Episode #31: Principled Salespeople

There is no doubt that having a solid personal philosophy for how we deal with others is a sound idea. Few people however bother to develop a personal approach, so they are always floundering around trying to get on better with others. We are some much more interdependent in business today than we have ever been in the past. If you are in sales, then your people skills have to be simply excellent. But are they in fact excellent or are you floundering?

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

Japan is the world’s third largest economy but it has not been successful yet in the start-up scene. There are many barriers here to do with entrepreneurship, especially because there are no second chances in Japan if you fail. Consequently, the startup scene here lags behind Beijing and Silicon Valley and the government is trying to do something about that. They are trying to create more unicorn start-up successes, firms valued at more than $1 billion. METI is going to launch the J-Startup initiative to strengthen support for startups with high potential . They are looking for help with this outside of Japan. Visas for foreign startup entrepreneurs will go from the current six months, to one year, to encourage more foreign startups to locate in japan rather than other countries. Getting over the social stigma of failing is going to be the biggest barrier for Japanese local start-ups, so maybe some foreign pixy dust is required to encourage the startup scene to really break through that cultural wall and get things going.

This is episode number 31 and we are talking about Principled Salespeople.

Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going.

In 1936 an unknown author, despite many frustrating years of writing and rejections, finally managed to get his manuscript taken up by a major publishing house. That book became a classic in the pantheon of self-help books – “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. Surprisingly, many people in sales have never read this work. Plato, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius etc., were all around substantially prior to 1936 and we still plumb their insights. Dale Carnegie has definitely joined that circle of established thinkers, offering wisdom and valuable ideas. His aim was to help all of us be better with each other, particularly in a business context. He did this by laying down some principles, which will make us more successful in dealing with others, especially those people not like us.

Salespeople should definitely be friendly. Ancient Chinese wisdom noted, “ a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”. Here are nine principles for helping us all to become friendlier with our clients. We need to build rapport and have the client know, like and trust us. These principles are a great guiding light on how to become very skilled in dealing with all variety of people. These are not tricks. These are fundamental mindset and behavior changes we need to make if we want to be successful with others.

Become genuinely interested in other people

Our buyers are actually more interested in what we know about what they want, than in what we know about our product or service. It is a common mistake though to be wrapped up in the features of our offering and lose focus on the person buying it and what they want. At the extreme, transactional thinking means you don’t care about the individual, you only care about their money from the sale. That is the hyper short career in sales option.

For a long career, we better get busy really understanding our clients. The key word in this principle is ”genuine”. Having a correctkokorogamaeor true intention, means we will be honestly focused on understanding the client so that we can really serve them and build a partnership. We must be fully focused on their success, because wrapped up inside that outcome is our own success.

Talk in terms of the other person’s interests

Salespeople have a nasty habit of selective listening and selective conversation around what they want to talk about. Their kokorogamaeis centered around their interests and the buyer’s interests are secondary. Sales talk is a misnomer - there is no sales talk. There are well designed questions and there are carefully crafted explanations around solution delivery, which are tightly tied to what the buyer is interested in. Questions uncover interests and with laser beam focus, that is the only thing we talk about.

Sounds simple, but salespeople love to talk, they love the sound of their own voice and they become deaf to the client, often without even realising it. Check yourself during your next client conversation – imagine we were to create a transcript of your words, would they be 100% addressed to the buyer’s interests. If not, then stop blathering and start talking in terms of their interests. By the way, Japanese buyers are rarely uncomfortable with silence, so don’t feel pressured to fill the conversation gaps with pap!

Be a good listener. Encourage the other person to talk about themselves

Good listening means listening for what is not being said, as well as what we are hearing. It means not pretending to be listening, while we secretly think of our soon to be unveiled brilliant response. It means not getting sidetracked by a single piece of key information, but taking in the whole of what is being conveyed. It means listening with your eyes – reading the body language and checking it against the words being offered.

Japan is a country of few direct words. Centuries of cheek by jowl living have smoothed the edges of human interaction. Because of this, Japanese people have become masters of subtlety and nuance. When they switch into English they retain these characteristics and their more limited vocabulary also reduces the amount of talking they will originate from their side. Salespeople have to be very alert to the smallest clues and must watch the body language like a hawk.

Talkative salespeople miss so much key client information and then scratch their heads as to why they can’t be more successful in selling. The client doesn’t have the sales process handbook, where the questioning sequences are nicely aligned and arranged for maximum efficiency. Instead the client conversation wanders all over the place, lurching from one topic to another, without any compunction.

I am just like that as a buyer. I have so many interests and will happily digress on the digressions of the digressions! Well designed questions from the salesperson keeps the whole thing on track and allows the client to speak about themselves at length. In those offerings from the buyer we learn so much about their values, interests, absolute must haves, their desirables, their primary interests and their dominant buying motives.

Japanese buyers usually need a high level of trust to be developed, before they may open up and talk about themselves. It is exceedingly rare to wrap up an agreement in Japan with just one meeting. So salespeople, play the long game here and don’t be in a rush. We are limbering up for a marathon, not a sprint in Japan.

Arouse in the other person an eager want

This is not huckster, fake, carnival barker manipulation. This is becoming a great communicator, someone who can arouse passion and enthusiasm in others. Sales is the transfer of enthusiasm, based on the salesperson’s belief in the “righteousness” of doing good, through supplying offerings that really help the buyer and their business.

One of the biggest barriers to success in sales is client inertia. They keep doing what they have always done, in the same way and get the same results. Our job is to shake that equation up and help them to get a better result, through doing something new – buying our product or service.

We have to help them overcome their fears and persuade them to take action. In Japan there is a penalty for action if something fails and less of a penalty associated with inaction, so the bias here is to do nothing. Having a need and taking immediate action are not connected in the client’s mind, until we connect them. We have to fully explain the opportunity cost of no decision, no action or no response to our proposal.

We achieve all of this by using well thought out questions, which lead the buyer to draw the same conclusion that we have come to – that our offering is what they need and that they need it right now. This Socratic method of asking questions works because it helps to clarify the buyer’s own thinking. Most salespeople don’t ask any enough questions, because they are too busy talking about the features of their widget. We can arouse an eager want if we frame the questions well.

Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers

As we know, telling is not selling. Ramming our proposal down the client’s throat is not selling. Being bombastic and dogged is not selling. Naturally, we will always have more information, data and knowledge about our solution than the client. Blabbing on about the fine detail won’t persuade the client to buy.

Often Japanese buyers expect a sales “lecture” on the proposal, so they can slip into the role of the critic. Avoid that scenario at all costs. All you will get out of that type of meeting is the thin, cheap green tea being served and little more. Instead, go and find some buyers who will accept your questions.

We all own the world we help to create. Our job is to help the client create a world we can share, that they feel deeply connected to and about which they feel some ownership. If I tell you some worthy insight I still own it. If I ask questions that spur your thinking and help you to gather some of those “light bulb” moments, then you own that insight. We are always more likely to execute on our own ideas than other people’s.

Sales is about assisting client’s to see possibilities they haven’t considered. We have probably all had the experience of shopping for something and the store clerk’s explanation alerted us to something we hadn’t even considered, which immediately framed our subsequent approach to that purchase. This is the job of the salesperson – to help the client re-frame their worldview with rich and valuable insights that lead them to make the best buying decision – with us!

Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view

We have reached the age we are today, built on a firm foundation of mistakes, errors of judgment and ineptitude. None of us were born perfect, we had to fail in order to learn what not to do, as well as what to do. We were not brilliant from the start with new tasks. We had to spend time to master the new and unfamiliar. In the beginning, we were inept until we gained some solid skills.

In other words, we are all hauling around prejudices, biases, painful memories and firm views on the world, built on our foundation of hard won experiences. Salespeople trying to inject their views into this construct, will feel like they are trying penetrate a block of marble. “Education” in the original Greek and Latin meant “to draw out”, not “inject in” information and ideas. We should embrace the classics and like Michelangelo, draw the hidden David out of the marble.

In order to be successful in doing this our communication skills are required to have empathy, to really get deep with the client’s worldview and experiences. We need to understand their concept’s creation platforms, which reveal who they are today. Let’s get to know them at a more substantial level so that we really get where they are coming from and more importantly, we need to understand their WHY. Most Japanese buyers are not as open to being frank about what they want. To get there, we need to build trust through multiple meetings, big dabs of patience and a correct kokorogamae or true intention.

This requires we stop concentrating on ourselves and what we want and focus on the buyer instead. We need to suspend our own surety of our concept’s creation platform and see things fresh, in an open, unbiased way. When we can get that clarity, the words coming out of our mouths will be perfectly aligned with what resonates most deeply with the client’s needs and they will buy our offerings.

Get the other person saying, “yes, yes” immediately

“Yes momentum” is an old idea in sales. It works on the psychological principle that a series of positive responses will lead to an acceptance of our offer. A simplistic understanding of this idea would see our hearty sales hero designing a long set of killer questions, to which the only logical answer to which must be expressed in the affirmative.

For example, asking a question such as, “if you were able to reduce costs, would this be of help to your business?”. Everyone wants to save costs in business, so the only answer is yes. The problem with this type of approach is it becomes manipulative, as the salesperson belts a whole series of these “can only be answered by yes” questions.

It reminds me on those nodding animals in the back of cars, that bob up and down with the ride. Expecting to fast track your way into a sale through this client head bobbing is a misunderstanding of the principle. The latter is saying let’s get “yes, yes” responses immediately, but not exclusively. In the Japanese language Haimeans “yes”, but this is the “yes” of I hear you, not the “yes” of I agree with you. We need to understand this and ask the question in a way that differentiates between the two responses.

We do want to design questions that help the buyer clarify their thinking about our proposition. We should start with one or two “yes” questions that narrow the focus down to a positive investigation of the value of our solution, when judged against all the alternatives. It should not become a “Yesfest” though.

After getting some positive responses we should begin asking the WHY behind the response. This helps us to dig deeper into the drivers of an affirmative decision. Clients, as mentioned, will wander all over the prairie once they get going, so we have to shepherd them back on topic. If you are ever selling to me, keep this shepherding back to the topic need in mind!!!

A good way to do that is to ask a closed question to which they can easily answer yes. Now we can keep the conversation moving in the right direction, without the whole process being manipulative. “Yes momentum” – yes, but in moderation is the better approach.

Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires

Understanding the dominant buying motive of the buyer is the Holy Grail of sales. Of course we need to know the primary buying motive – the WHAT, but to really serve the client we need to know the WHY. In particular, how will this buying decision advance their career or their business? Where can we fit in, to become a booster for their success?

Risk aversion is a strong emotion in all of us, especially among Japanese buyers, concerning the buying process. We have all been burnt at some stage through a purchase that failed to satisfy us and which we immediately regretted. We paid too much or it broke straight away and the sales person’s spiffy spiel wasn’t matched by the good’s performance. Some people may have an MBA, but we all have an MDS - an advanced Master’s Degree in Skepticism. The Japanese buyers by the way all seem to have a Ph.D. in Skepticism Of Sales People, especially foreign sales people.

As salespeople, we need to be mindful of the client’s emotions and find ways to legitimately prove our solution will not disappoint. The client’s desire is to improve or defend their situation – no one wishes to go backwards in business. They have their own ideas about how that is done best and our job is to find out WHAT and WHY they think so. We may have reached a different conclusion on the HOW, but by understanding what is driving them, we can more easily explain where our solution gels with what they want to achieve. Getting them to do most of the talking and by prompting new thoughts through great questions, we can make that happen.

Dramatise your ideas

When we pick up the phone to speak with our client or when we sit down in the meeting room with them, they are bursting at the seams with “stuff” in their heads. They are wrestling with what happened yesterday, what they have to get through today and worrying about what will happen tomorrow. These days, we are all having much more face-to-device time than face-to face time. There is no downtime any more, as we slip out our phone to check everything we ever wanted to know and lot of things we don’t need to know. Salespeople are competing for client brain space with all of this internal “noise”.

We need to be primed to break through all the clutter and grab the client’s attention or we will never be able to sell our wares. We need to be working out how our client likes to be communicated with. Are they micro or macro focused? Are they interested in people or task outcomes? Once we have established the form of communication which best resonates with them, we should be looking for various ways to dramatise our recommendations.

Vocal word picture drawing is a great skill for a salesperson, as we choose evocative words that our listener can see in their mind’s eye. Collect “power words” that you can pepper your sales explanation with, in order to register the greatest reaction with the buyer. If you don’t break through, then you won’t be heard.

We need to become great story tellers with lots of “colour and movement” to grab the buyer’s nanosecond attention span. In regards to the delivery it may vary quit a bit. We may be very direct or we may be very thoughtful in our expression, according to the client’s preferred style of communication.

We are giving them the floor for the bulk of the meeting time, so we have only a limited window for our words, so we need to be very deliberate in what we are going to say. Salesperson blarney is a thing of the past – you simply don’t have enough air time to blab on anymore. We need word injection precision when we speak.

The words themselves and the vocal range we use to articulate them, are both important. We need to use speed – fast and slow for emphasis. We need to put the power in for some words and take the power out entirely for others. Word emphasis can completely change the meaning of a sentence. Try this sentence: “I didn’t say he hit his friend”. Repeat the sentence seven times but on each occasion, emphasise one word, much more that all of the others. By doing this the inference of the words also changes. This simple exercise underlines that we have a powerful tool at our disposal – our voice. We also need facial expressions and gestures which are congruent with what we are saying and which add strength to amplify the key message.

Dale Carnegie was a leader in thinking about being good with people. His principles are universal and timeless. All of us in sales can adopt these principles and become more effective in our dealing with our buyers.