THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
THE Sales Japan Series is powered by with great content from the accumulated wisdom of 100 plus years of Dale Carnegie Training. The show is hosted in Tokyo by Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and is for those highly motivated students of sales, who want to be the best in their business field.
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How to Own the Sales Transition Zone
09/02/2025
How to Own the Sales Transition Zone
Why mastering client conversations in Japan defines long-term sales success When salespeople meet new clients, the first few minutes set the tone for everything that follows. This “transition zone” between pleasantries and serious discussion is where trust is either built—or broken. Let’s explore how professionals in Japan and globally can own this crucial phase. Why is the sales transition zone so critical? The sales transition zone is the moment when the buyer and seller move from small talk into business. For the client, the first question is usually, “How much will this cost me?”. For the salesperson, the focus is on proving value beyond price. Unless this gap is bridged quickly, the conversation can collapse into a price war. In Japan, where relationship-building and long-term trust are prized, handling this transition with sensitivity is even more critical than in the US or Europe. Western executives may prefer blunt efficiency—“Let’s get straight to business”—but Japanese buyers expect context, respect, and subtlety. Mini-Summary: The transition zone is where price-driven client expectations collide with value-focused sales strategy. Mastering it determines whether the meeting builds trust or breaks down. How should salespeople frame the meeting agenda? After greetings, professionals should set a clear agenda that shows respect for the client’s time. For example: “I appreciate Suzuki-san introducing us. She felt there may be mutual benefit, so today I’d like to explore how our solutions may support your business. I also want to better understand your needs and see if there’s a fit. Are there other items you’d like to cover?” This framing balances structure with flexibility. It prevents the client from feeling “sold to” while subtly keeping control of the meeting. Across industries—from pharmaceuticals to IT services—Japanese clients respond positively when they feel their input is requested early. Mini-Summary: Outlining a flexible agenda signals professionalism and respect, while keeping the salesperson in control of the meeting flow. How can unique selling propositions (USPs) be introduced naturally? Clients don’t want a corporate brochure; they want proof of relevance. Introduce USPs in a conversational way: “We are global soft-skills training experts, here since 1963, specialising in sales training in Japan.” This single sentence embeds four powerful points: global scope, world best practice, 60 years of Japanese experience, and local market adaptation. Companies like Toyota, Rakuten, and Fujitsu look for vendors who demonstrate both international credibility and deep domestic roots. Mini-Summary: Well-crafted introductions should deliver layered USPs that combine global credibility, local experience, and proven relevance. How can salespeople prove credibility with results? Proof must be concrete, relevant, and measurable. For example: “Recently we trained a company in your industry. Salesperson confidence rose 40%, and revenues increased 18% within six months.” This approach works across sectors—manufacturing, finance, and consumer goods—because executives trust comparative results. But credibility evaporates if numbers are exaggerated. In Japan, where long-term relationships matter, any suspicion of dishonesty ends future business. Mini-Summary: Share specific, industry-relevant metrics to prove impact. Honesty is non-negotiable if you want repeat business in Japan. How do you smoothly shift to client questioning? Once credibility is established, invite permission to ask questions: “I don’t know if we could achieve the same results for you, but may I ask a few questions to better understand your situation?” This low-pressure approach keeps the salesperson in control while respecting the client’s space. It allows for uncovering challenges—talent gaps, process inefficiencies, competitive threats—without triggering defensiveness. Japanese executives particularly value humility paired with competence. Mini-Summary: The best transition uses respectful permission to shift into diagnostic questioning, creating trust and revealing real client needs. What if you discover you can’t help the client? Not every prospect is a fit. Forcing a solution damages reputation. Instead, tell the client: “This may not be the right match.” This honesty preserves brand integrity. In Japan’s tight-knit business networks, reputation compounds: one display of integrity can open doors elsewhere. Global comparisons support this: US firms often admire aggressiveness in sales, but in Japan, restraint builds credibility. Long-term success comes not from a single deal, but from a portfolio of reorders, referrals, and reputation. Mini-Summary: Walking away respectfully when there is no fit strengthens credibility and ensures long-term opportunities in Japan’s relationship-driven market. Conclusion Owning the sales transition zone means balancing confidence with humility, structure with flexibility, and proof with empathy. Salespeople who master this moment avoid premature price talk, build credibility through structured storytelling, and earn the right to ask deeper questions. Ultimately, success is not about one transaction but about sustaining long-term partnerships in Japan’s trust-based business culture. About the Author Dr. Greg Story, Ph.D. in Japanese Decision-Making, is President of Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training and Adjunct Professor at Griffith University. He is a two-time winner of the Dale Carnegie “One Carnegie Award” (2018, 2021) and recipient of the Griffith University Business School Outstanding Alumnus Award (2012). As a Dale Carnegie Master Trainer, Greg is certified to deliver globally across all leadership, communication, sales, and presentation programs, including Leadership Training for Results. He has written several books, including three best-sellers — Japan Business Mastery, Japan Sales Mastery, and Japan Presentations Mastery — along with Japan Leadership Mastery and How to Stop Wasting Money on Training. His works have also been translated into Japanese, including Za Eigyō (ザ営業), Purezen no Tatsujin (プレゼンの達人), Torēningu de Okane o Muda ni Suru no wa Yamemashō (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのはやめましょう), and Gendaiban “Hito o Ugokasu” Rīdā (現代版「人を動かす」リーダー). In addition to his books, Greg publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, offering practical insights on leadership, communication, and Japanese business culture. He is also the host of six weekly podcasts, including The Leadership Japan Series, The Sales Japan Series, The Presentations Japan Series, Japan Business Mastery, and Japan’s Top Business Interviews. On YouTube, he produces three weekly shows — The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show, Japan Business Mastery, and Japan’s Top Business Interviews — which have become leading resources for executives seeking strategies for success in Japan.
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Don’t Say “No” For The Client
08/26/2025
Don’t Say “No” For The Client
At the age of sixteen, I was wandering around the streets of a lower working class area in the suburbs of Brisbane, working my first job, trying to sell expensive Encyclopedia Britannica to the punters who lived there. Despite my callow youth, I had a tremendous gift as a salesman. I could tell by looking at the house from the outside whether they were interested or not in buying Encyclopedia Britannica and so could determine whether I should knock on their door or not. I was saying “no” for the client. Obviously, I had no clue what I was doing. The only training we received was to memorise, word for word, a twenty five minute pitch for the buyer, synchronised with showing the flash looking pages inside the encyclopedia. I am sure though there are many much older and wiser salespeople out there, still making that fundamental error I was making. Eventually, I discovered I didn’t have any x-ray vision gift. I was just an idiot. There will be plenty of opportunity for the buyer to say “no”, so we shouldn’t be joining in to support them on that quest. Even before the call, we will have anticipated some potential pushback and we are fully armed and ready to go when it emerges. I was reminded of this x-ray vision into the buyer problem recently. The top salesperson of an organisation I know, said “no” for the buyer. He was an intermediary for me with the client and didn’t like one of the conditions of the sale I was proposing. This was an important source of his commissions for him and they had been a big buyer over a number of years. He had them wrapped up in cotton wool and was extremely nervous about maintaining the relationship. I have learnt the hard way and so I don’t believe in saying “no” for the buyer, so I pushed it. I rejected his rejection and told him to put my request to the client. We got into an elongated email wrangle over this, but not only am I dim most of the time, I am also supremely stubborn, especially when it comes to sales. Stubborn and dim is a lethal combination. He didn’t like it at all, but he held his nose and put my proposition to the client. Guess what? They went for it. As we say in Japan, “even the monkeys fall from the trees” and even Mr. Number One sales guy can get it wrong. I refrained from mentioning that Japanese proverb of course or being a smarty pants and just thanked him for his cooperation. One common case of saying “no” for the client is when the prices are raised for the product or service. Salespeople invariably will start whinging to the boss, that the client will never agree to buy at that higher price. Effectively, they are saying “no” for the buyers. There are many ways to dilute the pain of raising the price. The terms of payment can be elongated. The guarantees and warranties can be expanded. The rise can be counterbalanced by discounts for volume purchases. The proposition can be ramped up on the value equation scale. Additional incentives can be packed together with the original offer to justify the price rise. Services can be thrown into the product purchase process to make it more palatable and vice versa. Interestingly, salespeople complaining about the price increase, spend zero time thinking about how to sell the value increase to the client. Price increases are one thing, but defending existing prices against discounting is another case of having to say “no” to the customer. In Japan, salespeople are very weak in front of the customer. The buyer here isn’t King but GOD and GOD doesn’t brook hearing “no” from salespeople. The constant complaint from our clients is that their firm’s salespeople identify too closely with the client and don’t defend the company’s policies well enough, including pricing. I had the same problem with one of my salespeople. He was happy to discount and take a lower commission, even though the firm made very little profit. He got his base salary and some commission, so he was happy. I wasn’t so happy. I get it - the logic is simple. The salesperson heavily invests in the relationship with the buyer and works hard to defend that relationship, even against their own employer. This sounds crazy, but they know the value of an existing customer, compared to the pain and effort to find a new buyer. This is where the value element has to be worked on more, so that salespeople can justify the existing pricing, without resorting to discounts to get the business. The basic sales skills of the team have to be improved, especially their communication skills. This don’t say “no” for the client arena, shows the real capabilities of the salesperson. Sadly, there is a major population decline underway here and salespeople are in increasingly short supply. The quality of the people we can hire isn’t going to improve, so our sales training mechanisms and our sales leadership mechanisms, become even more important than any time in the past. Are you ready for this and are your people ready to say “yes” for the buyer?
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Unlocking Value For Clients
08/19/2025
Unlocking Value For Clients
It is seriously sad to be dumb. Nothing annoys me more than when I finally realise something that was so obvious and yet I didn’t see what was there, right in front of my nose. We talk a lot about value creation in relation to pricing, trying to persuade clients that what we are selling is a sensible trade off between the value they seek and the revenue that we seek. We want the value we offer to be both perceived and acknowledged value by the buyer. Often however, we get into a rut in our sales mindset. We carve a neuron groove once in our brain and keep ploughing that same row. Outside stimulation is needed. I realised that fact when I recently did some formal online training. My previous companies had sent me to the Harvard, Stanford and Insead business schools in the past, which of course, were all amazing. However, when I was doing my recent studies, I recalled that it has been some time since I did something formal like that. During the coursework, I realised many things we could do around value provision, which we have not been doing or not doing sufficiently well enough. I am an avid reader, but I also found that the mantra of both “formal” and “informal” lifetime learning is a good one to follow. I found we have had a lot of assets lying around, which we have not fully utilised, hence the “I hate how dumb I am” statement. We need an omnichannel approach. Often, we may have videos hanging around, explaining the benefits and the details of a service or a product. Now the video has an audio track, which we can strip out of the video. This allows us to turn it into a different medium, allowing clients to access the information in that format. So many people are now processing information through audio, thanks to the recent proliferation of podcasts and audiobooks. Buyers are busy, busy and so many are multi-tasking while listening. Having audio alternatives may help to save them valuable time, compared to them having to sit down and watch our video. Depending on the content, the audio might also become a training tool for our own staff. Now if that video is sitting there on YouTube for free, then once people have watched it, suddenly, a whole world of YouTube’s other groovy offerings appears on your client’s screen. They are being tempted to look at our competitor’s videos. That is not a great result for us. We want to keep the client on our website for as long as possible. There are companies like Wistia, for example, which will host the videos for a monthly fee. These videos are no longer mashed into YouTube’s offerings, but sit independently, such that the client cannot stray into competitor territory. We want to build a moat to keep the client in our ecosystem, so that after watching the video on Wistia, they have to come back to us. Are you able to free your clients from the YouTube loop and make sure they escape your rival’s charms? The audio track can also be run through AI programmes like Descript, which will turn sound into text. Once the text emerges, we need to edit the content, because the AI is good, but it is not perfect. Once we have the corrected information in text, it can go into our newsletters, get it on to our website and we can send it out to clients. When we have text in English, we can translate it into Japanese and use that for clients. We can use this text information to supplement other information we are going to send to clients or include it in our after sales service programmes. Do you have any opportunities to create text, which didn’t exist as text before and find ways to employ this to add more value for clients? Often we have multiple solutions for clients, which we could bundle together. As salespeople though, we tend to be stuck in that Johnny One Note neuron groove and only sell clients one solution. An ideal bundle would be so attractive that the client would be willing to enter into a subscription format to pay something upfront for a whole year or each month or each quarter. The point is to get them to sign up for more than an episodic transaction that always has a formal completion date. We want repeat business and this subscription model is one way to weld the relationship between buyer and seller closer together. Once we become part of their ongoing business plans, it reduces the buying friction. Importantly, it also increases their internal friction to turn the buying process off. It is always easier to keep something going, than to start it in the first place. This builds a moat around our client, denying our rivals an option to steal our business. So, what could you bundle together to create a no-brainer, totally stupendous offer for the buyer? There might be some administration associated with using our type of product or service. The buying entity inside the client’s company is always time poor. Perhaps we can offer a system which supplies the service or product, but in such a way that we reduce the friction involved on their side. A famous example is the Kanban system at Toyota. It works well for Toyota as the buyer of the auto parts, as their warehousing costs are substantially reduced. The suppliers have revolutionised their logistics ability and can time their deliveries to fit in with Toyota’s production schedule. The suppliers are selling their products but also reducing Toyota’s friction. What can we do to sell our products and services and also reduce the friction in the buyer’s internal systems? When I finally got religion about maximising the assets we already have for increasing our value to clients, I was amazed at how much latent opportunity we had there all along. I was asking myself, “why has it taken me so long to work out this simple idea?”. I was just dumb but now I have wised up at long last. What items are available for you to recognise the latent value you possess and package them up as assets transformed into new forma
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Selling As A Team
08/12/2025
Selling As A Team
When we think of team selling, we imagine a room with the buyers on one side of the table and we are lined up on the other. There is another type of team selling and that is taking place before we get anywhere near the client. It might be working together as a Sales Mastermind panel to brainstorm potential clients to target or strategising campaigns or plotting the approach to adopt with a buyer. Salespeople earn their remuneration through a combination of base salary and commission or bonus in Japan. There are very few jobs here in sales, which are 100% commission, simply because salespeople don’t have to accept that model. There is always a demand here for salespeople and in fact the declining population is keeping a lot of dud salespeople afloat. Given there is not much 100% commission selling going on, there is also not so much salesperson competition going on with each other. There is competition, but the losers usually don’t get fired, as they might in some Western business environments. So the opportunity is there to collaborate more on approaches to the client and generating more business. What often happens though is, salespeople tend to operate from within their own little castles. They have their moat around their existing clients, which they serve and they spend their time trying to find new clients by themselves. They may have sales managers, but in these modern times, sales managers are expected to produce revenues as well. That means there isn't a lot of coaching going on. If we have one person looking at the client through the prism of their own experience, things get a bit thin quickly, if that person doesn’t have such a wealth of experience. It would be more logical to gather a team of salespeople together and look at the best approach for that client, rather than relying on the best efforts of a single person. But we don’t do this very often. This tends to be because of a territorial concept, where each salesperson has their clients and they should take care of them, without wasting anyone’s time, especially when they are getting paid a commission or a bonus, for the sale. This does make sense at one level, but we are missing out on the sum of the parts being able to exceed the whole here. This is often a culture issue within sales teams. If you run things with tight individual accountability, it is hard to get other salespeople to assist a colleague. As leaders we need to establish a framework for teamwork even in a commission based world of focused individual benefit. The money getting paid out doesn’t change, but the time becomes the sticking point. How do we get salespeople to spend time to help others be more successful? One way to do this it to treat a particular client as a project and pull in other salespeople to work on the best approach. Once the salesperson in question has spoken with the client, then we need to gather the Sales Mastermind together again and brainstorm what would be the ideal solution. This should be one of the tasks for the sales manager, but often they are swamped with their own clients and trying to keep the whole sales team coordinated and moving forward. Breaking out time for one-on-one discussions may simply not be happening and the salespeople are often left to their own devices. When we approach this on the project level, the time required becomes contained and less oppressive for the other salespeople. It is also a case of quid pro quo too, because it will be their turn to benefit next time, from having more heads than one tackling client problems and helping match the best solutions. This is where the sales manager can play a role in setting up the project teams and monitoring progress. It is good for the salespeople because one day they will become sales managers and will need to introduce similar systems into their own teams. Funnily enough, we often have the experience of learning a lot ourselves, when we are working on someone else’s problem. We can be too close to our own issues and be blind to aspects which could have an important bearing, but we cannot see the wood for the trees. Somehow looking at another’s problem brings clarity for us about our own contemplations. There are many benefits to using Sales Masterminds from within the team, working together for the best outcomes for the client. There is an education process going on both up and down the scale of experience, as we all come away from the process that little better educated in our craft.
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Four Client Focus Areas For Salespeople
08/05/2025
Four Client Focus Areas For Salespeople
was studying an online learning programme from Professor Scott Galloway, where he talked about Appealing To Human Instincts. His take was from the strategy angle, but I realised that this same framework would be useful for sales too. In sales we do our best to engage the client. We try to develop sophisticated questions to help us unearth the stated and unstated needs of the buyer. Professor Galloway's pedagogical construct can give us another perspective on buyer dynamics. The first Human Instinct nominated was the brain. This is our logos, our rational, logical, analytical mode. What are the unanswered questions and key internal conversations occupying the minds of our buyers. If we can meet the buyer in their thought process, then we are more likely to be able to understand their needs and then be in a position to meet those needs. We know that some buyers will be analytical types, for whom three decimal places is unremarkable when considering data. Often though salespeople are big picture. Macro types who shun this level of detail because they feel it is boring. They love the sale and abhor the paperwork which goes along with it. I had two insurance salesmen in my home trying to get me to buy various policies. What astounded me was they were middle aged, well experienced gentlemen and yet they couldn’t fill out the paperwork correctly, so we had to do it again. They loved the conversation with me but not the conversation with the fine print in the contract. The next instinct was the heart. Our emotions are there for all to see, if the right stimulation is provided. We laugh, cry, get angry, become determined and give up, based around our emotional configuration at any point in the day. Salespeople walk into a mine field of buyer emotions, with no way of knowing which particular configuration we have bumped into today. Our job is to gauge as quickly as possible where the buyer is emotionally and how they prefer to communicate at that moment. We know our tempers once frayed, tend to trigger a supreme impatience with everything. Woe be tied a salesperson who cannot “kuki wo yomu” or read the air, as we say in Japanese, to understand this client needs another visit on a better day for them. Instinct number three was the gut. This reminded me of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where survival was at the bottom and became the prism through which information and ideas were judged. Company buyers are always bound firmly by risk reduction, budget stringencies, cash flow imperatives and fears for the future. Everyone loves a bargain except salespeople, especially those salespeople who have commissions attached to the sale price. Value is the only antidote for this price discount swamp fever infecting buyers. Babbling on about features won’t cut it. Yet amazingly this is the step where many salespeople check out. They never even attempt to consider scaling the summit. We had better migrate up the value scale and talk about the application of the benefits. We need to lock in the evidence where this has worked magnificently somewhere else, for this buyer to feel safe that there are precedents. The fourth instinct was sex appeal. Buyers want to attract attention to themselves as capable, highly promotable, sexy beasts attracting a lot of favourable accord. Our role is to make them look like heroes, legends, masters of the universe. They want to elevate their worth, status and value within the organisation. “Look at me, I am clever” they want to say. We become their instrument to promote that message by giving them our product or service, which becomes a game changer inside the client company. Salespeople have to be master jugglers, elevating many balls in the air at the same time. We need to see our buyers in a holistic manner, to fully appreciate the tack we need to take buyer by buyer, because they are all different. This takes a change in the sales mindset because most salespeople are focused on themselves, their commission, their Beemer upgrade and a thousand other things, which the buyer couldn’t care less about. So next time we sit down with a buyer, we need to make sure we are engaging all of their human instincts and appealing to them from many angles.
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How To Sell from The Stage
07/29/2025
How To Sell from The Stage
Group crowdsourcing has been around since cave dweller days. Gathering a crowd of prospects and getting them to buy your stuff is a standard method of making more sales or starting conversations which hopefully will lead to sales. Trade shows provide booths but also speaking events, if you pay more dough to attend. These days the event will most likely be online rather than in person, but the basics are common. “We all love to buy but we don’t want to be sold”, should be a mantra all salespeople embrace, especially with selling from the stage. The common approach at events is to provide a lot of information, generally the features of the product and then trot out the sales pitch at the end. As an audience, we brace ourselves because we see the switch from value to pitch coming. Mentally, we get our sceptic hat out and put it on ready for the sales blurb. When you think about it this is a pretty dumb approach. The giving value first idea is a good one, but why separate the value from the pitch at the end? Why not integrate the two together, so there is no audience bracing required? It all comes back to design. We have all grown up with the explanation, then pitch model, so we tend to just accept that is how it is done. This is even though on other occasions as audience members ourselves, we are experiencing that “brace yourself” mental switch. It is a bit strange isn’t it, so why not learn from our own experience and make a change for the better. The talk will be broken down into chapters. Chapter One is the opening. This is where we have to say something that snaps a distracted, sceptical audience member out of their social media induced coma and gets them to listen to us. We may share a really surprising piece of high value data or information. We might tell a gripping story that attracts the audience. We might ask a devilish question that completely consumes the attention of the audience. Next we start to move into some features of the solution we are proffering and critically, we must link these to the applied benefits. We do this by using examples of what other buyers have done with our solution so that the audience can draw a direct line between the purchase and the benefit. These claims have to be backed up with solid evidence or it comes across as salesperson hot air. At this point we need to ask a question which gets the audience thinking about their situation. It must be subtle, rather than bold outbursts like “You should have this shouldn’t you?”. Rather we can say, “can you see an area of your business where this widget would increase revenues or reduce costs?”. We then say nothing and let that question hang in the air, to allow the audience to focus on it and make a mental evaluation for themselves. We will keep repeating this formula in each chapter – feature, benefit, application of the benefit, evidence and then a subtle question. We can't keep repeating the exact same question every time, because that sounds ridiculous, so we need a stock of these. Others could be, “Thinking about some of your strategies for your business, can you see where having this widget would help advance the business for you?”, or “Even incremental advances are welcome, so can you see where you could gain a five, ten or fifteen percent improvement in results through applying this widget to your business?”, or “Business is super competitive today so stealing a march on your rivals is always a challenge. Can you see an avenue through using this widget which will differentiate you from your competitors in the minds of your buyers?”. By the time we get to the end of our presentation, we will have used a variety of questions which will resonate differently with each of our potential clients, because not all of their situations are identical. We need to use this insight when we are designing our questions, hoping at least one will hit the bullseye for a particular client. We finish off with inviting members of the audience to stay back and chat, if they found some solutions to their business issues from our talk. At no point could the audience members “brace for impact” from our sales pitch. We have eliminated resistance to what we are saying. We have also come across as a company who focuses on value for clients and are not a collection of rabid shysters, spivs, hucksters and dodgy carnival barkers. Even if they don’t buy from us today, our reputation will have been enhanced and they are more likely to look favourably on us in the future.
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"That Sounds Pricey"
07/22/2025
"That Sounds Pricey"
Japanese salespeople should love to hear “that sounds pricey” from buyers. Why? Because they know that this statement is the most common objection to arise in response to their sales presentation and they are completely ready for it. It is one of the simplest buyer pushback answers to deal with too. Well, simple that is, if you are trained in sales and know what you are doing. Untrained salespeople really make a big hot mess of this one. They want to argue the point about pricing with the buyer. Or they want to use their force of will to bully the buyer into buying. Or they want to use one of those American style aggressive response statements, to try and push the deal over the line. This is all nonsense. The only words emerging from our lips should be “Thank you. May I ask you why you say that?”. We could say something else like “compared to what?”, which is a pretty snappy rejoinder, but it is a bit too aggressive in this situation and doesn't really yield enough information about buyer thinking. We could simply drop the price to be “competitive”, but that is the mark of the weak, whining, unwashed, pathetic salesperson. We need to do better than that, unless that proffered discount is directly linked to certain purchase volume prerequisites. When we first hear “that sounds pricey” we may feel some pressure to justify our numbers. That is totally the wrong way of thinking. That number of ours is there for a reason. There is a justification for that number, based on the value it provides. There are plenty of clients willing and happy to pay that number for the goods or services they receive in exchange. When we sweetly ask why they say that, we now have moved the pressure for justification back to the buyer. This is called “tossing back the porcupine”. The comment “pricey” is like a spiky porcupine being thrown to us and it is tricky to handle, without incurring lots of pain. We ask “why” thus shooting the porcupine back to the buyer and we can sit there cool calm and collected and listen to what they have to say. This is important because we need to use our highest level of empathetic listening to comprehend what they are saying, in order to understand what is really on their mind. Our object in sales is to meet the buyer in the conversation they are having in their own mind. That will be a compilation of their current situation, their experiences to date, their personal situation and a million other factors which we will never be privy to. Asking them that “why” question gives us the chance to tune in to what is important for them and to alert us to factor in things which we hadn’t considered before. I was given that price pushback for some training I was proposing to the HR team at a Japanese company. I asked them the “why” question and then just sat there stone cold silent. They did not reply immediately. It was one of those long uncomfortable silences for foreigners. Fortunately, I have learned to become comfortable with silence in Japan. After what seemed an absolute age, they explained that they are given a quarterly budget for training and my number was over that quarterly limit. Did I rail against the inequity of having such dopey quarterly budgets or rage that they should change their entire budgeting system and get that accounting department better geared up to suit my preferred pricing? No. I sweetly asked, “If we could spread the payment across two quarters, would that be of any help?” and again I shut up and didn’t say one more word. They looked at each other and I saw a light get switched on inside their heads and they said that would work. So, it wasn’t too pricey after all. It was too much price for that arbitrary temporal unit called a quarter of the year. After the buyer tells us all the good reasons why our price is too high, we need to be packing heavy with our value justification for the number we have just quoted. This is why salespeople need to be well prepared and practice for this “that sounds pricey” pushback. Trying to wing it and produce some intellectual and articulation magic on the spot is possible. Unlikely though, especially when your brain is frozen with fear getting that infamous pushback. Recently a multinational client wanted presentation training in Japan, after having conducted training in APAC with another provider who was based out of Hong Kong. They were unable to deliver in Japan so the client contacted us. I gave them my proposal and they told me my number was “pricey”. When I sweetly asked “why”, they not so sweetly told me that the other vendor did the exact same training for a price significantly at a discount to what I was proposing. They said that I should match this other provider, whom I had never heard of. I checked them out. They didn’t have a 109 year history of teaching presentation skills, a track record of 58 years in Japan, teach 90% of the Fortune 500 companies, have 200 branches in over 100 countries, teach in 35 languages, have ISO 9001 certification, require their trainers to undergo 250 hours of train-the-trainer instruction for their first license, have a trainer who had personally delivered 545 public speeches, appear in the Training Industry Top 20 training companies and on and on it went. You get the idea. In the end, I suggested we do a demo session with the key decision makers, so that they could comfortably recommend us to their executives, at the price I required. The demo blew them away, because now they could directly compare us with the other vendor. We did the training and achieved a 9.3/10 Net Promoter Score and a Voice Of Customer score of 92.8/100, which are very high scores, thoroughly justifying the investment. Yes, I am bragging, but the point is we have numbers we can quote back to clients in order to brag. We do the satisfaction surveys for our professional work, so we can justify the value of our training, at the price point we nominate. When professional salespeople hear “that sounds pricey” they remain extremely calm, because they know what to say and how to justify their pricing. How about your sales team? Are they like deers in the headlights when they get pushback or are they legends of value explanation to buyers?
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The Craziness Of Sales In Japan
07/15/2025
The Craziness Of Sales In Japan
Japan’s image as a sophisticated country with a solid, unique traditional culture is well placed. For example, every year around 130,000 Shinkansen bullet trains run between Tokyo and Osaka, bolting through the countryside at speeds of up to 285 kilometers an hour and boast an average arrival delay of 24 seconds. Think about that average, sustained over a whole year! Such amazing efficiency here is combined with basically no guns, no drugs, no litter, no graffiti, very little crime and the people are so polite and considerate. If you step on their foot in the crowded subway cars, they apologise to you for getting their foot in the wrong place. If you drop your wallet there is a close to 100% chance of you getting it back, intact. Considering all of the above and with the biggest concentration of Michelin three star restaurants in the world, no wonder Tokyo is the best city in the world to live in. Once Covid is contained, put Japan on your bucket list folks, you won’t regret it. Yet sales professionalism is still so far behind, by Western standards. I am going to make incredibly broad, general statements here, but actually they are true for most salespeople in Japan. How do I know this? We have been teaching sales training here since 1963 and these are the things companies consistently ask us to fix. Let’s highlight a few things which may surprise you about sales in Japan. Asking for the order is avoided. Saying “no” is culturally taboo, so the best way to avoid having to say it or to hear it, is to save everyone’s face and leave the outcome deliberately vague. There are shelves of books in English on how to close the sale, many are in translation, but not a great take up here as yet. When the seller meets any resistance from the buyer, the first reflex is to drop the price by 20%. Western sales managers would be apoplectic if this was the default objection handling mechanism. Here defending your price, through explaining the value, is thrown overboard and simple price point reductions are the preferred lever. Objection handling skills are weak, because the seller sees the buyer not as a King but as a God. The seller’s job is to do everything God wants. The salespeople are predominantly on base salary and bonus remuneration arrangements, so not much commission sales “fire in the belly” going on here. Salespeople love the spec, the data, the detail and are not so keen on the application of the benefits. How do we know this? I am a buyer here too and in they come bearing their catalogue, flyer or their slide deck to take me through all the details. Surprisingly, they never rise above the spec waterline to talk about value or benefits or how to apply the benefits. It is the same in our sales classes and we see this phenomenon in the role play sequences. Salespeople struggle to think about what the spec represents in terms of the benefits to the buyer. This opens up the can of worms about understanding buyer needs. By any definition, getting straight into the detail of the product or service, without asking the buyer any questions, is insanity. Yet this is normal here. So much for all that slick American consultative sales jive. We are back to the God problem. The seller must not brook God’s displeasure by rude behaviour, such as asking questions about what are their firm’s problems. Ergo, the buyer completely controls the sale’s conversation. They demand the pitch be made straight up, so that they can lacerate it, to make sure all the risk has been cut out. Buyers are incredibly risk averse in Japan. This a zero default, no errors, no mistakes business culture. This is great as a consumer of course. However, the seller is not considered a partner here, more of a slave to the buyer’s every whim and demand. So the Japan business sales process is pretty “refined”. There are only three steps. The salesperson opens with their pitch, then we move immediately to client objections. Next, the buyer will get back to you, but probably not. How does any business get done here? Please see the next section! Sellers really prefer to concentrate on existing clients, rather than running around trying to find new clients. They rely on the firm brand to do all the prospecting work, rather than their skill as a professional in sales. Hunters are a rare breed of salesperson in Japan, as everyone prefers being a farmer. This is probably true of everywhere, because obviously it is much easier to keep the business going, than to start a new piece of business. Japanese salespeople just take it to new heights of speciality. Salespeople never think to ask permission of the buyer to ask questions. Such a simple thing, but so hard to break out of your own cultural context to actually execute. Once we teach them how easy it is, the scales literally fall from their eyes and they become true believers in asking questions, before introducing anything about the detail of their solution line up. The first foreigners who lived in Japan in the late 19th Century often described Japan as a “topsy turvey” world, because so many things were opposite to what they were used to back in Europe and America. The differences are what makes it so fascinating and why I have been here for 36 years and am never leaving. These differences are also a big business opportunity too, as many companies have found, including ourselves. See you over here after Covid!
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We Need More Formality On Line When Selling To Japanese Buyers
07/08/2025
We Need More Formality On Line When Selling To Japanese Buyers
Selling to a buyer in-person and selling to the same Japanese buyer online are worlds apart. Yet how many salespeople are succeeding in making the transition? Are your clients seeking virtual sales training? Not enough. COVID has revealed a lot of salespeople weaknesses. which were hidden in the face-to-face sales call world. Wishing things get better is a plan, but not a very good plan because things don't appear like they are going to get better for quite some time. There is also the fact that a lot of companies are not going to have staff in the office every day anymore. So selling online, isn't going to disappear as a part of our reality. Our skills have to include this piece of the puzzle, whether we like it or not. What do we need to do? Here are some ideas to apply with your sales team and get them better able to get the deals COVID or otherwise. First impressions whether at the office venue or online are critical. Posture sounds like an unlikely choice for something to focus on, but think about the body language clues we pick up from people according to the way they hold themselves. Online, we need to be quite formal sitting up ram rod straight, or if we are standing, than standing tall. Our posture needs to convey confidence, competence, trust, and reliability. Sit forward, Roman style toward the edge of the seat online just as you would do in a face-to-face meeting. Get the camera lens up to eye height and frame yourself on screen so that your upper half of your body is visible. This becomes important when we want to use our gestures. Many people I see in online meetings never use their gestures when explaining things. Gestures work online too, but you have to make some adjustment. The corridor between your chest and your ear height is where to use gestures, because that way they will be easily seen. Also don't wave your hands around. These fake backgrounds can't take that type of movement. So it means we need to maintain our gestures longer than usual and move our hands very slowly. You wouldn't slouch in the chair in front of a buyer. And you would look them in the eye when you talk to them. Looking at their faces on screen looks like you are looking down on them when you're talking and that cannot help build a good relationship. Instead, look straight at the lens and try to engage the buyer. We need to make greater use of our voice and lift the energy up at least 20% louder and stronger than usual to compensate for the power loss, which the camera extracts. We need to hit key words and phrases much stronger in order to give them emphasis. We also need to slow our speaking speed down because the audio on these video platforms is universally poor. Pauses become more important to allow what we have said be captured, processed, and understood. We should eliminate ums and ahs because we've rehearsed our sales call online before we make it. We want to sound assured, confident and convinced about what we are saying. Any vocal hesitations defeat that effect so we have to get rid of these verbal ticks. We need to lead off with our credibility statement. This is a brief highlight of our USP or unique selling proposition. We should be using the screen share function to show any visuals supporting what we are saying. For example, one of our USP is longevity, having stood the test of time. For that purpose, we show the New York skyline as it looked in 1912, when the company was founded and the Tokyo skyline in 1963, when we opened in Japan. This visually is much more powerful than just saying we started in 1912 and 1963. Next, we should put up a draft agenda for the call using the screen share function. In this agenda we specify why speaking with us is a good idea. We nominate that we are going to discuss their current situation and their desired future situation, as well as barriers, challenging them from reaching their targets. We ask them if they would like to add any points to the agenda so that they feel ownership of the plan for the call. If they have any additions, then we just type them straight into the document and put it all back up on screen. As we work our way through the detail, it is important to check for understanding. One of the bad elements of online meetings is that buyers multitask while we are talking. In person, they can't do it. But online is the new wild west and there are few rules. This means we have to be insistent that they turn on their camera even though this may uncover some pushback or reluctance. We need to set this up. We both appreciate that mutual trust is very important in business. So let's both turn our cameras on today while we have this meeting. If they won't even turn their camera on, you have to ask yourself if this is really a prospect you should be spending any time. After the meeting, we need to send a lot of data they can look at on their own time. Japan is the data vortex of the universe. And the basic rule is you can never give Japanese buyers too much information. If I asked for a quotation or a proposal, then we should make an appointment right there and then for the next meeting for you to take them through it. Never send the document ahead of the meeting. Arrange the next meeting and then use the screen share function to take them through it. Send the actual document after the meeting. This way you can control their understanding of the content and justify that big number on the last page, because you can explain the value it represents.
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I Like It, It Sounds Really Good, But I Am Not Going To Buy It
07/01/2025
I Like It, It Sounds Really Good, But I Am Not Going To Buy It
You manage to get the appointment, which at the moment is seriously job well done. Trying to get hold of clients, when everyone is working from home is currently a character building exercise. You ask permission to ask questions. Well done! You are now in the top 1% pf salespeople in Japan. You do ask your questions and quickly realise you have just what they need. Bingo! We are going to do a deal here today, so you are getting pumped. But you don’t do a deal, in fact you leave with nothing but your deflated ego and damaged confidence. The finish line was right there in front of you and you fell down short. Why? This is one of the most frustrating things in sales. You do all of the right things or so you think and then you don’t get the deal. You start analysing what went wrong. Let me save you some time on that one. You didn’t ask your questions in the right way. Finding out things like: what they want, where they are now and where they want to be, are all brilliant questions. They won’t do the deal though, because you have missed one vital step. That step is to ask the question about where they want to be, and ask it in a specific way. We can say, “so you have mentioned to me the current state of play in the business, can you now please allow me to understand where you want the business to be going forward?”. Good try, but no cigar. That question needs an addendum. We need to ask it this way, “so you have mentioned to me the current state of play in the business, can you now please allow me to understand where you want the business to be going forward and what are the implications, if you don’t get there fast enough?”. This is a clever phrasing of the question, because it is no longer about whether they can get there or not, but can they get there fast enough. Often, the buyer is sitting there listening to us, but thinking to themselves, “that is all very true and we will work on all of that – BY OURSELVES”. That may be the case, but the world has not stopped, so that they can get their act together at their pace, when they are ready, in the fullness of time. No, they have competitors and are engaged in a life and death struggle for survival and in that fierce contest, speed to market is a big factor. This is where we come in. The question is a good one because it challenges their ability to get it done themselves internally and done fast enough. They have to allocate scarce resources to this project and they are already quite busy with what is on their plate now. We can provide that high level of expertise immediately and make a big difference. The best plan in the world never executed is no help. Procrastination affects people and institutions. Getting stuff done inside companies can be excruciatingly slow. So many meetings required, so may sign offs, so much paperwork and bureaucracy to wade through. Having a problem and doing anything about it are different things. As the salesperson, the first thing we learn is that the client is never on our timetable. You need that deal now but they don’t feel any sense of urgency. We have to make sure that sense of the size of the gap between where they are now and where they need to be is enormous. So vast that they just won’t be able to do it by themselves. Also, we have to create that sense of urgency that the cost of doing nothing is not zero. We have to paint the picture of the opportunity cost of being too slow to get going and how their competitors are active and moving forward, while they are lagging behind. If we don’t do this well they will imagine they can do it by themselves at their leisure. The person we are talking to is thinking they can be a hero to their boss by fixing the problem with no need to hire external solution providers. We could say to them, “By applying our solution now, you will speed up the opportunity to gain increased revenues. These additional revenues will not only pay for our solution very quickly but will build a war chest for you to be more agile in taking on your competitors”. That won’t work. Why? Because it is a statement from a salesperson, trying to sell something. Instead, we need to extinguish that false hope of doing it themselves at their leisure, by pointing out through asking well constructed questions, the folly of that approach. For example, “If by applying our solution now, would it be beneficial to you to speed up the opportunity to gain increased revenues?”. After they say, “yes”, we continue. “If these additional revenues allowed you to not only pay for our solution very quickly, but also build a war chest for you to be more agile in taking on your competitors, would that assist your business?”. We need to be sensitive to the client becoming our competitor for the needed solutions. We can most easily attack that false flag by raising the issue of speed. Few companies can move as quickly as they need to and our agility becomes our competitive advantage, as a solution provider.
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Bringing More Marketing Into Sales Calls
06/24/2025
Bringing More Marketing Into Sales Calls
Salespeople have sales tools which often are not thoroughly thought through enough. These can be flyers, catalogues, slide decks, etc. They can also be proposals, quotations and invoices. Usually the salespeople are given the tools as they are and either don’t ask for improvements or don’t believe the marketing department has much interest in their ideas about the dark art of marketing. Consequently, there are some areas for improvement which go begging. Flyers, catalogues and slide decks tend to be very evenly arranged. Every page is basically presented in the same way. Yet, as salespeople we know that there are going to be certain products which are more popular than others. These items and corresponding pages should be up the front. It might mean breaking away from the sectional approach, of all the bits and bobs being collected together in their respective places, separate and cordoned off. Also, on important pages of these most important products or services, there are bound to be key words or key paragraphs that, over time, we have learnt are of the most relevancy to our clients. There will also be key data tables, diagrams or photos which should be drawn to the buyer’s attention. Why don’t we have marketing do something with this information. Maybe make the font larger, or add bold or highlight using colour. This is only a matter of adjusting the layout of the page and getting the next round of printing or soft copy to reflect these updates. Generally speaking, we don’t want to be handing our materials over to the client, in the first instance. We want to spin the item around, so that they can easily read it. With our nice pen we draw their attention to the areas we want them to see. Not everything on that page has equal value. Some sections will be more important than others. They can read the whole thing later at their leisure, but while we are there with them, we want to go through the content and determine what they need to focus on. When we leave the materials with them the highlighted areas will draw their attention to where we need them to be looking for information. If this is so easy, why are all the sales materials we see all look the same – flat, undifferentiated and no attempt to direct the eye of the reader? Everyone has their job. Marketing is there to produce the materials, but they don’t know which are the key sections for buyer purview. Salespeople are busy running around seeing clients and just take what they have been given. They never think to make requests to marketing to change the materials. What if the buyers have different interests? That will be true, but it will also be true that 20% of the key information will suit 80% of the buyers, so we should concentrate on that content. If there are particular sections which are not highlighted, then we can deal with that problem when we are with the buyer. The other areas for some marketing effort are around how we present quotations, invoices and proposals. We should be advertising our services or goods on the quotations and invoices. Key people in the buyer’s company will see these materials and here is a chance to get our information in front of them. If there are soft copies involved this allows us to add links to the website where more information can be found. QR codes are also good for taking information on a page to a website. Proposals can be very florid or very flat. Something in the middle is a good idea. We don’t want the presentation of the information overwhelming the messages. We also don’t have to just rely on text. Visual stimulation is very powerful and photos of people are always attractive to us. This is where we salespeople need marketing’s help. We need someone who has great layout skills and knows how to assemble the look and feel of the pages. Let’s rethink our sales materials and ask what more could we get from them?
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Nemawashi Is Gold When Selling In Japan
06/17/2025
Nemawashi Is Gold When Selling In Japan
I hear some people say translating terms like “nemawashi” into English is difficult. Really? I always thought it was one of the easier ones. Let's just call it “groundwork”. In fact, that is a very accurate description ,from a number of different angles. Japanese gardeners are superstars. There is limited flat space in this country, so over centuries gardeners have worked out you need to move the trees you want, to where you want them. They prefer this approach to just waiting thirty years for them to turn out the preferred way. It is not unusual today to see a huge tree on the back of a big truck ,being moved from one location to another and presto instant garden. The roots of that massive tree will be wrapped up in cloth to protect them. That wrapping process is called “nemawashi”. In business, it means being well prepared for the business meeting – doing the ground work beforehand. In a Western context being well prepared for the meeting will mean assembling all the data and analysis in order to make an impassioned plea for your idea or suggestion, to be accepted by the big bosses. We all get to the meeting, listen to the different approaches and we make a decision in that meeting. What could be more time efficient and logical? They never do it that way in Japan. Concepts of time efficiency differ for a start and throwing massive amounts of overtime at a problem is not problem in Japan. The meeting is also a ceremony, because the decision has already been arrived at beforehand and the gathering is just to formalise the outcome. This happens in the West too. Whenever you see global leaders delivering their joint statements or signing agreements, they didn’t arrive at the wording during the meeting. That was all worked out by their minions beforehand, over many hours of debate, negotiation and discussion. The TV cameras just capture the big guys and gals inking the document, after all the “groundwork” has been completed. I was talking with a Western businessman recently and he was relating how hard it was to get the team behind his ideas. The issue was, he was trying to get it all agreed to, at the key meeting and hadn’t invested the time to do the groundwork. What he needed to do was go to see all the key people, the influencers, the stakeholders with a vested interest and explain the idea. Get their input and agreement and then rinse and repeat with the rest of them. By the time the meeting happens, everyone will recognise parts of their preferences and ideas in the submission. Agreement flows easily in these cases. In sales, we will probably not have direct access to all of the decision makers, influencers and stakeholders. Our primary contact has to become our champion for sheparding the agreement through the internal nemawashi process. Asking them directly who are these hidden decision makers is insulting. It says, you are a nobody, but I still need your help. We need to be more considerate of their “face” and ask in a way that enhances their face. Once we have established the trust, have uncovered their needs, shown we can help and have dealt with any hesitations they may have, we are ready to marshal our forces for the final push through to a “yes” to the sale. We explain, we understand that many people will be interested to know about this change in the delivery of product or services. We also know that they will be tasked to explain it to others who cannot join our meetings. We ask how can we help them? This is a rhetorical question because we want to get into the detail of who are the players. So we go straight into asking who do they think would have the most concern about the change and why they would be concerned? We keep repeating this process until we have fleshed out the people who will have the most interest in saying “no”. The next stage is to arm our champion with the tools to deal with the pushback. We try to understand the concerns and then arrive at creative ways of overcoming those concerns. This is what we mean by nemawashi or ground work. Is it time consuming – yes! Do we have to invest the extra time – yes! There is an internal logic to the way decisions are made in Japan. There is no point railing about how the Japanese business decision making process should be Westernised, so it is more familiar for us. That is never going to happen, so we need to be better and more flexible to understand the system and then become a master of influence within it. We need to become the nemawashi maestro!
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The Three Barbers Of Minato
06/10/2025
The Three Barbers Of Minato
Minato-ku or the “Port Area” is a central part of Tokyo, which used to be harbourside for goods being delivered to the capital in ancient times. My three barbers’ stories are tales of customer service opportunities gone astray, in a country where customer service is the envy of the rest of the world. Each story brings forth a reflection on our own customer service and how we treat our buyers. My apologies to Gioachino Rossini for lifting the title idea for this piece from his famous opera. Barber Number One worked in a men’s barber shop in the Azabu Juban shopping street which I frequented (and took my son too), for fifteen years. During that time a number of different barbers there took care of my hair as they came and went. One day, while trimming the hair on the back of my neck, the electric razor must have had a fault, because he cut my skin where he had been shaving my neck. My wife, being a typical demanding Japanese consumer, was appalled by this poor customer service and went there to complain about how they were treating her husband. Me being a laid back Aussie, I didn’t raise a fuss myself, but that didn’t stop my missus from wading in. The youngish barber decided to argue the point with my wife and wasn’t immediately forthcoming with a satisfactory apology. My wife showed the offending damage on the photos on her phone and wasn’t backing off. One of the more senior barbers intervened and made the apology on behalf of the shop. Did that satisfy her? Not in the least. Why? Because she didn’t feel it was a sincere apology. She told me I should never attend that establishment again. The lifetime value of a regular customer is high, especially in a crowded market. There was a management issue there because the service culture wasn’t correct. The interesting thing I understood was that barbers are hard to recruit these days, because not so many people want to join the trade. They felt they could afford to lose me as a regular over fifteen years or more but they couldn’t afford to lose the barber. The point though is where do you draw the line around the culture of your service? What are you saying is acceptable behaviour to the other staff? When things go wrong, this is when the real culture of your organisation is revealed. Barber Number Two belonged to a well known chain of successful barber shops and was introduced by my wife as an appropriate alternative to the previous bloodthirsty razor wielding maniac she disapproved of. I wasn’t all that keen on this Roppongi establishment, once Covid-19 hit, because it was a rather confined space. In the centre of Tokyo, a lot of companies are using what were once apartments as business premises, so the layout and size can be quite small. Having trained this young guy on how I like my hair done, I persevered, Covid or otherwise. I called to make an appointment only to be told he had been transferred to one of their shops on the outskirts of Tokyo. Staff movements happen, but how we handle them is another matter. Did my barber call me and introduce his successor? No. How expensive would that have been? Again, no one was thinking about the lifetime value of the customer here. I had invested in educating him about what I liked and so I would not switch easily unless I had to. This is another management failure, where handovers are not being properly choreographed. Customer continuity has a distinct value to it. Barber Number Three is my new barber and belongs to a shop which has been continuously operating on that same spot for the last 203 years, again in the Azabu Juban area. It must be the oldest barber shop in Japan and probably the world. The young guy cutting my hair showed me to the chair and started asking me about how I liked my hair done. Red flag there. He didn’t introduce himself to me, and I had to ask him for his name. Why would that be the case? I asked him about the history of the shop and it was clear he didn’t know much beyond it was 203 years old. He didn't know if they had famous people over that time as customers. I asked him how they traditionally cut hair in Japan, before western scissors arrived in the Meiji era – he had no idea. So, this was really just the same as any other barber shop, because the management has not educated their staff about the heritage value of their offer. I was a new client, so here was the chance to make me a permanent client. In a sea of so many competing establishments, I thought what a waste of an opportunity to differentiate themselves, beyond just having a sign in the window, that says they are over 200 years old. There was no narrative around that fact, no great stories attached to it, no buzz, no particular vibe. The common theme across these stories is how to differentiate your service in highly competitive industries. There were also poor levels of understanding about the lifetime value of a customer on the part of the staff. These were leadership issues and the solutions were basically cost free and simple, yet they couldn’t pull it off. So, let’s take another cold hard look at our staff’s service provision and particularly at the service culture we have created. Are we all doing what we are supposed to be doing? Do the staff understand these concepts or are they just doing their daily job? We often presume our people know these things, but perhaps we need to remind them more often.
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Create Reference Points For Clients
06/03/2025
Create Reference Points For Clients
There is no doubt that the pandemic has made it very fraught to find new clients in Japan. The new variants of the virus are much more contagious and have already overwhelmed the hospital infrastructure in Osaka, in just weeks of the numbers taking off. Vaccines are slow to roll out and so extension after extension of lockdowns and basic fear on both sides, makes popping around for chat with the client unlikely. We forget how much we give up in terms of reading and expressing nuanced ideas through not having access to body language. Yes, we can see each other on screen, but it just isn’t the same. In this situation, which looks to be scheduled to last until early 2022, we have to work on new skills. We know about storytelling, word pictures and refined word selection for better communication. Knowing about it and doing it though, are ridiculously different. I know, because we teach this stuff. I can explain the formulas and the methodologies and the class participants get it, but doing it is often a struggle. Obviously practice with strong coaching is the cure. We will be beginning our conversation with a client online and this could be a new client or more likely, a new person down at the client’s company, as every April the wheel of fortune is spun and the HR department nominates who goes where. The explanation of who we are and what we do and why you should deal with me (and by extension my firm) is a critical juncture. Jumping straight into the product catalogue tour is dumb. This made little sense when we were sitting knee to knee, but makes absolutely no sense when we are screens apart. Instead, we need to get their permission to ask cogent questions, which will ultimately unveil needs. There is a simple formula for doing this, so there is no excuse why every salesperson should not be doing this. Firstly we need to explain who we are and what we do. This is a great opportunity to build your firm’s credibility with the client. We shouldn’t forget to weave our history into the narrative and make it personal. This is not a history lesson on the company but a base on which to build trust and we have to make sure we are represented in this part of the storytelling. For example, “We are global soft skills training experts and Dale Carnegie launched the company in New York in 1912. The fact that ninety percent of the Fortune 500 companies use us, shows that the most discerning firms recognise the value we bring. We have stood the harsh test of time globally and in Japan too, since we established operations here in 1963. We are way beyond all of that ‘it is American so it won’t work in Japan’ stuff, as we have localised the content and 80% of our delivery in in Japanese. I have been with the firm for the last eleven years and have seen the impact our training has across all industries”. In this forty second burst we have packed the content to the gunnels with credibility statements and emotive words. This initial reference point tells the buyer we are a safe option. “Nobody got fired for choosing Dale Carnegie Training” type of idea. Next, we tell a story about a client. They had a certain issue, preferably one we think might be shared by this client and we explain the solution applied and the result achieved in a very micro and brief manner. We emphasise the pain this problem was causing for a particular decisionmaker inside the company, someone in a similar position or role to our interlocutor. We briefly explain what we did and then we dwell on the perceived value of the solution formed from the client’s point of view. We should bring back pieces of their dialogue with us, to fully express their happiness that the problem was fixed, so that the buyer we are in front of on screen, will have confidence in our suggestions. This is a reference point for the client that we can help them. Finally, we say, “Maybe we could do the same for you. I am not sure, but in order to find out, may I ask a few questions”. And then we say nothing. Wait until they speak – don’t add, or clarify, just sit there in total silence until they give an answer. Once we have their permission, then we can dig in and see if we have a solution for their problem. This is a reference point that says the buyer is now willing to share a lot of confidential information with us. If we don’t get a match between what we do and what they need, then no slamming of the square peg into the round hole – we get off that call and we hold another potential business discussion with another buyer. The pandemic has made the whole art and science of selling more complex, but there are some fundamental basics we have to get right or nothing will go our way. Business is hard to find at the moment, but never find bad business – the money won’t be worth the trouble and you only tarnish your personal and professional brands. There are plenty of clients who have problems we can help them with, so we need to be concentrating our efforts right there.
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Do You Have Enough Grey Hairs In The Sales Team?
05/27/2025
Do You Have Enough Grey Hairs In The Sales Team?
Japan is a very hierarchical society. I am getting older, so I appreciate the respect for age and stage we can enjoy here. Back in my native Australia, older people are thought of having little of value to say or contribute. It is a youth culture Downunder and only the young have worth. “You old so and so, you don’t know anything” is reflective of the mood and thinking. As a training company in Japan, we have to be mindful of who we put in front of a class and in front of clients. If the participants are mainly male and older, then it is difficult to have a young female trainer or salesperson allocated to that company. That young woman is going to be talented and effective as a trainer because our trainer development system is so demanding. She is also going to be highly skilled in sales, because we teach sales. It doesn’t matter. The HR people or the line manager complains, because the class members don’t feel young people have anything to teach them or are qualified to sell them anything. I was reminded of this recently when trying to allocate trainers and salespeople for certain companies. We have a lot of internal trainers and salespeople who are under 35 and a few who are over 45 and so there is an imbalance. One of my senior guys has suddenly quit. He was performing both functions, so it is a double loss. As our older team members age, they have seen their kids leave the home and then have their aged parents to worry about. The life of a small business owner is always like this. There is never an equilibrium or a period of extended stability with staffing. Just when you think you have it working like a smoothly oiled machine, in goes a wrench and the whole thing comes to a shuddering halt. The transfer of responsibilities for clients between staff is not that easy. It goes both directions too. We have staff who build strong personal relationships with counterparties and then their interlocutor is moved to another function and a replacement appears. Often, this can mean the end of the relationship with that firm, as the new broom have their preferred suppliers and you are not one of them. You also imagine that within the client big firms there is a seamless transfer between their staff for that part of the business. Not so. I was dealing with a big multi-national and to my amazement the new person had absolutely no knowledge of what we had been doing for them in terms of training. Obviously there was no hand over of the tasks and things have been going less smoothly as a result. Normally in Japan, we try to recruit younger people, however we have to also be flexible and look to hire older staff, the venerable grey hairs who can gain the respect of the clients. Trying to maintain the right balance between the generations is not that easy. Also, anytime we have to replace someone as a salesperson, then we can draw a big red line diagonally across each month of the calendar for the next 18 months. They will not be particularly productive for that period of time. Learning the business, really understanding the products and our methodology takes a lot of time. They also have to build their own client base and that doesn’t happen in a hurry. It takes about the same period of time to see someone make their way through the Dale Carnegie labyrinth of trainer certification. It is an arduous, challenging process and not everyone is suited to become a trainer. The skills for selling and training have similarities but there is also that X Factor of personality needed to become accepted by clients. The infamous and elusive Plan B needs to be dusted off and then we can move into action. The problem is we don’t spend any time thinking about negative circumstances that require a Plan B. Also, the mix of possibilities across the range of staff is so complex, how can you effectively anticipate what happens next. Nevertheless, I quickly realised I need multiple Plan Bs ready to go, in case of changes in the team complexion. I usually spend a minus amount of time thinking about those myriad possibilities, because I am too busy doing other things in the business. I will need to do better in this regard and have an update process scheduled throughout the year, rather than leaving it to surprise announcements of staff departure, to stir me to action. How about your case? How are your multiple Plan B development scenarios going?
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The Big Myth Of The Sales A Player
05/20/2025
The Big Myth Of The Sales A Player
When we read commentary about how we should be recruiting A Players to boost our firm’s performance, this is a mirage for most of us running smaller sized companies. If you are the size of a Google or a Facebook, with massively deep pockets, then having A Players everywhere is no issue. The reality is A Players cost a bomb and so most of us can’t afford that type of talent luxury. Instead we have to cut our cloth to suit our budgets. We hire C Players and then we try to turn them into B Players. Why not turn these B Players into A players? This is a contradiction isn’t it, because we always striving and thrusting for the best possible results. If we invest and take a B Player to A Player status, there is a very strong likelihood someone else will admire our handiwork and poach them from us. We have all heard that truism about “what if I develop my people and they leave”, countered with “what if we don’t invest in them and they stay?’. This is correct up to the point of your cash flow reserves. We are not talking about having useless people staying on, sucking up our cash resources. B Players are very capable and are worth investing in to become even more capable. The additional investment to turn them into A players though, if they have that capability in the first place, may be a case of over investment. Having large portions of your revenue centered around a very small number of clients is recognized as a very dangerous position to be in. In the same way, having one or two people accounting for a disproportionate amount of firm income or expertise is also dangerous. When the top performers leave it can be very disruptive. Most bosses do not sufficiently explain their departure to the remaining staff. In this vacuum, the other members of the team worry about what the A Players know that they don’t. Is the firm going down and are those most capable of getting another job jumping ship? Will an exodus of A Players introduce fragility into the business? The loss of the contribution of A Players is bad enough, but their departure can be interpreted by staff in ways bosses would never imagine. That is why no matter who leaves, leaders always need to carefully reassure everyone else, that the firm is fine and this was a personal choice by one individual. Don’t allow rumours, imaginings and guesswork to creep into the equation. We need to own the narrative every time. I have a very carefully designed spreadsheet which allows me to track my sales team’s performance. It includes all of their costs and related costs, to give me a clear picture of what each sales person’s contribution to the company actually is. This allows me to see the amount of leverage they represent. I want to know what is the multiple of their revenue return against their total cost. The bigger that multiple the better, up to a point. If the multiple is fantastic, but the overall income volume generated is too low, then we can go broke in short order. So there has to be a balance between raw volume of funds coming in and the effectiveness of return on their efforts. This is where B Players can excel. They produce multiples which work for the business and generate a positive profit result. The A Players can have bigger numbers, but their multiples may not be that outstanding. They also point to their big numbers and say rude things like “I want more money”. That pay rise to keep them will hammer the attractiveness of their multiple pretty quickly. A Players are like an oasis in the desert. The vision through the heat haze can lure small business owners to invest, when that may not be the best idea. It can be better, over time, to build the ranks of the B players from the within the ranks of the C Players. This is the classis bootstrap approach to building companies. We all do it at the beginning don’t we, but then with some success comes hubris and we start to imagine we can extrapolate our genius. Before you know it, the multiples have swung in the wrong direction. For this reason, it is wise to track the multiples down to the last cent and determine to keep on tracking. When you are small, love your B Players and hold them close. Invest in them, but don’t over invest. Where is that elusive line of demarcation? Experience watching newly minted A Players, who were once your B Players, heading for the exits and more money, helps to establish it in your mind. Monitoring the multiple components will create an algorithm indicating how much is enough and how much is too much. We won’t always get it right, but we can get pretty close if we pay careful attention to the issue. Remember this is art, but with big servings of science tossed into the mix.
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Dealing With Bad News
05/13/2025
Dealing With Bad News
If we try to hide the bad news for the buyer will that work? How long with it work for? Bernie Madoff died in prison, his wife left in a perilous state, one son dead from suicide and the other from cancer. I call that family devastation. He got away with his lies and cheating for quite a while. He offered modest, but steady returns. He told people he had no capacity to take their money, then rang them back at a later stage to say there was an opening. They were grateful for the chance to give him their money. The 2008 recession showed who was “skinny dipping” in the markets, as Warren Buffet termed it and Bernie could no longer sustain the fraud. If we are loose with the facts and the truth with our buyers, how will that go toward fostering the re-order culture we want to create? The usual ploy is to downplay the costs by offering the best case example and not offering the most realistic case. I was reminded of this the other day, while watching a video from the President of this particular organisation. He wanted more money, a lot more money for this project. Let’s park the fact he was a hopeless advocate for his case, bumbling his way through his pitch. The examples he offered were very carefully culled to make the pain look miniscule. The obvious problem with that though was the vast majority of the stakeholders did not fit into that minimum damage category. He was trying to avoid the pain, but that came across as dodgy and duplicitous. We have to reach for our financial calculators and work out the damage for ourselves and we are left to our own conclusions. It would have been much better to meet the elephant in the room head on and explain why the bigger number was a good decision. That way the seller controls the narrative, not the buyer. Call out the number, then justify the living daylights out of it. Talk about the long term benefits and the opportunity costs if we take no action now. Pile on the value of the proposition in the context of the number. Trying to talk about the value proposition unrelated to the number doesn't fly. We need to connect them together as we explain the value. We unveil the ugly number but wrap the pain up in the value to come, to the glorious future, to the sunny uplands, the better days hereafter. Context is everything here. Our hero didn't do that and I believe he missed a great opportunity to get people to back his proposal. When we are selling there is a number attached to the service or good. Actual tangible objects are easier to understand from a pricing point of view. Services though are nebulous. I was selling some training to a major corporation and the people I was dealing with were HR folk located outside Japan. If you live here, you understand the cost of living and all the relativities which apply around pricing. If you are in Hong Kong or Singapore you don’t. Living in these low tax, low cost environments makes Japan’s numbers look stratospheric. They told me our pricing was much higher than this Hong Kong located from who delivered for them in English speaking countries in Asia. I asked them why they didn’t use them for Japan. Of course, they didn't know Japan, had no capacity to deliver here in cultural and linguistic contexts, so that is why they were talking to me. Yet the expectation was my pricing would fit in with this other vendor, based in Hong Kong. Who were these people? I checked them out and they are nobodies. They are not global, they don’t have 109 years of credibility or 60 years on the ground in Japan. In the end, I had to do a demonstration of what we would deliver. It blew them away because the value proposition was so much greater than the other firm. Now the cost, the higher price, the bigger ask, that larger number made sense. I didn't fold on the price for two simple reasons. I know our value and I know what companies here will pay for the value we generate. Yes, it is Covid and yes it is perilous for training companies at the moment, but you have to believe in your value based pricing and you have to be prepared to fire the client. Don’t run away from the hard conversations. Instead find ways to demonstrate and show your value. Keep honing your persuasion skills to sustain the narrative about why they should buy from you and buy from you now and keep buying from you.
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Dealing With Bad News
05/13/2025
Dealing With Bad News
If we try to hide the bad news for the buyer will that work? How long with it work for? Bernie Madoff died in prison, his wife left in a perilous state, one son dead from suicide and the other from cancer. I call that family devastation. He got away with his lies and cheating for quite a while. He offered modest, but steady returns. He told people he had no capacity to take their money, then rang them back at a later stage to say there was an opening. They were grateful for the chance to give him their money. The 2008 recession showed who was “skinny dipping” in the markets, as Warren Buffet termed it and Bernie could no longer sustain the fraud. If we are loose with the facts and the truth with our buyers, how will that go toward fostering the re-order culture we want to create? The usual ploy is to downplay the costs by offering the best case example and not offering the most realistic case. I was reminded of this the other day, while watching a video from the President of this particular organisation. He wanted more money, a lot more money for this project. Let’s park the fact he was a hopeless advocate for his case, bumbling his way through his pitch. The examples he offered were very carefully culled to make the pain look miniscule. The obvious problem with that though was the vast majority of the stakeholders did not fit into that minimum damage category. He was trying to avoid the pain, but that came across as dodgy and duplicitous. We have to reach for our financial calculators and work out the damage for ourselves and we are left to our own conclusions. It would have been much better to meet the elephant in the room head on and explain why the bigger number was a good decision. That way the seller controls the narrative, not the buyer. Call out the number, then justify the living daylights out of it. Talk about the long term benefits and the opportunity costs if we take no action now. Pile on the value of the proposition in the context of the number. Trying to talk about the value proposition unrelated to the number doesn't fly. We need to connect them together as we explain the value. We unveil the ugly number but wrap the pain up in the value to come, to the glorious future, to the sunny uplands, the better days hereafter. Context is everything here. Our hero didn't do that and I believe he missed a great opportunity to get people to back his proposal. When we are selling there is a number attached to the service or good. Actual tangible objects are easier to understand from a pricing point of view. Services though are nebulous. I was selling some training to a major corporation and the people I was dealing with were HR folk located outside Japan. If you live here, you understand the cost of living and all the relativities which apply around pricing. If you are in Hong Kong or Singapore you don’t. Living in these low tax, low cost environments makes Japan’s numbers look stratospheric. They told me our pricing was much higher than this Hong Kong located from who delivered for them in English speaking countries in Asia. I asked them why they didn’t use them for Japan. Of course, they didn't know Japan, had no capacity to deliver here in cultural and linguistic contexts, so that is why they were talking to me. Yet the expectation was my pricing would fit in with this other vendor, based in Hong Kong. Who were these people? I checked them out and they are nobodies. They are not global, they don’t have 109 years of credibility or 60 years on the ground in Japan. In the end, I had to do a demonstration of what we would deliver. It blew them away because the value proposition was so much greater than the other firm. Now the cost, the higher price, the bigger ask, that larger number made sense. I didn't fold on the price for two simple reasons. I know our value and I know what companies here will pay for the value we generate. Yes, it is Covid and yes it is perilous for training companies at the moment, but you have to believe in your value based pricing and you have to be prepared to fire the client. Don’t run away from the hard conversations. Instead find ways to demonstrate and show your value. Keep honing your persuasion skills to sustain the narrative about why they should buy from you and buy from you now and keep buying from you.
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Why Selling To Japanese Buyers Is So Hard And What To Do About It
05/06/2025
Why Selling To Japanese Buyers Is So Hard And What To Do About It
The buyer is King. This is a very common concept in modern Western economies. We construct our service approach around this idea and try to keep elevating our engagement with royalty. After living in Japan for 36 years and selling to a broad range of industries, I have found in Japan, the buyer is not King. In Nippon the buyer is God. This difference unleashes a whole raft of difficulties and problems. My perspective is based on an amalgam of experiences over many decades and I am generalising of course. Not every buyer in Japan is the same, but those foreigners who know Japan will be nodding their heads in agreement. The most intelligent sales approach the West has come up with is “consultative sales”. This basic term gets bandied about, in different ways and at different times, but the fundamental concept is to uncover the buyer’s needs through asking insightful questions and then determine if you can satisfy that need or not. By definition, if you use this methodology, you are intelligent. If you were going to sell to buyers from the world’s third largest economy, where 50% of young people are University educated and is known for its advanced technology, then intelligent consultative selling is bound to be your “go to” model. You will fail because GOD doesn’t approve of your funky Western ways. Pitch Momentum Predominates In Japan In Japan, GOD expects a pitchfest. GOD does not brook questions from low life salespeople. Instead give your pitch, put it up, so that the buyer can slam closed the two barrels on the shotgun and then blast your pitch to pieces. Japan is a very conservative business climate where failure is not accepted and mistakes are not allowed. The Western CFO sharpening the pencil and working out that a 5% defect rate is the most profitable construct, will get a big bonus and a promotion. Going to a zero defect rate is deemed too expensive and unnecessary. GOD doesn’t accept any defects or mistakes in Japan and to achieve that the science of risk aversion has been taken to the ultimate heights of human possibility. The Japanese buyer wants to hear your pitch, then viciously attack it to satisfy themselves that they are eliminating any possibility of future problems from this supplier. I was working with a company exporting bark to Japan as part of the gardening boom. It had to be clean - no pebbles, sand or twigs, just pure bark. The foreign supplier breezily rang to tell me the shipment had missed the boat, but “no problems, it will be on the next one”. GOD was apoplectic. Storage costs in Japan are expensive, so the “just in time” idea of holding little in the way of stock and delivering at the right moment, is well accepted. Our buyer had just burned all of his buyers down the food chain, because the foreign supplier had missed the boat. The Japanese buyer’s trust, built up over many years with his client base, had been broken. In Japan that trust is almost impossible to rebuild. You Need A GOD Approving Credibility Statement Pitching is a daft idea. How on earth do you know what to pitch? Imagine your favourite colour was blue and I turn up to sell you my awesome range of pink. I am warbling away like a morning lark about the wonder of my pink and you haven’t the slightest interest, because you want blue. If I had asked you a question about your colour preferences, then knowing you wanted blue, I would have only spoken about our range in blue. This is pretty simple. So, why don’t Japanese salespeople ask GOD some questions about what is needed? Well GOD is a deity too high for that type of inappropriate familiarity and base rudeness. Consequently, everyone is pitching into the void. The cunning antidote to this GOD induced pitch problem is to have a well crafted credibility statement. For example, “We are experts in soft skills training for adult learners. We recently helped a client’s Tokyo leadership team raise their Japanese staff engagement scores by 30% and their New York headquarters was very happy to see that rapid improvement. Maybe we could do the same thing for you. I have no idea if that is possible or not, but if you would allow me to ask a few questions, I will soon know if it is a viable option or not”. Switch From The Pitch To Consultative Sales Once GOD acquiesces and allows us to ask questions, then we are out of the pitch business and now immersed in the consultative sales flow. When asked this way GOD does allow questions in most cases. Sometimes we will get a stern GOD who says “just give me your pitch”. We comply because you cannot deny GOD, but mentally we know we should down the lukewarm, cheap, bitter green tea and head for the door, because there won’t be any sale here today. Knowing what a client needs is the key enabler to craft a sales presentation tailored to that particular buyer which resonates, excites and satisfies. GOD just needs some nudging to get religion about consultative sales. When you have your next sales meeting with a Japanese buyer, mentally picture you are sitting down with GOD and act accordingly. Be comfortable with formality, silence, hierarchy and sit up straight. Politely pull the velvet curtain back on your beautifully polished and well practiced credibility statement and wait for “yes, you may ask me some questions”. Don’t say one word after you ask your question, even if it is killing you. Sit there in silence until you get an answer. GOD likes to think about it and is in no hurry.
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Confidence And Truth In Selling
04/29/2025
Confidence And Truth In Selling
Confidence sells. We all know this instinctively. If we meet a salesperson who seems doubtful about their solution or unconvinced it is the right thing for us, then we won’t buy from them. The flip side is the con man. They are brimming with brio, oozing charm and pouring on the surety. They are crooks and we can fall for their shtick, because we buy their confidence. They are usually highly skilled communicators as well, so the combo of massive confidence paired with fluency overwhelms us and we buy. We soon regret being conned but we are more cautious thereafter every time we meet a salesperson. By the way, there is a good chance we are that next salesperson. So how do we navigate the rapids and the rocks here of coming across as confident and being skilful in describing our solution, without tripping the client’s internal con man alarm system”? Ultimately it comes down to your kokorogamae. This Japanese compound word can be translated as our “true intention”. What are we on about with this sales lark? Who are we showing up for – ourselves or the client’s best interests? With con men it is always their self interest. They keep moving like a shark, swimming around constantly in motion, always looking for something to devour. If we sit down and examine ourselves we can make a decision. Are we in sales as a profession – yes or no? If the answer is no, then please get out of sales immediately. Go. Do something else, because the rest of us, who want to be professional, don’t want you polluting our waters. If the answer is “yes”, then examine what does “professional” actually mean to you? We can get caught up in the finer points of sales technique, but what I am asking is please look at sales and ask what is my true intention here? If it is to serve the best interests of the buyer then we are getting on the right track. If the answer included to serve the buyer forever and to be aiming for the reorder, rather than the sale, then go to the top of the class. That mentality is the antithesis of the con man who knows they have to leave town after the sale, because they have cheated the buyer and can’t expect any further business – ever. There is a successful businessman I know, who told me a story about his early days in sales. He sold an inferior product and the client would only come to realise that reality following the purchase, when the product itself was consumed. He had to have a big territory from his company, because he could never go back to a town he had sold into. I had liked him but after hearing that story I liked him a lot less. He knew the product was inferior and was not matching the claims he was making. He was confident and fluent. In other words, he was a con man. His kokorogamae was incorrect and I am wary of him because I am not sure about his mentality in business today. Maybe he has reformed, but I am in no hurry to find out at the cost of my own personal business. If our true intention is correct, then being confident and fluent come into their own. The way we think about the business changes. We see the lifetime value of the business rather than a transaction. That means the effort we make to serve the client changes. The follow up is done in a different and superior way. The client feels our commitment to their success. We obviously ask particular questions which would only be of interest to someone who was committed to serving the buyer. We are thinking as if this was our business and we are looking for ways to build it higher. The questions around that aim are a lot different to discussions of the features of the widget and the needed logistics to supply it. We are thinking and talking beyond the initial sale. So ask yourself – what is my kokorogamae? What types of questions am I asking – are they transactional or long term oriented? Am I communicating well enough my commitment to help this buyer succeed or am I only operating at a very superficial, order taker level? Am I thinking about potential buyer problems down the track and how to fix them? Have I wrapped my confidence up in truth? Record your presentation and have a good listen to it. Are you coming across as (A) a very basic provider of transactional solutions (B) a con man or (C) a true sales professional who has sorted out their kokorogamae? If the answer wasn’t (C) then there is a lot of work to be done on you by you!
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We Buy From People We Like And Trust
04/21/2025
We Buy From People We Like And Trust
Buying from people we like and trust makes a lot of sense. Sometimes we have no choice and will hold our nose and buy from people we don’t like. Buying anything from people we don’t trust is truly desperate. So when we flip the switch and we become the seller to the buyer, how can we pass the smell and desperation tests? How do you establish trust and likeability when you are on a virtual call with a new potential client? What do you do about those new buyers who won’t even turn on their camera during the call? The best defense against buyer scepticism is to be professional. You will be well presented whether face to face or online. In the latter case, you will have a background that advertises your firm and hides the background of your home, because this reduces the distraction factor. You will use gestures which are in front of your body, so that your arms are not suddenly cut off by the fake background. You will be sitting up straight in your chair and looking straight at the lens on the computer camera, which you have cleverly arranged to be at eye level. In a face to face meeting, we are communicating quite a lot through our body language, so we are going to be sending out messages of confidence, credibility and trustworthiness. We are going to be well dressed for all meetings regardless of the medium. That means put on your business battle dress, which means a jacket and tie for men in the online meeting as well, so that we are not looking too casual. We are going to be precise and clear in our language, with no filler words like ums and ahs diluting the message and annoying the buyer. Online, the body language factor can be tricky, especially if we are showing any documents or slides on screen. In these cases, we are reduced to a tiny box on screen and so is the client. The lesson here is to not show too much information on screen such that the size of the faces is maximized, so that we can each read as much body language information as possible. What about those Japanese clients who only turn on the sound? We are now at the equivalent of a phone call, except that they can see you and you cannot see them. We have a couple of choices. I don’t match them with turning my camera off to even out the stakes. I still want to exude credibility and the camera gives me more scope to do that, than the audio only. We have to grab the opportunity of the sales call and we, not the buyer, have to run the meeting. Right from the start, I ask them to turn their camera on. This is difficult for our Japanese staff to do, because for them the buyer is God. If the omnipresent deity doesn’t want to reveal themselves to mere mortals, then what right has the lowly supplicant salesperson to demand that of God? Nevertheless, we have to train them on how to do that. We need to say to the buyer, “Thank you for your time today for this meeting, I appreciate it given I am sure you are very busy. Over the last few years, I have done a lot of these meetings online and they always seem to be more productive for both sides, when we both turn the cameras on, so let’s both turn our cameras on today for this brief meeting”. Now what comes next is the key component. Shut up and do not say one word, no matter how much awkward painful silence ensues. Sit there and wait for them. Isn’t this risky? In my view, if they won’t even come on camera, how successful do you imagine you are going to be selling them something? By definition they are not a buyer and you are better to go find someone who can turn their camera on and can buy. What happens if they say they prefer not to turn their camera on? Mentally reduce the prospects of a subsequent positive outcome to a substantial negative integer and carry on as best you can. A non-buyer is a non-buyer, online or in person but in sales you often have to grit your teeth and just plough on. All very depressing isn’t it. To just to end on a real downer, let me relate a recent story from the sales trenches here in Tokyo. My salesguy cold calls a company here. The person answering the phone says, “we do not deal with people we are not already dealing with”. Being the supreme optimist from sunny Australia, I encourage him to go once more into the breach and call again at a different time. Potentially he might encounter a different person and hopefully receive a better reception. He did just that and he got exactly the same response from another member of staff, “we do not deal with people we are not already dealing with”. As we say here, “welcome to Japan!”.
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Selling Through Micro Stories
04/15/2025
Selling Through Micro Stories
Is selling telling or is it asking questions? Actually, it is both. The point though is to know what stories to tell, when to tell them and how to tell them. We uncover the opportunity through asking the buyer questions about what they need. Once we know what they need, we mentally scan our solution data base to find a match. This is when the stories become important, as we explain why our solution will work for them. What we don’t want is having to scrabble together stories on the spot and then make a dog’s breakfast of relating the details. These stories have one purpose and that is to give credibility to our solution. The content should have elements of the context of the solution and evidence of where this has worked for others. Buyers may not be familiar with your company in detail, so the background of the company told in two to three minutes is a micro story we need ready to go. Longevity or fresh innovation are the two spectrums. Either we have stood the test of time and you can trust us or we have come up with something new, that will be a game changer and you need it. Often though salespeople don’t know the detail of the company or even if they do, they have never spent any time weaving this into a brief narrative for the buyer. This requires practice to ensure the micro story is kept tight and packed with credibility. We cannot go on and on about our own company or the buyer will switch off with disinterest. They are only going to listen if the background of the company has some strong relevancy for them. This is why we have to craft that story specifically for them, before we talk to them Our systems, products or services all need explanation about how they will help the buyer. Just leafing through the five kilo, tome like product catalogue is not enough. Pitch salespeople will do this. They will go through the catalogue hoping to snag some buyer interest by using this shotgun pitch approach. When I had my first sales job selling Encyclopedia Britannica door to door, that is what were taught to do. We all learned a canned twenty minute walk through the pages of the book, introducing all the cool features. Not recommended! If we have asked the right questions, we know exactly which few pages in the catalogue to show or which sections of the flyers we need to introduce. This is where we want our micro story about how this solution was created, including legendary moments of daring do by the R&D team or genius manufacturing breakthroughs or whatever that sounds amazing and clearly differentiates us from the competitor rabble. These have to be short, sharp and terrific. That means delivery practice. They have to be customized and then memorized for the best content and cadence for that particular buyer. There are often too many products in a catalogue though, so being able to remember all of them may be unrealistic. Over time however, there will be a smaller group most important to most buyers and so we can work on remembering the stories associated with these products or services. We definitely need to include client stories there as well. Telling the buyer what the widget will do is not enough. What are the benefits the widget will bring to their business. How have other buyers applied the benefits of the widget and what were the results. Often salespeople never get beyond the widget features and yet we all know we don’t buy the features, we buy the benefits, but that doesn’t stop a lot of salespeople dwelling on the wrong thing. The story needs to have included the location, season, characters involved, some drama around an issue the buyer needed to fix and the triumphant outcome resulting from our solution. We need the context placed in the perspective of the prospective buyer. What is the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer and how can we meet them there through our narration of our brief story. Sales raconteurs were part of the furniture in the pre and postwar periods, prior to the modern switch to consultative selling. We have moved on from just telling amusing stories and jokes to entertain the buyer. We have also gone beyond pitching products. Contemporary selling skills means asking clients excellent questions. This is now a high tech, time poor world and the buyers are busy, busy people. Our stories are important because they grab the attention of those with short attention spans, by adding some colour to the solution explanation. Relevant, well delivered stories help us to deepen our engagement with the buyer. Today we all need to master the art of micro storytelling. Does your sales team have their micro stories ready to go?
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The Care Factor In Sales In Japan
04/08/2025
The Care Factor In Sales In Japan
Japanese salespeople really care about their clients. This is good, except when it isn’t and that is usually when they are prioritizing the client over the firm which employs them. Japan is a relationship driven, risk averse business culture, where longevity is appreciated. This often translates into the salespeople being captured by a type of “Stockholm Buyer Syndrome” where they identify with the interests of the buyer, over those of their boss. Going to bat for the client is admirable because the salesperson is their representative inside the organisation. It can create problems though, when perspectives become skewed. Price rises, stock shortages, quality issues, staff allocations can create a divide in the priorities of the buyer and seller. Where does the typical Japanese salesperson plonk themselves down? Right in the buyer’s camp. They become advocates for the buyer’s interests over the firm’s interests and this can create tremendous friction inside the organisation. As we know, in Japan the buyer is not a royal, an aristo or a King. The buyer is a deity, a God and that changes things up considerably. As the boss, you can hand out the orders but that doesn’t mean the salespeople are going to compromise their relationship with the buyer aka God, to keep you happy. They are thinking about their bonus or commission and the lifetime value of that client. In that equation, the boss’s views and interests are mildly interesting, but not arresting. So boss orders are issued like confetti and then the Great Obfuscation commences. Delays, excuses, detours and ninja like silence start cropping up. The sales staff can always rely on the boss to get distracted and be so time poor that they never get around to following up at all, or at least for some considerable time. With multinational firms, with any luck, the boss will get transferred or fired and the coast will be clear again. Or the market shifts, or the currency moves and the whole point becomes moot. The salesperson rule is keep your helmet pulled down tight and low and dig a bit deeper into the foxhole, waiting for the boss order barrage to die down. So as the boss, how do we navigate between ensuring the salespeople take brilliant care of the client, without sending the firm to the edge of bankruptcy? We have to become much better time managers, because that is the key to following up and keeping track of the change you have initiated. We need to keep a note somewhere of what was discussed, what was requested and then some milestones to check against for progress. It could be electronic reminders or something analog, it doesn’t matter, as long as it works for you, but do it. Coaching is one of the victims of tech today. Tech is supposed to give us all more time. It hasn’t. Everyone is so busy, including the boss, that the time is not created for coaching sales staff. If we want the salesperson to go down there to the client and deliver some distasteful news, they may need some help on how to handle that interview. Imagine asking a Japanese salesperson who has spent an entire career agreeing to everything the client wants, to head over to the buyer’s office and tell them “no” or the new price has been increased to “x”. They are just not trained for that and have no clue how to do it. This is where they need help and the busy, busy bee boss has to pony up the time for them to help have that difficult negotiation. Depending on the situation, it may be time for the boss to go and speak with the client. Hierarchy is important in Japan and having the more senior person turn up, is a mark of respect which the buyer in Japan will appreciate. It won’t make them any happier about the bad news, but at least they feel their due was given. The salespeople will appreciate it too, because it allows them to keep their relationship with the buyer and heap all the blame on their mad dog, crazy, gaijin boss. The answer is simple and complex at the same time - encourage a sharp client focus by the salespeople, but keep that tempered within the interests of the firm, by making your time available to follow up, coach or intervene.
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The Seven Lucky Stars Of Selling
04/01/2025
The Seven Lucky Stars Of Selling
Luck is the nexus of hard work and persistence. Salespeople need some luck, even if they have to create it themselves. That old blues refrain “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all” can’t apply. We have to make our own luck and here are seven luck creation principles we can start using immediately to help us get there. No fancy varsity degrees or puffed up IQ scores needed. Common sense that morphs to common practice is all we need to change our luck in sales. Arouse in the other person an eager want Salespeople are consumed by what they want and it is usually getting enough commission to be able to eat. Buyers don’t purchase for any other reason than getting what they want. Our job is to communicate in such a way the client realises they have a want they didn’t recognize or give sufficient import to previously. Opportunity cost is a measure which shows that taking no action is not a zero cost option. Clients are not in a static market, their competitors are still alive and hungry for market share. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests We have to show that taking action today is needed and that argument has to be based around a good understanding of what the client needs as opposed to wants. If we honestly have the buyers interests foremost in our minds we can build the trust needed to secure the business. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it Salespeople arguing with buyers is the silliest thing in the world. Nevertheless, there are legions of salespeople out there trying to slam square pegs into round holes and make a deal fit which should never even be a consideration. Trying to overpower the buyer to drive them through force of will to buy is ridiculous, has always been ridiculous and will remain ridiculous. Some salespeople don’t learn however. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking Talkative salespeople lose a lot of potential business. Being good in sales means being a tremendously good listener. Understanding what the client needs is critical to providing a match that works between what you are selling and the gap in the clients business which they need to fix. When I realise I have violated the 20/80 ratio of salesperson to buyer occupying the airwaves I shut up and ask a question to get them talking. We all need to be alert to our proclivity to love the sound of our own voice. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view What are the buyer’s fears, headaches and aspirations? If we don’t know these answers then we are not doing our job as salespeople. Force feeding our pitch down the buyer’s throat is stupid, but so many salespeople do just that. They launch straight into their widget pitch without finding out what the buyer needs. Something so basic, but so commonly missed in sales. Ask questions instead of making statements If I say it, as a salesperson, it might be true, but if the buyers says it, then it is 100% true without any doubt. Our communication skills are called upon to make sure we ditch every opportunity to tell the client something and rather replace that statement with the same information, but now reconstituted as a question. For example, “we have overnight delivery” is statement. Rather than trotting this out, we say instead, “would having overnight delivery be of value to your business”. If they say yes, then we can talk about how we do that. If they say “no”, then we keep fishing for what is of value to them by asking questions Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest We want action. We want the order right now, without delay. We don’t want buyers to think about it or worse, agree in principle and then do nothing about it. We need them motivated to buy. What will success mean for them in their business? What can we do to help them become even more successful? If we can wrap our sale up in those flags of self-interest, then they will buy and will they buy right now. Keep these principles in your mind when talking to clients. They are not complex to remember, but are complex to execute. Well, that is sales and that is the requirement. Get on to them fright now, delay no more and make sales today.
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Gamification Makes Sales Role Play Fun
03/25/2025
Gamification Makes Sales Role Play Fun
An ideal work week for salespeople would start everyday with sales role play with colleagues. When we do serious exercise we warm up to get into prime condition for becoming better at our activities. It is the same with sales, we need to warm up before we interact with clients. We need to get our communication vehicle into top well maintained condition. By practicising what we will be saying to the client we will be so much better when we come face to face or face to screen with the client. Yet, how many people do this every day? How about a couple of times a week? How about never? Sadly the “never” answer would be the overwhelming majority. Clients don’t need any preparatory work to say, “your price is too high”. Buyers are all given this facility at birth, so they are always ready to go. Salespeople on the other hand, have to work hard at setting up the context for the client, so that the “your price is too high” missile is never launched. Given this reality why aren’t profession salespeople working hard to perfect their skills before they are interacting with buyers? Too busy would be the typical excuse. Really? What about between 8.00am and say 8.30am in the mornings? Probably everyone has this slot open to them. No one to lead the session is another cop out. What leadership does it take to buddy up and go through different aspects of the sale’s call? None. Every sales team could self regulate and practice with each other. All that is needed is to tell your partner what they were doing well in their role play and then tell them how they could make it even better. We can also make sales role plays fun. We can set up some variables for variety. We can allocate different personality styles to be played out as the buyer. The Driver – time is money types, “tell me what you want and then buzz off buddy, I’m busy”. The Amiable – “let’s have a cup of tea together and get to know each other better”. The Analytical, “can I get the data to three decimal places?”. The Expressive, “let me grab the whiteboard marker and outline for you why we are going to have a spectacular year this year. Later let’s catch up for Happy Hour and have a few drinks”. The buyer in the role play practices adjusting their communication piece to deal with the different types of buyers. Another game is the pushback variable game. We have different types of objections written down and placed in a container. Like getting an evil fortune cookie, the role play buyer pulls out the objection and the salesperson has to deal with it on the spot. A few rounds of this and probably most of the typical pushback conversations will have been covered, the random nature of the selection means we have to think on our feet. We can also have another bowl and draw out which personality style is giving us the objection and start coming up with different combinations. For example, the Driver says your delivery reliability is not any good with an aggressive snarl. Are you ready for that and how will you handle it? The next one is the Analytical, so you need to go data, evidence and proof heavy, are you ready for it? Your get the idea. The storytelling game is another angle. It might be the story of your firm in Japan, or the story of your products. The buyer selects the story theme from the bowl and you have to tell that story in under 2 minutes and thirty seconds. Why this short time frame? We need enough length to get the story pumping , but short enough that we are not boring our audience. Three minutes or more in length and we are pushing things with the listener’s patience. Now here is an interesting question? Do you have your company Japan story ready to go? What about an individual story about particular products? People don’t keep data in their minds, but they are able to retain interesting stories. When I was a kid growing up in Brisbane, I remember the radio DJs telling a bunch of trivia related to my favourite bands. I always thought to myself, wouldn’t it have been more beneficial if they had told stories with something more advantageous to the country, than some rock legend’s doings. The point is we can use stories to make sure the buyer remembers us when they are looking around for a solution. Storytelling is a powerful arrow in our communication quiver.
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Selling Year In, Year Out (Part Two)
03/18/2025
Selling Year In, Year Out (Part Two)
In Part One, we talked about Jan Carlzon’s insights into the importance of consistent service being provided to clients. The buyer mantra is know, like and trust in sales. We also talked about the basics of sales – prospecting and closing. Now are we going to continue the errors, shortcomings and mistakes of last year into the new year or not? Are we going to just continue doing what we have always done year in, year out or are we going to improve? We tend to get into a groove in sales, which is perfectly fine, if it is the correct groove. We start again this year, but are we adding years of sales experience or are we just duplicating the same dubious experience of last year? We have to make the decision that we are going to become better in all aspects of the basics of selling and build a professional career. As mentioned in Part One, a big element of sales success revolves around our communication skills. These days it is made even more difficult, because we are probably doing this, while selling remotely. How do you like someone you have never met before in person and only interact with on a small screen during an online call? In this environment, what we say and how we say it become vital. Did you know that we lose about 20% of our pep when we are on screen. We have to lift our energy just to get back to parity, let alone start to impress the client with our energy and passion to serve them. You will have noticed what dead dogs a lot of people are when on screen. They are lifeless and low power. If you are the buyer, they are probably not the type of person you want taking care of your business. You want a powerhouse who will run through brick walls for you, who will leap tall buildings in a single bound to do the best deal, someone who will take a bullet for you on the pricing. This means the same old, same old, year in, year out sales boogie doesn’t function properly and we will lose the customer and the sale. We have to refine our onscreen communication skills further just to tread water, in order to stay where we are right now. These are the new basics of sales. However, are salespeople leaping out of bed ready for the day and seeing it as a new day in sales, that requires a set of different skills from last year? How are we doing with understanding and mastering the new basics for this coming year? Understanding clients seems the most obvious basic skill, but that is a rarity. You have to wonder how that could be the case? In Japan, the reason is simple. The communication flow is one way. The seller is trying to “convince” the buyer to buy. To do that they trot out their widget catalogue and describe it in vast detail. The problem with this “no questions asked” approach is you don’t know enough information. Does the buyer need that widget in pink or blue? Waxing lyrical about the bountiful aspects and many wonderful attributes of your blue widget is ridiculous and pointless because the buyer needs the widget in pink. You need to know that and the way to find out is to ask the buyer questions, rather than blindly pitching into the dark. The Japanese client is a problem too. Over time, they have trained salespeople to offer up their pitch, so that they can cut it to shreds. They do it this way in order to satisfy themselves this is a low risk purchase. They prefer the “smash the walnut with a sledgehammer” approach. Risk aversion is fair enough and nobody wants to make an incorrect purchase or waste resources. Pitching is a total waste, however salespeople and buyers haven’t woken up to that fact yet. A Japanese salesman who came to see me promptly sat down and immediately went through his entire slide deck adding his commentary. He didn’t ask me one teensy-weensy question about my business or what was the problem I was trying to fix. I teach sales, so I was amazed and wondered how long it would be before he would ask me a question. Well he didn’t. He just pitched and pitched and pitched. We wasted twenty five minutes of that meeting going through stuff of no value or interest to me the buyer. I wanted pink but he kept talking about blue the whole time. If he had taken a few moments to ask me some questions, he could have zeroed in on the two slides that were pertinent to me, in that whole massive deck. We could have had a much more meaningful and fruitful conversation. He didn’t get the sale and no wonder. Whether we are selling online or selling when person to person, we need to ask questions. Japan being Japan, we need that mezzanine step of first getting permission to ask questions and that is not difficult. Are you or your colleagues asking for permission? Salespeople in Japan need to start the new year with a new realisation that pitching is inefficient and basically self-defeating. Let’s start the new year reflecting on the true basics of selling. Then we can put those basics into practice, in order to get the results we need. The equivalent of football blocking and tackling is what we need in sales. If we salespeople don’t get it, then this will be another year of opportunity which has slipped by, eluding our grasp. We simply cannot afford that year in, year out business anymore.
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Selling Year In, Year Out (Part One)
03/11/2025
Selling Year In, Year Out (Part One)
Journeymen salespeople are starting another year of selling. Maybe their financial year is a calendar year or maybe the year wraps up in March. It doesn’t matter, because there is a mental trick we play on ourselves that January 1st represents a new start, a new year. Sales can be exhausting and 2025 will not go down as a bumper year for the vast majority of salespeople. Yet, here we go again. How do we get ourselves back up into the saddle on that bucking bronco that is the sales life? In Japan, very few salespeople are basing their livelihood on full commission sales. Here we have either a base and bonus or a base and commission system. That means that if we don’t sell much we can still eat. So the economic pressure here is less intense than in other markets. It is also tricky to get fired for poor performance in Japan. The courts expect the employer to reassign the sales failures into other jobs more suited to their lack of talent. So the downside of not selling is not that cut throat here. Also, the vast majority of salespeople are amateurs, not properly trained in the profession. Rank amateurs bumbling their way along is the norm here, so no need to feel any social pressure either. In these circumstances it can be as if everyone in sales in Japan is sitting in a lukewarm bath – not too hot and not cold, but also not very exciting either. “Blocking and tackling” was the basics of winning football games according to Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers. So with sales, prospecting and closing are the basics of sales. We have to be farmers and hunters. Finding new buyers and treasuring our existing buyers, looking for the reorder sequence to kick in. Know, like and trust are the basics of sales. The buyer has to know who we are. If they have never heard of us or never met us, then they won’t be buying anything from us. The internet is a godsend because buyers can find us to solve a problem they are having and we didn’t lift a finger. All that finger lifting was done by the marketing department spending dough and presto, we get the leads. Okay, we get the lead but so what? Will the buyer like a total stranger and even more importantly, trust a total stranger. What did you parents tell you – don’t talk to strangers! Therefore the initial touch with the buyer is critical. It isn’t a one and done thing though, because there is bound to be numerous touches on the way through. Jan Carlzon’s book “Moment of Truth” is a must read on the importance of every part of the organisation taking ownership and accountability for the customer. This sounds simple enough. In my experience, Japanese businesses don’t teach accountability to the entire team. Salespeople are expected to be accountable and bend over backward to meet the buyer’s requests. The person picking up the phone though didn’t get the email about first impressions, accountability or ownership. They got the email about if they transfer a salesperson through they will get severely scolded. Because they don't know who is calling, they have found it is best to treat everyone as guilty until proven innocent and be as cautious as possible with strangers. If the buyer calls for you and you are not there, the person picking up the phone is not helpful. They say stuff like “they are not at their desk now” and say nothing more. This forms a negative impression about your company and its care for the buyer. Your own team are killing the like and trust bit for you with the customer. This was what Carlzon found. You have to educate everyone to think differently about keeping the sense of ownership high and the like and trust part powerful. Another part of the like and trust component are our communication skills. If we sound like we don’t know what we are doing, then the client won’t like that. If we say one thing but the truth proves to be something else, buyers definitely won’t like that either. I had a person I know here in Tokyo call me up about some animation sales tools. I was interested and we had a conversation about it. It turned out he was actually just fronting for the American firm and my next conversation was with someone from the headquarters. What the local guy told me was different to what the American rep told me. I immediately lost trust in both sides. I never went any further with the deal and I would never do business with the local guy ever again. This is another Carlzon nominated fail point. As the conversation moves around through the organisation, there has to be integrity, consistency and truth. In Part Two we will continue to look at the other key basics, the blocking and tackling of the sales process.
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The Seven Bridges Of Sales
03/04/2025
The Seven Bridges Of Sales
There is a process to sales. Amazingly, most salespeople don’t know what it is. They are either ignorant, because they haven’t been trained or arrogant, arguing they won’t be entangled by any formulistic wrangling. They say they follow their muse and let the sales conversation go where it may, because they are “spontaneous” creatures, residing in the “here and now”. Both answers are rubbish. There are professional salespeople and there are dilettantes. Let’s be professionals and master the sales process. We are going to go deeper into the sales process and look at some of the inner workings. Gluing the whole process together are seven bridges to move us through the sales continuum Bridge number one is the move from casual chit chat at the beginning of the sales meeting to a business discussion with the buyer. When is the best time to make that move and what do you say? The opening conversation will flow to and fro, as various small talk questions are answered and everyone becomes comfortable with each other. Let the buyer finish their point. Pause to make sure they have actually finished and are not about to expand their point. Then we simply say, “thank you for your time today”. This signals, now is the time to get into the sales conversation proper. Bridge number two comes after we have explained our agenda and after checking if they have any extra points, we start to move through the points we have chosen. The agenda gives the sales call structure and helps to control where the conversation will go. We must ask the buyer if they have any points of their own. This is important because it gives them control over what we will discuss and that makes them feel better about owning our agenda. Bridge number three is when we ask for permission to ask questions. We have outlined the agenda and now it is time to get down into the murky depths of their business. Never forget we are “blowins” off the street, the great unwashed. They are about to be asked to open up the kimono and share all of their mysteries and secrets with a total stranger. We need to point to some evidence showing where we have been able to help a similar company, in the same industry. We then proffer, “maybe we could do the same for you. In order to understand if that is possible or not, would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”. Bridge number four is what we say after hearing all of the answers to our questions. We are now in a position called the “moment of truth”. We have to make the decision for them concerning if they can buy and what they should buy. We know our line-up of solutions in depth, to a degree they never will. If we decide we don’t have the proper solution for them, we should fess up now and then hightail it out there, to find the next prospect. If we can help them, then we need to announce it clearly and loudly. We need to reference some of the things they told us in the questioning phase. They mentioned to us the key thing they are looking for and also why achieving that is important to them personally. We now wrap our “yes we can do it” answer around those two key motivators for the sale. Bridge number five comes after we have gone through (a) the facts, (b) the benefits, (c) the evidence and then (d) the application of the benefit. This will be news to a lot of salespeople in Japan, because they have never gotten beyond (a), the detail, the spec, the nitty gritty of their widget. After we have told the story of how wondrous things will be for them after purchasing our widget, we then ask the trial close question. It is not complicated and anyone can memorise it. Here it is, “how does that sound so far?”. Bridge number six comes after the buyer answers our trial close with an objection. There has been a gap in our process located in the questioning component. We have not flushed out their concern and dealt with it already, so that is why it pops up here at this point. We ask why it is an issue for them and we keep asking if there are any other issues. We need to do this in order to know which key concern we need to answer. Once we have prioritised their concerns, we then give our answer to the major objection. We then ask, “does that deal with the issue for you?”. We do this to check we don’t have any residual resistance preventing them from giving us a “yes” answer when we ask again for the order. We just say, “shall we go ahead then?”, or “do you want to start this month or next month?” or “do you want the invoice sent to you by post or can we send it by email?”. Bridge number seven comes after they say, “yes” they will buy. We must be very careful what we say next. We must bridge across to the delivery discussion of how and when they will receive their purchase. Under no circumstances keep selling at his point. Random things blurted out after receiving their “yes” may sidetrack them to a concern they hadn’t thought about. Or it may get them confused about whether now is the time to buy or should they wait until a bit later? Rather, get deep into the detail of the next steps immediately and stop selling. Salespeople need to know the sales process and the glue that holds it all together. That is the mark of the professional and the path to sales success.
/episode/index/show/dalecarnegietokyoselljapan/id/35299360
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How To Deal with Major Misperceptions Buyers Have About Your Company
02/25/2025
How To Deal with Major Misperceptions Buyers Have About Your Company
A stranger contacts you out of the blue or you meet them fleetingly at an event and they call you afterwards. They are a salesperson and they want to sell you something. Our typical reaction is one of caution. Why is that? We have all become addicted to technology which has sped everything in business up to warp speed, but somehow we are all perennially time poor. We don’t want to be distracted from our tasks or waste our time listening to what someone else wants. We are also not sure if we can trust this salesperson. Why would that be? Maybe we were duped or heard of someone we know being duped by a “salesperson” in the past, so we are permanently suspicious of anyone we meet in sales. This is not a great start is it. We have to deal with all the baggage that our buyers have accumulated over the years. Japan is a brutally vicious sales environment. We are all in a street fight with our competitors and like in a physical street fight, there are no rules and little mercy shown. Rivals will lie, disparage, spread false rumours, make nasty insinuations about us and our company. “They are having financial trouble and won’t be around much longer”, “all I ever hear are complaints about their bad after sales service”, “their representative keeps getting fired from companies, so he won’t be around for long”, etc. “But Greg, Japan is such an honest country, would rivals lie so brazenly?”, you might be thinking. Yes, some of them will do so without any shame or guilt. I have heard these wild stories myself, shared by buyers, so from my own experience I know this happens. How do we start the sales call in Japan? We chit chat a little, then we get into the sales discussion. If we don’t know what we are doing, we are launching straight into our pitch about our wonderful widget. If this is you, please stop doing that. Rather we should be asking questions to completely understand the needs of the client. We can do this through just asking for permission to ask questions and then going for it. Another way we can do it is to propose an agenda for the meeting. This provides the same content, but it is a more structured approach. Japanese buyers love to be given the agenda to look at, because they love data and the more the merrier. The questions we are going to ask about needs are all there of course, but we add one more. We ask, “what are your impressions of our company?”. Why would we do that, why not just blast off into the nitty gritty detail of the wonders of the widget? Remember we are either a total stranger coming in off the street or a fleeting acquaintance from an event. If I visited your home and sat down and said, “tell me all about the problems inside your family?”, I don’t think you would want to share your dirty laundry with someone you hardly know. Company representatives feel the same about sharing the dirty laundry of their firm. If our rivals have been stabbing us in the back or if the client has some incorrect information about our company, we need to get that out early and deal with it. In our case, as an expert soft skills training company, our history of over 108 years can be a double edged sword. It means we have stood the test of time and yet, for some buyers they may think we are old fashioned and not current enough for the modern market. Chit chat is pretty thin gruel to establish trust with, so we need to work on establishing the credibility of our company. Rather than random selection in the chit chat content about what trust buttons to push, we ask this impressions question. This allows us to zoom right into the core concerns and deal with them. Now when they give me their concern, I don’t immediately answer it. I cushion it instead. That is, I put up a neutral statement, that neither inflames nor tries to argue with their comment. This neutral cushion buys my brain some thinking time about what I am going to say and how I am going to say it. Rather than giving the first answer that suddenly pops into my head, I can give a more considered answer. I could say, “It is important to consider perspectives on the brand”. Those three or four seconds are enough to drill down to a more polished answer. I would then say, “The balance to our longevity is that we are a global organisation. That means that every second of the day clients, somewhere around the world, are asking us to address their most pressing problems. In this way, dealing with client demands always keeps us fresh and current in the market”. Are you ready with your answers for some curly questions your client may have for you? More importantly, are you trying to flush out these secret resisters, before you try to introduce your solution? Let’s not assume we are on a level playing field here. Accept that for whatever reason, there may be some hidden obstacles to trusting us and so let’s get those out of the way early, so that we can properly serve the client.
/episode/index/show/dalecarnegietokyoselljapan/id/35299355
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How To Deal With Major Misperceptions Buyers Have About Your Company
02/18/2025
How To Deal With Major Misperceptions Buyers Have About Your Company
A stranger contacts you out of the blue or you meet them fleetingly at an event and they call you afterwards. They are a salesperson and they want to sell you something. Our typical reaction is one of caution. Why is that? We have all become addicted to technology which has sped everything in business up to warp speed, but somehow we are all perennially time poor. We don’t want to be distracted from our tasks or waste our time listening to what someone else wants. We are also not sure if we can trust this salesperson. Why would that be? Maybe we were duped or heard of someone we know being duped by a “salesperson” in the past, so we are permanently suspicious of anyone we meet in sales. This is not a great start is it. We have to deal with all the baggage that our buyers have accumulated over the years. Japan is a brutally vicious sales environment. We are all in a street fight with our competitors and like in a physical street fight, there are no rules and little mercy shown. Rivals will lie, disparage, spread false rumours, make nasty insinuations about us and our company. “They are having financial trouble and won’t be around much longer”, “all I ever hear are complaints about their bad after sales service”, “their representative keeps getting fired from companies, so he won’t be around for long”, etc. “But Greg, Japan is such an honest country, would rivals lie so brazenly?”, you might be thinking. Yes, some of them will do so without any shame or guilt. I have heard these wild stories myself, shared by buyers, so from my own experiencE I know this happens. How do we start the sales call in Japan? We chit chat a little, then we get into the sales discussion. If we don’t know what we are doing, we are launching straight into our pitch about our wonderful widget. If this is you, please stop doing that. Rather we should be asking questions to completely understand the needs of the client. We can do this through just asking for permission to ask questions and then going for it. Another way we can do it is to propose an agenda for the meeting. This provides the same content, but it is a more structured approach. Japanese buyers love to be given the agenda to look at, because they love data and the more the merrier. The questions we are going to ask about needs are all there of course, but we add one more. We ask, “what are your impressions of our company?”. Why would we do that, why not just blast off into the nitty gritty detail of the wonders of the widget? Remember we are either a total stranger coming in off the street or a fleeting acquaintance from an event. If I visited your home and sat down and said, “tell me all about the problems inside your family?”, I don’t think you would want to share your dirty laundry with someone you hardly know. Company representatives feel the same about sharing the dirty laundry of their firm. If our rivals have been stabbing us in the back or if the client has some incorrect information about our company, we need to get that out early and deal with it. In our case, as an expert soft skills training company, our history of over 108 years can be a double edged sword. It means we have stood the test of time and yet, for some buyers they may think we are old fashioned and not current enough for the modern market. Chit chat is pretty thin gruel to establish trust with, so we need to work on establishing the credibility of our company. Rather than random selection in the chit chat content about what trust buttons to push, we ask this impressions question. This allows us to zoom right into the core concerns and deal with them. Now when they give me their concern, I don’t immediately answer it. I cushion it instead. That is, I put up a neutral statement, that neither inflames nor tries to argue with their comment. This neutral cushion buys my brain some thinking time about what I am going to say and how I am going to say it. Rather than giving the first answer that suddenly pops into my head, I can give a more considered answer. I could say, “It is important to consider perspectives on the brand”. Those three or four seconds are enough to drill down to a more polished answer. I would then say, “The balance to our longevity is that we are a global organisation. That means that every second of the day clients, somewhere around the world, are asking us to address their most pressing problems. In this way, dealing with client demands always keeps us fresh and current in the market”. Are you ready with your answers for some curly questions your client may have for you? More importantly, are you trying to flush out these secret resisters, before you try to introduce your solution? Let’s not assume we are on a level playing field here. Accept that for whatever reason, there may be some hidden obstacles to trusting us and so let’s get those out of the way early, so that we can properly serve the client.
/episode/index/show/dalecarnegietokyoselljapan/id/35207205