 5th.  Details are on our website at emjapan.dalecarnegie.com

Now back to where we left off.  When I am coaching aspirant professional salespeople, I ask them how do they know which slides to show or which flyer they should offer to the client?  This is usually greeted with a “Huh?” response. We all did “show and tell” in elementary school but some have not travelled very far since then and think this is how you do sales.  When I arrived at the Shinsei Retail Bank  the financial product sales team would whip out a flyer of one product and if the wealthy client didn’t go for it, then they would just whip out the next one. This went on until the client either got tired of it or bought something.

As salespeople, we don’t know what to show the client and we shouldn’t show the client anything, until we know what they want.  So keep the laptop closed, the flyers in the briefcase, the widget under the table and ask questions instead.  By the way, get permission to ask questions first, especially in Japan.  Here the status of the buyer is sky high and it is a total impertinence for a lowly sales pond scum to be asking God questions about anything.

Nevertheless, God or otherwise get their permission and ask your intelligent questions.  Find out if there is a match between what you sell and what they need.  Mentally scour the walls of your gigantic solutions library, floor to ceiling packed with possible antidotes to their business ailments and select the best one for the client.   If there is no solution in your library, then don’t try and force the square peg into the round hole.  Just thank them for their time and go and find someone you can help.

If your solution doesn’t fit, then don’t waste the client’s time - keep your shtick to yourself and move on to the next prospect for whom it may be a perfect fit.

THE Cutting Edge Japan Business Show is here to help you succeed in Japan.  Subscribe on YouTube, share it with your family, friends and colleagues, become a regular.

Thank you for watching this episode and remember to hit the subscribe button.

Our website details are on screen now, enjapan.dalecarnegie.com, it is awesome value, so check it out.  Please leave me some feedback on YouTube, I would love to know how this show helped and what other topics you are interested in for me to cover.  Remember I am here as a free resource to help you, so just tell me how I can help you best.

You might also enjoy my weekly podcasts. Look for the Leadership Japan Series, The Presentations Japan Series and The Sales Japan series wherever you get your podcasts.

In episode  seventy eight we are talking about Good Leader Habits. Find out more about that next week.

So Yoroshiku Onegai Itashimasu please join me for the next episode of the Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

We are here to help you and we have only one direction in mind for you and your business and that is UP!!!

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