• The Sales Japan Series

  • 著者： Dr. Greg Story
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The Sales Japan Series

著者： Dr. Greg Story
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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
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  • 382 Selling To Sceptics On The Small Screen In Japan

    382 Selling To Sceptics On The Small Screen In Japan
    2024/04/24
    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 effective though. In my view, we should always try to be in person with the buyer. Some may say I am “old school” and that is quite true. Old school though has a lot of advantages when selling. Being there with them, we can take the client through the materials much more easily and we can read their body language in depth and minutely. Buyers are always sceptical about salespeople, because everyone is risk averse and concerned about getting conned or taken for a ride. When we are in the room together, they can get a better sense of who we are. They can read our body language to make sure our words match up with the intentions we are spruking. I had a sales call with a new client and, being in the room together, I could hand over the training manual and take him through it page by page, explaining the content of what he would be buying. I could easily control what page he was on so that we were in synch. We have to be careful when handing materials over that we are on page five and so are they, rather than they are racing ahead of us to page twenty. The commentary coming out of our mouth has to line up with what they are looking at in the materials. It happens that they race ahead of us, so we have to be aware of that danger and control what the buyer is looking at very carefully. I had another new client sales meeting, this time online and with three people on their side. They degenerate into three tiny little boxes on screen and it gets worse once you start sharing documents online. It is very hard to read three people’s reaction when you are in the room with them let alone trying to do it remotely. As we know the current systems aren’t as good as teleprompter technology. You can look into a camera lens on a teleprompter and read the text appearing on screen at the same time. With these various virtual platforms, the camera is located on one part of the computer screen, usually at the top and the people you are talking to are located way down below. You have to make a choice – look at the camera and not at your audience or look at your audience and not at the camera. The teleprompter technology eliminates that choice, but it hasn’t been applied to the virtual world as yet. In this situation, I look at my camera and give up trying to read the reaction of the buyers online. This is a big give up, by the way, and most unsatisfactory. I do it this way, because what they see is me speaking directly to them, making eye contact all the time. From their screen angle, they see me staring straight at them. This creates the sense of trustworthiness. On screen, I can keep staring at them intensely, without it creating any tension, as would happen in Japan if we were in person. Japanese culture avoids too much direct eye contact. This is why people look at our chin or throat or forehead. On screen, though, we are safely removed and so if we look down the barrel of that lens, we can keep applying the eye contact without it becoming intrusive. It allows us to connect with the viewers. Yes, we cut out the travel time and the costs to get to the client, but we are giving up a lot more in return. Being there is so much better and more valuable. Yes, it may take three hours there and back to hold the meeting and only one hour to do it online. But that one hour in person enables us to be so much more persuasive. We are also better able to recognise pushback or reluctance. It is almost impossible to read the vibe going on between the attendees on their side. When you are together in the room, you can see if there is any difference of opinion amongst the buyer group or cases where one person is not onboard with the idea. Onscreen, that is much more disguised. These various elements are hard to gauge on the small screen. We often find ourselves doing too much talking to compensate for the restricted nature of the small screen interaction. We feel we have to add energy and vitality to the sale process in a way we don’t feel such a strong need when we are in person. The communication distance gets us ramping up our side of the conversation to try to inject some enthusiasm into the buyer group. We are trying to will them to buy because we feel the remoteness of the situation. Buyers are often working from home these days and so they insist on online meetings. Remember, for them, not buying is the safest and preferred option. We, on the other hand, have a duty to help supply solutions to buyers and for us we should always choose the best medium for that purpose....
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    12 分
  • 381 The Two-Step Process When Selling In Japan

    381 The Two-Step Process When Selling In Japan
    2024/04/16

    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 involved to some extent, so there is always going to be some due diligence required. In most cases, the actual sale may come on the second or even third meeting. Risk aversion is a big thing is Japan, so everyone is very careful to make sure their decision is the right one and that there will be no blow back on them, if things go bad.

    I met the owner of a very successful accounting business at a networking event. It was a very crowded affair and as is my want, I will just shanghai strangers and introduce myself. “Hi, my name is Greg” as I extend my hand to shake theirs, followed in short order by my reaching for my business card.

    I followed up to set up a meeting, which we had, and it went quite well. He invited me back to meet his team. The people I met were quite well established in the company and focused on the administrative side of things. He was obviously thinking about the training arrangements and logistics and that is why he wanted me to explain what we will do to these two staff members. He was the decision maker, but we still had to involve other members of the team to get the internal buy-in. We had a third meeting with just him and I, to sort out the final arrangement and set dates, etc.

    In another case, I met an insurance company representative at an event and followed up for a meeting. He directed me to one of the staff who takes care of HR and I had an initial meeting to uncover their needs. Following that discovery meeting, we had a second meeting where I presented our options to solve their issue. There was a competition with other suppliers of training to see who they would choose. We then had a third meeting, and he brought a colleague from their department and I explained what we do and what we do for them in that meeting. Again, the decision had been taken as we had won the competition and now he was harmonising the next stages internally, to get it to become a reality.

    Because the steps are elongated, I often don’t even bother to bring any Flyers with me to the first meeting and spend the whole time trying to best understand their needs and wants. This way, the full hour of time usually allocated can help me clearly ascertain if we have what they need or not. It is always a good idea to set up the next meeting at the end of the first meeting, because everyone in Tokyo is so busy you need to get into their schedules fast. Once I have done that, I bring the materials to the second meeting to support my recommendation and we go through them together. It is not uncommon to have to come back a third time and go through specific elements once more, to help them gain a clearer understanding of the contents and its suitability for their situation.

    Once you understand the cadence of doing business here, you are not getting exercised by how slow the process is or by trying to cram everything into one meeting and driving for a “yes” decision. That is very unlikely, and we need to be thinking in terms of three meetings rather than one. If we can get it done in two, then magic, but don’t expect that to happen.

    Risk aversion and team decision-making ensure that things will move slowly. No one is in a hurry to buy anything we have to offer and we have to keep that thought firmly in the front of our minds. No one gets fired for being overly cautious in Japan and risk taking is not well regarded as a concept. Patience and a full pipeline are the requirements for doing business here. If you are desperate, then you will have a rocky time because no one is on your timeline and frankly, they don’t care. We have to adjust ourselves to the way they do business, and trying to reverse the natural order of things here is a fool’s mission. “Ride the wave in Japan” is always the best advice.
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    11 分
  • Sell With Passion In Japan

    Sell With Passion In Japan
    2024/04/09
    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 since 1992. In all of that time I am struggling to recall any Japanese salesperson who spoke with emotion about their offer. It is always low energy, low impact talking, talking, talking all the time. There are no questions and just a massive download of information delivered in a monotone delivery. As salespeople, our job is to join the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer. But it is also more than that. The buyer’s mental meandering won’t necessarily have the degree of passion we need for them to make a purchasing decision. So we have to influence the course of that internal conversation they are having. This is where our own passion comes in. I always thought Japanese people were unemotional before I moved to Japan the first time in 1979. The ones I had met in business in Australia were very reserved and quite self contained. They seemed very logical and detail oriented. After I moved here I realised I had the wrong information. Japanese people are very emotional in business. This is related closely to trust. Once they trust you, they have made an emotional investment to keep using you. No one likes to make a mistake or fail and the best way to avoid that is to deal with people you can trust. How do you know you can trust them? There is some track record of reliability there, that tells you the person or company you are dealing with is a known quantity that will act predictably and correctly every time. The problem with this approach though is that you will only ever be able to sell to existing accounts. What about gaining new customers? You have no track record and no predictability as yet. When you meet a new customer they are mentally sizing you up, asking themselves “can I trust you?”. Naturally a good way to overcome the lack of track record is to create one. Offer a sample order or something for free. This takes the risk out of the equation for the person you are dealing with. To get involved with a new supplier means they have to sell the idea to their boss, who has to sell it to their boss, on up the line. No one wants to take the blame if it all goes south. A free or small trial order is a great risk containment tactic and makes it easy for all the parties concerned to participate in the experiment. The other success ingredient is passion for your product or service. When the buyer feels that passion, it is contagious and they are more likely to give you a try to at least see if there is some value to continue working with you. When he was in his mid-twenties, my Japanese father-in-law started a business in Nagoya and needed to get clients. He targeted a particular company and every morning he would stand in front of the President’s house and bow as he was leaving by car for the office. After two weeks of this, the President sent one of his people to talk to him to see why he was there every day bowing when the President left for work. When he heard that my father-in-law wanted to supply his company with curtain products, he told him to see one of his subordinates in his office to discuss it. That company eventually became a huge buyer and established my father-in-law’s business. Was that a logical decision, just because some unknown character is hanging around your house everyday like a stalker? No it was an emotional decision. What my father-in-law was showing the President was his passion, belief, commitment, discipline, patience, seriousness, earnestness and guts. That is a pretty good line-up for a new supplier in order to be given a chance. We need to remember that buyers are wanting to know our level of belief in what we are selling. The way we express that is through our passion and commitment to the relationship and the product or service we supply. Is our demeanour showing enough passion, without it seeming fake or contrived? Do we have enough faith in what we are selling, that it naturally pours out of the pores of our skin? Are we painting strong enough word pictures to get the buyer emotionally involved in a future involving what we sell? Audit your own levels of passion when you are in front of the buyer. Do you sound sold on your own offer? Do you sound committed to go the extra mile? Do you sound confident and assured, showing no hesitation? Are you honest about what is possible and what is not possible? Always understand that buyers, whether for themselves or for the company, buy on emotion and justify it with logic. Make sure you can supply that emotional requirement as ...
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    13 分

あらすじ・解説

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
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