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.

I have been coaching a founder client here for quite a while now and his emotional reaction to his clients not buying on his schedule always surprises me. I keep telling him, “it is business; it is not personal”. We know that there are some customers who will just never buy, some who will buy now and some who will buy in the future. We just don’t know which is which until we get rejected.

When I get rejected in a deal, they are not rejecting Greg Story. They are rejecting my offer, in its current construction, at this point in their cash flow cycle, within the bounds of their strategic direction, in relation to what my competitors are offering and a whole bunch of other stuff I will never even know about.

Does it still hurt? Yes, of course it does. I get super annoyed and upset like everyone else. The difference between me and my client, who I am coaching, is I never pass that emotional reaction on to the client, who said “no” to my stupendous offer. He does pass it on because he feels so upset and frustrated. I keep telling him to chill. Write the email if you must, to get your hurt feelings out, just never send it. My advice isn’t working as yet, but I will continue to counsel him to not take it personally.

I had my own rejection case the other day. I was doing an RFP for a client and they came back and said they went with a rival firm who specialises in sales in their industry. What was my initial thought? “They are idiots” was the first reaction. This was followed by “why are they just doing what all of their competitors are doing? Why not use another more differentiated approach with something more fresh?”.

What did I reply? I didn’t mention any of that. By the time the decision has worked its way through their internal decision-making system, there is no going back. Telling them they are stupid may make me feel good, but it won’t alter their course of action. I wrote what I always write, “thank you for letting me know” and that is that. I don’t bother with appeals for consideration in the future. I just accept their idiotic decision and move on to find someone smarter, taller, better looking and who bathes and who can do a deal with us.

Now I also put them on my follow up list, because not every deal works out. Their situation can change and maybe my competitor is useless and what they provide doesn’t work. So I keep in touch and ask them if they have any needs that we can help them with, and I do this regularly. The initial interval is around six months. That is long enough for them to realise they made a huge mistake by using my competitor and that they got nothing from that ridiculous solution they chose instead of mine. After that, I follow up every three to four months, because business is fluid and what wasn’t on the table is now in play.

How long should you follow up for? Ryan Serhant, who I follow and who started his own successful real estate brokerage in the US, says “keep following up until they die”. I am not that pushy, because I figure there are reputational costs to being too pushy and too insistent in Japan.

Tokyo is big, but it is also a small village in many ways. We sell to Japanese domestic firms and foreign multi-national companies. Our reputation as Dale Carnegie, a business based on being able to get on well with all different types of people, has to be careful how we are perceived in the market. If we say one thing, but do another, then our brand consistency will suffer and so will our sales.

Where is the line between persistence, which is admirable, and being too pushy, which is frowned upon here? It is not always clear, but if I feel that there is no interest, then after about four follow-ups with no reaction stretched over a twelve-month period, I will shelve that firm for a while. The people may change in the future and maybe someone smarter will be the person to talk to or maybe their business has changed and they are now more open to our solutions.

Regardless of what the client does, we can control how we react and we must keep cool, calm and collected in the face of failure and rejection. Is that easy? No, but the choices are few. My client hasn’t quite gotten to the point of handling the rejection in a calm, non-emotive manner yet, but I will keep working on him until he gets there. I am constantly working on myself, too. I have found that no one is a clear genius with this stuff and we are all a work in progress.

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.