329 Join The Buyer Conversation In Japan
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 11/24/2024
357 Sabotaging Your Conversations?
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
We are often good talkers, but poor listeners. We have many things we want to say, share, expound and elaborate on. For this we need someone to be talking it all in. We like it when people do that for us. It soothes our ego, heightens our sense of self-worth and importance. We are sometimes not so generous ourselves though when listening to others. Here are six nightmare listeners you might run into. By the way, do any of these stereotypes sound a bit too familiar to you? The “preoccupieds” are those breathless types, racing around, multi-tasking on steroids, permanently distracted....
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356 How To Win Business With Japanese Buying Teams
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Selling to companies in Japan usually means sitting in a meeting room with a single buyer or perhaps two people. There are occasions though where we may need to present to a larger number of buyers in a more formal setting. It may be a pitch to secure the business, or it may be a means of getting the buying team more easily coordinated on their side. Before we know how to present to a team, we have to analyse the people in the team. That means we need to know ahead of time, who will be in the room from their side. A team comprises multiple layers of...
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355 How To Make Your Employees Actually Like You
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
We often hear about the need for bosses to do more to engage with their teams. The boss looks at their schedule and then just checks out of that idea right then and there because it seems impossible. The employees for their part, want to get more praise and recognition from the boss, to feel valuable and valued. Bosses are often Driver type personalities who are extremely outcome and task orientated. People are there to produce, to get the numbers, to complete projects and to do it with a minimum of boss maintenance needed to be invested. The snag in all of this though is employees don’t...
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354 Presenting Elicits Valuable Lessons. Capture Them.
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Today is a good time to start reviewing and reflecting upon the presentations you have over the past few years. What have you learnt not to do and what have you learnt to keep doing? Those who don’t study their own presentations history are bound to repeat the errors of the past. Sounds reasonable doesn’t it. We are all mentally geared up for improvements over time. The only issue is that these improvements are not ordained and we have to create our own futures. Do you have a good record keeping system? When I got back to Japan in 1992 I was the...
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353 Build Relationships That Last: Get Your Re-Order Mojo Happening
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Here is an important mantra: We don’t want a sale, we want the re-orders. That task however is getting harder and harder. Customers today are more educated, better prepared and have more alternatives than ever before. Satisfying a customer is not enough – we have to exceed their expectations and provide exceptional customer service. Customer service has only one truth – how the customer perceives the quality of the service. Forget what we think is good customer service. We have to be really clear about what is the customer’s perception of good customer...
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352 Let’s Build Our Personal Brand As A Presenter
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
The New Year’s resolutions concept is ridiculous, but only because we are weak, lazy, inconsistent and lacking in discipline. Apart from those small barriers to execution of desires, the concept works a treat. The idea of a new start is not bad in itself and we can use the Gregorian calendar fantasy, to mark a change in the year where new things are possible. We learn as we go along and we add experience from year to year to hopefully make life easier. So as a presenter what would be possible? There are around 4.4 million podcasts around the world. Blogs are in the...
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351 My Boss Isn't Listening
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
351 My Boss Isn't Listening f you reading this title and thinking “this has nothing to do with my leadership”, you might want to think again. We hear this comment a lot from the participants in our training. They complain that the boss doesn’t talk to them enough because they are too busy, don’t have much interest in their ideas or do not seek their suggestions. In this modern life, none of these issues from staff should be surprising. There have been two major tectonic plate shifts in organisations over the last twenty years. One has been the compression of many organisational layers...
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350 The Rule Of Three
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
350 The Rule Of Three Our financial year ended in August and we were up over 20% on the previous year’s revenue results. I should have been ebullient, chipper, sanguine, fired up for the new year, but I wasn’t. Was it because we were back to zero again, as we all faced the prospect of the new financial year? That sinking feeling of , “last year was hard and here we go again, but this time with an even higher target”. Maybe that was it, but it was hard to tell. There were three other things which were gnawing away at me, regarding incidents which...
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349 Success Speaking Formula
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
I was invited to an English Speech contest for Middle School students. The students must have home grown skills and are not eligible to compete if they have spent more than six months abroad, in an English speaking environment. This was pretty grand affair. The organisation running it is run by students at university, who took part in the contest themselves when they were in Middle School. Many of the graduates become business patrons and supporters as they work their way up in their business careers. It a perfect Japanese storm. Japan loves uniforms...
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348 Open The Kimono Leaders
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
The supervisor has super vision. The leader knows more. The captain makes the calls. The best and the brightest know best. The cream rises to the top. We accept that there will be leaders either our “superiors” or “the first among equals”. We put leaders up on a pedestal, we expect more from them than we expect from ourselves. We judge them, appraise them, measure them, discuss them. When you become a leader what do you find? There are rival aspirant leaders aplenty waiting in the wings to take over. They have the elbows out to shove the current leader aside and replace them....
info_outlineLife is busy, busy today. Communications has sped up business to an extent unthinkable even ten years ago. Every company is a publisher now, due to social media’s pervasiveness. Content marketing is driving original content creation and release. LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook are favouring live video, so we have to become television talents. Voice is the next big thing, so podcasting requires us to be radio personalities. If you are in business, your personal information is out there, easily searchable and found. We check out the buyers and they check out the sellers, before we meet.
When you turned up at a client meeting eighty years ago, you came with some good jokes, some market information, some competitor intelligence, etc. You did this to break the ice with the buyer. Even if they were an established client, you needed to break the ice for that day. Buyers then and buyers now have a lot going on inside their heads when we turn up and almost none of it has anything to do with us and what we want.
In Japan, meeting room space is always at a premium, so getting time with buyers has some automatic limitations placed upon it with certain companies. After thirty minutes you are given the bum’s rush, because that space has been booked for the next meeting and they are loitering with intent outside the glass wall waiting to get in for their meeting.
That doesn't give us much time to carve out some mind space with the buyer, get into questioning mode, talk about the solution, deal with any objections and seal the deal. If the first part of the meeting isn’t well planned then there won’t be any result. We cannot let the first few interactions be random events. We need to plan in detail how we are going to establish some rapport with this buyer or reestablish some rapport if they are an existing buyer.
We will have checked some of the media aggregation sites to see if there has been anything released in to the public arena about the client company, which we can then refer to. If it is a first meeting then checking the annual report is a must. There will be a glossy coverage of the CEO’s vision and strategy for the enterprise, with photographs in a swish corporate setting. We are looking for things we can ask about in this meeting.
Our objective is to get the client talking as soon as possible. Most salespeople still cling to the idea that they have to dominate the airwaves, so they just keep talking, talking, talking. We don’t want that. We only have a limited amount of time, so we want the client talking as much as possible. When we do that, the client will have stopped thinking about all of the other things going on in their work and private lives. We will be concentrated on the business at hand and that is exactly what we need.
We hopefully will be able to check whether some insight we have found is relevant to what they are doing. We deal with that industry vertical so we are picking up ideas across companies on what is working and not working. We share these ideas as a means of demonstrating we provide value to their enterprise. They may not go for it, but they will go for our intention to assist them to make their business more successful.
A discussion with a drill manufacture company I called upon, prompted a suggestion by me that they copy Blendtec’s “will it blend” phenomenon, but for drills not blenders. Blendtec’s CEO Tom Dickson video’s the blending of iPads, golf balls, whatever and post it on YouTube and they get massive views. My idea was to copy this for Japan and create some buzz around the product line up. They didn’t go for it in the end, but I have no doubt that I have a closer relationship with the President today, because of my effort to think out of the box for them. I had his attention for our discussion.
Getting the full attention of the buyer is no longer a given. They are permanently distracted today and we are competing with so much noise, more than ever before. We need to have a strategy to get their attention. We cannot leave it to chance or expect that, “of course they will be paying attention – we have an appointment”. That concept is way too indulgent.
Ask well thought through questions to get them talking, bring insights and valuable market intelligence. Today, we have to do this every time, even if they are an established buyer. Just because we have a relationship with them, doesn’t mean we have automatically broken through all the completion for their attention. Start fresh every time as if it were the very first meeting. In this modern age this is the new normal.