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, we talked about how he does his sales.

He told me he contacts a lead, gets an appointment, shows up and explains the service and submits a quote. 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.

I then asked him what does he do when the buyer says, “too expensive”. His answer had me reeling. 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.

Here is the snapper – do you know what is happening inside your team? Are they also dropping the price immediately as their first counter to an objection on the money?

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.

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, very, very low.

Japan loves rote learning and parents will pay cram schools to get their kids fully tuned up and on to the education escalator. Rote learning and exam technique is the standard educational approach in Japan right through to starting University classes. At University, unless you are trying for very specific careers like medicine, the elite bureaucracy or some job that requires you to pass a national exam, then the next four years are a type of Club Med for undergraduates.

In the internet and AI age, when anything you want to know can be found through a search engine, how relevant is rote learning and exam technique for the future? We all know we need more innovation and creativity in companies. Where is this going to come from? If we think about the work skills, knowledge and abilities we will demand of our employees in the next twenty years, we can be absolutely sure the current Japanese system of education won’t be producing it.

With lifetime employment, investing in training people made economic sense because you would reap the rewards. With greater job mobility on the horizon however, this social contract between staff and company will be broken. Young people, who will be in short supply due to demographic changes, will become like baseball free agents. They will rapidly discover they are able to swap teams for a better deal.

So where are we up to? The companies aren’t training their staff as comprehensively as they once did. The staff themselves will find themselves being lured by recruiters to move on to greener pastures.

I believe the educational construct in Japan basically has its ladder up against the wrong wall. What will become of this country? What will we need to do to prepare ourselves for this brave new world? Are we thinking about these prospects? If we haven’t spared a thought for this grim future of work, then now is a good time to take another look at assumptions, strategies, plans and targets. Those preparing now, will win in this coming war for talent. Game on!

Normally when we give presentations, they tend to be pretty dry affairs. We marshal the facts, relate what happened, tell stories perhaps but in a one dimensional way. We are relating what happened, but are not making any attempt to bring it alive. However, what do we seek when we are looking for entertainment or education – we are looking for dialogue. Our television dramas, movies, novels, biographies are all using dialogue to good effect.

Why not do the same thing in our talks, to make our key point stronger? Let me give an example of something that happened to me in 2010 in Miami. I was attending my first Dale Carnegie International Convention and hardly knew anyone there. In the evenings there would be various parties to attend and on this particular occasion I had the honour of meeting Dale Carnegie’s daughter Donna Dale Carnegie and she introduced me to Mike.

Now Mike stood out in that crowd of Dale Carnegie people, because he had a long ponytail and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. It turned out that Mike was the contractor who did all the stage audio sound etc., for the Convention and had been doing it for years.

“I always finish my year with the Dale Carnegie convention because you hold it in early December”, he told me. He also got me attention when he said, “I really like your organisation”. Being new to the Dale Carnegie world I was curious, so I asked him why he said that. He whispered to me in a conspiratorial fashion, “The things that people are saying out in front of stage and what they are doing behind the stage are the same”.

I asked what he meant by that. He continued, “Well I do a lot of these same types of events and we are all hooked up on the mics, so we can hear what is going on behind stage, as well as out on stage. There are plenty of folks who say one thing to the audience, but carry on quite the opposite off stage. I found in years of dealing with Dale Carnegie people they are genuine and they live the principles they espouse and I like that”.

I could say all of the same things and relate that story, just telling the details of what happened. However, when I include the dialogue, it brings the whole thing to life. People in the audience can picture a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, with a long ponytail, whispering this information to me. I can even cup my ear, as if I was listening to him, when he told me that secret part. They can hear his voice as I relate the story, which makes it more credible.