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
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_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.