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The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

By: Dr. Greg Story
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  • Summary

  • For succeeding in business in Japan you need to know how to lead, sell and persuade. This is what we cover in the show. No matter what the issue you will get hints, information, experience and insights into securing the necessary solutions required. Everything in the show is based on real world perspectives, with a strong emphasis on offering practical steps you can take to succeed.
    copyright 2022
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Episodes
  • Salespeople Bitchiness

    Salespeople Bitchiness
    Jun 1 2024
    Sales is a tough enough job without having additional complications. Clients can be very demanding, often we depend on logistics departments and production divisions, to get the purchase to the buyer. We can’t control the quality, but we have total responsibility, as far as the client is concerned. There is the constant pressure of producing revenue results, with bosses always pushing hard on the numbers. If we are successful and we are doing well, you would think that life would be good. Fat chance of that. We know the emotional roller coaster that is the sales life and you are only ever as good as your last deal. Perhaps with a little bit of success should come some respite from the turmoil of hitting the numbers. I hate to break this to you, but no such luck! Our sales colleagues, by definition, cannot all be equally successful. The Pareto Principle says that the top 20% of salespeople will account for 80% of the revenue numbers and commissions. So that means the other 80% of the team are scrambling around for the remaining 20% of the sales. People come into sales from different backgrounds, with different levels of experience, with degrees of motivation and they join at different points in the annual results cycle. This means that some will be in the top group, a chunk will be in the middle and the rest are at the bottom. In the West, the usual way sales teams are managed is based on the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest. Those who can’t cut it are cut loose. Those who can continue to produce get to stay. If they can survive a couple of recessions, they may even be moved up into management positions. This means that those at the bottom are basically on their own. This should spur them on to greater efforts to move up the sales ranks and to strike for the top position in the sales results table. Yet often this doesn’t happen. In Japan, most salespeople are on a salary and bonus structure, rather than salary and commission. Almost nobody is on 100% commission arrangements and nobody wants that type of sales structure. This means the financial ambition or necessity to get ahead in sales is not as strong as we see in the West. Often the base salaries are large by foreign standards and so people can live on the base. In some cases, there can be pushback against the top salespeople, by those failing, because the successful are making everyone else look bad. Snide comments can be made, negative inferences drawn and a host of other petty signals that says “we don’t like you”. This is driven by spite, jealousy and envy. This is their “the way to build the tallest building in town is to tear down all the taller buildings” approach to greatness. In a small sales team this can be very uncomfortable. There is a degree of mutual cooperation involved in sales teams and this is usually where the disputes arise. Who owns the client, who owns the deal, and how is the revenue commission going to be split up? If the sales politicians in the firm get going, they can really do damage to the morale of the organisation. These people are usually excellent at whining, gathering whiners together and hosting whine parties. They use their energy to pull down those who are successful, instead of trying to become a success themselves. When you are the top performer or if you are in the top ranks, you can feel you have become a target. Instead of just worrying about getting sales done, you now have to waste precious energy walking around on egg shells, to avoid criticism from your colleagues. This is all kept below the radar, so the boss is often unaware of what is really going on. However, in many cases they don’t care anyway. They are looking for numbers and they don’t want to have to deal with personalities and sales soap operas in the office. If the bosses are any good, they would be sorting out the toxic few, but often they don’t. The top salespeople are razor focused on serving clients and doing all the hard yards needed to get the sale, so they are not politically minded. The whole mess gets made worse because in a declining demographic, many organisations are looking at their salesperson retain strategies. They do this because they know they cannot easily recruit enough salespeople replacements. This means the internal war goes on for much longer that it should. We lose sight of the external competition and fight amongst ourselves. Bosses, hear me, sack the toxic! If you don’t, you will find the whole organisation will start failing as the wrong culture takes command. If you are one of the top salespeople, insulate and isolate yourself from the whiners. They don’t work as hard or as long, so there is plenty of opportunity to get to the work, without having to engage with them much. Winners start early and concentrate on their Golden Time between 9.00am-5.00pm on speaking with clients, not idiots in...
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    13 mins
  • Chasing Buyer “No” Replies

    Chasing Buyer “No” Replies
    May 26 2024
    Everyone hates to be rejected, but not many people have this as a fundamental aspect of their work. We ask colleagues for help and they assist, we ask our bosses for advice and they provide it. Buyers though are a different case. They can easily find a million reasons not to buy and unashamedly tell us “no”. The rejection itself is not so much the problem, as is how we respond, how we deal with the rejection. In Japan, the two areas our clients flag with us for special attention in sales training for their team are around understanding the client’s needs and asking for the order or closing, as it is commonly referred to in sales parlance. The poor questioning skills are a result of salespeople wanting to tell the buyer a lot of stuff about the features, but not bothering to ask some well designed questions to uncover what their clients need. This in itself will explain a lot about why buyers say “no”. If we don’t properly understand what they need, then how do we suggest solutions that make sense and motivate the buyer to action? The two problems are closely linked. Even assuming that the questions are well thought through and that the solution selected is professionally conveyed to the buyer, they may still say no. This is because the buyer’s hesitations have not been properly addressed. There was something unclear or unsatisfactory in what they just heard from the salesperson and they are not convinced this is the right solution to their problem. This is why a “no” will certainly be forthcoming, especially from Japanese buyers. Risk aversion is a fundamental part of the fabric of Japan and buyers more than most, observe this in distinct detail. They would rather give up on something better, if they thought there was a possibility their decision might bring some stain on their record. Failure is hard to recover from in Japan. There are no second chances here. People have learnt the best way to avoid failing is to take as few decisions as possible. Especially any decisions which can be traced back to you. Best to have a group decision, so the blame can be spread around and no one loses their job. Actually that works like a charm here, so no one wants to buck the system Having given the sales presentation, many salespeople in Japan simply don’t ask for the order. They get to the end of their spiel and they just leave it there. The buyer is not asked for a decision, it is left vague on purpose, so that if it is a “no” then that will not have to be dealt with directly. The Japanese language is genius for having circles within circles of subtle obfuscation. The end result is a “no” but nobody ever has to say it or hear it. To get a sale happening, the buyer has to do all the work here in Japan, because the salespeople don’t want commit, to take the plunge and ask for the order. If they get a “no”, their feelings of self worth are impacted, they feel depressed, that they are failing. Not doing fully competent work or being highly productive, yet keeping you job is a pretty safe bet in most Japanese companies. The level of productivity amongst white collar workers is dismally low. Collective responsibility helps because it lessens the impact of personal inability to reach targets or make deadlines. Sales though is totally crystal clear about success and failure. It is very hard to argue with numbers – you either made the target or you didn’t. Sales is also a numbers game. You are not going to hit a homerun every time, so the number of times becomes important. You will have certain ratios of success that apply right through the sales value chain and the only way to increase your sales, is to improve these ratios. You have to up the ante, regarding the volume of activity. This sounds easy, but it isn’t when you are feeling depressed, insecure and plummeting in confidence. The key is to see sales in a different way. The increased volume of activity will even out the rejections. The way you think about rejection has to change. Rejection isn’t about you personally. Buyers don’t care that much about salespeople as people. They are rejecting your offer. As it is made today. In this part of the budget process. At this point in the economic cycle. In this current construction. At this price, with these terms. We haven’t shown enough value yet, to get a “yes’. As these aspects change, the answer can go from a “yes” to a “no” and from a “no” to a “yes”. That decision is irrelevant of the salesperson and how the buyer feels about them. These are macro and micro factors which can impact the decision one way or another. The answer is to see more people. In that way you can have a better chance of meeting a buyer for whom all the stars align and they can say “yes”. At the same time, you need to keep working on getting better, at showing more value....
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    14 mins
  • What The Pro Public Speakers Do

    What The Pro Public Speakers Do
    May 19 2024
    When you see someone do a very good presentation, your faith in public speaking humanity is restored. There are so many poor examples of people killing their personal and professional brands with poor public speaking skills, it is refreshing to see talks done well. It is not that hard really, if you know what you are doing and if you rehearse and practice. This is where the majority of lousy, boring and uninspiring speakers trip up. They don’t rehearse or practice. Instead, they just unload on their poor unsuspecting audience. Here is a pro hint. Never practice on your audience! The global CEO of a major pharma company jetted into town recently and spoke at a chamber of commerce event. The presentation was well structured and flowed in a way that was easy to follow. The slides were professional and clear. He spoke fluently, wasn’t reading from any script and instead was talking about the key points up on screen. When we got to Q&A, he repeated the question, so that everyone could hear it and then answered it. He did that while addressing the entire audience, rather than just speaking to the inquirer. When he did not have the information referred to in a question, he admitted it straight up, without trying to fudge it. This is not an admission of weakness, rather it builds trust and credibility. I doubt he did any rehearsal for that audience, because it was a stump speech he has given so many times he was entirely comfortable with the content. Could he have done better? Yes, he could have added more stories into the presentation. A few vignettes from the exciting world of white lab coats, where they were developing new medicines to save humanity, would have been good. He could have delivered it with a bit more passion. It was professional, but it came across as a stump speech. He was supremely comfortable delivering it and that is one issue we have to be alert to. When we are too comfortable, we can sometimes slip ourselves into cruise control mode. We should keep upping the ante each occasion, to try and see how much further we can push ourselves as presenters. Another function I attended was an industry awards event and the main VIP guest made some remarks before announcing the winners. Humour is very, very hard to get right. For every professional comedian we see on television, there are thousands waiting tables and trying to break into the industry. When you see humour done well by a public speaker, you are impressed. You need to have material that is funny for a start. Then you have to be able to deliver it so that people laugh. This sounds easy, but as professional comedians know, the timing of the delivery is key. So are the pauses and the weighting of certain key words. It has to be delivered fluently, so no ums and ahs, no hesitations, no mangling of words. Getting the facial expressions to match what is being said is also tricky. Our humorous VIP was delivering some lines that he had used a number of times before, so he knew his material worked. It is always good when big shots are self depreciating. We can more easily identify with them, when they don’t come across as taking themselves too seriously. “I am good and I know it”, doesn't work so well with the rest of us. How do you become humorous as a speaker? Where do we acquire our humorous material? We steal it. Our speaker had probably heard those jokes somewhere else and just topped and tailed them for this event. Very cleverly, he made them sound personal, as if these incidents had really happened to him. This is important in order to build a connection with the punters in the audience. So when you attend an event and you hear someone make a good joke or tell a humorous story, don't just laugh and reach for another Chardonnay, quickly write it down and later start using it yourself. The secret though is to practice that humorous telling on small audiences to test you have the delivery just right. The cadence is important and that takes practice. I would guess our speaker had told those jokes many times before. It is fresh for us, but for him, it was well within his range of capability. This is what comedians do. They introduce new material in small venues, filter out what doesn't work, and then they bring it to the big audience on the big stage with the best gags. We should do the same. Another place where we can find humor is in what we say that makes an audience laugh. When I was returning to Japan in nineteen ninety two as a diplomat and as a trade commissioner, I was called upon to do a lot of public speaking in Japanese. I began with constructing jokes in Japanese that I thought were humorous. This was a pretty bold step, because I had no track record in being funny in English, let alone in Japanese. These jokes of my own crafting all bombed completely. However, I would say something not meaning to be funny and the Japanese audience would laugh. I ...
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    14 mins
Management Economics
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