196: The Cold Calling On Zoom Salesperson - Part Six

<p>We have come to the final stage of the sales process, getting people to agree to move forward and place their order.  We have built the trust, understood the buyer’s needs, matched our solution to those needs, cleared up any hesitations, so now we can ask for their business.  What could be easier than this after all that preparatory work?  In Japan, as with many things, it is not that simple.</p> <p>Salespeople here fear the buyer.  They believe their job is to always say “Yes” to whatever the buyer wants.  Buyers in Japan have been trained by errant salespeople, to expect a pitch.  The idea is you turn up deliver your pitch and then the buyer will dissect it and tell you all the things wrong with it.  They then expect you to deal with those issues, so that they can be assured this is a safe buying decision.  Online or in person, the same expectation rules.</p> <p>This sounds reasonable, except it is folly for salespeople to do things this way.  I can never understand how a pitch could possibly be considered a good idea for the opening of your sales presentation?  How do you know what to pitch?  Most of us have multiple solutions, so which one should we start off with?  When pitching, we can begin talking about something which is not central to their interests, thus wasting their time or something completely irrelevant and so totally waste their time.</p> <p>This fear of the buyer spills over into not saying “No” to the buyer.  Sometimes, it makes no sense to agree to the buyer’s requests or demands.  Japanese salespeople will just take the command as an order and then twist the organisation up into knots to deliver the demand.  Over the years, whenever I question my sales teams about these client demands, they reply that they agreed because that is what the buyer wanted. “Why didn’t you say no”?, is met with blank looks, staring at their shoes or puzzlement.  The “say yes to everything” mentality is drilled into salespeople here, so that they cannot imagine a parallel universe, where you don’t agree to everyt