The Sales Japan Series

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...

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...

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...

In Part One, we talked about Jan Carlzon's insights into the importance of consistent service  being provided to clients.  The buyer mantra is know, like and trust in sales. We also talked about the basics of sales – prospecting and closing. Now are we going to continue the errors, shortcomings and mistakes of last year into the new year or not?  Are we going to just continue doing what we have al...

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 2025 will not go down as a bumper year for the vast majority of salespeople.  Yet, here we go again....

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...

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...

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...