The Sales Japan Series

Buyers don't know us at first, so all they have to go on is the brand and our personality.  If the brand is a powerful selling point, great, but for many smaller companies that is not something which is going to make the sale for you.  A lot of Japanese salespeople rely on the brand. They never learn how to do sales as a professional and instead decide to transform themselves into glorified order-...

Recently, I was asked to do a hands-on session regarding post-Covid sales for a group of CEOs.  What was interesting to me was the different idiosyncratic approaches many of them had come up with to make sales.  It was immediately clear that none of them had ever had any sales training.  This meant that they had been relying on trial and error and hope to make sales.  Given the amount of informati...

When we meet the buyer in Japan, it will be extremely rare that they are the final decision-maker. Usually, there are other people sitting behind the meeting room wall, who will have an interest in any changes or new initiatives.  A collective decision will be reached about whether or not they will proceed with you.  Japan likes this splitting of the authority because if things go bad, the blame g...

There is nothing worse than meeting a buyer with no problems.  Theoretically, we shouldn't be meeting them at all because we should have qualified them first.  After three years of Covid forcing us all on video, getting to meet a buyer face-to-face is a genuine thrill for salespeople. We are likely to meet every single buyer we can get in front of.  There is also the point that a buyer may think t...

If you are in the consulting or selling fields, then telling buyers that what went before is now irrelevant is an attractive way to generate revenues.  You can see numerous offerings in social media about the "new" dimension and their "out with the old" remonstrations.  Thinking about this for Japan, what has happened here, as buyer concerns about Covid begin to ebb away. The biggest difference is...

There is a certain well known Japanese recruitment focused company, who keeps calling me at regular intervals.  Maybe there is nothing particularly outstanding about a firm doing follow-up, but I am impressed.  The reason this firm stands out amongst others for me is that the people calling me change from time to time.  Usually, with sales teams, someone is the designated salesperson for that firm...

We hit hard times often and quickly in sales.  Deals have been done and the solutions delivered and then nothing.  The income flow of revenues suddenly dries up and the revenues attached to your name are looking very sad.  There is a monthly target or a quarterly target or both and you are not scratching.  It is embarrassing to see your name on a spreadsheet of salespeople showing the forecast for...

This was very frustrating.  It became obvious from the client's email response that there was a sizeable gap between what I thought was going on and the reality.  How could that be?  I am an experienced salesperson with a solid track record of sales; I have written two books on selling in Japan, one in English and one in Japanese, I have had a weekly blog on the subject for nearly seven years. I t...

Victor Antonio is one of my favourite podcasters on sales and he recently had an episode on reducing friction in the sale.  This got me thinking about how would that work in Japan?  A big barrier to sales in Japan is the culture.  I remember a business contact of mine, a long time Tokyo resident, who moved from Japan to Hong Kong a few years ago, pre-pandemic. I asked him what differed from doing...

Listening to a young salesperson in his first sale's role talking about being nervous to present to a high powered, senior company President, made me think about that.  As we all get older, we forget about our younger "age and stage" evolutions in business.  Somehow, we imagine that in those days, we were exactly as we are now.  A conversation like that got me reflecting whether I was the same, wh...

In Japan we don't have the custom of haggling when we go to shop.  The price is the price is the price, in the consumer world and if you don't like it, don't buy it.  In the B2B world though there is often a price negotiation.  This can be related to volumes being purchased for tangible goods or it could be for services as well.  Tangible products are somehow psychologically easier to price defend...

Role play is one of the keys to improving in sales.  We are in a psychologically safe environment where we can experiment and learn.  The majority of salespeople however are practicing on the client.  That is an extremely bad idea, but they do it anyway.  The main reason is the firm is not well organised or the salespeople are not well organised.  Even if the firm isn't helping, grab a colleague a...

Salespeople are constantly talking to clients, but if you think about it, clients don't have that many conversations in a year with salespeople, so there is a massive power imbalance in play.  That imbalance is in favour of the salesperson, if they know what they are doing.  Humans have survived on the basis of many factors, physical and mental and certainly pattern recognition is one of those cru...

I was chatting with a prospective client about a proposal I had submitted and he offered this feedback from one of his colleagues from the senior management team, "we don't need to bring in trainers, we can use LinkedIn Learning instead".  I was shocked to hear that from the lips of a senior leader.  Is this guy really a leader? I have used LinkedIn Learning myself and is cheap, but I found the qu...

How could we lose track of buyers?  Unfortunately it is very easy.  That nice person we have been dealing with inside the company, the one with whom we have built a solid relationship, where the trust is brimming and the bonhomie is pumping, is transferred to another section or they leave the company for another job.  Suddenly we are left with nothing.  If it is an internal transfer, we may find t...

The front row of sales training courses will often have the best salesperson sitting there trying to get even better.  The salesperson who is failing or is a mediocre performer is nowhere to be found or is there, but is solidly resisting the content and approach.  I read this many years ago and decided I would attend all sales training I could get and that I would be in that front row because I wa...

You have done an excellent job as a salesperson, hitting your numbers and getting a strong reputation as a "producer".  The big bosses like the cut of your jib and decide that they will promote you into the role of player/coach to lead the sales team.  No training is provided of course. It assumed that as you know how to get results, you can just sprinkle your pixie dust on the rest of the crew an...

There was an excellent effort on display here.  A salesperson was using LinkedIn to find potential buyers and conducting energetic prospecting activities to reach out with cold emails.  A total waste of time though.  We all get tons of these cold emails on social media and we religiously delete them and move on, because we are busy, busy people.  I asked how many of these emails had been sent out?...

Arguing with buyers is a slippery slope to sales oblivion.  "I told him off and made him fly straight", is a leap into seller delusion.  In Japan, the buyer isn't King, but GOD.  The seller is in no position to tell the buyer anything here, let alone start arguing the point.  The upshot is that Japanese salespeople, for the most part, are very weak in the face of the buyer's remonstrations.  We of...

In Japan we usually need a couple of meetings with the client to get the business.  In Meeting One, we build the rapport and trust, we explore their needs and try to understand if what we have is actually what they need.  We are tremendously disinterested in slamming any square pegs into round holes and wasting our precious sales time. If we have understood their needs and we can help them, then w...

We salespeople love to talk.  We are enthusiastic about our differentiation, our solution, our features, the benefits and a myriad other remarkable things about what we sell.  Many salespeople have never moved out of first gear and are stuck there just telling the buyer all about their widget. The more advanced salespeople are asking questions and trying to become the trusted advisor, helping the...

If you are a student of sales, then you will know all about SPIN Selling developed by Neil Rackham, based on his 1970s and 1980s research involving 30 researchers who studied 35,000 sales calls in 12 countries.  The acronym stands for S- Situation, P- Problem, I-Implication and N-Need Payoff.  The concept was not to be just packaging up the details of the solution and then jamming it down the thro...

In many sales organisations, sales scripts are a way of harmonising the messaging as well as getting newbies up to speed.  ChatGPT can come up with a sales script within about one second.  We just need to design the question we want answered intelligently and it will do all of the work.  When you have to listen to sales people using sales scripts on you, the conclusion is ChatGPT must surely be ab...