The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

Cold calling always creates a debate amongst the sales community.  Some say it has seen it’s day, others defend it as part of the sales resource bank for getting leads.  I don’t think anyone suggests…

When you are on the executive floor, the carpet is thick, the mood is quiet and the décor is sumptuous.  It is a world removed from the scramble going on floors below.  Maybe you are in your own Pres…

It sounds so obvious that we should have structures for doing our project planning.  Projects are part and parcel of the fabric of work life and they constantly arise.  It is surprising though that s…

When we are haggling over the price with the buyer and they say, “this price is too high”, “that is out of our budget”, “we can’t afford it at that level, can’t you drop the price”, “we never pay tha…

Pricing is usually set by the boss and salespeople are just there to get out and sell at that designation.  The provenance of that price point can be quite varied.  In some cases, there is a careful …

We can speak to a group. Then there is another level, where we try to totally captivate our audience.  What makes the difference?  The content could even be the same, but in the hands of one person i…

Projects are simply too common.  Because of this we take them for granted, seeing them as part of our everyday work, but we don’t approach them properly.

We certainly don’t apply as much planning e…

Sales people are always under pressure to meet their targets.  In high pressure situations, this creates certain behaviours that are not in tune with the client’s best interests.  We know we should l…

Sometimes you see a confident presenter really bomb.  It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does, the contrast is vast.  If they are totally hopeless as their default mode as a speaker and th…

We can control 100% of our attitude.  Yes, but often we don’t.  There are few things we can be 100% in control of and our attitude would have to rank at the top of things we really need to control.  …

Sales is one of the few things in business you can measure accurately and immediately.  Are you getting greater efficiencies from your internal systems?  Is the marketing working?  Are our team becom…

Education can be a barrier to intelligence sometimes.  This is often the case with people educated in very hard skill disciplines.  They are asked to absorb vast amounts of complex information and to…

“We all have possibilities we don’t know about.  We can do things we don’t even dream we can do”.  This quote from one of the pioneers of the self-help movement, Dale Carnegie, marked a major change …

Everyone hates to be rejected, but not many people have this as a fundamental aspect of their work.  We ask colleagues for help and they assist, we ask our bosses for advice and they provide it.  Buy…

When you see someone do a very good presentation, your faith in public speaking humanity is restored.  There are so many poor examples of people killing their personal and professional brands with p…

Peter Drucker has this great quote. “Only three things happen naturally in organizations: friction, confusion and under performance.  Everything else requires leadership”.  That is a very profound an…

Bullying, humiliation, ridiculous stretch targets, rubbish goods, stress, shame – a toxic cocktail often suffered in the sales environment.  We often get into sales by accident.  There are not many v…

You want to promote your business or organisation, so that you can be more successful.  A genius idea pops up amongst the brain trust over a few drinks after work – why don’t we enter the Business Aw…

Sakaiya Taichi, well known author and futurist,  made an interesting observation about the current trend of Japanese society.  He referred to Japan’s current lack of yoku (desire), yume (dreams) and …

We have many images of negotiation thanks to the media.  It could be movie scenes of tough negotiators or reports on political negotiations with lunatic led rogue states.  Most of these representatio…