The Sales Japan Series

In the first two parts of this three part series we have gone deep on how to become known and liked by buyers.  That is all very well, but if they don't trust us, they won't buy our solutions if they can avoid it.  If you are in an industry where the supply side is totally restricted and the buyers have to compete for supply, then lucky you. I have never had that luxury and I would guess 99.9% of...

  In Part One, we went deep on the KNOW Factor in sales and today we turn to why we need to be likeable.  Actually, do we need buyers to like us? Maybe not in every case, but it doesn't hurt does it?  As a buyer yourself, would you rather deal with someone you like, rather than a person you didn't like?  We will all prefer to work with people we like, but what makes us likeable? Some clients we ge...

We have all heard this bromide about Know, Like and Trust in sales, but have we really deeply explored what it means in today's post-Covid business climate?  Over the next three contributions, I am going to go deep on these three aspects of sales.   The Marketing Department will work on promoting the brand, but it very rare that they ever promote individual salespeople.  Let's assume they won't be...

AI has opened the floodgates to allow any idiot to create content. If content marketing is an important vehicle for promoting your credibility in business, then be concerned.  Most content is currently created by people who are literate, that is, they can write the pieces themselves.  One notable exception is Gary Vaynerchuk and I am a big fan. He is a prolific creator of content, including best-s...

Sale's solutions are what make the business world thrive. The client has a problem and we fix it, our goods or services are delivered, outcomes are achieved and everybody wins. In a lot of cases however these are only partial wins. Problems and issues are a bit like icebergs – there is a lot more going on below the surface than can be spotted from the captain's bridge. The salesperson's role is to...

He slid effortlessly into the chair and before I knew it, he had popped open the oyster shell of his laptop and was pointing his screen menacingly in my direction. Uh oh! Powerpoint slide after powerpoint slide bombarded me with detailed data, specs, diagrams and text information. After 20 minutes he stopped the torture. "Wow", I thought, "he hasn't managed to ask me even one teensy question durin...

In 1936 an unknown author, despite many frustrating years of writing drafts and receiving publisher rejections, finally managed to get his manuscript taken up by a major publishing house. That book became a classic in the pantheon of self-help books – "How to Win Friends and Influence People". Surprisingly, many people in sales have never read this work. Plato, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius etc., were...

Salespeople are carrying around a lot of baggage with them when they visit clients. The smooth talking, dodgy sales person trying to con us, is the folkloric villain of the piece. Reversing that doubt and hesitation is critical to gaining acceptance as a valuable business partner for the client. This entire problem is magnified when we meet the client for the first time. Because the client's don't...

The hardest sales job in the world is selling something you don't believe in yourself. The acid test is would you sell this "whatever" to your grandmother? If the answer is no, then get out of there right now! It is rarely that clear cut though. The more important test is whether what you are selling solves the client's problem or not. Selling clients on things that are not in their best interests...

It has always been astonishing to me how hopeless some salespeople are in Japan. Over the last 20 years, I have been through thousands of job interviews with salespeople. We teach sales for our clients and so as a training company we see the good, the bad and the ugly - a very broad gamut of salespeople. We also buy services and products ourselves and so are actively on the receiving end of the sa...

Do you subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc? The following morsel popped into my inbox the other morning, "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 should be metaphorically tattooed on to t...

We have all seen it – the pendulum swings of organisational change.  You can basically break out your stopwatch and get the timing down perfectly.  The new CEO arrives and reverses whatever the predecessor was doing.  If things had been centralised, now everything will be decentralised. Then here we are five years later, another CEO and we reverse course again.  In the sales area, the goalposts ke...

Pitching for the business is quite different to selling to a client representative we may be meeting in a meeting room.  In the latter case, we have only one or sometimes two people to persuade, but in a pitch it could be department representatives from many parts of the firm.  The worst possible pitch environment is when on this occasion you have had no chance to meet the client beforehand to und...

Selling to idiot buyers sounds a bit harsh doesn't it, but I am sure we have all had a version of this experience.  It usually manifests itself in the pricing component of the transaction.  We provide value, but the buyer is too inexperienced, uninformed, basically stupid, has a massive ego or is lacking in context to appreciate why they need to pay more than they suggest.  We have to remember the...

Understanding client's needs presumes we care about what they want.  For many salespeople this isn't even a topic in their mind.  Their understanding is that they turn up and tell the client all about their widget in microscopic detail and somehow the client will buy once they have all of that data.  Now this approach may work with certain analytic personality types and certain professions, but it...

Imposter syndrome is a fact of this sale's life.  If we try to avoid that and strive for safety by staying in our lane and just repeat the same actions, we will probably master what we need to do to complete the job.  The problem is organisations keep moving the goalposts e very year and they want higher revenue productivity.  The market also moves on us too and we cannot control that.  The defini...

We have products and services to sell and there are key details about their features which we need to explain to the buyer.  Clients need to know what they are getting for their money, so fair enough.  In Japan, the client will lead you down the road of morbid detail about the ins-and-outs of the purchase, as they suck you dry for all the information you have.  This is a defence mechanism to make...

  Nobody in sales likes it when buyers pushback and don't make a purchase decision.  There are varying degrees of pushback though.  Sometimes it might be the buyer being the Devil's advocate trying to better assure themselves that buying would be the right decision.  Other times it is just the buyer being a pain and exerting their power and authority over the sales person.  Most buyers have never...

If we have done a professional job in selling we will have understood what the buyer is attempting to achieve and we will have concluded if we have a solution that matchs or not.  Following that we need to explain the solution to the buyer and convince them that this is what they need.  Japan presents a danger at this point.  There is a ravenous hunger in Japan for data and detail.  Buyers are sup...

For most places in the world, and Japan in particular, when you find a good salesperson, you tend to stick with them.  Why is that?  There is a huge trust component to the idea that this person is someone you can rely on and who isn't going to rob you blind, so that they get rich at your expense.  There are so many unprofessional salespeople floating around on every continent and this is just base...

In Japan, we meet the client, build the rapport, seek permission to ask questions, ask the questions and then we set the date and time for the next meeting.  Usually, in the first meeting this is where we expect to get to and we know we have to come back with a lot more detail for the second meeting.  What level of detail do we need to go into in the proposal?  Decision-making is done differently...

Content marketing has been around for many years now and is an accepted way of appealing to clients.  Thought Leadership and Intellectual Property are given away for free to establish our credentials with the buyers.  If we show how knowledgeable we are, prospective clients will choose us over our rivals.  So for many years now, blogs, books, podcasts, magazine and newspaper articles, videos, Medi...

  Usually in Japan, we meet more than one buyer. In Western meetings, it is more likely to be a one-on-one situation.  Sometimes the buyer boss will bring others to the meeting and they are there to represent their functions and report back what has taken place.  The danger is we just focus on the boss and ignore their henchmen.  These hangers-on have important roles to play in the decision-making...

  Every professional salesperson has a set script of how the sales call will run.  Amateur salespeople just turn up and don't try to direct the action.  Having a set script means we know what will happen during the call, what the stages will be, what we will say at certain points, what we want to know from the client and how the call will conclude.  We have already worked out how to be charming in...

Salespeople are always desperate to make a sale.  There are targets, quotas, KPIs aplenty and the pressure is unrelenting.  When you are in a downturn, a recession, a pandemic etc., which are driving down sales, the desperation becomes even more intense.  Getting meetings at all is considered a win and we go for it, regardless of whether the buyer is qualified or not.  Telling your Sales Manager y...