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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

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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11:15

395 The Thrill Of The Hunt In Sales In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/07/27

There are farmers and hunters in sales and both are needed in organisations. The hunters are energised by landing the deal and bored with the paperwork and administrivia required after the sale. The farmers are not much chop at landing new clients, but they are genius at taking care of existing clients and keeping them as repeater clients. I am a hunter. I realise about myself that I love finding new clients, discovering what they need and then helping them to achieve their goals and aims. There

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01:17:29

394 The Sales Success Code For Post Covid Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/07/16

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10:02

393 Missing The Real Needs When Selling In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/07/09

I had a meeting with a client I have been chasing for business for the last ten years. They have had the same President right throughout and we get on very well, but this has not resulted in any business coming my way. Over the years, I had been introduced by him to his various HR people, and that is where it has always floundered. Maybe they had their own internal solutions and didn’t need us or the HR people didn’t like me or didn’t like the President trespassing on their turf. Actually, I

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10:24

392 Preparing RFPs in Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/07/02

I don’t like doing RFPs in Japan. We are translating concepts and intangibles into text in a document, which a lot of people we will never ever meet will be reading and making decisions about us. I prefer to work on my champion and have them marshal the approval through their byzantine internal processes to get the agreement to go ahead. It feels more in control than launching a bunch of words into space and hoping for the heavens to align. I had a case like that recently. I had met a person

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11:52

391 Stress Free Closing The Sale In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/06/25

Recently, we had a negotiation with an existing buyer. They had severely cut back their purchasing quantities under direct orders from the European Headquarters. A new President had arrived and looking at the global training bill, decided he could save a lot of dough if they did it all themselves. The first salvo was to reduce the amount of previously scheduled training while they sorted it out. Actually, his local team just cannot do it from a time perspective and on the talent front. Anyway,

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10:28

390 Sales Can Be Depressing In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/06/18

I am having a bad run in sales at the moment and it is depressing. I am a constant networker attending events to meet potential clients. The leads we get to our website go to my sales team and so I have to hustle and get out there and make it happen. I do that and I follow up with the prospects to try to get a meeting or at least an introduction to a decision-maker. Like everyone else, I get ghosted a lot of the time, but that doesn’t prevent me from following up again and again until there is no

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12:23

389 AI And The Death Of Content Marketing

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/06/11

I started my first podcast “The Japan Leadership Series” on August 2nd, 2013. Shortly after that, I discovered Content Marketing and got better educated on the subject thanks to Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose’s podcast “This Old Marketing”, launched on November 20, 2013. The premise at the time was revolutionary. You put up your best stuff for free and don’t protect your IP. This was a radical idea and few went for it. I didn’t think of my podcast as “Content Marketing”, but I soon realised that

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10:20

388 Confirming Your Understanding Of The Client Needs...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/06/04

Have you ever had this experience? You cannot get on the same wavelength as the client. I remember an HR Director at one of the major fashion brands and I was always confused during our conversations. I was never sure where she stood on any number of issues about us delivering training for them. Yes, she was very pleasant, but also very obtuse and hard to corral. I would leave the meetings unsure of where we stood with this deal, if in fact there was a deal in there at all. Because no one in

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11:06

387 How To Present Your Sales Materials To The...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/05/28

Japan loves detail. A lot more detail than we expect in the West. I remember a lecture I attended at an academic conference on Sino-Japanese relations here in Tokyo in the early 1980s. The Professor was making this point about the Japanese love of detail by relating how a Zen metaphor had been imported into Japan from China. In the Chinese telling, there was a bucket to draw water from the well and there was no great attention placed on the apparatus, but instead on the broader philosophical Zen

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11:29

386 Controlling Our Hour For The Sales Meeting In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/05/21

Usually in Japan, we are granted an audience with the buyer for an hour for the meeting. Sometimes with Western buyers, they want to restrict the time, so we only have thirty minutes, which makes things very difficult. We also know that if we can capture their interest, that thirty minutes can magically become much longer. We also know that there will be more than one meeting, so we don’t have to try to squeeze everything into that initial conversation. One point though – in the case of a second

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385 Body Language In Sales In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/05/21

Body language is just that, a silent language, which communicates meaning. We can get verbal communication confused and make incorrect judgements and assumptions and body language is the same. There are some constants though and we should always be looking for giving clues and receiving clues through our and the buyer’s body language. When we are the seller, we want to present with an open posture. Most of the time, we will be seated. I often meet buyers in meeting rooms and these can vary from

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12:08

384 Sardonic Humour, Sarcasm and Irony When Selling...

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/05/07

Aussies are a casual people. They prefer informality and being chilled, to stiff interactions in business or otherwise. They can’t handle silence and always feel the need to inject something to break the tension. Imagine the cultural divide when they are trying to sell to Japanese buyers. Japan is a country which loves formality, ceremony, uniforms, silence and seriousness. Two worlds collide in commerce when these buyers and sellers meet. My job, when I worked for Austrade in Japan, was to

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10:35

383 Being Convincing In Front Of The Buyer In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/04/30

Blarney, snake oil, silver tongued – the list goes on to describe salespeople convincing buyers to buy. Now buyers know this and are always guarded, because they don’t want to be duped and make a bad decision. I am sure we have all been conned by a salesperson at some point in time, in matters great and small. Regardless, we don’t like it. We feel we have been made fools of and have acted unintelligently. Our professional value has been impugned, our feelings of self-importance diminished and we

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11:54

382 Selling To Sceptics On The Small Screen In Japan

The Sales Japan Series ·

2024/04/24

We are slowly emerging from Covid, yet a few leftovers are still hanging around, making our sales life complicated. One of those is the sales call conducted on the small screen using Teams or Zoom or whatever. These meetings are certainly efficient for the buyers, because they can get a lot of calls done more easily and for salespeople, it cuts out a lot of travel. Efficient isn’t always effective though. In my view, we should always try to be in person with the buyer. Some may say I am “old

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