The Sales Japan Series

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...

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...

Why Japanese buyers demand sharper differentiation in today's competitive market Many companies thought that surviving the global pandemic would reduce competition. Instead, by 2025 the business environment in Japan has become even more intense. Buyers have more choices, new competitors are entering the market, and digital transformation is raising expectations. Today, if your Unique Selling Propo...

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...

Japan loves the Devil they know over the Angel they don't know.  Change here is hard to achieve in any field, because of the inbuilt fear of mistakes and failure.  This country takes risk aversion to the highest heights in business.  There are no rewards for salaried employees to take risk.   There are massive career downsides though, if things go wrong, due to an initiative they introduced.  Pers...

I have been in sales since 1988, with a slow, then fast migration of skills.  I started my own small one-man consultancy in 1988 in Brisbane to assist businesses wanting to create revenues with Japan.  I moved into commercial real estate in 1989, then into market entry in 1992, retail banking in 2003 and then selling soft skills training in 2010. I began my personal study of sales around 1990.  Th...

Storytelling is usually associated with novels of hundreds of pages, movies lasting two to three hours, television drama series fifty minutes long per episode.  In sales in Japan we get a mini window to the buyer that, hopefully, in the first meeting will last an hour.  During the second meeting, to present the solution, we will also get around the hour the buyer has allocated for the meeting with...

Bosses love hunters. They beat the bushes and find new clients for the business. Usually, they love the thrill of the hunt and wrestling the buyer down to do the deal. CRM systems, paperwork, boring follow-up detail—not so much. This is the preserve of the farmer. That person you can entrust the client to, knowing that they will be well taken care of. The follow-through will be well executed and,...

I received this note following my attendance at a networking event run by one of the foreign Chambers of Commerce here in Tokyo. "Dear Greg Story , I hope this message finds you well. It was a pleasure meeting you, and I truly enjoyed our conversation and the valuable insights you shared. Please feel free to reach out if there is anything I can assist you with. I would be delighted to stay connect...

"Thank you for submitting your proposal for our capability development project.  We appreciate the time and effort your team invested in preparing the proposal.  After careful consideration, we have decided to proceed with another vendor whose proposal more closely aligns with our current needs and strategic direction.  This decision was not easy, given the high quality of all the submissions we r...

n the West, we often emphasise that inaction doesn't necessarily mean safety for the buyer, and there is a real cost to taking no action. We talk about the "opportunity cost" of doing nothing. A buyer's competitors aren't stagnant; they're actively seeking new advantages with something better or more advanced. The market is never still either, as it's always shifting, and companies need to be agil...

One of the worst combos in sales is a virtual meeting online and the buyer says, "send me your proposal" or even more insane, you volunteer to send it. Even if you managed to sit down face-to-face with a buyer, do not under any circumstances finish up the meeting with this sentence, "I will send you my proposal".  Sale is hard enough as it is, so why do salespeople decide they are not living on th...

Hunting for new clients is difficult and expensive.  Marketing tries to drive people who are seeking our solution to our door through the website, advertising, search words and SEO.  That all costs a lot of money and the success ratio can be quite low.  We attend networking events and these usually cost money too. Now our most fundamental sales goal is not a sale.  We are desperately looking for t...

We know that there are a lot of salespeople who are totally untrained.  They have cobbled together bits and pieces of the sales process but they don't have the whole picture in their brains.  I remember when Dave Stearns, a Carnegie Master Trainer came to Tokyo to certify us a Sales Trainers. He started with the top right hand corner of the whiteboard and then he slowly outlined every single aspec...

Basically, we know that a third of the potential buyers we meet will never buy from us, another third will buy, but not right now and the remaining third are ready to go, if they can be convinced to take action right now.  The issue though is when we meet them for the first time, we don't know which bucket they fit into and we can waste a lot of time and energy thrashing around before we work it o...

I am a great fan of Victor Antonio, who writes books, gives lectures and training on sales.  I listen to his Sales Influence Podcast and he has a lot of solid, credible advice. In a recent episode he spoke about not using "weasel words" in sales and being more directive and certain with the buyer.  Weasel words are defined as "words or statements that are intentionally ambiguous or misleading" and...

The denizens of the upper floor, quiet, luxurious C-suites with expensive wall hangings and deep pile carpets, determine the changes the organisation needs to make to survive or to do even better. They expect everyone below to get behind their dispositions.  Deep down in the engine room of the sales team, these changes are communicated by their boss.  Usually, sales leaders become the boss because...

Salespeople turn up in Japan and expect things to be pretty much the same as where they have come from.  After all, sales is sales right? Wrong.  Japan, as usual, is quite different. If these newly arrived salespeople had received training on how to sell, then they are probably going to try a consultative sales approach.  This is absolutely what they should be doing, except it doesn't work in Japa...

"There are no excuses for failing in sales", is a common ideological position. However, is this really true? There is no doubt that sales is a very macho environment for men and women.  There are set quotas, targets, numbers to be hit and if they are not hit, then that person is deemed to be failing. There are no hiding places in sales.  You make your target or you don't.  Now, if we fired every s...

Most of the sales jobs in Japan require the ability to sell in Japanese.  That usually means native speakers of Japanese or foreigners who can operate at a highly sophisticated language level.  There will be exceptions, but they are not that numerous.  Probably the bilingual recruitment industry is one of the main employers of foreigners who can't speak Japanese and English-language schools.  One...

I have been coaching a founder client here for quite a while now and his emotional reaction to his clients not buying on his schedule always surprises me.  I keep telling him, "it is business; it is not personal".  We know that there are some customers who will just never buy, some who will buy now and some who will buy in the future.  We just don't know which is which until we get rejected.  When...

This is Part Three and is the conclusion of our series on how to provide superior customer service. 1.    Go the extra mile Time is always short and we all tend to cut corners and look for anywhere we can save time.  On the receiving end of the service though, we are looking for as much personalised attention as possible, so there is a natural tension between these two aspirations.  Training staff...

In Part One, we looked at some of the elements we need to be working on in providing excellent customer service, and so now let's continue. 1. Friendly This would seem to be a very basic requirement in customer service, but often the wrong people are placed in these roles and many of them don't like people.  Even those who do like people can suffer brutal invective from irate customers and this ca...

Elements Of Outstanding Customer Service In Japan (Part One) Customer service in Japan is pretty good by comparison with most other countries.  To me, it is polite yet impersonal.  The status gap between those serving and those being served is quite rigid.  In my own country of Australia, those serving are quite happy to have a conversation with the customer. They don't see themselves as inferior...

Watching Joe Biden destroy himself during the debate with Donald Trump was painful.  He was appealing to the American voting public, that is to say, around 68% of voters based on the 2020 numbers, a then record turnout. This type of debate is similar to closing the sale in business.  We have to outline why what we are doing is good for the client and why they should choose us over the alternatives...