Episode #101: What Is Kokorogamae And Why Does It Matter In Sales In Japan

Intention in life is key. Are we living an intentional life or are we a buffeted bystander of what is happening around us? We have our personal vision, aspirations, goals, targets or maybe not. Sales is one area of professional pursuit where intention is everything. Assertion is key in sales, but it is assertion with a Smiley Face not a grimace. Of course, salespeople need to have superb people and communication skills. The point though is toward what end? What is the intention behind everything that is being done? Is it to make a lot of money, to be the big dog in the sales team, to own lots of luxury goods?

This is what kokorogamae is all about. This is a compound word. Kokoro itself has a number of meanings, one is heart, another is spirit. Kamae undergoes a phonetic change when joined together and becomes Gamae in the compound word. It means to take your stance and we use it in karate, when we talk about the different opening postures we use. In the Dojo, when you hear the command kamae everyone knows to go into their fighting stance.

So all very interesting Greg, but what has any of this got to do with sales? If I translate kokorogamae as true intention, then perhaps it makes more sense than “spirit stance”. We have a starting point with our intention in sales. The infamous Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort’s kokorogamae was to rip off as many people as possible and make himself super rich in the process. Wikipedia lists him as “an American author, motivational speaker, and former stockbroker”. They left out the “heinous criminal” descriptor. After coming to an agreement with the prosecutors to rat out his partners, he spent only 22 months in prison for his fraud scheme. He now does speeches and runs training clinics on sales.

As an Aussie, I say to myself, “that is America isn’t it”, where the notorious can still make money regardless of how many people they cheated out of their life savings and how many families they destroyed. But this is not what I am talking about. Dale Carnegie talks about not being a good salesperson, but being a good person in sales. There is a tremendous difference between the two. I hate people like Jordan Belfort, because they pollute and poison our sales profession with their toxic mentality. They should have left him in jail forever, rather than let him run around giving public talks on how to do sales.

We all have an obligation in sales and that is to win the trust of the buyer and then honour that trust. These criminals like Belfort or Bernie Madoff, who ran a huge Ponzi investment scheme for years until he went to jail, where unlike Belfort he is serving a life sentence, make the skepticism nerve in buyers run on a ragged, raw edge.

The kokorogamae question is which one are you? Are you in sales to serve the client and make the client successful or to make yourself successful at the client’s expense. There is nothing in the middle. There is no grey area involved here. One of my sale’s heroes is Zig Ziglar. He was a door to door pots and pans salesman, who became a highly successful trainer of salespeople. He is also a Dale Carnegie graduate by the way. One of his great quotes is, “you can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want”. This is the correct kokorogamae in my book.

We have a job to do in sales and how we approach it makes all the difference. If we want to have a long and successful career in sales, our kokorogamae will determine the degree of success and longevity. There is a Japanese four character saying that I like, “shin shi kei shuu” which means to have integrity from start to finish. If this is your north star, guiding light, beacon on the hill in sales then you are on the correct path.

Well, this all sounds good in theory. The problems arise when salespeople become desperate and start ramping up the buyer, to get more revenue to make their targets and keep their jobs. They are making decisions based on their own interests and not the interests of the client. They recommend solutions that pay a higher commission or yield a bigger profit, regardless of whether that is the best solution for the client. I was speaking with an American sales guy once who related how he could never make sales calls for his product in the same town twice in his territory. This was because the consumers would have discovered after the purchase, just how poor the quality was of what he was selling them.

Another example was from a friend of mine who was being interviewed for a job as a recruiter. The scenario was that your candidate had been offered another job which was perfect for them, but from a rival recruiting firm What do you do? My friend said she would advise the candidate to take the other firms job and not hers, because the other job was the perfect job. The interviewers replied, “No, your job is to make the candidate take the job you are offering”. Where are the best interests of the client or the candidate in this little episode – both missing in action.

The antidote for this short-termism is study, effort, training, practice, self-awareness and reflection on what are your core values. Become highly skilled and highly trustworthy. Make a decision about what you as a human being actually stand for? If it isn’t being honest, having integrity and doing the right thing by the client every time, then please get out of sales right now.

Sales is a process that requires an understanding of the sales cycle. Plan the sales call and do prior research, build trust at the initial meeting, ask really well designed questions to understand the buyer’s needs, present the solution stressing the benefits to the buyer, deal with any push back, ask for the order and then do the follow-up perfectly. Excellent communication skills, especially drawing out emotive word pictures, makes the end result become real for the buyer.

At the heart of all this though is our true intention. We can use our sale’s cycle and communication skills for evil, like these low life, pond scum criminals in sales I have mentioned or we can vow to serve the client’s interests. Make your mantra that “in the client’s success, I sow the seeds of my own success”. Kokorogamae is a term that captures that idea of our true intention - our starting point.