By Dr. Greg Story
The podcast currently has 359 episodes available.
Having an audience interested enough in your topic to ask questions is a heartening occurrence. Japan can be a bit tricky though because people are shy to ask questions. Culturally the thinking is different to the West. In most western countries we ask questions because we want to know more. We don’t think that we are being disrespectful by implying that the speaker wasn’t clear enough, so that is why we need to ask our question. We also never imagine we must be dumb and have to ask a question because we weren’t smart enough to get the speaker’s meaning the first time around. We also rarely worry about being judged on the quality of our question. We don’t fret that if we ask a stupid question, we have now publically announced to everyone we are an idiot.
Some speakers encourage questions on the way through their talks. They are comfortable to be taken down deeper on an aspect of their topic. They don’t mind being moved along to an off topic point by the questioner. The advantage of this method is that the audience don’t have to wait until the end of the talk to ask their question. They can get clarification immediately on what is being explained. There might be some further information which they want to know about so they can go a bit broader on the topic.
This also presents an image of the speaker as very confident in their topic and flexible to deal with whatever comes up. They also must be good time managers when speaking, to get through their information, take the questions on the way through and still finish on time. In today’s Age Of Distraction, being open to questions at any time serves those in the audience with short concentration spans or little patience. Not everyone in the audience can keep a thought aflame right through to the end, so having forgotten what it was they were going to ask, they just sit there in silence when it gets to Q&A. Their lost question may have provoked an interesting discussion by the speaker on an important point. Having one person brave enough to ask a question certainly encourages everyone else to ask their question. The social pressure of being first has been lifted and group permission now allows for asking the speaker about some points in their talk.
The advantage of waiting until the end is that you remain in control of the order of the talk. You may deal with all of the potential questions by the end of the talk and the Q&A allows for additional things that have come up in the minds of the audience. It also makes it easier to work through the slide deck in order. The slide deck is alike an autopilot for guiding us through the talk, as we don’t have to remember the order, we just follow the slides. Of course if we allow questions throughout, we can always ask our questioner to wait, because we will be covering that point a little later in the talk. Nevertheless the questions at the end formula gives the speaker more control over the flow of their talk with no distractions or departures from the theme.
Time control becomes much easier. We can rehearse our talk and get it down to the exact time, before we open up for questions during the time allotted for Q&A. If we have to face hostile questions, this is when they will emerge. Prior to that, we have at least gotten through what we wanted to say. We had full control of the proceedings. If we get into a torrid time with a questioner, early in the piece, it may throw our equilibrium off balance or cause some consternation or embarrassment to the audience, detracting from what we want to say. The atmosphere can turn unpleasant very quickly which pollutes everyone’s recollection of you as the speaker. Also, if we don’t know how to handle hostile questions, our credibility can crumble. A crumbling credibility in a public forum is not a good look.
So my recommendation is for the seasoned pro speakers to take questions whenever you feel like it. For those who don’t present so frequently, err on the side of caution and take the questions at the end.
Teams are fluid. People move or leave and new people join. Targets go up every year. The compliance and regulatory requirements become more stringent, the market pivots and bites you, currency fluctuations take you from hero to zero in short order. Head office is always annoying. There are so many aspects of business which line up against having a strong sense of team. We can’t be complacent if we have built a strong team and we have to get to work, if we are in the process of team building.
Sports teams are always high profile and successful sports coaches are lauded for their ability to produce results, especially when they are always dealing with tremendous fluctuations in the make up of the team. Vince Lombardi is one of those much heralded coaches and he noted: “Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another and of strength to be derived by unity”.
Sterling stuff, but how do you do that? Vince had access to some of the most highly paid and motivated team members on the planet, but what about the rest of us? We often haven’t chosen the team. We have inherited someone else’s criteria and selection model. People come to us from different companies or different sections and so how do we address the issue of establishing a common purpose?
We need to make sure each individual has a clear sense of the reason the team exists, their individual role and the importance of their role to the team effort. If you suddenly asked your team members about the reason the team exists, you might be dumbfounded to receive so many disparate answers. We assume everyone knows and that we all in sync, but we should check. And we should do it regularly, as the team composition changes over time and new people may not know.
Establishing an agreed set of team values is an important glue to hold the whole team together. Whenever we do this exercise for ourselves or for clients, we always get a huge range of values being nominated. This is helpful but not particularly helpful. We need to do it in two parts, starting with our personal values and then do the team values. Ideally, each individual’s values will also be part of the team values so that the ownership factor is sky high.
A team vision is the next stage and this is where many people start to weep. They are heartily sick of the word vision. So many vision consultants, articles, videos and podcasts covering this one little word. It bogs down and eventually all the fluff associated with the word, collapses under its one weight. Regardless, you still need a team vision, so get over it.
Jack Welch pointed out, “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion”.
A vision is a future picture of what could be and what should be, regardless of what is today. The vision is stated in the present tense, as if we were already at the final state of development and success that we are aiming for. The visualisation is positive and optimistic and the words both powerful and specific. We need a vision to define where we want to be, in order to work out how we will get there.
Our mission is the other building block. It describes what we do and by definition, what we don’t do. Clarity around objectives and goals means counting out some shiny objects that are not core requirements for the team. The vision tends to last long, as do the core values, whereas we have to keep revisiting the mission. This is because things change and we may need to change tack and go in a different direction. In which case our mission has also flexed and we need to restate it. We do this so that everyone in the team has clarity around what we are doing and how we are doing it.
Successful teams have achieved great clarity throughout the entire organization about what the team is trying to do. This is not an accident, but the product of good leadership work to establish a base and then good ongoing work, to keep the ideas alive and relevant.
The hero’s journey is for the very, very few. I did it my way, I slaved away in a garret and got to the top, I realised the American dream – all good stuff, but an illusion for most. The reality is there are more of us who need the cooperation of others, than those who can succeed despite others. The age of the “one” has been taken over by the age of the “many”. Hero teams are more powerful than individual heroes.
The problem is although we may need the cooperation of others, we are not that good at getting it. We limit our scope through two key areas – how we communicate and how we react. We like what we like and we find affinity with those who like similar things. We like to speak in a certain way and we click with others who speak the same way. It might be a shared accent, denoting a similar background, and we are all pretty good at spotting the subtleties of dialect. That is okay, but it still doesn’t help us to go far enough. You might share a common accent, but that doesn't mean you get on with everyone from back home\
Reflecting the preferences of others is a much more effective way of building trust and cooperation. Does this mean being two faced and manipulative? No, it means being flexible and other focused rather than me, me, me focused.
When we are speaking with others we notice the way they prefer to communicate. It will vary from very low energy to high output - softly spoken to plain loud. Neither side likes the other much. The loud person can’t hear the softly spoken person and feels annoyed, because they have to struggle to hear what they are saying. The softly spoken person is quietly upset, because they don’t like people who are loud and aggressive.
The key here is to adjust ourselves to suit the situation and the other person, if we want to gain their cooperation. If you say, “well I am me, I have my rights and they should adjust themselves to how I like it”, then let me know how that is working out for you?
We will need to increase our energy and volume when we speak with high output people. We may feel like we are screaming, but on their scale all we are doing is communicating normally. The opposite applies, when we have to drop the volume and the strength. We may feel like we are whispering and it is killing us, but the counterparty feels very comfortable chatting with you.
Some individuals are really detail oriented, they are constantly seeking data, proof, evidence about what they are being told. When we interact with this group, we notice the micro focus immediately and so we need to start adding a lot more detail to our explanations or recommendations. We may feel this is too nitty gritty and frankly, massive overkill, but that is not how they see it. For them this is absolutely normal and unremarkable.
The opposite preference is for big picture discussions. Don’t worry about the details, the practicality, the roll out - we will get to that later. They want to plot the future direction in broad brush terms. For detail orientated people this is painful, because everything seems fluffy and unrealistic. Don’t fight it – encourage them to go big and go with them. Put up some crazy ideas (judged crazy from your evidence based thinking point of view) of your own and don’t feel guilty. They will welcome all crazy ideas, including yours.
When we hear something we don’t like, we often react first and think later. Bad approach! Instead, bite your tongue and hear them out – don’t jump in over the top of them with your counter idea, critique or cutting comment. Try ear, brain, mouth rather than ear, mouth, brain as an order of approach. Use a “cushion”, a sentence that is neither for nor against what they are saying. It is a neutral statement, used to simply break our usual pattern of too rapid intervention. It gives us crucial time to think about what we want to say and how we are going to say it.
Before we comment or attempt to criticise them, we instead ask them why they think that or why they say that. While they are providing some background and context around their position, we are able to bypass our immediate chemical reaction and reach deeper down to our calmer second or even third, considered response. When we do speak we may even accept their position because the context made sense or be able to suggest a counter position. We can do this in a calm way, that doesn’t lead to an argument and bad feelings.
These two actions on our part will build the trust and establish the lines of communication required to convince other to help us on our own hero team journey. Speak in a reflective manner and don’t react immediately to what you are hearing. You may think this is killing you, because it is so different to how you normally operate, but if you want to be effective with all types of people, this is the secret – adjust yourself first.
Newtonian physics says for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Fine, but we don’t want that – we want a different and improved reaction, so let’s change our own angle of approach with others, so that we get a much better response.
Action Steps
Normally, as the seller, we are getting told “no” in sales, rather than the other way around. When salespeople become desperate to hit their numbers, they start to do crazy things. They start telling lies to the buyer, they exaggerate the scope of the solution, they savagely discount the price, they overpromise on the follow-up, they agree to horrendous delivery dates, they become visibly agitated during the sales call. All bad.
When we meet the client, our brain has to get into a specific gear. That means we are focused on how can we contribute to build the client’s business? What can we do that will grow the buyer’s revenues, cut costs or expand market share? That mental gear is entirely different to questions such as “how will I make my monthly sales quota?”, “how will I stop being fired?”, etc. The latter are solely focused on you and not the buyer and this impacts what comes out of your mouth.
If we are doing a proper job of prospecting we will always have alternatives. When the pipeline is too thin, desperation sets in. The existing clients get worked over, to try and squeeze blood from a stone, because there are no other options. It is easy to talk to an existing client than go and find a new one, which is so why salespeople hate prospecting – it is hard and tough work. Nevertheless, prospecting and building pipeline are the keys to positioning ourselves as sellers.
When we have a strong pipeline, we are not dependent on any one sale. When we are doing the questioning phase of the sale’s call we start to understand what the client needs. We may realise that what we have isn’t really a fit. When we don’t have pipeline, we start to think how we can make it fit anyway. This is desperate thinking and ultimately very damaging to our trust, brand and reorder possibilities. We are thinking single order, rather than the start of many orders.
We may know that to take on this project is going to put a lot of pressure on the back office or the supply chain within our organisation. We have to keep in mind the opportunity cost that this deal represents, not just the income it will generate. We are impinging on other better quality work to do this deal. If the pricing for doing it was at a premium, it might be justifiable but that is usually quite rare. Or if the scale of the work is considerable and sustained over a long period of time, it might be viable. In fact, usually, a bad deal more often than not comes with other ugly lumpy bits attached to it that are not very attractive.
We are better to say “no”. When deals come that are outside of our usual scope and therefore require a lot of work, the price needs to be high, to warrant doing it. If it is not, then get back to being busy building pipeline and let that deal flow to a competitor, who is either better suited to handle it or more stupid than we are. It hurts to give business away to a competitor, but that is the better choice than damaging your own operation.
A deal came to me though LinkedIn and the buyer was a substantial company in Singapore, with a strong brand name. The details of what they wanted to do in Japan though, had potential grief written all over it for me. It was somewhat related to what we do, but just that bit off to the side, where we would have to do a lot of work to make the project work. The money mentioned was so, so and really didn’t cover the extra work that would be needed. I introduced the deal to a “frenemy” rival company and asked if they were interested. They said yes and so I connected them with the seller.
I heard later, that they got hammered on the pricing, when they came to deal with the lower level operations people inside the company. A typical Singaporean business play where they are very tough on pricing, often known as the “squeeze all the juice out of the deal for the buyer” play. The “frenemy” took the pricing offered, rather than saying no or demanding more money and got smashed. It turned out to be a huge amount of work, sucked up a lot of their time and burned some of their contacts. This is exactly what I thought it would do to me too. I was glad I missed that bullet. Saying “no” was a very, very good choice on my part. It was also a one off deal, so there was no hope of repeat business. This made it less attractive, because I couldn’t see any return on the investment of time and effort.
I didn't take it because I had pipeline, alternatives, other potential business. Say “no” to a bad or marginal deal and keep working on building pipeline to find better deals. You will spend the same amount of time, but the rewards are vastly different.
Gaining credibility as a speaker is obviously important. We often do this by telling our own experiences. However, having too much focus on us and away from the interests of the audience is a fine line we must tread carefully. When we get this wrong, a lot of valuable speaking time gets taken up and we face the danger of losing our audience. They are like lightening when it comes to escaping to the internet, to go find things they feel are more relevant.
We must always keep in the front of our mind that whenever we face an audience, we are facing a room packed with critics and skeptics. We definitely have to establish our credibility or they will simply disregard what we are saying. The usual way to gain credibility is to draw on our experiences. A great way to do this is telling our war stories. The focus is usually on things that are important to us, so we certainly enjoy reliving the past. In fact, we can enjoy it a bit too much. We begin telling our life story because we are such an interesting person. We are certain everyone will want to hear it, won’t they.
Actually, their own life story is much more fascinating for them. So, we should be trying to relate what we are talking about to their own experiences and their realities. When we want to tell our stories, we have to be committed to keeping them short and to the point. As soon as an audience gets the sense the speaker is rambling down memory lane, they get distracted, bored and mentally depart from the proceedings. I was listening to a senior company leader giving a talk and he went on and on about how he started in sales and all his adventures. He was obviously enjoying it, but what did something that happened forty years ago in America have to do with the rest of us here in Tokyo?
A good way to keep the audience engaged and focused on themselves is by asking rhetorical questions. These are questions for which we don’t require an actual answer, but the audience don’t know that. This creates a bit of tension and they have to focus on the issue we have raised. The focus is now on the same points the speaker wants to emphasise. Because of the question, they have to mentally go there themselves. It is much more effective than having the speaker try and drag them there.
Rather than just telling war stories, we can ask them to compare the story we are going to tell with their own experiences. In this case, the speaker’s example is just a prompt for them to identify with the situation being unveiled. This is better because they are relating the issue to their own reality. They can take the speaker’s example and either agree with it or disagree with it. Even if they disagree with it, their different stance will be based on their own facts rather than opinion. We might say, “I am going to relate an incident which happened to me in a client meeting. Have any of you had this experience and if so what did you do? Listen to what I did and see if you think I made the best choice or not”. We have now set up the comparison with their own world. This gets their attention in a natural way, rather than me banging on about what a legend I was in the meeting with the client.
Talking about ourselves is fun but it is dangerous. How should we incorporate it? As we plan our talk, we have to work out the cadence of the delivery to includE our war stories. If we are talking too much about ourselves the audience may lose interest and mentally escape from us. If we have designed in content which will involve them, we can keep them with us all the way to the end. This doesn’t happen by itself. We have to carefully implant it when designing the talk. It is also very important to test this design during the rehearsal. Better to discover any issues in rehearsal rather than testing the content on a live audience. Sounds simple enough, but remarkably, 99% of speakers do no rehearsal at all. Doubt that statistic? How many speakers have you heard where you got the sense they had carefully rehearsed their talk? Case closed!
In developing our attention grabbing cadence during the talk, rather than waiting to Q&A to deal with any pushback on our opinions, we can go early. We can anticipate what those objections might be and handle them during the main body of our speech. We pose them as rhetorical questions. Some people in the audience when they hear these objections will be thinking “yeah, that’s right”. We then use our evidence drawn from our experiences, our war stories, to demolish that potential objection and ensure we maintain control of the issue. This technique also engages the audience more deeply in our presentation, as they start to add perspectives they may not have thought of before. There is also a strong feeling of comprehensiveness about our talk too. It shows we are aware of different views, are not afraid of them and have an answer to remove them as a consideration.
We are on the cusp of a change amongst youth in Japan. Those already entered into the workforce have memories of the Lehman Shock and the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdown and the impact this had on the job market. They are looking for security of employ and family life, because of the fragility of both were exposed to them in September 2008 and again in March 2011. They saw the dire straights of those who slipped into the part-time employee hell of low wages, no prospects and everything tough, tough, tough.
In 2016, only 6.9% of those in the 25-34 age group switched jobs. The September 2016 survey by the Japan Institute For Labor Policy and Training also found nearly 90% supported lifetime employment. This figure was only 65% in 2004. Of those in their 20s, 55% wanted to work for the same company right through. That same number was only 34% in 2004.
There is a generation coming behind them though who will be different again. They were born around the time of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, have little recollection of the Lehman debacle in 2008 and except for those with close links to the Tohoku region, vaguely recall the ordeal of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdowns.
They are going to graduate after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. They are going to see the part-time jobs market filled with Asian, mainly Chinese, students working their allowed 38 hours a week (more hours than the work week in France). They are going to see driverless electric cars, Artificial Intelligence breakthroughs, the ubiquity of voice commands, bumptious robots and the Internet of Things controlling their lives. Their demographic curve is in rapid decline, their numbers are dropping every year and will be half today’s figures by 2060. They are going to be in big demand. The current unemployment rate of 2.8% will sink even further. They will be free agents looking at multiple job offers and openings available to them.
They will be the last juku or cram school generation. University entrance requirements will collapse. Except for the absolute elite institutions, a pulse and cash will be the only entry requirements. Tokyo is going to cap the numbers of students on campus, but the rest of the country will have no limits. Many universities will be hungry for fees and desperate to attract students. The Millennial’s successor generation, who some are calling Generation Z and for Japan, I am calling the “Olympics’ Generation”, will have an entirely different perspective on education. “Exam hell” will mainly disappear as a cultural construct for the 90%-95% who don’t aim for the elite universities.
Mid-career hires are still an anathema for many local Japanese firms, but that is going to have to change. They simply will not be able to find staff. What to do with women is confusing for them, as their structures are built on the old post-war model of husband works and the wife raises the kids. That will have to disappear quite soon.
This whole concept will have to change and they are going to have to learn to be more flexible about hours worked and leave. When the kids get sick, the husband is still unlikely to be dropping tools and heading off to the school to pick up junior. The working wife will need to do that and woe be tide to any firm who doesn’t cooperate, because others will and she will move on.
Today, some domestic firms still look askance at employees having a profile on LinkedIn. This site started as a pseudo-job board, but it has become another source of useful information available for free. This will all add up to assisting greater job mobility.
Recruiters will be poaching people right, left and center to satisfy firms desperate to find young workers. The wooing to move will be constant. We have seen an aberration of Economics 101 where labour supply shortages have not yet resulted in wages growth. That cannot last much longer. Certainly this Olympics’ Generation will enjoy the financial benefits of powerful labour demand.
The key word for this Olympics’ Generation will be “mendokusai” （めんどくさい）or “bothersome” and anything duly defined will be resisted. Companies are going to struggle with leading this generation. The current Millennials may become their immediate bosses, but the cultural divide between them will be vast.
Middle managers in Japan will be faced with the greatest challenges of any generation of Japanese leaders. Unless they are properly trained for this onslaught, it is going to be a nightmare. Their situation will simply outstrip the leadership answers usually tapped from OJT (On The Job Training). There is no roadmap for this eventuality, because this is all a brave new world of leadership.
Is anyone in Japan thinking about this? I would say based on my discussions so far, the answer is “no”.
You heard it hear first folks: “Winter is coming”.
What are the chances of getting a “no” to your offer in sales? Probably around 70% of the time, this is what we will get. Given that type of frequency and hit rate, you would think that salespeople would be masters of dealing with this type of response. You would be wrong. The chemicals kick in and sales people lose all reason.
I was reminded of this recently when we were conducting sales training. It is hard to create a new habit for salespeople. They have egos and they are easily entrenched in less productive ways of doing things, because that is how they have always done it. Stupid, is what I would call that, unless you are really shooting the lights out with your results.
The issue is when we see the body language signaling a negative response the fight response starts and then we hear the words and we go into overdrive. Our brain is on fire concerning the thousand good reasons that no should be a yes. We are delving deep into why the client is wrong and we are right. WE are rapidly processing our line of attack to counter the argument they have proffered. What a complete waste of time.
Instead we need to get smart. Stop the chemical reaction from getting out of control. Throw the Breaker Switch, like we have with the electricity in our houses, if the power load gets too dangerous. Shooting your mouth off in sales is even more dangerous. That intervention comes in the form of a cushion. No, we don’t put a cushion over our mouth, so that no words come out. We put it over our brain instead. We offer a very neutral response to the buyer, that neither agrees with nor inflames the situation.
The point of this neutral statement is to give us critical thinking time. Are we using this critical thinking time to dream up a killer response that will shut the buyer down in their tracks and turn that “no” into a “yes”? Nope. We use it to stop the chemical rush and regroup. We need to go into question mode.
When we hear a “no” it is a headline, like we have in newspapers. A short form of reply that gives the key details and no more. We want to know what is in the article accompanying that headline. Why is it “no”? So we sweetly and gently ask, “May I ask you why you said “no”; or “your price is too high”; or “we are happy with our current supplier”; or “we have no budget for this”; or the thousand other dubious reasons buyers give us for declining our genius offer. Give me the article accompanying the headline, so I can understand how I am supposed to answer this rejection.
Now we have to be patient. We hear the reason and again we are sorely tempted to go into counter attack. We know can tear that shabby reasoning apart and want to bombard the buyer with a million reasons why they should buy. Hold your horses there pardner. What if this isn’t the killer objection? What if a more vicious version is lurking in the long grass, ready to bite us at the first opportunity? We need to keep digging.
After we hear that reason, we sweetly and gently ask, “Apart from that are there any other concerns for you?”. They will usually have another one. Again we don’t go into rambunctious reply mode. We ask why that is a problem for them, just like we did the first time. They tell us and again we must be patient. We must keep our power dry, hold the line, keep our nerve. Again, we venture forth on our seeker journey and sweetly and gently ask, “Are A and B your only concerns or do you have another? If they do, we still don’t rush in where angles fear to tread and blurt out our killer retort.
We sweetly and gently ask, “You have mentioned A, B and C. Of these which one is the most pressing concern for you?”, and then we shut up and don’t even breath, let alone speak. They make a choice and now we open up both barrels and answer that concern and ignore the other two. Usually, if we successfully deal with the main concern, the lesser concerns fade away like the dew on a spring day.
When we were doing some role play practice in the training, it was interesting that the person playing the buyer gave a reason for not buying and the seller was starting to jump in. We tied them up and physically restrained them so they couldn’t answer right then and there. Okay, that is an exaggeration. Actually, we just asked them to keep digging, to follow this procedure and not answer yet, until they know what to answer. Sure enough of the A, B and C reasons given, it turned out that it was C that was the concern of most import. “A” was price by the way and “C” was quality in this case.
We don’t know what to answer until we know what to rebuff. Hold off on answering the pushback, until you know what is their key concern. Don’t be fooled by smokescreens, wild goose chases and other buyer subterfuges. If we do this we will be a lot more successful closing the sale and building a strong relationship with the buyer.
It is a bad sign when a presentation makes me sleepy, especially if it is at lunch time. It is very common to have speakers address a topic over a lunch to a group of attendees. After lunch, you might explain away a bit of the drowsiness, but during the lunch is a warning sign. The speaker had good voice strength, so nobody was struggling to hear him. He was knowledgeable on his subject having worked in this area for a number of years. He was speaking about what his firm does everyday, so he is living the topic. So what went wrong?
Thinking back to the talk, I wondered whether his structure was the issue? When a speech doesn’t flow well, the audience has to work hard. Actually, they choose not to work hard and instead just drop out and escape from you. This was one of those cases.
If we think about giving a speech, we have to plan it well. In his case, he had prepared slides, but the style of the lunch and the venue meant it was a no slide deck presentation. He had some side notes written down on his laptop screen to follow. That is fine for the speaker, because it aids navigation through the topics. The problem was that the points were not ordered or structured well. This made it hard to follow, as it tended to jump around, rather than flow.
We design our talks from the idea spark. In one sentence, we need to isolate out what is the key point we want to make to our audience. This is not easy, but the act of refining the topic gives us clarity. We create the opening last, because its role is to break into the brains of the audience and capture their full attention for what is coming.
The middle bits between opening and closing is where the design part comes in. Think of the sections like chapters in a book. The chapters need to be in a logical order that is easy to follow. They need to link to each other so that the whole thing flows. To create the chapters we take our central conclusion and ask why is that true? The answers will come from the points of evidence or our experiences. We need to get these down and then get them in order.
It might be a simple structure like “ this is what happened in the past, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future”. We could use a macro-micro split. This is the big picture and here are the details of the components. It could be advantage-disadvantage. We investigate the plusses and minuses of what we are proposing. It could be taking the key points of evidence and breaking them down to make each a chapter in its own right.
The key is in the sequencing. What is the logical flow here to move from one chapter to the next? We need a bridge between chapters to set up what is coming next and to tell our audience we are changing the focus. We need to constantly loop each chapter back to what is the central point. We can’t just put out evidence and leave it there, expecting the listener to work it out themselves. We have to tell them why this is important, what it means for them and how they can use it.
Visuals on screen do assist in this process. It does make it easier to follow because we are hitting more points of stimulus with our audience. When we don’t have slides, we need to use word pictures to draw the audience into our topic. I am struggling to recall any stories he told about the topic, which is the best place to create those word pictures.
So break the talk up before you go anywhere near the slide construction. What is the point you want to make? What are the reasons for that and turn them into chapter headings. Check that the flow of the chapters is logical and easy to follow. Then create a blockbuster opening to grab attention. If our speaker had spent more time on the design then the talk would have been more accessible to the audience. Get that wrong in this Age Of Distraction and you have lost them immediately.
All interfaces with the customer are designed by people. It can be on-line conversations with robots or in store interactions, but the driving force behind all of these activities are the people in our employ. The way people think and act is a product of the culture of the organisation. That culture is the accountability of senior management. The common success point of organisations is to have the right culture in place, that best serves the customer. The success of senior management in making all of that work is a combination of their leadership, people and communication skills.
This sounds infinitely reasonable in theory, but the reality is often so different. Senior leaders, who themselves are not particularly people focused, expect their customer interaction designers and in store staff to be customer focused. They don't walk the talk themselves and what is worse, they don't see the contradiction.
They haven't worked out yet that good customer service begins with good employee service. Love your staff and they will love your customers. Richard Branson is widely referenced with his philosophy of employees first, customers second. His idea is to produce the right mental framework for employees to then put the customer first. Our emotions lead our behaviors, which determines our performance.
Fine, love all of that, but how do we get it right? Leadership has to be clearly understood by the leaders. It is not a function of rank or longevity in the organisation. Instead, it is a function of the degree of cooperation we can get from our team. We might believe things are rolling out beautifully, in a pre-ordained way, in relation to how we treat the customer. Sadly, the front-line customer experience with our service could be entirely different from how the leaders planned it and how they want it.
To get that employee cooperation to buy into what we believe is the correct way forward, we need to have well developed people and communication skills. We also need to make sure that our middle managers also have those same skills. We could be doing things really well up at the top of the organisation, but our middle managers may be sabotaging the culture we want to build and we just do not see it.
If we want sincerity to be a function of our customer service, then, as an organisation, we have be sincere. If we want customers to feel appreciated, we have to appreciate our staff and do it in a sincere way. People can spot fake from a mile away. If we spend all of our time finding errors and faults, we may miss the things that are being done well, which we can communicate that we appreciate.
We might want many things in business such as personal success, greater revenues, reduced costs etc. We can only achieve these things through others: either our own staff or our customers. They may however want different things. We have to find the means to appeal to our staff and customers such that they want what we want. This is not manipulation. This is well developed people and communication skills. The trust is created and we lead others, to also want what we want. As Zig Ziglar famously noted, we can get whatever we want in this life, if we help enough other people get what they want.
To create that trust we have to be genuinely interested in others. This starts with our staff because we want them to be genuinely interested in our customer. When they do this, they build the trust with the buyer and a bond that is very difficult to break. If we don't demonstrate this genuine interest in our staff, we are not building the culture where they will naturally pass this feeling on to the customer.
There is an old Chinese saying that, “a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”. Yet in modern business, we have plenty of people floating around who don't smile. It could be the very top executives who are too serious to smile at their staff. They set up a culture that is dry and remote, but expect that at the interface with the customer, there will be an emotional connection with the brand. They just don't see the miscalculation and self-delusion involved here.
Bosses are often poor listeners, who imagine that their front line staff are all doing an excellent job of listening to the customer. What if that is not the case? If the bosses want to create a culture of good listening habits, then starting with themselves is a reasonable idea. When we listen, we learn more than we already know. This is so important when dealing with the customer. We need to make sure we have a culture of good questioning skills to trigger the opportunity for the customer to talk to us. In these conversations we can better come to understand what would be best for the customer and how to properly service them.
One of the frustrating things about training salespeople is the difficulty of getting them to stop focusing solely on what they want (bonuses, promotions, commissions) and concentrate on what the client wants (solve my problem). When they are talking to the client, the conversation is all about what the salesperson is hoping for. We have to learn to change that dialogue and talk in terms of the key interests of the buyer.
I was giving a keynote speech at an event hosted by one of our major clients, for their most important customers. Another speaker before me spent the entire time just talking about his own company! I really wondered what was the take away for the audience? Actually, I don't wonder, I know. It was a big fat zero. We can get caught up in ourselves and forget that everything we talk about with the buyer, has to be firmly focused on the client’s interests. The way we do that is by listening to their answers, to the brilliant questions we have designed for that purpose.
When a customer encounters one of our touch points, we want them to like and trust us. Doing this on-line is a challenge but good navigation, intuitive processes and clear explanations all assist in this regard. In the face-to-face world, we need to start in a friendly way. The culture of this basic idea however springs from within the company and is guided by the outlook of the leaders.
If the top management are a dour bunch, always serious, rarely smiling, stiff and “businesslike” rather than friendly with their teams, then we have to wonder why the front line staff would not be influenced by this outlook? If we want our people to smile and begin in a friendly way with customers, then the leadership group needs to demonstrate that attitude themselves and show this in their own staff interactions.
Another challenge for bosses is to shut up. Often, because they are older, more experienced and time poor, they get into the “everything abbreviated” habit of firing out orders. They do all the talking. The same problem with salespeople, they talk too much. The key to satisfying both staff and customers is to let them do the bulk of the talking. This requires a strategy and considerable discipline, but it is worth it because it creates a different type of culture in the organisation and this flows out to the customer interactions.
It is an obvious thing in sales to get customers to have a sense of ownership. We might describe the product or service and the situation after they have bought it. We regale them with the problem solutions we are bringing and the success platform we are going to create. We have a goal in mind – find the best solution for the client and get them to have ownership of this idea. We want them coming up with our preferred solution. We design the questions we will ask, with this in mind. It is our idea, but they reach the same idea on their own and in the process come to have ownership of that idea.
The same thing is needed with our staff. We can tell them how to do their jobs in great detail, but it would be better if we could have them come up with them own conclusion. Preferably one that matches what we have decided is in the best interests of the company. Again, question design here is crucial and if we do this correctly, the client arrives at their own conclusion and it matches the one we had previously reached. This way there is no sense of hard push sales or badgering of the buyer. They got there by themselves and so their sense of ownership is very high
We cannot be persuasive unless we can honestly see things from the point of view of the buyer. The aim in persuasion is to join the conversation going on in the head of the customer. This gets us on the same wavelength and our conversation will be in sync, because we are speaking about the things that are of greatest interest to them.
Trying to stop seeing everything from only our own viewpoint and to see if from the client’s viewpoint, sounds tremendously simple, but it requires a strong effort. We need to do this logically as well as emotionally. We have to be understanding at the empathetic level, which means really understanding the driving ideas and desires of the buyer. Nevertheless we need to enable this discipline to apply if we want to be successful in convincing others of what we think will serve them best.
If we want our staff to appreciate the business we can receive from the buyer, we need to build that attitude internally of praising staff and giving them honest appreciation. This is often missed in firms, where everything is rather cut and dried. Buying is an emotional activity which we justify with logic. We want our designers of the interface with the customer to have a sense of appreciation for the buyer. We want staff who are facing customers to do the same. If we are not giving our own staff praise and appreciation, we are not building a floor to ceiling culture that will work best when interacting with customers. It has to run on automatic, because we cannot be everywhere at the same time. We have to trust our people to deliver great customer service.
The ability to ask questions instead of making statements is an important skill. It is easier to drive this skill throughout the organization, if this is part of the culture. Bosses shooting out orders is a “tell” culture. If they automatically asked questions instead of giving orders, they would be building the right mentality for customer service. Our objective is to find out what the customer wants. To do that we need to be asking them questions. This is a mental frame around which the customer interaction needs to be built.
When we ask questions, we can come up with solutions that the customer themselves realise are the best outcomes for them. If we are more concentrated on what is best for us, then the customer can feel that too. So we want to understand their needs, suggest solutions that we know will make them happy to follow our lead.
Inside the organisation this is how the team should be managed. They should be doing what they are supposed to be doing, happily. Their bosses have communicated in a way that the staff member comes naturally to the same conclusion, as being the best way forward. When we achieve this common level of understanding then everything moves forward very smoothly.
The object of a sale is to exchange a good or a service for money. The degree to which that money can exceed the variable and fixed costs associated with delivering it, determines the success and longevity of the company. We all know that nothing happens in business without a sale. If that is the case then salespeople have a critical role to produce as much revenue as possible for the firm. There are prices set for goods and services. Goods are tangible items and plotting the costs and the margin of profit are relatively straight forward. Buy low and sell high is an old business maxim. Services are more difficult to price because they are intangibles. In both cases, the value proposition of the price against what is being delivered, is the communication piece that salespeople have to master in order to be successful.
Imagine my surprise, as an expert in sales training, when I meet salespeople who have not spent even one second trying to master the bridging of the gap between value and cost. Sitting in the audience at a speaker event, next to a thirtyish Japanese sale’s guy, I was astounded by a few things he said as we discussed selling over lunch. I was interested in hearing what his sales process was. He didn’t really understand my question because he had no defined process. He had been selling for this firm for seven years so he was an experienced salesperson.
He contacts a lead, gets an appointment, shows up and explains the service and submits a quote, he told me. Really? On the blank side of meal menu, I mapped out the elements of the sales process for him. Prepare for the meeting and focus your intention on one thing – getting the re-order, not just the solitary sale. Build trust through establishing rapport. Create interest by asking extremely well designed questions to understand the client’s needs. Now tell the client whether we can help them or not and if we can, explain the how of our solution. There may be points of insufficient clarity, concerns, hesitations or downright objections to what we are proposing. We need to deal with those before we proceed to ask for the order, and then we do the follow up to deliver the service or good.
He was impressed by this structural approach to the sales call, as he should have been, because he was certainly doing it the hard way. Having a roadmap makes the whole process much easier for both buyer and seller. I then asked him what does he do when the buyer says, “too expensive”. With a cherubic mien, he told me he offered to “drop the price”. Incredulous, I asked “by how much do you usually drop it?”. He quoted 20% as the number. There were four other sales people in his team and if that is how they roll over there, then that is an expensive first response to client pushback on pricing.
He was an experienced guy, but that was the best he could come up with. Why would that be? He didn’t have any other knowledge about how to deal with that type of situation. Do you think price comes up fairly regularly in sales conversations with buyers? Of course it does, so how could this continue like this, as if it were acceptable.
He should have said, “why do you say that” when told it was too expensive? Was the price objection genuine, a ruse, sport negotiation, time bound, or irrelevant because they haven’t seen enough value yet to understand the price point? There will be one highest priority element in the too expensive objection. It might be the actual volume of cash involved, budget allocation timings, internal competing project competition concerns, etc. Which one is it – we need to know.
I have been told “too expensive”, which I recognise is a short form summary of a host of reasons for not proceeding. When I questioned the why, it was a “budget issue”. Now as sale’s professionals we have to dig deeper, “why is it a budget issue?”. “Because that number will exceed our budget allocation for that quarter”.
That means it is not too expensive after all. It is just too expensive if paid in one quarter, but fully capable of purchase if the payments are split across quarters. Except you would never know that, if your response was to drop your price by 20%. Would you be willing to help the client out and split the payments across quarters? I would guess you would prefer that to having to drop your price.
The moral of this story is to take a very detailed look at what your salespeople are doing. Don’t confuse seven years of sales experience with one year of experience seven times. Also, don’t imagine that they have a process, that they know how to explain the value or to deal with objections. Based on what we see in our sales training classes and talking with clients, in Japan, the chances of that being the case are very low.
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