Episode #159: The Art Of Cold Calling In Japan

Cold calling always creates a debate amongst the sales community. Some say it has seen it’s day, others defend it as part of the sales resource bank for getting leads. I don’t think anyone suggests it has a high rate of success. Yet, there are occasions when we need to call someone we have never spoken to before and who has never heard of us. Why would we be doing that? We may have spun the spider into action.

The spider is a metaphor for when you have success with a client in one industry or industry sector and you believe you can have success with other similar companies. Often the problems you discover from talking to one client are probably common for other companies in the same industry. Say you are talking to a Five star hotel and they have a problem with turnover. The chances are that many other Five star hotels have the same issue. If you have a solution that fixes the problem for this client of yours, then why not help out the other hotels suffering the same problem. So, like a spider with its web, you branch out to the other hotels and bring them into your ecosystem of solutions.

Or, you may have run out of leads. Maybe your marketing efforts are not proving very fruitful and the lead flow is a bit dismal. There are a number of industry and association directories which list the key people in those organisations. You know who you want to speak with and that is a great starting point for making a cold call.

Now there are many difficulties with cold calling, so let’s deal with the most problematic. This is when you only have a company name and want to talk to a decision-maker. You are not even sure of which section you need. You are forced to navigate your way through the company’s phone system. In Japan, the task of taking incoming calls is allocated to the lowest person on the totem pole. Usually, the youngest, newest female in the administration section.

Her job is to get rid of pesky salespeople. Which are the pesky ones? They are all those salespeople who are cold calling the company trying to waste the time of her bosses. She knows she will get scolded if she makes that transfer to her boss and the boss doesn’t like it. In this case, we need a really powerful credibility statement that will be a hook to get us transferred to the boss. We cannot be vague. We need to be authoritative, commanding and confident in our voice quality.

We need to create the impression that if she doesn’t transfer this call right now, then the company is really going to miss out on something that will fundamentally change their business. When you have that spider’s web of insight, you are able to pin point the pain point of their business and that can be a great door opener for us.

Even when we know the name of the person, we can get ourselves into trouble. I was coaching a Japanese salesperson recently and asked where was the breakdown point in her sales approach. She mentioned cold calling and being unable to engage with the decision maker. I suggested some role play to get an idea of her approach. Shock, horror, gasp. It was horrible. She began her conversation with the weakest, most lacking in confidence voice you can imagine. A voice that was begging for relegation to the garbage heap of failed cold callers. I was sitting there thinking, “no wonder you can’t get through”.

We need to consider the psychology of the youngest female answering the phone. In their company she is a nobody. She has no great knowledge of the boss’s business, because she is so many layers removed. When a call comes in and sounds timid and lacking in conviction, then it is an open invitation to get rid of them.

However, an unknown caller might also be a good buddy of the boss, an important client, someone the boss just met or some big shot from another firm. She can only judge that by how they speak with her. If she is talked to like a junior and told to get the boss on the line right now, she will probably make that transfer.

Probably the call will be transferred to the boss’s assistant, so that is always a fail safe action for a very junior person in the company. They have relinquished all responsibility at that point and they can go back to stamping documents or whatever.

When we get to the assistant, we need that credibility statement to be on fire. It has to be a well designed strong hook, to convince them that we should speak to the boss. The impression is if we don’t, then the company will be missing out on a fantastic game changing, really rocking it opportunity.

We need some key points about who we are, why we are calling, what we have found from hearing the needs of similar companies and the excellent results we achieved for those companies. We then suggest that, “maybe we could do the same for your company, so please transfer me now, so I can explain how we do that”. This has to be delivered in a silky smooth massively confident way, with no voice hesitations, stumbles or umming and ahhing.

Action Steps

1. Look for spider opportunities to parlay your knowledge from one client to a potential client
2. Study industry or association directories for target clients you can serve and for whom you have a great solution
3. Prepare your credibility statement as a hook to get the person taking the call to transfer you to the boss.
4. If you know the person’s name, then ask for it with all the authority of the boss’s best buddy and be rather brusque in your manner, implying you are not there to take any nonsense from underlings