356 How To Win Business With Japanese Buying Teams
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 06/22/2025
367 How to Give Your First Major Presentation With Confidence
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
At some stage in every career, the moment arrives: you’re asked to give a presentation. Early on, it may be a straightforward project update delivered to colleagues or a report shared with your manager. But as you advance, the scope expands. Suddenly you’re addressing a whole-company kickoff, an executive offsite, or even speaking on behalf of your firm or industry at a public event. That leap — from small team updates to high-stakes presentations — is steep. And so are the nerves that come with it. Why Presentations Trigger Nerves In front of colleagues, we often feel confident. But...
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366 Win the Deal: Negotiating in Japan Without Losing the Relationship (Part Two)
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Negotiating in Japan is never just about numbers on a contract. It is about trust, credibility, and ensuring that the relationship remains intact long after the ink is dry. Unlike in Western business settings, where aggressive tactics or rapid deals are often admired, in Japan negotiations unfold slowly, with harmony and continuity as the guiding principles. The key is to combine negotiation frameworks such as BATNA (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) with cultural sensitivity. By doing so, foreign executives and domestic leaders alike can win deals without damaging vital...
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365 Win the Deal In Japan Without Losing the Relationship Part One
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Our image of negotiating tends to be highly influenced by the winner takes all model. This is the transactional process where one side outwits the other and receives the majority of the value. Think about your own business? How many business partners do you have where this would apply? For the vast majority of cases we are not after a single sale. We are thinking about LTV – the life time value of the customer. We are focused on the proportion of our time spent hunting for new business as opposed to farming the existing business. Where do you think...
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364 You Can’t Win A Knife Fight With A Slide Deck
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Presenting isn’t always adoration, adulation, regard and agreement. Sometimes, we have to go into hostile territory with a message that is not welcomed, appreciated or believed. Think meetings with the Board, the unions, shareholders, angry consumers and when you have sharp elbowed rivals in the room. It is rare to be ambushed at a presentation in Japan and suddenly find yourself confronting a hostile version of the Mexican wave, as the assembled unwashed and disgruntled take turns to lay into you. Usually, we know in advance this is going to get hot and...
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363 The Truth About Death by Overwork in Japan
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
So many sad cases of people dying here in Japan from what is called karoshi and the media constantly talks about death through overwork. This is nonsense and the media are doing us all a disservice. This is fake news. The cases of physical work killing you are almost exclusively limited to situations where physical strain has induced a cardiac arrest or a cerebral incident resulting in a stroke. In Japan, that cause of death from overwork rarely happens. The vast majority of cases of karoshi death are related to suicide by the employee. This is a reaction to...
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362 One Pitch, No Matter How Genius, Never Works in Japan
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Presenting to buying teams is very tricky in Japan. Because of the convoluted decision making process here, there will be many voices involved in the final decision. What makes it even harder is that some of those key influencers may not ever be present in the meeting. Those proposing the change have to go around to each one of them and get their chop on the piece of paper authorizing the buying decision. In the case of Western companies, the decision tends to be taken in the meeting after everyone has had their say. In Japan there is a lot of groundwork needed so that...
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361 Your Outfit Speaks First – Make It Say ‘Professional’
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
How should we dress when presenting and does it actually matter? Yep, it matters - particularly in Japan. Japan is a very formal country, in love with ceremony, pomp and circumstance. Always up your formality level in dress terms in Japan, compared to how formal you think will be enough. This was a big shock for this Aussie boy from Brisbane, who spent a good chunk of his life wearing shorts and T-shirts or blue jeans and T-shirts. Tokyo is not Silicon Valley, where dress down is de rigueur and where suits have gone the way of the Dodo. This is a very well...
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360 Back Your Team Or You Break Their Trust
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
We don’t run perfect organisations stocked with perfect people, led by perfect bosses. There are always going to be failings, inadequacies, mistakes, shortcomings and downright stupidity in play. If we manage to keep all of these within the castle walls, then that is one level of complexity. It is when we share these challenges with clients that we raise the temperature quite a few notches. How do you handle cases where your people have really upset a client? The service or product was delivered, but the client’s representative is really unhappy with one of...
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359 The Sales Trap Crippling Japanese Business
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
We see Japan as a modern, high tech country very advanced in so many sectors. Sales is not one of them. Consultative selling is very passé in the West, yet it has hardly swum ashore here as yet. There are some cultural traits in Japan that work against sales success, such as not initiating a conversation with strangers. This makes networking a bit tricky to say the least. We train salespeople here in Japan and the following list is made up of the most common complaints companies have about their salespeople’s failings and why they are sending them to us for...
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358 Story Magic
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Storytelling is one of those things that we all know about, but where we could do a much better job of utilising this facility in business. It allows us to engage the audience in a way that makes our message more accessible. In any presentation there may be some key information or messages we wish to relay and yet we rarely wrap this information up in a story. As an audience we are more open to stories than bold statements or dry facts. The presenter’s opinion is always going to trigger some debate or doubt in the minds of the audience. The same detail enmeshed...
info_outlineSelling 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 responsibility. We might have some functional interests represented such as the Executive Buyer, Financial Buyer, User Buyer, Technical Buyer and Our Champion. Each one has a different driver for making buying decisions.
The Executive Buyer will have a strategic vision for the organization so they are interested in opportunities and growth. We need to include the big picture here of what our solution will do to position the company into the future, as well as today.
The Financial Buyer is always interested in cash flow, no matter the size of the organisation. They focus on the cost, the terms of the transaction and how much flexibility it can provide for them.
The User Buyer wants to know about the features, how easy is the solution to use, how reliable will it be?
The Technical Buyer is concerned about efficiency, practicality and capacity. Usually we are in that room because of our Champion. They are concerned about their relationships within the company, with having influence over the buying situation and gaining recognition for their efforts.
Just to make it more complicated, there are also the buyer personality styles to contend with.
The Amiable who is focused on relationships and is never in a hurry to make a decision.
The Driver is the exact opposite. They are dynamic, fast movers who just want the facts so they can make a decision and move on.
The Analtyicals want data and lots of it. Three decimal places is fine for them.
The Expressives are bored with the nitty gritty detail, preferring the big picture.
It is possible to focus on just one group but not very wise. The presentation should have a little something for everyone.
There are also going to be attitudinal differences. Some will Hostile, Resistant, Discontent, Ambivalent, Favourable, Supportive and Enthusiastic. We need to get our body language meter on full throttle to read the audience and we need our Champion to give us the who’s who of who is in the room, so we can anticipate where we might hit trouble.
There are different levels of expertise in a team. There will be varying levels of Experiences, Education, Biases, Problem/Positive issues, Goals, Expertise and Culture. Before we present we need to know who is going to be in the meeting and try to understand what will be driving their reaction to what we are going to say.
We may not know this completely beforehand but we will certainly start locating people into different sectors once we get into the meeting room.
We need a presenting structure which will be well regarded by the majority of people in the room. We need an opening to grab attention, a statement of need for change, an example of the need for change and to suggest three possible solutions.
For solution one, we outline the advantages and disadvantages. We repeat this balanced formula for solutions two and three. We then suggest the best solution of the three, with evidence as to why it is best. In our closing remarks we repeat the final recommendation.
Selling to a buying group is fraught with difficulty, because of the massive variations in the room, as to perspectives, needs and interest. Nevertheless we can use this structure to cover off as many of the needs in the room as possible.
We rely on our champion to brief us on who is in the room beforehand and to go around drumming up support following our presentation. We win or lose though the quality of our preparation and our structure.
If they are both in good working order, then the chances of winning the business go up dramatically. We won’t get so many chances to present to a buying group but we need to be well prepared when we do.