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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

11:21

415 Micro Stories Unlock Trust In Sales Meetings In...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/12/10

Storytelling is usually associated with novels of hundreds of pages, movies lasting two to three hours, television drama series fifty minutes long per episode. In sales in Japan we get a mini window to the buyer that, hopefully, in the first meeting will last an hour. During the second meeting, to present the solution, we will also get around the hour the buyer has allocated for the meeting with us. In both cases, we have to make sure the buyer, rather than us, is doing most of the talking. That

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11:40

414 Thrill, Skill, and Follow-Through: Mastering...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/12/03

Bosses love hunters. They beat the bushes and find new clients for the business. Usually, they love the thrill of the hunt and wrestling the buyer down to do the deal. CRM systems, paperwork, boring follow-up detail—not so much. This is the preserve of the farmer. That person you can entrust the client to, knowing that they will be well taken care of. The follow-through will be well executed and, in a fair wind, will remain a repeat buyer. I'm a hunter and easily bored with the mundane aspects of

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12:24

413 Networking Done Very Badly. A Real-Life Lesson...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/11/26

I received this note following my attendance at a networking event run by one of the foreign Chambers of Commerce here in Tokyo. “Dear Greg Story , I hope this message finds you well. It was a pleasure meeting you, and I truly enjoyed our conversation and the valuable insights you shared. Please feel free to reach out if there is anything I can assist you with. I would be delighted to stay connected and explore potential opportunities for collaboration. Thank you again for your time, and I look

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12:02

412 Turning Rejections into Resilience: Dealing with...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/11/19

“Thank you for submitting your proposal for our capability development project. We appreciate the time and effort your team invested in preparing the proposal. After careful consideration, we have decided to proceed with another vendor whose proposal more closely aligns with our current needs and strategic direction. This decision was not easy, given the high quality of all the submissions we received.” I have stopped crying now, but this is the response I got from the buyer. Obviously, I have

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10:29

411 The Limits of Opportunity Cost in Japan: A Sales...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/11/12

n the West, we often emphasise that inaction doesn’t necessarily mean safety for the buyer, and there is a real cost to taking no action. We talk about the “opportunity cost” of doing nothing. A buyer’s competitors aren’t stagnant; they’re actively seeking new advantages with something better or more advanced. The market is never still either, as it’s always shifting, and companies need to be agile to keep pace. Economic conditions are equally unpredictable, with movements in currency, oil, gold,

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10:29

410 Why Sending Your Sales Proposal in Japan Is the...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/11/05

One of the worst combos in sales is a virtual meeting online and the buyer says, “send me your proposal” or even more insane, you volunteer to send it. Even if you managed to sit down face-to-face with a buyer, do not under any circumstances finish up the meeting with this sentence, “I will send you my proposal”. Sale is hard enough as it is, so why do salespeople decide they are not living on the edge enough and make these types of ludicrous statements? We usually get one hour in the first meeting

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10:05

409 Caring For Your Sales Orphans In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/10/29

Hunting for new clients is difficult and expensive. Marketing tries to drive people who are seeking our solution to our door through the website, advertising, search words and SEO. That all costs a lot of money and the success ratio can be quite low. We attend networking events and these usually cost money too. Now our most fundamental sales goal is not a sale. We are desperately looking for the reorder. If we can get that, it means we don’t have to spend any more money on getting this client on

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10:58

408 Balancing Questions With Suggestions In Sales In...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/10/22

We know that there are a lot of salespeople who are totally untrained. They have cobbled together bits and pieces of the sales process but they don’t have the whole picture in their brains. I remember when Dave Stearns, a Carnegie Master Trainer came to Tokyo to certify us a Sales Trainers. He started with the top right hand corner of the whiteboard and then he slowly outlined every single aspect of the sales process and the flow filled the whiteboard from top to bottom, from left to right. It

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10:36

407 In Japan, How To Tell If The Deal Is Real?

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/10/15

Basically, we know that a third of the potential buyers we meet will never buy from us, another third will buy, but not right now and the remaining third are ready to go, if they can be convinced to take action right now. The issue though is when we meet them for the first time, we don’t know which bucket they fit into and we can waste a lot of time and energy thrashing around before we work it out. The knowledge gain process is not straightforward and there are a lot of traps and feints ahead of

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11:04

406 Victor Antonio You Are Wrong About Weasel Words...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/10/08

I am a great fan of Victor Antonio, who writes books, gives lectures and training on sales. I listen to his Sales Influence Podcast and he has a lot of solid, credible advice. In a recent episode he spoke about not using “weasel words” in sales and being more directive and certain with the buyer. Weasel words are defined as “words or statements that are intentionally ambiguous or misleading” and in sales would include words such as “perhaps”, “maybe”, “could”, etc. I was thinking about how this

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10:29

404 Salespeople Hate Organisational Changes In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/10/01

The denizens of the upper floor, quiet, luxurious C-suites with expensive wall hangings and deep pile carpets, determine the changes the organisation needs to make to survive or to do even better. They expect everyone below to get behind their dispositions. Deep down in the engine room of the sales team, these changes are communicated by their boss. Usually, sales leaders become the boss because they lasted through two consecutive recessions and were the last one left standing or they were the

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11:47

405 The Required Mindset For Selling In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/10/01

Salespeople turn up in Japan and expect things to be pretty much the same as where they have come from. After all, sales is sales right? Wrong. Japan, as usual, is quite different. If these newly arrived salespeople had received training on how to sell, then they are probably going to try a consultative sales approach. This is absolutely what they should be doing, except it doesn't work in Japan. The consultative approach at base has a very sensible and basic idea – ask the client what they want

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11:10

403 Rationalising Failure In Sales In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/09/17

“There are no excuses for failing in sales”, is a common ideological position. However, is this really true? There is no doubt that sales is a very macho environment for men and women. There are set quotas, targets, numbers to be hit and if they are not hit, then that person is deemed to be failing. There are no hiding places in sales. You make your target or you don’t. Now, if we fired every salesperson who failed to hit their target, we wouldn’t have many people in sales. Japan makes this

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10:25

402 What To Look For When Hiring A Salesperson In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/09/10

Most of the sales jobs in Japan require the ability to sell in Japanese. That usually means native speakers of Japanese or foreigners who can operate at a highly sophisticated language level. There will be exceptions, but they are not that numerous. Probably the bilingual recruitment industry is one of the main employers of foreigners who can’t speak Japanese and English-language schools. One could argue that today neither requires any real sales skills. Recruitment, in particular, is at an

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10:13

401 Don’t Get Emotional In Sales In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/09/03

I have been coaching a founder client here for quite a while now and his emotional reaction to his clients not buying on his schedule always surprises me. I keep telling him, “it is business; it is not personal”. We know that there are some customers who will just never buy, some who will buy now and some who will buy in the future. We just don’t know which is which until we get rejected. When I get rejected in a deal, they are not rejecting Greg Story. They are rejecting my offer, in its

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14:23

400 Elements Of Outstanding Customer Service In Japan...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/08/27

This is Part Three and is the conclusion of our series on how to provide superior customer service. 1. Go the extra mile Time is always short and we all tend to cut corners and look for anywhere we can save time. On the receiving end of the service though, we are looking for as much personalised attention as possible, so there is a natural tension between these two aspirations. Training staff to think beyond the natural limits of time challenged customer service is the start. We can all do

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12:52

399 Elements Of Outstanding Customer Service In Japan...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/08/20

In Part One, we looked at some of the elements we need to be working on in providing excellent customer service, and so now let’s continue. 1. Friendly This would seem to be a very basic requirement in customer service, but often the wrong people are placed in these roles and many of them don’t like people. Even those who do like people can suffer brutal invective from irate customers and this can impinge on their joy for the work. In Japan, the land of the “customer is God”, we now see

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10:26

398 Elements Of Outstanding Customer Service In Japan...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/08/13

Elements Of Outstanding Customer Service In Japan (Part One) Customer service in Japan is pretty good by comparison with most other countries. To me, it is polite yet impersonal. The status gap between those serving and those being served is quite rigid. In my own country of Australia, those serving are quite happy to have a conversation with the customer. They don’t see themselves as inferior in status and treat customers as equals. In Japan, there is no such equality. The language and the

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11:29

397 Joe Biden Couldn’t Sell His Message And What...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/08/05

Watching Joe Biden destroy himself during the debate with Donald Trump was painful. He was appealing to the American voting public, that is to say, around 68% of voters based on the 2020 numbers, a then record turnout. This type of debate is similar to closing the sale in business. We have to outline why what we are doing is good for the client and why they should choose us over the alternatives. Polling, surveys, focus groups etc., provide politicians with insight into the needs of the voters and

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10:37

396 No Zen Needed In Sales In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/07/30

I belong to Dan Slater’s Delphi Network and every week his newsletter contains unattributed quotes from CEO conversations he has heard at his recent events. One of them caught my eye about sales. The anonymous contributor was saying that selling in Japan has to be no selling, a bit like a zen approach – “the sales of no sales” type of approach. I found that interesting and was wondering what on earth this CEO was talking about? The inference was that in Japan you can’t try to sell company

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