213: Sell With Passion

<p>We often hear that people buy on emotion and justify with logic.  The strange thing is where is this emotion coming from?  Most Japanese salespeople speak in a very dry, grey, logical fashion expecting to convince the buyer to hand over their dough.  I am a salesperson but as the President of my company, also a buyer of goods and services.  I have been living in Japan this third time, continuously since 1992.  In all of that time I am struggling to recall any Japanese salesperson who spoke with emotion about their offer.  It is always low energy, low impact talking, talking, talking all the time.  There are no questions and just a massive download of information delivered in a monotone delivery.</p> <p> </p> <p>As salespeople, our job is to join the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer.  But it is also more than that.  The buyer’s mental meandering won’t necessarily have the degree of passion we need for them to make a purchasing decision.  So we have to influence the course of that internal conversation they are having.  This is where our own passion comes in.</p> <p> </p> <p>I always thought Japanese people were unemotional before I moved to Japan the first time in 1979.  The ones I had met in business in Australia were very reserved and quite self contained.  They seemed very logical and detail oriented.  After I moved here I realised I had the wrong information.  Japanese people are very emotional in business. This is related closely to trust.  Once they trust you, they have made an emotional investment to keep using you.  No one likes to make a mistake or fail and the best way to avoid that is to deal with people you can trust.  How do you know you can trust them?  There is some track record of reliability there, that tells you the person or company you are dealing with is a known quantity that will act predictably and correctly every time.</p> <p> </p> <p>The problem with this approach though is that you will only ever be able to sell to existing accounts.  What about gaining new customers?  Yo