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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

12:12

269: The Client's Needs Analysis Process

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/12/21

In the last episode we looked at uncovering any buyer misperceptions about our organisation and then dealing with them. How did that go? Today we will work on one of the most critical phases in the buying cycle – uncovering buyer needs. Depending on where the client sits in the buyer organisation, they can have different needs. In broad brush terms, we can assume that the CEOs are strategy focused, CFOs are bottom line focused, the user buyers are interested in ease of use and the technical

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11:58

268: Dealing with Misperceptions

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/12/14

Business is brutal and sometimes clients have received incorrect information about our companies from competitors or the media. When I was selling on behalf of Australian exporters in Nagoya, I remember a client telling me that our competitors had said the Aussie company was verging on bankruptcy and was about to go under. You can easily imagine what effect that had on business for that exporter. There was a very famous case of national brand damage, through linguistic imperfection. In 1985, the

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13:05

267: Designing Qualifying Questions and Our Agenda...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/12/07

This week we will look at improving our questioning skills and setting up the meeting agenda. There are a variety of qualifying questions we need to design before we meet with the client, be that meeting online or in person. What we don’t want is to be trying to work it out on the spur of the moment. It is always better to have a basic structure and then adjust to suit the situation, than trying to come up with brilliance on the fly. Yes, we have to be flexible and adaptable、 but planning is

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12:12

266: Building Our Credibility Statement

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/11/30

In sales, we definitely need a Credibility Statement. Buyers are always worried about buying what they don’t need or paying too much for what they do buy. The subterranean vibe is one of distrust toward salespeople. So we have to work hard to overcome that fundamental doubt. Salespeople without a solid sales process won’t have this valuable persuasion tool at their disposal. In fact, they will be like lemmings leaping off a cliff, running headlong into the explanation of the features of their

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11:03

265: Our Pre-Approach in Sales

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/11/23

What is your pre-approach regimen before you meet the buyer? We cannot do everything and our time is finite. We should be trying to save our valuable time for meetings with the most qualified clients who can buy. This might be new clients or existing clients who have more capacity to buy from us. It is always disheartening when you analyse the existing buyer activity and realise we are only selling a small amount, compared to what we could be selling. It is even worse when you discover, they are

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10:28

264: Our Personal Sales KPIs

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/11/16

In this episode we will look at KPIs or Key Performance Indicators. These are activities which when carried out effectively lead to revenue results. There are also behavioural aspects to KPIs which are important and shouldn’t be neglected. Everyone has their own business area, so the construct of the KPIs will vary across industries and sectors. What are they for you? Has your company already defined them for you and you were given them when you came on board? If we haven’t been given KPIs

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12:15

263: Sales Attitude, Image and Credibility

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/11/09

We know that our attitude determines everything. Henry Ford is often quoted for saying, “if you think you can or your think you can’t, your right”. In the 1920s, psychologists understood that we can change our futures by changing how we think. Up until that time, everyone talked about God’s will or fate and as individuals we had no options. Today we understand the power of our mind to drive our behaviour in ways which will help us to realise the goals we have set for ourselves or which have been

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11:23

262: Don't Sell The Prez

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/11/02

Usually gaining access to the big company President is a real coup. We now have the ear of the decision maker and if we can convert the Prez, then we are going to get the sale. In Japan, unless the President is also the owner, then gaining access and then a sale is usually a mirage. There is a particular species of President in Japan called a wan man shacho or the dictatorial President who decides everything. Convert them and you will get the sale. If we are talking to a larger company or a

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12:06

261: Honing Our Unique Selling Proposition

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/10/26

Every minute, there is more and more competition for the same clients, so we need to differentiate ourselves very clearly. I see new competitors entering the market all of the time, even during Covid. You would think at least during Covid, things would quieten down a bit on the competitor front, but no. Existing competitors are getting more and more desperate, so they start giving everything away and this puts tremendous pressure on pricing. What we absolutely don’t want is for the buyer to think

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10:31

260: How To Get Better Results

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/10/19

We have so many things pulling us in different directions at the same time, we can get a bit overwhelmed by all the sales work we have to do. We can get caught up in the weeds of our daily work and lose sight of the big picture. We are being beaten up over the numbers or lack thereof, the revenue budget daily, weekly, monthly status. How can we get the right focus on what we should be doing and make our efforts more effective? There is a simple method we can use which is very quick and

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12:01

259: How To Build Strong Relationships With Our...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/10/12

Over Parts One and Two we have been exploring how to apply some human relations principles when we are working with our buyers. Buyers don’t buy products or services. They buy us first and the solution comes with us, as a package. If they don’t buy us, then the package can be the best one on the planet on paper, but they won’t bother to buy it because it doesn’t feel right because the trust is not there. Let’s look at three more powerful time tested universal principles to help us build buyer

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10:43

258: How To Build Strong Relationships With Our...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/10/05

In the last episode we looked at the first three of the human relations principles we can apply when interacting with our buyers. Sales is all about trust. Trust is built up through what we say and what we do. It is also a function of our behavior with buyers. We face a tricky equation of getting on with all types of buyers with different outlooks, communication and personality styles. There are some universal aspects of our control over what we say and how we say it, which will serve us well in

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10:07

257: How To Build Strong Relationships With Our Buyers

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/09/28

If we want to succeed in sales, we want to build a strong relationship with our buyers. Having to run around and create a new buyer every single time is seriously hard work. Yes we must hunt, but we also want to farm. However, nowever, nHoot all buyers are easy to deal with. We might think they should change, so that they are easier to deal with. They should make it easier for us to sell them our solutions. Unfortunately, we can’t change others. We can only change how we think and behave. Doing

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11:45

256: Revising Our Unique Selling Proposition

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/09/21

You would think that if your business has survived Covid, then the pandemic will have cut a swathe through your competitors. Therefore, we would all be granted a temporary reprieve from the usual rigorous competition for client business. Counterintuitively, there seems to be more and more competition for the same clients, so we need to differentiate ourselves very clearly. What we absolutely don’t want is for the buyer to think they can just swap another company’s solution in to replace us, like a

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10:13

255: Why You Need A Salescycle

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/09/14

At the center of everything we do is the customer relationship. Additionally, like planets revolving around the sun, there are five stages of the sales cycle revolving around the customer relationship, which we must pass through in order to make the sale. In a way, this is our roadmap for when we are talking to the buyer. If we want to make a sale and get the re-order, we must control the sales conversation with the buyer, not the other way around. When we are talking to the buyer we are never

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11:21

254: Building Customer Loyalty

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/09/07

We all know that without trust there will be no sale and much worse than that, no ongoing sales. So how do we build trust with our buyers? It is a critical salesperson facility, because research shows that 63% of buyers would rather buy from someone they completely trust, than from someone who gives them a better price. Think about that – trust trumps price. What is the cost of creating trust versus having to resort to discount pricing to get deals done? Our mindset is the key. We have to be

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10:35

253: Japan Doesn't Change In Sales

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/08/31

I listen to a lot of sales gurus because I am a permanent student. I have noticed there is a consistent theme which comes up. Because being a guru is quite competitive, they have to draw a line between themselves and the rest. The way they do this is to make the point that “sales has changed”. They then go through introducing their version of the new sales methods for the new era. I was reflecting on this and thinking about sales in Japan. SPIN Selling, Consultative Selling, Challenger Selling

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13:17

252: How To Own The Sales Transition Zone

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/08/24

New clients are so demanding. They want to hear what we have to offer and quickly find out how trustworthy we are. They don’t want to be wasting their valuable time either. This can trigger some bad choices though for salespeople. Remember that the client playbook is not our playbook. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of tracking along their preferred path. We have our job and they have their job and both are highly specific, so we had better master ours, if we want to really help our clients.

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11:35

251: Getting New Clients During Covid’s Long Tail

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/08/17

We are all hungry for Covid to end so that we can get back to normal. It looks like it will be all good by September. Then it looks like October, then November and this goes on and on as some fresh piece of diabolical news filters out. Will a bell ring or an alarm go off announcing “Covid is done”? Unfortunately that isn’t going to happen. It will ebb and wane and then probably resurface intermittently over the next couple of years. So when do we start moving out of the orbit of our existing

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12:04

250: Don’t Say “No” For The Client

The Sales Japan Series ·

2021/08/10

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

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