We love acronyms! Our workplaces are thriving with them such that we can hold extended conversations composed entirely of seemingly impenetrable codes. They are handy though and this one R.E.AL. is short and serviceable to describe best practice leadership attributes. It always good to have evidence around pontification.

“Reliable” is an obvious choice and though much upheld in principle, tends to break down in practice. Reliable is an attribute that leads to trust only when the staff observe that what is said is actually done, that promises are kept and that their own personal development is being given a high priority. “What is in it for me” is a common human frailty. Bosses who keep this in mind when making sure the organisation and individual goals of their staff are aligned, get more loyalty and more accomplished.

“Empathetic” is closely linked to listening skills. Taking the viewpoint of the other person is difficult if we don’t know what that viewpoint is. Busy bosses don’t have much time to get below the surface calm of the workplace. Some don’t care – just get me the numbers – or else! Using our position power works up to a point but we miss out on a lot of creative potential as the opportunity cost. Successful bosses have good awareness and confidence to communicate they really do care about their people.

“Aspirational” reflects ideas about grasping the bigger picture. Hovering above the melee of the everyday to see the vision to be realised on the far horizon. It means communicating beyond this quarter’s goals and placing each individual’s role in terms of their contribution to the bigger goal. The leader has to inject the ideas and concepts involved into terms that resonate with each person individually.

“Learning” gets nods of approval but many executives have had one year of experience thirty times rather than thirty years of experience. Their views are still locked away in a mental vault, for which they have lost the key. Too busy to learn. Busy, busy working in their business, rather than on their business. If we aren’t prepared to permanently kill our favoured ideas and concepts, we must be prepared to risk falling behind, trampled by our competitors.

REAL, is easy to remember and that at least is a start to actually realising its power. We know all of these things – we just forget or get too busy to do them. Let’s change that.

Sales people are always under pressure to meet their targets. In high pressure situations, this creates certain behaviours that are not in the client’s best interests. We know we should listen carefully to what the client wants, before we attempt to suggest any solution for the buyer’s needs. We know that by asking well designed questions, we can possibly come up with an insight that triggers a “we hadn’t thought of that” reaction at best and at worst, at least know if we have a solution for them or not. Under pressure though, salespeople can go temporarily deaf.

Even assuming they are smart enough to ask questions in the first place, they may fall over when it comes to listening to the buyer’s answers. They are not actually plumbing the depths of what the client is trying to achieve. In fact, they are ignoring the hints and nuances in the sales conversation. What are they doing? They are fixated on their needs, their target achievement, their big bonus, their job security.

The client may have outlined what they had in mind, but that won’t scratch because the salesperson needs a bigger sale to make target. They need to expand what the client wants regardless of whether the client needs that solution or not. Upselling and cross selling are legitimate aspects of sales, but the purpose has to be very clear. It is not about making the salesperson more money

The client may not have the full view of what is possible, because they will never know the seller’s lineup of solutions as well as the salesperson. They will also not have had deep conversations with their competitors. They won’t have been allowed behind the velvet curtain, to see what their competitors are doing and how they are doing it. They will not have had a broad exposure to what other firms and industries are doing in terms of best practice.

This is the value of the salesperson, because they are constantly doing all of these things. They are collectors of stories, problems, breakthroughs, successes and can connect many dots together. In this sense, they can see possibilities the client may not have know exist or may not have thought of. This is where the cross-sell and the up-sell add value, because the salesperson can expand the client’s world and help them to become more successful. That is a long way from ramping up the number value of the sale, to make target.

Nevertheless, this is what happens when the focus is on the wrong objective. If salespeople are trying to expand the complexity of the sale, to manufacture a larger sale, at some point the client is going to drop out. Unless they see overwhelming value in increasing the scope, they are well aware that this enlarged project is over budget.

Now budget is just a fiction and we all know that. It is an imaginary estimate of where expenses could be allocated and it occupies a cell in a spreadsheet line. Many times we have seen budgets miraculously appear from nowhere, when the perceived value is great. The “Rob Peter To Pay Paul” school of accounting.

The point about value comes back to listening skills. If the salesperson is focused on the client’s benefit, then they can rummage through their memory banks for best practices that could be applied to help the client achieve their aim. In the process, this may mean increasing the investment to get a bigger return.

If the salesperson is just focused on getting their monthly number, they are not really paying attention to the client’s needs at all. They just start padding the details of the project, so that the numbers are bumped up. Once the client feels they are being ramped up for the salesperson’s benefit, then the trust is gone and the deal won’t happen anyway.

Salespeople need to be really listening to the needs of the client and should forget about what they want. As Zig Ziglar said, “if you can help enough other people get what they want, then you will get what you want”. Zig was a great listener!

Basically your job is toast. There is a machine or there will soon be a machine that can do it faster, better and cheaper than you. Our skill set didn’t change much from the start of agriculture 12,000 years ago until the industrial revolution in the mid-18th century. This last 150 years has been busy. We have created a weapon that can destroy our race. Who thought we would be that stupid? Fifty years ago we didn’t believe machine translation of our complex language skills would get very far.

Driving cars and trucks requires us, because it is such a delicate, detailed and difficult set of tasks. What a ridiculous idea to imagine replacing those cantankerous, aging Japanese taxi drivers and punch perm truckers here in Tokyo with a self-driving, self-navigating vehicles. Internet of Things Komatsu tractors ploughing rice fields by themselves, nah, never happen. Apocalypse Now style “death from the air” requires top gun pilots and gum chewing gunners, doesn’t it. Killing each other can’t be delegated to drones. Robot vacuum cleaners, programmable pets, hotty droid receptionists, nimble stair climbing machines, adult men (many with passports) waving light sticks at holograph vocalists (Hatsune Miku) – not possible right?

Don’t worry, moral and ethical judgments, “the buck stops here” business decisions, hiring and firing employment protocols, creative brainstorming – there is a long list of actions which will always require people to be involved.

We need the human interaction, to hear stories, to share experiences, to be motivated, to aspire together against the rival firm, to set and follow our organisation’s Vision and Mission. We want empathy, collaboration, a sense of ownership, relationships.

Geoff Colvin in his book “Humans Are Underrated” references a recent Oxford Economics study asking employers which staff skills they will need the most over the next five to ten years. The top priorities were all right brain - relationship building, teaming, co-creativity, brainstorming, cultural sensitivity and the ability to manage diverse employees.

Henry Ford complained that every time he wanted a pair of human hands on his assembly line, he got “a brain attached”. Today, we want that brain that can feel as well as think. We have to be good at being human and good in our interactions with other humans. Colvin noted, “being a great performer is becoming less about what you know and more about what you’re like.

Here is the challenge for typical male CEO driver types, who are assertive and task, not people, oriented: how to lead organisations where technical skill is being outsourced to bots and the value of human interaction has become more critical to the success of the organisation?. Do you ignore it or do you decide to change? How do you change?

My eyes are closing. I am struggling to stay awake. There is something about this presentation that is not working. I thought, it must be me. I must be tired. Later however I realized the problem. I was being lulled into sleep by the monotone delivery of the presenter.

The brand by the way is gorgeous. This is seriously high profile, a name that everyone knows and respects. The name alone triggers images that are all first class. The slides and videos he presented were all quality. These people have money and they know about marketing very high end products.

Our speaker had all of this powerful support going for him, yet the actual presentation was sleep inducing. Why was that? The brand is a passion brand, but there was no passion. The brand is a great story, but the storytelling was minimal. The delivery was wooden. Measured, but wooden.

Fortunately, despite his lifeless delivery, the brand is so powerful it can survive his attempt to murder it. But what a wasted opportunity. It is not as if this brand doesn’t have competitors. He is their guy in Japan, so that is his job, every time, everywhere.

It was a good audience too. These are people who appreciate a good brand, who are influencers, who can spread the message. No one will bother though because they were not receiving any energy from this talk.

Brands are being recreated every single day. When the product is consumed that is a brand defining moment. If the brand promise is not delivered when the product or service is consumed, then the brand is that much lessened. If this continues, then the brand will disappear, vanquished by its competitors.

If our man in Japan had given a high energy presentation, extolling the virtues of the brand, that would have been consistent with the positioning of the brand. If you are representing a funeral home however, that would not be appropriate. So obviously we need to be congruent. This brand case though would be a great platform for enthusiastic storytelling and verbal passion for the brand. Where were the gripping stories of high drama and intrigue, as they duked it out with their competitors across the globe and over the decades? Where were the human dimension stories of the customers who were famous and fans.

There was little or nor energy being transmitted to the audience. When we speak we have to radiate that energy to the listeners. We need to invigorate them. We do this through our voice and our body language. It is an inside out process, where the internal belief is so powerful it explodes out to the audience. They see we are convinced, we are believers and they become believers too.

Let’s raise our energy levels up when promoting our company in a public presentation. Make sure our voice is using all the range of highs and lows to get full tonal variety. No monotone delivery please. We need to punch out hard certain key words and phrases, like the crescendos in classical music. We need our body language to be backing this up, our gestures in sync with what we are saying. We need to lift the energy of the audience through our personal power.

Pricing is usually set by the boss and salespeople are just there to get out and sell at that designation. The trouble though is salespeople are not convinced by any price setting methodology. They only believe in the reality of the market. The way they know the reality is the degree of pushback they get from clients, when they are trying to sell.

When you have no belief in the value backing up that price point, your ability to sell at that rate is simply squashed. You default to discounting to get a small piece of something, rather than a very large piece of nothing.

The crunch point is the sales price negotiation with the buyer. If you have gotten into the death spiral of last minute discounting, in order to move the product or service, you have now trained the buyer to extract the biggest possible discount every time.

Instead, give them an ultimatum on price and a very, very short fixed time to take it or leave it. In the meantime, call another potential buyer. If you have not built up pipeline for your sales, then you are always going to be vulnerable to price collapse.

If you discount once and then imagine that by telling the Japanese buyer this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, a spectacularly rare alignment of the planets, which will never happen again in their lifetime, a never to be repeated offer, you are kidding yourself.

Don’t miss this. In Japan, as soon as you drop the price, you are now locked into that price point with that client forever. It is not impossible to go higher but it is very, very hard to pull that one off. You have to be ready to drop the buyer entirely, to restore your price point validation.

The equation here isn’t just with the buyer, it is with the salespeople as well. By dropping the price we tell them that this is all this is worth and they believe it. They cannot push the price back up, because they don’t see it at that level either. The company leadership has to intervene and say “burn that buyer if they won’t accept this price”. Be prepared to lose their business. If we do that, then the salespeople will get religion about the pricing validity.

When we are haggling over the price with the buyer and they say that, “this price is too high”, “that is out of our budget”, “we can’t afford it at that level, ”can’t you drop the price”, “we never pay that much”, etc., we are in a bind. We want the sale, so we immediately go into discount mode. This is a big negotiating mistake.

Don’t fold on the price pushback. What we should be doing is defending our price. We don’t do that by arguing with the buyer. We don’t do that by force of will. We do it by trying to better understand the client’s situation. Often salespeople stop asking questions at this critical juncture and instead go into high energy “tell mode”. They start telling all the good reasons why the buyer should pay the requested price. This won’t work.

Firstly, don’t start your response by arguing with the client. Instead agree with them. We can say, “You are right and I understand it is a considerable investment”. If we disagree with them, they stop listening to us and start thinking about all the reasons their “too high” statement was correct.

While we have their attention, we have to transition and question the buyer as to why they made that comment. “You just mentioned the price was too high, may I ask you why you feel that way?”. We avoid arguing and instead of us having to justify the price, we now need to switch it. After you make that comment do not speak.

In this process of further explanation by the buyer, we pick up very valuable insights into the client’s situation. Armed with more data and insight, we may be able to come up with a flexible solution that is a win-win for both of us.

We may in fact discount the price. We might give them longer payment terms or structure the payments across two quarterly budget periods. We may offer the discount on the basis of a volume purchase.

All of this sounds simple enough, but when salespeople hear “the price is too high” they go blank and forget the basics. The job of the salesperson is to serve the client and that means to clearly understand the client’s situation. The only way to do that is to ask questions. It is not to be annoying, pigheaded, stubborn or inflexible. Quite the opposite. We are here to solve the client’s problem and we have to do that in an arrangement, that is a win-win for both of us.

You have to tell people how it is or you will lose power and authority. If you swallow what you want to say, you will diminish yourself. If you avoid hard conversations, you will have less influence. You need to tell them exactly how you are feeling. This was the tenor of the advice coming from an American communication “guru”. While listening to this, I thought this is absolutely going to fail in Japan, if not everywhere.

Dale Carnegie’s human relations principles however work well not only in Japan, they work well everywhere. So rather than trying to ardently assert our rights, telling others how we feel and gaining power through strength of will, let’s try some proven methodologies that actually work.

Don’t criticize, condemn or complain

The guru gave the example of someone keeping you waiting, suggesting you “respectfully” tell them how you feel about that. Dale Carnegie realised there was no point. Even if you are polite, people become defensive and are irritated to be reminded that they are less than perfect. They were late, you can’t get the time back, so you just have to accept others are not as reliable as you are and move on.

Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view

When we are fixated on what we want, we become inwardly focused. The goal of successful human relations is to be liked and trusted. Selfishness won’t get you there. They are massively late, so what? Are they doing this to annoy us, to punish us, to irritate us? No, there are bound to be any number of things happening in their world which we don’t know about, so let’s not be too hasty to apply “our rights” to the situation.

Begin with praise and honest appreciation

Rather than launching into the witch hunt of the “crimes’ of the other person, zeroing in on the hard talk topics, build the relationship with praise. Not fake, apple polishing, sycophantic praise. Rather, genuine reflections on their good points, backed up with concrete evidence or examples.

Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves

Few people listen today. Tied up in themselves, in having power or status, they are all about them. They interrupt others when they are talking, they try to display their cleverness by finishing other people’s sentences, they one-up others to be dominant. People however want to be acknowledged, to be heard and our job is to get them talking about themselves.

Forget about being powerful through winning at hard talk. People will willingly cooperate with you, if you apply these principles. The ideas are easy to understand, but not so easy to apply.

We can speak to a group and then there is another level, where we try to captivate our audience. What makes the difference. The content could even be the same but in the hands of one person it is dry and delivered in a boring manner. Someone else can take the same basic materials and really bring it to life.

The quality of the argument we are going to present is important. We definitely need to design two powerful closes, one for the end of the speech and an extra one for after the Q&A. Importantly, we start from this point when designing the talk. We work out what is the most compelling message we want to leave with our audience and we start working backwards structuring the speech from here. Once we know what we what to say, we need to be gathering evidence to back up that assertion.

In a thirty minute speech, there won’t be so much time, so we might get through three or four of these key points and that is it. Now we make sure that the evidence is super strong, offering really compelling proof, to build credibility for our argument.

Next we work on a blockbuster opening. This has to compete with all the things running through the minds of our audience. We have to smash through all that obstruction and clear a path so that they will hear our message. The first words out of our mouth had better be compelling or we will lose the battle for today’s minute attention spans.

We want our visuals on screen to be clear and comprehendible within two seconds. Let’s keep the colours to an absolute maximum of three. Photos are great with maybe just one word of text added. If we use graphs, we should have only one per screen wherever possible.

Every five minutes we need to be switching the energy levels right up, to keep our audience going with us. Naturally, we have tonal variety right throughout the talk, but we need to be hitting some key messages very hard, around that five minute interval. This needs to be combined with some powerful visuals on screen to drive home the point.

We are meticulously sprinkling stories throughout the speech to highlight the evidence we want to provide for our key points. Data by itself is fundamentally dull, but stories fleshing out the data are so much more scintillating. We sketch out physical locations, describe colours, talk about the season, mix in people they may know, explain the why of what is in the story.

Our final close after the Q&A has to go out with a bang and not a whimper. We want a strong call to action.

We need great structure, evidence, visuals, stories, pacing, energy, passion and belief in our presentation. The delivery is going to rock because we make it rock through rehearsal after rehearsal, until we have refined the whole thing into a symphonic triumph. That is how we need to be thinking to captivate our audience when we start constructing the talk. Begin with audience capture in mind.

Jan Carlzon many years ago published a tremendous guide to customer service. He had the job of turning around SAS airlines and captured that experience in his book “Moments Of Truth”. I was reminded of Carlson’s insights when I was recently checking into my hotel in Singapore. While going through the check-in process at the hotel, a waiter from the adjoining restaurant approached me bearing an ice-cold glass of freshly squeezed juice. Singapore is very humid and trust me, that ice cold beverage went down very well. I thought this is really well thought through customer service by this Hotel.

One of Carlzon’s observations about customer service however was the importance of consistency of delivery. For example, visualise the telephone receptionist answers your call in a pleasant helpful manner and you are uplifted by your exposure to the brand. The next staff member receiving the transferred call however, is grumpy and unfriendly. Now both your mood and positive impression plummet. You are suddenly irritated by this company, who have just damaged their brand by their lack of an ability to sustain good service across only two consecutive touch points with the customer.

So back to my story. As I get to my room, in good spirits after unexpectedly receiving my ice-cold juice, I find out the television isn’t working. After a forensic search for the cause, including a few harsh words with the television controller, I discover the power is not on. There is a card slot next to the door that initiates the power supply to the room. Yes, I worked it all out eventually, but the thought occurred to me that the pleasant young woman checking me into the hotel, failed to mention these two facts to me. Sustainability of good service has to be the goal if you want to protect or grow your brand.

When you are the leader of your company, you presume that everyone “gets it” about representing the brand and that the whole team delivers consistent levels of service. You expect that your whole team is supporting the marketing department’s efforts to create an excellent image of the organization. After all, you have been spending truckloads of money on that marketing effort, haven’t you?

But are all the staff supporting the effort to build the brand? Perhaps they have forgotten what you have said about consistent customer service in the past or they are a new hire or a part-timer who didn’t get properly briefed.

As leaders, we should all sit down and draw the spider’s web of how customers interact with us and who they interact with. We should expect that nobody gets it and determine that we have to tell them all again, again and again.

First impressions count, but so do all the follow-up impressions, if we want to build a sustainable, consistent positive image with our customers. Consistency of good experiences doesn’t happen automatically. We have to look again at all of our touch points with our customers and ensure that everyone in the team understands their place in maintaining the excellent brand we have built up.