415 Micro Stories Unlock Trust In Sales Meetings In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 12/10/2024
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
You manage to get the appointment, which at the moment is seriously job well done. Trying to get hold of clients, when everyone is working from home is currently a character building exercise. You ask permission to ask questions. Well done! You are now in the top 1% pf salespeople in Japan. You do ask your questions and quickly realise you have just what they need. Bingo! We are going to do a deal here today, so you are getting pumped. But you don’t do a deal, in fact you leave with nothing but your deflated ego and damaged confidence. The...
info_outlineTHE 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...
info_outlineTHE 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...
info_outlineTHE 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...
info_outlineTHE 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,...
info_outlineTHE 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...
info_outlineTHE 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...
info_outlineTHE 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...
info_outlineTHE 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...
info_outlineTHE 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...
info_outlineStorytelling is usually associated with novels of hundreds of pages, movies lasting two to three hours, television drama series fifty minutes long per episode. In sales in Japan we get a mini window to the buyer that, hopefully, in the first meeting will last an hour. During the second meeting, to present the solution, we will also get around the hour the buyer has allocated for the meeting with us. In both cases, we have to make sure the buyer, rather than us, is doing most of the talking.
That is especially the case in the first meeting, because we don’t actually have any clear, in depth idea about what they need. The time should be spent in two phases – one establishing credibility and trust and the second phase devoted to asking questions to uncover their needs.
The main opportunity for telling micro stories in phase one is around our background and experience. The buyer wants to know who they are dealing with. They want someone who knows what they are doing, someone who can help them and we need to fill in those details for them.
We have all had the experience of buying something, we ask a question and the clerk says, “one moment please” and then disappears to ask someone else the answer. This is never a confidence builder. We immediately recognise we are being served by the clueless. That is the danger for us in sales in B2B situations, where we have to answer their questions without having to get the answer from someone else. We need to tell stories which will assure the buyer we are an expert in this field and we can give them concrete and valuable assistance to solve their complex problems.
Usually, there is a rapport building phase at the start and this is where we can package up a mini-bio of who we are. Remember, we are a stranger to the buyer, yet we expect them to unveil all of their corporate problems and challenges. Recall what your parents told you: “don’t talk to strangers”, yet here we are trying to sell them something and they don’t know who we are.
In Japan, in that rapport building phase, I am often asked about why I came to Japan. I have a plan for that question and so should you. I mention I came for two years to study Japanese at Jochi University as a Japan Education Department scholar and this has turned into 40 years. This gives the listener a lot of confidence that I know Japan and that I am an “insider” not just a gaijin or “outsider”.
I also make a subtle point that actually the real reason I came to Japan was to study traditional Shitoryu karate. This reinforces for the listener that I know Japan at the deepest level having trained in the martial arts here – one of the last bastions of old style traditional culture.
Establishing my Japan credentials isn’t enough though, because the issues at hand are commercial and I need to demonstrate that I know what I am doing so that I can help them. Having a strong brand like Dale Carnegie is helpful because I always mention that we started the training in Japan in 1963. This tells them we have a lot of experience in Japan, so we can understand their problems. I give them a very brief bio of Mr. Mochizuki, who launched Dale Carnegie in Japan, to personalise the point.
In the second meeting, when presenting the solution, it is vital to have stories of how other buyers succeeded with the solution. These don’t have to be long stories, but they need to do three things: one, put flesh on the bone of what the solution does for the buyer in application; two, explain how that buyer was able to adapt the solution to their business specificities; and three, talk about the success they had with it.
We may not be able to mention the name of the other buyer, for confidentality reasons, and we should definitely point that out. No buyer wants to hear all about the juicy details of another company and then hand over the details of their own company to you, knowing you have such a big mouth and will go around telling everyone about their secret business, if they do business with your firm.
We just have to make the point it is a company very similar to the current buyer. We should talk numbers, best expressed as percentages of growth, or speedy turnaround or major cost reductions, etc. Japanese companies rarely want to be the first mover because of their risk aversion. They prefer others to trial it first and then they can study the results to see if it is for them.
We don’t have that much speaking time with the buyer, so we need to have micro stories we can draw on to bolster our credentials as a reliable, trustworthy partner. We also need to allay their fears that what we have won’t work for them, by telling micro stories of where it has worked for other buyers. These stories can’t be just pulled together out of thin air in the moment. We need to have worked these up for meetings with clients before we meet them, so that they are lean and pared down for easy, yet fast retelling. Stories need data and data needs stories in sales. We should never forget this golden rule when selling in Japan.