The Sales Japan Series

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.  T…

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.  Th…

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 bus…

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…

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 loo…

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…

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 Robe…

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 conversation…

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 Professo…

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 th…

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 bre…

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 ba…

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 o…

Getting a deal done in a single meeting is an extremely rare event in Japan.  Usually, the people we are talking to are not the final decision-makers and so they cannot give us a definite promise to …

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…

I recently launched a new project called Fare Bella Figura – Make a Good Impression.  Every day I take a photograph of what I am wearing and then I go into detail about why I am wearing it and put it…

Public speaking spots are a great way to get attention for ourselves and what we sell.  This is mass prospecting on steroids.  The key notion here is we are selling ourselves rather than our solution…

Finding clients is expensive.  We pay Google a lot of money to buy search words. We pay them each time someone clicks on the link on the page we turn up on in their search algorithm.  We monitor the …

Salespeople are good talkers.  In fact, they are often so good, they decide to do all the talking.  They try to browbeat the buyer into submission. Endless details are shared with the client about th…