Episode #174: Selling Through Others In Japan

We may think we are selling directly to the buyer in japan but often we are not actually dong that. Selling through distributors is obviously a case where we sell through others. However when the buyers are sitting in front of you, you can easily delude yourself that you are going direct. No true in most cases. Yes, if you are dealing with a “one man shacho”, the founder/owner dictator, all powerful President, then it may be true. They make the decisions and everyone snaps into line and carries out the boss’s wishes. In reality, these types of cases are very few and far between. In our case, as a training company, we still find that the HR department sabotages the Presidents wishes and despite the orders from above, they never proceed with the training.

Sitting in the meeting room with the buyers gets us excited because we think we have the chance of getting an agreement to buy. We go through the sales cycle of building rapport, gaining trust, getting permission to ask question, asking about their needs, presenting the solution, dealing with hesitations and objections and then closing the deal. They tell us they will think about it and get back to us.

The reason they say this in the West is to get rid of you. American sales trainers have a whole suite of aggressive tactics for dealing with this push back. When I listen to their stuff I am always thinking “there is no way that will fly in Japan”. In Japan, yes, sometimes it will be a no loss of face mechanism to get rid of you, but more often the case is, that they can’t make the decision by themselves. There are people sitting unseen a few meters from you on the other side of that meeting room, who are division or section heads, who need to be consulted. The job of the people sitting in front of you is to collect information. They then share that with other people important to the decision making process, who we salespeople will never meet.

When they say “we will think about it”, we should never go into arm wrestle overdrive to force them to buy, like a lot of American sales trainers teach. As an Aussie, I find America an interesting place. The Wolf Of Wall Street is out of jail and teaching salespeople how to con buyers, using the same techniques he used. Bernie Madoff conned buyers too, but he is still in jail. How does that work? What amazes me is that there is a market for learning sales from someone who was rotten to the core and ripped off thousands of people. I absolutely detest this sales culture of win/lose in favour of the seller. The Wolf should still be in jail, as far as I am concerned and I one hundred percent reject everything he stands for and everything he teaches. Pond scum should never be our model in sales.

“I will think about it” should have us understanding we now need to sell through those people who are in the room with us. We should ask them, “I am sure there will be other sections and divisions who will be involved with this buying decision. Thinking about this opportunity from their point of view and given their individual personalities, are there any people you think might need a little more information to help them make the decision to buy?”.

What we are searching for here are the possible objections other people will have with the new buying decision. Once we draw out as many of the key hesitations as possible, then we need to arm our interlocutors with the answers that they can use in their subsequent conversations with the supreme sceptics on the other side of the wall. We will never get a chance to present our solution to these hidden decision makers, so it is critical we do a good job with our buyers in the room.

We usually only get one chance to do this and we have to calculate this into the time we are given for the meeting. In Japan, this is usually only one hour. In big companies, there will be a knock on the door at the hour mark and a horde of people will be standing around outside, with their half open laptops at the ready, waiting to start streaming into the room for their own meeting.

This part of the conversation must be planned at the start and cannot unfold under its own momentum. Consensus reigns supreme in Japan, so we can anticipate there will be a need to brief others on what came up in the meeting. Better to head off trouble at the pass, so we need to find out who else has a voice in the decision and what is likely to bother them about buying our solution. The better we prepare our hosts for that conversation, the more likely we will make a sale.