214: Group Selling is Not for the Faint Hearted

<p>Most of the time in Japan, I attend client meetings alone.  This is not how the Japanese do it.  The President going to a meeting alone, without some staff in attendance is rather rare.  Presidents have degrees of prestige and one of the indicators is how many flunkies they have in attendance.  My ego is big enough already to have to worry about people carrying my bag around for me.  The Japanese client meeting can often be quite an affair though with many people seated around the room, waiting to hear what you have to say.  Invariably, you have no idea who is turning up on their side, who they are or what they do.</p> <p> </p> <p>The key word there is “waiting”.  They expect this to be a presentation from me to them, with zero interaction, no questions and then they go away and thrash it out internally on what they want to do next.  The punters in the room are the earpieces of their respective sections, there to record and then report what was said and who said it.  There will usually be one or two designated interlocuters on their side who will engage with the seller to facilitate the meeting.  That facilitation is usually to insist we give them a presentation on our offer, done passively, without any insight into what they need.</p> <p> </p> <p>You can see the problem immediately.  We have many solutions, so which one is the best for them?  To know this we need to be asking questions.  The buyer side don’t quite see it that way and we can have a tense standoff.  We ask seller style consultative questions. No one answers them from the buyer side and the silence hangs heavy in the air, trying to strangle the seller.  If we hang tough and let that silence hang around for a long time, eventually someone on the buyer side will say “give us your pitch”.  When we hear this we know things are not going well.</p> <p> </p> <p>Being on our own is not a big deal, because usually we can make decisions on our own. We don’t need to work the idea through the system to get some type of convocation to agree to it. What is no