“I like talking with people, so I want to be in sales” is a terrifying conversation to have with one of your staff. They are not doing so well in their current role, so they imagine they will just glide across to sales to have an easier time of it. They may try and do it internally as a switch of roles or they may quit their current job and go and try to get a sales job somewhere else. Given the shortage of salespeople in Japan at the moment and from now on ad nauseum, there is a strong chance they will be picked up by a competitor or another company quite easily.

They are partially correct. Yes, it helps if you like people as a salesperson. Also, having good communication skill is a definite requirement. Talking to someone and persuading them to hand over their hard earned cash is a different equation. What do we talk about, how do we talk about it, when should we be silent, when should we speak up? These are important questions about which they are ignorant.

When I hear people say they like “talking to people” that sets off an alarm in my head. One of the biggest issues with salespeople is that they talk too much. I am guilty of it too. I am passionate about helping people to grow their businesses and their careers, so I bring a lot of belief and energy to the conversation. That is all good, but it is also dangerous. If I am doing all the talking, I maintain possession of what I already know but I don’t gain any additional knowledge of the client and their problem.

Sometimes, I catch myself and realise the only noise in the room is me talking, so I should ask the client a question, shut up and get them talking instead. I want them to tell me about their current situation and where they want to be. In Japan, you can’t do that. Clients are passively expecting your pitch, so they can destroy it and assure themselves this is a low risk transaction they are considering entering into. So, the first thing out of our mouths here has to be a question seeking permission to ask questions. People who like talking will have no problem with this traditional pitch approach. In fact they will probably be happy, to get straight into the pitch.

Fine all around except for one small thing. What are you pitching to the client? How do you know what solutions from your line-up will best match the client’s need? What normally happens is the salesperson blunders on, talking about things which are irrelevant to the client. They completely squander their client facing time and leave the meeting with nothing. This is not good.

Get permission first, then ask those first two questions – where are you now and where do you want to be? We are trying to gauge urgency on the buyer’s part. If they think they can bridge this gap, then they will try and do it themselves and not involve any external parties. That means no business for us and we are wasting our time to continue sitting there chatting with them, no matter how much we enjoy a good chat.

If they can’t do it by themselves, then we want to know why? There is no point going straight into solution mode at this point, talking, talking, talking. We should ask that exact question: “if you know where you want to be, why aren’t you there now?”. What a pearler of a question. In this answer lies our raison d’etre. Maybe we can’t do it for them. That is good to know, because we have to high tail it out of there and go and find someone we can help. No point hanging round for more chatting with a business dead end in front of you. Another other issue is talking past the deal. When the buyer agrees, only talk about the follow up and stop selling. People who like talking get themselves into trouble by saying too much and opening up a Pandora’s box of deal breakers.

If we are doing our job, we are hardly talking at all during the meeting, except to ask a few clarifying questions. “Liking to talk with people” is a mirage, would-be salespeople see about what is involved in a professional sales life. This is their uniformed illusion about the job. Instead, I want to hear, “I like asking people questions”. In all my years in business though, I have never heard that lucid comment emerge as a precursor to a life in sales. If you want a career in sales, now you know what to say to a prospective boss to get them interested in hiring you.

Generally speaking, we mainly have failures of follow up in B2B sales. The conduct of the sale’s meeting is normally done professionally. Perhaps the salesperson could have asked better questions or presented the application of the benefits of the solution better. Maybe they could have dealt more professionally with objections or closed the deal more effectively. In B2C though, the troubles start from the point of contact. Getting this wrong means no meeting, let alone no sale.

I blame the managers for these issues. If they were doing their job properly, then there wouldn’t be these customer facing problems. We are salespeople and we are also buyers. We go shopping, we eat out, we buy lots of stuff in the face to face environment. Maybe not as much as before, because of Covid-19, but we still we do engage in some B2C activities. When the whole hospitality industry is on its knees, you expect that those survivors still operating, are really maximising their opportunities to build their clientele.

Imagine my surprise when I called a restaurant in Midtown for a lunchtime booking and bumped into some idiocy that flies in the face of the current reality. It was around 11.31am and I was calling to make a booking for a 12.00 luncheon. The staff member who answered the phone told me that all bookings for lunch close at 11.30am. I could just show up at 12.00 and take my chances with the rest of the punters. It is 11.31am when we are having this conversation. I asked him does that mean I should book at another restaurant instead of his. There are tons of restaurants in Midtown by the way. Irony and sarcasm aren’t really features of the Japanese language, so my obtuse point went straight over his head.

He had been told that bookings for lunch close at 11.30am and that was that. The idea that we are in the middle of a pandemic and that many enterprises in his industry are closing for lack of business, would warrant additional flexibility wasn’t one that had ever crossed his mind. He couldn’t connect the dots and realise that what his job depends on are customers. It was not clear to him that every restaurant wants to build new clients and to boost the spending of their regular clients. He is just an employee, so building the business isn’t part of his work remit.

Well it should be. He could have been focused on grabbing my booking, guaranteeing two covers at lunch, rather than relying on providence to supply walk-ins off the street. He could have made me feel special by telling me that although 11.30am is the cut off point, he would take the booking anyway and really looked forward to meeting me at 12.00, “Ask for Taro and I will take care of you”, he could have said. How would I have felt? Would I have become more likely to go back again in the future? Could I become a valued customer? The answers are obvious to me but the concept was not in his mind.

By way of contrast, I like Elios in Hanzomon, which is across town for me. I have been going there with clients and with my family, since 2001 when I came back to Tokyo from Osaka. What is my lifetime value as a customer? Elio certainly knows this equation and so do his staff. That is one of the reasons why I keep coming back.

So I was wondering what is the difference and the reasons are obvious. The leadership outlook and work culture of the restaurants are different. The bosses determine the way the staff think about the business and the customers. So, the natural extension of this reflection is to move to self reflection. Are my staff flexible when dealing with our clients? Are they just following the rule book and not using their brains? Do they feel trusted enough to take responsibility to fix an issue for a client or are they ninjas, hiding behind the rules. As the boss, you cannot be in every client conversation, so you have to delegate client care to your team. Let’s all take another look at the culture we have created. Are we allowing individual decision making based around a common understanding of how we think about our clients?

One of the things we quickly learn as leaders is that telling people something once, almost guarantees no one will remember it. It becomes annoying to have to keep repeating the same things over and over, but you find you have to do it. So, it always a good practice to remind everyone about how we think about serving the client. Explain where this aligns with the value system, the vision and the mission of the enterprise. There has to be a symbiotic relationship between our teams and the clients. The boss determines how that plays out at every micro-interaction, every day.