The Sales Japan Series

I listen to a lot of sales gurus because I am a permanent student.  I have noticed there is a consistent theme which comes up.  Because being a guru is quite competitive, they have to draw a line between themselves and the rest.  The way they do this is to make the point that "sales has changed".  They then go through introducing their version of the new sales methods for the new era.  I was refle...

New clients are so demanding.  They want to hear what we have to offer and quickly find out how trustworthy we are.  They don't want to be wasting their valuable time either.  This can trigger some bad choices though for salespeople.  Remember that the client playbook is not our playbook. We shouldn't fall into the trap of tracking along their preferred path.  We have our job and they have their j...

We are all hungry for Covid to end so that we can get back to normal.  It looks like it will be all good by September.  Then it looks like October, then November and this goes on and on as some fresh piece of diabolical news filters out.  Will a bell ring or an alarm go off announcing "Covid is done"?  Unfortunately that isn't going to happen.  It will ebb and wane and then probably resurface inte...

At the age of sixteen, I was wandering around the streets of a lower working class area in the suburbs of Brisbane, working my first job, trying to sell expensive Encyclopedia Britannica to the punters who lived there.  Despite my callow youth, I had a tremendous gift as a salesman.  I could tell by looking at the house from the outside whether they were interested or not in buying Encyclopedia Br...

It is seriously sad to be dumb.  Nothing annoys me more than when I finally realise something that was so obvious and yet I didn't see what was there, right in front of my nose.  We talk a lot about value creation in relation to pricing, trying to persuade clients that what we are selling is a sensible tradeoff between the value they seek and the revenue that we seek.  We want the value we offer t...

When we think of team selling, we imagine a room with the buyers on one side of the table and we are lined up on the other.  There is another type of team selling and that is taking place before we get anywhere near the client.  It might be working together as a Sales Mastermind panel to brainstorm potential clients to target or strategising campaigns or plotting the approach to adopt with a buyer...

I was studying an online learning programme from Professor Scott Galloway, where he talked about Appealing To Human Instincts.  His take was from the strategy angle, but I realised that this same framework would be useful for sales too.  In sales we do our best to engage the client.  We try to develop sophisticated questions to help us unearth the stated and unstated needs of the buyer.  Professor...

Group crowdsourcing has been around since cave dweller days.  Gathering a crowd of prospects and getting them to buy your stuff is a standard method of making more sales or starting conversations which hopefully will lead to sales.  Trade shows provide booths but also speaking events, if you pay more dough to attend.  These days the event will most likely be online rather than in person, but the b...

Japanese salespeople should love to hear "that sounds pricey" from buyers.  Why?  Because they know that this statement is the most common objection to arise in response to their sales presentation and they are completely ready for it.  It is one of the simplest buyer pushback answers to deal with too.  Well, simple that is, if you are trained in sales and know what you are doing.  Untrained sales...

Japan's image as a sophisticated country with a solid, unique traditional culture is well placed.  For example, every year around 130,000 Shinkansen bullet trains run between Tokyo and Osaka, bolting through the countryside at speeds of up to 285 kilometers an hour and boast an average arrival delay of 24 seconds.  Think about that average, sustained over a whole year!  Such amazing efficiency her...

Selling to a buyer in-person and selling to the same Japanese buyer online are worlds apart. Yet how many salespeople are succeeding in making the transition? Are your clients seeking virtual sales training? Not enough. COVID has revealed a lot of salespeople weaknesses. which were hidden in the face-to-face sales call world. Wishing things get better is a plan, but not a very good plan because th...

You manage to get the appointment, which at the moment is seriously job well done.  Trying to get hold of clients, when everyone is working from home is currently a character building exercise.  You ask permission to ask questions.  Well done!  You are now in the top 1% pf salespeople in Japan.  You do ask your questions and quickly realise you have just what they need.  Bingo! We are going to do...

Salespeople have sales tools which often are not thoroughly thought through enough.  These can be flyers, catalogues, slide decks, etc.  They can also be proposals, quotations and invoices.  Usually the salespeople are given the tools as they are and either don't ask for improvements or don't believe the marketing department has much interest in their ideas about the dark art of marketing.  Conseq...

I hear some people say translating terms like "nemawashi" into English is difficult.  Really?  I always thought it was one of the easier ones.  Let's just call it "groundwork".  In fact, that is a very accurate description ,from a number of different angles.  Japanese gardeners are superstars.  There is limited flat space in this country, so over centuries gardeners have worked out you need to mov...

Minato-ku or the "Port Area" is a central part of Tokyo, which used to be harbourside for goods being delivered to the capital in ancient times.  My three barbers' stories are tales of customer service opportunities gone astray, in a country where customer service is the envy of the rest of the world.  Each story brings forth a reflection on our own customer service and how we treat our buyers.  M...

There is no doubt that the pandemic has made it very fraught to find new clients in Japan.  The new variants of the virus are much more contagious and have already overwhelmed the hospital infrastructure in Osaka, in just weeks of the numbers taking off.  Vaccines are slow to roll out and so extension after extension of lockdowns and basic fear on both sides, makes popping around for chat with the...

Japan is a very hierarchical society.  I am getting older, so I appreciate the respect for age and stage we can enjoy here.  Back in my native Australia, older people are thought of having little of value to say or contribute.  It is a youth culture Downunder and only the young have worth.  "You old so and so, you don't know anything" is reflective of the mood and thinking.  As a training company...

When we read commentary about how we should be recruiting A Players to boost our firm's performance, this is a mirage for most of us running smaller sized companies.  If you are the size of a Google or a Facebook, with massively deep pockets, then having A Players everywhere is no issue.  The reality is A Players cost a bomb and so most of us can't afford that type of talent luxury.  Instead we ha...

If we try to hide the bad news for the buyer will that work?  How long with it work for?  Bernie Madoff died in prison, his wife left in a perilous state, one son dead from suicide and the other from cancer.  I call that family devastation.  He got away with his lies and cheating for quite a while.  He offered modest, but steady returns.  He told people he had no capacity to take their money, then...

The buyer is King.  This is a very common concept in modern Western economies.  We construct our service approach around this idea and try to keep elevating our engagement with royalty. After living in Japan for 36 years and selling to a broad range of industries, I have found in Japan, the buyer is not King. In Nippon the buyer is God. This difference unleashes a whole raft of difficulties and pr...

Confidence sells.  We all know this instinctively.  If we meet a salesperson who seems doubtful about their solution or unconvinced it is the right thing for us, then we won't buy from them.  The flip side is the con man.  They are brimming with brio, oozing charm and pouring on the surety.  They are crooks and we can fall for their shtick, because we buy their confidence.  They are usually highly...

Buying from people we like and trust makes a lot of sense.  Sometimes we have no choice and will hold our nose and buy from people we don't like.  Buying anything from people we don't trust is truly desperate.  So when we flip the switch and we become the seller to the buyer, how can we pass the smell and desperation tests?  How do you establish trust and likeability when you are on a virtual call...

Is selling telling or is it asking questions?  Actually, it is both.  The point though is to know what stories to tell, when to tell them and how to tell them.  We uncover the opportunity through asking the buyer questions about what they need.  Once we know what they need, we mentally scan our solution data base to find a match.  This is when the stories become important, as we explain why our so...

Japanese salespeople really care about their clients.  This is good, except when it isn't and that is usually when they are prioritizing the client over the firm which employs them.  Japan is a relationship driven, risk averse business culture, where longevity is appreciated.  This often translates into the salespeople being captured by a type of "Stockholm Buyer Syndrome" where they identify with...

Luck is the nexus of hard work and persistence.  Salespeople need some luck, even if they have to create it themselves.  That old blues refrain "If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all" can't apply. We have to make our own luck and here are seven luck creation principles we can start using immediately to help us get there.  No fancy varsity degrees or puffed up IQ scores needed.  Common...