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Having an audience interested enough in your topic to ask questions is a heartening occurrence.  Japan can be a bit tricky though because people are shy to ask questions.  Culturally the thinking is different to the West.  In most western countries we ask questions because we want to know more.  We don’t think that we are being disrespectful by implying that the speaker wasn’t clear enough, so that is why we need to ask our question.  We also never imagine we must be dumb and have to ask a question because we weren’t smart enough to get the speaker’s meaning the first time around.  We also rarely worry about being judged on the quality of our question.  We don’t fret that if we ask a stupid question, we have now publically announced to everyone we are an idiot.

Some speakers encourage questions on the way through their talks.  They are comfortable to be taken down deeper on an aspect of their topic.  They don’t mind being moved along to an off topic point by the questioner.  The advantage of this method is that the audience don’t have to wait until the end of the talk to ask their question.  They can get clarification immediately on what is being explained.  There might be some further information which they want to know about so they can go a bit broader on the topic. 

This also presents an image of the speaker as very confident in their topic and flexible to deal with whatever comes up.  They also must be good time managers when speaking, to get through their information, take the questions on the way through and still finish on time.  In today’s Age Of Distraction, being open to questions at any time serves those in the audience with short concentration spans or little patience.  Not everyone in the audience can keep a thought aflame right through to the end, so having forgotten what it was they were going to ask, they just sit there in silence when it gets to Q&A.  Their lost question may have provoked an interesting discussion by the speaker on an important point.  Having one person brave enough to ask a question certainly encourages everyone else to ask their question.  The social pressure of being first has been lifted and group permission now allows for asking the speaker about some points in their talk.

The advantage of waiting until the end is that you remain in control of the order of the talk.  You may deal with all of the potential questions by the end of the talk and the Q&A allows for additional things that have come up in the minds of the audience.  It also makes it easier to work through the slide deck in order.  The slide deck is alike an autopilot for guiding us through the talk, as we don’t have to remember the order, we just follow the slides.  Of course if we allow questions throughout, we can always ask our questioner to wait, because we will be covering that point a little later in the talk.  Nevertheless the questions at the end formula gives the speaker more control over the flow of their talk with no distractions or departures from the theme.

Time control becomes much easier.  We can rehearse our talk and get it down to the exact time, before we open up for questions during the time allotted for Q&A.  If we have to face hostile questions, this is when they will emerge.  Prior to that, we have at least gotten through what we wanted to say.  We had full control of the proceedings. If we get into a torrid time with a questioner, early in the piece, it may throw our equilibrium off balance or cause some consternation or embarrassment to the audience, detracting from what we want to say.  The atmosphere can turn unpleasant very quickly which pollutes everyone’s recollection of you as the speaker.  Also, if we don’t know how to handle hostile questions, our credibility can crumble.  A crumbling credibility in a public forum is not a good look.

So my recommendation is for the seasoned pro speakers to take questions whenever you feel like it.  For those who don’t present so frequently, err on the side of caution and take the questions at the end.

Teams are fluid. People move or leave and new people join. Targets go up every year. The compliance and regulatory requirements become more stringent, the market pivots and bites you, currency fluctuations take you from hero to zero in short order. Head office is always annoying. There are so many aspects of business which line up against having a strong sense of team. We can’t be complacent if we have built a strong team and we have to get to work, if we are in the process of team building.

Sports teams are always high profile and successful sports coaches are lauded for their ability to produce results, especially when they are always dealing with tremendous fluctuations in the make up of the team. Vince Lombardi is one of those much heralded coaches and he noted: “Build for your team a feeling of oneness, of dependence on one another and of strength to be derived by unity”.

Sterling stuff, but how do you do that? Vince had access to some of the most highly paid and motivated team members on the planet, but what about the rest of us? We often haven’t chosen the team. We have inherited someone else’s criteria and selection model. People come to us from different companies or different sections and so how do we address the issue of establishing a common purpose?

We need to make sure each individual has a clear sense of the reason the team exists, their individual role and the importance of their role to the team effort. If you suddenly asked your team members about the reason the team exists, you might be dumbfounded to receive so many disparate answers. We assume everyone knows and that we all in sync, but we should check. And we should do it regularly, as the team composition changes over time and new people may not know.

 Establishing an agreed set of team values is an important glue to hold the whole team together. Whenever we do this exercise for ourselves or for clients, we always get a huge range of values being nominated. This is helpful but not particularly helpful. We need to do it in two parts, starting with our personal values and then do the team values. Ideally, each individual’s values will also be part of the team values so that the ownership factor is sky high.

A team vision is the next stage and this is where many people start to weep. They are heartily sick of the word vision. So many vision consultants, articles, videos and podcasts covering this one little word. It bogs down and eventually all the fluff associated with the word, collapses under its one weight. Regardless, you still need a team vision, so get over it. 

Jack Welch pointed out, “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision and relentlessly drive it to completion”.

A vision is a future picture of what could be and what should be, regardless of what is today. The vision is stated in the present tense, as if we were already at the final state of development and success that we are aiming for. The visualisation is positive and optimistic and the words both powerful and specific. We need a vision to define where we want to be, in order to work out how we will get there.

Our mission is the other building block.   It describes what we do and by definition, what we don’t do. Clarity around objectives and goals means counting out some shiny objects that are not core requirements for the team. The vision tends to last long, as do the core values, whereas we have to keep revisiting the mission. This is because things change and we may need to change tack and go in a different direction. In which case our mission has also flexed and we need to restate it. We do this so that everyone in the team has clarity around what we are doing and how we are doing it.

Successful teams have achieved great clarity throughout the entire organization about what the team is trying to do. This is not an accident, but the product of good leadership work to establish a base and then good ongoing work, to keep the ideas alive and relevant.

The hero’s journey is for the very, very few.  I did it my way, I slaved away in a garret and got to the top, I realised the American dream – all good stuff, but an illusion for most.  The reality is there are more of us who need the cooperation of others, than those who can succeed despite others.  The age of the “one” has been taken over by the age of the “many”.  Hero teams are more powerful than individual heroes.

The problem is although we may need the cooperation of others, we are not that good at getting it.  We limit our scope through two key areas – how we communicate and how we react.  We like what we like and we find affinity with those who like similar things.  We like to speak in a certain way and we click with others who speak the same way.  It might be a shared accent, denoting a similar background, and we are all pretty good at spotting the subtleties of dialect.  That is okay, but it still doesn’t help us to go far enough.  You might share a common accent, but that doesn't mean you get on with everyone from back home\

Reflecting the preferences of others is a much more effective way of building trust and cooperation.  Does this mean being two faced and manipulative?  No, it means being flexible and other focused rather than me, me, me focused. 

When we are speaking with others we notice the way they prefer to communicate.  It will vary from very low energy to high output - softly spoken to plain loud.  Neither side likes the other much.  The loud person can’t hear the softly spoken person and feels annoyed, because they have to struggle to hear what they are saying.  The softly spoken person is quietly upset, because they don’t like people who are loud and aggressive.

The key here is to adjust ourselves to suit the situation and the other person, if we want to gain their cooperation.  If you say, “well I am me, I have my rights and they should adjust themselves to how I like it”, then let me know how that is working out for you?

We will need to increase our energy and volume when we speak with high output people.  We may feel like we are screaming, but on their scale all we are doing is communicating normally.  The opposite applies, when we have to drop the volume and the strength.  We may feel like we are whispering and it is killing us, but the counterparty feels very comfortable chatting with you.

Some individuals are really detail oriented, they are constantly seeking data, proof, evidence about what they are being told.  When we interact with this group, we notice the micro focus immediately and so we need to start adding a lot more detail to our explanations or recommendations.  We may feel this is too nitty gritty and frankly, massive overkill, but that is not how they see it.  For them this is absolutely normal and unremarkable.

The opposite preference is for big picture discussions.  Don’t worry about the details, the practicality, the roll out - we will get to that later.  They want to plot the future direction in broad brush terms.  For detail orientated people this is painful, because everything seems fluffy and unrealistic.  Don’t fight it – encourage them to go big and go with them.  Put up some crazy ideas (judged crazy from your evidence based thinking point of view) of your own and don’t feel guilty.  They will welcome all crazy ideas, including yours.

When we hear something we don’t like, we often react first and think later.  Bad approach!  Instead, bite your tongue and hear them out – don’t jump in over the top of them with your counter idea, critique or cutting comment.  Try ear, brain, mouth rather than ear, mouth, brain as an order of approach.  Use a “cushion”, a sentence that is neither for nor against what they are saying.  It is a neutral statement, used to simply break our usual pattern of too rapid intervention.  It gives us crucial time to think about what we want to say and how we are going to say it. 

Before we comment or attempt to criticise them, we instead ask them why they think that or why they say that.  While they are providing some background and context around their position, we are able to bypass our immediate chemical reaction and reach deeper down to our calmer second or even third, considered response.  When we do speak we may even accept their position because the context made sense or be able to suggest a counter position.  We can do this in a calm way, that doesn’t lead to an argument and bad feelings.

These two actions on our part will build the trust and establish the lines of communication required to convince other to help us on our own hero team journey.  Speak in a reflective manner and don’t react immediately to what you are hearing.  You may think this is killing you, because it is so different to how you normally operate, but if you want to be effective with all types of people, this is the secret – adjust yourself first. 

Newtonian physics says for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Fine, but we don’t want that – we want a different and improved reaction, so let’s change our own angle of approach with others, so that we get a much better response.

Action Steps

1. Be flexible and be focused on those with whom you are communicating:

• If they are micro, you go micro
• If they are macro, you go macro
• If they are fast paced, then speed up
• If they are moderate in pace, then slow down

1. When you hear something you don’t like use ear, brain, mouth
2. Before you reply, use a cushion to give yourself time to craft your response

Normally, as the seller, we are getting told “no” in sales, rather than the other way around.  When salespeople become desperate to hit their numbers, they start to do crazy things.  They start telling lies to the buyer, they exaggerate the scope of the solution, they savagely discount the price, they overpromise on the follow-up, they agree to horrendous delivery dates, they become visibly agitated during the sales call.  All bad. 

When we meet the client, our brain has to get into a specific gear.  That means we are focused on how can we contribute to build the client’s business?  What can we do that will grow the buyer’s revenues, cut costs or expand market share? That mental gear is entirely different to  questions such as  “how will I make my monthly sales quota?”, “how will I stop being fired?”, etc.  The latter are solely focused on you and not the buyer and this impacts what comes out of your mouth.

If we are doing a proper job of prospecting we will always have alternatives.  When the pipeline is too thin, desperation sets in.  The existing clients get worked over, to try and squeeze blood from a stone, because there are no other options.  It is easy to talk to an existing client than go and find a new one, which is so why salespeople hate prospecting – it is hard and tough work.  Nevertheless, prospecting and building pipeline are the keys to positioning ourselves as sellers.

When we have a strong pipeline, we are not dependent on any one sale.  When we are doing the questioning phase of the sale’s call we start to understand what the client needs.  We may realise that what we have isn’t really a fit.  When we don’t have pipeline, we start to think how we can make it fit anyway.  This is desperate thinking and ultimately very damaging to our trust, brand and reorder possibilities.  We are thinking single order, rather than the start of many orders. 

We may know that to take on this project is going to put a lot of pressure on the back office or the supply chain within our organisation.  We have to keep in mind the opportunity cost that this deal represents, not just the income it will generate. We are impinging on other better quality work to do this deal. If the pricing for doing it was at a premium, it might be justifiable but that is usually quite rare.  Or if the scale of the work is considerable and sustained over a long period of time, it might be viable. In fact, usually, a bad deal more often than not comes with other ugly lumpy bits attached to it that are not very attractive.

We are better to say “no”.   When deals come that are outside of our usual scope and therefore require a lot of work, the price needs to be high, to warrant doing it.  If it is not, then get back to being busy building pipeline and let that deal flow to a competitor, who is either better suited to handle it or more stupid than we are.  It hurts to give business away to a competitor, but that is the better choice than damaging your own operation.

A deal came to me though LinkedIn and the buyer was a substantial company in Singapore, with a strong brand name.  The details of what they wanted to do in Japan though, had potential grief written all over it for me.  It was somewhat related to what we do, but just that bit off to the side, where we would have to do a lot of work to make the project work.  The money mentioned was so, so and really didn’t cover the extra work that would be needed.  I introduced the deal to a “frenemy” rival company and asked if they were interested.  They said yes and so I connected them with the seller. 

I heard later, that they got hammered on the pricing, when they came to deal with the lower level operations people inside the company.  A typical Singaporean business play where they are very tough on pricing, often known as the “squeeze all the juice out of the deal for the buyer” play.  The “frenemy” took the pricing offered, rather than saying no or demanding more money and got smashed. It turned out to be a huge amount of work, sucked up a lot of their time and burned some of their contacts.  This is exactly what I thought it would do to me too. I was glad I missed that bullet.  Saying “no” was a very, very good choice on my part.  It was also a one off deal, so there was no hope of repeat business.  This made it less attractive, because I couldn’t see any return on the investment of time and effort.

I didn't take it because I had pipeline, alternatives, other potential business.  Say “no” to a bad or marginal deal and keep working on building pipeline to find better deals.  You will spend the same amount of time, but the rewards are vastly different.

Gaining credibility as a speaker is obviously important.  We often do this by telling our own experiences. However, having too much focus on us and away from the interests of the audience is a fine line we must tread carefully.  When we get this wrong, a lot of valuable speaking time gets taken up and we face the danger of losing our audience. They are like lightening when it comes to escaping to the internet, to go find things they feel are more relevant.

We must always keep in the front of our mind that whenever we face an audience, we are facing a room packed with critics and skeptics.  We definitely have to establish our credibility or they will simply disregard what we are saying.  The usual way to gain credibility is to draw on our experiences.   A great way to do this is telling our war stories.  The focus is usually on things that are important to us, so we certainly enjoy reliving the past.  In fact, we can enjoy it a bit too much. We begin telling our life story because we are such an interesting person. We are certain everyone will want to hear it, won’t they.

Actually, their own life story is much more fascinating for them. So, we should be trying to relate what we are talking about to their own experiences and their realities.  When we want to tell our stories, we have to be committed to keeping them short and to the point.  As soon as an audience gets the sense the speaker is rambling down memory lane, they get distracted, bored and mentally depart from the proceedings.  I was listening to a senior company leader giving a talk and he went on and on about how he started in sales and all his adventures.  He was obviously enjoying it, but what did something that happened forty years ago in America have to do with the rest of us here in Tokyo?

A good way to keep the audience engaged and focused on themselves is by asking rhetorical questions.  These are questions for which we don’t require an actual answer, but the audience don’t know that.  This creates a bit of tension and they have to focus on the issue we have raised. The focus is now on the same points the speaker wants to emphasise.  Because of the question, they have to mentally go there themselves. It is much more effective than having the speaker try and drag them there.

Rather than just telling war stories, we can ask them to compare the story we are going to tell with their own experiences.  In this case, the speaker’s example is just a prompt for them to identify with the situation being unveiled.  This is better because they are relating the issue to their own reality.  They can take the speaker’s example and either agree with it or disagree with it.  Even if they disagree with it, their different stance will be based on their own facts rather than opinion.  We might say, “I am going to relate an incident which happened to me in a client meeting.  Have any of you had this experience and if so what did you do?  Listen to what I did and see if you think I made the best choice or not”.  We have now set up the comparison with their own world. This gets their attention in a natural way, rather than me banging on about what a legend I was in the meeting with the client.

Talking about ourselves is fun but it is dangerous.  How should we incorporate it? As we plan our talk, we have to work out the cadence of the delivery to includE our war stories.  If we are talking too much about ourselves the audience may lose interest and mentally escape from us.  If we have designed in content which will involve them, we can keep them with us all the way to the end. This doesn’t happen by itself.  We have to carefully implant it when designing the talk.  It is also very important to test this design during the rehearsal.  Better to discover any issues in rehearsal rather than testing the content on a live audience.  Sounds simple enough, but remarkably, 99% of speakers do no rehearsal at all. Doubt that statistic?  How many speakers have you heard where you got the sense they had carefully rehearsed their talk?  Case closed!

In developing our attention grabbing cadence during the talk, rather than waiting to Q&A to deal with any pushback on our opinions, we can go early.  We can anticipate what those objections might be and handle them during the main body of our speech.  We pose them as rhetorical questions. Some people in the audience when they hear these objections will be thinking “yeah, that’s right”. We then use our evidence drawn from our experiences, our war stories, to demolish that potential objection and ensure we maintain control of the issue.  This technique also engages the audience more deeply in our presentation, as they start to add perspectives they may not have thought of before.  There is also a strong feeling of comprehensiveness about our talk too.  It shows we are aware of different views, are not afraid of them and have an answer to remove them as a consideration.

We are on the cusp of a change amongst youth in Japan.  Those already entered into the workforce have memories of the Lehman Shock and the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdown and the impact this had on the job market.  They are looking for security of employ and family life, because of the fragility of both were exposed to them in September 2008 and again in March 2011.  They saw the dire straights of those who slipped into the part-time employee hell of low wages, no prospects and everything tough, tough, tough.

In 2016, only 6.9% of those in the 25-34 age group switched jobs.  The September 2016 survey by the Japan Institute For Labor Policy and Training also found nearly 90% supported lifetime employment.  This figure was only 65% in 2004.  Of those in their 20s, 55% wanted to work for the same company right through. That same number was only 34% in 2004. 

There is a generation coming behind them though who will be different again.  They were born around the time of the Sydney Olympics in 2000, have little recollection of the Lehman debacle in 2008 and except for those with close links to the Tohoku region, vaguely recall the ordeal of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear core meltdowns.

They are going to graduate after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.  They are going to see the part-time jobs market filled with Asian, mainly Chinese, students working their allowed 38 hours a week (more hours than the work week in France).  They are going to see driverless electric cars, Artificial Intelligence breakthroughs, the ubiquity of voice commands, bumptious robots and the Internet of Things controlling their lives.  Their demographic curve is in rapid decline, their numbers are dropping every year and will be half today’s figures by 2060. They are going to be in big demand.  The current unemployment rate of 2.8% will sink even further.  They will be free agents looking at multiple job offers and openings available to them. 

They will be the last juku or cram school generation.  University entrance requirements will collapse. Except for the absolute elite institutions, a pulse and cash will be the only entry requirements.  Tokyo is going to cap the numbers of students on campus, but the rest of the country will have no limits.  Many universities will be hungry for fees and desperate to attract students.  The Millennial’s successor generation, who some are calling Generation Z and for Japan, I am calling the “Olympics’ Generation”,  will have an entirely different perspective on education.  “Exam hell” will mainly disappear as a cultural construct for the 90%-95% who don’t aim for the elite universities.

 Mid-career hires are still an anathema for many local Japanese firms, but that is going to have to change. They simply will not be able to find staff.  What to do with women is confusing for them, as their structures are built on the old post-war model of husband works and the wife raises the kids.  That will have to disappear quite soon. 

This whole concept will have to change and they are going to have to learn to be more flexible about hours worked and leave.  When the kids get sick, the husband is still unlikely to be dropping tools and heading off to the school to pick up junior.  The working wife will need to do that and woe be tide to any firm who doesn’t cooperate, because others will and she will move on.   

Today, some domestic firms still look askance at employees having a profile on LinkedIn.  This site started as a pseudo-job board, but it has become another source of useful information available for free.  This will all add up to assisting greater job mobility.

Recruiters will be poaching people right, left and center to satisfy firms desperate to find young workers.  The wooing to move will be constant.  We have seen an aberration of Economics 101 where labour supply shortages have not yet resulted in wages growth.  That cannot last much longer.  Certainly this Olympics’ Generation will enjoy the financial benefits of powerful labour demand.

The key word for this Olympics’ Generation will be “mendokusai” （めんどくさい）or “bothersome” and anything duly defined will be resisted.  Companies are going to struggle with leading this generation.  The current Millennials may become their immediate bosses, but the cultural divide between them will be vast. 

Middle managers in Japan will be faced with the greatest challenges of any generation of Japanese leaders.  Unless they are properly trained for this onslaught, it is going to be a nightmare.  Their situation will simply outstrip the leadership answers usually tapped from OJT (On The Job Training).  There is no roadmap for this eventuality, because this is all a brave new world of leadership. 

Is anyone in Japan thinking about this?  I would say based on my discussions so far, the answer is “no”. 

You heard it hear first folks: “Winter is coming”.

What are the chances of getting a “no” to your offer in sales?  Probably around 70% of the time, this is what we will get. Given that type of frequency and hit rate, you would think that salespeople would be masters of dealing with this type of response.  You would be wrong.   The chemicals kick in and sales people lose all reason. 

I was reminded of this recently when we were conducting sales training.  It is hard to create a new habit for salespeople. They have egos and they are easily entrenched in less productive ways of doing things, because that is how they have always done it.  Stupid, is what I would call that, unless you are really shooting the lights out with your results.

The issue is when we see the body language signaling a negative response the fight response starts and then we hear the words and we go into overdrive.  Our brain is on fire concerning the thousand good reasons that no should be a yes.  We are delving deep into why the client is wrong and we are right.  WE are rapidly processing our line of attack to counter the argument they have proffered.  What a complete waste of time. 

Instead we need to get smart.  Stop the chemical reaction from getting out of control.  Throw the Breaker Switch, like we have with the electricity in our houses, if the power load gets too dangerous.  Shooting your mouth off in sales is even more dangerous.  That intervention comes in the form of a cushion.  No, we don’t put a cushion over our mouth, so that no words come out.  We put it over our brain instead.  We offer a very neutral response to the buyer, that neither agrees with nor inflames the situation.

The point of this neutral statement is to give us critical thinking time.  Are we using this critical thinking time to dream up a killer response that will shut the buyer down in their tracks and turn that “no” into a “yes”?  Nope.  We use it to stop the chemical rush and regroup.  We need to go into question mode.   

When we hear a “no” it is a headline, like we have in newspapers.  A short form of reply that gives the key details and no more.  We want to know what is in the article accompanying that headline.  Why is it  “no”?  So we sweetly and gently ask, “May I ask you why you said “no”; or “your price is too high”; or “we are happy with our current supplier”; or “we have no budget for this”; or the thousand other dubious reasons buyers give us for declining our genius offer. Give me the article accompanying the headline, so I can understand how I am supposed to answer this rejection.

 Now we have to be patient.  We hear the reason and again we are sorely tempted to go into counter attack.  We know can tear that shabby reasoning apart and want to bombard the buyer with a million reasons why they should buy.  Hold your horses there pardner.  What if this isn’t the killer objection?  What if a more vicious version is lurking in the long grass, ready to bite us at the first opportunity?  We need to keep digging. 

After we hear that reason, we sweetly and gently ask, “Apart from that are there any other concerns for you?”.  They will usually have another one.  Again we don’t go into rambunctious reply mode.  We ask why that is a problem for them, just like we did the first time.  They tell us and again we must be patient.  We must keep our power dry, hold the line, keep our nerve.  Again, we venture forth on our seeker journey and sweetly and gently ask, “Are A and B your only concerns or do you have another? If they do, we still don’t rush in where angles fear to tread and blurt out our killer retort.

We sweetly and gently ask, “You have mentioned A, B and C.  Of these which one is the most pressing concern for you?”, and then we shut up and don’t even breath, let alone speak.  They make a choice and now we open up both barrels and answer that concern and ignore the other two.  Usually, if we successfully deal with the main concern, the lesser concerns fade away like the dew on a spring day.

When we were doing some role play practice in the training, it was interesting that the person playing the buyer gave a reason for not buying and the seller was starting to jump in.  We tied them up and physically restrained them so they couldn’t answer right then and there.  Okay, that is an exaggeration.  Actually, we just asked them to keep digging, to follow this procedure and not answer yet, until they know what to answer.  Sure enough of the A, B and C reasons given, it turned out that it was C that was the concern of most import.  “A” was price by the way and “C” was quality in this case. 

We don’t know what to answer until we know what to rebuff.  Hold off on answering the pushback, until you know what is their key concern. Don’t be fooled by smokescreens, wild goose chases and other buyer subterfuges.  If we do this we will be a lot more successful closing the sale and building a strong relationship with the buyer.

It is a bad sign when a presentation makes me sleepy, especially if it is at lunch time.  It is very common to have speakers address a topic over a lunch to a group of attendees.  After lunch, you might explain away a bit of the drowsiness, but during the lunch is a warning sign.  The speaker had good voice strength, so nobody was struggling to hear him.  He was knowledgeable on his subject having worked in this area for a number of years.  He was speaking about what his firm does everyday, so he is living the topic.  So what went wrong? 

Thinking back to the talk, I wondered whether his structure was the issue?  When a speech doesn’t flow well, the audience has to work hard.  Actually, they choose not to work hard and instead just drop out and escape from you.  This was one of those cases.

If we think about giving a speech, we have to plan it well.  In his case, he had prepared slides, but the style of the lunch and the venue meant it was a no slide deck presentation.  He had some side notes written down on his laptop screen to follow.  That is fine for the speaker, because it aids navigation through the topics.  The problem was that the points were not ordered or structured well.  This made it hard to follow, as it tended to jump around, rather than flow. 

We design our talks from the idea spark.  In one sentence, we need to isolate out what is the key point we want to make to our audience.  This is not easy, but the act of refining the topic gives us clarity.  We create the opening last, because its role is to break into the brains of the audience and capture their full attention for what is coming.

The middle bits between opening and closing is where the design part comes in.  Think of the sections like chapters in a book.  The chapters need to be in a logical order that is easy to follow.  They need to link to each other so that the whole thing flows.  To create the chapters we take our central conclusion and ask why is that true?  The answers will come from the points of evidence or our experiences.  We need to get these down and then get them in order. 

It might be a simple structure like “ this is what happened in the past, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future”.  We could use a macro-micro split.  This is the big picture and here are the details of the components.  It could be advantage-disadvantage.  We investigate the plusses and minuses of what we are proposing.  It could be taking the key points of evidence and breaking them down to make each a chapter in its own right.

The key is in the sequencing.  What is the logical flow here to move from one chapter to the next?  We need a bridge between chapters to set up what is coming next and to tell our audience we are changing the focus. We need to constantly loop each chapter back to what is the central point.  We can’t just put out evidence and leave it there, expecting the listener to work it out themselves.  We have to tell them why this is important, what it means for them and how they can use it.

Visuals on screen do assist in this process.  It does make it easier to follow because we are hitting more points of stimulus with our audience.  When we don’t have slides, we need to use word pictures to draw the audience into our topic. I am struggling to recall any stories he told about the topic, which is the best place to create those word pictures.

So break the talk up before you go anywhere near the slide construction.  What is the point you want to make?  What are the reasons for that  and turn them into chapter headings.  Check that the flow of the chapters is logical and easy to follow.  Then create a blockbuster opening to grab attention.  If our speaker had spent more time on the design then the talk would have been more accessible to the audience.  Get that wrong in this Age Of Distraction and you have lost them immediately.

All interfaces with the customer are designed by people.  It can be on-line conversations with robots or in store interactions, but the driving force behind all of these activities are the people in our employ.  The way people think and act is a product of the culture of the organisation.  That culture is the accountability of senior management.  The common success point of organisations is to have the right culture in place, that best serves the customer.  The success of senior management in making all of that work is a combination of their leadership, people and communication skills.

This sounds infinitely reasonable in theory, but the reality is often so different.  Senior leaders, who themselves are not particularly people focused, expect their customer interaction designers and in store staff to be customer focused.  They don't walk the talk themselves and what is worse, they don't see the contradiction.

They haven't worked out yet that good customer service begins with good employee service.  Love your staff and they will love your customers.  Richard Branson is widely referenced with his philosophy of employees first, customers second.  His idea is to produce the right mental framework for employees to then put the customer first.  Our emotions lead our behaviors, which determines our performance.

Fine, love all of that, but how do we get it right?  Leadership has to be clearly understood by the leaders.  It is not a function of rank or longevity in the organisation.  Instead, it is a function of the degree of cooperation we can get from our team.  We might believe things are rolling out beautifully, in a pre-ordained way, in relation to how we treat the customer.  Sadly, the front-line customer experience with our service could be entirely different from how the leaders planned it and how they want it. 

To get that employee cooperation to buy into what we believe is the correct way forward, we need to have well developed people and communication skills.  We also need to make sure that our middle managers also have those same skills.  We could be doing things really well up at the top of the organisation, but our middle managers may be sabotaging the culture we want to build and we just do not see it. 

If we want sincerity to be a function of our customer service, then, as an organisation,  we have be sincere.  If we want customers to feel appreciated, we have to appreciate our staff and do it in a sincere way.  People can spot fake from a mile away.  If we spend all of our time finding errors and faults, we may miss the things that are being done well, which we can communicate that we appreciate.

We might want many things in business such as personal success, greater revenues, reduced costs etc.  We can only achieve these things through others: either our own staff or our customers.  They may however want different things.  We have to find the means to appeal to our staff and customers such that they want what we want.  This is not manipulation.   This is well developed people and communication skills. The trust is created and we lead others, to also want what we want.  As Zig Ziglar famously noted, we can get whatever we want in this life, if we help enough other people get what they want.

To create that trust we have to be genuinely interested in others.  This starts with our staff because we want them to be genuinely interested in our customer.   When they do this, they build the trust with the buyer and a bond that is very difficult to break.  If we don't demonstrate this genuine interest in our staff, we are not building the culture where they will naturally pass this feeling on to the customer.

There is an old Chinese saying that, “a man who cannot smile should not open a shop”. Yet in modern business, we have plenty of people floating around who don't smile.  It could be the very top executives who are too serious to smile at their staff.  They set up a culture that is dry and remote, but expect that at the interface with the customer, there will be an emotional connection with the brand.  They just don't see the miscalculation and self-delusion involved here.  

Bosses are often poor listeners, who imagine that their front line staff are all doing an excellent job of listening to the customer.  What if that is not the case?  If the bosses want to create a culture of good listening habits, then starting with themselves is a reasonable idea.  When we listen, we learn more than we already know. This is so important when dealing with the customer.  We need to make sure we have a culture of good questioning skills to trigger the opportunity for the customer to talk to us.  In these conversations we can better come to understand what would be best for the customer and how to properly service them.

One of the frustrating things about training salespeople is the difficulty of getting them to stop focusing solely on what they want (bonuses, promotions, commissions) and concentrate on what the client wants (solve my problem).  When they are talking to the client, the conversation is all about what the salesperson is hoping for.  We have to learn to change that dialogue and talk in terms of the key interests of the buyer.  

 I was giving a keynote speech at an event hosted by one of our major clients, for their most important customers.  Another speaker before me spent the entire time just talking about his own company!  I really wondered what was the take away for the audience?  Actually, I don't wonder, I know. It was a big fat zero.  We can get caught up in ourselves and forget that everything we talk about with the buyer, has to be firmly focused on the client’s interests.  The way we do that is by listening to their answers, to the brilliant questions we have designed for that purpose.

When a customer encounters one of our touch points, we want them to like and trust us.  Doing this on-line is a challenge but good navigation, intuitive processes and clear explanations all assist in this regard.  In the face-to-face world, we need to start in a friendly way.  The culture of this basic idea however springs from within the company and is guided by the outlook of the leaders.   

If the top management are a dour bunch, always serious, rarely smiling, stiff and “businesslike” rather than friendly with their teams, then we have to wonder why the front line staff would not be influenced by this outlook?  If we want our people to smile and begin in a friendly way with customers, then the leadership group needs to demonstrate that attitude themselves and show this in their own staff interactions.

Another challenge for bosses is to shut up.  Often, because they are older, more experienced and time poor, they get into the “everything abbreviated” habit of firing out orders.  They do all the talking.  The same problem with salespeople, they talk too much.  The key to satisfying both staff and customers is to let them do the bulk of the talking.  This requires a strategy and considerable discipline, but it is worth it because it creates a different type of culture in the organisation and this flows out to the customer interactions.

It is an obvious thing in sales to get customers to have a sense of ownership.  We might describe the product or service and the situation after they have bought it.  We regale them with the problem solutions we are bringing and the success platform we are going to create.  We have a goal in mind – find the best solution for the client and get them to have ownership of this idea.  We want them coming up with our preferred solution.  We design the questions we will ask, with this in mind.  It is our idea, but they reach the same idea on their own and in the process come to have ownership of that idea.

The same thing is needed with our staff.  We can tell them how to do their jobs in great detail, but it would be better if we could have them come up with them own conclusion.  Preferably one that matches what we have decided is in the best interests of the company.  Again, question design here is crucial and if we do this correctly, the client arrives at their own conclusion and it matches the one we had previously reached.  This way there is no sense of hard push sales or badgering of the buyer.  They got there by themselves and so their sense of ownership is very high

We cannot be persuasive unless we can honestly see things from the point of view of the buyer.  The aim in persuasion is to join the conversation going on in the head of the customer.  This gets us on the same wavelength and our conversation will be in sync, because we are speaking about the things that are of greatest interest to them. 

Trying to stop seeing everything from only our own viewpoint and to see if from the client’s viewpoint, sounds tremendously simple, but it requires a strong effort.  We need to do this logically as well as emotionally.  We have to be understanding at the empathetic level, which means really understanding the driving ideas and desires of the buyer.  Nevertheless we need to enable this discipline to apply if we want to be successful in convincing others of what we think will serve them best.

If we want our staff to appreciate the business we can receive from the buyer, we need to build that attitude internally of praising staff and giving them honest appreciation.  This is often missed in firms, where everything is rather cut and dried.  Buying is an emotional activity which we justify with logic.  We want our designers of the interface with the customer to have a sense of appreciation for the buyer.  We want staff who are facing customers to do the same.  If we are not giving our own staff praise and appreciation, we are not building a floor to ceiling culture that will work best when interacting with customers.  It has to run on automatic, because we cannot be everywhere at the same time.  We have to trust our people to deliver great customer service.

The ability to ask questions instead of making statements is an important skill.  It is easier to drive this skill throughout the organization, if this is part of the culture.  Bosses shooting out orders is a “tell” culture.  If they automatically asked questions instead of giving orders, they would be building the right mentality for customer service.  Our objective is to find out what the customer wants. To do that we need to be asking them questions.  This is a mental frame around which the customer interaction needs to be built. 

When we ask questions, we can come up with solutions that the customer themselves realise are the best outcomes for them. If we are more concentrated on what is best for us, then the customer can feel that too.  So we want to understand their needs, suggest solutions that we know will make them happy to follow our lead. 

Inside the organisation this is how the team should be managed.  They should be doing what they are supposed to be doing, happily. Their bosses have communicated in a way that the staff member comes naturally to the same conclusion, as being the best way forward.  When we achieve this common level of understanding then everything moves forward very smoothly.

The object of a sale is to exchange a good or a service for money. The degree to which that money can exceed the variable and fixed costs associated with delivering it, determines the success and longevity of the company. We all know that nothing happens in business without a sale. If that is the case then salespeople have a critical role to produce as much revenue as possible for the firm. There are prices set for goods and services. Goods are tangible items and plotting the costs and the margin of profit are relatively straight forward. Buy low and sell high is an old business maxim. Services are more difficult to price because they are intangibles. In both cases, the value proposition of the price against what is being delivered, is the communication piece that salespeople have to master in order to be successful.

Imagine my surprise, as an expert in sales training, when I meet salespeople who have not spent even one second trying to master the bridging of the gap between value and cost. Sitting in the audience at a speaker event, next to a thirtyish Japanese sale’s guy, I was astounded by a few things he said as we discussed selling over lunch. I was interested in hearing what his sales process was. He didn’t really understand my question because he had no defined process. He had been selling for this firm for seven years so he was an experienced salesperson.

He contacts a lead, gets an appointment, shows up and explains the service and submits a quote, he told me. Really? On the blank side of meal menu, I mapped out the elements of the sales process for him. Prepare for the meeting and focus your intention on one thing – getting the re-order, not just the solitary sale. Build trust through establishing rapport. Create interest by asking extremely well designed questions to understand the client’s needs. Now tell the client whether we can help them or not and if we can, explain the how of our solution. There may be points of insufficient clarity, concerns, hesitations or downright objections to what we are proposing. We need to deal with those before we proceed to ask for the order, and then we do the follow up to deliver the service or good.

He was impressed by this structural approach to the sales call, as he should have been, because he was certainly doing it the hard way. Having a roadmap makes the whole process much easier for both buyer and seller. I then asked him what does he do when the buyer says, “too expensive”. With a cherubic mien, he told me he offered to “drop the price”. Incredulous, I asked “by how much do you usually drop it?”. He quoted 20% as the number. There were four other sales people in his team and if that is how they roll over there, then that is an expensive first response to client pushback on pricing.

He was an experienced guy, but that was the best he could come up with. Why would that be? He didn’t have any other knowledge about how to deal with that type of situation. Do you think price comes up fairly regularly in sales conversations with buyers? Of course it does, so how could this continue like this, as if it were acceptable.

He should have said, “why do you say that” when told it was too expensive? Was the price objection genuine, a ruse, sport negotiation, time bound, or irrelevant because they haven’t seen enough value yet to understand the price point? There will be one highest priority element in the too expensive objection. It might be the actual volume of cash involved, budget allocation timings, internal competing project competition concerns, etc. Which one is it – we need to know.

I have been told “too expensive”, which I recognise is a short form summary of a host of reasons for not proceeding. When I questioned the why, it was a “budget issue”. Now as sale’s professionals we have to dig deeper, “why is it a budget issue?”. “Because that number will exceed our budget allocation for that quarter”.

That means it is not too expensive after all. It is just too expensive if paid in one quarter, but fully capable of purchase if the payments are split across quarters. Except you would never know that, if your response was to drop your price by 20%. Would you be willing to help the client out and split the payments across quarters? I would guess you would prefer that to having to drop your price.

The moral of this story is to take a very detailed look at what your salespeople are doing. Don’t confuse seven years of sales experience with one year of experience seven times. Also, don’t imagine that they have a process, that they know how to explain the value or to deal with objections. Based on what we see in our sales training classes and talking with clients, in Japan, the chances of that being the case are very low.

Questions in general are powerful tools for speakers.  They bring focus to key points we want to get across.  They are particularly useful in getting our audience engaged.  They also have danger within them.  Knowing when to use questions and what types of questions to use are things which must be worked out in the planning of the presentation and shouldn’t be done on the fly.  If you want to get yourself into trouble then ask the wrong question, at the wrong time, in the wrong way and brace yourself for the reaction.

There is a cadence to any talk or presentation and in the planning phase we can break the delivery down to five minute blocks.  It doesn’t have to be five, it could be four or six, but five minutes is a long enough time to go deep with a thought, idea or imparting some information without losing the concentration of the audience.

Actually, audience concentration spans are a nightmare today.  They have become so short and everyone has become addicted to multitasking.  Even if they are enjoying the presentation, they are scrolling through their screens right in front of you anyway, without any hint of shame.   This is the new normal folks.  We will face this problem forever and we are never going back to the good old days of people politely listening to us right through our presentations.

This is why we need to be switching up the presentation every five minutes or so, to keep the audience intrigued with what we are presenting.  This is where great information or insights really help.  The audience access to something new or valuable will pry them away from their phone screens for a few minutes longer.  We will need to be using the full range of our vocal delivery skills to keep them with us.  Any hint of a monotone delivery and the hand held screens will light up and be blazing throughout the room.

Questions are an additional assist to break through the competing focus for audience attention.  By simply asking a well constructed question we can grab audience attention.  Even a simple question can work.  If I suddenly asked you, “What month were you born in?”, you will return your attention to me from wherever you were straying.  In our talk, we may have been waffling along taking about some pressing issue or downloading some precious data, losing our listeners in the process.  However, when we lob in a question, we magically get all eyes back on us.  We have now gotten the audience thinking about the point we have raised.

The downside with asking questions though is people in the audience want to answer them.  They see the question as a great opportunity for them to intervene in the proceedings.  They may have a counterview and enjoy the chance to debate with us.  They may have their own personal agenda and this break in the traffic is perfect for them to weigh in with what they think.  They may even get into debates amongst themselves and exclude us entirely.  Within no time at all, the proceedings have been hijacked and we are no longer in control of the agenda. 

This is where rhetorical questions are so handy.  They give us the ability to capture the mental attention of our audience on the topic we are discussing, get them engaged, but we maintain control.  A rhetorical question and a real question are identical.  The audience cannot distinguish one from the other.  This is good, because we can keep them guessing.  What we want them thinking about is whether this is a question they have to answer and are they ready to do that or is this a rhetorical question and all they have to do is listen?  The difference between the two is the timing of the break before our next contribution.  If we stop there and invite answers then they know it is time to speak up.  If we leave a pregnant pause, but then answer the question or add to it, then they know they are not being required to contribute.

The key point here is to design the questions into the talk at the start. In those five minute blocks we need to have little attractions to keep interest.  They might be powerful visuals, great storytelling, vocal range for effect or rhetorical questions.  The key is to have variety planned from the start.  In a 40 minute speech, apart from the opening and the closings, there are going to be 5-6 chances to grab strong attention.  At the start we can use vocal range and visuals but as we get to the middle and toward the end, we need to bring in the bigger guns as people’s concentration begins to fade out. 

We can’t flog the audience with a series of rhetorical questions and wear them down.  We can maybe get in two or maximum three in a forty minute presentation.  Any activity we repeat with our audience gets boring very fast.  Anything that smacks of manipulation absolutely gets the wrong response.

There is a fine line to be walked here. We do want to control the agenda, the debate, the timing, the attention of the listeners, without appearing controlling.  Sprinkling a couple of well constructed rhetorical questions into our presentation will help us to maintain interest. We need to defeat our screen based, social media and internet addictive attention rivals.  Get used to this, because this is the future for all of us as presenters and we have to lift our game to make sure we are in a position to have a powerful influence with our audiences.  The alternative is speaker oblivion.

We love acronyms!  Our workplaces are thriving with them such that we can hold extended conversations composed entirely of seemingly impenetrable codes.  They are handy though and this one R.E.AL. is short and serviceable to describe best practice leadership attributes.  It always good to have evidence around pontification. This summary of the great and the good tendencies amongst leaders is based on research we did in the USA, on what respondents thought leaders needed to do to be more successful.  REAL is composed of these key elements – Reliable, Empathetic, Aspirational and Learner. 

“Reliable” is an obvious choice and though much upheld in principle, tends to break down in practice.  “Managing upwards” is a buzzword for describing how to deal with one’s boss.  It used to be called “sucking up to the boss” to get ahead.  Climbing the greasy pole meant taking all the glory for yourself, Teflon-like blaming others for mistakes and stepping on the bodies of your staff, to elevate your own brilliant career. 

Reliable however is an attribute that leads to trust only when the staff observe that what is said is actually done, that promises are kept and that their own personal development is being given a high priority.  “What is in it for me” is a common human frailty.  Bosses who keep this in mind when making sure the organisation and individual goals of their staff are aligned, get more loyalty and more accomplished.  Misunderstandings arise, usually traced back to poor communication.  More work need by bosses!

“Empathetic” is closely linked to listening skills.  Taking the viewpoint of the other person is difficult if we don’t know what that viewpoint is.  The Japanese expression kuki wo yomu or summing up the real situation, is a great phrase to explain emphathy.  What is being said is important but more often, what isn’t being said is where all the insight is buried. 

Busy bosses though don’t have much time to get below the surface calm of the workplace.  Some don’t care – just get me the numbers – or else!  Using our position power works up to a point but we miss out on a lot of creative potential as the opportunity cost.  If we want to know what is really going on and what people are really thinking, we have to spend time and work at it.  Expressing we actually do care is also another orphan amongst communication skills.  Successful bosses have good awareness and confidence to communicate they really do care about their people.

“Aspirational” reflects ideas about grasping the bigger picture.  Hovering above the melee of the everyday to see the vision to be realised on the far horizon.  It means communicating beyond this quarter’s goals and placing each individual’s role in terms of their contribution to the bigger goal.  The framed glass protects the vision statement, ceremoniously hung on the wall. While it may not fade in the sunlight, it fades in the collective memory.  No one can recite it, let along live it, so it is as meaningful as the flower arrangement on the reception desk.  Pleasant enough idea but ephemeral.  The leader has to inject the ideas and concepts involved into terms that resonate with each person individually.  This takes time, which is why so few organisations get any return on their investment in their vision statement.

“Learning” gets nods of approval but many executives have had one year of experience thirty times rather than thirty years of experience.  Their views are still locked away in a mental vault, for which they have lost the key.  Too busy to learn. Busy, busy working in their business, rather than on their business.  They are up to date on Facebook but way behind where the industry is headed and where their company needs to go.  Well informed yet ignorant, because they lack perspective and acuity.  If we aren’t prepared to permanently kill our darlings, our favoured ideas and concepts, we must be prepared to risk falling behind, trampled by our competitors.

REAL, another acronym heaven dweller, is easy to remember and that at least is a start to actually realising its power.  We know all of these things – we just forget or get too busy to do them.  Let’s change that.

Projects are too common.  Because of this we take them for granted, seeing them as part of everyday work, but we don’t approach them properly.  We usually gather the team together and then dive straight into the details of the project, without really applying a professional approach.  We certainly don’t apply as much planning expertise to the task as we should, as we wade straight into the mechanics of the execution.  Why is that?   Poor leadership and lack of skills make for dangerous dance partners, as the team launches forth rocking and rolling with no strategy and little expertise.

Often, there is no existing documented planning process in place.  This can be rather ironic because often the projects are repeated or very similar projects are undertaken.  Templates and structure are missing so everyone just wings it, making it up as they go along, re-inventing the wheel.

The goals of the project are often vague.  This is a lack of direction from the top leadership to those tasked with doing the work.  The project leader has to push back and manage upwards, seeking clear reasons for the WHY of the project and then make sure everyone involved in the team understands the WHY.

Project scope creep is like a cancer that can kill the project, denying it success.  The project begins with vague boundaries around what is to be done.  In quick order, either external parties or the team themselves, become like Emus and are attracted by bright shiny objects.  Very quickly the additional tasks multiply but the time frame and the resources committed to the project do not change.  This never ends well.

The implementation strategy regarding roles, budgets, timelines and follow-up is weak or non-existent.  Well, when you are having fun and winging it, you are super busy getting on with the actual work, so no strategy needed.  Later things go wrong because timelines were not clear nor properly planned.  The resources do not turn up at the required timing or the sequencing of the work is found to be skewwhiff, so there are delays you cannot easily cover or resolve.

You quickly find that people, rather than logistics, are the trickiest part of project leadership.  All the coolest project management software and sophisticated systems in the world won’t save you from people problems. You may not have been able to match the project team resource with the skill sets required and you have to make do with what you have.  There may be incompatible working styles in the team and you are now also chief psychologist, in addition to team project leader, spending a lot of time and energy dealing with staff or division conflicts.

Zen study is a way to strip out all of the non-essentials in life.  The noise, the distraction, the things that are not so important.  People sit around concentrating on their breath cycle or one word or any number of other methods to quiet the mind. They are seeking to get more clarity about themselves and what are their real priorities.  As presenters, this is a good metaphor for when we are in front of people speaking. 

You would think with all those thousands of years of Zen in Japan, in art, in design, in temples, gardens, in history etc., that the Japanese people would be legends of simplicity and clarity when presenting.  Not true!  Presenting as an idea only came to Japan around 160 years ago.  Fukuzawa Yukichi who founded Keio University and who graces the 10,000 yen bank note, launched public speaking in Japan in the Meiji period.  There is still an enzetsukan or speech hall preserved on the grounds of Keio University, where presumably the first public speeches were given.

Western society plumbs the wisdom of ancient Greece and Rome, parliaments allowing debate and Hollywood for models on speech giving.  Japan has no traditional home grown role model. If the authorities needed you to know anything in old japan, a notice board would have it written there for you.  No shogunal oratory from the castle walls to the assembled masses.  No Mel Gibson Braveheart style speeches before vanquishing the foe in battle.  Japan bypassed all of that until Fukuzawa Yukichi decided this was another area of modernization that needed implementation in Japan, like wearing ties, boots, hats and petticoats. 

 Of course there were no slide decks in those days, but Japan certainly was an early adopter of the technology for giving presentations – the overhead projector, the slide projector, the modern light weight projector, large screen monitors, electronic pointers, etc.  Any venue you go to in Japan will be bristling with cool tech gear.

Interestingly, the content on the speaker’s screen will also be bristling.  There will be 10 graphs on the one page, lurid diagrams employing 6 or more vivid colours, numerous lines of text so small you could use it for an optometrist’s eyesight test chart.  Where has the zen gone?

To be an effective presenter, we don’t need any tech or screens or props or gizmos.  We can just speak to the audience and enjoy being the full focus of their attention.  As a result of this visual conflagration, many speakers are competing for attention with what is being displayed on the screen.  Company representatives love to play the video of their firm or product or service.  They can be quite slick, the joy of the marketing department. They are the pit into which a chunk of money was thrown for the production company, directors, designers, film and sound crew, talents and innumerable others who all got a slice of the pie.

The question to ask though is does this video actually assist the speaker to make the key point under consideration.  Often they are like eye candy, but are not on point to the main argument.  Unless it strongly reinforces your message dump it.  It will only be competition for you the speaker and it will suck up valuable time which could be spent better with you as the main focus. 

I saw Ken Done, a well known Australian artist, give a talk in Japan many years ago.  He has a very unique visual painting style. He moved around from behind the lectern, stood next to it and just spoke about his art to the audience.  It was very engaging because it was so intimate.  The Japanese audience loved it.  There was only one source of stimulation for the audience and that was Ken Done.  This is what we want – to be the center of our audience’s world for the next thirty or forty minutes.

Don’t use a slide deck unless there is something in that content and presentation on screen which really helps bring home your argument.  If it is for information purposes, then that will work well.  If you are there to persuade, then you will be so much more powerful if all the attention is concentrated on one point and that point needs to be you.

In this case we have stripped away all the visual noise, so we have to fill the void with word pictures.  We need to transport the audience to a place where they can see what we are talking about, in their mind’s eye.  If you have ever read the novel after seeing the movie, you find yourself transported visually to the scenes from the movie, as you read the novel’s pages.  This is the same idea. We have to usher the audience to a place, time and situation that we are describing in words, in such a way that visually they can imagine it.

We don’t always have to have slides or visuals.  We are the message, so let’s manufacture the situation so that we are the center piece of the proceedings and all eyes and ears are on us, totally focused on every word we say.  We need to Zen our way to speaking and presenting success!

Projects have been around for a long time of course and in the modern era we have accumulated a vast amount of best practice on how to manage them.  It isn’t usually that we don’t know what to do, it is that we don’t actually do it.  We get into trouble when we just leap in and dig straight into the logistical entrails,  without giving enough thought to a macro 360 degree view of what is involved.  We see this tendency all the time.  Any group of people given a project task go straight into the gruesome detail.  In project planning, a pinch of planning goes an extremely long way. Having a common and clear set of rules helps to ensure we are all approaching the project in the same vein.

Here are ten rules for ensuring that what needs to get done is completed on time and to expectations.

1. Mind our business. Keep our eye on the ball, especially defining what is inside and outside the project scope.  This often changes mid-steam so we need to be nimble and adjust accordingly.
2. Know the customer’s requirements. Double check you have properly understood the detail, document it and keep checking against that documented record, especially if there are changes needed.
3. Plan well. The plan will cover the scope, schedule, cost, approach etc.  Involve task owners to gain buy-in and apply a strong reality check to what you have created.  Strangely, the planning value comes from the creation process and not just the project outcome.  It forces some hard thinking, tough prioritisations, player commitments, clear controls, smooth coordination and cooperation.  Basically, the things at which most companies are usually rubbish.
4. Build a great team with strong ownership. Motivation of the team is critical, so we need total clarity around the WHY, trust, communication, sufficient resources and mutually agreed deadlines.
5. Track progress. Frequent reviews, wide visibility, broad communication and clear goals are needed.  There are hard and soft aspects to most projects, so ensure we don’t overlook the soft skills needed to succeed.
6. Use baseline controls. These are the fundamental building blocks against which we steer the project forward and against which we alter course when needed.
7. Write it, share it, save it. Here is the Holy Grail of project management – write it down - if it isn’t written down it doesn’t exist. Document procedures, plans, evolving designs.  Baseline controls are compared against the preserved records.  Repeatable projects especially need this record, to which are added the fresh set of insights and learnings of the current project.
8. Test it. Jumping into new territories with both feet can be high risk.  Better to develop test cases early to help with understanding and verification of what is required to succeed.  Resources and time are the most often underestimated elements, so an early testing helps to flush out the gaps.
9. Ensure customer satisfaction. Make the customer’s real needs the prism through which everything is viewed.  Undetected changes in customer requirements or not focusing on the customer’s business needs can in fact blow up in our face.
10. Be pro-active. Be proactive in applying these principles and in identifying and solving problems as they arise. Review and search for problems, knowing there are people dedicated to hiding issues.  Vigilance is a virtue we all need to practice when working on projects, especially anticipating trouble before it arises or becomes too explosive.
11.  Stop the same old, same old and take a fresh look at your methodology for approaching projects.  It seems so simple, but it can simply go wrong so easily. You might be surprised at how loose and inefficient your current methodology is.  We can always do better and these ten rules will help us on that journey.

Great service is so fleeting and  illusive. You encounter it and then like the morning mist, the next minute it is gone.  One company representative is so spectacularly helpful and then next one is seemingly possessed by evil spirits and demonic. As companies how do we get the angels inside our staff to engage with the clients, rather than having reputation destroying devils intrude.  Good service, consistently delivered, is no accident and so it has to be made to occur.  How can we do that?

Jan Carlzon many years ago published a tremendous guide to customer service.  He had the job of turning around SAS airlines and captured that experience in his book “Moments Of Truth”.  Carlson’s insights flooded back to me when I checked into a hotel in Singapore. 

By the way, the drive in from Changi Airport is a credit to the Singaporean Government, who spend millions every year to develop and maintain their landscaped, leafy, green, tropical thoroughfares.  This is smart.  You are already in a pleasant mood just getting into town.  While going through the check-in process at the hotel, a waiter from the adjoining restaurant approached me bearing an ice-cold glass of freshly squeezed juice.  Singapore is very humid and trust me, after a long flight, that ice cold beverage went down very well.  I thought this is really well thought through customer service by this Hotel.

One of Carlzon’s observations about customer service however was the importance of consistency of delivery.  For example, visualise the telephone receptionist answering your call in a pleasant, helpful manner and you are uplifted by your exposure to the brand.  The next staff member receiving the transferred call however, is grumpy, disinterested and unfriendly. Instantly,  your mood and positive impression plummet. You are suddenly irritated by this company, who have just damaged their brand by their lack of an ability to sustain good service across only two consecutive touch points with the customer.  How do you feel when you are given the run around from department to department?

So back to my story.  As I get to my room, in good spirits after unexpectedly receiving my ice-cold juice, I find out the television isn’t working.  After a forensic search for the cause, including a few harsh words with the television controller, I discover the power is not on.  There is a card slot next to the door that initiates the power supply to the room.  Actually, I discovered the same system in the elevator, when I unsuccessfully tried to select my floor.  Yes, I worked it all out eventually, but the thought occurred to me that the pleasant, busy young woman checking me into the hotel, failed to mention these two salient facts to me.  Sustainability of good service has to be the goal if you want to protect or grow your brand.

Let me mention a customer service breakdown I particularly dislike here in Japan.  When you call just about any organization here, you get a very flat voice answering the phone saying in Japanese ,“XYZ company here”.  You ask to speak with that very excellent and impressive member of staff, Ms. Suzuki whom you met recently. The flat uninterested voice tells you that she “is not at her desk right now” and then you are abandoned to stone cold motherless silence. 

The “may I take down your name and phone number so that she can call you back” bit is rarely offered.   Instead, you are left hanging on the phone. The inference of the silence is that if Ms. Suzuki is not around, that is your problem buddy and you should call back later, rather than expect a return call.  Again, to Carlzon’s point, these inconsistencies of customer service directly damage the brand.  In this example, when I had previously met Ms. Suzuki, I was impressed by her and consequently I had a good impression of the whole organisation.  I was projecting that positive vibe to the entire company. The person taking the call has just put that positive image of the brand to the sword.

When you are the leader of your company, you presume that everyone “gets it” about representing the brand and that the whole team delivers consistent levels of service.  You expect that your whole team is supporting the marketing department’s efforts to create an excellent image of the organization.  After all, you have been spending truckloads of money on that marketing effort, haven’t  you?

But are all the staff supporting the effort to build the brand?  Perhaps they have forgotten what you have said about consistent customer service in the past or they are a new hire or a part-timer who didn’t get properly briefed. 

I heard one of my recent hires in the sales team answering the phone with an unhelpful tone in his voice.  He actually sounded like he was angry.  He was in his fifties, so no boy, but obviously that had been his standard, ugly phone manner throughout his entire working life.  A perpetual brand killer, client alienating, reputation destroyer right there.  We have an open plan office, so I could hear this. If you are encased in the dark wood paneled corner executive crib with a tremendous view, then maybe you will never know what is going on in the engine room and therefore be unable to do anything about it.

Leaders, we should all sit down and draw the spider’s web of how customers interact with us and who they interact with.  We should expect that nobody on our team gets it about the preservation of the brand and determine that we have to tell them all again, again and again. 

So how about this for a starter for educating our staff to do a better job protecting and enhancing the brand:

1. Answer the phone with a pleasant, happy voice. Be helpful and offer your name first, so the customer won’t be embarrassed that they didn’t recognise your voice.  It also gives the caller confidence that a real person is going to take care of their needs.
2. If you take the call and the person they are calling isn’t there, proactively offer to ensure they get a call back as soon as possible and guarantee you will get their message through to them.
3. End with thanking them for their call and again leave your name, in case there is anything further the caller may need.

First impressions count, but so do all the follow-up impressions, if we want to build a sustainable, consistent positive image with our customers.  Consistency of good experiences doesn’t happen automatically.  We have to look again at all of our touch points with our customers and ensure that everyone in the team understands their place in maintaining the excellent brand we have built up.

Action Steps

1. Draw your spiders web of client touch points and identify who needs training, including non-regular staff.
2. Design the experience you want the client to have and train everyone around the content.
3. Look at your systems for moving or transitioning the client through the organization, to make sure the client experience is consistently good.
4. Always check to see what you think is happening is actually the case.

I have often thought there are so many lessons from the martial arts for our businesses.  Here are my musings after 50 plus years of training in traditional Shitoryu Karate.

 Stepping on to the floor

The dojo is the ultimate equalizer.  Whether you arrived by chauffeur driven Roller or took Shanks’s mare, once you step on to that dojo floor only your ability and character separates you from everyone else.  You have had all of your wealth, privileges, educational background, society status, connections stripped away and you are left alone to rise or fall based on your own abilities.

In business, we forget this primary lesson and allow people to accrue titles, status and power unattributed to their abilities.  We need to see beyond the spin and politics and ensure that people’s real abilities are recognized and rewarded.

Starting

The class begins with a short meditation interval.  This is designed to focus the mind and separate the day from what is to come.  Next everyone is bowing toward the front.  The front of the class represents all who came before us.  We are not here today based solely on what we have done. Others were here before us building the art and the organization.  By bowing we acknowledge the continuum and our responsibility to keep it going.  Now we bow to the teachers, respecting their knowledge and their devotion.  Finally, we bow to each other expressing our solidarity as fellow travelers on a journey of self-discovery.

How do we start the work day?  Is there a chorei or morning gathering of the work group, to get everyone aligned and focused on the WHY we are there.  In our office we review one of the Dale Carnegie Principles each day.  We then share our scheduled meetings, our highest goals for the day, end with a motivational quote and a final rousing call to all do our best (ganbarimashoo!).

Stretching

We warm-up our minds and our bodies by going through a set routine to stretch our muscles to be able to operate at the highest possible levels of performance. 

If you are a sales team, are you beginning your day with role play practice and coaching or are you just practicising on the client?

Basics

We repeat the same drills over and over, every class, every year, forever.  We are seeking purity of form and perfection of execution.  We are aiming for absolute efficiency and economy of movement.  We are preparing ourselves for a Zen state where we can react without pre-thought. 

 A large amount of our work is routine, but can we improve the systems, the execution to bring in greater efficiencies and achieve higher productivity?

 Sparring

There are two formats.  Prearranged sparring dictates what is coming and the order in which it comes.  Free sparring is one hundred percent spontaneous, ebbing and flowing with the rhythm of ploy and counter ploy.  At a high level, this is like playing a full chess match in under one minute, but using our physical techniques with total body commitment.

When we compete in the marketplace are we a speedboat or an oil tanker?  Are we nimble, adaptive, on purpose and aware of market changes?  Are we thinking steps ahead of the opposition, anticipating their moves and constantly outflanking them, applying our brains and  speed over their brawn?

Kata

These are full power set pieces, representing a battle against multiple opponents.  The forms are fixed and the aim is perfection.  The form is set and so we can release the mind into a Zen state enabling us to go beyond the form. 

Are we able to keep reproducing execution pieces of our work that are perfected?  Can we refine our actions for the maximum effectiveness?  Can we eliminate mistakes, defects and rework entirely at all levels in the organisation? 

Strengthening and warming down

Strength training is there to build the physical power and our mental perseverance.  We do a final stretch to reduce stiffness and muscle pain by reducing lactic acid build up in the muscles.

Are our training methodologies making us stronger than our rivals in the marketplace?  Are we allocating sufficient time to grow our people?  Are we seeing outcomes from the training time invested.

Finish

We repeat the bowing and this time we add our Values.  We voice carefully chosen words which represent the value system of our dojo, (Effort, Patience, Moderation, Respect).  These are the last things setting into our minds, before we go back to our normal routines.

How do we end the workday?  Do we set up for the next day by reviewing what we did today, what we achieved and what we need to work on tomorrow?  Do we reflect on the quality of our performance and think about ways to do better?

 The system of the martial arts hasn’t changed all that much over the many centuries and for a very simple reason.  It works.  How about your company?  Are you perfecting your systems for the ages?

Japan is merciless with salespeople.  When you call the client’s company everyone is doing their absolute best to make sure you don’t get to talk to the boss.  They won’t tell you their name, they don’t offer to take a message for you, the whole vibe is “get lost”.  If you don’t know the precise name of the person you want to speak with, then the wall of steel descends very quickly.  They will question you as to why you want to speak to the person in charge, tell you that the person will call you back.  They never will.  

No one wants to take any responsibility in the Japanese system, so that is why they won’t share their name.  They don’t want to get scolded by the boss, so that is why they won’t put you through.  The boss is a salaried employee and they won’t take calls from people they have never heard of.  They don’t think, “this might be a business opportunity that will help my company”.  They think, “I don’t want to have to deal with people I don’t know, especially foreigners, because it is risky”.  Risk aversion is a big thing here and the easiest way of never taking a risk is never doing anything new or different.  It has worked for thousands of years here.

So how do we break through the steel barrier.  Many companies have meetings on Monday mornings, so invariably no one is around to take the call, even presuming you know their name.  The last day of  the month is also a very busy day for many companies, so that is another hard one.  Days with a five in the date called gotoobi (5th, 10th,15th, 25th)  are also busy days in Japan because they are cut off dates for invoice submissions, monthly invoice payments, salary payments, Government department submission dates, etc.

If we want to call a company and we don’t know the person’s name, then we should try and do it before the gate keepers arrive for work or after they have left for lunch or for after they have departed at the end of the day.  This is not fool proof, but the chances of talking with someone with a bit more authority goes up.

Those tasked with taking general calls to the company or section, are usually female, young and at the very, very bottom of the hierarchy with no authority, except to make your life a misery.  Companies don’t understand that these staff are the bearers of the brand to the outside world, so invariably they are not properly trained.  They think their job is to screen out all salespeople and all unknowns.

I called the new President of a major Italian brand here in Tokyo to say hello and thank him for his business, as we had been commissioned by his headquarters to provide training for them.  I didn’t know his name because he had just arrived and that information was not public at that point.  I could never get past the gatekeeper.  She would always tell me he wasn’t available and that he would call me back. That never happened.  I am the President of the company delivering training for his company, to develop his business, to help hit his targets.  You would expect he would want to talk with me.  No such luck.  In the end, I got so frustrated, I just gave up trying to talk to him and left the training delivery logistics to my staff.  I never did meet him in fact and he was posted to a new country.

Here are some ideas. Even if you don’t know the name of the person send a package to their title within the company. This package might contain your company brochure or a small gift, but whatever it is, preferably make it slightly bulky to excite curiosity. Then, when you call asking for them, mention to the gatekeeper that you want to follow up on the package you recently have sent to them.   

That package, by the way, once received by the target will probably go straight into the waste paper bin sitting next to their desk, unread, possibly unopened, because they don’t know who you are.  This “send the package then call” technique will slightly increase your chances of getting put through. 

Try to make the call before 9.00am, after lunch at around 1.10pm and again after 6.00pm.  The junior people will usually arrive around 9.00am or 9.30am.  They will have to man the phones from 12.00pm while all the important people go to lunch.  This means you have a slightly better chance of talking to the boss when they are back from lunch and the junior person is not there.  Companies are more concerned these days about junior, non-manager staff working overtime, so the junior people will be gone after 5.00pm or 5.30pm. The managers however are still there.  Obviously the same considerations apply if you know the person’s name. Your chances of connecting will go up.

If you have met them before, you can say that you are calling to follow on with them on that recent conversation you had.  Or you are calling to follow up on that email that you have sent them.  Or that you are calling to get an answer to your question in the email you sent to them.  More senior staff will generally recognize you have a business connection established and are more likely to put you through.

Why don’t they ever call you back?  They recognize you are trying to sell them something and that means making a change in the supply arrangements.  Change triggers a lot of requirement for internal harmonisation of a new supplier choice. They have to get the hanko seals stamped on the submission they will have to circulate to all those effected by the new decision.  It will also probably require individual meetings with certain key people to secure agreement.  It is a lot less work, trouble, time loss and risk to just ignore you in the first place. 

Yes, you can get through but it is not easy. You need to try some tactics to make it possible.  Have these issues in mind before you reach for the phone.  This will save you a lot of frustration and lost time.

I am sitting there with a crowd of people attending a presentation on blockchain technology.  Some are very technical people active in the crypto currency area, some run their own tech businesses.  Our presenter has amazing experience in this area, having worked for some very big names in the industry.  He also has his own company to promote as well as himself as a leader in this field.  He has some recommendations for us based on where he sees the industry moving over the next couple of years.

The coverage of his subject was logical and easy to follow.  It was clear he really knew what he was talking about. The slides by the way, overall, were excellent.  Very professionally done by a designer and they reinforced the credibility of his company.  Very clear, for the most part, with not too much information on each slide and plenty of white space.  Some fonts were a bit smallish and if you were seated at a distance, probably rather impenetrable.  Apart from that quibble though, they were well done. 

I was astounded though, by the way he presented his material.  I calculated that during the entire presentation, including both the Q&A as well as the main body of the talk, he had eye contact with his audience for about 1% of the time.  Where was he looking?  He interspersed his eye contact between looking at the floor and behind him at the monitor he was using to show the slides.  In fact, it was almost like some extremely primitive tribe living in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea, encountering a high spec, large form TV monitor, showing amazing scenes for the first time.  They would be amazed by what they were seeing and their eyes would be glued to the screen. This describes our modern, urban, high tech presenter to a tee.  He seemed hypnotised by the screen and just kept looking at it the whole time.

Mercifully, he wasn’t reading the content to us, line by line, like some other dim presenters I have had the misfortune to encounter.  He was transfixed though on the screen and just totally ignored his audience.  Occasionally he would break free from the siren call of the monitor and amble around the front of the room, wandering to and fro, staring down at the carpet tiles.

He did have good energy, was obviously expert in this area and had some passion for his subject.  Unfortunately, he preferred to speak in a monotone, where every single word gets the exact some strength treatment and there was no vocal variety.  I liked his gestures, although they tended to be held a bit low. It would have been better to get his hands up higher around shoulder height, so they would be more visible.

He didn’t seem to be lacking in confidence.  I spoke with him briefly before we started when I exchanged business cards. He didn’t come across as some nerdy, painfully shy techie, who wants to avoid contact with human kind as much as possible.  What was going on here?

I put this dismal display down to a lack of knowledge.  He knows a lot about the tech but knows close to zero about how to explain it to an audience.  He didn’t seem to understand that in order to convince an audience of your point of view, you need to engage them.  Like a lot of technical people, he must have believed that by just putting the data and information up on the screen, the goodness and sanctity of the content would carry the day.  He must have imagined that his personal part in the process was not relevant.  Even during the Q&A, he completely ignored the source of the questions – the rows of people seated in front of him.  He just continued to stare at the screen. By the way, the words up on the screen at that point were “Thank You”, so not a lot to look at.

The basic rule of presenting is to use all the tools at your disposal.  Eye contact with your audience is so powerful as a persuader.  We wrap that up with our vocal variety, pauses, gestures and body language.   

Hold the gaze of one individual in your audience for six seconds.  Longer than that it becomes too intrusive.  Speak to one person, on a point while holding their gaze, then switch your gaze to another person.  Don’t do it in any predictable order, because people will anticipate what you are doing and switch off , because they know their turn is not coming yet. 

Rather divide the room up into six sections.  Front to the left, middle and right and the same for the rear half of the room.  Then at random move your gaze around picking up people, making eye contact with them and converting them to your point of view on the subject.

Our presenter missed a big opportunity to persuade his audience to use his firm.  He failed to sway us with his point of view, because he under powered the persuasion bit.  The quality of your content may be the best on the planet, but that does not remove your role in explaining it.  Back up what you are saying with knowledge of presenting as well and unlike our speaker, become the total package.

Focus is under constant attack.  The speed of business makes longer term planning a dubious endeavor.  Projecting 5 years forward sounds reasonable.  That is until you go back 5 years and look at all the changes that have taken place through technology, societal attitudinal changes, business realities and logistics.  The leader is supposed to be defining the way forward for the team.  The vision of the future is the guiding light on the hill toward which the troops are pointed.  The relevancy of that vision is constantly being challenged by the market and by clients. 

The leader can no longer easily keep up with all of the demands on their time.  Social media has become a major source of information and we are all drinking from the firehouse.  Meetings are numerous and suck up time at a prodigious rate.  Email comes gushing forth in relentless fashion and inboxes become archives.  "I will get to that email" is a plaintive cry from the oppressed masses.  If we are traveling across time zones, then sleep patterns are shattered and we enter a zombie like twilight zone but still have to function anyway. When we get finally back home we are still trying to assimilate with our usual everyday challenges, but in a jet lag induced vegetative state.

We are not delegating enough.  We know we should do more of it but we don't.  We are holding on to too much control and this is ramping up our workload.  In tougher times we had to jump in and keep things afloat.  After the refloat though, we haven't eased off on the controls and are still doing too much ourselves.  Where is the time to work on those things that only we can do?  

 Projects are bright shiny objects that fascinate our minds.  We already have a big bag of them to carry around, but we keep stuffing more into the same bag. Our intellect and our imagination make us constantly hungry to do more and more interesting things and we do.  The hours of the day don't grow to match our hunger, so things start well and then drift.  We pull back the edge of the carpet and there they all are - projects started but never finished.  Stacked up there out of sight and out of mind because they have been replaced by a newer sexier beau.

 We never get to any perfect harmony with our team.  The ones we want to keep, move on to greener fields, the ones we want to move on, we wind up keeping by default.  The turnover means time and expertise is lost and we are in a state of constant starting again.  This kills progress.  The current candidate friendly market in Japan means that we are in a permanent recruit and retain mode.  We have to put a higher value on continuity, than in the past, because the lag between losing people and hiring new staff gets longer.  Hiring gets harder and more expensive.

None of this looks like it is going to improve any time soon.  The ability to deal with this level of complexity becomes more important.  The agile yet focused will win in this game.  A good leverage point is heightened self-awareness.  Knowing what is important and then giving that time is a differentiator.  We need to have a “true north” in mind, against which to align ourselves, or we will find ourselves adrift in a sea of confusion.  

The fog of busyness needs a clear counterpoint.  We need to reestablish who we are, what we want and where we are going.  This sounds simple.  But if I ask you right now, can you pull out your written down game plan for your future?  Can you articulate the steps needed to keep moving forward?  Have you clearly nominated what success actually looks like.   

“I want 10 million dollars”, is too vague.  What do you want it for, how are you going to use it, how does this translate into your personal happiness or satisfaction? 

The manic pace of the everyday can distract us and we forget about working on our personal alignment.  Ironically, we need to slow down in order to speed up and get more done.  We need to re-establish the point of what we are doing.   We need to re-set the starting point and to fix a clear image of the finish line in our minds.  We can then swim hard against the pull of busyness with a firm plan in place.  The alternative is often being drawn along in the froth and fury of the storm tide.

So stop what we are doing.  Intervene in our busyness.  Re-connect with who we really are.  Reaffirm our direction.  Define true north. Make a new plan and follow it.

Because the vast majority of people in sales have no idea what they are doing, they are making it up as they go along.  Wouldn’t it be better to have a roadmap to progress the making of a sale?  This roadmap will keep us on track and not allow the buyer to take us off on a tangent that leads to nowhere. Foundering around with no central direction wastes a lot of key buyer facing time and we don’t want to do that.  We can’t expect unlimited access because of their busy schedules, so once we are in front of them we have to get all of the discovery process done in usually around an hour. 

The sale call roadmap starts even before the call.  These days with so much information readily available, especially with the advent of AI tools, we can’t turn up and ask basic questions about the company.  We need to have done some research beforehand on media reports, their website, annual report, social media and using LinkedIn where possible, to check on the individuals we will meet, before we meet them.

Having done all of that, we are well armed to get the conversation off to a great start.  We may have friends or contacts in common; or shared a similar working experience in the same company; or lived in the same town; or went to the same university or studied the same subjects.  When we have done our research we will have an opportunity to try and find these little connectors.  I was working with an American guy when I was at the Shinsei Bank.  He was an absolute master at this.  He had just joined the bank and I was supposed to brief him on the work my division was doing.  We spent the whole time with him making connections between people we both knew.  He did this to break the ice and establish rapport.  I never did get to brief him on my division!

This rapport building is important with clients.  We know if we don’t get a good relationship going at the start of the conversation, then it is unlikely they will buy from us.  Even if we don’t have much in common, we can use other techniques like bring some interesting industry data or intelligence to them.  We might have seen something work somewhere else and we can introduce this idea to them.  In this initial meeting process, we need to make a very important intervention.   

We need to get permission from the buyer to ask questions. When they are happy to meet us and having established some rapport, they are more likely to say “yes” to our request to ask questions about the inner details of what the company is doing and all the problems they are encountering.  In other words, all the firm’s dirty laundry. If there was no rapport or trust created would you be keen to share that detail with strangers?  Now in a western business environment, asking questions is no big deal, but with Japanese buyers it is crucial we do this.  They are used to being hit with sales pitches, so the concept of them being questioned by the seller is not something they are used to. 

Having gotten that permission we should ask very intelligent questions, so that we can fully understand their needs.   Now buyers sometimes don’t want to tell us their precise situation.  We have to ask our questions in a way that gets around that reluctance.  We are searching for an entry point where we might become useful to them, to solve a problem they have.  If they don’t have a big enough problem or if they think they can fix it themselves, then we will have a lot of difficulty making the sale.  We have to show why this issue is best addressed now, rather than after. And why they should leave it to us to fix, rather than trying to do it themselves.  Left to their own devices and a hundred year time frame, businesses can solve their own problems and they don’t need us, which is why we have to emphasise speed and the urgency of time to get them moving. If we don’t deal with these issues up front, then no sale. Once we understand their needs, we move along the roadmap to the part when we present the solution.  Now in Japan, this will usually take place at the second meeting. There will be a discussion about the technical pieces of what we will do, talking about how this solution will fit their company.   We can’t leave it there though, because that is still too abstract.  We need to talk about how they can project and apply these benefits inside their company, in order to get better results.  This is where word pictures are very powerful.  In most cases, we are selling a future that they can’t fully appreciate.  So we need to explain how we can add to their business through increasing revenues, reducing costs or grabbing greater market share.

If we have been able to uncover what the success of this project will mean for them personally, then we wrap that bit around the benefit too.  The client naturally doubts what sales people are telling them, so we need to show evidence for them that this has worked for other companies.  Once we have done that, then we can test the waters to see if what we have suggested is the right solution for them.  We do this by asking a simple trial closing question like, “How does that sound”.  We want to flush out any resistance to place an order.  If they don’t have any problems, then we just ask for the order, “Shall we go ahead?”.

If they have issues with what we are suggesting, then we need to confirm what these are?  They may have problems with our pricing, payment terms, quality, delivery or schedule.  It doesn’t matter what they mention, we shouldn’t answer it immediately.  I know the emotional temptation is strong to jump in and correct their misunderstanding or their resistance but wait.

Remember, we are only getting the headline, at this point and we need more information before we are in a position to answer their objection.  Once we have heard the details of what they are thinking, we still wait, we don’t answer it.  We keep digging.  There may be other even more pressing concerns they haven’t mentioned yet and there is no point in answering a minor concern, if the big one is left unattended. Once we have gotten out their key concerns, we ask them about which one is the highest priority for them. And then we proceed to answer that item.  Often once we have answered that one, the other concerns fade away.  

Finally we ask for the order. They may say they have to think about it and because of the consensus decision making system in Japan, they actually have to get the rest of the organisation behind this yes. 

That is fine but make an appointment right then and there for a follow up meeting to put a firm schedule behind getting that consensus.  If you don’t, then it could drag on forever. You are better to push for a finite yes or no.  Thinking you have something in your pipeline, when you don’t is false comfort.  A clear no is better because then you have a better picture of deal flow and revenue projections. You can devote your full energy on another buyer who can say yes and go ahead.  If we get a yes, next we do the follow up and deliver on what we promised.

This roadmap is how we run the sales meeting with the client as opposed to Japan where, typically, the buyer hijacks the process and usually runs the meeting.  We need to keep control and bring the buyer back to the roadmap to move along the rails or we will never get a sale.  Winging it may be more exciting and appealing to your free spirit, but you won’t make as many sales.  The path to the sale is clear and you have to keep it moving along that path, going through all the stages, to get to a yes.

At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has been completed.  How about you? When people are filing out of the venue, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if you were able to eavesdrop on their conversation?  Being clear is always a favourite and another high ranking popular desire is to be more inspiring.

Now “inspiring” can be defined in many ways, but for the purposes of giving presentations, we can think of it as lifting people up, getting them to take action, to challenge new things, to push themselves harder than before.  Actually that is a pretty tall order in a forty minute talk.  Unless we are a professional motivational speaker, the majority of our talks will probably be focused on dispensing information and offering advice on how to solve business problems. 

What would a business audience find inspiring?  It could be a tale of daring do, where great adversity had been overcome through the human will.  Conquering dangerous elements of nature, one’s circumstances or fellow man, often come up in this regard.  The problem is business people’s activities usually are far removed from conquering the poles, vertiginous mountain ascents or vast ocean  crossing exploits.  These are very specialist pursuits, which are out of our purview. 

The arc of the story of rags to riches is a popular trope.  This works in business, because we are looking for hope in the face of tough odds.  When we hear that others made it despite all the trials and tribulations, we take it that maybe we can do it too.  It can be a personal story or it can the saga of a firm or a division and its imminent elimination, coming from back from the cusp of destruction to rise again and prosper.  We are magnets to lessons on survival.  We prefer to learn through the near death experience and ultimate triumph of others, than try it on ourselves. 

You might be thinking your life is rather dull, your industry absolutely dull and your firm perpetually dull.  How could you liven up a talk with stories than were inspiring to others?  Maybe you can’t.  Perhaps you have to draw lessons from other industries or personalities and weave these into the point you are making in your talk. 

I like to read biographies and autobiographies for this reason.  I enjoy interviews with outstanding people, telling how they climbed the greasy pole and got to the top.  Strangely, obituaries are also a good source for this type of information.  They are usually brief summaries of a person’s life. They often contain snippets of great hardship or success and frequently both.  Don’t just skim over these heroic tales, instead collect these rich stories.  These can be your go to files for greatness, when you want to introduce an idea that needs some evidence.   

There may be legendary figures in your industry or your firm.  These are stories you can retell for effect, to drive home the insights you want illuminate.  Okay it wasn’t you, but the audience doesn’t care that much.  They like to learn and they love hearing about disasters, so the train wreck doesn’t have to be your personal catastrophe. 

Usually the founders of your firm went through tough times. There are bound to be tales in there you can use.   Or you can draw on recent recessions, the Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown, the pandemic, to find episodes where all looked grim, but a legendary team battled on and survived, while many businesses around them disappeared. 

You may have some personal experiences that are also relevant.  This can be quite hard, because you are sharing something quite personal with the world.  As an introvert, it took me a long time before I was comfortable to talk about my own experiences.  When I did though, the impact on the audience was immediate.  I could sense the feeling of closeness with strangers, as they listened to my tales of error, overreach, miscalculation etc.   I still have trouble with this, so I do prefer the woes of others to my own, but definitely my own stories are always so much more powerful.  I just need the temerity to tell more of them.

So pepper your talk with uplifting examples from others or from your own experiences, that justify the action you want them to take or boost the feeling of confidence you want to instill in your audience.  The raw material is all around you.  Just start looking for it and begin compiling it.  When you hear something, you can use, capture it immediately for later employ.  Dig into the vaults of your own experiences and draw out examples that will make you magnetic for your audience.  Telling these types of stories is how speakers have inspired audiences down through the ages.  The reason we still do it today is because it works a charm.

For decades I drove myself hard, based on a fundamental fallacy. Fear of a future of living in a cardboard box haunted me. I pushed hard so that cardboard box and I would never become well acquainted. You see homeless people in Japan and other countries living that way and it is a reality for them, that they never chose. It happened to them anyway.

The odd part was that this was a deep seated fear within me, that I wasn't really all that conscious of. It was sort of sitting there in the background, in the inner sanctums of my mind. My father had been a big smoker (died of lung cancer at 51), big drinker (every night) and a big gambler (every Saturday at the track). If you grew up in a gambler's household, then you know what never having any money is all about. The weekly pay packet received on Friday evening is taken down to the racetrack and blown on Saturday morning. I never gamble, I never smoke and I drink very, very moderately. Hanmen Kyoshi (反面教師) it is called in Japanese – my Dad was my teacher by negative example.

So as a gambler's son, you start below the waterline and have to work hard to break the surface and make something of yourself and eventually you do. The strange part is that the fear of poverty, the fear of failing never leaves you.  Somewhere in the back of your mind is the idea that success is not allowed for you. So you drive yourself hard, constantly dissatisfied with your progress. It is never big enough, never good enough, never fast enough, never safe enough.  I could never answer the question of how much was enough, so I just tried to maximize it every time, in every way, in every situation.  This put enormous stress and pressure on myself.

Then one day, something happens or someone says something, that makes you rock back on your heels and think hard about it. That is what happened to me. I was describing my fears of the cardboard box and my listener questioned that thesis.  He said, "Greg, you have a Ph.D., you have a big job with lot's of responsibility, you have money, you have assets and investments, you have drive and energy, so why are you operating on a false premise of failure. Why can't you drive forward based on a different idea?  What about the concept that you can live out of your potential, rather than your fear of failure?".

Wow. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I was stopped in my tracks by that comment. That thought of living out of my potential had never occupied my mind, not for even one nanosecond. Getting good information and doing something about it are not the same thing.  I was gripped by what he said and started to ask myself whether that was actually feasible. After so many decades of living out of fear of failure, could I just switch gears completely?

Well it turns out that I could.  From that moment in 2000, I forgot about a cardboard box bound future. I made the switch by starting to concentrate on what I had going for me and looked for ways to make more of that.  Find out more when we come back from the break

I made a list of all the things I thought were my strengths and I added that list to my goal setting routine, for daily review.  I concentrated on the positive, not the negative. It sounds simple to say that, but this is not simple, when your whole lifetime narrative has been one of probable failed future prospects.

I changed my perspective about myself.  I started by questioning my basic assumption -  why I thought I would eventually fail?  What was the evidence for that assumption?  Was I still caught up in my father’s paradigm of self perpetuating poverty, as part of the gambler’s curse.  He was a hard worker.  He started work at 13 out in the bush on a sheep station in the west of Queensland.  He tried many things, but he could never get ahead because of the gambling.  When I analysed it, what had any of his life challenges to do with me?   

I said to myself, “Hey, I don’t gamble – ever”.  My real narrative should be different to my Dad’s and it should be about who I am, not who my father was.  When I put it like this it sounds so obvious but it took me a long time to work that out.  I was trapped in a mindset of possible total failure looming in the future.

For other fellow "fear of failure" travellers out there, hear me now - we can change gears.  We can live everyday with drive and hard work based on a new premise. There is such a thing as working toward our potential, rather than trying to escape from our fear of failure. We can change our view of who we are and where we are going.  We can objectively analyse our current and future prospects.  We can prepare for the future without worrying about it.  We can take steps to head off any possible calamities and take action now, rather than just spinning around in worry circles.

Don't be like me though and spend lost decades working this out. Don't rely on getting lucky through the most random chance of a single comment. Hear me now and hit the reset button.  Decide you want to say goodbye to your cardboard box premonition or whatever fear is driving you and move to a better future based on the reality of your current strengths, experience and accomplishments.

Knowledge of the specifications, functionality, inner workings are all fine and dandy but not enough anymore.  Increasingly technically specialised people are being asked to deal with people other than their normal counterparts.  Once upon a time, the engineers spoke with other engineers on the buyer side and that was about it.  A nerdy lovefest on the specs, so to speak. Today there are broader spectrum buying teams.  These “civilians” are often the key decision-makers and are not technical in the traditional sense.  This means the technical person has to be able to communicate and present to them in a way which they can understand.

Communication skills have always been low on the totem pole for technical people.  At High School they hated English and thrived on Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry etc.  At University, the key focus and preference was on technical subjects.  In fact, after the second world war, these technically oriented people were creating problems in the workforce to such an extent, that Universities had to create a new programme for them.  This was the basis for the origination of the Masters in Business Administration.  The aim was to teach technical folks the non-technical sides of running a company. 

I was reminded of the big gap in fundamental presentation skills recently at a presentation I attended.  It was a big crowd and the speaker had a star studded resume.  He had a Ph.D. in his technical field and was a Corporate Officer in his very, very large, global firm.  He was a big wheel in that world and someone often called upon to give technical presentations, representing the firm.

When he started his presentation proper, I was shocked.  I couldn’t believe that someone in his position, with his experience, in that role, with that amount of responsibility for the brand, would be making such a basic, fundamental mistake.  The first slide went up and it was densely packed with text.  I thought it was the typical compliance required disclaimer statement that usually goes up first.  No, no, no.  This was his first slide of the actual presentation. 

To make it really exciting, he had made the text in ten point sized font, so it was almost impossible to read.  To add insult to injury the bottom quarter of the page was blank, unused white space.  There was no concept of balance on the slide and it was ugly. He then proceeded to basically read the slide to us.  The next slide was even worse.  Same ten point font, but this time the bottom half of the slide was tantalising white space.  After that ordeal by tiny text, we got on to a series of line graphs.  This was a relief, except that a lot of the graph text descriptors were impossible to read too.

I was sitting there thinking WOW.  In the 21st century, how could this be possible?  A High School student would do a better job than this gentlemen of presenting the information on screen.  The snapper is that he is in a role where he would be giving a lot of these types of presentations.  He is highly technically trained and often graces the boardrooms of major companies, who are clients of his firm, giving this and similar presentations.  He has been doing this a long time.  He is one of the most well recognized public faces of the company, after the President and Chairman, because his role is to promote the technical expertise of the company to grow the stock price.

After the initial slide deck shock, I started zooming in on how he was delivering the presentation.  There were a lot of numbers involved, so it was a rather dense talk.  Pointedly, there were no stories to bring the ramifications of the numbers to life.  These were just dry, dull data points that were not thought to need any elaboration.  The audience however were a mixed industry bunch, so there were varying levels of technical expertise in the room.  Pulling out experiences with similar numbers in the past, would have been great pointers to what we might expect in the future.  Dry numbers can come to life when wrapped up in an interesting example.  Also, we are much better at remembering stories, than concentrations of data points.

As a public speaker, he did look toward his audience, but somehow managed not to look at any of the people in his audience.  You have seen this one before too, I am sure. He moved his face from left to right and back again, sort of rapidly scanning the room, but not actually making any eye contact with anyone in particular.  This precluded his ability to make a stronger connection and engage with the people in the room. In the time he had allotted, he could have connected with each one of us individually and directly, if he had tried.  We know that around 6 seconds of eye contact works very well.  It is not too intrusive, yet allows us to really engage with individuals one at a time.

His voice was soft and even throughout.    It hung perilously close to a monotone.  This habit is deadly for a presenter, because it robs us of some key tools to add luster, shine and strength to our argument.  When we give each word an equal emphasis in a sentence, then we miss the CHANCE to highlight particular key words for our audience.  In that last sentence, I hit the word CHANCE harder than the other words, so this gives it strength and prominence over the other words. 

I could also have made chance much softer than the words around it, almost like a conspiratorial whisper, to make it stand out.  Both are voice modulation variations which are at our disposal and we should be making good use of them.  A monotone delivery will kill the audience and put everyone to sleep.  He could have also added to the variety, by speeding sentences up for effect or the opposite, s-l-o-w-i-n-g them down.  Both allow us to grab the attention of the audience. 

People today are deep in the age of disruption, from a technology point of view, but they are also deep in the Age of Distraction, thanks to that very same technology.  For presenters, the challenge has never been greater in the history of our species and we must rise to the occasion. Boring presenters immediately lose their audiences to competition from mobile phones.  These are surreptitiously being held under tables, as people hit the internet and mentally flee the room, the speaker and their message 

What is the advantage of being an expert, with tremendous reserve powers of technical expertise, if no one is listening,.  Who are you actually talking to?  Yourself? This is what happens when you have lost your audience.  Mastery of the slide deck presentation professional protocols are an absolute basic requirement.  I don’t even know why I have to mention this. 

Engaging the audience and telling memory captivating stories is another basic skill.  Stories enlarge the impact of the numbers and stay with us, long after the data and the date of the talk has been forgotten. Making eye contact to personalize the delivery is so powerful.  When combined with voice emphasis, by either adding or subtracting strength and speed, this becomes the mark of the true professional presenter.   

Technical people can no longer hide from reality.  They can’t find refuge in their clubby expertise area. They are required to convey their knowledge to others who are not part of their shared technical heaven.  Get the skills and most importantly of all, rehearse before you give your presentations.  The difference is infinite.

Sales is a tough enough job without having additional complications.  Clients can be very demanding, often we depend on logistics departments and production divisions, to get the purchase to the buyer.  We can’t control the quality, but we have total responsibility, as far as the client is concerned. There is the constant pressure of producing revenue results, with bosses always pushing hard on the numbers. 

If we are successful and we are doing well, you would think that life would be good.  Fat chance of that.  We know the emotional roller coaster that is the sales life and you are only ever as good as your last deal.  Perhaps with a little bit of success should come some respite from the turmoil of hitting the numbers.  I hate to break this to you, but no such luck! 

Our sales colleagues, by definition, cannot all be equally successful.  The Pareto Principle says that the top 20% of salespeople will account for 80% of the revenue numbers and commissions.  So that means the other 80% of the team are scrambling around for the remaining 20% of the sales.  People come into sales from different backgrounds, with different levels of experience, with degrees of motivation and they join at different points in the annual results cycle.  This means that some will be in the top group, a chunk will be in the middle and the rest are at the bottom.

In the West, the usual way sales teams are managed is based on the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest.  Those who can’t cut it are cut loose.  Those who can continue to produce get to stay.  If they can survive a couple of recessions, they may even be moved up into management positions.  This means that those at the bottom are basically on their own. This should spur them on to greater efforts to move up the sales ranks and to strike for the top position in the sales results table.  Yet often this doesn’t happen. 

In Japan, most salespeople are on a salary and bonus structure, rather than salary and commission.  Almost nobody is on 100% commission arrangements and nobody wants that type of sales structure.  This means the financial ambition or necessity to get ahead in sales is not as strong as we see in the West.  Often the base salaries are large by foreign standards and so people can live on the base.

In some cases, there can be pushback against the top salespeople, by those failing, because the successful are making everyone else look bad.  Snide comments can be made, negative inferences drawn and a host of other petty signals that says “we don’t like you”.  This is driven by spite, jealousy and envy.  This is their “the way to build the tallest building in town is to tear down all the taller buildings” approach to greatness. 

In a small sales team this can be very uncomfortable.  There is a degree of mutual cooperation involved in sales teams and this is usually where the disputes arise.  Who owns the client, who owns the deal, and how is the revenue commission going to be split up?

If the sales politicians in the firm get going, they can really do damage to the morale of the organisation.  These people are usually excellent at whining, gathering whiners together and hosting whine parties.  They use their energy to pull down those who are successful, instead of trying to become a success themselves. 

When you are the top performer or if you are in the top ranks, you can feel you have become a target.  Instead of just worrying about getting sales done, you now have to waste precious energy walking around on egg shells, to avoid criticism from your colleagues.  This is all kept below the radar, so the boss is often unaware of what is really going on.  However, in many cases they don’t care anyway.  They are looking for numbers and they don’t want to have to deal with personalities and sales soap operas in the office.

If the bosses are any good, they would be sorting out the toxic few, but often they don’t.  The top salespeople are razor focused on serving clients and doing all the hard yards needed to get the sale, so they are not politically minded.  The whole mess gets made worse because in a declining demographic, many organisations are looking at their salesperson retain strategies.  They do this because they know they cannot easily recruit enough salespeople replacements.  This means the internal war goes on for much longer that it should.  We lose sight of the external competition and fight amongst ourselves.

Bosses, hear me, sack the toxic!  If you don’t, you will find the whole organisation will start failing as the wrong culture takes command.  If you are one of the top salespeople, insulate and isolate yourself from the whiners.  They don’t work as hard or as long, so there is plenty of opportunity to get to the work, without having to engage with them much.  Winners start early and concentrate on their Golden Time between 9.00am-5.00pm on speaking with clients, not idiots in the office. 

This Golden Time is reserved for client meetings and to create more business.  All of the administrivia needs to be fitted in around those hours.  Writing proposals, holding sales meetings, collecting data, putting together sales information, recording activities in the CRM, etc., are what happens outside of Golden Time.  These days, thanks to technology, this can be done remotely.

Keep the time in the office with losers to an absolute minimum and protect yourself from their influence.  Remember, you are superman or superwoman and they are kryptonite.

 Everyone hates to be rejected, but not many people have this as a fundamental aspect of their work.  We ask colleagues for help and they assist, we ask our bosses for advice and they provide it.  Buyers though are a different case.  They can easily find a million reasons not to buy and unashamedly tell us “no”.  The rejection itself is not so much the problem, as is how we respond, how we deal with the rejection.

In Japan, the two areas our clients flag with us for special attention in sales training for their team are around understanding the client’s needs and asking for the order or closing, as it is commonly referred to in sales parlance.  

The poor questioning skills are a result of salespeople wanting to tell the buyer a lot of stuff about the features, but not bothering to ask some well designed questions to uncover what their clients need.  This in itself will explain a lot about why buyers say “no”.  If we don’t properly understand what they need, then how do we suggest solutions that make sense and motivate the buyer to action?   

The two problems are closely linked.  Even assuming that the questions are well thought through and that the solution selected is professionally conveyed to the buyer, they may still say no.  This is because the buyer’s hesitations have not been properly addressed.  There was something unclear or unsatisfactory in what they just heard from the salesperson and they are not convinced this is the right solution to their problem. 

This is why a “no” will certainly be forthcoming, especially from Japanese buyers.  Risk aversion is a fundamental part of the fabric of Japan and buyers more than most, observe this in distinct detail.  They would rather give up on something better, if they thought there was a possibility their decision might bring some stain on their record. 

Failure is hard to recover from in Japan.  There are no second chances here. People have learnt the best way to avoid failing is to take as few decisions as possible.  Especially any decisions which can be traced back to you.  Best to have a group decision, so the blame can be spread around and no one loses their job.  Actually that works like a charm here, so no one wants to buck the system

Having given the sales presentation, many salespeople in Japan simply don’t ask for the order.  They get to the end of their spiel and they just leave it there.  The buyer is not asked for a decision, it is left vague on purpose, so that if it is a “no” then that will not have to be dealt with directly.  The Japanese language is genius for having circles within circles of subtle obfuscation.

The end result is a “no” but nobody ever has to say it or hear it.  To get a sale happening, the buyer has to do all the work here in Japan, because the salespeople don’t want commit, to take the plunge and ask for the order.  If they get a “no”, their feelings of self worth are impacted, they feel depressed, that they are failing.  Not doing fully competent work or being highly productive, yet keeping you job is a pretty safe bet in most Japanese companies.  The level of productivity amongst white collar workers is dismally low. Collective responsibility helps because it lessens the impact of personal inability to reach targets or make deadlines.

Sales though is totally crystal clear about success and failure.  It is very hard to argue with numbers – you either made the target or you didn’t.  Sales is also a numbers game.  You are not going to hit a homerun every time, so the number of times becomes important. 

You will have certain ratios of success that apply right through the sales value chain and the only way to increase your sales, is to improve these ratios.  You have to up the ante, regarding the volume of activity.  This sounds easy, but it isn’t when you are feeling depressed, insecure and plummeting in confidence. 

The key is to see sales in a different way.  The increased volume of activity will even out the rejections.  The way you think about rejection has to change.  Rejection isn’t about you personally.  Buyers don’t care that much about salespeople as people.  They are rejecting your offer.  As it is made today.  In this part of the budget process.  At this point in the economic cycle.  In this current construction.  At this price, with these terms.  We haven’t shown enough value yet, to get a “yes’.

As these aspects change, the answer can go from a “yes” to a “no” and from a “no” to a “yes”.  That decision is irrelevant of the salesperson and how the buyer feels about them.   These are macro and micro factors which can impact the decision one way or another.  The answer is to see more people.  In that way you can have a better chance of meeting a buyer for whom all the stars align and they can say “yes”.  

At the same time, you need to keep working on getting better, at showing more value.  You need to harden up and become tougher.  Whatever you are selling, you always need to remember your AFTOS mantra: “ask for the order stupid”.  Never say no for the buyer and understand that “no” is never “no” or forever.

When you see someone do a very good presentation, your faith in public speaking humanity is restored.  There are so many poor examples of people killing their personal and professional brands with poor public speaking skills, it is refreshing to see talks done well.  It is not that hard really, if you know what you are doing and if you rehearse and practice.  This is where the majority of lousy, boring and uninspiring speakers trip up.  They don’t rehearse or practice. Instead, they just unload on their poor unsuspecting audience.  Here is a pro hint.  Never practice on your audience!

The global CEO of a major pharma company jetted into town recently and spoke at a chamber of commerce event.  The presentation was well structured and flowed in a way that was easy to follow.  The slides were professional and clear.  He spoke fluently, wasn’t reading from any script and instead was talking about the key points up on screen.  When we got to Q&A, he repeated the question, so that everyone could hear it and then answered it.  He did that while addressing the entire audience, rather than just speaking to the inquirer.  When he did not have the information referred to in a question, he admitted it straight up, without trying to fudge it.  This is not an admission of weakness, rather it builds trust and credibility.

I doubt he did any rehearsal for that audience, because it was a stump speech he has given so many times he was entirely comfortable with the content.  Could he have done better?  Yes, he could have added more stories into the presentation.  A few vignettes from the exciting world of white lab coats, where they were developing new medicines to save humanity, would have been good.  He could have delivered it with a bit more passion.  It was professional, but it came across as a stump speech.  He was supremely comfortable delivering it and that is one issue we have to be alert to.  When we are too comfortable, we can sometimes slip ourselves into cruise control mode.  We should keep upping the ante each occasion, to try and see how much further we can push ourselves as presenters.

Another function I attended was an industry awards event and the main VIP guest made some remarks before announcing the winners.  Humour is very, very hard to get right.  For every professional comedian we see on television, there are thousands waiting tables and trying to break into the industry. When you see humour done well by a public speaker, you are impressed. 

You need to have material that is funny for a start.  Then you have to be able to deliver it so that people laugh.  This sounds easy, but as professional comedians know, the timing of the delivery is key.  So are the pauses and the weighting of certain key words.  It has to be delivered fluently, so no ums and ahs, no hesitations, no mangling of words.  Getting the facial expressions to match what is being said is also tricky.

Our humorous VIP was delivering some lines that he had used a number of times before, so he knew his material worked.  It is always good when big shots are self depreciating.  We can more easily identify with them, when they don’t come across as taking themselves too seriously.  “I am good and I know it”, doesn't work so well with the rest of us.  How do you become humorous as a speaker?

Where do we acquire our humorous material?

We steal it. Our speaker had probably heard those jokes somewhere else and just topped and tailed them for this event. Very cleverly, he made them sound personal, as if these incidents had really happened to him. This is important in order to build a connection with the punters in the audience. So when you attend an event and you hear someone make a good joke or tell a humorous story, don't just laugh and reach for another Chardonnay, quickly write it down and later start using it yourself.

The secret though is to practice that humorous telling on small audiences to test you have the delivery just right. The cadence is important and that takes practice. I would guess our speaker had told those jokes many times before. It is fresh for us, but for him, it was well within his range of capability. This is what comedians do. They introduce new material in small venues, filter out what doesn't work, and then they bring it to the big audience on the big stage with the best gags. We should do the same.

Another place where we can find humor is in what we say that makes an audience laugh. When I was returning to Japan in nineteen ninety two as a diplomat and as a trade commissioner, I was called upon to do a lot of public speaking in Japanese. I began with constructing jokes in Japanese that I thought were humorous. This was a pretty bold step, because I had no track record in being funny in English, let alone in Japanese. These jokes of my own crafting all bombed completely. However, I would say something not meaning to be funny and the Japanese audience would laugh.

I took note of that reaction and I realized that was a joke. I would incorporate that into my other talks. Over a long period of time and a lot of speeches, I built up a stock of these humorous sprinklings of pixie dust that worked with Japanese audiences.

It was refreshing to see two competent speakers in action recently and it is certainly a skill that all of us can improve in. There are some simple basics of speaking we need to concentrate on - prepare, rehearse, learn, repeat. If we don't, we could be damaging our personal reputation.

We don’t get the chance to do so many public presentations in business, so it becomes a hard skill set to build or maintain.  The internal presentations we give at work tend to be very mundane. Often we are just reporting on the numbers and why they aren’t where they are supposed to be or where we to date are with the project.   These are normally rather informal affairs and we are not in highly persuade mode when we give them.  We should be clear and concise, but we probably don’t really get out of first gear as a presenter.

Obviously, giving public talks is a lot more pressure than the internal weekly team meeting report.  We need to be operating at a much higher level and the complexity index is much, much higher.  This translates into pressure and often comes with a big dose of self-doubt.  This is called the imposter syndrome. Should I be the one talking on this subject?  What if they have questions I can’t answer?  What if they don’t like it or me?  What if I underperform as a presenter?   What if I white out and forget what I want to say?  The scenes of potential disasters are played out in our minds, as we talk ourselves into a panic.

How do we stop that negative self-talk and get a more positive view on our potential to do a really first class, impressive, professional job?  It is not a level playing field. We need to realize that the world of business presenters is full of people who are quite hopeless and boring, so the audience has been trained to expect very, very little.  We don’t have to be a super star, we just need to be competent and we will automatically stand out from the crowd of losers murdering their presentations out there everyday.

What does competent look like?  It means we are well prepared.  This doesn’t mean we have fifty slides in the slide deck ready to rumble.  It means we have thought about our talk in the context of who will be in the audience and what level of expert knowledge they have of the subject, so that we know at what level to pitch our talk. 

It means we have designed it by starting from the key punch line we will deliver in the initial close and then we have worked backwards to select the “chapters” that will bring home that point we have selected.  We have seized upon an opening that will grab the attention of our increasingly attention deficit audience They are all armed with their mobile phones, ready to escape from the speaker at any hint of unprofessionalism or potential boredom.

It means we will have rehearsed the talk at least three times, to make sure it flows well and fits the time slot we have been allocated.  We will make sure the slides are supporting us, not hogging all the attention and upstaging us.  They will be so clear that our audience can deduce the key point of each slide in two seconds, because of how we are presenting the information.  The slides provide us with the navigation of the speech, so we don’t have to worry about what comes next. We also have our talking points in front of us, if we need to refer to them as a backup, reducing our stress levels.

   It means we are not head down the whole time, reading from the printout or the laptop screen.  We are eyes up and looking at some of the members of our audience.  We are looking precisely at those who are either nodding approvingly or at least have a neutral expression on their face.  This builds our confidence on the way through the speech. We are avoiding anyone who looks obstreperous, negative, hostile or angry.  We do this to keep our mental equilibrium under control and positive throughout the talk.  We keep all of our doubts, fears, insecurities and worries to ourselves as a secret.  We definitely don’t show any of these to our audience.  We are fully committed to the idea that the “show must go on”, no matter what unexpected things may occur during our speaking time.

Those whom we have chosen to look at, are getting about six seconds of total eye contact concentration each time, as we make our points.  We then move on to the next person and keep repeating this as we build a one-to-one feeling with members of our audience.  They feel we are speaking directly to them and this is powerful. We are backing up our eye contact with our gestures, voice modulation and pauses.  This helps to drive home the key points we want to make.  We are purposely asking rhetorical questions to keep everyone engaged.  In terms of pure volume, we are speaking about 40% louder than normal.  This projects our voice for clarity and at the same time our confidence.  Audiences buy speaker confidence and we are keeping ourselves busy selling it to them.

We are using our first close we developed as we go into Q & A and we are confidently prepared for their questions.  We are confident because we have built up reserve power through our study of the subject.  We have kicked off Q & A, by publicly stating how many minutes we have for questions.  We do this to give ourselves a dignified retreat, a smooth way of departing the talk if we need to, in case things get out of control and a bit too hot.

We know how to cushion any salvos, thinly disguised as questions, that might come our way. A cushion is a general statement that doesn’t agree with or disagree with, what has been mentioned in the question.  This cushion buys us crucial thinking time before we have to respond.  We end the talk with our final close, to make sure our key message is resonating with the audience.  This is purposely designed to be the last thing they hear, as they walk out the door.

“We don’t plan to fail, we fail to plan” is an old saw and still true.  The key to success in building self-belief as a speaker is to be really well prepared and thoroughly rehearsed.  When you make the time to fully prepare before the talk, to become ready, you head off all potential disasters and meltdowns that might otherwise occur.  This is how to build self-belief – hard work, detailed preparation and lots of practice before you give the talk.

We can speak to a group. Then there is another level, where we try to totally captivate our audience.  What makes the difference?  The content could even be the same, but in the hands of one person it is dry and delivered in a boring manner.  Someone else can take the same basic materials and really bring it to life.  We see this with music.  The same lyrics, but with a different arrangement and something magical happens. This new version becomes a smash hit.  Speeches are similar.  A boring rendition is given a delivery make over and suddenly has the audience sitting on the edge of their seats fully enthralled.  I am sure we would all vote for the enthralling version, so how to do we do that?

The quality of the argument we are going to present is important.  We definitely need to design two powerful closes, one for the end of the speech and an extra one for after the Q&A.  It sounds counterintuitive, but we should start from the close when designing the talk.  We work hard to clearly define what is the most compelling message we want to leave with our audience.  Only then do we start to work backwards, structuring the rest of the speech from that point. 

Once we know what will really resonate with the audience, we begin gathering evidence to back that assertion up.  We have to remember that broad statements are too easy to make.  This is the Era of Cynicism, “fake news”, so the listener will need a lot of convincing.

We now do a rough sketch of the key points and attach the supporting evidence.  In a thirty minute speech, there won’t be so much time, so we might get through three or four of these key points and that is it.  We must make sure that the evidence is super, super strong.  We need really compelling proof, in order to build solid credibility for our argument.

The next stage is vital, especially in this Age of Distraction.  We have to wrangle a dynamite blockbuster opening.  We have to compete with all the things running through the minds of our audience.  The things they were doing before they got to the venue and all the things they have to do after this speech.  The hand held device is a modern day siren call.  It so silkily diverts their attention away from us, as they check email and social media. 

We have to smash through all that obstruction.  We sweep all before us and clear a path so that the audience will actually hear our message.  The first words out of our mouth had better be super compelling. If not, we will lose the battle for people’s modern miniscule attention spans.  We need to carefully design what that will be, because it won’t happen by itself.

 We want our visuals on screen to be clear and instantly comprehendible within two seconds.  It used to be ten seconds, but now we are down to just two, so really take a cold hard look at what you are putting up on screen. If it is taking the viewer longer than two seconds, then the slides are too dense. 

Let’s keep the colours to an absolute maximum of three.  Photos are great with maybe just one word of text added or just kept as they are.  This intrigues our audience to learn more.  We can then talk to the point we want to make. If we use graphs, we should have only one per screen wherever possible.  If we are going to use video, it had better be short and really, really hot. The transition from slide deck to video, back to slide deck must be seamless, so none of that tech fail we often see on display.

Every five minutes we need to be switching the energy levels right up, to keep our audience going with us.  This is key because they flag.  Classical music has its lulls and crescendos and so should we.   Naturally, we have tonal variety right throughout the talk, but we need to be hitting some key messages very hard, around that five minute interval.  This should be synchronised with some powerful visuals on screen, to further drive home the point.  This is not a result of chance, good fortune or fortuitous accident.  We need to plan for this massive impact on the audience. We structure the presentation so that this brings all the vocal and visual elements together, in a powerful, distinct, one in a million way.

We are meticulously sprinkling stories throughout the speech to highlight the evidence for our key points.  Data by itself is fundamentally dull, but stories fleshing out the data, should be scintillating.  These will be full of visual stimulation, using word pictures to conjure mental pictures in the minds of our audience.  We bring physical locations to life, describe vivid colours, talk about the season, mix in people they may know and importantly, explain the why of the story.  In this way we take our listeners on a magical journey, where they see the scene playing out in their own mind’s eye.  It is a bit like reading a novel, after having seen the movie.  As you read it, you can mentally imagine the scenes you saw previously on screen.  This is exactly the powerful effect we are going for.

Our final close, after the Q&A, has to go off with a real bang and not a whimper.  We want a powerful strong call to action.  The final few words must finish on an intense, uplifting upswing.  Many speakers let that very last sentence just sputter and peter out.  Remember, we want to muster the audience to our cause.  We want them to leave dyed in the wool supporters.  We want them getting a florid forehead tattoo with our name on it.  Okay, I was getting a bit carried away there.  That is probably too much, but you get the idea.

We need great structure, unassailable evidence, clear visuals, gripping stories, pacing, energy, passion and 100% belief in the value of our presentation.  The delivery is going to rock because we make it rock through rehearsal after rehearsal.  We keep going until we have refined the whole thing into a symphonic triumph.  We need to be thinking to create raving fans in our audience, right from the start, when we construct our talk.  Begin with captivation in mind.

We have many images of negotiation thanks to the media.  It could be movie scenes of tough negotiators or reports on political negotiations with lunatic led rogue states.  Most of these representations however have very little relevance in the real world of business.  A lot of the work done on negotiations focuses on “tactics”.  This is completely understandable for any transactional based negotiations.  Those are usually one off deals, where there is no great likelihood of any on-going relationship continuing between buyer and seller. This is false flag. 

The aim of sales is not a sale.  The aim is repeat orders.  If you want to be permanently in 100% prospecting mode, then transactional selling is fine.  That gets tiring and is tough, as you have to spend all of your time hunting because you can’t farm.  Now there will be some cases with buyers, where that is how it rolls and there is not much you can do about it.  The majority of salespeople though are trying to strike up a lifetime relationship with the buyer, so that the orders keep coming rain, hail or shine.

The style of negotiations for this business play are completely different to the one-off, transactional occasion.  In this world “tactics” are only partially relevant.  Going one up on the buyer, getting the better of them, isn’t sustainable in a continuing relationship.  They remember what you did to them and they definitely don’t like it. They either dump you completely as the supplier or they even it up down the road.  They don’t forget and they don’t forgive.

Technique has a role, in the sense that there are certain best practices in negotiating, which we should observe.  The philosophical starting point though is key.  What are we trying to do here, what is our purpose?  Are we trying to build an on-going business relationship where we become the favoured supplier or are we after a one–off smash and grab deal?  If you highly evaluate the lifetime value of the customer and this is your main consideration, then you will have a lot of commitment to win-win outcomes.

The consideration of the communication style of the buyer is another important negotiating consideration.  How we communicate with the buyer will vary, that is, if we know what we are doing.  Clueless salespeople will have one default mode – the way they personally like to communicate and that is all they have in their tool box. 

Professionals understand that if the buyer is micro focused, we go with them on facts, detail, evidence, testimonials, proof etc.  If they are the opposite, then we talk big picture and don’t get bogged down in the smaller details.  We describe what future success looks like.  If they are conservative, self-contained and skeptical, we drop the energy level to match theirs.  We don’t force the pace, we spend time having a cup of tea to build the trust in the relationship.  We mirror what they like.  If the buyer is a “time is money” hard driving, take no prisoners type, then we don’t beat around the bush.  We get straight down to business.  In rapid fire, we lay out the three key reasons they should buy, we get their order and then get out of their office pronto.

With this analysis in mind, we prepare for the negotiation by analyzing the buyer’s perspective.  We use what we know about them and their situation to build up a picture of what they will need from the deal we are negotiating.  We match that with what we can provide and we amplify the value we bring to the equation.  We now set out our BATNA – our “best alternative to a negotiated agreement”.  This is our walk away position. 

We have analysed the potential of this client, by looking at their lifetime value as a buyer.  This can have a big impact on how we see the pricing.  When negotiating with a big multi-national buyer, I had to take a painful hit on my pricing.  I only agreed to this though, because the volume in the first year was very substantial and the understanding was that this would be repeated annually.  Now, it may not become annual, who knows, but if it does, then this is a major feast of guaranteed farming that allows a better balance to all the other hunting required. 

In another case, I “fired” the buyer because their pricing requirement was too low. There was no prospect of any on-going business and the volume was not attractive.  When you believe you bring value, you enjoy inner confidence in your pricing.  We all have our positioning in the market. If we want to maintain that, then we have to be prepared to reject low ball offers that damage our position and our brand.  Hopefully you don’t have to do this too often, because you can convince other buyers to pay the full tariff.

In most cases, sales negotiating requires a holistic approach, rather than a “mechanical” tactics driven approach.  Decide what type of relationship you want with the buyer.  If it is win-win, then we are looking at trade offs for pricing against volume and repeat business.  Leave all that tricky dicky negotiating palaver to the fantasy world of Hollywood movie scripts.  Let’s negotiate in the real world.

Sales people are always under pressure to meet their targets.  In high pressure situations, this creates certain behaviours that are not in tune with the client’s best interests.  We know we should listen carefully to what the client wants, before we attempt to suggest any solution for the buyer’s needs.  We know that by asking well designed questions, we can possibly come up with an insight that triggers a “we hadn’t thought of that” or “we haven’t planned for that” reaction at best.  At worst, at least they know whether we have a solution for them or not.  Under pressure though, salespeople can temporarily become deaf toward the buyer.

Even assuming they are smart enough to ask questions in the first place, they may fall over when it comes to carefully listening to the buyer’s answers.   They can hear some buyer white noise in the background while they are thinking about their own interests.   They are self absorbed and are not plumbing the depths of what the client is trying to achieve.  In fact, they are ignoring the hints and nuances in the sales conversation.  Well then, what are they doing?  They are fixated on their own needs, their own target achievement, their own big bonus and their job security.

The client may have outlined what they had in mind at this stage, but that won’t scratch because the salesperson needs a bigger sale to make target.  They need to expand what the client wants, regardless of whether the client needs that solution or not.   Upselling and cross selling are legitimate aspects of sales, but the purpose has to be very clear.  It is not about making the salesperson more money.  It is serving the client in a deeper way.

The client may not have the full view of what is possible, because they will never know the seller’s lineup of solutions as well as the salesperson.  They will also not have had deep conversations with their competitors.  They won’t have been allowed behind the velvet curtain, to see what their competitors are doing and how they are doing it.  They will not have had a broad exposure to what other firms and industries are doing in terms of best practice.

This is the value of the salesperson, because they are constantly doing all of these things.  They are like butterflies, skipping from one sweetly fragranced flower to the next. They are collectors of stories, problems, breakthroughs, successes and can connect many, many dots together.  In this sense, they can see possibilities the client may not know exists or may not have thought of.  This is where the cross-sell and the up-sell add value, because the salesperson can expand the client’s world and help them to become more successful.  That is a long way from ramping up the number value of the sale, to make target.

It is rare to see a presentation completed well, be it inside the organization, to the client or to a larger audience.  The energy often quickly drops away, the voice just fades right out and there is no clear signal that this is the end.  The audience is unsure whether to applaud or if there is more coming.  Everyone is stuck in limbo wondering what to do next.  The narrative arc seems to go missing in action at the final stage and the subsequent silence becomes strained.  It sometimes reminds me of classical music performances, when I am not sure if this is the time to applaud or not.

First and last impressions are critical in business and in life, so why leave these to random chance?  We need to strategise how we will end, how we will ensure our key messages linger in the minds of the listeners and how we will have the audience firmly enthralled, as our permanent fan base. 

Endings are critical pieces of the presentation puzzle and usually that means two endings not just one.  These days, it is rare that we don’t go straight into some form of Q&A session, once the main body of the talk has been completed.  So we need an ending for the presentation just given and we need another ending after the Q&A.  Why the second one, why not just let it end with the final question? 

The pro never lets that happen.  Even the most knee quivering, voice choking, collar perspiration drenched, meltdown of a speaker is in 100% control while they have the floor. The audience usually let’s them speak without denunciation or persistent interruption.  Life changes though once we throw the floor open to take questions.  At that point speaker control is out the window and the street fight begins.  Now most Japanese audiences don’t go after the speaker, they are too reserved and polite.  Western audiences are less docile and big bosses ask difficult and potentially embarrassing questions.

When we get to the Q&A, the members of the audience are able to ask rude, indignant questions, challenging everything you hold to be true.  They can denounce you as a charlatan, scoundrel, dilettante and unabashed poseur.  Sometimes, they even launch forth into their own mini-speech, usually unrelated to whatever it was you were talking about.  Or they move the conversation off to a new place, which has nothing to do with your keynote content.  Suddenly your message is lost.

The original topic of your talk is now a distant memory.  That is why the pros ensure they bring it all back together with a final close to the proceedings.  Let the masses wander hither and thither with their questions, the pro never worries.  After the last question is done, the last word is now with the speaker, not some provocateur who happened to turn up to the event.  Surprisingly, many speakers don’t claim this right and allow the last question from the audience member to set the tone for the whole proceedings.  Don’t ever let that happen.

There are a number of ways of bringing the speech home.  In the first close, before the Q&A, we might harken back to something we said in our opening, to neatly tie the beginning and end together.  Or we might restate the key messages we wish to get across.  Another alternative is a summary of the key points to refresh everyone’s recollection of what we were saying.  We might end with a memorable story that will linger in the minds of the audience, that encapsulates all that we wanted to say.  Storytelling is such a powerful medium for increasing the memory of what has been said, you would expect more speakers would use it.

When we do this wrap-up, we should be picking out key words to emphasise, either by ramping our vocal power up or taking it down in strength to differentiate from the rest of what we are saying.  Speaking with the same vocal power throughout just equates the messages together. The messaging is not clear enough and makes it hard for the audience to buy what we are selling, Bland doesn’t sell. 

At the end of the final sentence we need to hit the power button and finish with a rising crescendo to really put the passion behind our position.  Don’t fade away.  Many speakers allow their voice to become weedy and just trail off into oblivion, sounding quieter and quieter at the end.  They appear exhausted and energy drained, rather than on fire with belief.  Instead of fading out, we need to bring energy to our final words.  We then add a small pause to let our words sink in with the audience and then smoothly move into inviting audience Q&A.  We have set the markers for what we want the audience to remember and we will return to those markers as second final time.

Don’t miss this key point: always specify the time available for Q&A at the very start when you call for Q&A – never, ever leave it open ended.  Why not?  If you are facing a rabid gathering of foes, critics and opponents and you just suddenly end proceedings, it looks cowardly and weak, as if you can’t take it when things get hot.  Slinking off the stage with your tail firmly between your legs is not how you want to construct the final audience impression of you. 

By mentioning the amount of time available for Q&A at the first close and then referring back to it again at the end, allows you to depart with your dignity intact.  You said 15 minutes and here we are, at time.  No shirking going on here, just magnificent time management.  Just suddenly ending, packing up and departing can make you to look like an wimp, scurrying out the door, because you can’t take it.  Not a great final impression.

Also, if you are trained on how to handle a hostile audience, you will sail out of there looking like an absolute legend.  Few people have any clue on what to do when under pointed attack.  The rest of the audience will look at you in awe and admiration, because they know if it had been them up there on the stage, they would have been mince meat.  If you have been in a room and the speaker got hit with a hot missile of a question, you were probably sitting there thinking, “I am glad that is not me up there on stage”. By the way, we teach how to handle hot missile questions.  If you are curious to know what to do when the gloves come off and all hell breaks loose, let us know!

Now, back to our topic.  The second or final close can be very similar to what we discussed earlier for the first close. Tie it all together or re-state key points or a summary.  In addition, this is also the point to use a pertinent quotation or a gripping story to leave a rousing call to action in the minds of your audience.  Again, the voice rises in strength at the end of the final sentence.  Don’t let it fade away.  Once you end, end.  Don’t keep adding to it.

When you get the ending right, you can then thank your audience so they are clear this is now over and you can relax and bask in their warm applause.  This is a good feeling and one that every speaker can enjoy, if they know what they are doing.

Action Steps

1.     Carefully strategise the ending rather than leave it to random chance

2.     Loop back to the beginning, hit the key message again or summarise some key points

3.     Always nominate a time limit when you call for Q&A

4.     Prepare two closes – one each for before and after Q&A

5.     Finish strong

Japan is a big small place.  It is about the same size as the UK, but is covered in mountains, the latter making up 70% of the land area.  We have very few of those horizon stretching field vistas like they have in England.  This mountainous aspect has led to quite strong sub-regional differences here, especially reflected in language, customs and cuisine.  England has these too, but I think Japan is more pronounced in this regard.  These differences pop up when you are selling here as well.  The following are my experiences having sold in all of these cites and having lived in Kobe/Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo and having made sale’s calls in other provincial centers.

If we go from south to north and start in Kyushu in Fukuoka, there is a local dialect and basically everyone went to school there and graduated from the local colleges and universities.  Foreigners are not calling on companies all that often down there, so there is still something of a rarity factor at play here.  Back in the good old days, when companies had generous entertainment budgets, the local staff were really glad to meet you.  This was a grand occasion to use you as the excuse to have a big night out on the town on the firm’s dime.  My ego took a bruising when I finally worked out it wasn’t the Story charm, that was generating this great enthusiasm for a night out on the town.  That big spending night out culture has gone by the wayside, but the rarity interest factor is still at play. Language is an issue though, because the English speaking capability is still underdeveloped in most of Japan.  The local burghers are quite cautious and conservative too.  It will take a lot of patience to do business here, but it can be done.  It just normally requires a lot more time than your company’s leaders or shareholders are prepared to give you.

Kobe was opened as an international port on April 1st, 1868, so it is one of the most open minded towns in Japan regarding international business.  They have had foreigners living in their midst for a very long time, so there is nothing special about us from a uniqueness point of view.  Trade has meant dealing with the outside world and being flexible about it in the process.  The denizens of Kobe often have a better level of English than other parts of Japan and they enjoy being seen as one of the most international cities in the country.  I always found people there open to discussing business.

Osaka is an ancient merchant town with a merchant mentality.  It was the center of the great commodity markets in Japan for salt, rice and soy beans.  One of the great things I like about this city is they will give you a “yes” or a “no”. Often, the reluctance to tell you “no” in Japan, leaves the whole decision piece dangling, without any clear idea of where we are going with this.  Not in Osaka.  If they like it, they will explore if there is a deal to be done and some money to be made.  They are proud of their local dialect and this is a big divider between insiders and outsiders.  As a foreigner, we are so completely outside of all consideration, that in a way, we are probably better accepted than their despised rivals from Tokyo.

Kyoto I always found very closed.  The aristocratic capital of Japan for centuries, it features a defined smallish city area hemmed in by mountains.  The interconnectivity of the local people is pronounced.  Their families have lived here for centuries, they know each other and they know who is a “blow in” and who isn’t.   Even for other Japanese salespeople from out of town, Kyoto is a hard market.  If you are from the outside, you are “out” for the most part.

The area around Nagoya has produced the three most famous warrior leaders in Japanese history, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Tokugawa family Shoguns, closed the country off from the rest of the world. When I say “closed”, this was upon pain of death for entry or exit.  This went on for hundreds of years.  In my experience, Nagoya is still relatively back there in a time warp – still closed off.  I didn’t find the local mentality particularly open to foreign business and there wasn’t much English going on around there either.  I said that in Osaka you get a “yes” or a “no” and that this knowing where you stood was attractive.  In Nagoya, they do the same thing and the answer is usually “no".  The pride of businesspeople in Nagoya is to have an exceptionally humble looking headquarters, with lousy office furniture, stained, aging carpets and everything very much down at heel, but to also have a huge pile of cash sitting in the bank.  I found they were extremely tight with their money too. 

It is the only place I have seen, where when a new shop opens and they put those decorative flower arrangements out front on the street, that passersby will shamelessly take handfuls of the flowers away with them.  They justify this on the basis that it is a waste to see them die and it is much better to have them home at their place.  It is a rough and tough market.  In a word to the wise, they have one little commercial idiosyncrasy that will kill you.  You meet, negotiate, agree the price and sometime later the agreed goods turn up at the seaport or the airport.  This is when they like to renegotiate the price with you!! 

“Character building” is how I would describe doing business in Nagoya.  The locals are very aware of who they are and don’t open up to “foreign” Japanese from distant places like Tokyo.  So, in one sense, they are very fair and they are closed minded to everyone, not just foreigners from overseas.

Tokyo is a really a first class international city and so different to when I got here over forty years ago.  The tallest structure here when I arrived was Tokyo Tower, which seems incredible today, when you take in the ever accumulating city skyline.  English is widespread, people are sophisticated, very international and everything works well.  Getting a decision though can be seriously painful. Because Tokyo is often the headquarters for companies, the scale of businesses being here is large.  As a consequence, there are many, many people who have to be consulted.  Getting them to agree can take an age.

Sendai and Sapporo are a bit like Fukuoka to me, in the sense that they are not often visited by foreigners, seeking to do international business.  The capacity to speak English is sparse and the local businesspeople are rather conservative.  Sapporo at least, is an international destination during the ski season, so there are pockets of more international business there.  Expect to have to keep coming back many times to build the trust.  Things will move slowly and in small test increments.

When I first lived here in Japan in the suburbs in Kunitachi, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I always imagined that the rest of Japan was like Tokyo.  It was only when I travelled around Japan selling in the late 1980s and then later lived in Nagoya in 1992 and in Kobe in 1996, that I realised that Tokyo was not Japan.  The regional differences are so important.  Of course, we can do business anywhere in Japan, and ultimately I did have success in regional centers.  The key success factor though is to know what is different locally and to have a defined, different strategy for each major center.  Did I mention you need a lot of patience?

In business, we are asked to present as a team.  We may be pitching for new business and the presentation requires different specialist areas of expertise.  This is quite different to doing something on your own, where you are the star and have full control over what is going on.  One of the big mistakes with amateur presenters is they don’t rehearse.  They just turn up and fluff it.  They blow up their personal and organisational brands.  When in a team environment, you absolutely cannot neglect the rehearsal component.  There will be many sessions needed before you are ready to face an audience, so you have to plan for this.  Do not leave this until the last moment after you have all been diligently assembling your slide decks.

The batting order is important.   Don’t put the brainy nerd up front. They may be the legitimate expert, but unless they are the best presenter keep them in reserve.  We want the best person to lead off, because this is how we create that all important first impression.  They may come back for the close out or have another equally skillful person secure the positive final impression.  The technical geeky people can be safely placed in the middle of proceedings.

As mentioned, don’t allow all the available team time to be sucked up by creating slides for the presentation.  This is the mechanical part and we need the soft skills part to be really firing. That takes time and repetition.  Set deadlines for deck completion, well in advance of the event, so that the chances to get everyone together are created.

Having worked out the order, do dry runs to see how the whole things flows.  Practice little things like each presenter shaking the hand of the next presenter as a type of baton pass between the team.  It shows you are a tight, united unit and connects the whole enterprise together. 

Also, make sure each presentation can be given by everyone in the team.  People get sick, planes get cancelled or delayed, all manner of circumstances can arise.  At the appointed time, you are down some key members of the team.  In this case the audience expects the show to go on and for you to cover the missing person’s part. 

This cannot be the first time this idea has occurred to you,.  You need to plan for this at the very start.  As you all rehearse together you hear their section over and over, so jumping in and working through their part of the deck shouldn’t be an impossibility.  The questioning part might be different, but the presenting part should not create too many difficulties, if you are organised.

Have a navigator for the questions determined at the start.  When questions land you want that process to be handled seamlessly.  I remember being on a panel for a dummy press conference, during media training. One ex-journo in the audience asked us a very curly question and being amateurs, we all just looked at each other, having no clue as to who would take that infrared missile.  Our work colleagues in the audience just burst out laughing, because we looked such a shambles.  Pretty embarrassing stuff, I can tell you.

Anticipate what likely questions will rise, nominate who will take care of which sections and if anything indeterminate hits the team, understand that the navigator will take care of it.  The navigator, will also control the questions.  If it is straightforward, then after thanking the questioner, they will just say, “Suzuki san will take care of this topic” and hand it over. 

If it is a bit tricky, tough or complicated and is going to be hard to answer, the navigator must control things.  They need to build in a bit of thinking time for the person who is going to have to take this one.  They need to “cushion” the answer.  By this I mean they will say something rather harmless, but which buys valuable thinking time for the person. This allows them to brace themselves for their reply. 

It would sound like this, “Thank you for your question.  Yes, it is important that the budget allocated helps to drive the business forward.  I am going to ask Tanaka san to give us some insight into how to address this budget issue - Tanaka san”.  That sentence takes around 12-15 seconds to say.  Tanaka san already knows she will get this one, because it is within in her designated area of expertise to answer during the pitch.  The navigator provides her with some extra time to compose her strategy for her answer. 

Another technique, which you can only use sparingly, is to simply ask them to repeat the question.  You actually got it the first time, but you may want to build in some extra thinking time to come up with the best answer.  Do this too often and the games up!

Teamwork requires coordination and rehearsal if you want to appear professional and well organised.  When you competitors turn up like a train wreck, you will be happy you put in the work.  Just make sure you don’t turn up like a train wreck and make your rivals look good.

 The Question and Answer component of talks are a fixture that we don’t normally analyse for structure possibilities. Having an audience interested enough in your topic to ask questions is a heartening occurrence.  When we are planning the talk though, we may just neglect to factor this Q&A element into our planning. We may have considered what some potential questions might be, so that we are prepared for them, but maybe that is the extent of the planning.  We need to go a bit broader though in our thinking about the full extent of the talk we are going to give.  Should we accept questions as they arise or do we tell the audience we will take their questions at the end?  What are the main considerations for each structure?

Q&A in Japan can be a bit tricky though, because people are shy to ask questions.  Culturally the thinking is different to the West.  In most western countries we ask questions because we want to know more.  We don’t think that we are being disrespectful by implying that the speaker wasn’t clear enough, so that is why we need to ask our question.  We also never imagine we must be dumb and have to ask a question because we weren’t smart enough to get the speaker’s meaning the first time around.  We also rarely worry about being judged on the quality of our question.  We don’t fret that if we ask a stupid question, we have now publicly announced to everyone we are an idiot.

Some speakers encourage questions on the way through their talks.  They are comfortable to be taken down deeper on an aspect of their topic.  They don’t mind being moved along to an off-topic point by the questioner.  The advantage of this method is that the audience don’t have to wait until the end of the talk to ask their question.  They can get clarification immediately on what is being explained.  There might be some further information which they want to know about so they can go a bit broader on the topic.

This also presents an image of the speaker as very confident in their topic and flexible to deal with whatever comes up.  They also must be good time managers and facilitators when speaking, to get through their information, take the questions on the way through and still finish on time.  In today’s Age Of Distraction, being open to questions at any time serves those in the audience with short concentration spans or little patience. 

Not everyone in the audience can keep a thought aflame right through to the end, so having forgotten what it was they were going to ask, they just sit there in silence when it gets to Q&A.  Their lost question may have provoked an interesting discussion by the speaker on an important point.  Having one person brave enough to ask a question certainly encourages everyone else to ask their question.  The social pressure of being first has been lifted and group permission now allows for asking the speaker about some points in their talk.

On the other hand, the advantage of waiting until the end is that you remain in control of the order of the talk.  You may have done an excellent job in the preparation of your talk and have dealt with all of the potential questions by the end of the talk. The Q&A then allows for additional things that have come up in the minds of the audience. 

It also makes it easier to work through the slide deck in order.  The slide deck is alike an autopilot for guiding us through the talk, as we don’t have to remember the order, we just follow the slides.  Of course, if we allow questions throughout, we can always ask our questioner to wait, because we will be covering that point a little later in the talk.  Nevertheless, the questions at the end formula gives the speaker more control over the flow of their talk with no distractions or departures from the theme.

Time control becomes much easier.  We can rehearse our talk and get it down to the exact time, before we open up for questions during the time allotted for Q&A.  If we have to face hostile questions, this is when they will emerge.  Prior to that, we have at least gotten through what we wanted to say.  We had full control of the proceedings.

If we get into a torrid time with a questioner, early in the piece, it may throw our equilibrium off balance or cause some consternation or embarrassment to the audience, detracting from what we want to say.  A public bun fight between the speaker and an audience member can be very harmful. The atmosphere can turn unpleasant very quickly, which pollutes everyone’s recollection of you as the speaker.  Also, if we don’t know how to handle hostile questions well, our credibility can quickly crumble on the spot.  A crumbling credibility in a public forum is not a good look for any speaker’s personal and professional brands.

So my recommendation is for the seasoned pro speakers to take questions whenever you feel like it.  For those who don’t present so frequently, err on the side of caution and take the questions at the end.

During the “bubble years” of surging economic growth, Japan could not keep up with the supply of workers for the 3K jobs – kitsui, kitanai, kiken or difficult, dirty, dangerous undertakings. The 1985 Plaza Accord released a genie out of the bottle in the form of a very strong yen, which made everything, everywhere seems dirt cheap. Japanese people traveled abroad as tourists in mass numbers for the first time. They often created havoc in international destinations, because they were so gauche – a bit like we have been experiencing with mass Chinese tourism. Companies bought up foreign companies and real estate at a rapid clip. French champagne and beluga caviar was being downed at an alarming pace.

 Finding Japanese workers became difficult, so the Japanese government turned to immigration. We had a very special immigration however. Countries with oil like Iran were allowed to send their citizens to Japan without requiring visas and suddenly we had an influx of Iranians, a bit like we have had with Nigerians. Brazilians of Japanese decent were encouraged to come and work in Japan. They rarely spoke Japanese being third and fourth generation, but they did have Japanese blood coursing through their veins. Somehow Japanese bureaucrats decided that would compensate for the fact that culturally they were 100% South Americans.

 With the collapse of the bubble economy many of these Brazilians went home as their jobs here in Japan dried up. We are again facing a shortage of workers in the 3K industries because of the declining population. We are scheduled to lose around 800,000 people every year. This has an impact on consumer spending because we have less people around to buy goods and services. Uncertainty over the future has played to Japanese risk aversion and native conservatism. People are not spending, preferring to leave their money in the bank at microscopic interest rates. In a deflationary economy at least you were not losing money, but that has changed now we have inflation. We are seeing Chinese and other foreigners working at convenience stores. Students can work up to 38 hours a week, which surpasses the work week in France.

 The Japanese government is adding immigrant workers without openly calling it immigration. Is immigration really needed when we have such low white collar productivity and low wages? Do we need to bring in mass immigration to maintain or expand the population levels? Wage growth has not occurred yet, despite companies hoarding massive cash surpluses under their corporate futons. Also, somehow the laws of supply and demand have not kicked in yet. There is a shortage of staff for child care facilities, but wages are not attractive enough to staff them. Nurses are in short demand, but salaries are not moving up much yet. Delivery workers are in short supply and there needs to be a substantial wage increase to fill the vacancies more easily.

Japan is looking to robots to help cover the staff shortages. This plays to Japan’s love of robots and their technological might. What would be more impactful would be to free up the latent capacity of white collar workers. They have very low productivity because of the culture of work here. Spending long hours as a tatemae or superficial show of devotion and loyalty is not helping. The amount and quality of work being produced is more important.

 There is a slow rhythm of work in Japan. In the big cities like Tokyo, people are tired in the morning because of the late nights and long commutes. Working long hours is tiring and as Parkinson noted “work expands to fit the time”. Just hanging around the office to show your devotion is nice, but not all that helpful. This is the exact opposite of a productive work culture focused on outcomes.  Work from home has freed up people from commute torture, but from what I can see, there doesn’t seem to be any increase in productivity as yet.  Staff lifestyles are better, but company results are not being positively impacted.

 The other issue is very low engagement numbers. Every engagement survey seems to show Japan as the global outlier in terms of engagement. Yes there are cultural reasons around Japanese conservatism when it comes to answering these survey questions. However nobody seems to think that directionally, the low scores are wrong.

 Low engagement affects work pace and also creativity. Tired people are rarely innovative. Finding better ways of working has a lot of potential but it needs desire. Doing new things isn’t rewarded in Japan because in the new there is risk. Failure isn’t tolerated and there are no second careers here for failures. You have to slink off into the sunset and disappear. Middle managers are experts at not rocking the boat and they don’t see any gain from being innovative and rallying their troops around that banner. Better to get ahead by doing the same old, same old.

 Better leadership, delegation, time management, engagement, outcome orientation and more tolerance for failure in pursuit of innovation would go a long way to lifting Japan’s productivity. This would easily compensate for the declining supply of workers due to the demographic reality Japan is facing. Immigration is not necessary to be the first response when there is so much excess latent capacity not being maximised here.

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We believe in our product and we are very knowledgeable about the facts, details, specs, etc.  We launch straight into our presentation of the details with the buyer.  Next, they want to negotiate the price.  Do we see the connection here, between our sales approach and the result, the entire catastrophe?  The reality is often salespeople are slogging it out, lowering the price, hurting their positioning of the brand, lowering their own commission. Unfortunately, in Japan, once we have established a discounted price for the product or service, it is very difficult to move it up thereafter.  What is missing?

The conversation isn’t hitting the high notes on value and instead is a boring pitch based on the details of the product.  Do you think you are unique in the market with this type of solution? Japan isn’t the only place where this is an issue.  Despite all of the resources available to American salespeople and the long history of consultative selling there, they are failing massively as well.  According to a study by Accenture, called the “Death Of the Salesman”, buyers are not seeing the value of the proposition.  In 77% of cases, the buyer found no value in the offer during the sales call.  In a separate study by Forrester, they found that from the buyer’s judgment, 92% of salespeople didn’t understand their business.  

These are pretty miserable figures, no matter which way you look at them.  I haven’t seem any similar numbers for Japan, but based on my experience with salespeople here, I would guess they would only be worse.  “Pitchpeople” is how we should properly term Japanese salespeople in my view.  They are not asking the buyer questions and are zeroing in only on the details of the product.

As the Accenture and Forrester studies show we need to know our client’s business and we need to counter price objections by showing value.  Excellent advice Greg and just how do we do that you might be thinking?

Knowing the client’s business these days is unbelievably more easy than in the past.  AI can whip together an unbelievably fast summary of what is happening in the industry and may have details on the company you are talking too as well. Listed companies very nicely put up their annual reports on their websites.  We can gain an understanding of the strategy and direction they are going and what are the major initiatives that are so attractive, we will part with our hard earned cash and buy their shares.  Not that many Japanese are on LinkedIn, so this is a more difficult resource to use here, than in the West.  There will be press coverage of companies, which we can search easily through Google and AI.  Even if we can’t find specific information, we may have other clients in the same industry and can probably assume many of the issues will be the same.

Even if we can’t get much publicly available information, we can ask the client.  Now in Japan, this is thought to be verboten, so Japanese pitchpeople don’t ask any questions of the buyer.  The reason is the buyer is GOD in Japan and GOD won’t answer our questions, because we are impudent minks for having the temerity to ask anything.  Well it is verboten if you play by God’s rules, so that is not a wise choice.  Instead, we can give our Credibility Statement and get permission that way. 

What is our Credibility Statement?  Here is an example, if we take Dale Carnegie Tokyo, we could say “Dale Carnegie is a global corporate training company, which leads the field in soft skills training.  An example of this would be XYZ company where we trained all their sales staff.  They told me they got a 30% increase in sales as a result.  Maybe we can do the same thing for you. In order for me to know if that is possible or not would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”.

Another approach might be, “Mr. Client, prior to this meeting I spent quite a bit of time researching your business, so that our talk today would be valuable and efficient.  To my surprise it was very hard to find any publicly available information on your company.  Before we go any further, would you mind helping me to better understand if I can actually help you or not,by asking a few questions about your business?”.

 Once we know what their issues are, we can make a judgment on what is the best solution for them from our lineup. We may in fact conclude that we are not a match for them.  If so, we should not waste anyone’s time and we should go find someone we can help.

If they are a match, then having identified the issue we explain our solution.  When doing this, we need to go beyond just the product spec.  We MUST explain how these facts and data transform into benefits for them.  That is still not enough.  A benefit applied is where they will understand the value to their business in their current circumstances.  If we leave this step out, they may not be convinced we can help them.

They next need proof of where we have done this for another client.   Salespeople talk a lot, so clients have learnt to be sceptical of salesperson blah blah blather.  After providing evidence we now ask them “how does this sound?”, to draw out any residual concerns, issues, hesitations or related questions.

If we do this, we will be in the top 1% of successful salespeople in Japan without a doubt.  We bring value to the client and we show we understand their business.  As the surveys have shown, this is what buyers are looking for.  Let’s give it to them.

Gaining credibility as a speaker is obviously important.  We often do this by sharing our own experiences. However, having too much focus on us and away from the interests of the audience is a fine line we must tread carefully.  When we get this wrong, a lot of valuable speaking time gets taken up and we face the danger of losing the attention of our audience. They are like greased lightening when it comes to ignoring us and escaping to the internet, so that they can go find things they feel are more relevant.

We must always keep in the front of our mind that whenever we face an audience, we are facing a room packed with critics and sceptics.  We definitely have to establish our credibility or they will simply disregard what we are saying.  The usual way to gain credibility is to draw on our track record.  A great way to do this is telling our war stories.  The focus is usually on things that are important to us, so we certainly enjoy reliving the past.  In fact, we can enjoy it a bit too much. We begin telling our life story because we are such an interesting person. We are certain everyone will want to hear it, won’t they.

Actually, their own life story is much more fascinating for them. So, we should be trying to relate what we are talking about to their own experiences and their realities.  When we want to tell our stories, we have to be committed to keeping them short and to the point.  As soon as an audience gets the sense the speaker is rambling down memory lane, they get distracted, bored and mentally depart from the proceedings. 

I was listening to a senior company leader giving a talk and he went on and on about how he started in sales and all his exciting adventures.  He was obviously enjoying it, but what did something which happened forty years ago in America have to do with the rest of us here in Tokyo?  It came across as self-indulgent and self-serving rather than inspiring and adding to his credibility for the market we are in today.

A good way to keep the audience engaged and focused on themselves is by asking rhetorical questions.  These are questions for which we don’t require an actual answer, but the audience don’t know that.  This creates a bit of tension and they have to focus on the issue we have raised. The focus is now on the same points the speaker wants to emphasise.  Because of the rhetorical question, they have to mentally go there themselves and think about the issue. It is much more effective than having the speaker try and drag them there against their will.

Rather than just telling war stories, we can ask them to compare the story we are going to tell with their own experiences.  In this case, the speaker’s example is just a prompt for the audience to identify with the situation being unveiled.  This is better because they are now relating the issue to their own reality.  They can take the speaker’s example and either agree with it or disagree with it.  

Even if they disagree with it, their different stance will be based on their own facts and their own track record rather than simple fluffy opinion.  We might say, “I am going to relate an incident which happened to me in a client meeting.  Have any of you had this experience and if so what did you do?  Listen to what I did and see if you think I made the best choice or not”.  We have now set up the comparison with their own world. This gets their attention in a natural way, rather than me banging on about what a legend I was in the meeting with the client and how I scored the big deal.

Talking about ourselves is fun and personally fulfilling, but it is dangerous.  How should we incorporate it? As we plan our talk, we have to work out the cadence of the delivery to include our war stories.  If we are talking too much about ourselves the audience may lose interest and mentally escape from us.  If we have designed in content which will involve them, we can keep them with us all the way to the end.

This doesn’t happen by itself.  We have to carefully insert it when designing the talk.  It is also very important to test this design during the rehearsal.  Better to discover any issues in rehearsal rather than testing the content on a live audience.  Sounds simple enough, but remarkably, 99% of speakers do no rehearsal at all.  Doubt that statistic?  How many speakers have you heard where you got the sense they had carefully rehearsed their talk and finished perfectly and comfortably on time?  Case closed!

In developing our attention grabbing cadence during the talk, rather than waiting to Q&A to deal with any pushback on our opinions, we can get ahead of the curve.  We can anticipate what those objections might be and handle them during the main body of our speech.  We pose them as rhetorical questions. Some people in the audience when they hear these objections will be thinking “yeah, that’s right”.

We then use our evidence drawn from our experiences, our war stories, to demolish that potential objection and ensure we maintain control of the issue.  This technique also engages the audience more deeply in our presentation, as they start to add perspectives they may not have thought of before.  There is also a strong feeling of comprehensiveness and balance about our talk too.  It shows we are aware of different views, are not afraid of them and have an answer to remove them as a consideration.

Japan seems to be going in opposing directions at the same time, when it comes to the supply of internationalised staff suitable for foreign companies.  The statistics show a peak in 2004 of 83,000 Japanese students venturing off-shore.  This dropped to a low of 57,500 in 2011 and since that point has climbed back above 60,000.  Just to put that in context, Korea has over 117,000 students studying overseas but has half the population of Japan.  Today, with many international companies looking to hire English speaking, internationalised Japanese staff, the supply situation is looking grim. 

Some Japanese domestic companies are becoming strong competitors because they need more international Japanese as well.  These firms are branching out overseas because they fear the decline in the Japanese consumer population will stunt their future growth.  Once upon a time, this meant shipping Japanese expats off overseas to be forgotten for five years, before sending the next one.  The shortage of staff in Japan makes this proposition harder these days, because they are needed here as the boomer generation retires.  Also with the increasing integration of overseas enterprise purchases into the Japanese mother ship, the internationalisation of the local headquarters staff is also becoming more important.

So we have less Japanese youth going overseas and an increasing demand at home for those with good English and international experience.  Previously the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) had been attempting to address this shortage. In 2013, the Japan Revitalization Strategy announced a government target of doubling the number of students studying abroad to 120,000 by 2020. There have been previous programmes introduced such as the “Reinventing Japan” project (2011), the “Tobitate!” (Leap for Tomorrow!) study abroad campaign (2013), and the TeamUp campaign (2015).  Looking at the numbers though, none of these has had much impact to date.

The current Government target of increasing the overseas Japanese student varsity population to 150,000 by 2030 sounds like an education bureaucrat’s wild fantasy, but at least there is an effort being made to address the shortage.  I won’t be holding my breath in anticipation that their programmes will be producing the numbers needed in the immediate future.

Why aren’t this generation heading overseas to study?  A British Council study found four key reasons: 1. Don’t have the language skills  2. Too expensive, 3. Unsafe and 4. Courses abroad are too difficult. 

There has been a lot of discussion also about the inward looking nature of this generation.  The Lehman Shock put loyal staff out on the street and shook up their kid’s assumptions about following the same lifetime employment path of their fathers and mothers.  Consequently, like Millennials elsewhere, they seem very focused on themselves. They don’t have much patience for things which are mendokusai or troublesome. That particularly includes studying English and dealing with pesky foreigners. 

The 3/11 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear reactor core meltdown refocused everyone on family, staying close (kizuna) and personal safety.  Going overseas doesn’t really fit into that picture.  Having said that though, the British Council study concluded that the interest in studying abroad is still strong.  The interest may be there, but their actions are not matching the needs of business here.

The risk aversion of the Japanese mentality also operates against going overseas.  Their perfectionist qualities also make the mastery of English seem like the impossible dream.  Getting a job when you get back is an issue because of the inflexible nature of Japanese company hiring practices.  Being older than your sempai (seniors) who entered the company before you, is confusing for the company hierarchical culture.  Fitting in is also harder because now because they no longer think the same as everyone else.  They have dared to be different and this is not a formula for career success in Japan.  Fitting in and being just like everyone else is preferred

There are a couple of things we can do.  Larger companies can look at providing scholarships, with golden handcuff clauses, to assist the motivated who want to study overseas, but may be financially restrained from doing so. 

Related to that is the issue of keeping internationalised youth in the company after hiring them.  This is where company culture becomes a winner, if you are smart about it.   Conditions of employ can be a lot more flexible than in competitor Japanese companies.  With a declining youth population, (the number of those aged zero to thirty-four, halves over the next 40 years) employers will have to become a lot more flexible anyway, if they want to retain staff. 

These graduates often want to work in an international environment.  However, they find themselves surrounded by local Japanese colleagues and they can’t get to use that English they worked so hard to improve.  If you are running a multi-national company, why not create opportunities for them to use their English by making English the real language of the office.  Monday and Wednesday can be designated Japanese day and Tuesday and Thursday English day.  Friday is your free choice.

Getting middle managers properly trained to lead the young is going to be a key to retention and even more so with those international youth returned from study overseas.  Coaching and communication skills are going to be at a premium, because in the coming free agent world of work, the young will walk out the door to the competitor without hesitation. 

Recruiters will be ringing their cash registers hard as they pick up fees for luring your young away by painting a glowing picture of the greener grass at your rival’s firm.  Your managers have to preclude that possibility by knowing how to provide the young a style of leadership they themselves never experienced.  Tough love leading is definitely out. If your leaders pursue that route all that will be left will be tough times, as staff shortages hit companies hard.  Our hiring Armageddon winter has well and truly arrived and hungry recruiters are the White Walkers taking our young English speakers away from us.

Japan loves the Devil they know over the Angel they don’t know.  Change here is hard to achieve in any field, because of the inbuilt fear of mistakes and failure.  This country takes risk aversion to the highest heights in business.  There are no rewards for salaried employees to take risk.   There are massive career downsides though, if things go wrong, due to an initiative they introduced.  Personal accountability is not very popular here. 

The decision-making system here is also a nightmare in this regard.  Who is the decision-maker?  Probably no single person.   The meeting we attend may have one to three people present in the room, but they are the tip of the iceberg.  An iceberg we will never fully get to meet by the way.  Behind the walls of the office, sit their other colleagues who will have to sign off and agree on the change.   

The checks and balances of Japanese organisations guarantee a few things.  One is it makes for good communication internally.  No one faces an unpleasant surprise.  I have found most Japanese, as individuals, are not good at dealing with the unexpected.  The sudden emergence of something that had not been previously factored in, has these staff rushing for emergency exits in fear.

The other thing this system supplies is the opportunity for all the vested interests to have their say.  Fast action is not viewed as a plus.  Reaching a consensus is very important in Japan and people expect to have input into any new arrangements.  The ringisho piece of paper suggesting the change physically moves around the section head’s desks and each one applies their hanko or stamp to the document, indicating they are okay with the change.  Nothing will happen until all of those stamps are there. 

Turning up as a salesperson and finding the buying team are already quite happy with their current supplier, means a lot of work has to be done internally by the people we are meeting, to make a change away from the known and established order.  Who wants more work?  No one in Japan, that is for sure.  When you are dealing with small to middle size firms the supplier arrangements can be even trickier.  They often have a strong CEO owner running the show – the famous One Man Shacho .  They make a lot of the key decisions and then everyone else does the execution of the decision.  You may not get to meet with the supreme dictator directly. 

In many cases, the current supplier company was supplying their grandfather who started the business.  Many a good time was had on the golf course, being entertained in the Ginza by geisha and visiting expensive cabaret clubs together in the good old days.  Gifts flowed thick and fast as well, over decades, to cement the relationship.  The current generation of the heads of the respective businesses may have been at school together, have marriage links between their two families or belong to special clubs as members.  I see these connections at my very exclusive Rotary Club here in Tokyo.  These are successful families who move in the same circles.  The third generation of family business heads have deep links together built up over the last generations.  Why would they change their trusted supplier to you, a stranger, a Johnny Come Lately?

Be it a big corporate or a smaller concern, there are a lot of barriers to change in supplier relationships in Japan.  Frankly, we have few levers at our disposal as a result.  The one thing that companies fear in common though is getting left behind by their competitors.  The globalisation of business has meant these harmonious relationships between supplier and buyer are getting shaken up. 

Just explaining the details, benefits, quality and pricing advantage of the solution you provide are not enough.  We need to lob some dynamite into their current cozy little supplier arrangements, by bringing up their exposure to being blindsided by a competitor.  We need to remind them that the best solution will win in the market or at least reduce their market share.  We need to point out that in a competitive industry, no one cares about the depth of the existing relationships, because they are fully focused on their survival.  Rivals will make key supplier changes and these will trigger changes across the industry, as everyone else has to adjust accordingly.  By getting ahead of the curve, they can win time to adjust and win market share for themselves, vis-à-vis their rivals.

Price and quality differentials only become meaningful in this light in the current market.  Just talking about price or quality in isolation won’t move the buyers to make any changes.  Being 30% cheaper sounds good, except the dislocation required to change suppliers is counted as much more expensive than the savings to be gained. The effort to make new or change supplier arrangements needs a strong reason in Japan or else everyone just defaults to a “do nothing” stance.

This requires we come armed with examples of where a change in supplier arrangements wiped certain companies out.  The best option is relating changes in their industry, but even if we don’t have that, we need to show evidence of how dangerous it can be to avoid change.  The drivers of change are plain to see: globalisation changing supply options, Japan’s declining population driving companies to take desperate measures to stay afloat, technical advances challenging existing business relationships, currency movements impacting pricing, etc.   As an example, the DoCoMo i-Mode was a world leading phone app until Steve Jobs turned up with the iPhone and the i-Mode is no more.

We say fear and greed drive behaviour.  Well in Japan, the fear factor is certainly more pronounced than the greed factor, so lead with the downside of non-action rather than the upside of a new initiative.  Paint a picture of how the advantages of your solution could become dangerous in the wrong hands, that is to say, their competitors.  Advise them to not give an unfair advantage to their rivals by not making the change today.  Express the importance of urgency, the time factor exigency to take action right now. 

We need to do this to drive the imperative of all those characters sitting behind the wall of the office, to get their hanko out and stamp the recommendation, showing their support for it.  The people we are meeting are not the final decision-makers, so we need to arm them with the required nuclear harpoon to break through all the inertia and resistance to change, that is the hallmark of business in Japan. 

Speech contests and debating contests are usually for younger people at school or university.  It is not often you see the most senior people from major corporations going head-to-head in a public setting.  I was at an event where there was a vote to take place for some prestigious seats on the board of a non-profit.  If the number of applicants equals the number of seats, then it is a perfunctory competition where the winner’s names are just announced.  In the case of more hopefuls than places, then things hot up. 

Each person had two minutes to make their pitch.  Now remember, these are very experienced and senior people, in some cases heading vast organisations.  I was fascinated to see how they would fare. With one exception, English was not their native language.  However, they have been in international business their whole lives and many have lived in numerous foreign countries running the local business for the multinational parent company.  Language skill wasn’t even a factor. 

As you might expect, some were better presenters than others.  However, overall they were pretty underwhelming, given the types of big jobs they were holding.  They knew for many weeks that this day would arrive, that they would have to speak and compete for places with each other and that they only had two minutes.  They had the opportunity to prepare, to rehearse what they would say.  This was not a spontaneous idea on the part of the organisers suddenly thrust upon a bunch of innocents. The first thing I noticed was how poorly they had all prepared.  Talking about your resume and how big your big corporate is, is fine, but there was no thought given to what the audience wanted to hear.  Everything was presented from their own point of view.

A few minutes spent planning and preparing would have come up with a fine list of audience expectations of this board. They would have identified which hot buttons they needed to push.  This is not hard stuff folks.  They will represent our interests on the Board and so what would our member interests be?  Having divined that, we should then craft our message to present about how our experience, organisational muscle and personal attributes will deliver for the members.  

We only have two minutes, so that means we have to prune hard to fix upon the most high impact points which will resonate with the audience.  We then need to rehearse to make sure we can get this inside the strict two minute limit.  We don’t want to be rushing it or confusing our audience with too many varied points.  If we rush it, they have no hope of keeping track of what we are on about.

Now when we deliver our talk, we have to engage with our audience.  We will be going one after another, so we have to break through and override the message of whoever preceded us and implant our message, such that our successor speaker cannot root it out.  Sadly, none of this was happening and they were not engaging their audience at all.  What are they like when addressing the troops back at the office I was wondering?  Going by this effort not much chop!

The common thing I noticed that was missing from all the speakers was eye contact.  They were not using their two minutes to physically engage with enough people.  Using six seconds of one-on-one eye contact, we can directly engage with at least twenty people in the audience.  Toward the rear, because of the distance, the people sitting around the target person also believe the speaker is talking directly to them as well, so we can increase that twenty number quite substantially.   

Delivering your resume in a monotone means you are missing the opportunity to hit key words for greater effect.  Now when I say hit, I mean that in the sense that you can choose whether to add voice strength or withdraw voice strength to gain variety in your delivery.  Our gestures are another way to bring power to what we are saying.  It creates energy and that is what we want to transmit to the audience – we are a person of energy who can get things done for the members. Some of the speakers chose to speak while holding their hands behind their backs, denying themselves the opportunity to use gestures. When we don’t show our hands, we are triggering a deep mistrust in the audience. This is because since we lived in caves, we have learnt not to trust people whose hands we cannot see.

It was all pretty bad actually.  Corporate leaders need to be excellent communicators and that includes giving professional presentations to external groups.  This is not something we are born with.  We learn it and we further develop it, over the course of our careers.  There was a lot of personal, professional and company brand damage done the other day, at the face off for the Board seats.  When it is your turn to speak, be ready and blow your competitors out of the water. Prepare properly, rehearse thoroughly, work on the mechanics of audience engagement through your eye contact, gestures and highlighting key words.

Business is more fast paced that ever before in human history.  Technology boasting massive computing and communication power is held in our palm.  It accompanies us on life’s journey, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, everywhere we go.  We are working in the flattest organisations ever designed, often at home on our own a few days a week or in noisy, distracting open plan environments.  We are also increasing thrust into matrix relationships with bosses, subordinates and colleagues residing in distant climes. We rarely meet them face to face, so communication becomes more strained and difficult.   

Milestones, timelines, targets, revenues, KPIs are all screaming for blood.  We are under the pressure of instant response and a growing culture of irritation and impatience.  If our computer is slow to boot up, or if a file takes time to download, we are severely annoyed.  Twenty years ago we were amazed you could instantly send a document file by email from one location to another. Oh, the revolution of rising expectations!

Imagine our forebears who when working internationally, had to wait for the mail from headquarters to arrive by boat and then would wait months for the reply to arrive there and then more months for the subsequent answer to come back. Super snail mail ping pong. Life was a wee bit more leisurely then and people had a lot more independence through necessity.  Not today.  We want it and we want it now and look out anyone who gets in our way.  We have unconsciously designed a system guaranteed to produce more conflict in the workplace.

Technology speeds everything up and internal expectations also keep rising.  Time is in permanent short supply and the stresses and strains of modern business are inescapable. Not everyone is keeping up and criticism is swift to follow.  The pressure is on and that means that civil discourse can be truncated and communication becomes more direct. All of this can increase the frequency of conflict in the workplace.  What can the leader do to deal with this upsurge in people problems between staff?  Let’s analyse the issue in more depth.

We can break the conflict touch point issues into five categories for attention. Process Conflict – is this what we are dealing with?  How much control do we have in this particular issue we are facing?  We need to analyse the root cause of the problem and talk to the process owner.  They may not be aware that their process driven actions are causing problems for others.  We need to diplomatically raise it with them, get agreement it needs to be resolved and come up with a joint action plan to fix it.

Role Conflicts easily arise in flat organisations.  What is our perception of our own role in relation to others involved in this issue?  We can’t expect others to be making the effort to clarify our role, so we have to take the lead to do so.  This is hard, but we have to be prepared to change our perception of what our actual role is.  We should take the macro view and see where we need to be flexible around our perception of our own role, to make sure the organisation is moving forward. This may require some changes and we have to see change as an opportunity for growth and improvement (easily said!!!).

Interpersonal Conflicts are the tough ones.  We are confronted by the actions, behaviors and word exchanges which have taken place and the reported versions from others around us.    We need to take a step back and ask, “to what degree are my personal biases and prejudices affecting this relationship”.   Are people telling me things to suit their own agenda and stirring me up for no good reason?   

There are key things we can do to improve the situation and we usually know exactly what they are, but we don’t want to do them.  However, we have to commit to making those changes, as difficult and painful as that may be.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for the other person to change – take action yourself.  

This may mean having a direct conversation with your counterpart on the issues.  Before you do that though, forget about what you want for the moment and put yourself in their shoes.  Reflect on how you would see the issue from their perspective.  This will make it easier to have that one-on-one conversation.

Direction Conflicts arise when the path forward is unclear.  Companies are not always excellent in informing everyone of what needs to happen or at the same time.  Check that you are in fact clear yourself on the organisation’s current direction or vision.  Bring up the discrepancy between you and the other party in respectful terms, in a neutral way.  This is not about establishing blame (although we often like doing that!), but about getting joint clarity about what is the aim and how it should be delivered together. 

External Conflicts are tough because by definition, you lack power or control.  Ask yourself whether you have a dog in this fight or not?  Choose your battles carefully and concentrate on what you can do to improve things, rather than wasting energy whining about what you cannot control.  As a general rule, if you find yourself complaining about anything outside of your control stop and re-set your mind around how the situation can be improved.  Ask yourself, “in what way can we continue to move the organisation forward?”.  In the words of the hardest working man in show business Mr. James Brown, “get on the good foot”!

Leaders have responsibility for dealing with staff conflicts and there is no sweeping these under the carpet or ignoring them.  We have to take accountability to fix the issue and get everyone pulling in the same direction with the same levels of commitment.  Energy spent fighting each other internally means that energy isn’t being directed toward defeating the opposition.  That is a total misalignment of outputs and we need to fix that problem and fix it immediately.

The release of 5G or fifth generation mobile networks was launched in Japan in March 2020. Our old phones ran on a 4G standard and 5G faster is significantly faster than 4G.  So what does that mean for salespeople across all industries?

The capacity to upload heavier files, to be sent at lightening speed, grabs your attention.  What are some of the heaviest files at the moment?  Video!  YouTube is already the second largest search engine after Google.  It is true too.  I have noticed myself that I prefer going straight to YouTube to find out how to do something, rather than wading through all the links and ads on Google.  The union of content marketing with blinding connection speeds, means the search function for YouTube will overtake Google in the next few years.  AI will probably overtake everything for search in the future.  Nevertheless, are you prepared to be found by buyers as the star of your own video?

Now this is not to say that the importance of audio is going away.  Podcasts are also a key way of getting value by turning up in front of buyers.  That is why I am releasing six ever week.  People are multitasking these days like they have been possessed by demons. They want to listen to audio, while they are at the gym or walking the dog.  Don’t miss the implications of audio access to our information from all of these devices like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Home, etc.  We will be tapping into information through audio, to a greater extent than now, but today I want to feature more on video and 5G and what it means for us in sales. 

Producing video content and uploading that to YouTube will become a more important aspect of “know, like and trust”.  Video gives a very strong impression about us.  How we look?  How we sound?  Are we trustworthy? How we relate to the audience? Are we authentic? As some of my friends have unkindly remarked, “Greg, you have a good head for radio”, meaning I am not very photogenic.  True. Consequently, we may be shy to video ourselves, thinking that we are not handsome or beautiful enough, or smooth enough in front of the camera, or attractive enough on tape when a microphone is involved.

Forget all of that.  This will be the age of discovery by buyers, before they ever meet us.  This is how they will be searching for experts to bring solutions for the problems they face.  They will be able to “try us before they buy us” by watching our video, to see if we have the goods or not.  What if we are not attractive enough for video, won’t that work against us? 

Well, I wish I was more handsome, but there is not much I can do about that.  My parent’s DNA contribution has spoken.  I have to go with what I have got and so do you.  I am releasing three video shows every week. I don’t have a great sounding voice either, because it sounds husky, from all that shouting or kiai I did, in my 53 years of karate training. Can’t do too much about that either.  One of our Dale Carnegie trainers in America is DJ Thatcher, who has a voice you would die for.  Very deep and melodic.  I can’t become DJ Thatcher, but I can control what comes out of my own mouth.

So despite how we look and how we sound, are we providing actual value?  Our videos have to show we know something special about our subject and that we can be useful to the buyer.  Don’t think you have to hold the “best bits” back either and keep them secret.  You have to go the other way and provide strong expert authority in this environment and do it for free.  Put your best stuff out there.

You might sorry, “won’t my buyers become sated on my free video offerings and not need more from me?”.  I don’t think this is a concern.  When they need more than what they can get from a video, you are the one they will select over everyone else you are competing with.  By the way, if a video can fix their issue that simply, then there probably wasn’t a substantial engagement involved anyway.

Won’t my competitors steal all my best ideas?  The old style control function of buyers by suppliers, through exclusive, high value, proprietary knowledge, still exists, but only just these days.  Almost everything is out there today.  I remember in karate training, that the Sensei had the secret knowledge of the kata and we could only learn it from him. It was a control mechanism to keep us in line.  Today, you can learn the most amazing kata via YouTube. That secrets era has passed and there are not many secrets left anymore.  You have to jump in because everyone else is.  There is a safety factor though. They can copy you, but they can’t be you. 

I could order a big truck right now and send all of our training manuals to my competitors, but it wouldn’t help them.  They don’t know how to deliver it the way we do, so all they get is an empty shell.  This is the same with your competitors.  They can’t replicate who you are, your company culture, your approach to clients, quality, reliability, plus all the human interaction pieces which are the sum of all that you are, down at your firm.   

As an example, I recently did the recordings for the audio version of my book Japan Sales Mastery.  Anyone could have read the text, but no one would emphasised key words the way I did.  This is because I wrote it, I know what I want to say and how I want to say it.  We cannot be copied.  Get busy and get your stuff out there in the public domain.

So let’s start working on video of you for your newsletters, video email messages, website, YouTube channel and then push it out through social media so that it can be easily found.  These days you have so many choices.  You can do it through various live broadcast functions as well. You just pick up your phone and away you go.   Although, as I found live broadcasting is like walking on the high wire between two skyscrapers, with a strong wind blowing and no safety net for beginners.  If you screw it up in the first forays, like I did (!), you are very visible to lots and lots of folks.  Oops.  I am your typical male who never reads the manual.  I found out later there is a function you can select where only you can see the video, which is probably a good precaution when you are starting.  Hey, I should have done that!

You can go for weekly YouTube TV shows like I have, with The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show or The Japan Business Mastery Show.  High quality camera, lighting soft boxes, serious audio recording technology, a set, editing suite, green screen, etc.  Or you can shoot something on the move with a mobile phone, or a tablet, as the camera quality is so good today.  Just add an external microphone, stand close to the camera and away you go.  It can be edited later, so you can correct any problems.  I have a number of videos on our Japan Dale Carnegie TV channel on YouTube which were shot on my iPad with an external mic.  Very low cost and time effective for the quality.  The audio is key though, so I suggest you make an effort to get that to be the best you can arrange.

What about appearing in front of the camera?  My recommendation is to do our High Impact Presentations Training course. I don’t say this because it is Dale Carnegie, I say it because it is such an awesome course. This will give you the supreme confidence and skills to master the lens.  That is what I did and you can check out the results in my videos!  I reckon if I can do it with how I look and how I sound, you can do it and probably do it much better.  You will now see AI technology rolling over the top of you or you can start surfing down the face of the wave.  The technology is here now and time waits for no salesperson. 

 Action Steps

1.  Read up on the technical innovations underway and what it will mean for you

2.  Understand the power of the YouTube search function with buyers

3.  Get over your inhibitions about being video and voice recorded, no one cares, as long as you are bringing value

4.  Be prepared to share your best stuff for free, because your competition will be doing that

5.  Start, review, improve, continue, master

Obviously we all have some trepidation when it comes to Q&A, but Japan is quite far behind the rest of the advanced countries when it comes to public speaking.  Let me put it on the table. The level of presentations here is abysmally low and excuses abound.  People here talk about a “Japanese style” of doing public talks.  This is their excuse for not being at the global standard for communication skills and it allow them to get away with amateur hour presentations. What they actually mean by “Japanese style” is they speak in a monotone, with a wooden face, use no gestures, make no eye contact, employ no pauses, Um and Ah with gay abandon, engage no one in the audience and are supremely boring. They kill everyone in the audience with their unprofessional slides - 8 point sized font, four different font types, five garish colours. They turn their slides into a psychological weapon of warfare which decimates their audience.  Because everyone is so bad, this is thought to be a “style”, obviously different from “Western” presentations.  It isn’t a style.  It is just plain bad.

Not being properly educated in how to give professional presentations, the trickier bits like Q&A are even scarier territory.  For any speaker, once the bell sounds for Q&A, the struggle is on.  As the well-known American philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face”.  Relatively speaking, Japan is a kindergarten for Q&A compared to Western audiences.  The ferocity of questions here is kids stuff.  So you would think that everyone would be very chipper about handling the Q&A, but that is not the case.  Here are some areas of the concern we found, when we polled our Japanese students of presenting.

1. If the audience is not familiar to us we get nervous

The reality here is that strangers are confronting for Japanese. The chances of having a lifetime of speaking to familiar audiences would be statistically impossible, I would say.  The inference here is that it is less daunting to speak to a “tame” audience who, because they know us, won’t unleash fury upon our heads during the questions component of the talk.

Unfamiliar audiences should be the considered the norm. I have delivered over 550 speeches so far and I cannot recall every giving a talk to the same audience twice. The way to deal with this “unfamiliarity” is to be well prepared and to have thoroughly rehearsed beforehand.  This is a tell. I would guess 0.001% of Japanese presenters have ever rehearsed their talk. 

2.  I am not sure if I can understand the question properly and also not sure if it is okay to ask them to repeat the question

Japanese society is very polite, so that is why until recently, you would be lucky to get any questions at your talk at all.  The thinking has been that it is impolite.  The nuance is that by asking a question, you are implying the speaker wasn’t clear enough in their oration.  Also I don’t think any Western audiences would even consider the possibility that it isn’t allowable to ask the questioner to repeat their question.  In Japan, that request implies the questioner wasn’t clear enough the first time and so is a veiled criticism.  Because the request for the repeat of the question is made in public, there is the possibility that the questioner will lose face and we can’t have that.

My advice - politely ask the questioner for clarification on their impenetrable question.  Japan is a polite place, so ask politely and put yourself at fault and not the speaker.  You might say, “Thank you for your question. I really want to answer it correctly, so would you mind repeating it once more for me?”.

3.  Not clear on how to answer the question

This will happen to all of us.  In my case, I do a lot of public speaking here in the Japanese language and I always find the Q&A the most difficult.  This is not for the ferocity of the questions, but because of the fog of the language.  Japanese is a highly circuitous language and vagary is a prized achievement.  Sometimes, I have no clue what they are asking me.

If we can’t answer the question, then we are human.  We cannot always be the font of all knowledge and there will always be occasions where we just don’t have an answer for that question.  We should apologise and fess up straight away.  “Thank you for your question.  I am afraid I don’t know the answer to it at this point.  After the talk, let’s exchange business cards and I will do my best to come back to you with an answer after I do more research on that topic”.  No one will complain about handling it in this way.

4.  No questions emerge because the audience weren’t paying any attention to the speaker

Most talks in Japan are supremely dull, so naturally the audience escapes to a more interesting place like their smart phone. Suddenly the Q&A springs up and as they haven’t being paying attention, they have no idea what to ask about.  The call for questions goes unanswered, so there springs forth this painful, embarrassing silence, as everyone carefully scrutinises their shoes, ensuring zero eye contact with anyone.  The speaker is left high and dry and the talk finishes on a low note of disinterest.  It feels like all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room, the speaker deflates and then in short order, departs.

If no questions are forthcoming, ask your own question: “A question I am often asked is….”.  This will often break the ice for someone else to muscle up the courage to ask their own question.  I am always amazed at well his works in Japan.  No one wants to go first. But interestingly they are happy to go second after you started with your own question to yourself. After doing this, If nothing is still forthcoming, then do a final call for more questions. If none emerge then give your final close and finish the proceedings.

Here are two basic rules for answering any question.  Always repeat the question if it is neutral, to make sure everyone in the audience heard it and to give yourself valuable thinking time before attempting to answer it.  If it is a hostile question, then paraphrase it by stripping out all the emotion and invective and make it sound neutral.  For example, “Is it true you are losing money and that ten percent of the staff are going to be fired before Christmas?”.  “Thank you, the question was about current business performance” and then you answer it.  We call this taisabaki in karate – you slip off to the side, away from confronting the full force of your opponent’s attack.

We will face Q&A when giving our talks.  Changing our mindset about welcoming the opportunity is a good place to start.  We can add more information, we couldn’t squeeze into the talk. We can elaborate on a theme we raised.  We get a chance to engage more deeply with our audience.  When we shoot down a nasty, vicious, brutish, hostile question and destroy it, this makes us a legend of pubic speaking and adds serious luster to our personal brand.  Bring on the questions!

The Spa magazine in Japan previously released the results of a survey of 1,140 male full-time employees in their 40s, about what they hated about their jobs.  The top four complaints were salaries have not risen because of decades of deflation; a sense of being underappreciated and undervalued and a lost sense of purpose. Salaries are a function of deflation and commercial success, as well as the tightness of the labour market. Feeling unappreciated and underevaluated though are both boss failings unrelated to the economy and cannot be esily dismissed.  This outcome is the direct result of decades of neglect of the soft skills of leadership.  

How do we improve on this situation?  We need better leader eduation. The feeling of being valued by the boss and the organisation is the trigger to producing high levels of engagement for your work.  Japan is renown for always scoring poorly on international comparative engagement surveys.  APAC as a region usually trails last across the world and Japan is usually situated at the very bottom for engagement scores in APAC. The global study on engagement by Dale Carnegie showed that feeling valued was the key factor.  The results for Japan were the same.

Good to know that we have the answer at hand to improve levels of engagement.  By the way, disengaged or hardly engaged staff are not going to add any additional extras to their work or be motivated to come up with a better way of doing things.  Innovation requires some sense of caring about the organization.  So work productivity and innovation both need higher levels of engagement to help us get anywhere.  In any competitive business environment, the abilty to out innovate your rivals has to be a very high value to the firm. 

Fine, but so what?  How do we get leaders who were raised in a different world of work – the bishibishi(relentlessly super strict) school of leading to now switch to becoming more warm and fuzzy?  Telling them to do so is an interesting intervention by senior management that will go precisely nowhere.  This requires re-education on what we need from our leaders.  The most widespread system of education in corporate Japan is OJT (On The Job Training).  How does your bishibishi boss change mindset alone?  They can’t. That is why training is required to better inform bosses about how to gain willing cooperation from subordinates, instead of just pulling rank on them to drive their obedience.

In the modern era, young people have all become free-agents, like the baseball stars.  In their parent’s time, staff were fearful of being able to get another job, if they strayed from the beaten path and quit where they worked.  Not today.  There is an army of hungry recruiters scouring firms to lift people out and place them in another company.  They can click the ticket for 40% of the first year salary on the way through this change of employ. By the way, the individual recruiter gets 50% of the fee.  It is a highly lucrative profession and relatively young, unremarkable people make a lot of money so the incentives to take your people and place them somewhere else is super high.  In this circumstance, there is no need to make it any easier for the recruiters by treating your staff badly.

How to deal with mistakes is a key to the future in a society that hasn’t worked out that mistakes are the glide path to learning.  Japan is a mistake free zone and this is a big disincentive to experiment, to try the new.  Locating oneself in the middle of your comfort zone makes the best sense, so you want to avoid all change efforts.  Here is the contradiction. If you want innovation, progress, creativity, then change must be embraced.  That also means embracing risk - the risk of error.

If the internal evaluation process for promotion is used to focus all the failings and insufficiencies of the staff - the dreaded HR little black book of staff mistakes - then don’t expect your shop to become a hotbed of innovation anytime soon.  What should we be doing? Leaders need to be helping staff lead intentional lives.  Goals, strategies to achieve the goals, milestones, targets all come as part of the package.  This is different from being Mr. or Ms. Perfect and holding the team to standards you yourself can never possibly achieve.

Encouraging people to come out of their comfort zones, take some risks and try new things requires a lot of communication skills.  It requires feedback, but not critique.  Telling people they are wrong, may make the boss feel superior and good, but it kills staff motivation and interest in doing things any differently.  Good/better feedback is a better strategy.  Tell them what they are doing that is going well and praise them for that.  Tell them what they could do to make things go even better.  The point is still communicated, but in a much better way and will be received in a more positive frame. 

Because of the old fashioned style of management in vogue here, Japanese bosses are actually untrained in how to give praise.  Telling staff “Good  Job” is not praise by the way.  That comment is a very vague reflection on a piece of work.  Tasks have many facets, the staff know that and so which part of that project did they do well?  We need bosses to be very specific about which bit was done well and how it was done well.  Leader then need to explain how that task fits into the big picture of the organization and encourage the staff member to keep doing that. 

Clearly, the leader in Japan has to do better.  The soft skills area is where the greatest productivity gains will come from, because hard skills education in Japan is already maximised.  This is the next frontier of leadership. If Japan can unlock the full potential of the working population, we are in for an exciting future.  If it can’t, then things look bleak. 

What is happening in your organisation at the moment?  What are your leaders focused on?  What is current your staff attrition rate?  How long does it take to hire in new people and what is ther quality like? How expensive is it to replace people?  Do you have strategy for all of this?  The best time to start was yesterday.

Riffraff inhabit all corners of the business world, but the sales profession suffers more than many others. Bankers do all sorts of evil things with our money.  Stock brokers do all sorts of evil things with our money.  Real estate agents tell one version of the truth to buyers. Government officials purloin our money. Everywhere you look, someone is ripping us off.  However, these industries and institutions do not get blanket smeared with the failings of the few, like in the case of salespeople.

We are our own worst enemy in many ways.  There is a taint to the profession, an odious odor, scandalising the hallways. Desperate people do dumb things and tell lies to buyers.  There are no common standards of conduct being adhered to in the sales profession. You just become a salesperson by dint of putting your hand up for a sales job.  After that point, you are free to unleash your reign of terror and destruction on all around you.

“I am not like that” you may say, but how would the buyer know that?  They have been trained to expect to be ripped off by salespeople. It is one of my pet hates with the profession.  Lo and behold someone called me up with a lie.  A lie? How could anyone be that stupid, you might be wondering? 

Well, have you heard this one before, “Hello Mr. Story, how are you today?  I am from XYZ company and we handle a range of investment products. One of our representatives will be in your area and so are you available for a meeting next week?”.

This industry of selling investment products is tricky.  I know, because I oversaw the sales of these products at the Shinsei Bank and the National Australia Bank here in Japan.  What makes them difficult is you can’t hear, see, touch, smell or taste these intangibles.  Investment products are abstract ideas. The buyer will have no idea if the decision to buy was a good one or not, for many months and in some cases, many years. 

So the obvious thing we are all buying is the trust that what we have been told will in fact happen. Given the trust element is so vital, how could the leadership at XYZ company come up with a sales script like this one, totally built on a lie?  Amazingly, this is the first thing coming out of their mouth.  Reality check: their representative won’t be in my area.  That is a total fabrication, a complete lie. Why? They think that somehow this will convince me to see that person. 

I don’t put up with is unprofessionalism and I go after them. When they call, I ask them which area their representative will be in.  They panic, look at the suburb address on their screen and blurt out “Akasaka”.  So, because I am unrelenting with such idiots, I ask, “Well given Akasaka is quite a big place, which exact part of Akasaka will they be in next week?”.  More blustering and panic, because now we have gone completely off piste.

Let’s step back and take a look at the big picture inside the sales profession. Japan is a very honest culture.  This means though, that when people tell lies, they never readily admit to it.  They never want to take any accountability.  Instead they will tell you anything, in order to not admit that what they told you was crap.  They try and move the blame back to you, by claiming you misheard or misunderstood what they were saying. 

This honest culture can blind us to this quaint trait to lie.  So when we are leading our salespeople, we can’t just assume because everyone is so honest in Japan, that our salespeople won’t lie to the client. This is also a culture where the buyer is GOD and whatever the buyer wants the salesperson will make happen. This can include lying, breaking the rules, over promising and being disingenuous.  The back office delivery component of the company cannot easily deliver on salesperson over-promised goodies.  Now we have a new set of problems to deal with, as sections within the company start to feud amongst themselves.  Or they agree to a deal that is bad for the business.  Being truthful with clients also means delivering bad news too. Salespeople in Japan have to be guided to do this, because of their own accord, they will avoid it every time and prefer to sow chaos internally.

It is important to state and keep re-stating what should be obvious – don’t lie to buyers.  We have to explain we would rather forego a deal than get it by lying.  This gets harder when their bonuses and commissions are linked to the sale.  Also, a hard-nosed sales culture will force people into positions where they will compromise their personal and the firm’s integrity to do the deal.  Suruga Bank had been a very aggressive lender in the market.  They reaped the whirlwind of negative media coverage, because of all the lies told by their bank staff to get loans written.  Wells Fargo had a similar issue with staff creating fake accounts to meet aggressive quotas.  The real cost of those lies play out over many years.

We may have our own aggressive targets too, but we also have to ensure that we are guiding people along the correct path of how to make those targets.  If we all agree that trust of the buyer is key, then we can start to build that trust by ensuring that our salespeople are never lying to the buyers, in order to make a sale.  We have to remind salespeople of one very important thing.  We are not after a sale.  This is important so let me repeat this point - we are not after a sale. We are after repeat orders and these only come when there is a track record of trust. 

We are currently negotiating with one of the biggest companies in the world.  We won’t continue with them, because they are after a single low value transaction rather than an ongoing relationship.  We are not after a single sale. We would rather put our energy into finding a buyer we can work with forever, than get bogged down in a small transactional piece of business.

Let’s wrap this discussion up. The solution to this lying salesperson problem doesn’t arrive from outside.  John Wayne is not going to come charging over the sand hill, heralded by a bugle call, to our rescue.  This is an inside out process. We have to start with our own sales operations and clean that up.  If we do this consistently over time, we can isolate out the baddies, the dodgy types, the liars and contain the harm they do to us.  None of us want to work in a profession that stinks.  Our job is to develop good people in sales, rather than good salespeople.  Is this what you are doing at the moment

 Like a lot of people, I subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc.  The following morsel popped into my inbox the other morning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care–Anonymous”.  Wow!  What a powerful reminder of the things that really matter in our interactions with others. This piece of sage advice should be metaphorically stamped on to the brain of every single person involved in sales.

Don’t miss it - selling stuff is a tough gig.  Rejection is the normal response to our spiffy sales presentation and follow up offer. You have to be tough to survive in a sales job.  You need other things too. Product and technical knowledge is important.  Total command of the detail is expected by clients.  However, we need to be careful about what we focus on. Are we letting the product details and features confuse us about what selling is really all about?

Some salespeople I have encountered remind me of an icy Siberian mammoth trapped in a time warp from the past, still trotting out the product brochure and seeing if I will go for one of their goodies?   You don’t like that one, well then how about this one, or this one, or this one, ad nauseam? I want “blue” but they keep showing me 50 shades of “pink”. They are playing that pathetic, failed salesperson game named “process of elimination”.

I want to buy, but are they really showing me they are focused on understanding me?  Are they demonstrating to me that they foremost care about my benefit?  Are they communicating to me that, “in your success Greg, is my success”?  Or do they come across not with stars in their eyes, buy $$$$ signs? 

I can recall seeing them sitting across the table from me, mentally salivating at the thought of the big fat commission this sales conversation is worth?  I can sense they have already bought the 3 series Beemer before the ink is dry?

The quote at the beginning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care” reminds me of a great Japanese word, which should be embraced by everyone in sales - kokorogamae(心構え). 

It can be simply translated as “preparedness” but the Japanese nuance goes much deeper than that.  Anyone studying a martial art or a traditional Japanese art (道) will immediately be on my wave length, when they hear this kokorogamae term. I would prefer to translate it as “getting your heart in order”.  Sounds a bit woo, woo doesn’t it. 

Well it is sound business sense. This means to really hark back to your most basic principles of true intention. What we can call True North – the purity of our intention.  What is the spark in our heart driving our behavior?  Is it the money or is it the serving?  Is it what you want or what the client wants?  Is this going to be a long-term relationship or a fleeting transaction? 

Salespeople need to start by searching their heart for their true intention.  Huh? There I go again. Does this sound a bit too “let’s all hold hands around the a tree” California emotional for you? 

Why do I recommend searching your heart? Because clients can sense your motivation isn’t centered on their best interests and therefore they won’t buy from you.  Even if somehow you do manage one sale, you will miss the key objective – the buyer’s re-order

Of course, there are the exceptions – the Hollywood image of the “smooth talking” salesperson who could sell you anything and will certainly try to.  They are like skyrockets that initially blaze through the night and then explode!  They are here for a good time not a long time and they give the profession of sales a bad brand.  Wolf of Wall Street ring a bell here.  That dude went to jail, which is where he deserved to go, for ripping all of those punters off and stealing their savings. He is out of jail now and is a sales trainer – the mind boggles at the thought.  This is why people don’t trust salespeople.  We have to prove we are different because we are judges guilty from the outset.

The best Japanese salesperson I ever interviewed for a sales job was also a criminal. 

 A criminal? Well, the criminal part didn’t surface immediately, but came up later through some background checks. Let me make a note to Sales Managers – do background checks!.  He was absolutely brilliant in the first two interviews, polished, genius personified in the role play, and WOW, what a closer!  I thought “Yes!” at last, I have found my perfect Japanese salesperson.  Actually, he was a liar, a thief and a baddie.  He had zero True North orientation and his kokorogamae was plain wrong.  What a wake up and smell the coffee moment for me. I realised how naïve and trusting I was.

So let’s ignore the outliers, those riff raff of sales and come back to the vast majority of salespeople who are not evil, just inept.  Change your heart, focus on True North, purify your intentions, show you genuinely care about the buyer’s best interests before your own.  If you do that every single time you meet a client, you will have get success in sales and build a power personal brand.

 It's inevitable - at some point disagreements are going to come up in the workplace. Power struggles, political plays, sectionalism, siloism – the list goes on regarding sources of organizational conflict.  As we all know, disagreements can get heated quickly and it can be difficult to put aside our opinions and biases in order to handle the situation diplomatically.  We can get locked into positions and we regret what we said later.

Powerfully motivated people often have powerful egos and when conflicts arise, teamwork can be compromised. It can become our team against their team, except we are all working for the same organization!  We have conveniently forgotten all about our competitors in the market, as we turn on each other.  This is not a winning formula.  Positive internal collaboration is a product of the culture created in the organization and needs to be built and rebuilt all the time.  It doesn’t have to be a “winner takes all” and the losers are vanquished in a battle of wills and egos.  There are several tried and true methods to "disagree agreeably” with colleagues and get the issues out on the table, but still preserve the teamwork. Would that be something that would be worthwhile pursuing?  The opportunity cost of wasting energy fighting each other and not winning in the market is huge.  We should stop shooting ourselves in the foot.  Let’s become a united team that allows many viewpoints and alternate ideas. Sounds good except most organisations have no idea how to do that.  Here are some ideas on how to navigate a disagreement in an empathetic manner, while presenting your point of view.

1. Give the benefit of the doubt. Don't immediately jump to conclusions even if you disagree with someone. Be generous with others.Hear them out, you may have more in common than you initially thought.  We are not perfect, we don’t have all of the possible information or all of the possible angles to view an issue.  Instead of concentrating on defending what we think, we should start with an open mind that there are many paths to the mountain top.  We may be wrong and wouldn’t we want to have the latest and best information available, as we duke it out in the marketplace with our competitors?
2. Listen to learn and understand. Be an engaged listener, make sure you are listening on an empathetic level instead of just pretending to listen. We do this don’t we.By gathering all the facts about the other person's point of view, you will be able to deliver your counterpoint in a diplomatic manner.  We need to switch gears from what we usually do.  We are often notorious interrupters, jumping in finishing off other’s sentences before they do, or just talking over the top of them to thrust our opinion forward.  We have trouble maintaining our listening capability when our brain is awash with what we want to say.  Our own internal conversation is all encompassing, roaring and it is effectively drowning out the points being made by the other person.  We need to be better at listening to others before we shoot our mouths off.  It should be done in this order – ear, brain, mouth - not ear, mouth, brain.
3. Use a cushion. This is inserting a little break in the proceedings, so we can think before we speak.Acknowledge the other person's point of view and relate to their emotions through empathetic listening. How do we do that?  We can use cushion statements such as "I hear what you're saying and what you're saying is important" or "I understand your point of view" to demonstrate that you understand and care about their feelings.  As I said, it is important to wait until they have finished speaking before we respond. I know, I know, this might feel absolutely painful and excruciating but do it!  Having exercised some patience to hear them out, now we bring in the cushion. This is a great little interregnum to allow us some thinking time before we go into our response.  Our immediate first response is usually not our most considered or best response.  It can often be an emotional response as well. Cushion, then respond – the results are enormously different.  It takes practice and won’t come naturally but the rewards are vast.
4. Number 4 is never use "but" or "however." No matter how much you empathize with someone, if you follow up your cushion statement with words like "but" or "however," it will negate everything prior. You lose credibility and the person you're disagreeing with is unlikely to take your thoughts seriously from this point on. We are all trained like hawks to watch for body language guiding us as to whether they agree with what we are saying or not.  So we have to make sure we are not giving off a negative vibe without even being aware of it.  We are also trained to listen for key words that tell us whether we have an argument on our hands or not. Words like “but”, “however”, “in reality” etc, set off alarms in our heads.  We immediately arm ourselves for counterattack when we hear those words. 

Sun Zu’s advice in The Art of War, was to win without fighting, so let’s do that.  Instead of words that contradict the other person’s original statement, use words like "and" or insert a pause instead.  Here is an example. “That is a good idea but we have to look at the budget ramifications”. This sounds negative and unhelpful.  Try this instead, “That is a good idea and we will need to look at the budget ramifications”.  The impression we get from the second version is more positive and hopeful.  Just change one word and the inference is vastly different.

Number 5 is State your opinion with evidence. Opinions are easy to refute, but facts are difficult to argue with. By backing up your point of view with evidence, you come across as more credible and can gain valuable leverage in a disagreement. By utilizing evidence, you may even be able to bring someone over to your line of thinking.  It is also a smart move to bring in the facts in a subtle way.  Rather than using facts as a mallet to belt them with, offer some consideration such as “I may not have all the facts but I was aware that this was the case, how does that correspond with your experience?”  Always be aware that people don’t like to lose face, be embarrassed, be humiliated or to feel slighted.  We know this but in the heat of the moment we may go too far.  Ramming facts down their throat may mean you are correct.  This may make you feel good, but you potentially create an enemy for life nevertheless.  We get into trouble when the message is delivered in the wrong way. 

So try these ideas and become much better with holding your position, being heard and retaining the relationship with people who disagree with you.

We are such a judgmental lot aren’t we! We form opinions about people within seconds of seeing them, often even before we hear them speak.  We judge their dress, their body language, their style, without knowing anything about them as a person.  We are slow to unwind our first impression as well, so those first seconds of any interaction are vital.  How is that going for you?

We are all critics too, when it comes to presentations. We want the best, we want to be educated, entertained, wowed in our seats and we are usually disappointed.  We carry that history of disappointment around with us like heavy baggage, to the next presentation and the next and the next.  We shamelessly hold others to a level of accountability, we never wish to have imposed upon us!

The cold, hard reality is that Presentation Effectiveness can be a make or break skill in the workplace. At some point in your career you will be asked to present information to a group. It doesn't have to be a formal occasion.  It might just mean answering a question or being invited to express a view or opinion. It is your job to ensure that you are ready to step up to the call.

An individual who can present confidently and effectively immediately differentiates themselves from the rest of the group. This is how to stand out in a positive way, a way that gets noticed when bosses are looking around for high potentials and they are always looking round for high potentials.  Whether you are a pro or a beginner with presenting or public speaking, here are some considerations for improving your presentation and communications skills.

Fear  Many people are terrified of speaking in front of a group. Everyone is staring at you, your palms are sweating, your pulse is racing, strangely your throat feels suddenly dry and parched, your energy levels have mysteriously dropped to precipitously low level.  Your knees might even be knocking as the fight or flight adrenalin chemical kicks in when leased by your brain.

Many of us can accomplish pulling off a presentation, but feel a certain amount of fear and stress. Speaking in front of groups does not have to be stressful or nerve racking; instead, make the experience positive so that it can help you stand out and get noticed.

Here are some tips that will help you fight through your anxiety and deliver an effective presentation:

Prepare, Prepare, Prepare  If you have a complete understanding of your material, it will definitely give you an advantage during your presentation. It will help to reduce the fear element because you will be in control. However, do not feel you have to memorize your material; you just need to be familiar with it. 

You can read key points as mental prompts to help you keep the flow going in the best order, but don’t read it in detail, if you can avoid it.  Many people are wedded to their text. They spend the entire time making eye contact with their own words on the page in front of them, rather than looking at their audience.  They then wonder why nobody was impressed with their presentation.  Look at your audience – talk to them as if it was fireside chat, be relaxed and engage with everyone. 

I attended the Harvard Business School, as part of an Executive Education Programme.  I found this technique fascinating in its simplicity.  One of the Professors had written down a list of 10 words on the back wall behind the audience.  This was his 3 hour lecture presented entirely without any visible notes.  This list was his navigation for the talk.  We can do the same.  A list of key words you talk to can be your presentation or you might use the slide deck as the navigation tool to move your talk along.

Open with Confidence.   Here is a big secret - only you know you are terrified. Unless you tell us, we will imagine you are competent, after all that is what we are expecting.  I saw a disaster unfold when the speaker told us she was nervous.  She had an impressive resume, was tall, well groomed, a confident looking business professional.  Or so we thought. 

A few minutes into the presentation she suddenly stopped, told us she was nervous and that she had to take a deep breath. And she repeated this sequence two more times. 

Her credibility just rocketed out right the window at that point and nobody took anything she had to say with any credence. She destroyed her message, her reputation and her personal brand in the space of 30 seconds.

She could have paused, taken a breath, regrouped and carried on.  We would have thought it was a natural break in her flow and thought nothing about it. She chose to tell us publically – big error right there. 

Keep it to yourself no matter how badly you feel inside.  We don’t need to know and we don’t want to know.

Japan of course, being a very humble society, loves to start a presentation with an apology, often mentioning what a hopeless speaker the individual is.  The President of a huge retail corporation here in Japan recently began his talk with an explanation that his English wasn’t any good and that he had never given a talk like this in English before.  He was piling on the excuses.  He then delivered a sparkling talk in near perfect English!  Did the excuses add any value to his presentation? Of course not.

No excuses.  No, no, no!  This is a presentation – it is not chit chat with your friends.  This is your personal brand we are talking about here.  If you are sick don’t tell us.  If you are nervous don’t tell us.  If you are sad because your cat died, don’t tell us. Don’t say anything about how you feel, because then the focus is on you and not where it should be - on your audience.  Work the room instead – focus outward not inward.  Look at the audience the entire time you are speaking – never break off eye contact.

Your opening gives your audience a first impression of your presentation. Make sure not to leave anything to chance. Your opening sets the tone for your entire presentation.  No ums and ahs please!  If we recorded you would we hear a succession of ums ahs?  Are you even aware you are doing this?  Trust me it doesn’t add any value. In fact it detracts from your message, because you don’t sound convinced yourself.  If you don’t seem sure of what you are saying why should I by into your message?

Want to know how to completely cure yourself of ums and ahs forever when speaking?Here is how to avoid the usual speaker opening kicking off with hesitation in the form of Ums and Ahs. 

 Select the first word of each sentence and hit it hard.  Say your sentence.  Now purse your lips once that sentence is completed and then hit the next sentence’s first word.  Once you finish that sentence purse your lips again.  Keep doing this over and over and hesitancy and timidity will disappear from your image as a speaker.  Those ums and ahs will be gone.  I know it works because I was a shocker too.  I used this method and it cured me, so it can cure you too.

Also lift your speaking volume up to about 30%-50% higher than in normal conversation.  This is not a normal conversation, so it needs a different approach. Stronger volume communicates greater confidence even if you don’t have any!.  You usually have microphones, so you don’t have to shout, but lift your energy. You will find that extra energy will help you relate your message more easily to the audience. 

We buy enthusiasm and a big part of enthusiasm is energy transfer from the speaker to the audience.  You will notice that speaker with a little mousy voice gets switched off pretty quickly by the audience.  You don’t have to have a DJ style bass voice.  You just need to project your voice at higher levels that you are used to.

If you have a reasonably strong voice and it is a small gathering, dispense with the microphone altogether, so that both your hands are free for using hand gestures.

Focus on a Few Key Points.   Know the major points you want to make. This will help ease your worry and increase your confidence. You should also use electronic visuals, note cards, or memory techniques to outline your key concepts. If you need some prompts then prepare them.  If you are using a teleprompter make sure you can carry on without it.  Why do I say that?

This incident has to be one of the biggest recorded meltdowns of all time.  Famous Hollywood Director Michael Bay just got started on his Samsung sponsored public presentationin Las Vegas.  When the teleprompter failed, in short order so did he.  You can see the disaster unfold on YouTube – it is seriously sad to watch.

Remember, the slides, the flip chart, the teleprompter are all secondary to you – you are the message.  Importantly, only Michael Bay and the host on stage at that time knew what he was going to say that day. He was there to support Samsung’s new curved TV screen, so everything had been scripted in advance by the marketing people.  He couldn’t continue because the teleprompter had all the information he needed and he hadn’t prepared a back up plan, if the tech failed.  Rather ironic for a film director who uses so much tech in his Transformer movies isn’t it.  Always have a plan B is the lesson here.

By abruptly walking off stage in shamed, burning silence he broadcast to the audience in the room and thanks to social media, the entire world, that he had forgotten his message, that he had 100% unceremoniously and completely failed. Now, by contrast, he could have carried on with his thoughts and we would never have known it wasn’t the intended content.  Only he and the host on stage knew what was in the talk.  Carry on regardless, never let us know you have forgotten what you are supposed to say – we will never know. 

Support Ideas with Evidence.   It is always important to provide evidence to support your main points. Supporting evidence will help your audience understand your points and will give you a chance to explain your points more fully.  Point-evidence; point-evidence; point-evidence is the way to go.  Just because you say it doesn't mean we believe it is true.  Prove it!  Making claims and statement is not enough.  Bring us proof, evidence, data, testimonials, corroborating expert opinion, statistics, etc.

Close with a Call to Action.   This will be the last impression your audience has of you and your presentation. It is important to ensure the closing reflects the purpose of the presentation. Your closing should summarize your content and give your audience a clear direction.  Ask them to do something after this talk, so that you can get them personally connected with your message.

Don’t forget that you must repeat your close again, after the end of Q&A.  Most people lose control of the proceedings when they get to Q&A and many a meltdown has been witnessed at this vital last impression juncture.  Don’t allow someone’s random question content define your final impression or final message for the audience. 

I remember I was giving a presentation in Japanese, to an audience of HR professionals about how great Dale Carnegie training was and teaching them how to use some of the key human relations principles.

It was going gangbusters, until we got to the Q&A.  This very charming, well dressed Japanese lady in her early 70s put her hand up to ask a question and then highjacked the proceedings.  For the next 10 minutes she launched into her own speech!  My message had been forgotten completely by the end of that speech she gave.  I need to get it back on track.  That is why you need two closes.

You must stay in command of the messaging and so the show ain’t over until you sing the last line of the wrap up after Q&A.  Repeat your close so the last message they get is the one you want them to get.  This is the mark of the pro!  When you see a speaker wrap it up, call for Q&A and then just let things complete because time is up, they are still not there in their professional development.  Keep an eye out for this when you hear people speak – see who is a real pro and who is still an amateur.

Here are some Action Points to remember

1. Prepare, Prepare, Prepare
2. Open with Confidence
3. Focus on a Few Key Points
4. Support Ideas with Evidence
5. Close with a Call to Action

Like a lot of people, I subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc.  The following morsel popped into my inbox the other morning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care–Anonymous”.  Wow!  What a powerful reminder of the things that really matter in our interactions with others. This piece of sage advice should be metaphorically stamped on to the brain of every single person involved in sales.

Don’t miss it - selling stuff is a tough gig.  Rejection is the normal response to our spiffy sales presentation and follow up offer. You have to be tough to survive in a sales job.  You need other things too. Product and technical knowledge is important.  Total command of the detail is expected by clients.  However, we need to be careful about what we focus on. Are we letting the product details and features confuse us about what selling is really all about?

Some salespeople I have encountered remind me of an icy Siberian mammoth trapped in a time warp from the past, still trotting out the product brochure and seeing if I will go for one of their goodies?   You don’t like that one, well then how about this one, or this one, or this one, ad nauseam? I want “blue” but they keep showing me 50 shades of “pink”. They are playing that pathetic, failed salesperson game named “process of elimination”.

I want to buy, but are they really showing me they are focused on understanding me?  Are they demonstrating to me that they foremost care about my benefit?  Are they communicating to me that, “in your success Greg, is my success”?  Or do they come across not with stars in their eyes, buy $$$$ signs? 

I can recall seeing them sitting across the table from me, mentally salivating at the thought of the big fat commission this sales conversation is worth?  I can sense they have already bought the 3 series Beemer before the ink is dry?

The quote at the beginning, “People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care” reminds me of a great Japanese word, which should be embraced by everyone in sales - kokorogamae(心構え). 

It can be simply translated as “preparedness” but the Japanese nuance goes much deeper than that.  Anyone studying a martial art or a traditional Japanese art (道) will immediately be on my wave length, when they hear this kokorogamae term. I would prefer to translate it as “getting your heart in order”.  Sounds a bit woo, woo doesn’t it. 

Well it is sound business sense. This means to really hark back to your most basic principles of true intention. What we can call True North – the purity of our intention.  What is the spark in our heart driving our behavior?  Is it the money or is it the serving?  Is it what you want or what the client wants?  Is this going to be a long-term relationship or a fleeting transaction? 

Salespeople need to start by searching their heart for their true intention.  Huh? There I go again. Does this sound a bit too “let’s all hold hands around the a tree” California emotional for you? 

Why do I recommend searching your heart? Because clients can sense your motivation isn’t centered on their best interests and therefore they won’t buy from you.  Even if somehow you do manage one sale, you will miss the key objective – the buyer’s re-order

Of course, there are the exceptions – the Hollywood image of the “smooth talking” salesperson who could sell you anything and will certainly try to.  They are like skyrockets that initially blaze through the night and then explode!  They are here for a good time not a long time and they give the profession of sales a bad brand.  Wolf of Wall Street ring a bell here.  That dude went to jail, which is where he deserved to go, for ripping all of those punters off and stealing their savings. He is out of jail now and is a sales trainer – the mind boggles at the thought.  This is why people don’t trust salespeople.  We have to prove we are different because we are judges guilty from the outset.

The best Japanese salesperson I ever interviewed for a sales job was also a criminal. 

 A criminal? Well, the criminal part didn’t surface immediately, but came up later through some background checks. Let me make a note to Sales Managers – do background checks!.  He was absolutely brilliant in the first two interviews, polished, genius personified in the role play, and WOW, what a closer!  I thought “Yes!” at last, I have found my perfect Japanese salesperson.  Actually, he was a liar, a thief and a baddie.  He had zero True North orientation and his kokorogamae was plain wrong.  What a wake up and smell the coffee moment for me. I realised how naïve and trusting I was.

So let’s ignore the outliers, those riff raff of sales and come back to the vast majority of salespeople who are not evil, just inept.  Change your heart, focus on True North, purify your intentions, show you genuinely care about the buyer’s best interests before your own.  If you do that every single time you meet a client, you will have get success in sales and build a power personal brand.