The Sales Japan Series

I have been in sales since 1988, with a slow, then fast migration of skills.  I started my own small one-man consultancy in 1988 in Brisbane to assist businesses wanting to create revenues with Japan…

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…

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 …

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 pleasu…

“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 …

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 buye…

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 wi…

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…

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 remem…

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 …

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…

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. Th…

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 a…

“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…

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…

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 bet…

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 …