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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

11:06

Confidence And Truth In Selling

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/04/29

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

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11:35

We Buy From People We Like And Trust

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/04/21

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

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10:26

Selling Through Micro Stories

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/04/15

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

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11:03

The Care Factor In Sales In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/04/08

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

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10:46

The Seven Lucky Stars Of Selling

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/04/01

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

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09:34

Gamification Makes Sales Role Play Fun

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/03/25

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.

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11:36

Selling Year In, Year Out (Part Two)

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/03/18

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

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10:32

Selling Year In, Year Out (Part One)

The Sales Japan Series ·

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

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12:15

The Seven Bridges Of Sales

The Sales Japan Series ·

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

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11:05

How To Deal with Major Misperceptions Buyers Have...

The Sales Japan Series ·

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

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11:05

How To Deal With Major Misperceptions Buyers Have...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/02/18

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

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10:59

Do You Have An End To End Sales Process

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/02/11

“I like talking with people, so I want to be in sales” is a terrifying conversation to have with one of your staff. They are not doing so well in their current role, so they imagine they will just glide across to sales to have an easier time of it. They may try and do it internally as a switch of roles or they may quit their current job and go and try to get a sales job somewhere else. Given the shortage of salespeople in Japan at the moment and from now on ad nauseum, there is a strong chance

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11:48

Fantasies, Folly, Mirages and Other Illusions of...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/02/04

“I like talking with people, so I want to be in sales” is a terrifying conversation to have with one of your staff. They are not doing so well in their current role, so they imagine they will just glide across to sales to have an easier time of it. They may try and do it internally as a switch of roles or they may quit their current job and go and try to get a sales job somewhere else. Given the shortage of salespeople in Japan at the moment and from now on ad nauseum, there is a strong chance

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13:11

Sell With Passion In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/01/28

We often hear that people buy on emotion and justify with logic. The strange thing is where is this emotion coming from? Most Japanese salespeople speak in a very dry, grey, logical fashion expecting to convince the buyer to hand over their dough. I am a salesperson but as the President of my company, also a buyer of goods and services. I have been living in Japan this third time, continuously since 1992. In all of that time I am struggling to recall any Japanese salesperson who spoke with

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11:15

Sales Service Debacles Are The Boss's Fault

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/01/21

Generally speaking, we mainly have failures of follow up in B2B sales. The conduct of the sale’s meeting is normally done professionally. Perhaps the salesperson could have asked better questions or presented the application of the benefits of the solution better. Maybe they could have dealt more professionally with objections or closed the deal more effectively. In B2C though, the troubles start from the point of contact. Getting this wrong means no meeting, let alone no sale. I blame the

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11:17

Group Selling Is Not For The Faint Hearted

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/01/14

Most of the time in Japan, I attend client meetings alone. This is not how the Japanese do it. The President going to a meeting alone, without some staff in attendance is rather rare. Presidents have degrees of prestige and one of the indicators is how many flunkies they have in attendance. My ego is big enough already to have to worry about people carrying my bag around for me. The Japanese client meeting can often be quite an affair though with many people seated around the room, waiting to

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11:45

Revising Our Unique Selling Proposition

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/01/09

Why Japanese buyers demand sharper differentiation in today’s competitive market Many companies thought that surviving the global pandemic would reduce competition. Instead, by 2025 the business environment in Japan has become even more intense. Buyers have more choices, new competitors are entering the market, and digital transformation is raising expectations. Today, if your Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) are vague or outdated, you risk being treated as a replaceable commodity. Why are

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13:11

Sell With Passion

The Sales Japan Series ·

2025/01/07

We often hear that people buy on emotion and justify with logic. The strange thing is where is this emotion coming from? Most Japanese salespeople speak in a very dry, grey, logical fashion expecting to convince the buyer to hand over their dough. I am a salesperson but as the President of my company, also a buyer of goods and services. I have been living in Japan this third time, continuously since 1992. In all of that time I am struggling to recall any Japanese salesperson who spoke with

en

17:24

How To Handle “We Are Happy With Our Current...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/12/24

Japan loves the Devil they know over the Angel they don’t know. Change here is hard to achieve in any field, because of the inbuilt fear of mistakes and failure. This country takes risk aversion to the highest heights in business. There are no rewards for salaried employees to take risk. There are massive career downsides though, if things go wrong, due to an initiative they introduced. Personal accountability is not very popular here. The decision-making system here is also a nightmare in

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13:41

416 Mastering Referrals. How to Ask Without Feeling...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/12/17

I have been in sales since 1988, with a slow, then fast migration of skills. I started my own small one-man consultancy in 1988 in Brisbane to assist businesses wanting to create revenues with Japan. I moved into commercial real estate in 1989, then into market entry in 1992, retail banking in 2003 and then selling soft skills training in 2010. I began my personal study of sales around 1990. The company didn’t provide any sales training, so I had to source it myself. I attended Tom Hopkins

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