217: How To Deal With Major Misperceptions Buyers Have About Your Company

<p>A stranger contacts you out of the blue or you meet them fleetingly at an event and they call you afterwards.  They are a salesperson and they want to sell you something.  Our typical reaction is one of caution.  Why is that?  We have all become addicted to technology which has sped everything in business up to warp speed, but somehow we are all perennially time poor.  We don’t want to be distracted from our tasks or waste our time listening to what someone else wants.  We are also not sure if we can trust this salesperson.  Why would that be?  Maybe we were duped or heard of someone we know being duped by a “salesperson” in the past, so we are permanently suspicious of anyone we meet in sales.</p> <p> </p> <p>This is not a great start is it.  We have to deal with all the baggage that our buyers have accumulated over the years.  Japan is a brutally vicious sales environment.  We are all in a street fight with our competitors and like in a physical street fight, there are no rules and little mercy shown.  Rivals will lie, disparage, spread false rumours, make nasty insinuations about us and our company.  “They are having financial trouble and won’t be around much longer”, “all I ever hear are complaints about their bad after sales service”, “their representative keeps getting fired from companies, so he won’t be around for long”, etc.  “But Greg, Japan is such an honest country, would rivals lie so brazenly?”, you might be thinking.  Yes, some of them will do so without any shame or guilt.  I have heard these wild stories myself, shared by buyers, so from my own experiencE I know this happens.</p> <p> </p> <p>How do we start the sales call in Japan?  We chit chat a little, then we get into the sales discussion.  If we don’t know what we are doing, we are launching straight into our pitch about our wonderful widget.  If this is you, please stop doing that.  Rather we should be asking questions to completely understand the needs of the client.  We can do this through just asking for permission to ask questions an