The Sales Japan Series

Japan is a complex market.  Brash plugging of your wonder widget won't work here.  American style sales techniques are always a lot more aggressive than will be tolerated in Japan and so fail with prodigious regularity. So I added the key words "For The Japan Market" to the title of this piece, to make sure I was talking about a niche I understand.  Clubhouse is an app on your iPhone, which is a d...

What are the biggest problems for salespeople in the online sales world today?  Cold calling would be number one, networking to find new clients would be number two and getting hold of the decision maker would be number three.  Is paddling around in the bitter cold and humid summers travelling to see clients inefficient?  Yes, but please, please give me that over trying to sell online.  The sad ne...

Client hesitation or objections to buying from us are indicators we have failed in some keys areas in our preparation, questioning or solution explanation with the client.  We have not fully understood what the client needs; have not matched our solution with what they need; have not shown sufficient value from our solution and have not created any sense of urgency to take action now.  It is hard...

We do a great job on building trust with the client.  We get permission to ask questions and away we go on that magic journey of buyer needs discovery.  We have a clear idea that we can help, know what will happen and what the likely outcomes will be for the buyer.  We are doing a good job as a sales professional, then suddenly we drop the ball, we stumble at the finish line, we flub it.  We are p...

An ideal work week for salespeople would start everyday with sales role play with colleagues.  When we do serious exercise we warm up to get into prime condition for becoming better at our activities.  It is the same with sales, we need to warm up before we interact with clients.  We need to get our communication vehicle into top well maintained condition.  By practicising what we will be saying t...

Suddenly my phone rang and the number was clearly from overseas, because of the country code. It was not a number I recognised.  The crackly voice at the other end of the line was unknown to me and they shot out their name very quickly. I couldn't catch it.  The company name was unfamiliar too.  Silently, I wondered, "Who is this and why are they calling me?".  Now, our business is global, so ther...

We all understand the importance of a brand.  Brands are a short form description of long term reliability and perceived trust, both based on solid evidence.  Every business has a brand. You might be thinking that your company is too small and insignificant to have a brand.  Yet you deal with your own staff and for them, the business is a brand because of their experience with you as their employe...

Journeymen salespeople are starting another year of selling.  Maybe their financial year is a calendar year or maybe the year wraps up in March.  It doesn't matter, because there is a mental trick we play on ourselves that January 1st represents a new start, a new year.  Sales can be exhausting and 2020 will not go down as a bumper year for the vast majority of salespeople.  Yet, here we go again....

January 6, 2021  219: Is That Light At The End Of The Sales Funnel I Can See Millions of people are being vaccinated for Covid-19.  Japan, being Japan, isn't going to accept any old tests which were not performed on Japanese people.  That means that the vaccination programme in Japan is many months way from commencing and will take many more months after that to get to a 70% vaccination herd immun...

There is a process to sales.  Amazingly, most salespeople don't know what it is.  They are either ignorant, because they haven't been trained or arrogant, arguing they won't be entangled by any formulistic wrangling.  They say they follow their muse and let the sales conversation go where it may, because they are "spontaneous" creatures, residing in the "here and now".  Both answers are rubbish. ...

A stranger contacts you out of the blue or you meet them fleetingly at an event and they call you afterwards.  They are a salesperson and they want to sell you something.  Our typical reaction is one of caution.  Why is that?  We have all become addicted to technology which has sped everything in business up to warp speed, but somehow we are all perennially time poor.  We don't want to be distract...

"I like talking with people, so I want to be in sales" is a terrifying conversation to have with one of your staff.  They are not doing so well in their current role, so they imagine they will just glide across to sales to have an easier time of it.  They may try and do it internally as a switch of roles or they may quit their current job and go and try to get a sales job somewhere else.  Given th...

"I like talking with people, so I want to be in sales" is a terrifying conversation to have with one of your staff.  They are not doing so well in their current role, so they imagine they will just glide across to sales to have an easier time of it.  They may try and do it internally as a switch of roles or they may quit their current job and go and try to get a sales job somewhere else.  Given th...

Most of the time in Japan, I attend client meetings alone.  This is not how the Japanese do it.  The President going to a meeting alone, without some staff in attendance is rather rare.  Presidents have degrees of prestige and one of the indicators is how many flunkies they have in attendance.  My ego is big enough already to have to worry about people carrying my bag around for me.  The Japanese...

We often hear that people buy on emotion and justify with logic.  The strange thing is where is this emotion coming from?  Most Japanese salespeople speak in a very dry, grey, logical fashion expecting to convince the buyer to hand over their dough.  I am a salesperson but as the President of my company, also a buyer of goods and services.  I have been living in Japan this third time, continuously...

Ninja are masters of illusion, invisibility and subterfuge.  All of these traits have pretty much died out in modern times, except for a small bastion of steadfast office workers.  Some Japanese commentators have tried to imply that the salaryman is the modern day samurai.  Loyal to their modern Han , the firm, giving up their lives for the greater good, sacrificing family for their corporate capt...

Sales is always a tough job, but not being able to get any new clients during Covid-19 just takes the degree of difficulty right to the top of the scale.  Every company I speak with says the same thing – they cannot get any new clients at the moment, so they are stuck.  Even when the target decision-maker is in the office, it is diabolically difficult to get through the steel wall erected to keep...

Generally speaking, we mainly have failures of follow up in B2B sales.  The conduct of the sale's meeting is normally done professionally.  Perhaps the salesperson could have asked better questions or presented the application of the benefits of the solution better. Maybe they could have dealt more professionally with objections or closed the deal more effectively.  In B2C though, the troubles sta...

Closing the deal is almost a non-existent art in Japan.  Salespeople here are particularly terrified of rejection.  The best way they have found to avoid that unfortunate result is to not ask for the business at all.  At the end of the sales presentation, after going through the details, dealing with any hesitations or concerns and qualifying the issues, the conversation just fades out.  The clien...

Most buyers are hurting at the moment, as entire industries are under assault and many of the remainder are in a perilous state. The common American style of aggressive salesperson reaction to pushback from buyers just doesn't work in Japan in normal times, let alone now.  We need to recognise this when we are sitting in front of the buyer, when we are both online and we need to change our mindset...

We all know that buyers remember stories more easily than facts and data points.  In fact, the ratio is twenty two times more likely than being able to remember simple detail.  Data is like swimming in six foot surf.  Each data point is overwhelmed and replaced by the next towering wave of data points.  It just keeps coming, so that we are being bashed by the constant data waves hitting us.  Stori...

We receive permission first, then we proceed to ask questions of the buyer.  We want to gain a sense of whether what we have said makes sense for them to use us or not. If there is not a match, then we should hightail it out of there and go find a buyer who is a match.  Having understood that we have a solution for their problem, we now need to present that solution.  In the face to face world, th...

In a virtual call, what is the maximum number of people who should be joining on the buyer side, to make the meeting effective?  There is a correlation between the number in the group and the number who will contribute during the meeting.  The more people on the call, the greater tendency for people to become less engaged.  Research by the Rain Group says that with up to four people on the call, t...

One of the sad things about salespeople is they mostly have no idea what they are doing.  So we transfer that poor understanding of the basics to the online world and then wonder why they are not succeeding.  Kata is a Japanese word to describe a set way of doing things.  In Karate we learn kata and they must be done in the exact same way, every time.  These are best practice modes and the idea is...

In Part One, we looked at the difficulties the modern communication platforms throw up because of the limitations of the technology, in particular, the poor audio quality.  Now we move forward to how we ask the questions and what we should ask.  Our client has various needs and we have to uncover them and the way to do that is ask questions.  This would seem the most obvious thing in the world. Ye...