The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

How is it possible that a salesman who can barely see over the counter become the top salesman in his company?  We all think we have our problems but compared to Toshiya Kakiuchi we have nothing to complain about.  With his limitations, he succeeded in sales, so if he can do it then what is our excuse? Welcome back to this weekly edition every Tuesday of "THE Cutting Edge Japan Business Show" I am...

Most presenters fail to consider the importance of where to stand when presenting.  In today's show we will go into some detail on how to adjust for different venues, how to engage with your audience and things to avoid.  Welcome back to this weekly edition every Tuesday of "THE Cutting Edge Japan Business Show" I am your host Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and best sell...

The pace is unrelenting.  The world is producing information at a prodigious rate and somehow we are supposed to keep up with it all.  In todays show we will explore some ideas on how we can better deal with this daily overpowering tidal wave of stuff.   Welcome back to this weekly edition every Tuesday of "THE Cutting Edge Japan Business Show" I am your host Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carn...

If we don't have a nice flow of new clients we cannot expand the business or replace clients who have dropped out.  The marketing team have their role to generate leads and the sales team have their responsibilities too.  Sadly, the two things they can do directly such as cold calling and networking they avoid. They don't like either because they have no idea of the best practices involved to make...

New clients are the lifeblood of businesses.  Keeping clients is difficult, things change and they disappear. They have to be replaced.  How do we replace them?  In today's show we look at two excellent techniques for doing just that.  Welcome back to this weekly edition every Tuesday of "THE Cutting Edge Japan Business Show" I am your host Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan...

Leaders become leaders because they were the best at their job, their tasks, their function. They are promoted and then left to their own devices to become a leader.  The lucky few actually get some training on what it means to be a leader. Very, very few however are ever taught how to coach others.  The leader's job is to manage processes and build people.  Everyone gets the manage processes part...

What are we on about with this sales lark?  Are we in sales to make our fortune or to make the client their fortune?  The difference in perspective is massive. For a long and successful career in sales we need to be thinking in terms of how we can best partner with the client to make them successful.  This mentality is not all that common in the profession and that is why so few salespeople are su...

Nervousness when presenting can make us do strange things.  Two of those are reading our speeches or trying to memorise them. Both are a potential disaster and best avoided.  We think we have to read it or memorise it, because we are not sure we will know what to say. We are killing our audience when we read it and we are jousting with a meltdown if we fail in our memorization. Today we will take...

We all know we are the product of our habits, yet we do nothing about elevating our behaviours.  We also know that certain things work better with people than others and we should focus on the things that work best and make those our habit.  But we don't do that either.  Instead we keep repeating the same errors every time.  What did Einstein say?  Repeating the same actions but expecting a differ...

Sales has been coopted by Hollywood, creating a stylized version of reality.  Sharp suits and conman ways are portrayed as the profession.  The truth is more prosaic, fundamental and involves simple basics.  Understanding buyer need and supplying it, isn't that hard, but salespeople say and do dumb things instead.  Today we will look at some simple things every salesperson should be doing and some...

The new Japanese financial year has already started now and I hope that last year's results went well for you.  The reason I do this show is to help as many people as possible improve in the areas of leadership, sales and persuasion power.  I hope it is helping and if it is, then please leave me some comments. Today we are talking about how to be the authentic you when you give presentations.  Tha...

Have you enjoyed a hanami or cherry blossom flower viewing party this year.  One of the great Japanese traditions I have to say. Today we are talking about when the system fails you, what do you do?  Creativity isn't part of the Japanese education system and how to think is being replaced with how to do.  We need innovation though and we need creative people.  Today we are going to look at what we...

happy sight . Our office location in Akasaka is a good one because the streets around here are full of trees in full bloom and it is really a magic time to be in Japan. If you haven't experienced it yet, come and do so!  Today we are talking about if we want to make a sale, we had better be talking value rather than getting dragged down into the mud and blood of pricing discussions. Great Greg, yo...

If you are in Tokyo, are you enjoying the early flowering cherry blossoms yet?  A fantastic pink canvas is heading our way. Today we are talking about in this Age of Distraction you have two seconds to establish a positive first impression as a speaker.  Don't leave this to random chance.  Plan to establish authority and credibility with your audience in that vital initial window.  Today we look a...

How is everyone's kafunsho or allergies to the cedar and cypress pine  tree pollens going?  Don't worry, I am suffering with you if you belong to roughly half the population here in Tokyo who are affected.  Today we are talking about how people in Japan are not connecting very well these days.  They are not connecting to find life partners and have children and not doing a great job in business ei...

Well this is the time everyone is driving their results over the line, with the approaching financial year end looming on the horizon.  I hope it is all on track!  Today we are talking about do we really have a clear idea about the first impressions we are providing for our customers.  Are the support teams delivering services after the sale, really reinforcing the brand and the customer's commitm...

We hear a lot about the current age of disruption but it is also the age of distraction.  If you are a speaker, then today's miniscule attention span problem on the part of your audience is definitely a big problem.  How can we speak in a way that keeps the audience with us and off their phones and escaping to the charms of the internet?  We need to look at our speech forensically. Breaking it dow...

Boss positions over others are often the last refuge of insecure people.  They are like little Napoleons, bossing everyone around, flaunting their status power.  They don't have great personal ability but they do have authority and they like to use it. They have worked out that fear is a great tool to use on others to keep themselves in control of the work situation.  This is a flawed model and th...

Negotiating is one of the dark arts isn't it.  The problem for most of us is that we usually spend very little of our time actually doing any serious negotiations in business.  The majority of the time, people agree to what we are proposing or they ask us for relatively minor modifications to our offer and we accommodate them.  Hard core negotiations are few and far between in everyday business fo...

Urban myths usually spring from a scintilla of truth and then morph into something unrecognizable from the original.  I am sure Professor Mehrabian is mystified how his original research has been corrupted, to say something he never claimed.  We hear these things trotted out by people who actually don't know what they are talking about.  In the presentation's world there are a large number of thes...

We all know first impressions are so important and so hard to unwind.  Well given we know that, why are we so hit and miss with the process of forming first impressions.  In customer service, the first thing seen should be a big, warm, sincere smile.  But is this happening?  It could be a big smile in the voice over the phone or in person, face to face. Leaders are often terrible hypocrites. They...

Quotas, budgets, targets, feared employment oblivion all drive salespeople toward making sales.  Some go for the whales, but often don't even get a minnow. Others grab everything they can get.  The focus tends to be on getting that sale, bringing some money in the door, getting some commission, keeping your job.  The issue with this though is it corrupts our salesperson horizon.  It makes it too p...

Okay, I have a presentation to give, so which slides can I use?  Bad idea.  This is the last thing you should be doing, in terms of preparing for your talk.  You have the topic, but who will be in the audience and what level of familiarity will they have with your topic?  Start with the end!  Go straight to the design of your key punch line, your biggest takeaway, the one thing you want to audienc...

Every culture has their work rhythm.  Some are a start early, go home early preference, the mainstream is probably more a nine to five approach and Japan has its late evening finish.  There are big variations according to the climate. Slugging it out through the heat of summer in my native Brisbane is debilitating because the heat drains you of your energy.  Winter in Tokyo achieves the same feat,...

Getting buyers to hand over their hard won cash is a daunting task in many ways.  We salespeople love a challenge though, so we often conspire to make it harder than it has to be, by killing the opportunity in front of us.  Semantics is a critical study area for salespeople, because how we say things makes such a huge difference.  There are ways of framing questions and making statements that work...