Episode #104: Hard Sell Hell

I feel sorry for the “phone dogs” having to cold call clients to sell them stuff and at the same time I hate them. They are paid to call clients to arrange for one of the sale’s team to roll in and close the sale. I am all in favour of cold calling but I detest idiocy. The phone dogs are given sales scripts cobbled together by idiot bosses and the end result is you feel your intelligence is being insulted by this brutal process. There are so may better ways to cold call clients it is embarrassing, so why do they persists doing it the stupid way? Let’s look at a more intelligent approach.

Welcome back to this weekly edition every Monday of "THE Cutting Edge Japan Business Show"

I am your host Dr. Greg Story, Your Corporate Coaching and Training Guy, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and best selling author of Japan Sales Mastery and my new book Japan Business Mastery. We are bringing the show to you from our High Performance Center in Akasaka in Minato-ku, the business center of Tokyo.

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Before we get into this week’s topic, here is what caught my attention lately.

We all grew up thinking teachers had a pretty good life. Work is over by 3.00pm and they get months off from work during the summer holidays. How good is that! Well of course not in Japan. Junior high school teachers here worked the longest hours on average of all the forty eight OECD countries. They are putting in fifty six hours per week on average compared to the thirty eight point three hours average by the participants in the Teaching and Learning International Survey. Primary school teachers in japan worked fifty four point four hours per week on average. In other news, a government survey has found that fifty three point two percent of youths and young adults in japan do not want to study abroad. This is interesting because as the Japanese consumer population declines, because of the aging society, Japanese companies must add operations based outside of Japan. These companies will desperately need more internationally minded and highly skilled speakers of English to compete internationally. Where will the come from if the young don’t want to leave Japan? Finally, there is a major wealth disparity in Japan. According to a Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications survey, households whose head is sixty years or older, have about twenty four million yen or two hundred and twenty thousand dollars in savings on average. About eighteen percent of this age group had forty million yen or three hundred and seventy thousand dollars or more in savings. Twenty two percent however only had five million yen or forty six thousand dollars. Households headed by someone twenty nine years or younger had on average only two point five million yen or twenty three thousand dollars in savings and debts of four point nine million yen or forty five thousand dollars. For those between the ages of forty and forty nine the average savings were ten point two million yen or ninety five thousand dollars and had debts of ten point six million yen or one hundred thousand dollars.

This is episode number 104 and we are talking about Hard Sell Hell Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going. “We are going to be in your area next week, would you be available on Tuesday or Thursday?”.

“Really? Which part of my area will you be in?”.

“Are you available on Tuesday or Thursday?”.

“Wait a minute, you just said you would be in my area, so which part of my area will you be in?”

“Akasaka”.

“Really that’s interesting. Akasaka is a big place, which part of Akasaka?”.

“Are you available on Tuesday or Thursday?”.

This was an outbound investment sales call. The object was to sell me on investing my hard earned cash in their company’s investment product.

By the way, this conversation carried on far beyond what I have extracted here and became even more ridiculous, if that is actually possible. The essence was that I didn't believe that what they were saying was true. They started with a suggestion that they would be in my area and could just drop by. They say this to appear indirect and less “hard sell”.

However, when you push back on the validity of what they are saying, out comes the blatant hard sell - their constant annoying refrain of “Tuesday or Thursday?”. Why would they be doing this, when it is so obviously ridiculous? The answer is lack of sales skills and proper training.

There is a set script in place and I departed from the sacred text by challenging what they were saying. I did not believe that they will happen to be in my area and therefore that they could just drop by. It sounded unlikely to me, so I pushed back on their basic assertion. If they wanted to see me, why not just say, “we would love to visit you, would Tuesday suit or how about Thursday?”. Instead they started with a lie or at best, a dubious assertion, that has close to zero credibility.

Now this sales call is for an investment offer, where you cannot see, taste, hear, touch or smell the product and you won't know if it is any good for years. The trust factor on this type of sale is huge, yet they start the proceedings with an obvious lie.

How could they have done it more professionally? They don't know me and have found my address and phone number somewhere, so are trying to begin a relationship. When you are starting a relationship you need to immediately put the other person at ease and try to build some rapport.

“Hello Dr. Story, we have not met or spoken before, but my name is Taro and I am with xyz company. We exist to serve the interests of highly discerning clients like yourself. Do you have a few moments to speak?

Thank you.

We offer information, insight and help busy executives like yourself to better manager their wealth. Our clients often tell us they are so busy helping everyone else that they tend to sacrifice devoting enough time to their own personal wealth management. Is this the type of experience you have ever had?

We may or may not have something that suits your situation, but the beauty of spending a short meeting with our experts is that they can at least outline some of the most successful portfolio structures that have been working for executives similar to yourself. Are you in a position today to be able to consider investing in products which you might find attractive?”.

Find out more when we come back from the break

Welcome back This example passage does a number of things. It flatters me that I am discerning, checks that I have time to talk, tells me they are in the wealth advisory business. They also pick a problem that busy executives do have and that is that often we are not managing our own wealth sufficiently well.

By asking me if I have had that experience, this opens up a sufficiently broad timeframe range to receive a positive “yes” response. By saying they may or may not have what I need, comes across as balanced, consultative and not hard sell. Referring to the best practice examples, tells me they are only going to talk about things that are relevant and working well already.

Checking whether I have capacity to take action will save us all a lot of time. Wealthy people don't leave their money sitting around in cash. They are leveraging it, investing it, working it. Often, as a result they don't have any capacity to invest, because they are already locked into other investments. The wealth management firm is looking for people who have not committed all of their wealth because they have recently cashed out of something, come into sources of cash or have a high degree of liquidity to enable them to move cash around between investments.

Instead, all we had here was a hard sell for a Tuesday or Thursday alternative of choice, built off a lie about the fact they would be in my area next week. There is no congruency between what they are selling and how they are selling it. The young woman I was talking to was calling me from a Philippines sales boiler room and was a "phone dog", her job being to call large numbers of people like me on a list and go through the script. I departed from the script and she was lost.

We are all in the trust business and so what we say can't be tricky, smarmy or duplicitous. We are here to serve clients and tricking them into seeing us isn't a winning formula. The point of the conversation was to get an appointment, no matter what. Wrong objective!

The point of the conversation should have to been to build trust and invoke interest. They need to weed out non-clients like me, so that they are only speaking with qualified buyers. I wasn't one, but she had no idea of knowing that because the script wasn't intelligent. Now you would hope that your financial advisor would be intelligent, yet what they were doing was clear proof to me how unintelligent they were.

In this modern age, boiler room induced hard sell doesn’t work. The client’s interest has to be paramount. Salespeople who don’t get this basic point are not going to be around very long. Re-design the sales approach and put the client’s success at the center and then you will meet clients and make sales.

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In episode #105 we are talking about Success Formula For Leading project teams. Find out more about that next week.

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