Episode #80 True North In Sales

What are we on about with this sales lark? Are we in sales to make our fortune or to make the client their fortune? The difference in perspective is massive. For a long and successful career in sales we need to be thinking in terms of how we can best partner with the client to make them successful. This mentality is not all that common in the profession and that is why so few salespeople are successful – they have the wrong mentality, they don’t know their true north to get their correct bearings.

Convenience store operator Lawson will introduce self-checkout systems in all of its fourteen thousand convenience stores by October this year to cope with Japan’s labour shortage. Customers will scan the barcodes themselves with cashier machines that can be used for self service. Only cashless payment methods such as credit cards and digital currency will be accepted. In related news, The Trade ministry last April, unveiled their Cashless Vision aiming to raise the ratio of cashless payments from twenty percent to forty percent by twenty twenty five. By comparison about ninety percent of transactions were cashless in south Korea, sixty percent in China and forty five percent in the USA. Pay Pay Corp entered the cashless market last October and is backed by yahoo and Soft Bank. Using the app, customers can scan QR codes displayed at stores with their smart phones to complete payments. PayPay has a tie up with Alipay, an on-line payment system from China’s Alibaba Group targeting foreign visitors. The Japanese Government is going to reward with discounts of five percent of purchase amounts for a period of nine months, to consumers who make cashless payments to small and medium sized retailers. They are doing this to take some of the sting out of the increase in the consumption tax from eight to ten percent in September. Finally, as part of the Tokyo twenty twenty Robot Project, robots will be deployed to assist spectators and staff at the Tokyo Olympics. The Human Support Robot (HSR) and Delivery Support Robot (DSR) developed by Toyota Motor corporation will be used in tandem to assist visitors using wheel chairs. The HSR is a one armed robot about a meter tall which can hold objects, pick things up off the ground and reach high up. When people order food or drinks using a tablet computer, DSR will transport the item in a basket and HSR will then deliver them directly to guests. In addition Atoun Model Y a wearable robotic suit developed by Panasonc corp will be used by staff tasked with carrying, loading and unloading heavy objects. The suit can reduce the burden of heavy loads by ten to forty percent.

Like a lot of people, I subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc. The following morsel popped into my inbox, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care –Anonymous”.

Wow! What a powerful reminder of the things that really matter in our interactions with others. This piece of sage advice should be metaphorically stamped on to the brain of every single person involved in sales.

Don’t miss it – we all know that selling stuff is a tough gig. Rejection is the normal response to our spiffy sales presentation and follow up offer. You have to be tough to survive in a sales job. You need other things too.

Product and technical knowledge are important. Total command of the detail is expected by clients. However, we need to be careful about what we focus on. Are we letting the product details and features confuse us about what selling is really all about?

Some salespeople I have encountered remind me of an icy mammoth trapped in a time warp from the past, still trotting out the product brochure and seeing if I will go for one of their goodies? You don’t like that one, well then how about this one, or this one, or this one, ad nauseam? I want “blue” but they keep showing me 50 shades of “pink”. They are playing that pathetic, failed salesperson game named “process of elimination”.

I want to buy, but are they really showing me they are focused on understanding me? Are they demonstrating to me that they foremost care about my benefit? Are they communicating to me that, “in your success Greg, is my success”? Or do they come across not with stars in their eyes, but $$$$ signs?

I can recall seeing them sitting across the table from me, mentally salivating at the thought of the big fat commission this sales conversation is worth? I can sense they have already bought the new three series Beemer before the ink is dry?

The quote at the beginning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care” reminds me of a great Japanese word, which should be embraced by everyone in sales - kokorogamae(心構え).

It can be simply translated as “preparedness” but the Japanese nuance goes much deeper than that. Anyone studying a martial art or a traditional Japanese art (道) will immediately be on my wave length, when they hear this kokorogamae term.

As a side note, here is a little Japanese language grammar insight for you. Kokoro in Japanese means your heart or spirit and kamae means you ready position. In karate, for example, we take our kamae, fighting position, when we do free sparring. So the word kamae becomes gamae when kokoro and kamae are made into a single compound word. So we can translate kokorogamaeas “getting your heart or true intention in order”. This concept is the core foundation of my sales philosophy.

This means to really hark back to your most basic principles of true intention. What we can call True North – the purity of our intention. What is the spark in our heart driving our behavior? Is it the money or is it the serving? Is it what we want or what the client wants? Is this going to be a long-term relationship or a fleeting transaction?

Salespeople need to start by searching their heart for their true intention. Huh? Does this sound a bit too “hug a tree” Californian style, overly emotional for you? Why do I recommend searching your heart? Because clients can sense your motivation isn’t centered on their best interests and therefore they won’t buy from you.

Of course, there are the exceptions – the Hollywood image of the “smooth talking” salesperson who could sell you anything and will certainly try to. Oh, they may con us once, but we will eventually work them out. In this modern age, social media can kill us very fast. Our reputation can be shredded and before we know it, we are out of business.

These single transaction orientated salespeople are like skyrockets that initially blaze bright through the night and then explode! They are here for a good time not a long time and they give the profession of sales a bad brand.

The best Japanese salesperson I ever interviewed for a sales job was a convicted criminal. The criminal part didn’t surface immediately, but came up later through some background checks - note to Sales Managers – do background checks!.

He was absolutely brilliant in the first two interviews, polished, genius personified in the sales role play, and WOW, what a closer! I thought “Yes!” at last, I have found my perfect Japanese salesperson. Actually, he was a liar, a thief and a baddie. He had zero True North orientation and his kokorogamaewas plain wrong. What a wake up call to smell the coffee for me.

So let’s ignore the outliers, those riff raff of sales and come back to the vast majority of salespeople who are not evil, just inept. They are underskilled because they have never received proper sales training. People often arrive into sales jobs through companies who are transactional in nature. It is the industrial model of sales.

Potential salespeople come in the front door and if they don’t magically hit their numbers, are shown the back door after a few weeks or months. Another sacrificial victim is then brought into the meat grinder through the front door and the process repeated forever.

No thought is given to investing in these new hires to properly develop their understanding and skills. It is just a throw of the dice every time, to see who stays and who goes.

This routine usually produces very unfortunate sales behaviour in the individuals involved, as they become more and more desperate to make a sale to keep their employ. Desperation drives people to extremes and the client’s interests in all of this are thrown right out the window. The ethos of the organization is short-term gain and their salespeople are a type of plug-and-play item, to be switched out as soon as needed.

If you want a successful career in sales, change your heart, focus on True North, purify your intentions, show you genuinely care about the buyer’s best interests before your own. If you do that every single time you meet a client, you will have get success in sales and build a powerful personal brand.

We need clients to know, like and trust us. Establishing our individual sales philosophy based on the kokorogamae concept is going to deliver the like and trust component in spades.

If your current sales life is a nightmare of transactional relationships, burning clients for short-tem gain, unrelenting pressure on the numbers and no training, then get out of there as soon as possible.

Before you can get out of there though, take responsibility for yourself, make kokorogamaeyour light on the hill and move forward. Watch the videos on YouTube, get the books on sales written by the famous masters and study hard about what it takes to have a successful sales life.

If you want to stay in sales, then create your own philosophy of what that means as a profession. Decide to be the very best that you can be. Decide what your personal kokorogamaeof sales will be. So, no more hesitation, let’s commit and get on to it!

Action Steps

1. Decide why you are in sales in the first place?
2. Choose sales as a career and create your own philosophy to guide you through the peaks and troughs, the good times and the scary times
3. If you are working for or with people who have the wrong approach, the incorrect kokorogamae, then get out of there as soon as possible
4. Make the client’s interests your interest and you will do well in sales.