I belong to Dan Slater’s Delphi Network and every week his newsletter contains unattributed quotes from CEO conversations he has heard at his recent events. One of them caught my eye about sales. The anonymous contributor was saying that selling in Japan has to be no selling, a bit like a zen approach – “the sales of no sales” type of approach. I found that interesting and was wondering what on earth this CEO was talking about?

The inference was that in Japan you can’t try to sell company representatives to buy your solution and you need a much more tangential angle of entry. I thought to myself, well that doesn’t gel with what I have been doing here. I definitely sell companies on the idea of buying our training and have zero hesitation about doing so. What is the difference? I may be creating a straw man here to make my point and risk misinterpreting what this CEO said, but I think they know little about sales.

They are probably imagining that sales is all hard sell. We enter the gladiatorial arena and we brow beat the buyer in submission. Relentless with our 50 closes, we never take no for an answer. We push and push and keep trying to jam the square peg into the round hole, regardless that it will not fit.

That is not sales to me and it certainly is not an approach which will yield revenues in Japan. When I first got here doing sales in the late 1980s, I tried to use “consultative selling” techniques which I had studied from American sales gurus. It was very distressing to find that these techniques were not working at all here.

I would get straight into the sales conversation and start asking them detailed questions about the condition and status of their business. To my confusion, they wouldn’t answer my questions. Instead, they would ask me questions about myself and my company and they wouldn’t buy.

Looking back, I now realise that I was so naïve and an idiot. I turned up for a first meeting, they didn’t know me or my company from a turnip and they got grilled on the inner sanctum questions about their business, from a total stranger, and even more exotically, a foreigner to boot. No wonder they wouldn’t answer my slick well-honed consultative sales questions.

I had built no trust and, worse, was in a hurry. Business trips are expensive and I had to justify the cost of getting me to swan around Japan for weeks at a time to my Aussie bosses back in Brisbane. The buyers in these cases were actually non-buyers, and trained me on what I needed to do. I realised I needed to spend more time talking about who I was, who my firm was, what we had done so far and establish a foundation of understanding and work toward building trust.

I am a slow learner, so for many years the sales meeting was basically run by the buyers rather than me, the sales guy. I actually can’t recall where this idea came from, but at a point in time, I realised I needed an entry point which would allow me to be able to ask my questions and to be able to follow the consultative sales approach.

My formula was and is very simple. I describe who we are, what we do, who else we have done it for and the success they have had and suggest that MAYBE we could do the same for this buyer. I then say, “In order for me to know if that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”.

The MAYBE bit is very important in Japan. In other parts of the world, salespeople will no doubt be very bolshie on the fact that they are the perfect partner, that their firm can do the whole shebang. Here we need to introduce some softness into the equation, some muted tones, indirect assertions which don’t come across as pushy.

Not every buyer here will accept this approach and some, a tiny minority, will insist on hearing my pitch. I do it, but what I want to do is stop the meeting right there, pack up my gear and leave. I have no idea what on earth they need, because I haven’t been able to ask any questions, so what am I pitching against? I am flying blind and there is a zero possibility this conversation will lead to a client or a deal, so I should reduce my losses, leave and go find a client I can help. Obviously, that is too confrontational in Japan, so I give my pitch, trying to make it broad enough that it might jag some point of interest. It rarely succeeds.

Getting permission to ask questions is the key to the door of getting deals in Japan and if this step is not achieved, then you are trapped in mindless pitch hell.