Episode #175: Unprofessional Professional Salespeople

Salespeople in their forties, who have been selling their whole careers are professional salespeople. They are not Johnny Come Latelys who found themselves washed up on the shore of the sales profession or people who wandered through the wrong door and found themselves in a sales job. They have been in the game for decades and have acquired vast experience. Or so you would assume but Japan always has a surprise or two up its sleeve.

My wife contacted a very large multi national insurance company here to buy some cancer insurance. The company rep was coming around on the weekend to get me to sign the dotted line for my component of the policy. Being a sales guy myself, I am always nice to fellow salespeople and treat them well. The policy was wrapped up and the documents duly signed and completed when they bridged into a cross sell.

We had now moved away from their insurance range of products to an annuity product. It wasn’t announced as such but I quickly realised what it was because we used to sell these when I was at the Shinsei retail bank. Actually they are a good idea for Japan because the Government pension scheme will collapse in the future when there are not enough young people paying in, to support the retirees taking the money out.

Being a best selling author of Japan Sales Mastery you can imagine my interest in seeing how these seasoned Japanese insurance sales guys were going to conduct the sales process with me. The brochure was immediately produced and we were walked through the details. Dollar cost averaging got a lot of attention and there were graphs and tables to support the idea. There was even a quiz with three amounts to choose from representing how much we thought the dollar cost averaging investment approach would produce based around a fluctuating graph of investment fund performance.

I chose the largest return amount and was immediately congratulated as being only the second person he had even met who got the answer correct. Terrific! However, while sitting there, I was beginning to wonder when these two characters would start quizzing me on my investment and financial goals, the structure of the family unit, current allocations etc. Nope, not a question about any of that. Just a long pitch on this product and the returns parameters we could expect at the end of ten years. Actually, Japan has a such a low interest environment, the number proffered at the end of ten years was a peanut.

I took hold of the brochure at the end of the pitch and started reading through it. They said their company was the fund manager, but what I found was it was a fund of fund structure. That is fine, nothing wrong with that, but what was the composition of these various funds they had selected. Not a word about that. I also found the bit about the fees, that the funds charged, including the tail. I asked about these fees and it was instantly obvious neither of them had ever looked at that section of the brochure. How could that be?

These are professionals in sales who don’t know their own product and don’t ask any questions. I would not qualify them as “professional” despite the many years they have been in sales. How can you expect to sell a sophisticated annuity product to a client, if you have no idea what their timelines are for retirement, what is the nature of their inheritance tax planning regime, their goals for investing?

This is Japan. Salespeople here are woefully under trained. You may have a sales force here and assume that “professional” salespeople in their forties, who have been in sales all their careers have a clue. You would be wrong.