Most of the sales jobs in Japan require the ability to sell in Japanese. That usually means native speakers of Japanese or foreigners who can operate at a highly sophisticated language level. There will be exceptions, but they are not that numerous. Probably the bilingual recruitment industry is one of the main employers of foreigners who can’t speak Japanese and English-language schools. One could argue that today neither requires any real sales skills. Recruitment, in particular, is at an inflection point where the demand definitely exceeds the supply, so anyone with a pulse can match a candidate from the database and invoice the firm looking to hire staff.

Be they Japanese candidates for sales jobs or foreigners, what should we be looking for? Some might look for a track record of sales results. That is one indicator, but often not all that useful. Is the methodology in your shop teams doing sales and being rewarded as a team with salary and bonuses? Or are there individual targets and commissions attached to the sales? This is such a different construct, it depends on how you are configured.

Japanese salespeople, in my experience, love a salary, bonuses and team accountability. They are reluctant to take individual responsibility for their sales results. The money is obviously better when operating as an individual, but most Japanese salespeople feel overly exposed to the harsh realities of the sales life in this situation and prefer the comfy team embrace. So expecting rocketing individual results from a salesperson who has been operating within a team is overly optimistic. Despite that, I always favour personal accountability for results and work on gluing the team together, even though they are focused on getting their own numbers.

How have they been trained is also a strong indicator? Very few salespeople anywhere on the planet have been given formal sales training. In Japan, it is usually on-the-job training or OJT where they go with their boss or more likely, with their senior to client calls. Japanese salespeople turning up on their own is rare in Japan. Usually they travel in pairs, as one is the understudy to the other, until such time that they become the senior in their own pair. Ideally, we either want properly trained salespeople or we want to be able to train them formally, rather than rely on the Japanese system of intergenerational mediocrity.

In some cases, the salesperson needs a degree of technical background for their work. Japan though has a weak connection between what they study at University and the jobs they wind up doing, so often there is no direct match. In many cases, the engineers may have the required technical training, but no formal sales training, so they are reliant on the OJT system for developing their sales abilities, which is at best a hit and miss affair.

In general, broad skills are required and, in particular, communications and human relations skills are needed. Technical people can often be duds at both, so they need to be developed. In other cases, the person has these key skills but is weak technically. The Unicorn is always hard to net. When I first worked at the retail bank in Shinsei, the hiring criteria was maths skills for salespeople selling investment products to wealthy individuals. A rather dubious idea, I thought, so I changed it to put more emphasis on people and communication skills. Naturally, the results vastly improved immediately.

The other element we need to think about is our brand. Does the person we are looking at hiring fit our brand or can we teach them how to fit. If I see a sales guy with some of the things we are looking for, but has scruffy, poorly shined shoes, I know that I can teach him how to fix that issue. If his haircut is a disaster, we can fix that too. The point, though, is the individual has to submit to the brand and fit in with the company’s thinking. In today’s environment where getting a sales job is super easy, maybe they don’t want to change themselves to match the brand and expect things to flow the other direction. In my case, I would always think long-term and want to defend the brand, because it is bigger than one salesperson.

There is no doubt that we are all facing a lot of difficulty finding suitable salespeople based on our preferred criteria. Whether we like it or not, we have to be flexible and the best idea is to train the people we hire to get them to the level we need. Expecting they will come fully outfitted from the get-go is now a fantasy. Times have changed and we need to move with the changes.