The Care Factor In Sales In Japan
THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 04/08/2025
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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
info_outlineJapanese 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 organisation. It can create problems though, when perspectives become skewed.
Price rises, stock shortages, quality issues, staff allocations can create a divide in the priorities of the buyer and seller. Where does the typical Japanese salesperson plonk themselves down? Right in the buyer’s camp. They become advocates for the buyer’s interests over the firm’s interests and this can create tremendous friction inside the organisation.
As we know, in Japan the buyer is not a royal, an aristo or a King. The buyer is a deity, a God and that changes things up considerably. As the boss, you can hand out the orders but that doesn’t mean the salespeople are going to compromise their relationship with the buyer aka God, to keep you happy. They are thinking about their bonus or commission and the lifetime value of that client.
In that equation, the boss’s views and interests are mildly interesting, but not arresting. So boss orders are issued like confetti and then the Great Obfuscation commences. Delays, excuses, detours and ninja like silence start cropping up. The sales staff can always rely on the boss to get distracted and be so time poor that they never get around to following up at all, or at least for some considerable time. With multinational firms, with any luck, the boss will get transferred or fired and the coast will be clear again. Or the market shifts, or the currency moves and the whole point becomes moot. The salesperson rule is keep your helmet pulled down tight and low and dig a bit deeper into the foxhole, waiting for the boss order barrage to die down.
So as the boss, how do we navigate between ensuring the salespeople take brilliant care of the client, without sending the firm to the edge of bankruptcy? We have to become much better time managers, because that is the key to following up and keeping track of the change you have initiated. We need to keep a note somewhere of what was discussed, what was requested and then some milestones to check against for progress. It could be electronic reminders or something analog, it doesn’t matter, as long as it works for you, but do it.
Coaching is one of the victims of tech today. Tech is supposed to give us all more time. It hasn’t. Everyone is so busy, including the boss, that the time is not created for coaching sales staff. If we want the salesperson to go down there to the client and deliver some distasteful news, they may need some help on how to handle that interview. Imagine asking a Japanese salesperson who has spent an entire career agreeing to everything the client wants, to head over to the buyer’s office and tell them “no” or the new price has been increased to “x”.
They are just not trained for that and have no clue how to do it. This is where they need help and the busy, busy bee boss has to pony up the time for them to help have that difficult negotiation.
Depending on the situation, it may be time for the boss to go and speak with the client. Hierarchy is important in Japan and having the more senior person turn up, is a mark of respect which the buyer in Japan will appreciate. It won’t make them any happier about the bad news, but at least they feel their due was given. The salespeople will appreciate it too, because it allows them to keep their relationship with the buyer and heap all the blame on their mad dog, crazy, gaijin boss.
The answer is simple and complex at the same time - encourage a sharp client focus by the salespeople, but keep that tempered within the interests of the firm, by making your time available to follow up, coach or intervene.