Episode 302: Starting Your Sales Presentation With A Lie Is Idiocy In Japan

Riffraff inhabit all corners of the business world, but the sales profession suffers more than many others. Bankers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Stock brokers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Real estate agents tell one version of the truth to buyers. Government officials purloin our money. Everywhere you look, someone is ripping us off. However, these industries and institutions do not get blanket smeared with the failings of the few, like in the case of salespeople.

We are our own worst enemy in many ways. There is a taint to the profession, an odious odor, scandalising the hallways. Desperate people do dumb things and tell lies to buyers. There are no common standards of conduct being adhered to in the sales profession. You just become a salesperson by dint of putting your hand up for a sales job. After that point, you are free to unleash your reign of terror and destruction on all around you.

“I am not like that” you may say, but how would the buyer know that? They have been trained to expect to be ripped off by salespeople. It is one of my pet hates with the profession. Lo and behold someone called me up with a lie. A lie? How could anyone be that stupid, you might be wondering?

Well, have you heard this one before, “Hello Mr. Story, how are you today? I am from XYZ company and we handle a range of investment products. One of our representatives will be in your area and so are you available for a meeting next week?”.

This industry of selling investment products is tricky. I know, because I oversaw the sales of these products at the Shinsei Bank and the National Australia Bank here in Japan. What makes them difficult is you can’t hear, see, touch, smell or taste these intangibles. Investment products are abstract ideas. The buyer will have no idea if the decision to buy was a good one or not, for many months and in some cases, many years.

So the obvious thing we are all buying is the trust that what we have been told will in fact happen. Given the trust element is so vital, how could the leadership at XYZ company come up with a sales script like this one, totally built on a lie? Amazingly, this is the first thing coming out of their mouth. Reality check: their representative won’t be in my area. That is a total fabrication, a complete lie. Why? They think that somehow this will convince me to see that person.

I don’t put up with is unprofessionalism and I go after them. When they call, I ask them which area their representative will be in. They panic, look at the suburb address on their screen and blurt out “Akasaka”. So, because I am unrelenting with such idiots, I ask, “Well given Akasaka is quite a big place, which exact part of Akasaka will they be in next week?”. More blustering and panic, because now we have gone completely off piste.

Let’s step back and take a look at the big picture inside the sales profession. Japan is a very honest culture. This means though, that when people tell lies, they never readily admit to it. They never want to take any accountability. Instead they will tell you anything, in order to not admit that what they told you was crap. They try and move the blame back to you, by claiming you misheard or misunderstood what they were saying.

This honest culture can blind us to this quaint trait to lie. So when we are leading our salespeople, we can’t just assume because everyone is so honest in Japan, that our salespeople won’t lie to the client. This is also a culture where the buyer is GOD and whatever the buyer wants the salesperson will make happen. This can include lying, breaking the rules, over promising and being disingenuous. The back office delivery component of the company cannot easily deliver on salesperson over-promised goodies. Now we have a new set of problems to deal with, as sections within the company start to feud amongst themselves. Or they agree to a deal that is bad for the business. Being truthful with clients also means delivering bad news too. Salespeople in Japan have to be guided to do this, because of their own accord, they will avoid it every time and prefer to sow chaos internally.

It is important to state and keep re-stating what should be obvious – don’t lie to buyers. We have to explain we would rather forego a deal than get it by lying. This gets harder when their bonuses and commissions are linked to the sale. Also, a hard-nosed sales culture will force people into positions where they will compromise their personal and the firm’s integrity to do the deal. Suruga Bank had been a very aggressive lender in the market. They reaped the whirlwind of negative media coverage, because of all the lies told by their bank staff to get loans written. Wells Fargo had a similar issue with staff creating fake accounts to meet aggressive quotas. The real cost of those lies play out over many years.

We may have our own aggressive targets too, but we also have to ensure that we are guiding people along the correct path of how to make those targets. If we all agree that trust of the buyer is key, then we can start to build that trust by ensuring that our salespeople are never lying to the buyers, in order to make a sale. We have to remind salespeople of one very important thing. We are not after a sale. This is important so let me repeat this point - we are not after a sale. We are after repeat orders and these only come when there is a track record of trust.

We are currently negotiating with one of the biggest companies in the world. We won’t continue with them, because they are after a single low value transaction rather than an ongoing relationship. We are not after a single sale. We would rather put our energy into finding a buyer we can work with forever, than get bogged down in a small transactional piece of business.

Let’s wrap this discussion up. The solution to this lying salesperson problem doesn’t arrive from outside. John Wayne is not going to come charging over the sand hill, heralded by a bugle call, to our rescue. This is an inside out process. We have to start with our own sales operations and clean that up. If we do this consistently over time, we can isolate out the baddies, the dodgy types, the liars and contain the harm they do to us. None of us want to work in a profession that stinks. Our job is to develop good people in sales, rather than good salespeople. Is this what you are doing at the moment