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

Release Date: 07/21/2024

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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Japan is merciless with salespeople.  When you call the client’s company everyone is doing their absolute best to make sure you don’t get to talk to the boss.  They won’t tell you their name, they don’t offer to take a message for you, the whole vibe is “get lost”.  If you don’t know the precise name of the person you want to speak with, then the wall of steel descends very quickly.  They will question you as to why you want to speak to the person in charge, tell you that the person will call you back.  They never will.  

No one wants to take any responsibility in the Japanese system, so that is why they won’t share their name.  They don’t want to get scolded by the boss, so that is why they won’t put you through.  The boss is a salaried employee and they won’t take calls from people they have never heard of.  They don’t think, “this might be a business opportunity that will help my company”.  They think, “I don’t want to have to deal with people I don’t know, especially foreigners, because it is risky”.  Risk aversion is a big thing here and the easiest way of never taking a risk is never doing anything new or different.  It has worked for thousands of years here.

So how do we break through the steel barrier.  Many companies have meetings on Monday mornings, so invariably no one is around to take the call, even presuming you know their name.  The last day of  the month is also a very busy day for many companies, so that is another hard one.  Days with a five in the date called gotoobi (5th, 10th,15th, 25th)  are also busy days in Japan because they are cut off dates for invoice submissions, monthly invoice payments, salary payments, Government department submission dates, etc.

If we want to call a company and we don’t know the person’s name, then we should try and do it before the gate keepers arrive for work or after they have left for lunch or for after they have departed at the end of the day.  This is not fool proof, but the chances of talking with someone with a bit more authority goes up.

Those tasked with taking general calls to the company or section, are usually female, young and at the very, very bottom of the hierarchy with no authority, except to make your life a misery.  Companies don’t understand that these staff are the bearers of the brand to the outside world, so invariably they are not properly trained.  They think their job is to screen out all salespeople and all unknowns.

I called the new President of a major Italian brand here in Tokyo to say hello and thank him for his business, as we had been commissioned by his headquarters to provide training for them.  I didn’t know his name because he had just arrived and that information was not public at that point.  I could never get past the gatekeeper.  She would always tell me he wasn’t available and that he would call me back. That never happened.  I am the President of the company delivering training for his company, to develop his business, to help hit his targets.  You would expect he would want to talk with me.  No such luck.  In the end, I got so frustrated, I just gave up trying to talk to him and left the training delivery logistics to my staff.  I never did meet him in fact and he was posted to a new country.

Here are some ideas. Even if you don’t know the name of the person send a package to their title within the company. This package might contain your company brochure or a small gift, but whatever it is, preferably make it slightly bulky to excite curiosity. Then, when you call asking for them, mention to the gatekeeper that you want to follow up on the package you recently have sent to them.   

That package, by the way, once received by the target will probably go straight into the waste paper bin sitting next to their desk, unread, possibly unopened, because they don’t know who you are.  This “send the package then call” technique will slightly increase your chances of getting put through. 

Try to make the call before 9.00am, after lunch at around 1.10pm and again after 6.00pm.  The junior people will usually arrive around 9.00am or 9.30am.  They will have to man the phones from 12.00pm while all the important people go to lunch.  This means you have a slightly better chance of talking to the boss when they are back from lunch and the junior person is not there.  Companies are more concerned these days about junior, non-manager staff working overtime, so the junior people will be gone after 5.00pm or 5.30pm. The managers however are still there.  Obviously the same considerations apply if you know the person’s name. Your chances of connecting will go up.

If you have met them before, you can say that you are calling to follow on with them on that recent conversation you had.  Or you are calling to follow up on that email that you have sent them.  Or that you are calling to get an answer to your question in the email you sent to them.  More senior staff will generally recognize you have a business connection established and are more likely to put you through.

Why don’t they ever call you back?  They recognize you are trying to sell them something and that means making a change in the supply arrangements.  Change triggers a lot of requirement for internal harmonisation of a new supplier choice. They have to get the hanko seals stamped on the submission they will have to circulate to all those effected by the new decision.  It will also probably require individual meetings with certain key people to secure agreement.  It is a lot less work, trouble, time loss and risk to just ignore you in the first place. 

Yes, you can get through but it is not easy. You need to try some tactics to make it possible.  Have these issues in mind before you reach for the phone.  This will save you a lot of frustration and lost time.