We have products and services to sell and there are key details about their features which we need to explain to the buyer. Clients need to know what they are getting for their money, so fair enough. In Japan, the client will lead you down the road of morbid detail about the ins-and-outs of the purchase, as they suck you dry for all the information you have. This is a defence mechanism to make sure they are not making a mistake. It is also tedious and over the top from the salesperson’s point of view. We know we should supply just enough information for them to make a buying decision without adding unnecessary data. Our mindless throw away comment can often lead to deal assassination, as we have triggered something that we shouldn’t have.
We nnow have to balance out the detail with explaining the benefits of the purchase. Buyers buy benefits notfeatures except in Japan they focus on the features and keep dragging more and more detail out of us. Japan is special. This is not a business-like culture. Companies are not interested in doing business. Japanese buyers attending a networking event are not thinking, “today, I might meet someone who will add a lot of value to our company and my job is to find as many people like that as possible, in the time I have available at this event”. They don’t want to meet people they don’t already know. Because unknown people are dangerous and there is risk involved. If their friend or acquaintance introduces someone new, that is acceptable because there has already been a filtering process in place to get to this point. The unfiltered person is to be feared.
Don’t believe me? Try walking up to Japanese businesspeople at an event and introduce yourself. Watch their face very carefully and you will see them react with shock and trepidation. They are not thinking “great, a potential business opportunity has just presented itself”. They are thinking, “I should be careful with this unknown person and anyone who just walks up and says hello can’t be trusted, because that isn’t how we do it in Japan. They should have had an introducer and followed the proper procedures”.
So we cannot rely on the buyer to do our job for us. We have to get to the benefits and the application of the benefits with the buyer, as soon as we can. Otherwise, they will squander all the time available for the meeting on the nuts and bolts of the purchase. They will never make a buying decision because we didn’t cover the benefits in our explanation. The buyer is happy to not decide because doing absolutely nothing or nothing new, is the safest path in business in Japan.
One benefit we can explain is about the reaction to the purchase. This could be by the users of the product or service and how they will react very well because it saves them time, money or effort. Buyers worry about the reaction of others to the buying decision and their biggest fear is getting criticised for making a poor decision. The reaction could be by their bosses or colleagues. Generally though, because of the buying process here, there will be many people involved in the buying decision. Nevertheless, everyone involved needs to react positively concerning the purchase. That means internally, the buyer has to shepherd the decision through many corporate layers and they have to appeal to various interested parties to make sure their interests are met and their reaction is positive.
If they are in the distribution process for purchase to on sell to another company, then the way the sale is made needs to consider how that buyer and their client will react. As we are making the original sale, we have to tell our buyer how the other buyers will react positively and why that will occur, in order to push our sale into the distribution funnel. We will never meet these buyers further down the funnel, but we have to create the bullets for our buyer to fire when they are doing the on sell.
We start with the end user in mind and work our way backwards, explaining why the reaction to the purchase will be positive. We need to draw on our word pictures here to describe the emotion of satisfaction in the post purchase phase. Just a dry retelling of the features of the widget won’t produce the reaction we want and it won’t travel across the many touch points toward the final user. We can talk about things like, “You will be very happy when you receive smiles of genuine thanks for making your end users work a lot easier thanks to this purchase. They will really appreciate you for helping them and you will have built an even closer relationship of trust with them”.
We know ourselves when we have made a good purchase as a consumer how we react. We feel that we have done something worthwhile and have done well. We have calculated the purchase decision against the benefits centered on time, money or effort. Our buyers are the same and we have to use our communication skills to flesh out the benefits and the positive reactions which will arise from everyone involved.
