The Sales Japan Series

We are starting the New Year and have we decided how we will start it?  Are we going to just slide back into our old habits and pick up the threads of the deals we were working on before the break?  …

A cushion, in the sales world, isn’t that thing you bite into with frustration when your old client buys from your competitor rather than you.  It is a ploy, a trick, a device, a subterfuge to stop u…

Most salespeople are very good on the detail of their solutions.  The more technical the solution, in order to be able to explain it to the buyer, the more expert level of knowledge is needed.  The o…

A very common complaint from foreign bosses here in Japan is that their sales staff are over-servicing the Japanese buyer.  Sometimes they are left to wonder who their staff are really working for – …

Proprietary research findings, industry experience, thick product catalogues, detailed flyers were the currency of the salesperson, before the advent of the iPhone.  The salesperson was an unknown qu…

Knowing where to find potential clients is one of the core skills of salespeople.  Yes, marketing drives activity and we have our networks, but we need to keep that sales funnel full.  That means we …

The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離.  Shu is to protect the traditional techniques, the basics, the fundamentals.  Ha is to detach and break away from the tradit…

Many salespeople contemplating this title would be flummoxed.  They don’t have really good questions for the client because they don’t ask any questions whatsoever.  They are losers who go straight i…

Buyers can smell fear and desperation on salespeople.  When the sales funnel is sad and prospects are few, we panic.  The client picks up on this and unconsciously they hesitate to work with us, beca…

The client is always right.  No they aren’t. We usually have more information about our offering than the buyer and are across the breadth of our range of solution in a way they can never be.  We are…

In modern economies, asking the buyer questions to understand their needs would be considered the most basic skills of a salesperson. This isn’t happening as much as you would expect in technologica…

When you are told that “hope is not a strategy” you get the point.  You also know that actually there is a fair bit of hope built into your strategy.  Every sales organisation comes up with targets a…

Inertia is a powerful retardant to getting deals done in Japan.  Either they already have a regular supplier or this is a new solution with which they have no experience and they don’t want to risk a…

Depending on your industry, times have been tough in sales.  We see the Japanese Government trying to resuscitate the inbound tourism industry to increase jobs and revenues to gather more tax income.…

In modern economies, asking the buyer questions to understand their needs would be considered the most basic of the basic skills of a salesperson. This isn’t happening as much as you would expect in …

Usually, we meet our contact in the company through a cold call, a referral or networking and we sit down and have a talk about the needs of the organisation.  If we are doing a professional job, we …

I am a big fan of Victor Antonio who is a sales coach in America. He has an excellent show called the Sales Influence Podcast.  In a recent episode I listened to he had some very interesting statisti…

I had been busy, so setting this appointment had been difficult.  Eventually, we found the day and time to meet.  I asked for the address and the text note mentioned the building and I knew it well, …

Many years ago, my job was to help Australian companies crack the Japanese market.  One of the elements of that job was explaining the Japanese business psyche to the Australian businesspeople target…

“Out of the frying pan into the fire”, seems to be an appropriate descriptor for where we are now.  We have been battered by Covid, or at least many of us have had that unpleasant experience, but now…