Episode #22: Sales Belief

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

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

Jerome Chouchan is a brilliant marketer. He runs Godiva chocolates here in Japan and recently published a book in Japan called Hitting The Target. He was drawing on analogies from his study of Japanese traditional long bow archery or kyudo to business. He had grown his business substantially over a number of years and was talking about how they did that. Just recently he also conducted a genius piece of guerilla marketing. He took a full colour page in the national daily the Nikkei newspaper which has a circulation of 3.2million subscribers. In this full page article he suggested everyone dump the practice of giving obligation chocolates on Valentines Day and instead only give gifts to people you really care about. In companies across Japan women give their male coworkers very cheap and ordinary chocolates on Valentines Day, as sense of obligation. A month later the men reciprocate, but their chocolates will be slightly higher in value. Either way the quality of the chocolates is nothing to get excited about. We do this in our office too and now Jerome is asking why we all keep bothering with this dubious custom. This article was very costly to run, probably around US$200,000-US$240,000. The upshot though was that is created a storm of debate and activity and got picked up everywhere in the media, mainstream and social. The initial advertising investment was large, but the subsequent free media was plain vast and the name recognition factor for Godiva was totally brilliant. The domestic chocolate makers would be seething because no one buys Godiva chocolates as obligation chocolates, so Gerome was advocating a non-buying policy that will never impact his own sales. In fact, the attention alone will no doubt drive his brand and sales much, much further into the market. He has really disrupted a traditional market here in Japan and that is not an easy thing to do. I will be interested to see the ROI on this one. This is episode number 22 and we are talking about Sales Beliefs.

Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going.

The hardest sales job in the world is selling something you don’t believe in yourself. The acid test is would you sell this “whatever” to your grandmother? If the answer is no, then get out of there right now! It is rarely that clear cut though. The more important test is whether what you are selling solves the client’s problem or not. Selling clients on things that are not in their best interests is a formula for long-term failure and personal and professional brand suicide.

There are elements of the sales process which are so fundamental, you wonder why I would even bring them up. For example, believing in what you sell. There are lots of salespeople though, trapped in jobs where they don’t believe but keep selling. You don’t have to look far to find them. They are going through the motions but you never feel they have your best interests at heart. They usually don’t have any other sales process than blarney and BS. We may buy from these people, but we come to bitterly resent being conned and we don’t forgive or forget. Today with social media, your “crime” is soon broadcast far and wide, warning everyone to be very careful when dealing with the likes of you.

So what should do?

The more common problem is that they actually do believe in what they sell but they are not professional enough to be convincing in the sales conversation. They often have a sales personality deficiency, where they are not good with people or not good with different types of people. They get into sales by accident. They should have been screened out from the start but sadly the world is just not that logical.

When I joined Shinsei’s retail bank, I recognised immediately that 70% of the salespeople should never have been given a sales role. My brief was “we have 300 salespeople and we are not getting anywhere – come in and fix it”. The vast majority of people in the role of convincing wealthy Japanese customers to buy our financial products were really suffering. They lacked the communication skills, the people skills, the persuasion power, the warmth, the concern for the customer, etc., which they needed to be successful. Why on earth were they there then, you might ask?

Many of them had never been in a sales role, many had been in backroom jobs, never facing customers. When Shinsei moved all of the operations components out of the branches they gained tremendous efficiency. The operations part became centralised and worked like a charm, but the operations staff were still there and were given sales jobs. Disasterous for them! How about your sales team? Are all of your colleagues in the right role? Are you in the right role?

As Shinsei, we worked out who was best suited for a sales role and gave those people the proper training to equip them for success. The remainder were given a role elsewhere in the bank. What training did we give them? Before I arrived, mathematics was thought to be really important for bankers. It probably is for certain roles but the ability to ask good questions, to fully understand wealthy customer’s needs, was much more important. So was the understanding that first impressions should not be left to chance but need to be created. If I don’t like you or trust you, why would I want to buy anything from you?

At Dale Carnegie we do a lot of sales training and we see the same client issues come up continuously. Certainty around the thing being sold must be in evidence. Selling is the transfer of your enthusiasm for the product or service to the buyer. Your body language must naturally exude belief. Your face needs to be friendly. This sounds a bit ridiculous except that many people in sales roles don’t smile easily. They don’t exude warmth, coming across as cold, hard, clinical, mercenary and overly efficient. We all love to buy, but we hate being sold and “efficient” sales people make us nervous.

Fluency in communication is critical. Be it Japanese or English, a lot of “filler words” like Eeto, Anou , Um, Ah, etc., might help you to think of what you want to say next, but you come across as if you are not sure or convinced about what you are saying or proposing. We definitely don’t buy sales person uncertainty. Record your own sales conversations and check if what you are saying is coming out in a professional manner, bolstering the confidence of the buyer in what you are saying.

A totally canned sales speech is the opposite problem. I sold encyclopedias for Britannica as my first sales job and we had to pass a memory test, where we could recite the entire 20 minute presentation precisely. Having passed, we were then dropped off in a forlorn, working class outer suburb in my home town of Brisbane and turned loose on an unsuspecting public. There were no questions involved, but a lot of data dumping going on in that canned speech.

Astonishingly, despite all we know 40 years later, there are still people trying to make careers in sales while wading through minute after minute of the features of the “whatever”. Where are the client questions, the needs understanding, the explanation of the benefits, the application of the benefits, the evidence – the proper sales basics?

Success in sales is based on following a sales process. That process is based on three powerful foundations – your belief in what you are selling, your ability to fluently articulate back to the buyer what you heard they need and how your solution satisfies their need.

If you want to be successful in sales, make sure you introduce a proper sales process, get certainty, get fluency and get going!