371 The Real Know, Like and Trust In Sales: Part Three – TRUST
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 01/30/2024
382 Selling To Sceptics On The Small Screen In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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...
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381 The Two-Step Process When Selling In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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...
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Sell With Passion In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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...
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380 Dress For Success When Selling In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
I recently launched a new project called Fare Bella Figura – Make a Good Impression. Every day I take a photograph of what I am wearing and then I go into detail about why I am wearing it and put it up on social media. To my astonishment, these posts get very high impressions and a strong following. It is ironic for me. I have written over 3000 articles on hard core subjects like sales, leadership and presentations, but these don’t get the same level of engagement. Like this article, I craft it for my audience and work hard on the content and yet articles about my suit...
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379 Selling Yourself From Stage In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Public speaking spots are a great way to get attention for ourselves and what we sell. This is mass prospecting on steroids. The key notion here is we are selling ourselves rather than our solution in detail. This is an important delineation. We want to outline the issue and tell the audience what can be done, but we hold back on the “how” piece. This is a bit tricky, because the attendees are looking for the how bit, so that they can apply it to fix their issues by themselves. We don’t want that because we don’t get paid. We are here to fix...
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378 How We Lose Clients In Sales In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Finding clients is expensive. We pay Google a lot of money to buy search words. We pay them each time someone clicks on the link on the page we turn up on in their search algorithm. We monitor the pay per click cost, naturally always striving the drive down the cost of client acquisition. If we have the right type of product, we may be paying for sponsored posts to appear in targeted individuals’ social media feeds. This is never an exact science, so there is still a fair bit of shotgun targeting going on, rather than sniper focus on buyers. If we go to...
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377 Using Demonstrations and Trial Lessons To Sell In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Salespeople are good talkers. In fact, they are often so good, they decide to do all the talking. They try to browbeat the buyer into submission. Endless details are shared with the client about the intricacies of the widget, expecting that the features will sell the product or service. Do we buy features though? Actually, we buy evidence that this has worked for another buyer very similar to us, in a very similar current situation in their business. We are looking for proof to reduce our risk. To get us to the proof point, we make a big deal about how the...
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376 The Buyer Is Never On Your Schedule In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
I am very active networking here in Tokyo, scouring high and low for likely buyers of our training solutions. I attend with one purpose – “work the room” and as a Grant Cardone likes to say, find out “who’s got my money”. I have compressed my pitch down to ten seconds when I meet a possible buyer at an event. My meishi business card is the tool of choice in this regard. Most people here have English on one side and Japanese on the other. I was like that too until I got smarter about selling our services. Typically, I would hand over my business card - Dr....
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375 Content Marketing Is Great For Japan Sales But Can Be Fraught
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Access to social media has really democratised salespeople’s ability to sell themselves to a broader audience. Once upon a time, we were reliant on the efforts of the marketing team to get the message out and, in rare cases, the PR team to promote us. Neither group saw it as their job to help us as a salesperson, and they were more concentrated on the brand. Today we have the world at our beck and call through social media. We can promote ourselves through our intellectual property. We can post blogs on areas of our expertise. We can do video and upload that to...
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374 Japan Small Businesses Must Pick Up The Dregs Of Sales
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Japan is facing a serious shortage of staff in many industries. The job-to-applicant ratio rose to 1.28, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare announced recently. The ratio means there were 128 job openings for every 100 job seekers.The figure has not yet reached the pre-pandemic level of 1.6 in 2019. The hospitality sector in particular, lost a lot of part-time staff during Covid and they haven’t returned in numbers sufficient to match the needs of employers. Hotels are getting back to pre-Covid occupancy rates, but they worry they don’t have enough staff to clean rooms...
info_outlineIn the first two parts of this three part series we have gone deep on how to become known and liked by buyers. That is all very well, but if they don’t trust us, they won’t buy our solutions if they can avoid it. If you are in an industry where the supply side is totally restricted and the buyers have to compete for supply, then lucky you. I have never had that luxury and I would guess 99.9% of salespeople are in my boat.
How do we get buyers to trust us? The answer is in our kokorogamae. This is our true intention. What is in our hearts as salespeople? Are we focused on what we get, our commissions, our new car, our benefit, making our targets to get the Sales Director’s jackboot off our neck? Or are we focused on the buyer’s interests. Is our success wrapped up inside the buyer’s success? One of my favourite sales trainers is Zig Ziglar, whose famous insight is: “you can get everything you want in this life, if you will just help enough other people get what they want”. Zig has passed away already, but he hit on a profound building block of gaining buyer trust with his philosophy.
Speaking of which, do you have a sales philosophy? Have you set out your approach to sales, to establish the guardrails and boundaries of your actions and behaviours. Of course, a wonderful sales philosophy is easy to embrace. Remember though that everyone has a plan until they are punched in the mouth. In sales, that means not selling and if you are on 100% commission that means not eating. Even if you are not on 100% commission, it means getting fired and having to find another job.
Are you pushing certain solutions to buyers because they are the group with the highest commissions for you? Are you putting your personal interests ahead of those of the buyer? When things are going well, then all of these issues can be eliminated, but when you are hungry and can’t support your family, then your own rules get thrown out the window and you become desperate.
There is nothing worse in the business world than a desperate salesperson. They will damage two brands in perpetuity. One will be the company brand. They will create distrust of their company because why would an honest, reputable, reliable company tolerate dodgy salespeople? The other brand is their personal brand as a businessperson. I remember a salesperson relating to me how he had to keep going to new towns in the US to find new clients, because the quality of his solution was bad and once the buyers discovered that fact, he couldn’t show his face in that town again. That was a companywide issue, but I silently asked myself why did he keep working for that dodgy company? What was his kokorogamae as a salesperson?
In another case, we were talking with a well-known businessperson here in Tokyo, about a possible collaboration, when up popped this note in my social media feed; “Has anyone seem Mr. X, because he owes me money?”. Wow! I knew the author of this social media post, so I went online and checked Mr. X out a bit more thoroughly and what a tangled mess I found. So many accusations of no trust and broken trust that it was scary. Needless to say, we stopped the talks with him immediately. What was his kokorogamae? His reputation never recovered from this incident.
My point of view is that if you are not making it in sales, then get out and leave the profession to the rest of us, who know what we are doing and who have the correct kokorogamae. All that bad actors do is pollute our profession and make it that much harder for the vast majority of us to win the trust of our buyers.
When you have the interest of the buyer at the forefront of your approach to the deal, then you will always make the right decisions. Your will take the long term view and try and build up a reputation of being trusted and always dealing fairly with everyone. That personal brand is worth a fortune and only an idiot would do anything to destroy it.
It takes a lot of consistency to build it and this is where having a correct kokorogamae comes in to guide us, when we have to make tough decisions. If we are in a transactional business model then maybe none of this matters. But seriously, is that the type of sales life we want? Don’t we want to have a solid book of repeat business, with buyers who trust us and who appreciate our kokorgamae?
We all know what is the right thing to do. We have to make a choice about whether we are going to defend that approach, against all of the pressure and temptations which will arise or not. Yes, sometimes we will make less money on a sale. Yes, sometimes we will leave money on the table in a sale. But if our mindset is long-term, then we can amortise these occasions against a long successful career in sales. We will benefit a lot more from being the choice of partner by our buyers, because they know we are honest, can be trusted and we always have their interests as our first priority.
Where do you locate your kokorogamae – your true intention?