377 Using Demonstrations and Trial Lessons To Sell In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 03/12/2024
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_outlineSalespeople 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 buyer can apply the benefits of our solution inside their company. Is that what happens in reality though?
In Japan, judging by what our clients tell us and by the raw material we find attending our training classes, it would be a miracle if the salesperson went through these critical five phases of the explanation of the solution: 1. feature 2. benefit 3. application of the benefit 4. evidence and 5. trial close. Most Japanese salespeople are absolute experts on the most intimate details to do with the features. However, they completely forget to expand that information to elucidate the benefits and beyond that, they have no clue what is supposed to come next.
In fact, finding a similar client in a similar situation in the current market is usually a stretch for us in sales. Even if we had such a rare case, often we are precluded from talking about it because of certain clauses in the contract or by a Non-Disclosure Agreement we signed.
How do we prove what we are saying then? This is where a trial session or a demonstration comes in handy. We can talk as much as we like about how great we are and our solution, but seeing is believing. If it is equipment, then running the machine can show whether the output will satisfy the demands of the buyer. If it is a service, we may have to recreate the situation and show how we do things.
Recently we did both. We had a request from one of Japan’s biggest financial institutions to run a sales training session, to see if we have what they want for their 3000 person sales team. In any trial, we have to make a decision on what we will choose for the content?
My advice would always be to choose the most difficult content. Isolate out the areas where everyone really struggles. This is usually the most relevant content and also the content which they currently have the most trouble with too. If the content is too easy, then they will think they can do it themselves and therefore they don’t need us.
In the services sector, this also raises the bar on the delivery side of things. Complex content needs a lot of expertise to deliver it professionally. If they are thinking to bring it in-house, they may watch the session and decide that they do not have the right resources to pull that off by themselves. Ergo, they have to buy from us to eliminate the gap they are facing between where they are and where they want to be.
In a demonstration, similar to a trial session, getting the participants to get their hands dirty is critical. Theory is fine, but doing it for real is a totally different thing. I was teaching a module on “How To Disagree Agreeably” to the leadership team of one of the 5 star hotels here in Tokyo. We went through the theory and then we had the role play practice. It was revealing how much they struggled to replace their old habits with what they had just learnt. It really brought home the importance of not just understanding things intellectually, but the importance of getting it to gel inside yourself and make it your own.
When we run a session or a demonstration, the client can see the content relevancy for their need and our expertise to deliver it to the team. We can usually customise the content further, if it is not quite where they need it. The delivery part shows our professional standards, our ability to relate to the team and whether we can be trusted. We have talked up a big game in the first few meetings about how great we are and now it is “game time” to show what we have. These impressions have to match up or there is no trust. No trust means no sale and we can’t have that outcome, can we!