4 Things Tokyo Taught Me About Sales Discipline

I was in Tokyo for the first time recently. My son and I went there for a little vacation, and I was struck by how clean and orderly everything is. In a region of 38 million people, I expected a lot more noise, chaos, and pollution. We found none of that.

Instead, every sidewalk was clean, every subway was orderly, every traffic jam was quiet. From the person who checked us into the hotel to the chefs and other employees at every restaurant, we were consistently greeted with respect, warmth, and pleasantness. It was overall an astonishingly good experience, and we agreed we would both like to go back.

This got me thinking about how unpleasant many people consider the sales process to be, especially from the buyer’s perspective. And how complex sales, especially, should be handled with a great deal more discipline and care than most organizations devote to it.

Here are four moments in Tokyo that taught me something about how to do sales better:

1. Process Discipline Gets You There Faster

   In Stockholm, where I live, commuter train stations at rush hour are very busy. We are known for politeness, but some of that goes out the window when we’re under the stress of trying to get to work on time on public transit. You’ll see people trying to get ahead of everyone else. In New York, I’ve experienced even worse. 

   In Tokyo, the subway stations are an entirely different experience. No matter how crowded the station is, everyone stands neatly and quietly in line to get on the train. Everyone gets on in the order in which they arrived. The station is quiet enough to have a conversation with your companions without having to shout. And everyone gets where they’re going in a timely fashion.

   Studies have shown that when everyone takes their turn, everyone gets where they’re going faster. For instance, this study published in Transportation Science, found that when pedestrians line up and take turns (zipper style) to enter a “bottleneck,” they increase the capacity of the bottleneck. Everyone gets through it faster.

    Ironically, when we’re all competing to see who can get there faster, we end up getting there slower.

   The same thing happens in complex sales when we try to rush through the sales process, skipping steps, pushing the sale “forward” and trying to cross the finish line as fast as possible. Salespeople who leap ahead to proposals, salespeople the customer experiences as “pushy,” and salespeople who aren’t taking the time to access all relevant stakeholders to build a shared mental model are less effective (and make fewer sales) than those who are disciplined, orderly, and consistent in their approach.

2. Personal Responsibility Leads To Better Outcomes

   In Tokyo, there are vending machines on nearly every corner. If you’re thirsty, you can buy drinks. If you’re hungry, you can buy snacks. You are rarely more than a block or two away from one of these. What you don’t see on street corners are trash cans. Or trash.

   How is it possible for the streets to stay so tidy in a city that large with no trash cans? Simple and elegant: Every person who lives there knows that they must carry their trash with them until they get to work or home. And they do. Everyone takes responsibility for themselves and ensures that they are contributing to the cleanliness of the city.

   In sales, it can be tempting to skip our responsibilities by not entering information during the sales process, leaving out information, or simply not taking the steps necessary to understand each stakeholder’s needs and perspectives. It’s easy to blame poor performance on factors outside of our control, like marketing, a bad economy, or lack of support.

   And while these things can be a problem as well, the best salespeople are those who take responsibility for their own performance, seek solutions when they feel undersupported, and do the work that is their job. Likewise, effective sales organizations take responsibility for providing the support, training, tools, and resources that salespeople need in order to be effective.

3. Getting Louder Won’t Get The Results You Want

   Another thing that shocked me about Tokyo is that the streets are quiet. Even during rush hour, at busy intersections, everything feels peaceful. Very few honk their horn, yell out their window, or otherwise add chaos to the scene. Instead, drivers wait patiently, follow the rules, and treat each other with respect, even from inside their cars.

   Like the lines in the subway stations, this makes the streets more efficient, as well as more pleasant. This put me in mind of sales teams who get desperate and try to make progress by getting “louder” in a metaphorical sense. Send more emails to quiet prospects, push existing prospects harder, use guilt or shame tactics to try to win business.

   Some of these tactics might work in transactional environments, but they won’t help you in complex B2B sales. What helps in complex B2B sales is providing clarity to the prospect, lowering perceived risk, and catalyzing better decisions. If other teams are creating chaos by “shouting louder,” you can create an oasis of peace where your prospects know their needs are being listened to and solutions are being built to serve their needs.

4. Create a Cohesive Experience

   I was also struck by the fact that every time you leave a restaurant in Tokyo, the entire staff, including the chefs, thank you. In Sweden, the kitchen staff rarely interact with customers at all, let alone greet you and thank you when you leave.

   For many buyers, the process of making a large purchasing decision can be complicated, confusing, and altogether unpleasant. Often, buyer stakeholders are passed around among marketing, sales team members, customer service, and product experts like a casserole at a potluck, without a lot of consistency, and sometimes with quite a lot of conflict.

   To be highly effective in a complex sales environment, everyone on the team needs to be on the same page, rowing in the same direction, and showing prospects and customers the same level of respect throughout the process, including after the prospect becomes a customer.

My son’s and my experience in Tokyo was extremely satisfying. Tokyo is beautiful and full of interesting and fascinating things to do and see. And the fact that everything was so clean, orderly, and polite made the stay very pleasant. We will almost certainly be back.

Which is exactly how you want your customers to feel about your sales team. How does your sales team make prospects and customers want to come back for more?