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414 Thrill, Skill, and Follow-Through: Mastering Sales Account Management In Japan

THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Release Date: 12/03/2024

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,...

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...

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...

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...

Dealing With Bad News

THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

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...

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...

We Buy From People We Like And Trust

THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Buying from people we like and trust makes a lot of sense. Sometimes we have no choice and will hold our nose and buy from people we don’t like. Buying anything from people we don’t trust is truly desperate. So when we flip the switch and we become the seller to the buyer, how can we pass the smell and desperation tests? How do you establish trust and likeability when you are on a virtual call with a new potential client? What do you do about those new buyers who won’t even turn on their camera during the call? The best defense against buyer scepticism is to...

Selling Through Micro Stories

THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Is selling telling or is it asking questions? Actually, it is both. The point though is to know what stories to tell, when to tell them and how to tell them. We uncover the opportunity through asking the buyer questions about what they need. Once we know what they need, we mentally scan our solution data base to find a match. This is when the stories become important, as we explain why our solution will work for them. What we don’t want is having to scrabble together stories on the spot and then make a dog’s breakfast of relating the details. These...

The Care Factor In Sales In Japan

THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Japanese salespeople really care about their clients. This is good, except when it isn’t and that is usually when they are prioritizing the client over the firm which employs them. Japan is a relationship driven, risk averse business culture, where longevity is appreciated. This often translates into the salespeople being captured by a type of “Stockholm Buyer Syndrome” where they identify with the interests of the buyer, over those of their boss. Going to bat for the client is admirable because the salesperson is their representative inside the...

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Bosses love hunters.

They beat the bushes and find new clients for the business.
Usually, they love the thrill of the hunt and wrestling the buyer down to do the deal. CRM systems, paperwork, boring follow-up detail—not so much.

This is the preserve of the farmer. That person you can entrust the client to, knowing that they will be well taken care of. The follow-through will be well executed and, in a fair wind, will remain a repeat buyer.

I'm a hunter and easily bored with the mundane aspects of sales.
I'm also the boss, so I know how we need both hunters and farmers operating at peak performance levels.

Here are some aspects of the farmer we need to perfect.

1. Building and Maintaining Strong Relationships

Trust based on a track record of reliability and predictability is crucial.
This calls for clear, frequent, and transparent communication with the buyer's side.

Omotenashi—service—means anticipating and exceeding the client's needs. Client needs change, their internal structures change, and we must be on top of those changes in order to remain relevant.Farmers are good at the detail and at scheduling regular contact. Hunters have already moved on to the next exciting deal.

2. Deep Understanding of the Client

Every industry and every sector is different, and every firm is unique.
So the ability to tailor services specifically for that buyer is needed. That means keeping up to date with changes in the industry, economic growth rates, currency rates, inflation rates, supply chain, etc.

The farmer knows who the players are on the buyer's side and what interests and concerns them. The key decision-makers can also change. Farmers keep abreast of these changes, always sensitive to wind direction fluctuation, which could eject them from the ongoing business.

They know what their counterparts' KPIs are and how they are measured and rewarded. They have to know what the personal interests of the buyer are in order to provide a holistic solution for them.

3. Strategic Account Planning

Design-in is the holy grail in manufacturing. It means your component or service is designed into the product or process from the start. To get to that stage, we have to know the client's plans, objectives, timelines, milestones, quality thresholds, price points, etcetera.

To keep the relationship humming along, we have to stress the value we bring and accommodate the needs of the buyer from the point of view of lifetime value and not this month's sales quota.

Not always easy, though. Headquarters mandate cost-cutting, and things go south very rapidly. That agreed deal is now shattered on the rocks, and the details are now flotsam and jetsam being pounded by the surf.

We serve a lot of folk in the automobile sector, and we have had two major clients really pull back on their spending. They're being hammered by their Chinese EV competitors. One recently celebrated the appointment of a new CEO and promptly ceased all training and froze their programs. Ouch.

The other recently informed us that the next contract will be decided by Dutch auction. The last thing you want to hear in a sales negotiation is the phrase "Dutch auction." The new contract bid starts at zero and goes up, and whoever raises their hand first gets the deal at that price point.

There's no differentiation here for a quality-versus-price comparison. It is a very unsophisticated methodology but highly in favour of the low-price buyer. Procurement department buyers, who see all items like nuts and bolts—basically undifferentiated—love it.

If you're in the service sector, where there are vast differences in quality provision, you are not going to love this way of thinking. Ouch.

4. Collaborative Problem-Solving

The farmer sees themselves as an extension of the client's firm and gets involved to help solve their problems. They do this through the prism of their product or service. They become an outside consultancy looking for areas where they can add value. Often, as salespeople, we see across many industries. Companies in industry A hardly ever mix with companies in industry Z, but we do.

We see what works and doesn't work across the range of our clients and their problems. We can bring in things we've seen work well elsewhere and help the buyer achieve the goals they have set.

Let's remember that farmers are important in any sales team. Hunters may be very flashy, flamboyant, and exciting, but they often create chaos and despair. They often lose repeat business because of their lousy follow-up and poor personal organisational skills. Farmers can glue the customer to us and keep that flywheel turning.

Bravo to the farmers out there.

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