Episode #221: Selling Year In, Year Out (Part Two)

In Part One, we talked about Jan Carlzon’s insights into the importance of consistent service being provided to clients. The buyer mantra is know, like and trust in sales. We also talked about the basics of sales – prospecting and closing. Now are we going to continue the errors, shortcomings and mistakes of last year into the new year or not? Are we going to just continue doing what we have always done year in, year out or are we going to improve? We tend to get into a groove in sales, which is perfectly fine, if it is the correct groove. We start again this year, but are we adding years of sales experience or are we just duplicating the same dubious experience of last year? We have to make the decision that we are going to become better in all aspects of the basics of selling and build a professional career.

As mentioned in Part One, a big element of sales success revolves around our communication skills. These days it is made even more difficult, because we are probably doing all of this, while selling remotely. How do you like someone you have never met before in person and only interact with on a small screen during an online call? In this environment, what we say and how we say it become vital. Did you know that we lose about 20% of our pep when we are on screen. We have to lift our energy just to get back to parity, let alone start to impress the client with our energy and passion to serve them.

You will have noticed what dead dogs a lot of people are when on screen. They are lifeless and low power. If you are the buyer, they are probably not the type of person you want taking care of your business. You want a powerhouse who will run through brick walls for you, who will leap tall buildings in a single bound to do the best deal, someone who will take a bullet for you on the pricing. This means the same old, same old, year in, year out sales boogie doesn’t function properly and we will lose the customer and the sale. We have to refine our onscreen communication skills further just to tread water, in order to stay where we are right now. These are the new basics of sales. However, are salespeople leaping out of bed ready for the day and seeing it as a new day in sales, that requires a set of different skills from last year? How are we doing with understanding and mastering the new basics for this coming year?

Understanding clients seems the most obvious basic skill, but that is a rarity. You have to wonder how that could be the case? In Japan, the reason is simple. The communication flow is one way. The seller is trying to “convince” the buyer to buy. To do that they trot out their widget catalogue and describe it in vast detail. The problem with this “no questions asked” approach is you don’t know enough information. Does the buyer need that widget in pink or blue? Waxing lyrical about the bountiful aspects and many wonderful attributes of your blue widget is ridiculous and pointless because the buyer needs the widget in pink. You need to know that and the way to find out is to ask the buyer questions, rather than blindly pitching into the dark.

The Japanese client is a problem too. Over time, they have trained salespeople to offer up their pitch, so that they can cut it to shreds. They do it this way in order to satisfy themselves this is a low risk purchase. They prefer the “smash the walnut with a sledgehammer” approach. Risk aversion is fair enough and nobody wants to make an incorrect purchase or waste resources. Pitching is a total waste, however salespeople and buyers haven’t woken up to that fact yet. A Japanese salesman who came to see me promptly sat down and immediately went through his entire slide deck adding his commentary. He didn’t ask me one teensy-weensy question about my business or what was the problem I was trying to fix. I teach sales, so I was amazed and wondered how long it would be before he would ask me a question. Well he didn’t. He just pitched and pitched and pitched. We wasted twenty five minutes of that meeting going through stuff of no value or interest to me the buyer. I wanted pink but he kept talking about blue the whole time. If he had taken a few moments to ask me some questions, he could have zeroed in on the two slides that were pertinent to me, in that whole massive deck. We could have had a much more meaningful and fruitful conversation. He didn’t get the sale and no wonder.

Whether we are selling online or selling when person to person, we need to ask questions. Japan being Japan, we need that mezzanine step of first getting permission to ask questions and that is not difficult. Are you or your colleagues asking for permission? Salespeople in Japan need to start the new year with a new realisation that pitching is inefficient and basically self-defeating. Let’s start the new year reflecting on the true basics of selling. Then we can put those basics into practice, in order to get the results we need. The equivalent of football blocking and tackling is what we need in sales. If we salespeople don’t get it, then this will be another year of opportunity which has slipped by, eluding our grasp. We simply cannot afford that year in, year out business anymore.