『The Sales Japan Series』のカバーアート

The Sales Japan Series

The Sales Japan Series

著者： Dale Carnegie Japan
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The vast majority of salespeople are just pitching the features of their solutions and doing it the hard way. They are throwing mud up against the wall and hoping it will stick. Hope by the way is not much of a strategy. They do it this way because they are untrained. Even if their company won't invest in training for them, this podcast provides hundreds of episodes with information, insights and techniques all based on solid real world experience selling in Japan. Trying to work it out by yourself is possible but why take the slow and difficult route to sales success? Tap into the structure, methodologies, tips and techniques needed to be successful in sales in Japan. In addition to the podcast the best selling book Japan Sales Mastery and its Japanese translation Za Eigyo are also available as well.Copyright 2022 マネジメント マネジメント・リーダーシップ 経済学
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  • Pitching Preferred In The Japanese Sales Call

    Pitching Preferred In The Japanese Sales Call
    2026/09/22
    In most modern sales environments, asking the buyer questions to understand their needs would be considered one of the most basic skills a professional salesperson should possess. Yet in Japan, questioning the buyer is often far less common than you might expect. Instead, many salespeople launch straight into the pitch. They explain the company, introduce the product, run through the features and hope something catches the buyer's interest. Why? It isn't simply poor technique. There are cultural, organisational and training reasons why pitching can feel safer than questioning in Japanese sales. Here are six of the biggest reasons. Why do Japanese salespeople often pitch instead of asking questions? Many Japanese salespeople pitch because they have never been systematically trained to conduct a consultative sales conversation. Pitching feels familiar, predictable and socially safer. Most salespeople everywhere receive far less professional sales training than they should. Japan has traditionally relied heavily on OJT — On-the-Job Training. In theory, that sounds reasonable. The experienced boss takes the younger salesperson along, demonstrates how professional selling works and gradually develops their skills. The problem is that today's managers are busy. OJT can easily become a couple of accompanied sales calls followed by, "Off you go." That model only works if the manager is already an excellent salesperson. Often, they aren't. From what we see in our own sales training programmes with Japanese employees, and from my own experience as a buyer, sophisticated needs-based questioning is not consistently well developed. The default is often feature pitching. Do now: Don't assume your salespeople know how to ask good questions simply because they have been selling for years. Observe their actual sales conversations and coach the questioning process deliberately. Does Japanese buyer-seller hierarchy discourage sales questions? Yes. The traditional power imbalance between buyer and seller in Japan can make questioning feel presumptuous, while pitching feels consistent with the salesperson's expected role. There is a saying in Japanese business that the customer is not King. The customer is God. That mindset changes the sales conversation. A relatively junior employee working for a huge corporation may be treated with tremendous deference by the President of a much smaller supplier. Company size matters. Rank matters. That is one reason business cards are so important in Japan. You need to understand who the other person is and where they sit in the hierarchy. Within that mindset, the roles can become very clear. The salesperson's job is to explain the offer. The buyer's job is to examine it, challenge it and eliminate risk. The idea that the salesperson should start interrogating "God" with a list of probing questions can therefore feel uncomfortable. Pitching looks safer. Do now: Reframe questioning as professional diagnosis rather than interrogation. You are not challenging the buyer's authority; you are gathering the information required to help them properly. Why are Japanese salespeople worried about embarrassing the buyer? A salesperson may avoid asking questions because the buyer might not know the answer, potentially causing embarrassment or loss of face. This is a genuine concern. Senior people don't always have detailed operational information. Ask them a question they cannot answer in front of colleagues and you may unintentionally put them in an awkward position. I have experienced this myself. We deal with many HR professionals who are sourcing training programmes on behalf of line managers. On one occasion, I asked the HR team my very first needs-based question. Silence. And Japanese silence can be impressively long. It became obvious they didn't know the answer. Then they abruptly asked me to give them my "pitch". What they actually wanted was vendor pricing. I innocently asked whether I could speak directly with the line manager whose people would receive the training. That didn't go well. I was bundled straight out of the opportunity. Goodbye sale. Do now: Ask questions in ways that allow the buyer to answer comfortably. If detailed information may sit elsewhere, ask, "Who would be best placed to help us understand that aspect?" Are direct sales questions too confrontational for Japan? They can be. Highly specific questions about problems, failures and weaknesses may clash with Japan's preference for indirect communication and social harmony. Consultative sales questions can sound brutally direct. "What is going wrong?" "Where are you failing?" "Why haven't you fixed the problem?" "What are the consequences?" In some sales cultures, those questions may be perfectly acceptable. In Japan, communication is often more indirect. Ambiguity can be deliberate. People may communicate difficult messages through nuance, implication and context rather than blunt statements. Direct questioning can...
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    15 分
  • Boosting Our Champions In The Sale

    Boosting Our Champions In The Sale
    2026/09/15
    Getting a buyer interested in our solution is only the beginning of a B2B sale. In many organisations — and particularly in Japan — the person sitting across from us may have very little authority to make the final decision. Instead, we need that person to become our internal champion. They have to take our idea back into their organisation, explain it, defend it, overcome resistance and put their own reputation behind recommending us. That creates an important responsibility for salespeople. We are not merely asking someone to help us win a deal. We are asking them to take a professional risk on our behalf. What is an internal champion in B2B sales? An internal champion is someone inside the buyer organisation who believes in your solution strongly enough to advocate for it when you are not in the room. Usually, we meet our initial contact through a cold call, referral or networking. We explain what we do, perhaps mention another client we have helped and then ask permission to explore their situation. If we are doing professional consultative selling, we ask questions and go deeply into the issues facing the organisation. Eventually, we start suggesting solutions matched to those needs. That is often when reality appears. Our contact may be enthusiastic about solving the problem but discover that managers, executives, Finance, Procurement or other divisions are not nearly as enthusiastic. We cannot personally attend every internal conversation. Our contact therefore becomes our representative. They have to carry the sale forward for us. Do now: Identify who inside the client genuinely wants the change to happen. Interest alone isn't enough — you need someone willing to advocate internally. Why are internal champions particularly important when selling in Japan? Japanese corporate buying often involves multiple stakeholders, so the salesperson's original contact may be only one participant in a much larger decision-making process. In traditional Japanese organisations, a proposal can move through several layers of internal review. Divisions affected by the purchase may conduct their own due diligence. Section Heads may approve the proposal before it moves to Division Heads. Depending on the scale and nature of the decision, senior executives may then become involved. The traditional ringi process illustrates why internal consensus matters so much in Japan. That can mean a tremendous number of people are involved. Meanwhile, we may only know one of them. The person sitting opposite us may not even have final approval authority, yet we depend upon them to help navigate the proposal through the organisation. This is why Japanese B2B selling cannot simply be about persuading one individual. We need to help that individual persuade everyone else. Do now: Ask, "Who else will be involved in evaluating or approving this decision?" Then help your champion prepare for each stakeholder's concerns. What risk does an internal champion take when recommending a supplier? Your champion puts their credibility and sometimes their career reputation behind your solution, because if your company fails, they may be blamed for recommending you. This is something salespeople can easily underestimate. We naturally think about our own risk. Will we win the contract? Will we achieve our sales target? Will we earn the commission? The buyer's champion is considering something completely different. "If I recommend these people and it goes badly, what happens to me?" Their colleagues are unlikely to say, "Well, that supplier made an unfortunate operational decision." They may say: "Why did you choose them?" That makes trust central to the sale. Our champion has to believe we are credible, reliable and capable of delivering what we promise. They also need confidence that supporting us won't make them look foolish in front of senior management. When viewed from their perspective, choosing a new supplier can be a significant personal risk. Do now: Before asking a champion to advocate for you, ask yourself, "What professional risk am I asking this person to accept?" What can go wrong when a salesperson fails to protect the champion? If the supplier fails after an internal champion has fought to get the deal approved, the damage can extend far beyond the contract — it can damage the champion's standing inside the organisation. I learned this lesson painfully while selling imported mobile telephone antenna steel towers in Japan. The towers were sourced from Australia, and we could install them for around 30% of the price being offered by local suppliers. Imported towers were new, however, so getting agreement wasn't straightforward. The buyer was a joint venture whose executives had come from several shareholder companies. Some arrived with relationships with preferred Japanese suppliers. My champions had to fight internally to get the Australian solution accepted. There was even resistance from the local supplier group, ...
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    12 分
  • What About The Deals We Lost

    What About The Deals We Lost
    2026/09/08
    Salespeople spend enormous amounts of time thinking about the deals they won and the deals they lost to competitors. But there is another, potentially much larger category we often ignore: the buyers who didn't buy from anybody. That group should be fascinating to us. If the client didn't choose us but also didn't choose a rival, perhaps our problem wasn't the competition at all. Maybe the real competitor was doing nothing. That changes how we should think about selling. Why do so many sales opportunities end with no decision? The biggest competitor in many sales situations may not be another supplier. It may be the client's decision to do absolutely nothing. I am a big fan of American sales coach Victor Antonio and his Sales Influence Podcast. In one episode, he discussed research suggesting salespeople close around 40% of the deals they pursue. That leaves 60% which don't close. The interesting part was his breakdown of that 60%. Only around 20% of the total opportunities were reportedly lost to competitors. Another 10% stalled because the price frightened the buyer into doing nothing. That still leaves a substantial group who didn't buy from us, didn't buy from the competition and didn't stop purely because of price. So what happened? For salespeople, this is an important distinction. We tend to conduct win-loss reviews based around, "Why did they choose the competitor?" Maybe we need another question: Why did the buyer decide that changing anything wasn't worth the trouble? Do now: When reviewing lost opportunities, separate competitive losses from genuine "no decision" outcomes. They are different sales problems and require different solutions. Is a lost sale really a price problem? Price matters, but price and value are not the same thing. A buyer can afford your solution and still decide the gain isn't sufficiently attractive to justify taking action. Victor Antonio's argument was that some stalled buyers simply didn't see enough value. That makes sense. Value depends entirely on what the client considers important. The gain might involve reducing costs, increasing revenue, accelerating delivery, saving employee time, improving integration with existing systems, reducing risk or making the client's own offer more attractive to its customers. Unfortunately, salespeople often decide for themselves what the client should value. We become enormously excited about our solution's features and benefits. We explain what it can do. We show the data. We provide evidence. Meanwhile, the buyer is quietly thinking, "So what?" The question isn't whether our solution has value. The question is whether the client perceives enough value according to their own criteria to justify changing their current situation. Do now: Ask clients explicitly, "When you assess a solution like this, what would represent significant value for you?" Why do salespeople struggle to discover what clients really value? Many salespeople don't discover value because their questioning is too shallow. They collect information without uncovering what really matters to the buyer. I see this regularly when we teach salespeople from Japanese companies. When we reach the question-design portion of the training, the idea of deliberately constructing questions to uncover needs, motivations and value can be surprisingly new. The traditional approach is often to get quickly into specifications, data and product features. That is basically throwing mud against the wall and hoping something sticks. Professional sales training is still not as deeply established in Japan as it is in some other markets. A lot of development happens through OJT — On-the-Job Training. The danger is obvious: inexperienced salespeople can inherit the habits of other salespeople who were never formally taught consultative selling themselves. Even salespeople who ask questions often miss opportunities to go deeper. The buyer gives them a hint. A flag appears saying DIG HERE. They ignore it and move mechanically to their next prepared question. That is where enormous amounts of useful information disappear. Do now: When a buyer reveals an important issue, temporarily abandon your question list. Probe it with "Why is that important?" and "What impact is that having?" Can implementation effort kill an otherwise attractive sale? Yes. Buyers don't evaluate only the potential gain from a solution; they also evaluate how difficult achieving that gain will be. I have experienced this myself. I teach in the Japan Market Expansion Competition, or JMEC, a non-profit programme where teams of young businesspeople work with companies and develop business plans for them. I have also been a paying JMEC client. In our case, I received the team's finished business plan — and threw it away. Why? Not because the ideas were necessarily bad. The problem was the amount of effort required to implement the recommendations. When I compared that effort with the likely gain, the equation ...
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    14 分
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