Episode #83 New Client Acquisition

If we don’t have a nice flow of new clients we cannot expand the business or replace clients who have dropped out. The marketing team have their role to generate leads and the sales team have their responsibilities too. Sadly, the two things they can do directly such as cold calling and networking they avoid. They don’t like either because they have no idea of the best practices involved to make these methods sing and yield new buyers.

Korean University students are targeting Japan as a place to work. The Korea Trade Investment Promotion Agency KOTRA helped two thousand six hundred and fifty three students obtain jobs abroad, eight hundred and seventeen of whom were hired in Japan. This was roughly thirty percent of the total. KOTRA noted that these South Korean students had high skills not only in Japanese but also in English. One Japanese employer commented, “They have experienced military service and are disciplined. They are good to work with, because they respect their superiors and are diligent”. Given the bad political relations with Korea this trend is somewhat surprising, but looks to continue to grow.

In other news, Toyota Motor Corp and Panasonic Corp will integrate their housing businesses as they seek to collaborate on “town development” for next generation lifestyles where homes and vehicles are connected to the internet. Toyota President Akio Toyoda said, “From here on out, information will link all items and services that support people’s daily lives. I want to take on a new challenge of providing a new kind of lifestyle”. Finally, as of two thousand and sixteen Japan had thirteen point one hospital beds per one thousand people., the largest ration amongst all the OECD countries., where the average is five point four beds. In fiscal two thousand and eighteen, Japan had an excess of two hundred and eleven thousand beds or fourteen per cent more than in two thousand and thirteen. This is important because forty percent of medical costs in japan go to hospitalisation. If a medical institution has excess beds the impulse is to fill them.

This is episode number eighty three and we are talking about New Client Acquisition Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going.

Japan is a huge market. This is a wealthy, sophisticated society, with a design sense second to none. People work diligently as a team and put in long hours. Achieving annual organic growth should be an expectation of bosses that sales teams should be able to realise. 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. Websites lure, social media sponsored posts promulgate, ad words harvest, email sequences are very precisely engineered and content marketing assures expert authority. But this is the world of marketing to unleash the lead flow so that the sales team can follow up. 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 sales people 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 over your competitors?

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? Can they nominate the ideal client?

A standard operating procedure should be the Spider. What is this Spider you might ask? 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. For example, if one airline buys from you there may be a good chance other airlines have similar needs. Imagine a whole bunch of other look alike buyers you can bring into your web. 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 is that?

A major ice wall confronts them – the unknown, unfamiliar and unnerving. 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 doing cold calling or are they avoiding it? They know the person who picks up the phone is going to be a slayer of salespeople aspirations.

It is not an impossible quest though. There is a way through the initial business barrier by focusing on the design of the conversation that will spark buyer interest. But no, they do nothing and just leave it. It is fair to say it is no push over here. When you cold call a Japanese company, if you don’t already know the exact name of the person you are after, then you get cordoned off by the lowest person on the firm totem pole – the youngest female usually.

They are not very lady like though, in fact they are stone cold killers, axing your intention right there to speak with the buyer. In short, they are merciless, ruthless and unrelenting. If you are made of sterner stuff and don’t go down immediately without a fight, they will cast you off to the next level on the totem pole. This is the spotty faced, flat headed youngest male in the section, who will promise you that their boss will call you back, as he gleefully gets rid of you, knowing that the hoped for call will never happen.

This is grim stuff, so these opening conversations should not be left to whim. These need to be well designed and well practiced, so that you do get through to someone who can make a buying decision. Untrained salespeople try to cold call without a solid plan, fail, and then tell all and sundry that you cannot cold call in Japan. Not true, but you do need to have a proven methodology for doing this. Is this the case for your firm?

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 terribly interested or motivated to network. I know you, you know Taro, you introduce me to Taro. I will do the same for you with my contacts. A pretty limited way of doing things, but this is acceptable here. Barefaced bowling up to a complete stranger and introducing yourself, trying create a new connection, is greeted with such shock, that salespeople give up quickly.

Can you widen your network of people you have no connection with 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. Do your salespeople practice how to network with complete strangers down at your firm?

Here is the issue. Cold calling and networking are defined activities with best practices that work. The majority of companies however do not invest in teaching their sales staff how to master these dark arts. Instead they whine about the lack of new clients. This situation is begging for a solution and for the most part will remain that way. The firms who get it will make the effort and collect the new business, while their competition runs around bewildered in ever decreasing circles.

Action Steps

1. Design hooks in the cold call conversation that the person receiving the call, wouldn’t dare not pass the call on to a key decision maker
2. Train the team on how to create a brilliant first impression when meeting complete strangers.