The Sales Japan Series

Suddenly my phone rang and the number was clearly from overseas, because of the country code. It was not a number I recognised.  The crackly voice at the other end of the line was unknown to me and t…

We all understand the importance of a brand.  Brands are a short form description of long term reliability and perceived trust, both based on solid evidence.  Every business has a brand. You might be…

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…

January 6, 2021  219: Is That Light At The End Of The Sales Funnel I Can See

Millions of people are being vaccinated for Covid-19.  Japan, being Japan, isn’t going to accept any old tests which were …

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 formu…

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…

“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 g…

“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 g…

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 h…

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 expecti…

Ninja are masters of illusion, invisibility and subterfuge.  All of these traits have pretty much died out in modern times, except for a small bastion of steadfast office workers.  Some Japanese comm…

Sales is always a tough job, but not being able to get any new clients during Covid-19 just takes the degree of difficulty right to the top of the scale.  Every company I speak with says the same thi…

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 o…

Closing the deal is almost a non-existent art in Japan.  Salespeople here are particularly terrified of rejection.  The best way they have found to avoid that unfortunate result is to not ask for the…

Most buyers are hurting at the moment, as entire industries are under assault and many of the remainder are in a perilous state. The common American style of aggressive salesperson reaction to pushba…

We all know that buyers remember stories more easily than facts and data points.  In fact, the ratio is twenty two times more likely than being able to remember simple detail.  Data is like swimming …

We receive permission first, then we proceed to ask questions of the buyer.  We want to gain a sense of whether what we have said makes sense for them to use us or not. If there is not a match, then …

In a virtual call, what is the maximum number of people who should be joining on the buyer side, to make the meeting effective?  There is a correlation between the number in the group and the number …

One of the sad things about salespeople is they mostly have no idea what they are doing.  So we transfer that poor understanding of the basics to the online world and then wonder why they are not suc…

In Part One, we looked at the difficulties the modern communication platforms throw up because of the limitations of the technology, in particular, the poor audio quality.  Now we move forward to how…