Episode #163: Why "Okay, Send Me Your Proposal" Is A Bad Idea In Japan

Getting to the request for a proposal stage is usually thought of as significant progress in Japan. This means there is an interest. Or may be not. Japan is a very polite society so a direct “no” is difficult to deal with. Over centuries, the society has found all sorts of clever ways of saying “no” indirectly. When you get this request you have to know if this is “no” or not. We are all super busy people, so slaving away to craft a proposal is a big waste of our very precious resource – our time – if it is just a polite means of giving us the bum’s rush out the door.

To understand if this is real or fake we can answer “yes, I can send you a proposal and in fact I can help you with determining if there is a match for your budget by explaining our pricing while we are here together”. This relies on the assumption you can offer a price on the spot. Generally we know what will be involved in the solution for the client, so we should be able to talk about pricing or a major part of the pricing required at that point. If there is a budget issue this will help to flush that out.

Being Japan, we can’t expect any agreement whether we talk pricing at that point or not, because the person we are dealing with will need to gain a consensus in support of the offer from their colleagues who are unseen, sitting behind the meeting room wall in the office. We can however gain some insight into whether we are going to be a contender or not for the business. Their body language is a key indicator we should be studying when we start talking price.

They may still want to see a proposal because they need to show something in writing to the other members of the team. Or they may prefer to say “no” in your physical absence because that is less stressful and embarrassing. We can always rely on Japanese buyers to take the path of least resistance.

I was listening to Victor Antonio’s podcast The Sales Influence on how he does it for American buyers. In his case, he tries to inject some sense of guilt with the buyer around him having to spend hours on making the proposal. The idea is that he wants them to clearly say no they are not able to go ahead right there and then or say they are interested, but not sure.

This wouldn’t help much in Japan, because the buyer is going to avoid any possible confrontation over a “no” answer and will always go for the interested but not sure possibility regardless of the reality. The Japanese concepts of tatemae and honne are fundamental to polite society here. Tatemae means the public truth and honne the real truth. Often Western businesspeople encountering tatemae for the first time will feel like they have been lied to.

We shouldn’t get too moralistic about this because we do it too in our own societies. We dress it up as a “little white lie” which is actually tatamae under a different flag.

If your family member or friend has been trying to lose weight and actually look like they have gained even more weight and ask you how they look, we don’t go for honne and say “Man, you are even fatter than before”. We bald faced lie and say they look like they have lost weight and look better, because we don’t want to hurt their feelings or discourage them. Japan is the same but on a grander scale and it is more institutionalised here.

So in Japan, we do have to give them a proposal but we should never “send” it. By this I mean we should always present it in person whenever possible. If we send off our proposal by email the document arrives alone and undefended. We need to be there to explain what it means so that there is no mistake. I can’t count the number of times I have been presenting a proposal and the client has misunderstood what I was trying to say. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. The key is to be there to clear up the issue. Whenever we get a proposal where do we look first? Straight to the numbers – how much is this going to cost? All the value explanation is in the front part of the document, but their view has been tainted by that big number at the back.

We need to control the physical document and walk them through the value explanation, checking all the while that we have successfully understood what they need. We can answer questions, make clarifications and shepherd the buyer through the value detail to the number section, which should by now have a tremendous amount of context wrapped around it. So make a proposal but always take it, never send it in Japan. If you do that, you will have much more success, by taking it with you.