Episode #236: Salespeople To Avoid

If you meet any salesperson who doesn’t ask you questions before explaining their widget run! This person is not a professional in sales, so don’t bother talking with them because you should only deal with professionals in any business and sales is no exception.

Salespeople in their forties, who have been selling their whole careers are professional salespeople. They are not Johnny Come Latelys who found themselves washed up on the shore of the sales profession or people who wandered through the wrong door and found themselves in a sales job. They have been in the game for decades and have acquired vast experience. Or so you would assume, but Japan always has a surprise or two up its sleeve.

My wife contacted a very large multinational insurance company here to buy some cancer insurance. The company reps were coming around on the weekend to get me to sign the dotted line for my component of the policy. Why they needed to send two people was a bit of a mystery to me, but this is common in Japan. Being a sales guy myself, I am always nice to fellow salespeople and treat them well. The policy was wrapped up and the documents duly signed and completed when they bridged into a cross sell.

We had now moved away from their insurance range of products to an annuity product. It wasn’t announced as such, but I quickly realised what it was because we used to sell these when I was at the Shinsei retail bank. Actually they are a good idea for Japan because the Government pension scheme will collapse in the future when there are not enough young people paying in, to support the retirees taking the money out.

Being a “best selling author” of Japan Sales Mastery you can imagine my interest in seeing how these seasoned Japanese insurance sales guys were going to conduct the sales process with me. The brochure was immediately produced and we were walked through the details. Dollar cost averaging got a lot of attention and there were graphs and tables to support the idea. There was even a quiz with three amounts to choose from representing how much we thought the dollar cost averaging investment approach would produce, based around a fluctuating graph of investment fund performance.

I chose the largest return amount and was immediately congratulated as being only the second person he had even met who got the answer correct. Terrific! However, while sitting there, I was beginning to wonder when these two characters would start quizzing me on my investment and financial goals, the structure of the family unit, current allocations, etc. Nope, not a question about any of that. Just a long pitch on this product and the return parameters we could expect at the end of ten years. Actually, Japan has a such a low interest rate environment, the number proffered at the end of ten years was a peanut.

I took hold of the brochure at the end of the pitch and started reading through it. They said their company was the fund manager, but what I found was it was a fund of fund structure. That is fine, nothing wrong with that, but what was the composition of these various funds they had selected. Not a word about that. I also found the bit about the fees, that the funds charged, including the tail. I asked about these fees and it was instantly obvious neither of them had ever looked at that section of the brochure. How could that be? You would think the buyer would have more than a passing interest in how much the initial costs was and what were the ramifications for the ongoing fees and therefore they would be ready for that type of question.

These are professionals in sales who don’t know their own product and don’t ask any questions. Actually, I would not qualify them as “professional” at all despite the many years they have been in sales. How can you expect to sell a sophisticated annuity product to a client, if you have no idea what their timelines are for retirement, what is the nature of their inheritance tax planning regime, their goals for investing, where they are currently tied up?

This is Japan. Salespeople are often woefully under trained here. This multinational may have a sales force here and assume that their “professional” salespeople in their forties, who have been in sales all their careers, have a clue. They would be wrong in this case and you have to ask why they don’t know that? This raises the question of the quality of the leadership of this firm, especially the sales managers.

What about the quality of your own sales managers and salespeople? Are there some assumptions being made that the salespeople have twenty years of experience, when it may be they have one year of experience duplicated twenty times? It pays to check just what quality of a sales team you have, rather than imagining everything is alright. How can you tell? Some simple role playing will revel all very quickly. If your salespeople are thrusting the product brochure in front of the buyer, before asking key questions, then begin to worry. If they don’t understand the detail of pricing of their product range, then begin to worry. You might check into what your sales managers are doing with themselves too, while you are at it.