Episode #227: Selling Online Forever

What are the biggest problems for salespeople in the online sales world today? Cold calling would be number one, networking to find new clients would be number two and getting hold of the decision maker would be number three. Is paddling around in the bitter cold and humid summers travelling to see clients inefficient? Yes, but please, please give me that over trying to sell online. The sad news is we are never going back to the old format. There is always going to be an online component, because companies have found it works for them to have a dispersed workforce. Are we really ready to play the long game of sales or not?

Judging by how well people have adjusted to online selling over the last twelve months, the answer would be a resounding “no”. If you had an existing client base then you could service them online because there was no choice. The relationship had been sufficiently invested in to be able to extend the interaction from face to face to screen to screen. They were happy with it and you had no alternative.

New clients are more difficult. How do you build the trust online with a completely new person? We have to spend more time shooting the breeze on line with new clients at the beginning. Being “efficient” and getting straight down to brass tacks is dumb. The meeting has now slid into the muddy ditch of a transactional arrangement between buyer and seller. The care factor is low, the forgiveness scanty and the margin of error is zero, because we haven’t been successful in building the relationship.

Japanese buyers are often stilted, formal and awkward in meetings with people they don’t know. Being a foreigner allows me to play the gaijin card and get cut some slack for not being Japanese, with all the cultural and linguistic expectations that brings with it. Regardless, our sales teams don’t have that card to flourish because they are mainly Japanese, so what are they going to do?

What they need is some serious role play practice on how to handle the first five minutes of the online meeting. It is going to be different to when we are face to face, because the body language has gone missing and all we have is our voice. In a way, online meetings are more similar to doing phone sales, than in person sales. Sitting in front of the buyer provides them with so many reassuring or alarming signals, from which to make a judgment about the seller. The signal rate online is very much reduced so the buyers are a bit flummoxed as to how to divine if this person can be trusted or not. When in doubt in Japan, “do nothing” is the tried and true formula. Doing nothing means not buying from us and well, we can’t have that.

How many sales teams are spending time every day or even once a week, practicising online role plays with coaching? I would vouch that number would be “not enough”. We have been working on storytelling online in our sales training, to bridge that chasm between buyer and seller at the start of the meeting. We work on how to tell the Dale Carnegie Training Japan story of these last 58 years. People who don’t know us need to be told how awesome we are and so a 150 second burst is about the maximum time we can expect to be allowed from the buyer, before their attention wanders.

It takes a lot of practice to make the story interesting for the listener and not sound like a boring, self aggrandising history lesson or come across as a bunch of platitudes strung together. They don’t know us, so we have to assault their supreme skepticism with evidence, credibility, and testimonials all bound together in the storytelling format, after completing the chit chat at the beginning.

We need this for each of our solutions as well. Each solution has its history, so let’s get that into a context that makes us look valuable, reliable and professional. For example, “we started teaching sales training in 1939, when Dale Carnegie realised that salespeople only got sales training if it was provided internally by their company. He also distilled that his training method, being based on building great human relations and communication skills was perfect for sales too. He began offering public courses to fill that void in the market and today our Winning With Relationship Selling programme reflects the 82 years of kaizen applied to that original sales training course”. That takes 25 seconds to get through and it is packed with credibility statements, giving the buyer confidence in what the company offers.

Online is here to stay, whether we like it or not. We need to recalibrate what we are going to say, in order to build the trust with the buyer when online in the first meeting. We can’t leave this to each individual to work it out by themselves. It needs some group brainstorming on what is the best formula and content for this vital first impression piece. Are you doing it?