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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

14:27

304: Preparing For Selling During A Recession

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/08/23

“Out of the frying pan into the fire”, seems to be an appropriate descriptor for where we are now. We have been battered by Covid, or at least many of us have had that unpleasant experience, but now everyone, even those who sailed through Covid, are about to get swept up in to the next recession. Inflation, rising interest rates, supply chain turmoil, energy supplies being weaponised, the list is long and depressing. Japan relies on foreign markets and if the USA has a sniffle, Japan catches a

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18:57

303: The Final Five Of Your Sales Call

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/08/16

A miraculous thing often happens when I am meeting clients for the first time. We have had our meeting, I am closing up my organiser where I have been taking my notes, I am getting ready to leave, when they will drop some major insight or important piece of information on me. It is always a bit fraught because the meeting has obviously ended, I am already packed up and I cannot easily unpack the organiser and start making additional notes. I have to wait until I am out of sight to then grab that

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12:08

302: Clients Forget The Price

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/08/09

Have you ever paid for something that you found was very good and which you used for many years. You will have forgotten perhaps the price you originally paid, but you have not forgotten the quality you received. You always maintain a positive mindset about that company and the product or service. On the other hand, if you paid for something that didn’t deliver what you expected, over time, you will forget the exact amount of money involved, but you will always recall that the quality was poor and

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14:18

301: Why Does Everything Take So Long In Business In...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/08/02

“In our business, at our size, we have to be the speedboat, we cannot be the oil tanker”, is a key mantra for my Franchise company. Why is that the case? I am the only non-Japanese in the firm and I was frustrated at the slow pace of decision-making and action taken by the team. Growing up in Western business, speed of decision-making and taking action are requirements drummed into you from any early age. Other foreign leaders in Japan reading our speed mantra will be sagely nodding their heads

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14:33

300: Should We Worry About Our Competitors

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/07/26

The ferocity of competitors depends on a number of factors. Are we in a commodity market where price and supply capacity determine all and it is a race to the bottom? Are we in a narrow band market where there are few suppliers and market share is hard to expand? Is our business exposed to currency swings? Are technological breakthroughs by rivals either going to deeply wound us or even drive us to the wall? Would a regulatory change up end our business relative to our competitors? Are deep

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12:41

299: Controlling Your Public Image As A Salesperson

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/07/19

In the good old days we could have multiple public personas in sales. We could be the professional salesperson, but that image was entirely separate to our family life. We could enjoy boozy celebrations and getting off our face with relative anonymity. We could accumulate customer complaints and deal with them in private. We could rely on word of mouth from within a limited circle of acquaintances. When we met people for the first time, they basically knew almost nothing about us, except the

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14:24

298: Networking In A Time Of Covid

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/07/12

For the last two and a half years business networking has been dead. The usual suspects who hosted live networking events migrated everything online, so you become totally restricted in your ability to create any relationship with the people attending the event. The hosts kick it off, the speaker speaks, the Q&A gets underway, the hosts wrap it up and you are left hanging there, without any good means of connecting with possible clients on the call. The hosts these days, don’t release who is on

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11:55

297: You Have Three Seconds For An Effective First...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/07/05

In our presentation training classes we ask the participants, “how long does it take for you to make a judgment about someone you are meeting for the first time?”. How about you? How long do you take to make a judgment about someone you are meeting for the first time? It used to be people in our classes would say 30 seconds, others would say up to a couple of minutes. Today, the answers are now down to three seconds! What does that mean for us in sales? We have such a small window to make

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13:35

296: When Is Too Much, Too Much In Sales

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/06/28

The most common complaint we get from clients about their sales team is that they are too passive. They are great at farming, but not great at hunting, growing the size of the existing business and finding new buyers. “It is as if they were working for the buyer and not for our company, because they bend over backwards to keep the client happy. Maybe too happy”, is not an unusual comment. On the other end of the scale is the American style hard sell effort which takes no prisoners, brooks no

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12:11

295: Wasting Salespeople

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/06/21

Useless salespeople who cannot sell get fired. But are they really useless or are their sales managers useless or their companies useless? There are some industries which are notorious for the up or out mentality and recruiting certainly comes to mind. There is a lot of rhetoric floating around about saving mankind, through matching the buyer and seller of services, but the reality inside these companies is brutal. These are corporate meat grinders, who have massive churn because the targets are

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12:06

294: How Good Are Your Supporting Documents To Drive...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/06/14

Japan just devours data, statistics and information. When you visit some scenic spot, there will be an amazing level of data available about that venue. The announcement on the subway train when you arrive at your stop will warn you that there is a specific gap in so many centimeters between the platform and the train, so be careful. I first discovered this data addiction when I was here as a student, some forty years ago. I attended a scholarly conference on Sino-Japanese Relations, as that

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13:51

293: Silence Is Golden In Business In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/06/07

Tension is a good thing in business, because this is how we get things done. There is an issue which needs solving and either we fix it ourselves or we outsource the specifics to someone else. There is a tension between scaling up and preserving oxygen, otherwise known as, “cash flow”. I have this issue all of the time. I want to grow my company, but I don’t want outside investors, so bootstrapping is required. That means the process is going to be slower than getting the cash in the door and

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13:11

292: Be Bullet Proof Against Criticism Of Your Follow-up

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/05/31

The phrase “I was ghosted” is a new addition to the sales lexicon but the problem is ancient. You meet someone at a networking event, have a positive conversation and then you follow up with them. Your email goes nowhere and all you get is crickets. So you send it again as a forward, so that the previous one is there in the thread as a subtle shaming reminder “hey, I wrote to you, but you haven’t answered me yet”. More crickets. What do we do in these cases? Being old school, I like the

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12:27

291: Your Agenda Or The Buyer’s When Selling

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/05/24

What would the buyer’s agenda be, during the sales call? “Don’t take too long, because I am busy”, “Don’t waste my time with stuff I don’t need”, “Don’t erode my cash flow”, “Don’t rip me off”, would probably be the most prevalent. Our clients often tell us one of the biggest problems they have with their sales teams, is the buyer runs the sales meeting. Their own salespeople just sit there, nice and sweetly and do whatever the buyer wants. “We are paying them, but we feel they are working for

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10:59

290: Work On Your Sales Not In Your Sales

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/05/17

We have all heard that business advice to “work on your business, not in your business”. When we are the owner of the business we can sometimes forget this, because we love doing the sales ourselves and spending time establishing relationships with our clients. I know this a problem for me, because the successful sales process is like a drug and you want more of those dopamine hits when you land the deal. Salespeople like people and they like the personal elements of dealing with buyers. To

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12:27

289: Blocking, Tackling And Grinding In Sales

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/05/10

The famous Green Bay Packers Coach Vince Lombardi often referred to the importance of the basics in the American Football game, the blocking and tackling. Being an Aussie and a Rugby fan, I sort of know what he is talking about. The brilliant plays, full length of the field returns, Hail Mary throws, the tactics and strategies are all important, but if the basics are not being done properly, it all comes crashing down and you will never win. Sales is the same. Blocking and tackling is boring,

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09:55

288: The Piranha Client

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/05/03

If you have ever watched one of those nature documentaries about the piranha fish, they can strip an animal of its flesh in seconds. The way they do that though is totally different to a shark. Growing up in Australia, we are all experts on sharks and we know that they can distend their lower jaw to make the size of the bite larger. They will take huge chunks of flesh off your body at a time. The piranha however only takes small bites but there are a tremendous lot of them and this is where the

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13:56

287: Can You Stimulate The Buyer Greed Gland In Japan?

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/04/26

The sales process has a number of stages we must pass through. One big one is gaining trust. We need to explain who we are, what it is we do, where we have had success before and suggest we could do the same for the buyer’s firm. Permission to ask questions is another key step. When you think about it salespeople are incredibly rude. We hardly know them and yet we start asking questions about corporate secrets around our failures, lack of progress and barriers to success. Salespeople are

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12:16

286: Bait Your Hook In Sales

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/04/19

I do a lot of coaching for salespeople and there is a common theme which continuously arises, which reveals why they are not getting sales with their clients. They get very deep into the weeds of the solution for the buyer. The features of their widget monopolise their own minds and that is what they try to use to envelop the client with. It doesn't work for a simple reason. Clients buy the application of the benefits of the solution, not the features. You would think, “Greg, this is highly

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11:27

285: A Different Value Based Selling

The Sales Japan Series ·

2022/04/12

I was contacted by an international training organisation about facilitating training for their clients here in Japan. They solemnly announced they do “value based” selling. Well I think all good salespeople do value based selling, so I checked out their website to see what they meant when throwing this type of terminology around. As I suspected, it was another one of those persistent re-inventions of something old, but cunningly repacked to appear shiny and new. Basically, they find out what

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