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317 Sales Is A Process In Japan

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Release Date: 06/30/2024

345 Japan Leadership Blind Spots show art 345 Japan Leadership Blind Spots

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

 Leadership is a swamp. Do leaders have to be perfect? It sounds ridiculous to expect that, because none of us are perfect. However, leaders often act like they are perfect. They assume the mantle of position power and shoot out orders and commands to those below them in the hierarchy. They derive the direction forward, make the tough calls and determine how things are to be done. There are always a number of alternative ways of doing things, but the leader says, “my way is correct, so get behind it”. Leaders start small with this idea and over the course of their career they keep...

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344 How Can Chinese Retail Be So Bad In Japan? show art 344 How Can Chinese Retail Be So Bad In Japan?

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Bad service is a brand killer. This is a controversial piece today, because I am singling out one race, one group in isolation.  It is also a total generalisation and there will be exceptions where what I am saying is absolute rubbish.  There will be other races and groups, who are equally guilty as well, who I am not singling out or covering, so I am demonstrating a blatant and singular bias. I know all that, but let the hellfire rain down on my head, I am just sick of some of this lousy service here in Tokyo.  It is a mystery to me how the service in some Chinese restaurants...

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343 Your Inspirational Talk Must Be Dynamic show art 343 Your Inspirational Talk Must Be Dynamic

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Public speaking takes no prisoners. I was attending a Convention in Phuket and the finale was the closing inspirational speech for the week of events.  I had to deliver the same speech myself at the Ho Chi Minh Convention a few years ago.  This is a daunting task.  Actually, when your audience is chock full of presentation’s training experts from Dale Carnegie, it is simply terrifying.  The length of the speech is usually around ten minutes, which though it seems shortish, can feel quite long and challenging to design.  Being an inspirational speech, it adds that...

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342 Success As a Leader In Japan show art 342 Success As a Leader In Japan

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

 Being the leader is no fun anymore. In most Western countries we are raised from an early age to become self-sufficient and independent. When we are young, we enjoy a lot of self-belief and drive hard along the road of individualism. School and university, for the most part, are individual, competitive environments with very little academic teamwork involved. This is changing slowly in some Universities as the importance of teamwork has been re-discovered. However, for the most part, it is still a zero-sum game, of someone is the top scholar and some are in the upper echelons of marks...

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341 Don't Get Sabotaged By Your Colleagues When Selling in Japan show art 341 Don't Get Sabotaged By Your Colleagues When Selling in Japan

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Sales is a nightmare. It is usually a solitary life.  You head off to meet customers all day.  Your occasional return to the office is to restock materials or complete some processes you can’t do on-line.  Japan is a bit different.  Here it is very common to see two salespeople going off to meet the client.  If you are selling to a buyer, it is also common to face more than one person.  This is a country of on-the-job training and consensus decision making, so the numbers involved automatically inflate. Even in Western style operations, there is more of a...

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340 How Crazy Can We Go When Presenting In Japan show art 340 How Crazy Can We Go When Presenting In Japan

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Japan doesn’t love crazy. In our High Impact Presentations Course we have exercises where we ask the participants to really let go of all their inhibitions and let it all hang out – and “go crazy, go over the top”.  This is challenging in Japan. Normally, we are all usually very constrained when we speak in society.  Our voices are very moderate, our body language is quite muted and our gestures are rather restrained.  Unfortunately, this often carries over into our public presentations. Without realising it, we find ourselves speaking in this dreadful monotone, putting...

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339 Building A Team In Stages In Japan show art 339 Building A Team In Stages In Japan

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Team building is fraught. Actually, when do we create teams? Usually we inherit teams from other people, stocked with their selections and built around their preferences, aspirations and prejudices, not ours. In rare cases, we might get to start something new and we get to choose who joins. Does that mean that “team building” only applies when we start a new team? If that were the case, then most of us would never experience building a team in our careers. This concept is too narrow. In reality, we are building our teams every day, regardless of whether we suddenly became their leader or...

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338 Sales Storytelling That Wins In Japan show art 338 Sales Storytelling That Wins In Japan

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Salespeople often miss the point. They are brilliant on telling the client the detail of the product or service. When you think about how we train salespeople, that is a very natural outcome.  Product knowledge is drummed into the heads of salespeople when they first join the company.  The product or service lines are expanded or updated at some point, so again the product knowledge component of the training reigns supreme.  No wonder they default to waxing lyrical about the spec.  These discussions, however, tend to be technical, dry, unemotional and rather boring. ...

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337 Don't Freak Out During The Q&A In Japan show art 337 Don't Freak Out During The Q&A In Japan

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Q&A can destroy your personal brand. Creating and delivering the presentation sees you in 100% total control.  You have designed it, you have been given the floor to talk about it, all is good.  However, the moment the time comes for questions, we are now in a street fight.  Why a street fight?  Because in a street fight there are no rules and the Q&A following a presentation is the same – no rules.  “Oh, that’s not right” you might be thinking.  “What about social norms, propriety, manners, decorum – surely all of these things are a filter on...

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336 Team Glue Insights In Japan show art 336 Team Glue Insights In Japan

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Staff can be a nightmare. Teams are composed of the most difficult material ever created - people. That requires many capabilities, but two in particular from leaders: communication and people skills. Ironically, leaders are often seriously deficient in one or both. One type of personality who gets to become the leader are the hard driving, take no prisoners, climb over the rival’s bodies to grasp the brass ring crowd. Other types are the functional stars: category experts; best salesperson, long serving staff members; older “grey hairs” or the last man standing at the end of the...

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Because the vast majority of people in sales have no idea what they are doing, they are making it up as they go along.  Wouldn’t it be better to have a roadmap to progress the making of a sale?  This roadmap will keep us on track and not allow the buyer to take us off on a tangent that leads to nowhere. Foundering around with no central direction wastes a lot of key buyer facing time and we don’t want to do that.  We can’t expect unlimited access because of their busy schedules, so once we are in front of them we have to get all of the discovery process done in usually around an hour. 

The sale call roadmap starts even before the call.  These days with so much information readily available, especially with the advent of AI tools, we can’t turn up and ask basic questions about the company.  We need to have done some research beforehand on media reports, their website, annual report, social media and using LinkedIn where possible, to check on the individuals we will meet, before we meet them.

Having done all of that, we are well armed to get the conversation off to a great start.  We may have friends or contacts in common; or shared a similar working experience in the same company; or lived in the same town; or went to the same university or studied the same subjects.  When we have done our research we will have an opportunity to try and find these little connectors.  I was working with an American guy when I was at the Shinsei Bank.  He was an absolute master at this.  He had just joined the bank and I was supposed to brief him on the work my division was doing.  We spent the whole time with him making connections between people we both knew.  He did this to break the ice and establish rapport.  I never did get to brief him on my division!

This rapport building is important with clients.  We know if we don’t get a good relationship going at the start of the conversation, then it is unlikely they will buy from us.  Even if we don’t have much in common, we can use other techniques like bring some interesting industry data or intelligence to them.  We might have seen something work somewhere else and we can introduce this idea to them.  In this initial meeting process, we need to make a very important intervention.   

We need to get permission from the buyer to ask questions. When they are happy to meet us and having established some rapport, they are more likely to say “yes” to our request to ask questions about the inner details of what the company is doing and all the problems they are encountering.  In other words, all the firm’s dirty laundry. If there was no rapport or trust created would you be keen to share that detail with strangers?  Now in a western business environment, asking questions is no big deal, but with Japanese buyers it is crucial we do this.  They are used to being hit with sales pitches, so the concept of them being questioned by the seller is not something they are used to. 

Having gotten that permission we should ask very intelligent questions, so that we can fully understand their needs.   Now buyers sometimes don’t want to tell us their precise situation.  We have to ask our questions in a way that gets around that reluctance.  We are searching for an entry point where we might become useful to them, to solve a problem they have.  If they don’t have a big enough problem or if they think they can fix it themselves, then we will have a lot of difficulty making the sale.  We have to show why this issue is best addressed now, rather than after. And why they should leave it to us to fix, rather than trying to do it themselves.  Left to their own devices and a hundred year time frame, businesses can solve their own problems and they don’t need us, which is why we have to emphasise speed and the urgency of time to get them moving. If we don’t deal with these issues up front, then no sale. Once we understand their needs, we move along the roadmap to the part when we present the solution.  Now in Japan, this will usually take place at the second meeting. There will be a discussion about the technical pieces of what we will do, talking about how this solution will fit their company.   We can’t leave it there though, because that is still too abstract.  We need to talk about how they can project and apply these benefits inside their company, in order to get better results.  This is where word pictures are very powerful.  In most cases, we are selling a future that they can’t fully appreciate.  So we need to explain how we can add to their business through increasing revenues, reducing costs or grabbing greater market share.

If we have been able to uncover what the success of this project will mean for them personally, then we wrap that bit around the benefit too.  The client naturally doubts what sales people are telling them, so we need to show evidence for them that this has worked for other companies.  Once we have done that, then we can test the waters to see if what we have suggested is the right solution for them.  We do this by asking a simple trial closing question like, “How does that sound”.  We want to flush out any resistance to place an order.  If they don’t have any problems, then we just ask for the order, “Shall we go ahead?”.

If they have issues with what we are suggesting, then we need to confirm what these are?  They may have problems with our pricing, payment terms, quality, delivery or schedule.  It doesn’t matter what they mention, we shouldn’t answer it immediately.  I know the emotional temptation is strong to jump in and correct their misunderstanding or their resistance but wait.

Remember, we are only getting the headline, at this point and we need more information before we are in a position to answer their objection.  Once we have heard the details of what they are thinking, we still wait, we don’t answer it.  We keep digging.  There may be other even more pressing concerns they haven’t mentioned yet and there is no point in answering a minor concern, if the big one is left unattended. Once we have gotten out their key concerns, we ask them about which one is the highest priority for them. And then we proceed to answer that item.  Often once we have answered that one, the other concerns fade away.  

Finally we ask for the order. They may say they have to think about it and because of the consensus decision making system in Japan, they actually have to get the rest of the organisation behind this yes. 

That is fine but make an appointment right then and there for a follow up meeting to put a firm schedule behind getting that consensus.  If you don’t, then it could drag on forever. You are better to push for a finite yes or no.  Thinking you have something in your pipeline, when you don’t is false comfort.  A clear no is better because then you have a better picture of deal flow and revenue projections. You can devote your full energy on another buyer who can say yes and go ahead.  If we get a yes, next we do the follow up and deliver on what we promised.

This roadmap is how we run the sales meeting with the client as opposed to Japan where, typically, the buyer hijacks the process and usually runs the meeting.  We need to keep control and bring the buyer back to the roadmap to move along the rails or we will never get a sale.  Winging it may be more exciting and appealing to your free spirit, but you won’t make as many sales.  The path to the sale is clear and you have to keep it moving along that path, going through all the stages, to get to a yes.