Episode #309: Pitching Preferred In The Japanese Sales Call

In modern economies, asking the buyer questions to understand their needs would be considered the most basic of the basic skills of a salesperson. This isn’t happening as much as you would expect in Japan, the world’s third largest economy. Most salespeople everywhere are untrained and are left to work it out for themselves. Japan has what they call OJT – On The Job Training - as the main teaching method. In this busy boss life, that is now reduced down to taking the new salesperson with them on a couple of sales calls and then the salesperson is on their own. If your boss is an ace salesperson, then this sounds reasonable. If only that were the case.

From our real world research across the classes we run reaching sales to Japanese employees and my own buyer experiences, it is obvious the skillset to ask the buyer questions hasn’t been well developed. Pitching the features is the mainstream technique. That lazy shotgun approach makes little sense though, so why aren’t Japanese salespeople asking the buyer questions, to be able to zero in on their needs?

Here are six reasons why Japanese salespeople prefer to pitch:

1. The buyer is not King in Japan, but God.

God doesn’t tolerate pesky salespeople asking questions, so the pitch seems safer. In Japan, relatively low ranking people in very large companies, are treated as superior by the Presidents of much smaller firms. Social hierarchy is very defined here by both the size of the company and the rank of the individual. That is why business cards are so predominant – you need to work out the stranger’s rank to know how to deal with them. The buyer always outranks the seller. The salesperson’s role is to pitch their offer. The buyer’s role is to shred it in order to eliminate all risk. No questions brooked by God in the sale. Therefore salespeople are in no social position to be asking anything of the buyer God.

2. Don’t embarrass the buyer

There is the fear that the salesperson might ask a question which the buyer can’t answer and the buyer will lose face. Often senior people don’t have all the details and embarrassment may engender. This may ensure that the salesperson will never do any business with that company ever again.

I have directly experienced this myself. We deal with a lot of HR people who are looking for training on behalf of line managers. When I asked the HR team my very first needs based question, they clearly had no clue. An ominous silence followed and in Japan silences, unnervingly, can be very long. Then they suddenly said they wanted my “pitch”. Actually all they were doing was collecting the vendor prices. I innocently asked if I could talk directly to the line manager. I was bundled straight out the door. Goodbye to that sale.

3. It is too direct

Our sales questions are quite specific. What are your problems, what is not working, where are you failing, why aren’t you fixing it, etc. The whole culture here survives through vagueness. Being indirect is a form of polite intercourse. Ambiguous conversation is a well refined art in Japan. Asking direct, pointed questions upsets the social harmony, so this makes the pitch the better choice.

4. The questions asked may be poor

Asking a potentially dumb question creates fear. It indicates a lack of professionalism or a lesser intellect. You have to know the industry well to hone in on pertinent issues. Failure to ask smart questions says you are clueless and not to be taken seriously. Better to keep that dirty little secret to yourself, by pitching and not asking any questions.

5. You seem to be stealing secrets

Asking about the current results, the firm’s plans, strategies, pricing margins, delivery quantities, activities, average sales per head, etc., is highly confidential. They have only just met you and yet you want all of this sensitive information?

6. They never think to ask questions

Salespeople think their job is to go through the catalogue or the flyers etc., explain all of the feature details and then the client will decide if they are interested. They are here to tell the client everything about the solution and answer any questions they may have. Therefore, according to this logic, there is no need to ask any questions.

Doing something different in Japan is greeted with suspicion. If all of your colleagues and bosses are pitchfest acolytes, you need to fit in. Each generation keeps shovelling poor approaches down the line to the next generation. Salespeople are never taught how to ask permission from the buyer to launch forth with their questions. Simply tell God about the results you have produced for other clients and say, “Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure, but in order for me to know if it is possible or not, may I ask you a few questions?”. So easy, just try it.

In Japan, there is a major imbalance in power between buyer and seller. That is not the way to think about it though. When you have the cure for cancer, who has the balance of power, the seller or the buyer? We have to think of our business in the same way. We have the business equivalent solution for the cancer impacting the buyer’s company. Our job is not to pitch, because that methodology is so inefficient. We are all time poor, so we have to get the solution to the buyer as fast as possible to help them.

I would guess there are a lot of pitchpeople around the world. We don’t have much time with buyers, so we all have to make the most of the opportunity and not waste it trialing hit and miss alternatives, hoping we hit gold. Hope is not a strategy. Be a professional, ask permission to ask questions, next find out what they need and then supply it. No pitching required.