Episode #266: Selling In Japan Is Different

This is a pretty big subject, so I will pick up a few of the more noteworthy differences. In the West, salespeople, for the most part, are involved in an occupation for which they have received no training. They are thrown into sales, to sink or swim. If they don’t sell, they don’t eat, because of the sales commission structures. Total commission based remuneration is a normal thing in most countries or at least the pay structures will have a very high “at risk” component. In many cases, this drives desperation and salespeople saying anything to get a sale, in order to last another week in the job. Cold calling potential clients is a big part of finding new buyers and a lot of attention is placed on prospecting and pipeline building activities.

Japan is quite different. There are very few salespeople here in 100% commission sale jobs. The simple reason is because they don’t have to. Anyone on that type of pay scale is in a very low level job and are usually pretty young people who not very well educated. The touts you see on the street outside clubs in Kabukicho in Shinjuku or in Roppongi or Akasaka will no doubt be on high commissions and very low base salaries. The societal status attached to those in commission sales is also very low and so it is very hard to find anyone who wants to do it. In Japan, you don’t want your daughter to marry one of them.

Like the West, most Japanese people have no training in sales apart from a perfunctory On The Job Training exposure. I say exposure because it is rather more cosmetic than concrete. Your boss or one of the more experienced salespeople, will take you with them to visit a few clients and then bingo, you are out there on your own. Your boss and the others in the firm went through the same process, so no one thinks anything about it. This is a brilliant system for reproducing mediocrity, generation after generation. In both cases of untrained Western and Japanese salespeople, they notoriously launch straight into their pitch without asking any questions of the buyer. They immediately go into the dark pit of details, the facts, the spec, the brochure, the flyers, the powerpoint, etc.

In the West, commission based salespeople can have ultra short professional lives in sales. Most people, with little or no training, have simply no idea what they are doing and so they just fail. In short order, they are sayonara out of sales. The Darwinian penalty for failure is sales oblivion. In Japan, sales people are usually on a salary and bonus arrangement or base salary and commission, with the base being fairly high. For some of my followers living outside of Japan, it may be news to learn that because of the labour laws here, incompetence is not an acceptable reason to fire people in companies. We are predominantly talking about the mid-sized and big companies now, because in smaller firms that bias is not so pronounced.

Nevertheless, in Japan, the failing salesperson would get a good dose of verbal abuse from the boss, on a regular basis. If they can’t take that, then they will quit or if they can take it and won’t quit, they will be transferred to another non-sales role elsewhere in the company. Fairly useless salespeople are tolerated here, much more than in the West.

Japanese larger companies are “generalist”, rather than “specialist” production machines. Everyone is expected to migrate their way around the different parts of the company, picking up experience along the way over the course of their long career. One of those rotations may be into the sales department. Strangely, there is very limited activity applied to prospecting, especially cold calling. Japanese salespeople rely on their firm’s brand to do the bulk of the selling for them. If you aren’t very good at hunting, getting new clients, then no problem, you are assigned to become a farmer taking care of existing clients. Basically your job is to turn up and clip their ticket for the next regular order.

For all Japanese salespeople, you must be totally subservient and uber obedient to the buyer. You must do whatever they say, be available 24 hours a day and put up with large amounts of crap to keep the buyer happy and loyal. And trust me, Japanese buyers are incredibly picky and demanding. If you make a mess of even this in the lesser demanding role of farmer, then you will get moved out and into another department. You won’t get fired.

In the West, we are trained to persuade the buyer, to counter whatever they say, to have a comeback immediately. We say the buyer is King, yet we need to get their royal agreement to buy. There are lots of tactics used to get this “Yes”. Salespeople can be very aggressive and terrier like about this process. They will argue with the buyer and try to convince them to reverse their opposition to purchasing. For example, if the buyer says “I will think about it”, then the salespeople will ask them, “what in particular do you need to think about”, “who else will be involved in this decision” etc., and keep pushing hard to get a sale.

In Japan, the end decision maker is very vague and unclear sometimes inside companies. When they say “we” will think about it, they mean it, because the person you are sitting across the table from cannot make the decision on their own. Everyone who will be impacted by the buying decision has to be consulted and a consensus reached, before moving forward. In Japan, this always seems to take a lot of time.

Now in Japan, the buyer is not King. The buyer is God. Salespeople must meekly obey whatever God says. The buyer will solely direct the sales meeting conversation and will be looking for the salesperson’s pitch, so they can fillet it and then destroy it. This is a tried and true technique to reduce risk.

By pulling the pitch apart limb from limb, they want the seller to now show them this is not a risky decision that will come back later to haunt their career. Part of this pitch and then firestorm of buyer criticism routine is that there are no discovery questions being asked of the buyer. The salesperson is scared to ask the buyer, that is to say God, any questions, so they remain ignorant of their needs. If they happen to have what the buyer needs and they have successfully dealt with the risk question, then they will get a sale.

The typical lack of sales training is similar in the West and Japan, but the degrees of aggression are quite different. Pushy sales techniques just won’t work here. If you don’t know how to get permission to ask questions, then be prepared to be like the grouse at a shooting afternoon in Scotland, as the well armed buyer gives you both barrels and blows your pitch out of the air. Decisions are always going to take time because of the group orientation of this society and the buyer is never on your nor your boss’s schedule.