The Sales Japan Series

Dealing With Buyer Price Push Back   Pricing is usually set by the boss and salespeople are just there to get out and sell at that designation. The derivation of that price point can be quite varied. In some cases, there is a careful calculation involved. It determines the necessary return to cover direct and indirect costs, plus make a specified margin of profit. In other cases a moist index fing...

Excuse Time Is Over Baby   "I would be able to sell a lot more except for all the extraneous, external factors over which I have zero control". Actually, you have never heard this line of argument before from a salesperson. This is because this statement is an honest appraisal of what they see as the problem, but they don't express it that way. This comes from not having sufficient self-awareness...

"I'm Listening". No Your Not!   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 wi...

Salespeople Need Better Self-Awareness   Sales is one of the few things in business you can measure accurately and immediately. Are you getting greater efficiencies from your internal systems? Is the marketing working? Are our tem becoming more skillful? These are topics which are super important but also devilish to measure. Sales however is straightforward – how much did you sell? The pressure o...

Showmanship In Sales   Tricky area in sales, showmanship. The word has a certain odor about it that reeks of fake, duplicity, con game, spruker, carnival barker, etc. Yet, like storytelling, this is an important part of the sales professional's repertoire. Clients are card carrying members of the Great Guild Of Skeptics. They are highly doubtful about salespeople's claims. We need to bring some po...

To Push Or Not To Push?     Pushy salespeople are very, very annoying. They try to bug you into buying and we really don't like it. We may actually buy, but we don't like them anymore and probably won't become a repeat buyer. Fair enough, but what about when you are the salesperson? At what point should we give up on convincing the buyer that our solution is the best for them?   It often happens t...

Real World Negotiations   We have many images of negotiation thanks to the media. It could be movie scenes of tough negotiations or reports on political negotiations with rogue states led by lunatics. Most of these representations however have very little relevance in the real world of business. A lot of the work done on negotiations focuses on "tactics". This is completely understandable for any...

Boozing Your Way To Sales Success in Japan    A LinkedIn post I read recorded how an American sales guy got off the booze and the client entertainment rat race. It got a lot of coverage and comment because it obviously struck a chord with many fellow salespeople. It got me thinking about the same conundrum for those of us selling in Japan.   This is a tricky issue here because, traditionally, so m...

Jealousy, Envy and Spite In Sales   Sales is a tough enough job without having additional complications. Clients can be very demanding, often we depend on logistics departments and production divisions, to get the purchase to the buyer. We can't control the quality, but we have total responsibility, as far as the client is concerned. There is the constant pressure of revenue results, with bosses a...

Rejection    Everyone hates to be rejected, but not many people have this as a fundamental aspect of their work. We ask colleagues for help and they assist, we ask our bosses for advice and they provide it. Buyers though are a different case. They can easily find a million reasons not to buy and unashamedly tell us "no". The rejection itself is not so much the problem, as is how we respond, how we...

Fast and Slow In Sales   Time is of the essence. Patience is a virtue. Worthy aims but sometimes we mix these aspirations up in sales. We are not moving quickly enough and miss the chance. At other times , we are impatient and we force the issue when we should be more stoic and considered. We lose on both counts whenever we confuse what we should actually be doing.   Being too slow usually relates...

Sales Stories   Storytelling in sales is our ability to express ourselves in a way which is engaging and persuasive.  We capture the attention of the buyer because we have taken the client to a world unexpected.  This might be because the real essence of their problem has just now been revealed to them.  The salesperson who can marshal the discussion to bring forth the hidden insights for the clie...

In The Mood For Sales?     The dark morning gloom of rain clouds, snow drifts or driving sleet can have an impact on our sales mood. We may be thinking to ourselves what a "lousy day" to have run around town juggling umbrellas, trains, taxis and bags of samples to visit clients. The next day, the rains have departed. Brilliant blue skies and a warm sun seem to say "what a beautiful day to make sal...

Prospecting For Golden Clients   Do you have a clear image and understanding of your perfect client? Authors often mention about writing for their avatar. This is their imaginary reader. They have a clear picture of whom they are writing for. They know their reader's hopes, fears, aspirations, behaviors, goals and idiosyncrasies.   In sales, prospecting to find your Golden Client is a bit like dis...

Hard Sell Stupidity   "We are going to be in your area next week, would you be available on Tuesday or Thursday?". "Really? Which part of my area will you be in?". "Are you available on Tuesday or Thursday?". "Wait a minute, you just said you would be in my area, so which part of my area will you be in?"  "Akasaka". "Really that's interesting. Akasaka is a big place, which part of Akasaka?". "Are...

  How to Properly Prepare For Client Meetings   Salespeople are very busy, rushing around finding new clients, developing leads, networking, cold calling, attending client meetings, getting stuck into preparing proposals and later executing the follow through on what has been promised. Somewhere in this process some key basics start to go missing. One of those basics is the proper preparation for...

The Importance Of Consistency In Sales   We all know that consistency is a fundamental requirement if we are going to establish trust with others.  We ask buyers to purchase from us on the basis that we will be delivering what we say we will deliver, on time, at the agreed price point and quality.  Now no salespeople go around promising anything less so there is no differentiation at this stage of...

What To Say When You Cold Call   Cold calling is an unheralded intervention into someone's already packed schedule.  They are distracted by the phone from what they were concentrating on, so they are automatically annoyed.  They are time conscious because this call was not in their plan.  The person calling them is an unknown quantity, so the trust factor is zero or less than that.  They have been...

Woeful Contributions From Salespeople     Three woeful contributions from salespeople include "we have this widget", "you should have it?" and "we can discount the price".  What a mess right there.  Yet, left to their own devices, this is the type of nonsense salespeople say to clients.  Serving the client's best interests is job one for salespeople, so why aren't they having a proper conversation...

In Sales When to Start Selling?   It always astonishes me that many salespeople have very little sense of proper timing to start selling their product or service.  In the sales call, they are in a rush to get down to business.  Japan has mastered the idea of building some rapport before starting the sales conversation.  Small talk predominates at the commencement of the meeting and then smoothly g...

Winner Sales Follow Through   The implication of this title is that if you don't properly follow through on the sale then you are a loser. Well, it is true - you are a loser. The difficulty of gaining a sale is hard enough, but the real difficulty is to get the re-order. This is where we should all be very finely focused. Rather than approaching a potential client with a sale in mind, what if we s...

Create Your Own Philosophy of Sales     Like a lot of people, I subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc. The following morsel popped into my inbox, "People don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care –Anonymous".   Wow! What a powerful reminder of the things that really matter in our interactions with others. This piece of sage advice s...

Sales Rocks, But It's All Uphill   Sisyphus was banished to Hades for misdeeds in life and spent eternity rolling a large stone to the top of a hill, to just watch it descend again. This is the sales life. Every end of financial year, we are back down at the bottom of the hill. Here we go again, having to push that big rock all the way to the top.   "You are only good as your last deal" is a commo...

The 106 Centimeter Cold Caller   Salespeople are world class whiners. They are the most creative group amongst all professions for coming up with excuses about why they can't meet their targets. The sale's life requires a constant stream of new buyers. Marketing is permanently inhabited with ne'er-do-wells, who are sabotaging the sales department's efforts with underdone campaigns and inept promot...

Japan New Client Sale's Agonies     Japan is a huge market. This is a wealthy, sophisticated society, with a design sense second to none. People work diligently as a team and put in long hours. Achieving annual organic growth should be an expectation of bosses that sales teams should be able to realise. Yet, the results are often flat lining or disappointing. Excuses abound – the yen is too strong...