386 episodes

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 sales success? Tap into the structure, methodologies, tips and techniques needed to be successful in sales in Japan. In addition to the podcast the best selling book Japan Sales Mastery and its Japanese translation Za Eigyo are also available as well.

The Sales Japan Series Dr. Greg Story

    • Business
    • 2.0 • 1 Rating

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 sales success? Tap into the structure, methodologies, tips and techniques needed to be successful in sales in Japan. In addition to the podcast the best selling book Japan Sales Mastery and its Japanese translation Za Eigyo are also available as well.

    379 Selling Yourself From Stage In Japan

    379 Selling Yourself From Stage In Japan

    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 are here to fix their problem, not for them to DIY (Do It Yourself) their way to a solution.
    All selling is public speaking and presentations skills.  However, very few salespeople are trained as speakers or presenters.  This is incongruous, isn’t it?  We need to be able to present to the one person in front of us or to hundreds of prospects all gathered together at an event.
    First of all, we are selling our personal brand and then by extension the solution we are representing.  That is the correct order and just jumping to the solution won’t work.  Buyers buy us first and then what we sell.  We all know we can’t do good business with a bad guy or gal and our talk is a due diligence process to see if we can be trusted.
    The dumb way to sell from stage is to provide all of the content up front and then come in at the end with the shiny sales pitch.  There is a discernable break in the flow and the audience braces themselves for the pitch.  This isn’t the way to do it.  We need to be interspersing our pitch throughout the talk, so there is no discernable shifting of gears by the speaker.  This way, there is nothing to brace against or push back on.
    The way to do this is to determine what are the key problems and fears confronting the audience.  We have the fix for these and can be a trusted partner for them.  Once we have determined what are the key problems, we construct our talk to address all the most high priority needs in the time allotted.
    The talk is broken up into specific chapters, rotating around the key issues.  We need to create hooks, which will grab the attention of the listeners. In each chapter, we outline the downside of not doing anything about fixing the problem we have raised.  We also talk about what needs to be done to fix it, but we don’t reveal how to fix it.  To get the point to register with the buyers, we pose rhetorical questions about what will happen if they don’t take action to deal with it.  We are painting a dismal picture for them of the future ramifications of leaving the mess as it is.
    The fact that we understand the problem in detail tells the audience we are an expert in this area.  If we have some visible proof of our expertise, all the better.  We might point them to our books, blogs, podcasts or our video shows.  Today, all of these things are much easier to pull off than ten years ago.  For example, Amazon prints my books one at a time if I request it and so no garage is full of unsold books, which used to be the reality for most authors.
    Today, creating blogs and pushing them out through social media gives us credibility at almost no cost.  The same with podcasts and videos.  There might be some small cost to recording the shows and hosting podcasts on a platform like I use with LibSyn, but really the cost is marginal.  YouTube hosts my videos and it is free.  Our mobile phones provide amazing quality for recording video and video editing software is not prohibitively expensive. Editing things yourself is possible in a way it wasn’t before.
    This means we can project our expertise beyond the physical limits of the stage.  Let me give you a case study. Please go to LinkedIn and find my page.  You will see I am posting all the time on three subjects – leadership, sales and presentations.  If you scroll down through the feed, you will just see over three thousand posts.  My prospective buyers d

    • 12 min
    378 How We Lose Clients In Sales In Japan

    378 How We Lose Clients In Sales In Japan

    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 buyers.  If we go to networking events, we may have to pay the organisation membership fee to be able to access the event and the fee for attending that meeting.  Or we may pay a usually very expensive amount to attend as a guest. If we do old style advertising, then we pay for the ad and it has a very brief shelf-life before it is discarded, usually unseen and unread, despite our best wordsmithing efforts with the copy.
    Given how difficult and expensive it is to get a client, you wonder how we could be so crazy as to lose a client we have already spent time and treasure on acquiring?  It usually happens for a number of reasons.  Our solution fulfilled a need they had at that time, but that need is a one off or not a consistent feature of their spending.  It might be a seasonal spend, so there are limited time during the year to interact with the buyer and the connection isn’t as strong as it needs to be.  The company may have run out of dough because of the market, currency exchange rates, wars disrupting supply chains or a pandemic killing millions of people and disrupting the entire global economy.
    Maybe our quality slipped up or our consistency of delivery wasn’t where it needed to be and the buyer punished us by going to another supplier.  Perhaps the buyer got moved around inside the client firm or quit and a new person has appeared.  The new broom has their own ideas and wants to mark out their territory by bringing in their own preferred suppliers and we are now out in the cold.  Or we have had a change of personnel. The person responsible for that firm has left the organisation and a new salesperson has to take over the account.  The chemistry is not there and the buyer moves their business to a rival firm.
    Client bonds are very fragile and so many things can destroy the continuity of the business.  Even if you get on well with the buyer, they have bosses and maybe they have a different idea about how to move forward.  This travels all the way to the top of the organisation back in headquarters.  So many times the boss of the global business changes and a few months later you find yourself out on the street, because the purchasing has been centralised or rationalised or right sized or whatever and you are out.  I have seen so many deals fall over because someone up the decision-making tree has decided to override the decision of the buyer I am dealing with.  There is a policy change and now hiring is frozen, expenditures are reeled in and suppliers are cut loose.
    A lot of this is beyond our control and we just have to accept the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in business.  When we make the change, we can do a better job of controlling the transition from one salesperson to the next.  Unless we have fired the individual and they are out the door quick smart, there is usually a month period of notice that gives us the time to glue in the new person to the buyer.  Japan as a formalised cyclical redistribution of jobs every few years, so firms here are used to people moving. 
    This should give us time for the existing client salesperson to take their replacement for them to meet the buyer and do the handover. What happens after that is the critical piece.  If the new representative doesn’t work on creating their own connections with the buyer, then the business continuity can be at risk.  This requires time together and busy salespeople may

    • 11 min
    377 Using Demonstrations and Trial Lessons To Sell In Japan

    377 Using Demonstrations and Trial Lessons To Sell In Japan

    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 deal about how the buyer can apply the benefits of our solution inside their company.  Is that what happens in reality though? 
    In Japan, judging by what our clients tell us and by the raw material we find attending our training classes, it would be a miracle if the salesperson went through these critical five phases of the explanation of the solution: 1. feature 2. benefit 3. application of the benefit  4. evidence and 5. trial close.  Most Japanese salespeople are absolute experts on the most intimate details to do with the features. However, they completely forget to expand that information to elucidate the benefits and beyond that, they have no clue what is supposed to come next.
    In fact, finding a similar client in a similar situation in the current market is usually a stretch for us in sales.  Even if we had such a rare case, often we are precluded from talking about it because of certain clauses in the contract or by a Non-Disclosure Agreement we signed.
    How do we prove what we are saying then?  This is where a trial session or a demonstration comes in handy.  We can talk as much as we like about how great we are and our solution, but seeing is believing.  If it is equipment, then running the machine can show whether the output will satisfy the demands of the buyer.  If it is a service, we may have to recreate the situation and show how we do things.
    Recently we did both.  We had a request from one of Japan’s biggest financial institutions to run a sales training session, to see if we have what they want for their 3000 person sales team.  In any trial, we have to make a decision on what we will choose for the content? 
    My advice would always be to choose the most difficult content.  Isolate out the areas where everyone really struggles.  This is usually the most relevant content and also the content which they currently have the most trouble with too.  If the content is too easy, then they will think they can do it themselves and therefore they don’t need us. 
    In the services sector, this also raises the bar on the delivery side of things.  Complex content needs a lot of expertise to deliver it professionally.  If they are thinking to bring it in-house, they may watch the session and decide that they do not have the right resources to pull that off by themselves.  Ergo, they have to buy from us to eliminate the gap they are facing between where they are and where they want to be.
    In a demonstration, similar to a trial session, getting the participants to get their hands dirty is critical.  Theory is fine, but doing it for real is a totally different thing.  I was teaching a module on “How To Disagree Agreeably” to the leadership team of one of the 5 star hotels here in Tokyo.  We went through the theory and then we had the role play practice.  It was revealing how much they struggled to replace their old habits with what they had just learnt.  It really brought home the importance of not just understanding things intellectually, but the importance of getting it to gel inside yourself and make it your own.
    When we run a session or a demonstration, the client can see the content relevancy for their need and our expertise to deliver it to the team.  We can usually customise the content further, if it is not quite where they need it.  The delivery part shows our professional standards, our ability to relate to the team and whether we

    • 10 min
    376 The Buyer Is Never On Your Schedule In Japan

    376 The Buyer Is Never On Your Schedule In Japan

    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 would hand over my business card - Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training.  The recipient would then ask me “what do you do?”. I realised I needed to have a better organised approach to that frequent question.  Knowing that we do better remembering things we hear and see at the same time, I created two cards – one for English and one for Japanese. 
    On the front of my card is all the logistical information – title, location and contact details.  On the rear of the card is the pitch deck. On that side, I note we are experts in “soft skills”  training, we have been here in Japan for 61 years and around the world for 112 years and that we cover five main areas – communication, sales, leadership, presentations and diversity, equity and inclusion.  At this point I ask them which one of these they need the most at their firm and then I shut up.  In ten seconds, I have them telling me their needs. This opens up the opportunity to visit them after the event and go through what we might be able to do for them. It is not the right occasion to attempt to have that conversation in a busy networking event. By the way, if they say, “all of them”, I still ask them which one is of the most interest. I need to get them to prioritise otherwise, it is left too vague and the conversation cannot advance.
    Naturally, I write to them immediately and try to set up the appointment.  Most people ghost me and don’t reply.  I know everyone is busy, so I also know I have to keep following up until they consent or tell me to buzz off.  Those who agree to meet will answer my questions and listen to what we have.  At this point, things slow down as they work their way through the labyrinth behind the meeting room wall, where their decision-making colleagues sit – out of my sight and touch.  They need to reach a consensus internally, to do the training and pay the dough.
    The problem is they are never on my timetable with their decision-making.  Don’t they know I have a monthly target to hit?  Don’t they know we need money now, not later?  Aren’t they aware we don’t like 60 and 90 day payment terms, because that is grossly unfair to the little guy? 
    So often when we complete a deal and I look back at the spark of that deal, going from the initial ten second pitch deck networking event chance encounter, to the time of payment, it can be six months or more.  If you have a cash flow issue in your firm, that is a big problem.  Yes, you can discount fees to speed up payment and you get less, but you get it faster. The better approach is to keep stacking your funnel with deals, so that if one is slow to fruition or falls over, you are not wiped out. 
    Deals falling over is super painful.  You have spent a ton of time marshaling this payday through their elaborate and baroque system. Everyone is ready to go, the contract is agreed by their legal beagles and then “someone” intervenes and scuppers the entire enterprise.  That payday may happen or it may not happen, but if that is all you have on the go, then you are naked and alone in a harsh world of pain.
    I am reminded of watching a show on television when I was a kid.  A performer was keeping plates spinning on top of cane sticks.  As one would falter, they would leap in and wobble the cane stick to get the plate back to maximum speed.  It was always fast-paced and frantic. I am sure it must have been

    • 12 min
    375 Content Marketing Is Great For Japan Sales But Can Be Fraught

    375 Content Marketing Is Great For Japan Sales But Can Be Fraught

    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 do video and upload that to YouTube, one of the biggest and most powerful search engines.  There are so many paths to the mountaintop, and they are all free.  Of course, the platforms are looking for money and so they shaft us and only show our stuff to a minute section of our followers, but the price is right.
    I was making this point in a recent speech to the American Chamber here in Tokyo, which you can see on YouTube.  One question following my recommendation to salespeople to get out there and promote theirexpertise and experience, was “what about the haters?”.  It is a good point and if you are delicate and sensitive, then social media could be a bruising encounter for you and your content.  Or like me, you can just ignore it and work on the basis that people who get it know you are an expert, because they consume your content and they will ignore the haters as well.
    Let me provide a real life case study for you. I was recently involved in a thread on LinkedIn responding to a post by the author about promoting your credentials when speaking in Japan, otherwise the audience won’t trust what you say.  I didn’t agree with the way this was characterised by the author and so added my “expert” comment.  Most people just ignored what I was saying, because they had what they wanted to say as their main interest and fair enough.  One person though said, “master trainer and executive coach coming in to bash an entire 125 million people country as non-professional in a single comment and blatantly disregard any suggestion on how to customize the message to appeal to a specific audience. Excellent communication strategy! 笑”.
    So what would you do with this type of criticism? 
    We can ignore it, as I suggested during my AmCham speech, or we can choose to expose it.  On this occasion, I decided to expose it.  This was my reply, “tell us your experience and share your insights. I am relating mine based on my experience here since 1979 and over 550 public speeches in Japan. Your comment doesn’t match with what I am suggesting from what I can see. What do you suggest that is diametrically opposed to what I am saying? I have published 373 blogs on LinkedIn on presenting in Japan and the same number of recordings for my podcast The Japan Presentations Series and published my book Japan Presentations Mastery as well as teaching the High Impact Presentations course. How about you - tell us what you have done?”.
    As you see, I am heaping on my own credibility in my reply and asking the critic to pony up and tell us their credentials.  I chose this route for a simple reason. I have a very high profile here because I have published 7 books, including three best sellers, and release six audio podcasts and three video podcasts a week. I also pump out four additional videos a day through LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram and Threads.  You may not have this type of onslaught happening and can simply ignore the irritation.  I didn’t plan it this way, but I also drown out any critics, because of the constant flow of content I keep posting every day.  Their previous negative posting gets pushed down the fold in the screen and just disappears.  It remains high in their postings on their page, but is crushed by my new posts on my page and is soon forgotten.
    In my reply, I made a special point of not criticising the person making the negative comment, but cha

    • 11 min
    374 Japan Small Businesses Must Pick Up The Dregs Of Sales

    374 Japan Small Businesses Must Pick Up The Dregs Of Sales

    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 standards they adhere to.  In July, the Japan Times noted 75.5% of surveyed hotel operators said they face shortages of regular employees while 78% said they lack part-time and other nonregular workers.
    The Immigration Services Agency recently announced the total number of foreigners in Japan has topped 3 million for the first time. The Japanese government has created a new skilled workers No. 2 visa category, just for the construction and shipbuilding industries. The Nikkei Asia in April quoted the Japan International Cooperation Agency estimates that, given Japan’s labor shortage, reaching the government’s economic growth target for 2040 would require nearly quadrupling the number of foreign workers to 6.74 million.
    This is a profound change for Japan, which as a society highly values conformity and harmony.  No “melting pot” for Japan. Foreigners in large numbers may threaten that harmony, because they don’t appreciate how things work here.  The Government is facing that labor shortage head on though and creating more visa availability for foreign labourers to enter Japan and do the jobs locals don’t want to do. 
    In the white collar world, the language barrier and the weak yen, both guarantee that there won’t be a rush of foreigners coming here to take up jobs.  That means that for most multi-national companies, there will continue to be a war for talent for Japanese staff.  If you require English as well, the pool of talent available becomes tiny.  If you are a large corporation, you will have deep pockets and can offer large base salaries to attract people to join you.  If you are a small to medium size business, then the nightmare has already started and will only get worse.
    The Council for the Creation of Future Education, chaired by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, has the goal for Japanese students studying abroad to reach 150,000 students seeking to earn degrees by 2033. The Japanese Trade Union Confederation (Rengō) conducted a survey in 2022 which showed 30% of new employees quit their jobs in the first three years. This more mobile younger group, called the Dai Ni Shinsotsu (second stage fresh graduates) will be attractive to target, especially those with international exposure, better English and a few years of work experience.  They will still need extensive training, though.
    In the world of sales in Japan, the picture is very grim.  If you need English speaking capability, the pool of talent available is very shallow and we are all competing fiercely for a limited resource. In my hiring experience, I have noticed over the last seven years that salespeople are becoming more expensive and certainly very expensive relative to their ability. The vast majority of salespeople everywhere are untrained and they are working it out by trial and error.  Japan is just the same.  Assuming that someone knows what they are doing after working for a number of years in sales is too optimistic in my experience.  Bosses need to accept that they will need to give these salespeople training to get their skills to the levels required.  We teach a lot of salespeople here and we notice some common trends. They need particular work on asking questions to fully understand the buyer’s needs rather than just delivering their pitch. Also, they need help on handling pushback from the client on pr

    • 12 min

Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5
1 Rating

1 Rating

Logan:) ,

Really great information

The information is really good if you yourself are starting a business large, small or you are just interested in Japanese businesses culture. The only problem I have with this podcast is the amount of time wasted because every episode has 3 or more minutes of nothing at the end and the podcast doesn’t start until about 2:00-2:30 after the intro pitch. I prefer to listen to podcast when I’m busy doing other things. So when I listen in the car and can’t skip or anything I’m busy, the 3 minutes at the end that have no sound and then listen to another 2+ minutes of intro pitch before the next podcast has already wasted 5 minutes of the users time. The real part of the podcast itself is only 5 minutes out of the usual 10 minutes. It’s wasting 30 minutes out of every 60 minutes of the listeners time when they listen to the podcast. I’m not sure why there is 3 minutes of nothing at the end but please cut it from the podcast. I want to listen to your other series but I’m worried they will have the same format and waste 5 minutes of every 10 minute podcast and that really turns me off from continuing listening. If the series stop ending with the 3 minutes of nothing at the end I would gladly change to 5 stars.

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