エピソード

  • How to Own the Sales Transition Zone
    2025/09/02
    Why mastering client conversations in Japan defines long-term sales success When salespeople meet new clients, the first few minutes set the tone for everything that follows. This “transition zone” between pleasantries and serious discussion is where trust is either built—or broken. Let’s explore how professionals in Japan and globally can own this crucial phase. Why is the sales transition zone so critical? The sales transition zone is the moment when the buyer and seller move from small talk into business. For the client, the first question is usually, “How much will this cost me?”. For the salesperson, the focus is on proving value beyond price. Unless this gap is bridged quickly, the conversation can collapse into a price war. In Japan, where relationship-building and long-term trust are prized, handling this transition with sensitivity is even more critical than in the US or Europe. Western executives may prefer blunt efficiency—“Let’s get straight to business”—but Japanese buyers expect context, respect, and subtlety. Mini-Summary: The transition zone is where price-driven client expectations collide with value-focused sales strategy. Mastering it determines whether the meeting builds trust or breaks down. How should salespeople frame the meeting agenda? After greetings, professionals should set a clear agenda that shows respect for the client’s time. For example: “I appreciate Suzuki-san introducing us. She felt there may be mutual benefit, so today I’d like to explore how our solutions may support your business. I also want to better understand your needs and see if there’s a fit. Are there other items you’d like to cover?” This framing balances structure with flexibility. It prevents the client from feeling “sold to” while subtly keeping control of the meeting. Across industries—from pharmaceuticals to IT services—Japanese clients respond positively when they feel their input is requested early. Mini-Summary: Outlining a flexible agenda signals professionalism and respect, while keeping the salesperson in control of the meeting flow. How can unique selling propositions (USPs) be introduced naturally? Clients don’t want a corporate brochure; they want proof of relevance. Introduce USPs in a conversational way: “We are global soft-skills training experts, here since 1963, specialising in sales training in Japan.” This single sentence embeds four powerful points: global scope, world best practice, 60 years of Japanese experience, and local market adaptation. Companies like Toyota, Rakuten, and Fujitsu look for vendors who demonstrate both international credibility and deep domestic roots. Mini-Summary: Well-crafted introductions should deliver layered USPs that combine global credibility, local experience, and proven relevance. How can salespeople prove credibility with results? Proof must be concrete, relevant, and measurable. For example: “Recently we trained a company in your industry. Salesperson confidence rose 40%, and revenues increased 18% within six months.” This approach works across sectors—manufacturing, finance, and consumer goods—because executives trust comparative results. But credibility evaporates if numbers are exaggerated. In Japan, where long-term relationships matter, any suspicion of dishonesty ends future business. Mini-Summary: Share specific, industry-relevant metrics to prove impact. Honesty is non-negotiable if you want repeat business in Japan. How do you smoothly shift to client questioning? Once credibility is established, invite permission to ask questions: “I don’t know if we could achieve the same results for you, but may I ask a few questions to better understand your situation?” This low-pressure approach keeps the salesperson in control while respecting the client’s space. It allows for uncovering challenges—talent gaps, process inefficiencies, competitive threats—without triggering defensiveness. Japanese executives particularly value humility paired with competence. Mini-Summary: The best transition uses respectful permission to shift into diagnostic questioning, creating trust and revealing real client needs. What if you discover you can’t help the client? Not every prospect is a fit. Forcing a solution damages reputation. Instead, tell the client: “This may not be the right match.” This honesty preserves brand integrity. In Japan’s tight-knit business networks, reputation compounds: one display of integrity can open doors elsewhere. Global comparisons support this: US firms often admire aggressiveness in sales, but in Japan, restraint builds credibility. Long-term success comes not from a single deal, but from a portfolio of reorders, referrals, and reputation. Mini-Summary: Walking away respectfully when there is no fit strengthens credibility and ensures long-term opportunities in Japan’s relationship-driven market. Conclusion Owning the sales transition...
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    13 分
  • Don’t Say “No” For The Client
    2025/08/26
    At the age of sixteen, I was wandering around the streets of a lower working class area in the suburbs of Brisbane, working my first job, trying to sell expensive Encyclopedia Britannica to the punters who lived there. Despite my callow youth, I had a tremendous gift as a salesman. I could tell by looking at the house from the outside whether they were interested or not in buying Encyclopedia Britannica and so could determine whether I should knock on their door or not. I was saying “no” for the client. Obviously, I had no clue what I was doing. The only training we received was to memorise, word for word, a twenty five minute pitch for the buyer, synchronised with showing the flash looking pages inside the encyclopedia. I am sure though there are many much older and wiser salespeople out there, still making that fundamental error I was making. Eventually, I discovered I didn’t have any x-ray vision gift. I was just an idiot. There will be plenty of opportunity for the buyer to say “no”, so we shouldn’t be joining in to support them on that quest. Even before the call, we will have anticipated some potential pushback and we are fully armed and ready to go when it emerges. I was reminded of this x-ray vision into the buyer problem recently. The top salesperson of an organisation I know, said “no” for the buyer. He was an intermediary for me with the client and didn’t like one of the conditions of the sale I was proposing. This was an important source of his commissions for him and they had been a big buyer over a number of years. He had them wrapped up in cotton wool and was extremely nervous about maintaining the relationship. I have learnt the hard way and so I don’t believe in saying “no” for the buyer, so I pushed it. I rejected his rejection and told him to put my request to the client. We got into an elongated email wrangle over this, but not only am I dim most of the time, I am also supremely stubborn, especially when it comes to sales. Stubborn and dim is a lethal combination. He didn’t like it at all, but he held his nose and put my proposition to the client. Guess what? They went for it. As we say in Japan, “even the monkeys fall from the trees” and even Mr. Number One sales guy can get it wrong. I refrained from mentioning that Japanese proverb of course or being a smarty pants and just thanked him for his cooperation. One common case of saying “no” for the client is when the prices are raised for the product or service. Salespeople invariably will start whinging to the boss, that the client will never agree to buy at that higher price. Effectively, they are saying “no” for the buyers. There are many ways to dilute the pain of raising the price. The terms of payment can be elongated. The guarantees and warranties can be expanded. The rise can be counterbalanced by discounts for volume purchases. The proposition can be ramped up on the value equation scale. Additional incentives can be packed together with the original offer to justify the price rise. Services can be thrown into the product purchase process to make it more palatable and vice versa. Interestingly, salespeople complaining about the price increase, spend zero time thinking about how to sell the value increase to the client. Price increases are one thing, but defending existing prices against discounting is another case of having to say “no” to the customer. In Japan, salespeople are very weak in front of the customer. The buyer here isn’t King but GOD and GOD doesn’t brook hearing “no” from salespeople. The constant complaint from our clients is that their firm’s salespeople identify too closely with the client and don’t defend the company’s policies well enough, including pricing. I had the same problem with one of my salespeople. He was happy to discount and take a lower commission, even though the firm made very little profit. He got his base salary and some commission, so he was happy. I wasn’t so happy. I get it - the logic is simple. The salesperson heavily invests in the relationship with the buyer and works hard to defend that relationship, even against their own employer. This sounds crazy, but they know the value of an existing customer, compared to the pain and effort to find a new buyer. This is where the value element has to be worked on more, so that salespeople can justify the existing pricing, without resorting to discounts to get the business. The basic sales skills of the team have to be improved, especially their communication skills. This don’t say “no” for the client arena, shows the real capabilities of the salesperson. Sadly, there is a major population decline underway here and salespeople are in increasingly short supply. The quality of the people we can hire isn’t going to improve, so our sales training mechanisms and our sales leadership mechanisms, become even more...
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    12 分
  • Unlocking Value For Clients
    2025/08/19
    It is seriously sad to be dumb. Nothing annoys me more than when I finally realise something that was so obvious and yet I didn’t see what was there, right in front of my nose. We talk a lot about value creation in relation to pricing, trying to persuade clients that what we are selling is a sensible trade off between the value they seek and the revenue that we seek. We want the value we offer to be both perceived and acknowledged value by the buyer. Often however, we get into a rut in our sales mindset. We carve a neuron groove once in our brain and keep ploughing that same row. Outside stimulation is needed. I realised that fact when I recently did some formal online training. My previous companies had sent me to the Harvard, Stanford and Insead business schools in the past, which of course, were all amazing. However, when I was doing my recent studies, I recalled that it has been some time since I did something formal like that. During the coursework, I realised many things we could do around value provision, which we have not been doing or not doing sufficiently well enough. I am an avid reader, but I also found that the mantra of both “formal” and “informal” lifetime learning is a good one to follow. I found we have had a lot of assets lying around, which we have not fully utilised, hence the “I hate how dumb I am” statement. We need an omnichannel approach. Often, we may have videos hanging around, explaining the benefits and the details of a service or a product. Now the video has an audio track, which we can strip out of the video. This allows us to turn it into a different medium, allowing clients to access the information in that format. So many people are now processing information through audio, thanks to the recent proliferation of podcasts and audiobooks. Buyers are busy, busy and so many are multi-tasking while listening. Having audio alternatives may help to save them valuable time, compared to them having to sit down and watch our video. Depending on the content, the audio might also become a training tool for our own staff. Now if that video is sitting there on YouTube for free, then once people have watched it, suddenly, a whole world of YouTube’s other groovy offerings appears on your client’s screen. They are being tempted to look at our competitor’s videos. That is not a great result for us. We want to keep the client on our website for as long as possible. There are companies like Wistia, for example, which will host the videos for a monthly fee. These videos are no longer mashed into YouTube’s offerings, but sit independently, such that the client cannot stray into competitor territory. We want to build a moat to keep the client in our ecosystem, so that after watching the video on Wistia, they have to come back to us. Are you able to free your clients from the YouTube loop and make sure they escape your rival’s charms? The audio track can also be run through AI programmes like Descript, which will turn sound into text. Once the text emerges, we need to edit the content, because the AI is good, but it is not perfect. Once we have the corrected information in text, it can go into our newsletters, get it on to our website and we can send it out to clients. When we have text in English, we can translate it into Japanese and use that for clients. We can use this text information to supplement other information we are going to send to clients or include it in our after sales service programmes. Do you have any opportunities to create text, which didn’t exist as text before and find ways to employ this to add more value for clients? Often we have multiple solutions for clients, which we could bundle together. As salespeople though, we tend to be stuck in that Johnny One Note neuron groove and only sell clients one solution. An ideal bundle would be so attractive that the client would be willing to enter into a subscription format to pay something upfront for a whole year or each month or each quarter. The point is to get them to sign up for more than an episodic transaction that always has a formal completion date. We want repeat business and this subscription model is one way to weld the relationship between buyer and seller closer together. Once we become part of their ongoing business plans, it reduces the buying friction. Importantly, it also increases their internal friction to turn the buying process off. It is always easier to keep something going, than to start it in the first place. This builds a moat around our client, denying our rivals an option to steal our business. So, what could you bundle together to create a no-brainer, totally stupendous offer for the buyer? There might be some administration associated with using our type of product or service. The buying entity inside the client’s company is always time poor. Perhaps we can offer a system which supplies the service ...
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    13 分
  • Selling As A Team
    2025/08/12

    When we think of team selling, we imagine a room with the buyers on one side of the table and we are lined up on the other. There is another type of team selling and that is taking place before we get anywhere near the client. It might be working together as a Sales Mastermind panel to brainstorm potential clients to target or strategising campaigns or plotting the approach to adopt with a buyer. Salespeople earn their remuneration through a combination of base salary and commission or bonus in Japan. There are very few jobs here in sales, which are 100% commission, simply because salespeople don’t have to accept that model. There is always a demand here for salespeople and in fact the declining population is keeping a lot of dud salespeople afloat.

    Given there is not much 100% commission selling going on, there is also not so much salesperson competition going on with each other. There is competition, but the losers usually don’t get fired, as they might in some Western business environments. So the opportunity is there to collaborate more on approaches to the client and generating more business. What often happens though is, salespeople tend to operate from within their own little castles. They have their moat around their existing clients, which they serve and they spend their time trying to find new clients by themselves. They may have sales managers, but in these modern times, sales managers are expected to produce revenues as well. That means there isn't a lot of coaching going on.

    If we have one person looking at the client through the prism of their own experience, things get a bit thin quickly, if that person doesn’t have such a wealth of experience. It would be more logical to gather a team of salespeople together and look at the best approach for that client, rather than relying on the best efforts of a single person. But we don’t do this very often. This tends to be because of a territorial concept, where each salesperson has their clients and they should take care of them, without wasting anyone’s time, especially when they are getting paid a commission or a bonus, for the sale.

    This does make sense at one level, but we are missing out on the sum of the parts being able to exceed the whole here. This is often a culture issue within sales teams. If you run things with tight individual accountability, it is hard to get other salespeople to assist a colleague. As leaders we need to establish a framework for teamwork even in a commission based world of focused individual benefit. The money getting paid out doesn’t change, but the time becomes the sticking point. How do we get salespeople to spend time to help others be more successful?

    One way to do this it to treat a particular client as a project and pull in other salespeople to work on the best approach. Once the salesperson in question has spoken with the client, then we need to gather the Sales Mastermind together again and brainstorm what would be the ideal solution. This should be one of the tasks for the sales manager, but often they are swamped with their own clients and trying to keep the whole sales team coordinated and moving forward. Breaking out time for one-on-one discussions may simply not be happening and the salespeople are often left to their own devices.

    When we approach this on the project level, the time required becomes contained and less oppressive for the other salespeople. It is also a case of quid pro quo too, because it will be their turn to benefit next time, from having more heads than one tackling client problems and helping match the best solutions. This is where the sales manager can play a role in setting up the project teams and monitoring progress.

    It is good for the salespeople because one day they will become sales managers and will need to introduce similar systems into their own teams. Funnily enough, we often have the experience of learning a lot ourselves, when we are working on someone else’s problem. We can be too close to our own issues and be blind to aspects which could have an important bearing, but we cannot see the wood for the trees. Somehow looking at another’s problem brings clarity for us about our own contemplations.

    There are many benefits to using Sales Masterminds from within the team, working together for the best outcomes for the client. There is an education process going on both up and down the scale of experience, as we all come away from the process that little better educated in our craft.

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    10 分
  • Four Client Focus Areas For Salespeople
    2025/08/05

    was studying an online learning programme from Professor Scott Galloway, where he talked about Appealing To Human Instincts. His take was from the strategy angle, but I realised that this same framework would be useful for sales too. In sales we do our best to engage the client. We try to develop sophisticated questions to help us unearth the stated and unstated needs of the buyer. Professor Galloway's pedagogical construct can give us another perspective on buyer dynamics.

    The first Human Instinct nominated was the brain. This is our logos, our rational, logical, analytical mode. What are the unanswered questions and key internal conversations occupying the minds of our buyers. If we can meet the buyer in their thought process, then we are more likely to be able to understand their needs and then be in a position to meet those needs.

    We know that some buyers will be analytical types, for whom three decimal places is unremarkable when considering data. Often though salespeople are big picture. Macro types who shun this level of detail because they feel it is boring. They love the sale and abhor the paperwork which goes along with it. I had two insurance salesmen in my home trying to get me to buy various policies. What astounded me was they were middle aged, well experienced gentlemen and yet they couldn’t fill out the paperwork correctly, so we had to do it again. They loved the conversation with me but not the conversation with the fine print in the contract.

    The next instinct was the heart. Our emotions are there for all to see, if the right stimulation is provided. We laugh, cry, get angry, become determined and give up, based around our emotional configuration at any point in the day. Salespeople walk into a mine field of buyer emotions, with no way of knowing which particular configuration we have bumped into today. Our job is to gauge as quickly as possible where the buyer is emotionally and how they prefer to communicate at that moment. We know our tempers once frayed, tend to trigger a supreme impatience with everything. Woe be tied a salesperson who cannot “kuki wo yomu” or read the air, as we say in Japanese, to understand this client needs another visit on a better day for them.

    Instinct number three was the gut. This reminded me of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where survival was at the bottom and became the prism through which information and ideas were judged. Company buyers are always bound firmly by risk reduction, budget stringencies, cash flow imperatives and fears for the future. Everyone loves a bargain except salespeople, especially those salespeople who have commissions attached to the sale price. Value is the only antidote for this price discount swamp fever infecting buyers. Babbling on about features won’t cut it. Yet amazingly this is the step where many salespeople check out. They never even attempt to consider scaling the summit. We had better migrate up the value scale and talk about the application of the benefits. We need to lock in the evidence where this has worked magnificently somewhere else, for this buyer to feel safe that there are precedents.

    The fourth instinct was sex appeal. Buyers want to attract attention to themselves as capable, highly promotable, sexy beasts attracting a lot of favourable accord. Our role is to make them look like heroes, legends, masters of the universe. They want to elevate their worth, status and value within the organisation. “Look at me, I am clever” they want to say. We become their instrument to promote that message by giving them our product or service, which becomes a game changer inside the client company.

    Salespeople have to be master jugglers, elevating many balls in the air at the same time. We need to see our buyers in a holistic manner, to fully appreciate the tack we need to take buyer by buyer, because they are all different. This takes a change in the sales mindset because most salespeople are focused on themselves, their commission, their Beemer upgrade and a thousand other things, which the buyer couldn’t care less about.

    So next time we sit down with a buyer, we need to make sure we are engaging all of their human instincts and appealing to them from many angles.

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    11 分
  • How To Sell from The Stage
    2025/07/29

    Group crowdsourcing has been around since cave dweller days. Gathering a crowd of prospects and getting them to buy your stuff is a standard method of making more sales or starting conversations which hopefully will lead to sales. Trade shows provide booths but also speaking events, if you pay more dough to attend. These days the event will most likely be online rather than in person, but the basics are common. “We all love to buy but we don’t want to be sold”, should be a mantra all salespeople embrace, especially with selling from the stage.

    The common approach at events is to provide a lot of information, generally the features of the product and then trot out the sales pitch at the end. As an audience, we brace ourselves because we see the switch from value to pitch coming. Mentally, we get our sceptic hat out and put it on ready for the sales blurb. When you think about it this is a pretty dumb approach.

    The giving value first idea is a good one, but why separate the value from the pitch at the end? Why not integrate the two together, so there is no audience bracing required? It all comes back to design. We have all grown up with the explanation, then pitch model, so we tend to just accept that is how it is done. This is even though on other occasions as audience members ourselves, we are experiencing that “brace yourself” mental switch. It is a bit strange isn’t it, so why not learn from our own experience and make a change for the better.

    The talk will be broken down into chapters. Chapter One is the opening. This is where we have to say something that snaps a distracted, sceptical audience member out of their social media induced coma and gets them to listen to us. We may share a really surprising piece of high value data or information. We might tell a gripping story that attracts the audience. We might ask a devilish question that completely consumes the attention of the audience.

    Next we start to move into some features of the solution we are proffering and critically, we must link these to the applied benefits. We do this by using examples of what other buyers have done with our solution so that the audience can draw a direct line between the purchase and the benefit. These claims have to be backed up with solid evidence or it comes across as salesperson hot air.

    At this point we need to ask a question which gets the audience thinking about their situation. It must be subtle, rather than bold outbursts like “You should have this shouldn’t you?”. Rather we can say, “can you see an area of your business where this widget would increase revenues or reduce costs?”. We then say nothing and let that question hang in the air, to allow the audience to focus on it and make a mental evaluation for themselves.

    We will keep repeating this formula in each chapter – feature, benefit, application of the benefit, evidence and then a subtle question. We can't keep repeating the exact same question every time, because that sounds ridiculous, so we need a stock of these. Others could be, “Thinking about some of your strategies for your business, can you see where having this widget would help advance the business for you?”, or “Even incremental advances are welcome, so can you see where you could gain a five, ten or fifteen percent improvement in results through applying this widget to your business?”, or “Business is super competitive today so stealing a march on your rivals is always a challenge. Can you see an avenue through using this widget which will differentiate you from your competitors in the minds of your buyers?”.

    By the time we get to the end of our presentation, we will have used a variety of questions which will resonate differently with each of our potential clients, because not all of their situations are identical. We need to use this insight when we are designing our questions, hoping at least one will hit the bullseye for a particular client.

    We finish off with inviting members of the audience to stay back and chat, if they found some solutions to their business issues from our talk. At no point could the audience members “brace for impact” from our sales pitch. We have eliminated resistance to what we are saying. We have also come across as a company who focuses on value for clients and are not a collection of rabid shysters, spivs, hucksters and dodgy carnival barkers. Even if they don’t buy from us today, our reputation will have been enhanced and they are more likely to look favourably on us in the future.

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    11 分
  • "That Sounds Pricey"
    2025/07/22
    Japanese salespeople should love to hear “that sounds pricey” from buyers. Why? Because they know that this statement is the most common objection to arise in response to their sales presentation and they are completely ready for it. It is one of the simplest buyer pushback answers to deal with too. Well, simple that is, if you are trained in sales and know what you are doing. Untrained salespeople really make a big hot mess of this one. They want to argue the point about pricing with the buyer. Or they want to use their force of will to bully the buyer into buying. Or they want to use one of those American style aggressive response statements, to try and push the deal over the line. This is all nonsense. The only words emerging from our lips should be “Thank you. May I ask you why you say that?”. We could say something else like “compared to what?”, which is a pretty snappy rejoinder, but it is a bit too aggressive in this situation and doesn't really yield enough information about buyer thinking. We could simply drop the price to be “competitive”, but that is the mark of the weak, whining, unwashed, pathetic salesperson. We need to do better than that, unless that proffered discount is directly linked to certain purchase volume prerequisites. When we first hear “that sounds pricey” we may feel some pressure to justify our numbers. That is totally the wrong way of thinking. That number of ours is there for a reason. There is a justification for that number, based on the value it provides. There are plenty of clients willing and happy to pay that number for the goods or services they receive in exchange. When we sweetly ask why they say that, we now have moved the pressure for justification back to the buyer. This is called “tossing back the porcupine”. The comment “pricey” is like a spiky porcupine being thrown to us and it is tricky to handle, without incurring lots of pain. We ask “why” thus shooting the porcupine back to the buyer and we can sit there cool calm and collected and listen to what they have to say. This is important because we need to use our highest level of empathetic listening to comprehend what they are saying, in order to understand what is really on their mind. Our object in sales is to meet the buyer in the conversation they are having in their own mind. That will be a compilation of their current situation, their experiences to date, their personal situation and a million other factors which we will never be privy to. Asking them that “why” question gives us the chance to tune in to what is important for them and to alert us to factor in things which we hadn’t considered before. I was given that price pushback for some training I was proposing to the HR team at a Japanese company. I asked them the “why” question and then just sat there stone cold silent. They did not reply immediately. It was one of those long uncomfortable silences for foreigners. Fortunately, I have learned to become comfortable with silence in Japan. After what seemed an absolute age, they explained that they are given a quarterly budget for training and my number was over that quarterly limit. Did I rail against the inequity of having such dopey quarterly budgets or rage that they should change their entire budgeting system and get that accounting department better geared up to suit my preferred pricing? No. I sweetly asked, “If we could spread the payment across two quarters, would that be of any help?” and again I shut up and didn’t say one more word. They looked at each other and I saw a light get switched on inside their heads and they said that would work. So, it wasn’t too pricey after all. It was too much price for that arbitrary temporal unit called a quarter of the year. After the buyer tells us all the good reasons why our price is too high, we need to be packing heavy with our value justification for the number we have just quoted. This is why salespeople need to be well prepared and practice for this “that sounds pricey” pushback. Trying to wing it and produce some intellectual and articulation magic on the spot is possible. Unlikely though, especially when your brain is frozen with fear getting that infamous pushback. Recently a multinational client wanted presentation training in Japan, after having conducted training in APAC with another provider who was based out of Hong Kong. They were unable to deliver in Japan so the client contacted us. I gave them my proposal and they told me my number was “pricey”. When I sweetly asked “why”, they not so sweetly told me that the other vendor did the exact same training for a price significantly at a discount to what I was proposing. They said that I should match this other provider, whom I had never heard of. I checked them out. They didn’t have a 109 year history of teaching presentation skills, a track record of 58 ...
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    14 分
  • The Craziness Of Sales In Japan
    2025/07/15
    Japan’s image as a sophisticated country with a solid, unique traditional culture is well placed. For example, every year around 130,000 Shinkansen bullet trains run between Tokyo and Osaka, bolting through the countryside at speeds of up to 285 kilometers an hour and boast an average arrival delay of 24 seconds. Think about that average, sustained over a whole year! Such amazing efficiency here is combined with basically no guns, no drugs, no litter, no graffiti, very little crime and the people are so polite and considerate. If you step on their foot in the crowded subway cars, they apologise to you for getting their foot in the wrong place. If you drop your wallet there is a close to 100% chance of you getting it back, intact. Considering all of the above and with the biggest concentration of Michelin three star restaurants in the world, no wonder Tokyo is the best city in the world to live in. Once Covid is contained, put Japan on your bucket list folks, you won’t regret it. Yet sales professionalism is still so far behind, by Western standards. I am going to make incredibly broad, general statements here, but actually they are true for most salespeople in Japan. How do I know this? We have been teaching sales training here since 1963 and these are the things companies consistently ask us to fix. Let’s highlight a few things which may surprise you about sales in Japan. Asking for the order is avoided. Saying “no” is culturally taboo, so the best way to avoid having to say it or to hear it, is to save everyone’s face and leave the outcome deliberately vague. There are shelves of books in English on how to close the sale, many are in translation, but not a great take up here as yet. When the seller meets any resistance from the buyer, the first reflex is to drop the price by 20%. Western sales managers would be apoplectic if this was the default objection handling mechanism. Here defending your price, through explaining the value, is thrown overboard and simple price point reductions are the preferred lever.Objection handling skills are weak, because the seller sees the buyer not as a King but as a God. The seller’s job is to do everything God wants. The salespeople are predominantly on base salary and bonus remuneration arrangements, so not much commission sales “fire in the belly” going on here.Salespeople love the spec, the data, the detail and are not so keen on the application of the benefits. How do we know this? I am a buyer here too and in they come bearing their catalogue, flyer or their slide deck to take me through all the details. Surprisingly, they never rise above the spec waterline to talk about value or benefits or how to apply the benefits. It is the same in our sales classes and we see this phenomenon in the role play sequences. Salespeople struggle to think about what the spec represents in terms of the benefits to the buyer.This opens up the can of worms about understanding buyer needs. By any definition, getting straight into the detail of the product or service, without asking the buyer any questions, is insanity. Yet this is normal here. So much for all that slick American consultative sales jive. We are back to the God problem. The seller must not brook God’s displeasure by rude behaviour, such as asking questions about what are their firm’s problems.Ergo, the buyer completely controls the sale’s conversation. They demand the pitch be made straight up, so that they can lacerate it, to make sure all the risk has been cut out. Buyers are incredibly risk averse in Japan. This a zero default, no errors, no mistakes business culture. This is great as a consumer of course. However, the seller is not considered a partner here, more of a slave to the buyer’s every whim and demand.So the Japan business sales process is pretty “refined”. There are only three steps. The salesperson opens with their pitch, then we move immediately to client objections. Next, the buyer will get back to you, but probably not. How does any business get done here? Please see the next section!Sellers really prefer to concentrate on existing clients, rather than running around trying to find new clients. They rely on the firm brand to do all the prospecting work, rather than their skill as a professional in sales. Hunters are a rare breed of salesperson in Japan, as everyone prefers being a farmer. This is probably true of everywhere, because obviously it is much easier to keep the business going, than to start a new piece of business. Japanese salespeople just take it to new heights of speciality.Salespeople never think to ask permission of the buyer to ask questions. Such a simple thing, but so hard to break out of your own cultural context to actually execute. Once we teach them how easy it is, the scales literally fall from their eyes and they become true believers in asking questions, before introducing anything about the ...
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