367 Dealing with Organisational Distractions When Selling
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 11/07/2023
Bringing More Marketing Into Sales Calls
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Salespeople have sales tools which often are not thoroughly thought through enough. These can be flyers, catalogues, slide decks, etc. They can also be proposals, quotations and invoices. Usually the salespeople are given the tools as they are and either don’t ask for improvements or don’t believe the marketing department has much interest in their ideas about the dark art of marketing. Consequently, there are some areas for improvement which go begging. Flyers, catalogues and slide decks tend to be very evenly arranged. Every page is basically presented in...
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Nemawashi Is Gold When Selling In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
I hear some people say translating terms like “nemawashi” into English is difficult. Really? I always thought it was one of the easier ones. Let's just call it “groundwork”. In fact, that is a very accurate description ,from a number of different angles. Japanese gardeners are superstars. There is limited flat space in this country, so over centuries gardeners have worked out you need to move the trees you want, to where you want them. They prefer this approach to just waiting thirty years for them to turn out the preferred way. It is not...
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The Three Barbers Of Minato
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Minato-ku or the “Port Area” is a central part of Tokyo, which used to be harbourside for goods being delivered to the capital in ancient times. My three barbers’ stories are tales of customer service opportunities gone astray, in a country where customer service is the envy of the rest of the world. Each story brings forth a reflection on our own customer service and how we treat our buyers. My apologies to Gioachino Rossini for lifting the title idea for this piece from his famous opera. Barber Number One worked in a men’s barber shop in the Azabu Juban shopping...
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Create Reference Points For Clients
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
There is no doubt that the pandemic has made it very fraught to find new clients in Japan. The new variants of the virus are much more contagious and have already overwhelmed the hospital infrastructure in Osaka, in just weeks of the numbers taking off. Vaccines are slow to roll out and so extension after extension of lockdowns and basic fear on both sides, makes popping around for chat with the client unlikely. We forget how much we give up in terms of reading and expressing nuanced ideas through not having access to body language. Yes, we can see each other on screen,...
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Do You Have Enough Grey Hairs In The Sales Team?
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Japan is a very hierarchical society. I am getting older, so I appreciate the respect for age and stage we can enjoy here. Back in my native Australia, older people are thought of having little of value to say or contribute. It is a youth culture Downunder and only the young have worth. “You old so and so, you don’t know anything” is reflective of the mood and thinking. As a training company in Japan, we have to be mindful of who we put in front of a class and in front of clients. If the participants are mainly male and older, then it is difficult to...
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The Big Myth Of The Sales A Player
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
When we read commentary about how we should be recruiting A Players to boost our firm’s performance, this is a mirage for most of us running smaller sized companies. If you are the size of a Google or a Facebook, with massively deep pockets, then having A Players everywhere is no issue. The reality is A Players cost a bomb and so most of us can’t afford that type of talent luxury. Instead we have to cut our cloth to suit our budgets. We hire C Players and then we try to turn them into B Players. Why not turn these B Players into A players? This is a...
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Dealing With Bad News
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
If we try to hide the bad news for the buyer will that work? How long with it work for? Bernie Madoff died in prison, his wife left in a perilous state, one son dead from suicide and the other from cancer. I call that family devastation. He got away with his lies and cheating for quite a while. He offered modest, but steady returns. He told people he had no capacity to take their money, then rang them back at a later stage to say there was an opening. They were grateful for the chance to give him their money. The 2008 recession showed who was...
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Dealing With Bad News
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
If we try to hide the bad news for the buyer will that work? How long with it work for? Bernie Madoff died in prison, his wife left in a perilous state, one son dead from suicide and the other from cancer. I call that family devastation. He got away with his lies and cheating for quite a while. He offered modest, but steady returns. He told people he had no capacity to take their money, then rang them back at a later stage to say there was an opening. They were grateful for the chance to give him their money. The 2008 recession showed who was...
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Why Selling To Japanese Buyers Is So Hard And What To Do About It
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
The buyer is King. This is a very common concept in modern Western economies. We construct our service approach around this idea and try to keep elevating our engagement with royalty. After living in Japan for 36 years and selling to a broad range of industries, I have found in Japan, the buyer is not King. In Nippon the buyer is God. This difference unleashes a whole raft of difficulties and problems. My perspective is based on an amalgam of experiences over many decades and I am generalising of course. Not every buyer in Japan is the same, but those foreigners who know Japan will...
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Confidence And Truth In Selling
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Confidence sells. We all know this instinctively. If we meet a salesperson who seems doubtful about their solution or unconvinced it is the right thing for us, then we won’t buy from them. The flip side is the con man. They are brimming with brio, oozing charm and pouring on the surety. They are crooks and we can fall for their shtick, because we buy their confidence. They are usually highly skilled communicators as well, so the combo of massive confidence paired with fluency overwhelms us and we buy. We soon regret being conned but we are more...
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.