The Sales Japan Series

Selling To Buying Teams   In Japan it is rare to be selling to one person.  Even if we only meet one person, there will be others who have to be consulted and have an influence over the buying decision.  It is often the case that we meet teams of buyers in the meeting.  We may have our champion helping us to become a provider for the client company, but there may also be blockers who attend the me...

No Sale's Questions Please, We Are Japanese   I was visiting the office of one of my multinational corporate clients and we were talking about the issues he was facing with his Japanese sales team.  His product is given the "yes" or "no" purchase decision by the business owner.  In this industry the business owners have very little time available so getting an opportunity to speak with them is gol...

Totally Ineffective Sales   The phone rings and a magazine wants to interview me for a series where they feature companies located in suburb of Minato-ku, in central Tokyo. I had never heard of this magazine, but am always grateful for any media exposure, so I say "Yes" to the interview. The date and time are fixed. One twist to the interview was that it would involve an interview by a Japanese ac...

Do Your Homework When Selling   I take the phone call and I noted they were asking for me in particular, rather than to speak to the boss. That tells me they know who I am, but I don't recognise the company name when my assistant is transferring the call. I get a blast of words strung together down the phone line which I cannot quite catch. I ask them to tell me the name of their company once more...

Sell The Sizzle Not the Steak   I recently saw a documentary sponsored by Salesforce called The Story of Sales. There were 8 chapters in this documentary: What is sales; the evolution of sales; educating salespeople; what makes a great salesperson; making a connection; technology's impact on sales; the future of sales and sales is great. It was very comprehensive and featured a number of American...

Business Contracts In Japan Aren't Worth The Paper They Are Written On   A friend of my mine has started his own consulting business recently and does Facebook Live updates to his growing band of devotees. I was watching one broadcast the other day when he was talking about always enforce the contract. He had signed a contract with his client, the situation changed and the client wanted to change...

Most Difficult Part Of Business? People!   Cash flow, market movements, competitor pricing, buyer budgets, seasonality, etc., there are many things which making business hard. I was listening to a podcast recently and the point was made that "people are the hardest part of running a business". The point they were making wasn't related to just the labour costs or turnover. They were thinking about...

Handling Sale's Meltdowns   Sales is a tough gig. Sometimes the whole sale's meeting turns out to be a disaster. I had one of those today. The majority of my personal sale's leads come directly through networking. We get leads off our SEO, through ad words and our general marketing activities. These all go to my sales team for follow up. We also do cold calling but as the President of the company,...

Growing Existing Account Sales   You call on your client at their downtown office and you are ushered into one of those typical Japanese meeting rooms. The client joins you and together you enjoy a coffee or green tea and chat about the business. The discussion is about the last sale and the possible next sale. It is usually a discussion about more of the same solution though, rather than a broad...

Extracting The Truth From Buyers   Sales as a profession requires the skills of the sleuth. There is no information, false information, incomplete information, low value information and actual stuff worth knowing to parse. The buyer has what we want and hopefully we have what they want. We need to go through a dance like phase first, as we shadow box around the subject, before we can start to go d...

In Sales Don't Soldier On Sick   We are experiencing the highest outbreak of influenza in Japan this year. The winter daytime temperatures have dropped well below zero in Tokyo which is pretty unusual. We still have a lot of snow lying around from last week, which was the largest snowfall since 2014. Everyday, staff are reporting in sick with colds, the flu, headaches etc. What happens to your sal...

Sale's Case Studies   Getting client cooperation to create sale's case studies in Japan is tough. Japanese companies are very careful about how much information they let outside of the firm. When you are thinking to yourself "we did a really great job and this would make a great case study", get ready for rejection. Not everyone in Japan says "no", but the percentage is very, very high in this cou...

Story San, We'll Think About It   In Japan, this "We'll think about it" response is often the result at the second meeting with the client. In the first meeting, the salesperson is establishing trust and credibility. They are trying to identify if they can actually be of assistance to the client or not. There will be permission sought to ask questions to better understand the buyer's needs. In the...

Admitting Wrong In Customer Service   Sometimes things go wrong. Mistakes are made, errors pop up, best laid plans are laid low. Stuff happens. How we deal with these incidents makes the big difference. Some societies are legalistic, litigious and phalanxes of lawyers are lined up telling us to deny everything. Japan isn't one of those cases, so we expect a different way of doing things here, admi...

Don't Blow The Solution Presentation To The Buyer   Finding clients is an art and so is building trust and credibility that you can help them solve their business problems. We might be very charming when we first meet the client, sending out a competency vibe that the client relates to. They are open to our inquiries into the current state of their business, where the gaps are located and the urge...

Widen That Buyer Gap Or Else   Having a buying need and doing something about it can often be quite disparate ideas. There are many things we would all like to do in business to grow our companies. The constraints are usually money and people. The lack of resources holds us back and so we persevere, always hoping that somehow, we will be able to bridge that gap between where we are now and where w...

Handling Buyer Objections   None of us like to hear "no". We are raised with this word from our parents and we didn't like getting it then and we don't like getting it now. We have something in our mind about how things should go and this little word means we are going to be denied. The irony is that in sales this is a very common answer to our offer. For something so prevalent, you would think th...

Buyers Please Object   Buyers should buy and not quibble, hesitate or question. That at least is what salespeople hope for. That may happen, but the frequency is not high and you certainly wouldn't want to be banking your career arc on the odds of that occurring. The reality is we want buyers to object. If we don't get an commitment to buy right then and there, the next best case is they give us a...

Stop Cutting Corners   Life is full of various rhythms and flows. We have a set piece most mornings. Arise, eat, get ready for work, head out the door. We work, finish, go to the gym, hobby, etc., or go straight home. Saturday we have a certain flow going on and it is usually different to our Sundays. We like certainty, predictability, constancy. That is all fine, because we are all deep in our Co...

How To End The Year Strong   Salespeople work to certain rhythms. One of the negative rhythms is to ease off as we get close to the end of the year. In Japan, most financial years end in March, so the end of December means things are starting to slow down as people get ready for the holiday break coming up. Mentally they start to take the foot off the accelerator and get ready to cruise to the yea...

Brand Killing Customer Service   You really appreciate the importance of brand, when you see it being trashed. Companies spend millions over decades constructing the right brand image with clients. Brands are there to decrease the buyer's sense of risk. A brand carries a promise of consistent service at a certain level. Now that level can be set very low, like some low cost airlines, where "cheap...

Back To Basics Baby   We get lazy. We start cutting corners. We get off our game. We chill, cruise and take the foot off the pedal. Sales is demanding and a life of constant pressure. The temptation is when we get to a certain level of success we think well, we have done enough. We can justify that coffee break, that longer lunch, coming in late after the first mid-morning appointment and heading...

Sales Is Easy, So Why Do We Make It So Hard?   The object of a sale is to exchange a good or a service for money. The degree to which that money can exceed the variable and fixed costs associated with delivering it, determines the success and longevity of the company. We all know that nothing happens in business without a sale. If that is the case then salespeople have a critical role to produce a...

Clueless Cold Calling In Japan   Cold calling always creates a debate amongst the sales community. Some say it has seen it's day, others defend it as part of the sales resource bank for getting leads. I don't think anyone suggests it has a high rate of success. Yet, there are occasions when we need to call someone we have never spoken to before and who has never heard of us. Why would we be doing...