Japan is merciless with salespeople.  When you call the client’s company everyone is doing their absolute best to make sure you don’t get to talk to the boss.  They won’t tell you their name, they don’t offer to take a message for you, the whole vibe is “get lost”.  If you don’t know the precise name of the person you want to speak with, then the wall of steel descends very quickly.  They will question you as to why you want to speak to the person in charge, tell you that the person will call you back.  They never will.   No one wants to take any responsibility in ..read more

I am sitting there with a crowd of people attending a presentation on blockchain technology.  Some are very technical people active in the crypto currency area, some run their own tech businesses.  Our presenter has amazing experience in this area, having worked for some very big names in the industry.  He also has his own company to promote as well as himself as a leader in this field.  He has some recommendations for us based on where he sees the industry moving over the next couple of years. The coverage of his subject was logical and easy to follow.  It was clear h ..read more

Focus is under constant attack.  The speed of business makes longer term planning a dubious endeavor.  Projecting 5 years forward sounds reasonable.  That is until you go back 5 years and look at all the changes that have taken place through technology, societal attitudinal changes, business realities and logistics.  The leader is supposed to be defining the way forward for the team.  The vision of the future is the guiding light on the hill toward which the troops are pointed.  The relevancy of that vision is constantly being challenged by the market and by clien ..read more

Because the vast majority of people in sales have no idea what they are doing, they are making it up as they go along.  Wouldn’t it be better to have a roadmap to progress the making of a sale?  This roadmap will keep us on track and not allow the buyer to take us off on a tangent that leads to nowhere. Foundering around with no central direction wastes a lot of key buyer facing time and we don’t want to do that.  We can’t expect unlimited access because of their busy schedules, so once we are in front of them we have to get all of the discovery process done in usually around an ..read more

At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has been completed.  How about you? When people are filing out of the venue, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if you were able to eavesdrop on their conversation?  Being clear is always a favourite and another high ranking popular desire is to be more inspiring. Now “inspiring” can be defined in many ways, but for the purposes of giving presentations, we can think ..read more

For decades I drove myself hard, based on a fundamental fallacy. Fear of a future of living in a cardboard box haunted me. I pushed hard so that cardboard box and I would never become well acquainted. You see homeless people in Japan and other countries living that way and it is a reality for them, that they never chose. It happened to them anyway. The odd part was that this was a deep seated fear within me, that I wasn't really all that conscious of. It was sort of sitting there in the background, in the inner sanctums of my mind. My father had been a big smoker (died of lung cancer at 51), b ..read more

Knowledge of the specifications, functionality, inner workings are all fine and dandy but not enough anymore.  Increasingly technically specialised people are being asked to deal with people other than their normal counterparts.  Once upon a time, the engineers spoke with other engineers on the buyer side and that was about it.  A nerdy lovefest on the specs, so to speak. Today there are broader spectrum buying teams.  These “civilians” are often the key decision-makers and are not technical in the traditional sense.  This means the technical person has to be able to c ..read more

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 l ..read more

 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 askin ..read more

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 pract ..read more