The Sales Japan Series

We have found the prospect.  It might have been through desk research then a cold call or a chance business card exchange at a networking event.  We have decided they probably need our solution, because they fit into the ideal client persona profile we carry around in our heads. If we have been artful, we will have managed to secure a meeting, be it online or more preferably, in person.  After som...

There are many non-Japanese speaking business people doing deals with Japanese companies.  They may be flying in for meetings or may be based on the ground here.  Even those locally based may not have sufficient fluency to conduct a sales meeting in Japanese, even though they make speak some level of Japanese language. I don't know if I would call myself "fluent", because I know how complex the Ja...

I was listening to a sales podcast and the expert guest was lampooning some typical closes as outdated, insulting and useless.  He was relating how early in his sales career he had come across these closes and they didn't work.  Naturally he had written his one book with a better alternative.  I was thinking about what he said and asked myself are these typical closes actually outdated or not? Eve...

  Riffraff inhabit all corners of the business world, but the sales profession suffers more than many others.  Bankers do all sorts of evil things with our money.  Stock brokers do all sorts of evil things with our money.  Real estate agents tell one version of the truth to buyers.  Government officials purloin our money.  Everywhere you look, someone is ripping us off.  However, these industries...

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 i...

We are starting the New Year and have we decided how we will start it?  Are we going to just slide back into our old habits and pick up the threads of the deals we were working on before the break?  Or are we going to do some fresh thinking about what we are doing and how we are doing it?  As salespeople, we are all massively time poor. That sets off a series of decisions where we are constantly c...

A cushion, in the sales world, isn't that thing you bite into with frustration when your old client buys from your competitor rather than you.  It is a ploy, a trick, a device, a subterfuge to stop us making a mess of the deal. Most salespeople have no idea what a cushion is or how to employ it, which is why they are losing sales on a regular basis.  The hardest people to teach this technique to a...

Most salespeople are very good on the detail of their solutions.  The more technical the solution, in order to be able to explain it to the buyer, the more expert level of knowledge is needed.  The only problem with this expertise concentration is that buyers don't buy features.  They have a problem which they need solved and the features are a necessary tool, but it is the outcome produced throug...

A very common complaint from foreign bosses here in Japan is that their sales staff are over-servicing the Japanese buyer.  Sometimes they are left to wonder who their staff are really working for – their company or the client's company.  I am sure there are many sales bosses based outside Japan thinking, "that is the type of problem I would like to have with my sales crew".  When we travel out of...

Proprietary research findings, industry experience, thick product catalogues, detailed flyers were the currency of the salesperson, before the advent of the iPhone.  The salesperson was an unknown quantity, so the only guarantee was their firm's brand.  The individual didn't have a personal brand.  Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007 and changed sales forever.  That salesperson of old has bee...

Knowing where to find potential clients is one of the core skills of salespeople.  Yes, marketing drives activity and we have our networks, but we need to keep that sales funnel full.  That means we need a healthy flow of new prospects to talk to.  Where will these new buyers come from?  Often we have to create them out of thin air.  Cold calling has become so much more difficult with remote work,...

The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離.  Shu is to protect the traditional techniques, the basics, the fundamentals.  Ha is to detach and break away from the tradition, to innovate and depart from our attachments to what we are doing.  Ri is to transcend to a level where there is no self-consciousness of what we are doing, we make it our own, because we have a...

Many salespeople contemplating this title would be flummoxed.  They don't have really good questions for the client because they don't ask any questions whatsoever.  They are losers who go straight into the detail, the nitty gritty of their solution. How do they know this is the right solution?  They don't worry about that, because they are delving into the product catalogue or the flyers for the...

Buyers can smell fear and desperation on salespeople.  When the sales funnel is sad and prospects are few, we panic.  The client picks up on this and unconsciously they hesitate to work with us, because for them something doesn't feel right. We are suffering.  We are reminded of the Sales Manager's mantra, "don't tell me about what you have sold in the past, tell me what deals you are doing today"...

The client is always right.  No they aren't. We usually have more information about our offering than the buyer and are across the breadth of our range of solution in a way they can never be.  We are interacting with a variety of buyers in the industry and the sector and are constantly picking up intelligence on what is working and what isn't.  We are not being driven by internal politicking, as a...

In modern economies, asking the buyer questions to understand their needs would be considered the most basic skills of a salesperson. This isn't happening as much as you would expect in technologically advanced, well educated, sophisticated Japan, the world's third largest economy. In Japan, busy bosses or more experienced salespeople, will take the new salesperson with them on a couple of sales c...

When you are told that "hope is not a strategy" you get the point.  You also know that actually there is a fair bit of hope built into your strategy.  Every sales organisation comes up with targets and often these are based on hope more than science.  There is imperfect information floating around and we use this as the basis of our assumptions.  There is incomplete data and we have to extrapolate...

Inertia is a powerful retardant to getting deals done in Japan.  Either they already have a regular supplier or this is a new solution with which they have no experience and they don't want to risk anything.  Buying from you represents a number of changes which must take place on their side.  Change equals risk in the Japanese buyer's mind rather than opportunity.  Doing nothing with the new solut...

Depending on your industry, times have been tough in sales.  We see the Japanese Government trying to resuscitate the inbound tourism industry to increase jobs and revenues to gather more tax income.  They are about to open the economy right up to stimulate business.  Domestic tourism is worth about three times as much as foreign tourism contributes to the economy. There is a big kick opportunity...

In modern economies, asking the buyer questions to understand their needs would be considered the most basic of the basic skills of a salesperson. This isn't happening as much as you would expect in Japan, the world's third largest economy.  Most salespeople everywhere are untrained and are left to work it out for themselves.  Japan has what they call OJT – On The Job Training  - as the main teach...

Usually, we meet our contact in the company through a cold call, a referral or networking and we sit down and have a talk about the needs of the organisation.  If we are doing a professional job, we will have explained what we do, mentioned a client we have done work for and the success they achieved as a result. We will then suggest that "maybe" we could do the same for this company too, but in o...

I am a big fan of Victor Antonio who is a sales coach in America. He has an excellent show called the Sales Influence Podcast.  In a recent episode I listened to he had some very interesting statistics.  According to US research, salespeople, on average, close about 40% of the deals they are seeking.  That means they lost 60% but what happened to that group who didn't buy?  The shocking component...

I had been busy, so setting this appointment had been difficult.  Eventually, we found the day and time to meet.  I asked for the address and the text note mentioned the building and I knew it well, so all good to go.  Except when I arrived there, the entry registration desk people said there was no company of that name in the building.  I checked my text note and sure enough, it specified this bu...

Many years ago, my job was to help Australian companies crack the Japanese market.  One of the elements of that job was explaining the Japanese business psyche to the Australian businesspeople targeting Nippon.  As you might imagine this wasn't an easy task, as the mindsets are so different.  White colonisation of Australia started in the late 1700s and the first convicts and settlers arrived into...

"Out of the frying pan into the fire", seems to be an appropriate descriptor for where we are now.  We have been battered by Covid, or at least many of us have had that unpleasant experience, but now everyone, even those who sailed through Covid, are about to get swept up in to the next recession.  Inflation, rising interest rates, supply chain turmoil, energy supplies being weaponised, the list i...