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PODCAST

The Sales Japan Series

Dale Carnegie Japan

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

business management

All Episodes

11:19

344 Questioning Skills In Sales

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/05/30

This was very frustrating. It became obvious from the client’s email response that there was a sizeable gap between what I thought was going on and the reality. How could that be? I am an experienced salesperson with a solid track record of sales; I have written two books on selling in Japan, one in English and one in Japanese, I have had a weekly blog on the subject for nearly seven years. I teach selling techniques as part of my job. What went wrong? In the email response, he clarified that

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12:13

343 Reducing Buying Friction In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/05/23

Victor Antonio is one of my favourite podcasters on sales and he recently had an episode on reducing friction in the sale. This got me thinking about how would that work in Japan? A big barrier to sales in Japan is the culture. I remember a business contact of mine, a long time Tokyo resident, who moved from Japan to Hong Kong a few years ago, pre-pandemic. I asked him what differed from doing business there compared to here. He noted a big difference in Hong Kong was businesspeople there were

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11:35

342 Don’t Be In Awe Of The Buyer When Selling

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/05/16

Listening to a young salesperson in his first sale’s role talking about being nervous to present to a high powered, senior company President, made me think about that. As we all get older, we forget about our younger “age and stage” evolutions in business. Somehow, we imagine that in those days, we were exactly as we are now. A conversation like that got me reflecting whether I was the same, when I was starting out in sales? I probably was, but it has all coalesced into the mists of time and I

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13:17

341 Haggling Over The Sales Price In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/05/09

In Japan we don’t have the custom of haggling when we go to shop. The price is the price is the price, in the consumer world and if you don’t like it, don’t buy it. In the B2B world though there is often a price negotiation. This can be related to volumes being purchased for tangible goods or it could be for services as well. Tangible products are somehow psychologically easier to price defend than intangibles like service provision. The item is right there in front of you, you can inspect it,

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11:51

340 How To Do Sales Role Play Practice

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/05/02

Role play is one of the keys to improving in sales. We are in a psychologically safe environment where we can experiment and learn. The majority of salespeople however are practicing on the client. That is an extremely bad idea, but they do it anyway. The main reason is the firm is not well organised or the salespeople are not well organised. Even if the firm isn’t helping, grab a colleague and agree to help each other by using role play practice before you see any clients. It doesn’t have to

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12:28

339 Prediction Ability In The Sales Call

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/04/26

Salespeople are constantly talking to clients, but if you think about it, clients don’t have that many conversations in a year with salespeople, so there is a massive power imbalance in play. That imbalance is in favour of the salesperson, if they know what they are doing. Humans have survived on the basis of many factors, physical and mental and certainly pattern recognition is one of those crucial skills we have accumulated. When we encounter any situation we search our memory for our

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14:00

338 Not Doing Sales Training Is Stupid

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/04/18

I was chatting with a prospective client about a proposal I had submitted and he offered this feedback from one of his colleagues from the senior management team, “we don’t need to bring in trainers, we can use LinkedIn Learning instead”. I was shocked to hear that from the lips of a senior leader. Is this guy really a leader? I have used LinkedIn Learning myself and is cheap, but I found the quality is also quite various. Individuals can shoot some training video content and LinkedIn Learning

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13:26

337 What To Do About Losing Track Of Buyers

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/04/12

How could we lose track of buyers? Unfortunately it is very easy. That nice person we have been dealing with inside the company, the one with whom we have built a solid relationship, where the trust is brimming and the bonhomie is pumping, is transferred to another section or they leave the company for another job. Suddenly we are left with nothing. If it is an internal transfer, we may find there is a new person who decides they will put their own stamp on things. They bring in their own

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14:14

336 The Four “Excellents” For Salespeople

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/04/04

The front row of sales training courses will often have the best salesperson sitting there trying to get even better. The salesperson who is failing or is a mediocre performer is nowhere to be found or is there, but is solidly resisting the content and approach. I read this many years ago and decided I would attend all sales training I could get and that I would be in that front row because I wanted to meet the top performers. I walk the talk and recently I attended a webinar on sales for a

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12:57

335 How Can The Player/Coach Sales Leader Manage The...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/03/28

You have done an excellent job as a salesperson, hitting your numbers and getting a strong reputation as a “producer”. The big bosses like the cut of your jib and decide that they will promote you into the role of player/coach to lead the sales team. No training is provided of course. It assumed that as you know how to get results, you can just sprinkle your pixie dust on the rest of the crew and clone those good outcomes. The first thing you discover is that what made you awesome, is different

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16:20

344 Don’t Do This In Sales

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/03/21

There was an excellent effort on display here. A salesperson was using LinkedIn to find potential buyers and conducting energetic prospecting activities to reach out with cold emails. A total waste of time though. We all get tons of these cold emails on social media and we religiously delete them and move on, because we are busy, busy people. I asked how many of these emails had been sent out? The answer was “hundreds”. While I applaud the commitment, it is always better if it produces

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12:14

333 How Do We Tell The Buyer They Are Wrong?

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/03/14

Arguing with buyers is a slippery slope to sales oblivion. “I told him off and made him fly straight”, is a leap into seller delusion. In Japan, the buyer isn’t King, but GOD. The seller is in no position to tell the buyer anything here, let alone start arguing the point. The upshot is that Japanese salespeople, for the most part, are very weak in the face of the buyer’s remonstrations. We often hear from our clients that they are concerned that their salespeople don’t stand up for the brand,

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13:24

332 Are Your Sales Proposals Working Effectively?

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/03/07

In Japan we usually need a couple of meetings with the client to get the business. In Meeting One, we build the rapport and trust, we explore their needs and try to understand if what we have is actually what they need. We are tremendously disinterested in slamming any square pegs into round holes and wasting our precious sales time. If we have understood their needs and we can help them, then we set up Meeting Two, right then and there, to come back with our proposal. In some cases, we might

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12:44

331 Be Very Careful With Your Chitchat When Selling

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/02/28

We salespeople love to talk. We are enthusiastic about our differentiation, our solution, our features, the benefits and a myriad other remarkable things about what we sell. Many salespeople have never moved out of first gear and are stuck there just telling the buyer all about their widget. The more advanced salespeople are asking questions and trying to become the trusted advisor, helping the client grow their business. Regardless, one of the biggest failings of salespeople and I definitely

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12:58

330 SPIN Selling’s Implication Genius

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/02/21

If you are a student of sales, then you will know all about SPIN Selling developed by Neil Rackham, based on his 1970s and 1980s research involving 30 researchers who studied 35,000 sales calls in 12 countries. The acronym stands for S- Situation, P- Problem, I-Implication and N-Need Payoff. The concept was not to be just packaging up the details of the solution and then jamming it down the throat of the buyer- the preferred method of most salespeople at that time - but to become a trusted

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12:52

329 Can ChatGPT Deliver the Perfect Sales Script?

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/02/14

In many sales organisations, sales scripts are a way of harmonising the messaging as well as getting newbies up to speed. ChatGPT can come up with a sales script within about one second. We just need to design the question we want answered intelligently and it will do all of the work. When you have to listen to sales people using sales scripts on you, the conclusion is ChatGPT must surely be able to do a better job, because the bar is set so low. Of course there are scripts and there are

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13:24

328 We All Need Our Evidence Bit In Sales

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/02/07

We have found the prospect. It might have been through desk research then a cold call or a chance business card exchange at a networking event. We have decided they probably need our solution, because they fit into the ideal client persona profile we carry around in our heads. If we have been artful, we will have managed to secure a meeting, be it online or more preferably, in person. After some preliminary small talk to gauge some sense of what personality style they are, we switch up our

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14:31

327 Do You Need To Speak Japanese To Sell In Japan?

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/02/01

There are many non-Japanese speaking business people doing deals with Japanese companies. They may be flying in for meetings or may be based on the ground here. Even those locally based may not have sufficient fluency to conduct a sales meeting in Japanese, even though they make speak some level of Japanese language. I don’t know if I would call myself “fluent”, because I know how complex the Japanese language is and I know that often I cannot always understand everything being said in the

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13:31

326: Asking For The Business In Sales

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/01/24

I was listening to a sales podcast and the expert guest was lampooning some typical closes as outdated, insulting and useless. He was relating how early in his sales career he had come across these closes and they didn’t work. Naturally he had written his one book with a better alternative. I was thinking about what he said and asked myself are these typical closes actually outdated or not? Everything is contextual so it is hard to give a bullet proof undertaking, but I think they still work and

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14:49

325 Regret At Leisure If You Tolerate Riffraff...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2023/01/17

Riffraff inhabit all corners of the business world, but the sales profession suffers more than many others. Bankers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Stock brokers do all sorts of evil things with our money. Real estate agents tell one version of the truth to buyers. Government officials purloin our money. Everywhere you look, someone is ripping us off. However, these industries and institutions do not get blanket smeared with the failings of the few, like in the case of

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484 results

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