Episodes

  • How To Deal With Major Misperceptions Buyers Have About Your Company

    How To Deal With Major Misperceptions Buyers Have About Your Company
    Feb 18 2025
    A stranger contacts you out of the blue or you meet them fleetingly at an event and they call you afterwards. They are a salesperson and they want to sell you something. Our typical reaction is one of caution. Why is that? We have all become addicted to technology which has sped everything in business up to warp speed, but somehow we are all perennially time poor. We don’t want to be distracted from our tasks or waste our time listening to what someone else wants. We are also not sure if we can trust this salesperson. Why would that be? Maybe we were duped or heard of someone we know being duped by a “salesperson” in the past, so we are permanently suspicious of anyone we meet in sales. This is not a great start is it. We have to deal with all the baggage that our buyers have accumulated over the years. Japan is a brutally vicious sales environment. We are all in a street fight with our competitors and like in a physical street fight, there are no rules and little mercy shown. Rivals will lie, disparage, spread false rumours, make nasty insinuations about us and our company. “They are having financial trouble and won’t be around much longer”, “all I ever hear are complaints about their bad after sales service”, “their representative keeps getting fired from companies, so he won’t be around for long”, etc. “But Greg, Japan is such an honest country, would rivals lie so brazenly?”, you might be thinking. Yes, some of them will do so without any shame or guilt. I have heard these wild stories myself, shared by buyers, so from my own experiencE I know this happens. How do we start the sales call in Japan? We chit chat a little, then we get into the sales discussion. If we don’t know what we are doing, we are launching straight into our pitch about our wonderful widget. If this is you, please stop doing that. Rather we should be asking questions to completely understand the needs of the client. We can do this through just asking for permission to ask questions and then going for it. Another way we can do it is to propose an agenda for the meeting. This provides the same content, but it is a more structured approach. Japanese buyers love to be given the agenda to look at, because they love data and the more the merrier. The questions we are going to ask about needs are all there of course, but we add one more. We ask, “what are your impressions of our company?”. Why would we do that, why not just blast off into the nitty gritty detail of the wonders of the widget? Remember we are either a total stranger coming in off the street or a fleeting acquaintance from an event. If I visited your home and sat down and said, “tell me all about the problems inside your family?”, I don’t think you would want to share your dirty laundry with someone you hardly know. Company representatives feel the same about sharing the dirty laundry of their firm. If our rivals have been stabbing us in the back or if the client has some incorrect information about our company, we need to get that out early and deal with it. In our case, as an expert soft skills training company, our history of over 108 years can be a double edged sword. It means we have stood the test of time and yet, for some buyers they may think we are old fashioned and not current enough for the modern market. Chit chat is pretty thin gruel to establish trust with, so we need to work on establishing the credibility of our company. Rather than random selection in the chit chat content about what trust buttons to push, we ask this impressions question. This allows us to zoom right into the core concerns and deal with them. Now when they give me their concern, I don’t immediately answer it. I cushion it instead. That is, I put up a neutral statement, that neither inflames nor tries to argue with their comment. This neutral cushion buys my brain some thinking time about what I am going to say and how I am going to say it. Rather than giving the first answer that suddenly pops into my head, I can give a more considered answer. I could say, “It is important to consider perspectives on the brand”. Those three or four seconds are enough to drill down to a more polished answer. I would then say, “The balance to our longevity is that we are a global organisation. That means that every second of the day clients, somewhere around the world, are asking us to address their most pressing problems. In this way, dealing with client demands always keeps us fresh and current in the market”. Are you ready with your answers for some curly questions your client may have for you? More importantly, are you trying to flush out these secret resisters, before you try to introduce your solution? Let’s not assume we are on a level playing field here. Accept that for whatever reason, there may be some hidden obstacles to trusting us and so let’s get ...
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    11 mins
  • Do You Have An End To End Sales Process

    Do You Have An End To End Sales Process
    Feb 11 2025

    “I like talking with people, so I want to be in sales” is a terrifying conversation to have with one of your staff. They are not doing so well in their current role, so they imagine they will just glide across to sales to have an easier time of it. They may try and do it internally as a switch of roles or they may quit their current job and go and try to get a sales job somewhere else. Given the shortage of salespeople in Japan at the moment and from now on ad nauseum, there is a strong chance they will be picked up by a competitor or another company quite easily.

    They are partially correct. Yes, it helps if you like people as a salesperson. Also, having good communication skill is a definite requirement. Talking to someone and persuading them to hand over their hard earned cash is a different equation. What do we talk about, how do we talk about it, when should we be silent, when should we speak up? These are important questions about which they are ignorant.

    When I hear people say they like “talking to people” that sets off an alarm in my head. One of the biggest issues with salespeople is that they talk too much. I am guilty of it too. I am passionate about helping people to grow their businesses and their careers, so I bring a lot of belief and energy to the conversation. That is all good, but it is also dangerous. If I am doing all the talking, I maintain possession of what I already know but I don’t gain any additional knowledge of the client and their problem.

    Sometimes, I catch myself and realise the only noise in the room is me talking, so I should ask the client a question, shut up and get them talking instead. I want them to tell me about their current situation and where they want to be. In Japan, you can’t do that. Clients are passively expecting your pitch, so they can destroy it and assure themselves this is a low risk transaction they are considering entering into. So, the first thing out of our mouths here has to be a question seeking permission to ask questions. People who like talking will have no problem with this traditional pitch approach. In fact they will probably be happy, to get straight into the pitch.

    Fine all around except for one small thing. What are you pitching to the client? How do you know what solutions from your line-up will best match the client’s need? What normally happens is the salesperson blunders on, talking about things which are irrelevant to the client. They completely squander their client facing time and leave the meeting with nothing. This is not good.

    Get permission first, then ask those first two questions – where are you now and where do you want to be? We are trying to gauge urgency on the buyer’s part. If they think they can bridge this gap, then they will try and do it themselves and not involve any external parties. That means no business for us and we are wasting our time to continue sitting there chatting with them, no matter how much we enjoy a good chat.

    If they can’t do it by themselves, then we want to know why? There is no point going straight into solution mode at this point, talking, talking, talking. We should ask that exact question: “if you know where you want to be, why aren’t you there now?”. What a pearler of a question. In this answer lies our raison d’etre. Maybe we can’t do it for them. That is good to know, because we have to high tail it out of there and go and find someone we can help. No point hanging round for more chatting with a business dead end in front of you. Another other issue is talking past the deal. When the buyer agrees, only talk about the follow up and stop selling. People who like talking get themselves into trouble by saying too much and opening up a Pandora’s box of deal breakers.

    If we are doing our job, we are hardly talking at all during the meeting, except to ask a few clarifying questions. “Liking to talk with people” is a mirage, would-be salespeople see about what is involved in a professional sales life. This is their uniformed illusion about the job. Instead, I want to hear, “I like asking people questions”. In all my years in business though, I have never heard that lucid comment emerge as a precursor to a life in sales. If you want a career in sales, now you know what to say to a prospective boss to get them interested in hiring you.
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    11 mins
  • Fantasies, Folly, Mirages and Other Illusions of Salespeople

    Fantasies, Folly, Mirages and Other Illusions of Salespeople
    Feb 4 2025

    “I like talking with people, so I want to be in sales” is a terrifying conversation to have with one of your staff. They are not doing so well in their current role, so they imagine they will just glide across to sales to have an easier time of it. They may try and do it internally as a switch of roles or they may quit their current job and go and try to get a sales job somewhere else. Given the shortage of salespeople in Japan at the moment and from now on ad nauseum, there is a strong chance they will be picked up by a competitor or another company quite easily.

    They are partially correct. Yes, it helps if you like people as a salesperson. Also, having good communication skill is a definite requirement. Talking to someone and persuading them to hand over their hard earned cash is a different equation. What do we talk about, how do we talk about it, when should we be silent, when should we speak up? These are important questions about which they are ignorant.

    When I hear people say they like “talking to people” that sets off an alarm in my head. One of the biggest issues with salespeople is that they talk too much. I am guilty of it too. I am passionate about helping people to grow their businesses and their careers, so I bring a lot of belief and energy to the conversation. That is all good, but it is also dangerous. If I am doing all the talking, I maintain possession of what I already know but I don’t gain any additional knowledge of the client and their problem.

    Sometimes, I catch myself and realise the only noise in the room is me talking, so I should ask the client a question, shut up and get them talking instead. I want them to tell me about their current situation and where they want to be. In Japan, you can’t do that. Clients are passively expecting your pitch, so they can destroy it and assure themselves this is a low risk transaction they are considering entering into. So, the first thing out of our mouths here has to be a question seeking permission to ask questions. People who like talking will have no problem with this traditional pitch approach. In fact they will probably be happy, to get straight into the pitch.

    Fine all around except for one small thing. What are you pitching to the client? How do you know what solutions from your line-up will best match the client’s need? What normally happens is the salesperson blunders on, talking about things which are irrelevant to the client. They completely squander their client facing time and leave the meeting with nothing. This is not good.

    Get permission first, then ask those first two questions – where are you now and where do you want to be? We are trying to gauge urgency on the buyer’s part. If they think they can bridge this gap, then they will try and do it themselves and not involve any external parties. That means no business for us and we are wasting our time to continue sitting there chatting with them, no matter how much we enjoy a good chat.

    If they can’t do it by themselves, then we want to know why? There is no point going straight into solution mode at this point, talking, talking, talking. We should ask that exact question: “if you know where you want to be, why aren’t you there now?”. What a pearler of a question. In this answer lies our raison d’etre. Maybe we can’t do it for them. That is good to know, because we have to high tail it out of there and go and find someone we can help. No point hanging round for more chatting with a business dead end in front of you. Another other issue is talking past the deal. When the buyer agrees, only talk about the follow up and stop selling. People who like talking get themselves into trouble by saying too much and opening up a Pandora’s box of deal breakers.

    If we are doing our job, we are hardly talking at all during the meeting, except to ask a few clarifying questions. “Liking to talk with people” is a mirage, would-be salespeople see about what is involved in a professional sales life. This is their uniformed illusion about the job. Instead, I want to hear, “I like asking people questions”. In all my years in business though, I have never heard that lucid comment emerge as a precursor to a life in sales. If you want a career in sales, now you know what to say to a prospective boss to get them interested in hiring you.
    Show More Show Less
    12 mins
  • Sell With Passion In Japan

    Sell With Passion In Japan
    Jan 28 2025
    We often hear that people buy on emotion and justify with logic. The strange thing is where is this emotion coming from? Most Japanese salespeople speak in a very dry, grey, logical fashion expecting to convince the buyer to hand over their dough. I am a salesperson but as the President of my company, also a buyer of goods and services. I have been living in Japan this third time, continuously since 1992. In all of that time I am struggling to recall any Japanese salesperson who spoke with emotion about their offer. It is always low energy, low impact talking, talking, talking all the time. There are no questions and just a massive download of information delivered in a monotone delivery. As salespeople, our job is to join the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer. But it is also more than that. The buyer’s mental meandering won’t necessarily have the degree of passion we need for them to make a purchasing decision. So we have to influence the course of that internal conversation they are having. This is where our own passion comes in. I always thought Japanese people were unemotional before I moved to Japan the first time in 1979. The ones I had met in business in Australia were very reserved and quite self contained. They seemed very logical and detail oriented. After I moved here I realised I had the wrong information. Japanese people are very emotional in business. This is related closely to trust. Once they trust you, they have made an emotional investment to keep using you. No one likes to make a mistake or fail and the best way to avoid that is to deal with people you can trust. How do you know you can trust them? There is some track record of reliability there, that tells you the person or company you are dealing with is a known quantity that will act predictably and correctly every time. The problem with this approach though is that you will only ever be able to sell to existing accounts. What about gaining new customers? You have no track record and no predictability as yet. When you meet a new customer they are mentally sizing you up, asking themselves “can I trust you?”. Naturally a good way to overcome the lack of track record is to create one. Offer a sample order or something for free. This takes the risk out of the equation for the person you are dealing with. To get involved with a new supplier means they have to sell the idea to their boss, who has to sell it to their boss, on up the line. No one wants to take the blame if it all goes south. A free or small trial order is a great risk containment tactic and makes it easy for all the parties concerned to participate in the experiment. The other success ingredient is passion for your product or service. When the buyer feels that passion, it is contagious and they are more likely to give you a try to at least see if there is some value to continue working with you. When he was in his mid-twenties, my Japanese father-in-law started a business in Nagoya and needed to get clients. He targeted a particular company and every morning he would stand in front of the President’s house and bow as he was leaving by car for the office. After two weeks of this, the President sent one of his people to talk to him to see why he was there every day bowing when the President left for work. When he heard that my father-in-law wanted to supply his company with curtain products, he told him to see one of his subordinates in his office to discuss it. That company eventually became a huge buyer and established my father-in-law’s business. Was that a logical decision, just because some unknown character is hanging around your house everyday like a stalker? No it was an emotional decision. What my father-in-law was showing the President was his passion, belief, commitment, discipline, patience, seriousness, earnestness and guts. That is a pretty good line-up for a new supplier in order to be given a chance. We need to remember that buyers are wanting to know our level of belief in what we are selling. The way we express that is through our passion and commitment to the relationship and the product or service we supply. Is our demeanour showing enough passion, without it seeming fake or contrived? Do we have enough faith in what we are selling, that it naturally pours out of the pores of our skin? Are we painting strong enough word pictures to get the buyer emotionally involved in a future involving what we sell? Audit your own levels of passion when you are in front of the buyer. Do you sound sold on your own offer? Do you sound committed to go the extra mile? Do you sound confident and assured, showing no hesitation? Are you honest about what is possible and what is not possible? Always understand that buyers, whether for themselves or for the company, buy on emotion and justify it with logic. Make sure you can supply that emotional requirement as ...
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    13 mins
  • Sales Service Debacles Are The Boss's Fault

    Sales Service Debacles Are The Boss's Fault
    Jan 21 2025

    Generally speaking, we mainly have failures of follow up in B2B sales. The conduct of the sale’s meeting is normally done professionally. Perhaps the salesperson could have asked better questions or presented the application of the benefits of the solution better. Maybe they could have dealt more professionally with objections or closed the deal more effectively. In B2C though, the troubles start from the point of contact. Getting this wrong means no meeting, let alone no sale.

    I blame the managers for these issues. If they were doing their job properly, then there wouldn’t be these customer facing problems. We are salespeople and we are also buyers. We go shopping, we eat out, we buy lots of stuff in the face to face environment. Maybe not as much as before, because of Covid-19, but we still we do engage in some B2C activities. When the whole hospitality industry is on its knees, you expect that those survivors still operating, are really maximising their opportunities to build their clientele.

    Imagine my surprise when I called a restaurant in Midtown for a lunchtime booking and bumped into some idiocy that flies in the face of the current reality. It was around 11.31am and I was calling to make a booking for a 12.00 luncheon. The staff member who answered the phone told me that all bookings for lunch close at 11.30am. I could just show up at 12.00 and take my chances with the rest of the punters. It is 11.31am when we are having this conversation. I asked him does that mean I should book at another restaurant instead of his. There are tons of restaurants in Midtown by the way. Irony and sarcasm aren’t really features of the Japanese language, so my obtuse point went straight over his head.

    He had been told that bookings for lunch close at 11.30am and that was that. The idea that we are in the middle of a pandemic and that many enterprises in his industry are closing for lack of business, would warrant additional flexibility wasn’t one that had ever crossed his mind. He couldn’t connect the dots and realise that what his job depends on are customers. It was not clear to him that every restaurant wants to build new clients and to boost the spending of their regular clients. He is just an employee, so building the business isn’t part of his work remit.

    Well it should be. He could have been focused on grabbing my booking, guaranteeing two covers at lunch, rather than relying on providence to supply walk-ins off the street. He could have made me feel special by telling me that although 11.30am is the cut off point, he would take the booking anyway and really looked forward to meeting me at 12.00, “Ask for Taro and I will take care of you”, he could have said. How would I have felt? Would I have become more likely to go back again in the future? Could I become a valued customer? The answers are obvious to me but the concept was not in his mind.

    By way of contrast, I like Elios in Hanzomon, which is across town for me. I have been going there with clients and with my family, since 2001 when I came back to Tokyo from Osaka. What is my lifetime value as a customer? Elio certainly knows this equation and so do his staff. That is one of the reasons why I keep coming back.

    So I was wondering what is the difference and the reasons are obvious. The leadership outlook and work culture of the restaurants are different. The bosses determine the way the staff think about the business and the customers. So, the natural extension of this reflection is to move to self reflection. Are my staff flexible when dealing with our clients? Are they just following the rule book and not using their brains? Do they feel trusted enough to take responsibility to fix an issue for a client or are they ninjas, hiding behind the rules. As the boss, you cannot be in every client conversation, so you have to delegate client care to your team. Let’s all take another look at the culture we have created. Are we allowing individual decision making based around a common understanding of how we think about our clients?

    One of the things we quickly learn as leaders is that telling people something once, almost guarantees no one will remember it. It becomes annoying to have to keep repeating the same things over and over, but you find you have to do it. So, it always a good practice to remind everyone about how we think about serving the client. Explain where this aligns with the value system, the vision and the mission of the enterprise. There has to be a symbiotic relationship between our teams and the clients. The boss determines how that plays out at every micro-interaction, every day.
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    11 mins
  • Group Selling Is Not For The Faint Hearted

    Group Selling Is Not For The Faint Hearted
    Jan 14 2025
    Most of the time in Japan, I attend client meetings alone. This is not how the Japanese do it. The President going to a meeting alone, without some staff in attendance is rather rare. Presidents have degrees of prestige and one of the indicators is how many flunkies they have in attendance. My ego is big enough already to have to worry about people carrying my bag around for me. The Japanese client meeting can often be quite an affair though with many people seated around the room, waiting to hear what you have to say. Invariably, you have no idea who is turning up on their side, who they are or what they do. The key word there is “waiting”. They expect this to be a presentation from me to them, with zero interaction, no questions and then they go away and thrash it out internally on what they want to do next. The punters in the room are the earpieces of their respective sections, there to record and then report what was said and who said it. There will usually be one or two designated interlocuters on their side who will engage with the seller to facilitate the meeting. That facilitation is usually to insist we give them a presentation on our offer, done passively, without any insight into what they need. You can see the problem immediately. We have many solutions, so which one is the best for them? To know this we need to be asking questions. The buyer side don’t quite see it that way and we can have a tense standoff. We ask seller style consultative questions. No one answers them from the buyer side and the silence hangs heavy in the air, trying to strangle the seller. If we hang tough and let that silence hang around for a long time, eventually someone on the buyer side will say “give us your pitch”. When we hear this we know things are not going well. Being on our own is not a big deal, because usually we can make decisions on our own. We don’t need to work the idea through the system to get some type of convocation to agree to it. What is not good though, is to squander our time before the meeting. We should be pumping whoever is organising the meeting logistics, for information ahead of time on who will be attending. Who are they, what do they do, what rank are they, etc., are key things we want to know before we turn up. We shouldn’t presume there will only be a couple of people we already know in the meeting, if it is an important stage or the first meeting. If this doesn’t happen, then after the initial exchange of business cards with the big boss, quickly dart around the room and exchange cards with everyone else there. This way you can arrange the cards on the table in front of you, according to where they are sitting, to see who is who and you can check their rank and area of responsibility. These are generalisations, but the CEO will be thinking strategy going forward, the CFO will be thinking protecting cash flow, the technical people will be thinking fit for purpose and the users will be thinking ease of application of the solution. Knowing roughly what the audience interests are is only a start. To avoid giving a pitch into the void of not knowing what they want, you need to set up permission to ask questions. They are expecting you to tell them about what your company does and what you can do for them. Here is an example of how this could go. “Dale Carnegie Training has been around for 109 years world wide and nearly 60 years here in Japan. We are soft skills training experts covering sales, leadership, communication and presenting. We have had a lot of success in Japan helping our clients to improve their effectiveness and grow their market share. Maybe we could do the same for you, I am not sure. In order for me to know if that is possible or not and to know which part of our line up best suits your internal needs, would you mind if I asked a few simple questions. The answers will guide me on what I should present to you regarding which parts of our line-up will be the best match for your business?”. Once you have permission to ask questions, start with the people tasked with facilitating the meeting. If they need more detail to answer your questions, they will involve some of the other experts in the room. We won’t get a lot of time to do this, as everyone is sitting there expecting a pitch which they can then flagellate within an inch of its life, by asking mean and nasty questions. They won’t be denied their Colosseum moment of throwing you to the lions for too long. You will at least get enough information to know what to present and how to present it. You won’t get an answer at that meeting on whether there is any interest or not so don’t push it. They need to harmonise opinions on their approach and they will do this after the meeting. Someone will be tasked with getting all of the feedback and bringing this to the most senior person. Japan teaches you many things, ...
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    11 mins
  • Sell With Passion

    Sell With Passion
    Jan 7 2025
    We often hear that people buy on emotion and justify with logic. The strange thing is where is this emotion coming from? Most Japanese salespeople speak in a very dry, grey, logical fashion expecting to convince the buyer to hand over their dough. I am a salesperson but as the President of my company, also a buyer of goods and services. I have been living in Japan this third time, continuously since 1992. In all of that time I am struggling to recall any Japanese salesperson who spoke with emotion about their offer. It is always low energy, low impact talking, talking, talking all the time. There are no questions and just a massive download of information delivered in a monotone delivery. As salespeople, our job is to join the conversation going on in the mind of the buyer. But it is also more than that. The buyer’s mental meandering won’t necessarily have the degree of passion we need for them to make a purchasing decision. So we have to influence the course of that internal conversation they are having. This is where our own passion comes in. I always thought Japanese people were unemotional before I moved to Japan the first time in 1979. The ones I had met in business in Australia were very reserved and quite self contained. They seemed very logical and detail oriented. After I moved here I realised I had the wrong information. Japanese people are very emotional in business. This is related closely to trust. Once they trust you, they have made an emotional investment to keep using you. No one likes to make a mistake or fail and the best way to avoid that is to deal with people you can trust. How do you know you can trust them? There is some track record of reliability there, that tells you the person or company you are dealing with is a known quantity that will act predictably and correctly every time. The problem with this approach though is that you will only ever be able to sell to existing accounts. What about gaining new customers? You have no track record and no predictability as yet. When you meet a new customer they are mentally sizing you up, asking themselves “can I trust you?”. Naturally a good way to overcome the lack of track record is to create one. Offer a sample order or something for free. This takes the risk out of the equation for the person you are dealing with. To get involved with a new supplier means they have to sell the idea to their boss, who has to sell it to their boss, on up the line. No one wants to take the blame if it all goes south. A free or small trial order is a great risk containment tactic and makes it easy for all the parties concerned to participate in the experiment. The other success ingredient is passion for your product or service. When the buyer feels that passion, it is contagious and they are more likely to give you a try to at least see if there is some value to continue working with you. When he was in his mid-twenties, my Japanese father-in-law started a business in Nagoya and needed to get clients. He targeted a particular company and every morning he would stand in front of the President’s house and bow as he was leaving by car for the office. After two weeks of this, the President sent one of his people to talk to him to see why he was there every day bowing when the President left for work. When he heard that my father-in-law wanted to supply his company with curtain products, he told him to see one of his subordinates in his office to discuss it. That company eventually became a huge buyer and established my father-in-law’s business. Was that a logical decision, just because some unknown character is hanging around your house everyday like a stalker? No it was an emotional decision. What my father-in-law was showing the President was his passion, belief, commitment, discipline, patience, seriousness, earnestness and guts. That is a pretty good line-up for a new supplier in order to be given a chance. We need to remember that buyers are wanting to know our level of belief in what we are selling. The way we express that is through our passion and commitment to the relationship and the product or service we supply. Is our demeanour showing enough passion, without it seeming fake or contrived? Do we have enough faith in what we are selling, that it naturally pours out of the pores of our skin? Are we painting strong enough word pictures to get the buyer emotionally involved in a future involving what we sell? Audit your own levels of passion when you are in front of the buyer. Do you sound sold on your own offer? Do you sound committed to go the extra mile? Do you sound confident and assured, showing no hesitation? Are you honest about what is possible and what is not possible? Always understand that buyers, whether for themselves or for the company, buy on emotion and justify it with logic. Make sure you can supply that emotional requirement as ...
    Show More Show Less
    13 mins
  • How To Handle “We Are Happy With Our Current Supplier” Pushback

    How To Handle “We Are Happy With Our Current Supplier” Pushback
    Dec 24 2024
    Japan loves the Devil they know over the Angel they don’t know. Change here is hard to achieve in any field, because of the inbuilt fear of mistakes and failure. This country takes risk aversion to the highest heights in business. There are no rewards for salaried employees to take risk. There are massive career downsides though, if things go wrong, due to an initiative they introduced. Personal accountability is not very popular here. The decision-making system here is also a nightmare in this regard. Who is the decision-maker? Probably no single person. The meeting we attend may have one to three people present in the room, but they are the tip of the iceberg. An iceberg we will never get to meet by the way. Behind the walls of the office, sit their other colleagues who will have to sign off and agree on the change. The checks and balances of Japanese organisations guarantee a few things. One is it makes for good communication internally. No one faces an unpleasant surprise. I have found most Japanese, as individuals, are not good at dealing with the unexpected. The sudden emergence of something that had not been previously factored in, has these staff rushing for emergency exits in fear. The other thing this system supplies is the opportunity for all the vested interests to have their say. Fast action is not viewed as a plus. Reaching a consensus is very important in Japan and people expect to have input into any new arrangements. The piece of paper suggesting the change physically moves around the section head’s desks and each one applies their hanko or stamp to the document, indicating they are okay with the change. Nothing will happen until all of those stamps are there. Turning up and finding the buying team are already quite happy with their current supplier, means a lot of work has to be done internally by the people we are meeting, to make a change away from the known and established order. Who wants more work? No one in Japan, that is for sure. When you are dealing with small to middle size firms the supplier arrangements can be even trickier. They often have a strong owner running the show. They make a lot of the key decisions and then everyone else does the execution of the decision. You may not get to meet with the dictator directly. In many cases, the current supplier company was supplying their grandfather who started the business. Many a good time was had on the golf course, being entertained in the Ginza by geisha and visiting expensive cabaret clubs together in the good old days. Gifts flowed thick and fast as well, to cement the relationship. The current generation of the heads of the respective businesses may have been at school together, have marriage links between their two families or belong to special clubs as members. I see these connections at my very exclusive Rotary Club here in Tokyo. These are successful families who move in the same circles. The third generation of family business heads have deep links together built up over the last generations. Why would they change their trusted supplier to you? Be it a big corporate or a smaller concern, there are a lot of barriers to change in supplier relationships in Japan. Frankly, we have few levers at our disposal as a result. The one thing that companies fear in common though is getting left behind by their competitors. The globalisation of business has meant these harmonious relationships between supplier and buyer are getting shaken up. Just explaining the details, benefits, quality and pricing advantage of the solution you provide are not enough. We need to lob some dynamite into their current cozy little supplier arrangements, by bringing up their exposure to being blindsided by a competitor. We need to remind them that the best solution will win in the market or at least reduce their market share. We need to point out that in a competitive industry, no one cares about the depth of the existing relationships, because they are fully focused on their survival. Rivals will make key supplier changes and these will trigger changes across the industry, as everyone else has to adjust accordingly. By getting ahead of the curve, they can win time to adjust and win market share for themselves, vis-à-vis their rivals. Price and quality differentials only become meaningful in this light in the current market. Just talking about price or quality in isolation won’t move the buyers to make any changes. The effort to make new or change supplier arrangements needs a strong reason in Japan or else everyone just defaults to a “do nothing” stance. This requires we come armed with examples of where a change in supplier arrangements wiped certain companies out. The best option is relating changes in their industry, but even if we don’t have that, we need to show evidence of how dangerous it can be to avoid change. The drivers of change ...
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    17 mins