Episode #68: Getting New Clients

Japan is a huge market. Yet, the results are often flat lining or disappointing. Excuses abound – the yen is too strong, the yen is too weak, competitors are discounting, new competitors are taking market share, etc. Finding new clients is the perpetual Holy Grail of the sales world. How well do the marketing and sales teams work together? Often, not well. The marketers complain the salespeople are squandering their hard earned efforts. The salespeople whine about the poor quality of the lead flow. Down at your shop, are they operating as two independent empires or as hand in glove colleagues furiously plotting together to achieve world domination?

Targeting new clients doesn’t get much attention in Japan. We all know that our avatar represents the typical client and all we have to do is identify others who fit that profile and the chances are high that they too will benefit from our product or service. How many sales teams here have defined their avatar? What about your crew?

A standard operating procedure should be the Spider. If a client from a particular business has landed in your sales funnel and have bought from you, there are no doubt others in that same niche who would also possibly buy as well. Having made a sale to one company, do the salespeople take the Spider metaphor to heart and start listing up other similar targets to proactively contact. They should, but they don’t. Why?

A major ice wall confronts them – the unknown. They don’t have a contact who can introduce them, so they do nothing. The idea of cold calling the target company is judged hard graft, so they don’t try. By the way, are your salespeople cold calling. These opening conversations should not be left to whim. They need to be designed and practiced, so that you do get through to someone who can make a buying decision.

The fall back position may be to try to meet new clients through networking. Japan is a curious place though in the networking world, because fundamentally, no one is interested. Barefaced bowling up to a complete stranger and introducing yourself, trying create a connection, is greeted with such shock, that salespeople give up quickly.

Can you widen your network of people you have no connection to and can you work the room here? Yes, you can, but again you need a methodology and you need to take salespeople out of their self -imposed limits and practice it.