The Sales Japan Series

I belong to Dan Slater's Delphi Network and every week his newsletter contains unattributed quotes from CEO conversations he has heard at his recent events.  One of them caught my eye about sales.  The anonymous contributor was saying that selling in Japan has to be no selling, a bit like a zen approach – "the sales of no sales" type of approach.  I found that interesting and was wondering what on...

There are farmers and hunters in sales and both are needed in organisations.  The hunters are energised by landing the deal and bored with the paperwork and administrivia required after the sale.  The farmers are not much chop at landing new clients, but they are genius at taking care of existing clients and keeping them as repeater clients. I am a hunter. I realise about myself that I love findin...

I had a meeting with a client I have been chasing for business for the last ten years.  They have had the same President right throughout and we get on very well, but this has not resulted in any business coming my way.  Over the years, I had been introduced by him to his various HR people, and that is where it has always floundered.  Maybe they had their own internal solutions and didn't need us...

I don't like doing RFPs in Japan.  We are translating concepts and intangibles into text in a document, which a lot of people we will never ever meet will be reading and making decisions about us.  I prefer to work on my champion and have them marshal the approval through their byzantine internal processes to get the agreement to go ahead.   It feels more in control than launching a bunch of words...

Recently, we had a negotiation with an existing buyer.  They had severely cut back their purchasing quantities under direct orders from the European Headquarters.  A new President had arrived and looking at the global training bill, decided he could save a lot of dough if they did it all themselves.  The first salvo was to reduce the amount of previously scheduled training while they sorted it out...

I am having a bad run in sales at the moment and it is depressing.  I am a constant networker attending events to meet potential clients.  The leads we get to our website go to my sales team and so I have to hustle and get out there and make it happen. I do that and I follow up with the prospects to try to get a meeting or at least an introduction to a decision-maker.  Like everyone else, I get gh...

I started my first podcast "The Japan Leadership Series" on August 2nd, 2013.  Shortly after that, I discovered Content Marketing and got better educated on the subject thanks to Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose's podcast "This Old Marketing", launched on November 20,  2013.  The premise at the time was revolutionary.  You put up your best stuff for free and don't protect your IP.  This was a radical i...

Have you ever had this experience? You cannot get on the same wavelength as the client.  I remember an HR Director at one of the major fashion brands and I was always confused during our conversations.  I was never sure where she stood on any number of issues about us delivering training for them.  Yes, she was very pleasant, but also very obtuse and hard to corral.  I would leave the meetings uns...

Japan loves detail. A lot more detail than we expect in the West.  I remember a lecture I attended at an academic conference on Sino-Japanese relations here in Tokyo in the early 1980s.  The Professor was making this point about the Japanese love of detail by relating how a Zen metaphor had been imported into Japan from China.  In the Chinese telling, there was a bucket to draw water from the well...

Usually in Japan, we are granted an audience with the buyer for an hour for the meeting.  Sometimes with Western buyers, they want to restrict the time, so we only have thirty minutes, which makes things very difficult.  We also know that if we can capture their interest, that thirty minutes can magically become much longer.  We also know that there will be more than one meeting, so we don't have...

Aussies are a casual people.  They prefer informality and being chilled, to stiff interactions in business or otherwise.  They can't handle silence and always feel the need to inject something to break the tension.  Imagine the cultural divide when they are trying to sell to Japanese buyers.  Japan is a country which loves formality, ceremony, uniforms, silence and seriousness.  Two worlds collide...

Blarney, snake oil, silver tongued – the list goes on to describe salespeople convincing buyers to buy.  Now buyers know this and are always guarded, because they don't want to be duped and make a bad decision.  I am sure we have all been conned by a salesperson at some point in time, in matters great and small. Regardless, we don't like it.  We feel we have been made fools of and have acted unint...

We are slowly emerging from Covid, yet a few leftovers are still hanging around, making our sales life complicated.  One of those is the sales call conducted on the small screen using Teams or Zoom or whatever.  These meetings are certainly efficient for the buyers, because they can get a lot of calls done more easily and for salespeople, it cuts out a lot of travel. Efficient isn't always effecti...

Getting a deal done in a single meeting is an extremely rare event in Japan.  Usually, the people we are talking to are not the final decision-makers and so they cannot give us a definite promise to buy our solution.  The exception would be firms run by the dictator owner/leader who controls everything and can make a decision on the spot.  Even in these cases, they usually want to get their people...

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...

I recently launched a new project called Fare Bella Figura – Make a Good Impression.  Every day I take a photograph of what I am wearing and then I go into detail about why I am wearing it and put it up on social media.  To my astonishment, these posts get very high impressions and a strong following.  It is ironic for me. I have written over 3000 articles on hard core subjects like sales, leaders...

Public speaking spots are a great way to get attention for ourselves and what we sell.  This is mass prospecting on steroids.  The key notion here is we are selling ourselves rather than our solution in detail.  This is an important delineation.  We want to outline the issue and tell the audience what can be done, but we hold back on the "how" piece.  This is a bit tricky, because the attendees ar...

Finding clients is expensive.  We pay Google a lot of money to buy search words. We pay them each time someone clicks on the link on the page we turn up on in their search algorithm.  We monitor the pay per click cost, naturally always striving the drive down the cost of client acquisition.  If we have the right type of product, we may be paying for sponsored posts to appear in targeted individual...

Salespeople are good talkers.  In fact, they are often so good, they decide to do all the talking.  They try to browbeat the buyer into submission. Endless details are shared with the client about the intricacies of the widget, expecting that the features will sell the product or service.  Do we buy features though?  Actually, we buy evidence that this has worked for another buyer very similar to...

I am very active networking here in Tokyo, scouring high and low for likely buyers of our training solutions.  I attend with one purpose – "work the room" and as a Grant Cardone likes to say, find out "who's got my money".  I have compressed my pitch down to ten seconds when I meet a possible buyer at an event. My meishi business card is the tool of choice in this regard.  Most people here have En...

Access to social media has really democratised salespeople's ability to sell themselves to a broader audience.  Once upon a time, we were reliant o n the efforts of the marketing team to get the message out and, in rare cases, the PR team to promote us.  Neither group saw it as their job to help us as a salesperson, and they were more concentrated on the brand.  Today we have the world at our beck...

Japan is facing a serious shortage of staff in many industries.  The job-to-applicant ratio rose to 1.28, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare announced recently. The ratio means there were 128 job openings for every 100 job seekers. The figure has not yet reached the pre-pandemic level of 1.6 in 2019. The hospitality sector in particular, lost a lot of part-time staff during Covid and they h...

Sales people are in massive competition today, with all the distractions that are out there for the client's attention. We want to get our message across about how we can help build the client's business, but it is a tough row to hoe because of all the competition we face from meetings, emails and social media. There are so many things that are occupying the minds of our clients and our buyers bef...

Our circle of friends will usually be people with whom we share a lot of commonalities.  Our viewpoints merge, our interests are similar, we like the same types of things.  We get on easily.  Life however throws us many curved balls, as meet new people who are not like us. Often we struggle when dealing with them.  There are nine tried and true human relations principles we can use to improve our...