253: Japan Doesn't Change In Sales

THE Sales Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

I listen to a lot of sales gurus because I am a permanent student. I have noticed there is a consistent theme which comes up. Because being a guru is quite competitive, they have to draw a line between themselves and the rest. The way they do this is to make the point that “sales has changed”. They then go through introducing their version of the new sales methods for the new era. I was reflecting on this and thinking about sales in Japan. SPIN Selling, Consultative Selling, Challenger Selling etc., reflect waves of change in the West. I haven’t seen any waves of change much in Japan. So what is going on here?

The Japan model reflects some specialties in selling here. The core difference with the West is the decision making system in Japan. There are tons of books in English on “overcoming objections” and the “100 closes you need to succeed” type of thing. Generally they come across as quite aggressive and they try to force the buyer into buying. Tricky closing tactics won’t work here in Japan for the vast majority of sales. Of course, if the person we are talking to is the owner of the business, then “yes” they can make the buying decision. More likely we are talking to a salaried employee of the organisation. They are not the sole decision maker in most cases and in fact are more like an influencer.

Wrangling them to the ground and extracting a “yes” out of them just won’t happen. There are bound to be a number of Division or Section Heads in the company, who need to give their agreement. This is a bottom up system. It is frustrating to meet the President and think you have the golden entry point to a buying decision, only to find out that is not the case. The President will push the proposal down the ranks to the person at the bottom, whose job is to do the due diligence on you and your offer.

That person will consult with all of those leaders whose sections will be impacted by the buying decision and whom we will never meet and may never even know they exist. Western sales tends to be hand to hand, one on one combat between buyer and seller. In Japan it is you against a whole team of invisible ‘ninja” decision makers.

We have similar phenomenon in the West too. Sometimes we realise the person we are talking to has to become our champion inside the buying organization. In this case we can’t wait for the objections to arise from invisible stakeholders. We need to be proactive with our champion and help them with answers for all of the possible hesitations and objections which may come up. This is the case almost every time in Japan.

The other speciality here is that this is the Land Of The Pitch. When I first started selling in Japan, I was trying my best consultative sales methodology on buyers and getting nowhere. They wanted my pitch and just ignored my best efforts to ask them questions about pain points, needs, future desired situations, barriers, payouts, current situations etc. I was quite shocked. What I didn’t realise at that time was that before me had swept in an entire army of salespeople talking features and pricing. I don’t know if the salespeople trained the buyers to expect a pitch or whether it was the other way around, but that is where we are still, even in 2021.

Fundamentally, don’t you think pitching your features at a buyer is just crazy? If you don’t know the buyer’s needs, how on earth do you know which features will be the most relevant, even ignoring the importance of describing benefits, applied benefits and evidence, for the moment. Dale Carnegie introduced the first ever public sales training back in 1939. Back then it was all about asking questions to understand buyer needs. Here we are 82 years later in Japan and most salespeople are still giving the pitch and asking zero questions.

All of these Western guru variations on variations and fine tuning the semantics of selling have just swept by Japan, which is still back in the dark ages of pitching. It doesn't have to be like that. Here is what we need to do to update the sales process in Japan: ask permission to ask questions; ask the questions; decide what is the best solution; present that solution; deal with any hesitations or objections and then ask for the order. If your salespeople are not doing this, then you have to ask the question “why?”. Also when are we going to do something about bringing Japan into this century? What are you doing about it?