367 Dealing with Organisational Distractions When Selling
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 11/07/2023
Japan Doesn’t Change in Sales
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Why Western sales revolutions haven’t reshaped Japanese selling practices Sales gurus often argue that “sales has changed.” They introduce new frameworks—SPIN Selling, Consultative Selling, Challenger Selling—that dominate Western business schools and corporate training. But in Japan, sales methods look surprisingly similar to how they did decades ago. Why hasn’t Japan embraced these waves of change? Let’s break it down. Why has Japan resisted Western sales revolutions? Japan’s business culture is defined by consensus decision-making. Unlike in the US, where one buyer may...
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Building Customer Loyalty
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Why trust is the ultimate driver of long-term sales success in Japan Salespeople everywhere know that trust is essential for winning deals, but in Japan, trust is the difference between a one-off sale and a lifelong customer. Research shows that 63% of buyers prefer to purchase from someone they completely trust—even over someone offering a lower price. In a market where relationships outweigh transactions, trust doesn’t just support sales, it builds loyalty. Why does trust outweigh price in Japanese sales? While discounting may win a deal, it doesn’t create loyalty. Trust, on the...
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How to Own the Sales Transition Zone
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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...
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Don’t Say “No” For The Client
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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...
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Unlocking Value For Clients
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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...
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Selling As A Team
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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,...
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Four Client Focus Areas For Salespeople
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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,...
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How To Sell from The Stage
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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...
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"That Sounds Pricey"
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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...
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The Craziness Of Sales In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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...
info_outlineWe have all seen it – the pendulum swings of organisational change. You can basically break out your stopwatch and get the timing down perfectly. The new CEO arrives and reverses whatever the predecessor was doing. If things had been centralised, now everything will be decentralised. Then here we are five years later, another CEO and we reverse course again. In the sales area, the goalposts keep moving. The raw numbers chase may now be leavened with big numbers, but from a better quality of client, as we move more up market. Or it may be that we spread the risks, by having a lot of middle level clients, rather than being too exposed and dependent on the big fish and our occasional whales. Or it may be profit, rather than market share, is the Holy Grail of the moment.
There is no doubt that these types of changes are distracting for salespeople. We get into a rhythm, and we are well organised and then next thing a big change swings through and we have to re-organise our lives and clients. We may have a campaign to get behind which alters how we have been working. It may impact the pricing, as we trade profitability for volume or the other way around. We may be on a mission to increase the number of new clients and bulk up the sales funnel.
One of the issues is that these distractions take our eye off the ball with our clients. We are suddenly wrapped up in admin activities and our time for prospecting is being diminished with endless meetings, new systems and more reporting requirements. Most salespeople are big picture expressive types. They hate the admin, the forms, the inputting, the detail focus. They feel they could be better off spending their time with buyers.
We may get a new Section or Division boss and the whole picture changes immediately as the new broom makes changes to territory or client allocation or commissions or whatever they feel like doing. These changes drive the entire team’s focus inwards and away from clients. We know this is bad, but we are swept up in the changes. We are desperately trying to navigate a fast flowing stream, which has just transitioned into deadly white water.
The answer to these externally generated woes is our time management discipline. If we think about it, time is all we have. Therefore, what we do with it determines our level of success. When we are under siege by these types of changes, we can lose control of our time and feel we are just being buffeted and beaten by the waves of the broiling white water, as we try to avoid the rocks and waterfalls. We know that Quadrant Two is where the gold is kept – Not Urgent but Important activities like planning.
We cannot do everything every day. That is just impossible in this modern business world, so we need to be focused on doing the most important things every day. The only way to get that done is to plan to do it and to stop all of the noise and distraction from taking us away from our most important goals for the day. The number of things we can get done during these distracting times may be less than normal, but at least if we are only doing one or two of the most key things, we will stay on track as the chaos unfolds around us. The important thing is that this is what we do every day and not just occasionally when the planets align. That regularity builds the discipline, because our time control is working to help us do better, with the time we have. Okay sometimes we are swept away by the chaos and our time is being wasted, but that loss needs to be sequestered to just that day. The very next day we get back into the discipline of regaining control over our time.
There are three groups of clients we face. Those who will never buy from us, those who will buy eventually and those who will buy right now. In times of chaotic organisational change, we need to be concentrated on those who will buy now and keep working on those who will buy at some point in the future. We need to be brutal with sorting out who is who and making some tough decisions about where we spend our time.
It may require us to fire some argumentative clients who take up a lot of our time, but don’t want to pay our fees and are basically a noisy pain. When we are short on time, we have to place a high value on how we spend our days and with whom we choose to spend them. Time is all we have so, we must invest it wisely and in chaos, that dictum become even more important. You can calculate the cost of your time – divide the income you want by the hours available to earn it and you come up with your effective hourly rate. It is always humbling to do this exercise. You quickly realise if you don’t keep a tight rein on your time, you can easily be working long hours for peanuts. Troublesome clients are expensive in this calculation. Fire them and concentrate your energy and time on wonderful clients, who will become lifetime business partners.