Salespeople often miss the point. They are brilliant on telling the client the detail of the product or service. When you think about how we train salespeople, that is a very natural outcome. Product knowledge is drummed into the heads of salespeople when they first join the company. The product or service lines are expanded or updated at some point, so again the product knowledge component of the training reigns supreme. No wonder they default to waxing lyrical about the spec. These discussions, however, tend to be technical, dry, unemotional and rather boring. This is ridiculous, because we know we buy on emotion and justify with logic. If we know that, then why are we spending so much time on the logic bits?

Finding relevant stories to wrap the product or service up inside is the answer to getting clients emotionally involved. For example, I could say, “Dale Carnegie has an excellent sales programme that is very complete and comprehensive”. All true but very dry in the telling. Or I could say, “In 1939 Dale Carnegie decided to revolutionise sales training. In those days, if your company provided sales training you were trained, but if they didn’t, you had to work it all out for yourself. Dale Carnegie introduced the first public training classes for salespeople. He created the material with Percy Whiting, one of the top securities salesmen in America at that time”.

The second telling is through a story and more engaging and memorable. It adds impressive elements about Dale Carnegie’s thought leadership about sales training, his partnership with an expert salesman to create the programme and the longevity of the training methodology. These are all USPs or unique selling propositions wrapped together in a story. In this way they are more easily absorbed by the listener. We think in pictures, so we need word pictures to be employed in our storytelling.

When we read books, we tend to best remember the stories being told. We all grow up listening to stories, so our brains are hard wired to remember them with just one exposure. A famous American sales trainer Charlie Cullen in the 1950s was one of the first to record his sales training on vinyl LPs. His recommendations on what salespeople should do, were all backed up by examples conveyed through stories.

In more modern times, Zig Ziglar’s whole approach to sales training was telling a series of parables for sales. Growing up in America’s Bible Belt, perhaps lessons communicated through parables came natural to him because of the culture of bible study in those regions. Brian Tracy, another great sales trainer is constantly mixing science and psychology with storytelling to get his point across. Gary Vaynerchuk, the modern marketing guru and entrepreneur is a master storyteller. They are almost exclusively about himself, but that is his style – supremely confident, self-opinionated, self-absorbed and constantly drawing on his own experience. He has a huge following of fans, including me. What he teaches is easy to follow because of the way he employs stories to get his key messages across.

So look into your line-up of products or services and pick out the stories that go with each item. It may come from the history. Or it may be the technology. It may be client stories about users and we relate what happened to them. We need to look for an angle that will make the story interesting for the buyer. It should bolster the USPs of the offering and project pots of value.

We don’t necessarily need a Hollywood production here in the storytelling. It doesn't have to be War and Peace either. Let’s keep them brief and to the point. If we can engage the listener’s emotions and bring them into the story, then we are succeeding. Can the buyer visualise what we are describing in their mind’s eye? This takes some work and some creativity. This is why it is often a good practice to involve everyone in the sales team to work together to curate some great stories and case studies of satisfied customers.

There is no doubt stories work. When I record my own sales talk, I realise how many stories I am employing. When I listen to the gurus of sales training, their whole underpinning platform is built on stories. Stories work, so let’s start creating them and using them with our buyers. We have tons of them, in fact. All we have to do is collect them and arrange them to match the industry or industry segment of the buyer. Buyers want proof and stories are a way of delivering that proof. Don’t forget that stories need data and data needs stories.

Change is hard to create anywhere in the world. Getting things to change in Japan also has its own set of challenges. The typical expat leader, sent to Japan, notices some things that need changing. Usually the Japan part of the organisation is not really part of the organisation. It is sitting off to the side, like a distant moon orbiting the HQ back home.

There are major differences around what is viewed as professional work. The things that are valued in Japan, like working loyally (i.e. long hours) even with low productivity, keeping quiet, not upsetting the applecart, not contributing in meetings, getting deep into the factional constructs of the organisation, are not seen as positive.

Inefficiencies seem to beg for correction. Innovation seems to be a foreign concept in both senses of the word. Doing what we have always done, in the same way as we have always done it, has eliminated most of the opportunities for making mistakes, so why change anything? Doing things in a new way is inherently risky, because there is no reliable road map. We are going to have come out of our comfort zone to do that and we might make a mistake – not appealing whatsoever to the Japanese staff.

Meritocracy is a given to the new expat leader and so personnel changes are a prime interest. People are where they are for many reasons and merit is not always the reason. Longevity, who entered the company first, who is your patron, always have a big determinant on whose who in the zoo in Japan.

Talented people are supposed to keep in line and do what they are told. Showing too many smarts seems they are getting uppity before their betters and the hocho, that is the razor sharp Japanese knives, rapidly come out. The “nail” sticking out is about the get a good whack from everyone who can hit it hard.

Nevertheless, ignorance is bliss, so our expat hero or heroine plunges in and starts shaking things up. Entrenched interests, who have created this current system to suit themselves, now feel threatened. They are not stoics. They make a very keen calculation. Can we outlast this clown, who is so rude, so ignorant about how to properly lead in Japan, so annoying and so dangerous to our vested interests. If the answer is “yes”, then a guerrilla war commences, where those most threatened band together to slow down progress, obfuscate the vital issues, hide key information, isolate out the new leaders pets to weaken them and look for petards on which to hoist the expat.

If the answer is “no”, then it is a bare knuckle street fight. There are no rules. Classic weapons are looking for points of failure with new innovations to blow them up on purpose. Anyone close to the boss becomes a target internally and all sorts of societal pressure is brought to bear, to “turn them” into a spy for the “good guys” against this lunatic from outside. They are reminded that our hero won’t be here forever and the rest of us will be. “We will get you. You are going to be toast when the boss heads to the airport for departure to the next foreign assignment. You aren’t going anywhere sunshine, remember that”.

Out of nowhere and nothing, headquarters starts to get anonymous communication about various crimes and misdemeanors that are pure fiction. Sexual harassment is a favourite, because they know Western companies are really sensitive to these types of allegations. Power harassment which was a preferred, traditional boss leadership technique, has now made it into the upper ranks of crimes, as this has become something flagged in Japanese society.

Unsuitability for leadership in Japan. Ignorance of the market, clients, business practices, damage to the reputation of the firm locally are all trotted out to paint a dismal picture. The staff engagement survey for Japan is always the lowest score in the world and this shows what a miserable job our expat hero is doing. It is always the lowest in the world, but HQ isn’t usually that smart or well informed enough to know that.

HQ is demanding Japan’s results improve, but are not happy to see any pushback when changes are introduced. The expat boss has to keep everything as it is, the exact same structure but produce greater results and they have to keep everyone happy about achieving that. The boss is on a hiding to nothing here. Welcome to Japan!