Episode #388: Confirming Your Understanding Of The Client Needs In Japan

Have you ever had this experience? You cannot get on the same wavelength as the client. I remember an HR Director at one of the major fashion brands and I was always confused during our conversations. I was never sure where she stood on any number of issues about us delivering training for them. Yes, she was very pleasant, but also very obtuse and hard to corral. I would leave the meetings unsure of where we stood with this deal, if in fact there was a deal in there at all. Because no one in Japan wants to give you a straight “no”, they get tied up in Gordian knots of obfuscation and you are often left marooned.
Sometimes for me it is a language issue. Japanese is so difficult and my level of understanding can really vary depending on who I am talking to. I can have one client meeting and I get everything they are saying and I am on top of the conversation.

A few hours later, I am sitting in another meeting room across from a potential client and I am struggling to get what they are saying. Not every native speaker is a fluent commander of their own language. Not every native speaker is smart, succinct, clear and logical in their speech. When you are not a native speaker and you are getting this barrage of poor communication skills, it gets bewildering very fast.

I have been having a series of back and forth emails with a potential client about arranging some training for them and the language is Japanese. It isn’t necessarily the linguistic aspect which has been giving me trouble. These days, tools like Google Translate do a phenomenal job if I need help. The issue is the person writing the email is a very poor communicator. Basically, she doesn’t have great skills in her own written language. This requires me to keep clarifying what she is trying to say, because it is not clear in the least.

Expectations can be an issue. We find we are both operating with different expectations and often we haven’t communicated what they are, because somehow we imagine the other party understands our position.
Japanese people suffer from this amongst themselves. So much is left unsaid in Japan and the idea is that each party fills in the blanks and coalesces their understanding of what happens next. It doesn’t always work though and they find they have completely misunderstood each other. Throw a foreigner into that mix and things can get very exciting, very quickly.

As a training company, we have to be careful of the message getting confused or mistaken between the salesperson and the trainer who will deliver the class. As a rule, we really want the trainer to meet the person contracting us, so that they can get a direct download of what is expected. Of course, we can pass on our understanding of what they want, but getting it directly from the horse’s mouth is a much better idea. Can you do something similar in your industry with your team who will execute the deal?

It is always interesting too, to find out that what you are hearing in this meeting is different or additional to what you heard in your own meeting with the client. Uh oh.

They may have moved their expectations in the interim or we just got it wrong, or we may have asked a different question this time and uncovered some hidden or previously uncommunicated needs.

This happened to me recently when we met the CEO. In that conversation, new requirements emerged which were not revealed or discussed in my first meeting. Either these were not tapped well enough by me in the first instance or they had subsequently emerged or the CEO’s own thinking had progressed since our original meeting.

It is always humbling when this happens. You have to question your own competence with asking client’s questions and taking notes in the meeting. It very important to catch these misunderstandings early, so that they can be corrected before the deal progresses too far down the track.

Getting things in writing is good for clarity. However, in most cases in Japan, the contracts are not proscriptive and do not carry all the very detailed aspects, especially in the service sector.

Usually, busy salespeople don’t want to summarise their understanding of the meeting and send it to the buyer, because they want to move on to the next client and the next deal.

Having a clarity meeting is part and parcel of the way things are done here and that is a good thing. We might want to skip that meeting and just get busy on the delivery, but Japan has found that such additional meetings to make sure we are all aligned work well in a country where communication is vague, parsimonious and confusing.