• The Sales Japan Series

  • 著者： Dr. Greg Story
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The Sales Japan Series

著者： Dr. Greg Story
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  • The vast majority of salespeople are just pitching the features of their solutions and doing it the hard way. They are throwing mud up against the wall and hoping it will stick. Hope by the way is not much of a strategy. They do it this way because they are untrained. Even if their company won't invest in training for them, this podcast provides hundreds of episodes with information, insights and techniques all based on solid real world experience selling in Japan. Trying to work it out by yourself is possible but why take the slow and difficult route to sales success? Tap into the structure, methodologies, tips and techniques needed to be successful in sales in Japan. In addition to the podcast the best selling book Japan Sales Mastery and its Japanese translation Za Eigyo are also available as well.
    Copyright 2022
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あらすじ・解説

The vast majority of salespeople are just pitching the features of their solutions and doing it the hard way. They are throwing mud up against the wall and hoping it will stick. Hope by the way is not much of a strategy. They do it this way because they are untrained. Even if their company won't invest in training for them, this podcast provides hundreds of episodes with information, insights and techniques all based on solid real world experience selling in Japan. Trying to work it out by yourself is possible but why take the slow and difficult route to sales success? Tap into the structure, methodologies, tips and techniques needed to be successful in sales in Japan. In addition to the podcast the best selling book Japan Sales Mastery and its Japanese translation Za Eigyo are also available as well.
Copyright 2022
マネジメント マネジメント・リーダーシップ 経済学
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  • Selling Year In, Year Out (Part One)

    Selling Year In, Year Out (Part One)
    2025/03/11

    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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    11 分
  • The Seven Bridges Of Sales

    The Seven Bridges Of Sales
    2025/03/04
    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...
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    12 分
  • How To Deal with Major Misperceptions Buyers Have About Your Company

    How To Deal with Major Misperceptions Buyers Have About Your Company
    2025/02/25
    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 ...
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    11 分

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