The Sales Japan Series

I am very active networking here in Tokyo, scouring high and low for likely buyers of our training solutions.  I attend with one purpose – “work the room” and as a Grant Cardone likes to say, find ou…

Access to social media has really democratised salespeople’s ability to sell themselves to a broader audience.  Once upon a time, we were reliant on the efforts of the marketing team to get the messa…

Japan is facing a serious shortage of staff in many industries.  The job-to-applicant ratio rose to 1.28, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare announced recently. The ratio means there were 128 …

Sales people are in massive competition today, with all the distractions that are out there for the client’s attention.

We want to get our message across about how we can help build the client’s busi…

Our circle of friends will usually be people with whom we share a lot of commonalities.  Our viewpoints merge, our interests are similar, we like the same types of things.  We get on easily.  Life ho…

In the first two parts of this three part series we have gone deep on how to become known and liked by buyers.  That is all very well, but if they don’t trust us, they won’t buy our solutions if they…

 In Part One, we went deep on the KNOW Factor in sales and today we turn to why we need to be likeable.  Actually, do we need buyers to like us? Maybe not in every case, but it doesn’t hurt does it? …

We have all heard this bromide about Know, Like and Trust in sales, but have we really deeply explored what it means in today’s post-Covid business climate?  Over the next three contributions, I am g…

AI has opened the floodgates to allow any idiot to create content. If content marketing is an important vehicle for promoting your credibility in business, then be concerned.  Most content is current…

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 everybody wins. In a lot of cases howe…

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! Powerpoint slide after power…

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 publishing house. That book b…

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 folkloric villain of the piece. Reversing that doub…

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 get out of there …

It has always been astonishing to me how hopeless some salespeople are in Japan. Over the last 20 years, I have been through thousands of job interviews with salespeople. We teach sales for our clien…

Do you subscribe to various sites that send you useful information, uplifting quotes etc? The following morsel popped into my inbox the other morning, “People don't care how much you know, until they…

We have all seen it – the pendulum swings of organisational change.  You can basically break out your stopwatch and get the timing down perfectly.  The new CEO arrives and reverses whatever the prede…

Pitching for the business is quite different to selling to a client representative we may be meeting in a meeting room.  In the latter case, we have only one or sometimes two people to persuade, but …

Selling to idiot buyers sounds a bit harsh doesn’t it, but I am sure we have all had a version of this experience.  It usually manifests itself in the pricing component of the transaction.  We provid…

Understanding client’s needs presumes we care about what they want.  For many salespeople this isn’t even a topic in their mind.  Their understanding is that they turn up and tell the client all abou…