200: Why There Are Few Sale's Case Studies In Japan

<p>All of the sales text books tell us, use case studies with clients who have been successful, to sell the next client.  Case studies are great for gaining credibility with potential cients, so it all makes so much sense.  If only it was that easy to do in Japan. </p> <p> </p> <p>Getting client cooperation to create sale’s case studies in Japan is tough.  Japanese companies are very careful about how much information they let outside of the firm.  What can we do, to get around this problem?</p> <p> </p> <p>We can create two types of case studies – the verbal and the print variety.  The format can vary but if we think about how time poor everyone is today, clarity and brevity are virtues in both cases.  We should start with the outcome, the result.  Why begin at the end?  We want to keep people reading or listening, so we need to break through all of the competing distractions and grab their attention.  Extolling the wonderful and extensive outcomes of your solution gets them interested to see if the same pixie dust magic can be sprinkled on their enterprise.  We are also showing our credibility.  The outcome must be a relevant example that the potential buyer of your services or product can mentally extrapolate to themselves in order to have real meaning. </p> <p> </p> <p>After dangling the goodies in front of the client, we now talk about the issue we solved.  This is best delivered in the form of  a story.  Just going into the mechanics of the issue is boring and not likely to motivate the listener.  If we can describe the people involved and the pain the issue was causing, we can start to ignite the listener’s emotional connection with the story.  We can say things like, “The pressure from our client’s senior management had been intense.  From last spring the section manager Shimada san was so stressed by the pressure for delivering the results on time, that he was developing an ulcer in his stomach. He even started to take time off to go to hospital.  His whole team were worried because they felt they would