The Sales Japan Series

10 Episodes
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By: Dr. Greg Story

The vast majority of salespeople are just pitching the features of their solutions and doing it the hard way. They are throwing mud up against the wall and hoping it will stick. Hope by the way is not much of a strategy. They do it this way because they are untrained. Even if their company won't invest in training for them, this podcast provides hundreds of episodes with information, insights and techniques all based on solid real world experience selling in Japan. Trying to work it out by yourself is possible but why take the slow and difficult route to...

379 Selling Yourself From Stage In Japan
Last Tuesday at 3:33 PM

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 in detail.  This is an important delineation.  We want to outline the issue and tell the audience what can be done, but we hold back on the “how” piece.  This is a bit tricky, because the attendees are looking for the how bit, so that they can apply it to fix their issues by themselves.  We don’t want that because we don’t get paid.  We...


378 How We Lose Clients In Sales In Japan
03/19/2024

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 pay per click cost, naturally always striving the drive down the cost of client acquisition.  If we have the right type of product, we may be paying for sponsored posts to appear in targeted individuals’ social media feeds.  This is never an exact science, so there is still a fair bit of shotgun targeting going on, rather than sniper focus on buy...


377 Using Demonstrations and Trial Lessons To Sell In Japan
03/12/2024

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 the intricacies of the widget, expecting that the features will sell the product or service.  Do we buy features though? 

Actually, we buy evidence that this has worked for another buyer very similar to us, in a very similar current situation in their business.  We are looking for proof to reduce our risk.  To get us to the proof point, we make a big de...


376 The Buyer Is Never On Your Schedule In Japan
03/05/2024

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 out “who’s got my money”.  I have compressed my pitch down to ten seconds when I meet a possible buyer at an event. My meishi business card is the tool of choice in this regard.  Most people here have English on one side and Japanese on the other.  I was like that too until I got smarter about selling our services.

Typically, I w...


375 Content Marketing Is Great For Japan Sales But Can Be Fraught
02/27/2024

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 message out and, in rare cases, the PR team to promote us.  Neither group saw it as their job to help us as a salesperson, and they were more concentrated on the brand.  Today we have the world at our beck and call through social media.

We can promote ourselves through our intellectual property.  We can post blogs on areas of our expertise.  We can...


374 Japan Small Businesses Must Pick Up The Dregs Of Sales
02/20/2024

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 job openings for every 100 job seekers.The figure has not yet reached the pre-pandemic level of 1.6 in 2019. The hospitality sector in particular, lost a lot of part-time staff during Covid and they haven’t returned in numbers sufficient to match the needs of employers.  Hotels are getting back to pre-Covid occupancy rates, but they worry they don’t have enough staff to clean rooms and run the Hotel at the st...


373 In Sales, How To Break Through The Buyer Brain Logjam
02/13/2024

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 business, but it is a tough row to hoe because of all the competition we face from meetings, emails and social media. There are so many things that are occupying the minds of our clients and our buyers before we get to talk to them. We have the appointment, we have their time; we turn up on the day. But inside thei...


372 In Sales, How To Be Liked By Different Types Of Buyers In Japan
02/06/2024

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 however throws us many curved balls, as meet new people who are not like us. Often we struggle when dealing with them.  There are nine tried and true human relations principles we can use to improve our ability to get on with everyone, rather than just a select few who are more like us.  I am going to analyse some different types of people we ar...


371 The Real Know, Like and Trust In Sales: Part Three – TRUST
01/30/2024

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 can avoid it.  If you are in an industry where the supply side is totally restricted and the buyers have to compete for supply, then lucky you. I have never had that luxury and I would guess 99.9% of salespeople are in my boat. 

How do we get buyers to trust us?  The answer is in our k...


370 The Real Know, Like and Trust In Sales In Japan: Part Two - LIKE
01/24/2024

 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?  As a buyer yourself, would you rather deal with someone you like, rather than a person you didn’t like?  We will all prefer to work with people we like, but what makes us likeable?

Some clients we get on with like a house on fire and others not so much.  In my case, I want to...