The Sales Japan Series

Negotiation Fails

Former American President John F. Kennedy left us with a great quote: “Let’s never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate”. Actually, we do fear to negotiate th…

The Sales Success Environment

What are today’s revenue results, how much is in the pipeline, when will we get paid by the client, what is the run rate, will we meet our budget - this is the lexic…

Pricing

Salespeople don't set the price of what they sell.  This is usually an obscure outcome decided by someone else inside the machine.  It might actually be an elaborate process, where multiple…

Why Lawyers Can’t Sell, But Need To

Lawyers have spent a lot of time studying to pass their bar exams. When they graduate, they are the white collar galley slaves, shackled to legal partner’s teams…

Toxic Sales

Bullying, humiliation, ridiculous targets, rubbish goods, stress, shame – a toxic cocktail often suffered in the sales environment. We often get into sales by accident. There are no var…

Presenting Our Sale’s Materials

If we are presenting a brochure, flyer, price list, hard copy slide deck or any other typical collateral item, then we should adopt best practice for greatest succes…

Creating Consistently Great Customer Service

Jan Carlzon many years ago published a tremendous guide to customer service. He had the job of turning around SAS airlines and captured that experience …

You Don’t Want Sales

 Clever, shallow, smooth as silk, glib, “rat with a gold tooth” salespeople are the scourge of the earth. They are focused on your money and how quickly they can separate you f…

Stop Sales Suicide

What we say and how we say it matters. It matters in life, in families and in business- especially in sales. Sale’s talk is very semantics driven. By the way, the classic Hollywo…

The Negotiation Process

“Winning is not a sometime thing. You don’t do things right once in a while…you do them right all of the time”. This is a great quote from the famous American football coa…

What Successful Negotiators Do

Every sale is a negotiation. It might be centered around price but it could also be around delivery times, quantities, guarantees, return policy, quality assurance,…

Omotenashi: Real Japanese Customer Service

I am sure you have you seen notices explaining that this store location is going to close while the building is being reconstructed and that it will reope…

Nasty Buyers

The customer is Kamisama (God) in sales in Japan. We hear this a lot here across all industries and sectors. Sometimes however, the buyer can more like an Oni (Devil) when they deal wi…

The Sales Valley of Death

Sales cannot run like a manufacturing production line. We are not making industrial cheese here. This is more like an artisanal pursuit, closer to art than science. Yet, e…

Let’s Go For The Sale’s Bull’s-eye

Sale’s solutions are what make the business world thrive. The client has a problem and we fix it, our goods or services are delivered, outcomes are achieved and…

Selling Ain’t Telling

He slid effortlessly into the chair and before I knew it, he had popped open the oyster shell of his laptop and was pointing his screen menacingly in my direction. Uh oh! Powe…

Principled Salespeople Win

In 1936 an unknown author, despite many frustrating years of writing drafts and receiving publisher rejections, finally managed to get his manuscript taken up by a major …

Credibility Counts For Everything In Sales

Salespeople are carrying around a lot of baggage with them when they visit clients. The smooth talking, dodgy sales person trying to con us, is the folklo…

Sales Certainty

The hardest sales job in the world is selling something you don’t believe in yourself. The acid test is would you sell this “whatever” to your grandmother? If the answer is no, then…

You Can’t Cold Call in Japan. Really?

The pressure for increasing results is not constant. It is just keeps surging “higher, faster, further”. We in the sales team do work hard. We are polite, co…