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381 The Two-Step Process When Selling In Japan

THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Release Date: 04/16/2024

383 Being Convincing In Front Of The Buyer In Japan

THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Blarney, snake oil, silver tongued – the list goes on to describe salespeople convincing buyers to buy. Now buyers know this and are always guarded, because they don’t want to be duped and make a bad decision. I am sure we have all been conned by a salesperson at some point in time, in matters great and small. Regardless, we don’t like it. We feel we have been made fools of and have acted unintelligently. Our professional value has been impugned, our feelings of self-importance diminished and we feel like a mug. This is what we are facing every time we start to...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

More Episodes

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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