375 Content Marketing Is Great For Japan Sales But Can Be Fraught
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 02/27/2024
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_outlineAccess 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 YouTube, one of the biggest and most powerful search engines. There are so many paths to the mountaintop, and they are all free. Of course, the platforms are looking for money and so they shaft us and only show our stuff to a minute section of our followers, but the price is right.
I was making this point in a recent speech to the American Chamber here in Tokyo, which you can see on YouTube. One question following my recommendation to salespeople to get out there and promote theirexpertise and experience, was “what about the haters?”. It is a good point and if you are delicate and sensitive, then social media could be a bruising encounter for you and your content. Or like me, you can just ignore it and work on the basis that people who get it know you are an expert, because they consume your content and they will ignore the haters as well.
Let me provide a real life case study for you. I was recently involved in a thread on LinkedIn responding to a post by the author about promoting your credentials when speaking in Japan, otherwise the audience won’t trust what you say. I didn’t agree with the way this was characterised by the author and so added my “expert” comment. Most people just ignored what I was saying, because they had what they wanted to say as their main interest and fair enough. One person though said, “master trainer and executive coach coming in to bash an entire 125 million people country as non-professional in a single comment and blatantly disregard any suggestion on how to customize the message to appeal to a specific audience. Excellent communication strategy! 笑”.
So what would you do with this type of criticism?
We can ignore it, as I suggested during my AmCham speech, or we can choose to expose it. On this occasion, I decided to expose it. This was my reply, “tell us your experience and share your insights. I am relating mine based on my experience here since 1979 and over 550 public speeches in Japan. Your comment doesn’t match with what I am suggesting from what I can see. What do you suggest that is diametrically opposed to what I am saying? I have published 373 blogs on LinkedIn on presenting in Japan and the same number of recordings for my podcast The Japan Presentations Series and published my book Japan Presentations Mastery as well as teaching the High Impact Presentations course. How about you - tell us what you have done?”.
As you see, I am heaping on my own credibility in my reply and asking the critic to pony up and tell us their credentials. I chose this route for a simple reason. I have a very high profile here because I have published 7 books, including three best sellers, and release six audio podcasts and three video podcasts a week. I also pump out four additional videos a day through LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram and Threads. You may not have this type of onslaught happening and can simply ignore the irritation. I didn’t plan it this way, but I also drown out any critics, because of the constant flow of content I keep posting every day. Their previous negative posting gets pushed down the fold in the screen and just disappears. It remains high in their postings on their page, but is crushed by my new posts on my page and is soon forgotten.
In my reply, I made a special point of not criticising the person making the negative comment, but challenged them to put up and tell us what they would recommend. This reply comes across as reasonable and not getting bogged down in the mud and the blood of personal recriminations. Never go there, because this is our public profile and we have to maintain our professional decorum.
Will I keep going in my responses, if they keep adding criticisms? Probably not. They have been challenged to show what they know. If they go the personal attack route, it is better to stand above the riffraff and ignore their salvos. People reading the thread will see they have got no experience or expertise and will discount what they say as mere opinion.
As salespeople, we should use social media etc., to get our expertise out there for potential buyers to find us and to assure potential buyers we meet, that we are the real deal. Today, buyers will search us out before they meet us to better understand who they are dealing with.
Now, if they searched on you, what will they find? In my case, everything is business. I chose to not to mix business with personal on social media. I want to present myself as an expert in leadership, sales, communications and presentations because as a training company, that is what we provide to our clients. It is always congruent. I don’t stray from those areas because I am conscious I have a limit to my time and my expertise. I try to control what the potential buyer sees from me. In this way, I can control my personal and professional brand.