174 Selling Through Others In Japan

<p>Selling Through Others In Japan</p> <p> </p> <p>We may think we are selling directly to the buyer in japan but often we are not actually dong that.  Selling through distributors is obviously a case where we sell through others. However when the buyers are sitting in front of you, you can easily delude yourself that you are going direct.  No true in most cases.  Yes, if you are dealing with a “one man shacho”, the founder/owner dictator, all powerful President, then it may be true.  They make the decisions and everyone snaps into line and carries out the boss’s wishes.  In reality, these types of cases are very few and far between.  In our case, as a training company, we still find that the HR department sabotages the Presidents wishes and despite the orders from above, they never proceed with the training.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sitting in the meeting room with the buyers gets us excited because we think we have the chance of getting an agreement to buy.  We go through the sales cycle of building rapport, gaining trust, getting permission to ask question, asking about their needs, presenting the solution, dealing with hesitations and objections and then closing the deal.  They tell us they will think about it and get back to us.</p> <p> </p> <p>The reason they say this in the West is to get rid of you.  American sales trainers have a whole suite of aggressive tactics for dealing with this push back.  When I listen to their stuff I am always thinking “there is no way that will fly in Japan”.  In Japan, yes, sometimes it will be a no loss of face mechanism to get rid of you, but more often the case is, that they can’t make the decision by themselves.  There are people sitting unseen a few meters from you on the other side of that meeting room, who are division or section heads, who need to be consulted.  The job of the people sitting in front of you is to collect information.  They then share that with other people important to the decision making process, who we salespeople will never meet.</p> <p> </p> <p>When they s