Episode #65: Not A Sale Thank You, Repeat Sales Please

Quotas, budgets, targets, feared employment oblivion all drive salespeople toward making sales. Some go for the whales, but often don’t even get a minnow. Others grab everything they can get. The focus tends to be on getting that sale, bringing some money in the door, getting some commission, keeping your job. The issue with this though is it corrupts our salesperson horizon. It makes it too proximate and makes us too short term focused. What we really need to do is reorient our thinking around building a profession where we enjoy repeat sales. We all know finding a new client is hard, difficult and expensive. We need to be farming part of the business and hunting for the rest. When your focus is on one sale your relationship with the client is quite different to trying to build a long term partnership. The sales pros always go for the partnership, over the short term gain of a single sale.

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

Japan’s falling birthrate is a concern for the Japanese Government and it is introducing some new measures to reverse the problem. The number of babies born in 2018 dropped to the lowest point since data became available in 1899. The required fertility rate is one point eight by the end of twenty twenty five and currently it is only one point four three. The Diet is going to be asked to approve a new scheme to provide free public education for all children between aged between three and five starting in October 2019. Also day care services will become free for children up to the age of two, if they come from low income households. Poorer households will also receive grant type scholarships for university students. In other news,Toyota is working on developing robots for our homes, helping with chores and offering companionship. In 2015 Toyota spent a billion dollars to open its AI focused Toyota Research Institute in Silicon valley. In 2017 , it set up a one hundred million dollar fund to invest in startups and new robot technology. In 2018 , it restructured its partner Robot Division to speed up decision making and shorten development time. It is an attractive market. In 2017 more than two point one billion dollars was spent by consumers on robots for automated vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers. Finally, Japan has extended the current copyright protection period from fifty years to seventy years, after an author’s death. Intellectual property is a signify export market for the USA and so this is a big benefit to rights holders there. Good news for me though, because my book Japan Sales Mastery will have seventy years of protection after I am dead. But I will still be dead though. Given the snail’s pace of change here in Japan it means Japan Sales Mastery will still probably be relevant into the next century!!!

This is episode number sixty five and we are talking about Not A Sale Thank You, Repeat Sales.

Clever, shallow, smooth as silk, glib salespeople are the scourge of the earth. They are focused on your money and how to separate you from it. There are no barriers to entry or qualifications to enter this field of work. Some will tell you anything, they live for today and like a shark, are constantly moving in order to feed. Snake oil purveyors to the naïve and trusting.

So, how do honest salespeople get anywhere when the image of the profession is so negative. Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room, people like Bernie Madoff, etc. - it goes on and on convincing us that we are permanent, potential victims of scammers, charlatans and confidence men.

By the way, we are all in sales today. You might be in one of the “professions” but you are no longer above the fray. Lawyers are competing for clients just as voraciously as dentists, architects, engineers, doctors and everyone else who spent years slogging through varsity. The title might be vague, such as the popular “business development”, but the activity is the same, just without the skills.

The key point to differentiate yourself from the carnival barker pond scum is to stop focusing on sales. Instead focus on the re-order. This mental shift is fundamental. A sale can be a one time thing, a transient satisfaction of a temporary itch. In some cases that may be all that is needed. This is the hard road of sales though – constantly prospecting to find new clients, having a pipeline that is razor thin and constantly teetering between feast and famine.

The re-order concept is totally relationship based. There is a degree of trust that brings the business to you, without you having to go and hunt it down. Clients want to work with you because they feel safe and secure. They know the value you provide and they know your word is your bond. Sometimes, it may be a long time between drinks before the follow up order appears, but it will eventually appear. In this profession of sales, we all know the client is never on your schedule.

So what is the key to gaining the trust and providing the value? I believe the term kokorogamae(心構え) or “true intentions” is the key. Your true intention is to be a partner in achieving the client’s success, on the basis that the more successful they become, the more goods or services you will need to provide them, as they grow and expand their operation.

If your true intention is to build trust, then there will be no attempt to snow the client at the first meeting, to lure them into a false sense of security. Instead you will tell the client what you do, who else you have done it for and some evidence about the results achieved for them. Evidence not bombast is a constant theme in your client conversations.

You will bring insights you have gathered, that spark those client “we hadn’t thought of that” moments. You don’t string together a bunch of statements and claims about your widget’s features. Rather you ask questions enabling you to best analyse whether you in fact have a suitable solution or not, for the client’s issue. If you don’t have it, you say so immediately - you don’t prevaricate or equivocate.

Your questioning skills are such that the client feels safe in the knowledge that your really understand what their business needs. You introduce the solution’s features, the benefits of the features, the applications of the benefits and the back up evidence to support what you are saying. You execute on the order from the client, as agreed and you deliver value at every point possible. You do this every time. If something goes wrong you fix it immediately, you don’t become mealy-mouthed about what was discussed and you hand back the money without hesitation.

No trust or no value – then no re-order. It is simple and complex at the same time. If your “true intentions” are correct, then value and trust will flow accordingly and so will the re-orders. Always go for the re-order, as the philosophical starting point of your sale’s efforts. Your kokorogamae will be aligned with future success and that is where we want to be isn’t it.