Episode #77: Sales Delusions

Sales has been coopted by Hollywood, creating a stylized version of reality. Sharp suits and conman ways are portrayed as the profession. The truth is more prosaic, fundamental and involves simple basics. Understanding buyer need and supplying it, isn’t that hard, but salespeople say and do dumb things instead. Today we will look at some simple things every salesperson should be doing and some things they should definitely be avoiding.

In a recent government survey six hundred and thirteen thousand people in the forty to sixty four age bracket were found to be recluses who rarely leave their homes. This is even higher than a previous survey, that found there were five hundred and forty one thousand in the fifteen to thirty nine age bracket. Known as hikikomori in Japanese these recluses number over a million today. Seventy six point six per cent were men. Nearly fifty percent have lived that way for at least seven years. In thirty four percent of cases these hikikomori relied financially on their parents. In other news, Japanese are working longer and not retiring. The ratio of people with jobs amongst those in the sixty five to sixty nine bracket is now forty four percent. The elderly accounted for nearly twelve percent of the nation’s workforce compared to only seven point eight per cent in two thousand and six. Of those aged sixty five to sixty nine, seventy two percent were hired as irregular workers and their pay has been reduced to fifty to seventy percent of what they used to earn as full time regular workers. In a Cabinet Office survey, forty two percent of people said they wanted to keep working as long as they can. Finally, SMBC Nikko Securities has launched a service for customers to advise on investment in Japanese stocks using artificial intelligence. They have teamed up with AI technology developer Herzog. The free AI based service will show stock prices expected a month into the future. It will propose the best portfolios according to the client’s risk appetite.

Smoothly memorised shtick, elaborate glossy materials, sharp suits, large expensive watches, bleached teeth, the perfect coiffure are not important in sales. Yet, this is the image of the pro-salesperson. Most of us never meet many pro-salespeople, because the vast majority we run into are hopeless. We meet the great unwashed and untrained, the part-time and partially interested, usually in a local retail format. The slick sales dude is what we see in movies or is a received image from urban myths. Hollywood pumps out Wall Street, Glengarry Glen Ross, Boiler Room, The Wolf of Wall Street and we get sold an image of what high pressure salespeople look like.

Japan is fascinating, in that it throws up some doozies. Rotting blackened stumps for teeth, disheveled clothing, scuffed worn shoes, ancient food stains on ties – you encounter this low level of personal presentation here with salespeople. It is almost the opposite extreme of the extravagent American movie image.

Rat with a gold tooth or rat with a rotting tooth – neither appeal very much. What we buyers really want is someone on our side. We want help to solve issues slowing us down, holding us back or preventing us from growing as we would wish. There are six steps on the client journey with salespeople: know you, like you, trust you, buy from you, repeat buy from you and refer you because they are a believer. This sounds simple, but salespeople get confused about who they are working for. They think they are there to work for themselves and get their commission or bonus or promotion and the client is just a tool in that process. This is really, really stupid.

I coach salespeople but am amazed at the dumb things they say and do. Some want to jam the square peg in the round hole and then argue with the client about why it will fit when it clearly doesn’t. When they get pushback from the client they then try to overwhelm the objection by strength of will or force of personality. This is really, really stupid too.

The salesperson jumps into the slide presentation on the laptop from the get go. Or they are pulling out their shiny flyers or expensive brochures or whatever and are launching forth with their memorised shtick. My first sales job was early evening door to door Britannica encyclopedia sales in a poor working class suburb in Brisbane. Before we were unleashed on an unsuspecting, semi-literate public, we had to memorise, word for word, the entire twenty-five minute presentation. It wasn’t great then, but it is unacceptable now. Some people are still back in the nineteen seventies with their sales efforts. I get sales prospecting calls even today telling me “so and so” is in my area etc. I can actually hear the cadence of them reading it off a script in front of them! Pathetic.

When I am coaching aspirant professional salespeople, I ask them how do they know which slides to show or which flyer they should offer to the client? This is usually greeted with a “Huh?” response. We all did “show and tell” in elementary school but some have not travelled very far since then and think this is how you do sales. When I arrived at the Shinsei Retail Bank the financial product sales team would whip out a flyer of one product and if the wealthy client didn’t go for it, then they would just whip out the next one. This went on until the client either got tired of it or bought something.

As salespeople, we don’t know what to show the client and we shouldn’t show the client anything, until we know what they want. So keep the laptop closed, the flyers in the briefcase, the widget under the table and ask questions instead. By the way, get permission to ask questions first, especially in Japan. Here the status of the buyer is sky high and it is a total impertinence for a lowly sales pond scum to be asking God questions about anything.

Nevertheless, God or otherwise get their permission and ask your intelligent questions. Find out if there is a match between what you sell and what they need. Mentally scour the walls of your gigantic solutions library, floor to ceiling packed with possible antidotes to their business ailments and select the best one for the client. If there is no solution in your library, then don’t try and force the square peg into the round hole. Just thank them for their time and go and find someone you can help.

If your solution doesn’t fit, then don’t waste the client’s time - keep your shtick to yourself and move on to the next prospect for whom it may be a perfect fit.