Episode #125: Three Keys For Sales Success

Know, like and trust are critical components for success in business. The “know” bit hopefully is being taken care of by your marketing efforts and your personal brand. What about the like and trust elements? If the buyer doesn’t like us, then the chances of getting a sale becomes so much more difficult. What makes you likable? If they don’t trust us, then the business won’t advance. How do they know we are trustworthy?

This whole frame of reference is especially important in the case of creating a new client. Most Japanese salespeople love their clients. That is to say, they love their existing clients. They are not so keen to do the work to go out there and create a new client. It may be the case that at your scale you don’t need any new clients, so bully for you. For the rest of us we need them. Old clients drop out and must be replaced. We also want to grow our business, so we need more from the clients we already have and we need to add new clients to do that.

If we are calling on a new client there are a lot of difficulties involved around being liked and trusted. They do not know us. We have a very small window in which to connect with them in the right manner. How we look, how we carry ourselves and what we say, become make or break equations.

Everyone is super busy today, so when we meet them they have a lot on their mind about what has happened so far in the day and what must happen later in the day. We have to break through all that internal noise. We might bring some useful information on the market or the industry. We might start with a question to get them talking.

We have to be careful with small talk though. If they have a really impressive office and it has a special feature, do you think you are the first person they have met who has commented on it? After the first week of moving in they have heard the same comments from everyone who has visited them. We need to ask a question that relates the impact of the new office to their business. We might say, “This is a beautiful office. I am sure everyone is very proud to work in this environment. Have you noticed a change in staff morale since you made the move?”. This gets them talking about their business and that is what we want. Get the focus off us and on to them. We need to become excellent listeners. This combination of them talking and we are passionate listeners builds likeability. It also allows us to gauge what type of personality style they have and their preferred communication preference.

During this phase we need to tell them about what we do and gain their permission to ask questions. In a Japanese context, almost all Japanese salespeople are scared to ask questions of the buyer, which is why they get stuck giving their pitch and then having it torn to shreds by the buyer. Asking for permission is not hard, if you know what you are doing. “Dale Carnegie is a global corporate training organisation specializing in soft skills training. An example would be XYZ, where we have been helping their engineers with their presentation impact skills. They have noticed a big improvement when they put these engineers in front of the clients compared to before. Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure, but in order for me to understand if that would be possible, would you mind if I asked a few questions?”.

Once you have permission now you can start to uncover what the clients needs. The way we ask the questions communicates to the buyer that we have their best interests at heart and that we are trying to find the perfect match between what we have and what they need. To do this, the questions have to be well designed. “What do you do?”, isn’t one of them. We have done our homework prior to the meeting. A better question would be, “Your global president has set down a growth target of 12%. Does that number get spread equally across every market or does Japan have a higher number?”. What a great question. Hopefully it is a higher number, because we are here to help them reach it.

By asking excellent questions we uncover what they need and then we have made a decision. We know if we can help them or not and if we can’t we leave. We don’t try and jam the round peg into the square hole. We go find someone we can help. They appreciate the honesty.

If we can help them, then the solution we provide will be perfect for what they need. They will understand that we have heard them and we have found the match between their need and our solutions. This builds trust. We have our aim front and center, which is to become a key partner for them to grow their business. We communicate this in the way we operate and by what we say.

So to be liked we need to be well planned with the first impression with a new client. We need to say things that make them feel good about us. We need to ask questions in order to understand what they need. When we deliver the solution they see that this works for what they need. This builds the trust. There is no shortcut in this process and the idea is to focus on their best interests as our starting point. Do that and they will feel they can trust you.