Episode #80: Salespeople, Money and Motivation In Japan

Salespeople are motivated by money and the more money they can make the more motivated they become. Except in Japan. Here salespeople are looking for stability, regular income, without the trials and tribulations of a commission sales life. Actually, what they really want is a steady salary regardless of how much they sell. The next preference is for a regular salary and some bonuses if they do well. The less palatable constructs involve commission sales. Total 100% commission remunerated salespeople are very rare in Japan and usually doing something nefarious.

When sales are not going well, the management thinking is to increase the incentives to get people motivated. Obviously, if we make it more attractive to produce then people will get behind this direction and support the effort to grow market share. Nothing happens and the leaders are perplexed. When you dig down to the root cause, you often find that the base salaries are too high. The at risk part is not significant and so people stay in their lane. By law you can't suddenly force people to take a massive salary drop and be switched over to a high commission structure. This limits the levers to pull, to get greater production.

In the current competitive climate, there is increasing pressure to raise base salaries in order to recruit new salespeople. Putting increased pressure on salespeople to sell, sees them heading for the door and being welcomed in by their new employer, because having a salesperson on staff is better than not having one. When hiring salespeople is hard to pull off, it becomes a retention game.

Money, money, money sounds good but it doesn't motivate in Japan as much as elsewhere. This is why most incentive schemes don't work well. The base salaries are usually too high, so everyone is in cruise mode. You notice it when you up the ante on the commissions, thinking that this will stir up some action. What happens instead is they slacken off, because now they are earning what they want, without getting out of first gear. The pressure on recruiting new salespeople means we are all going to be forced to pay our salespeople more just to keep them, so money isn't going to trigger a massive effort in the sales team. There are other ways we have to think of to get people more focused on results.

One of those ways is to get more self-awareness going. We see very few salespeople with a written down vision statement. This is a handy document to have because it captures a future success state. We write it in the present not future tense. “I am…” not “I will be….” It will include revenue targets but will also have other aspirations. We don’t care what they are as long as they are motivational for the salesperson. Getting people to step up starts with getting them to think differently about what they are doing everyday and how they do it.

Once we set the vision, then we can help the salespeople to back fill with how they can realise that vision, that they have nominated is important to them. We help them setting goals and establishing milestones. In Japan this would probably be a first for 99.99% of salespeople. They will have had quotas, sale’s targets etc., but a vision for themselves and their families is an entirely different beast. It is an important process though if we want to generate internal self directed motivation.

Pushing people to realize the company’s goals doesn’t have quite the appeal of realising your own tightly held goals. Usually companies only think about the firm’s goals and don’t do anything to integrate the salesperson’s goals with the company goals. This is where taking time away from selling, to go through a visions statement crafting exercise is so important. The key is to put it into a future frame, as if it were already achieved.

Secondly, it is important to revisit the vision after a few weeks, because people’s thinking about what they want starts to become clearer. It would be a rare individual, who never having set a vision, completely nails it perfectly for themselves in their first iteration. So we get one away and then we get them to come back and revise it. The second revision is powerful, because it will be more specific than the first one, because they have had time to think about it further in the intervening period.

So money is important. However, it is not the only lever that can work in Japan, to improve the motivation and commitment of the team to hit the sales targets. We need to be looking for multiple touch points to gain the engagement of the team. Their own vision statement is one of those key touch points.