I had a meeting with a client I have been chasing for business for the last ten years. They have had the same President right throughout and we get on very well, but this has not resulted in any business coming my way. Over the years, I had been introduced by him to his various HR people, and that is where it has always floundered. Maybe they had their own internal solutions and didn’t need us or the HR people didn’t like me or didn’t like the President trespassing on their turf. Actually, I have no idea why we have never been able to crack the code, but finally, I thought we were getting somewhere.

I was to have yet another meeting with the President from last year and it kept getting postponed and postponed. Finally, we had our meeting in January and he said wait until June and we will continue the conversation. I was somewhat surprised when his assistant reached out to me to have that June follow-up meeting before I did the follow-up from my side.

I expected he would be in the meeting with the new HR head he had recently hired, but he did not appear. They had three executives there for the meeting, including one based outside Japan who was visiting. Naturally, I had notes for the January meeting and I was working off the basis that this meeting was a continuation of the previous meeting direction with the President.

So, I get straight into outlining the solution for them based on my understanding from my previous discussion with the President at our January meeting. That was a mistake. I assumed he had briefed them on our talk, but it gradually dawned on me that wasn’t the case.

My approach was wrong. What I should have done was to first ask them what they understood the situation to be around what the President wanted. I didn’t do that and so wasted a lot of time and effort early in the meeting barking up various wrong trees.

I could see this genius, transformational idea of mine, wasn’t going anywhere. They kept asking me rather tactical questions. This totally confused me because the President had been operating at the strategic level. In the course of them getting frustrated with me not getting the picture, they explained the problem from their point of view. I was floored.

The things they wanted were the most basic requirements. I couldn’t initially get my head around what I was hearing, because it didn’t correspond with the image I had in my mind. This firm has been around a long time and they have been very successful. They have many branches and, therefore, I assumed, they had all the basics well and truly nailed down. Their ducks were in a row, I thought, but not true.

Being a 112-year-old training company and being here since 1963 in Japan, I have a huge curriculum resource at my command and can operate at the most basic or sophisticated levels. In other words, I could give them what they want once I understood it.

I was reflecting on why this meeting was initially so hard. I see that I had a direction for them in my mind based on the meeting with the President and I forgot to do the sales basics with them. I assumed we were advancing on a previous conversation going on to the next level. I was operating above the fluffy white clouds and they were down a deep mine shaft.

What I should have done was to expect that the busy President had not briefed them at all or not to a very distinct degree. I should have ignored what I thought was happening and should have dealt with what I had in front of me – three people I didn’t know and should have assumed that I had no idea what they wanted. I wish I had been that smart.

If I had started that way, it would have been obvious to me that I needed to focus down on the basics for them. This hand it over phenomenon from the President to the working level staff is a common enough thing in business for busy senior executives. I will make it my rule from now on to ignore what I think is happening and check to see what they think is going on and what they need to fix their issues. I promise to do better.

I don’t like doing RFPs in Japan. We are translating concepts and intangibles into text in a document, which a lot of people we will never ever meet will be reading and making decisions about us. I prefer to work on my champion and have them marshal the approval through their byzantine internal processes to get the agreement to go ahead. It feels more in control than launching a bunch of words into space and hoping for the heavens to align.

I had a case like that recently. I had met a person from the company at a networking event and when I followed up they directed me to the person who would become my champion. I met them, understood what they wanted and came back with some alternatives from which they could choose. They made a selection and asked for a simple proposal, with pricing, which I put together.

Unbeknownst to me, someone higher up in the hierarchy didn’t like what they had selected and said they should have a demonstration training first before committing to the delivery of the option they chose. I could tell my champion was annoyed by this, but we did the demonstration more as a fig leaf to get approval to move forward as planned.

In the case of an RFP, the champion receives it, but it is a much more formal process, no doubt involving procurement, compliance and a host of other entities who will need to scrutinise the document. None of these people will have had a chance to get the necessary “passion” inoculation from me about how this will be so great for their company. It is a very dry affair all round.

Because so many people we will never meet will be looking at the content we have to really lay on the detail. Anytime we write something down, there is the danger of misinterpretation or lack of understanding of what they are reading. We are experts in our business, but often the people behind the scenes are not experts and they don’t know the lexicon or the content or the concepts. Often, what we are covering is quite complex as well, which makes it hard for them to gauge what they are reading to weight it up against rival submissions.

There is the danger we produce something so complete, so water tight, that it is impenetrable for them and they go for a competitor application because it is much less sophisticated and less complex, allowing them to make a decision. Where do we strike the balance between full details and a lighter version with enough data to get a yes. We have a varied audience, so some will prefer a light version and others want every detail.

Creating a version within a version could be the answer. We can have the executive summary bit and we can have the heavy details as well. In this way, the reader can choose to skim or do a deep dive. Japan always skews toward wanting more detail, so by definition a Japanese RFP will be relatively dense.

Supporting documents are always a good idea. Often we have Flyers or catalogues or white papers or whatever, which we can attach to the submission. No one may have the time to read it all but it does show a depth of command of the subject and that your firm is well organised on this topic.

We should never underestimate the Japanese preference for risk reduction, which usually translates into a desire for ALL the information they can get their hands on. Somehow, by collecting a lot of information, they feel immunised from making a mistake through a lack of knowledge or perspective.

The RFP evaluation process results in a yes or a no and when you get the no, it is perplexing to understand why you were not selected. In Japan, there is no mechanism for sharing with you why you missed out because the system doesn’t want to get into a debate about the decision. Therefore, it is very hard to learn from the process and it becomes a bit of a black box procedure. Was it the content, was it the money, was it the timing – what was it? Did our competitor offer something we don’t have or didn’t think about? You can lose a lot of sleep trying to parse what happened and it usually leads nowhere.

If you can get together with your champion unofficially, it is worthwhile trying to get some insight. They may be reluctant though to do that because there is no upside for them and they don’t want to compromise the organisation’s decision or decision-making processes.

I am having a bad run in sales at the moment and it is depressing. I am a constant networker attending events to meet potential clients. The leads we get to our website go to my sales team and so I have to hustle and get out there and make it happen. I do that and I follow up with the prospects to try to get a meeting or at least an introduction to a decision-maker.

Like everyone else, I get ghosted a lot of the time, but that doesn’t prevent me from following up again and again until there is no more point. I actually cannot recall anyone ever criticising me for my following up activities. If they ever did, I have my riposte ready to go. Would you like to hear it? Here we go. “Yes, you are correct. I do keep following up with potential clients. Your organisation has salespeople too, and wouldn’t you expect them to be following up with potential clients for your company’s growth and development? Well, that is what we do and by the way we teach sales and equip you salespeople to be better at the follow-up to win more business. Isn’t that something your organisation would value?”.

Amongst the clients I have been able to visit, there are the seeds of some potential training for them. This takes time and often they tell me to wait a little until they are ready to go. Naturally, I take note of that and I get back to them later to check in. I have had some clients on that cycle for over a year now.

It is very depressing though when they get back to you after you have followed up and say, “we are doing nothing this year and we won’t be spending anything on training until 2025”. When you get one of these, it is bad, but lately I am getting a number of these one after another. It is also leavened with this refrain, “our headquarters has put a freeze on hiring and training for the foreseeable future”. Ouch!

What do we do when we get slammed with these rejections and delays? If they come at reasonable intervals, it is one thing to deal with them. However, when you are pushing hard on the follow-up, you are lifting rocks to find poisonous spiders, centipedes and scorpions and have to deal with the product of your tenacity. I have been getting failures day after day for over a week now and I am constantly tasting the bitter ashes of defeat.

In this situation, we forget about our previous successes and abilities and focus on our current emasculation and inertia. This is dangerous because what we think determines our future success. We need to switch our mindset to the positive. It is a good idea to call past clients at this point, especially those happy clients, and ask how things are going.

For a start, they are going to take your call and will be happy to speak with you because you have built the trust and have provided value. It also reminds them that you are there. We tend to make a sale and then move on to the next sale and forget about keeping in touch with satisfied clients. There is a slight chance that they have a new need and bingo, we call them and this triggers some action on their part. At the least, it changes our mood to something more positive than the depression we are feeling about getting no new sales.

“Nana korobi, ya oki” is a Japanese saying I like, which means “fall down seven times, get up eight”. It is a bit like that advice to the cowboy who gets thrown from a bucking bronco, to get back up in the saddle immediately. This is important because if we think about it too much about it, we will talk ourselves out of getting back in the sales saddle.

So, get out there and attend networking events, call prospects and try to get a meeting. Call past clients and stir the embers of a possible deal. Dwelling on the failure component of what we do in sales will take us nowhere. We have to be positive and get on the front foot all the time, no matter how hard we are being driven down and pushed back. There is a success psychology in sales. It is based around self-belief. When that wall cracks, there is no going back and people drop out, never to return.

Have you ever had this experience? You cannot get on the same wavelength as the client. I remember an HR Director at one of the major fashion brands and I was always confused during our conversations. I was never sure where she stood on any number of issues about us delivering training for them. Yes, she was very pleasant, but also very obtuse and hard to corral. I would leave the meetings unsure of where we stood with this deal, if in fact there was a deal in there at all. Because no one in Japan wants to give you a straight “no”, they get tied up in Gordian knots of obfuscation and you are often left marooned.

Sometimes for me it is a language issue. Japanese is so difficult and my level of understanding can really vary depending on who I am talking to. I can have one client meeting and I get everything they are saying and I am on top of the conversation. A few hours later, I am sitting in another meeting room across from a potential client and I am struggling to get what they are saying. Not every native speaker is a fluent commander of their own language. Not every native speaker is smart, succinct, clear and logical in their speech. When you are not a native speaker and you are getting this barrage of poor communication skills, it gets bewildering very fast.

I have been having a series of back and forth emails with a potential client about arranging some training for them and the language is Japanese. It isn’t necessarily the linguistic aspect which has been giving me trouble. These days, tools like Google Translate do a phenomenal job if I need help. The issue is the person writing the email is a very poor communicator. Basically, she doesn’t have great skills in her own written language. This requires me to keep clarifying what she is trying to say, because it is not clear in the least.

Expectations can be an issue. We find we are both operating with different expectations and often we haven’t communicated what they are, because somehow we imagine the other party understands our position.

Japanese people suffer from this amongst themselves. So much is left unsaid in Japan and the idea is that each party fills in the blanks and coalesces their understanding of what happens next. It doesn’t always work though and they find they have completely misunderstood each other. Throw a foreigner into that mix and things can get very exciting, very quickly.

As a training company, we have to be careful of the message getting confused or mistaken between the salesperson and the trainer who will deliver the class. As a rule, we really want the trainer to meet the person contracting us, so that they can get a direct download of what is expected. Of course, we can pass on our understanding of what they want, but getting it directly from the horse’s mouth is a much better idea. Can you do something similar in your industry with your team who will execute the deal?

It is always interesting too, to find out that what you are hearing in this meeting is different or additional to what you heard in your own meeting with the client. Uh oh.

They may have moved their expectations in the interim or we just got it wrong, or we may have asked a different question this time and uncovered some hidden or previously uncommunicated needs.

This happened to me recently when we met the CEO. In that conversation, new requirements emerged which were not revealed or discussed in my first meeting. Either these were not tapped well enough by me in the first instance or they had subsequently emerged or the CEO’s own thinking had progressed since our original meeting.

It is always humbling when this happens. You have to question your own competence with asking client’s questions and taking notes in the meeting. It very important to catch these misunderstandings early, so that they can be corrected before the deal progresses too far down the track.

Getting things in writing is good for clarity. However, in most cases in Japan, the contracts are not proscriptive and do not carry all the very detailed aspects, especially in the service sector.

Usually, busy salespeople don’t want to summarise their understanding of the meeting and send it to the buyer, because they want to move on to the next client and the next deal.

Having a clarity meeting is part and parcel of the way things are done here and that is a good thing. We might want to skip that meeting and just get busy on the delivery, but Japan has found that such additional meetings to make sure we are all aligned work well in a country where communication is vague, parsimonious and confusing.