Episode #386: Controlling Our Hour For The Sales Meeting In Japan

Usually in Japan, we are granted an audience with the buyer for an hour for the meeting. Sometimes with Western buyers, they want to restrict the time, so we only have thirty minutes, which makes things very difficult. We also know that if we can capture their interest, that thirty minutes can magically become much longer.

We also know that there will be more than one meeting, so we don’t have to try to squeeze everything into that initial conversation. One point though – in the case of a second meeting - always have your diary there and set it while you are with them in the same room. Don’t leave it or you will get crushed in the competition for their time by other competing forces.

That first hour should be concentrated on building rapport and trust with the buyer at the very start. We need to establish our credentials and our trustworthiness. In most cases, they don’t know us at all and we turn up expecting them to share their deepest, darkest corporate secrets with a stranger. Remember your parents told you, ”don’t talk to strangers”.

This first meeting requires good communication skills, centered around our choice of the content and the way we express it. Stumbling, bumbling speech patterns are automatically assumed to show we are an incoherent idiot, unprofessional, unreliable and best stayed away from.

Japanese buyers are trained to hear our pitch and then completely destroy it, as a defence mechanism against making a bad decision. We don’t want that. Instead, we need to get their permission to ask questions during that first meeting, so that we can avoid pitching into the void. If we don’t know what they need, how on earth do we know what to pitch? If they want A and we keep talking about B, we will not get the business. We have to know they are interested in A and not B. To find out what they want, we use a simple four-part structure:
I. who we are
2. what we do
3. who we have done it for and what happened
4. suggest we could possibly do it for them too

I say “possibly” because we still don’t have enough information to know for sure. We are better to say we don’t know if we are a match and make the point that, “if I can ask some questions,I will have a better idea if we can help or not”.

The temptation in Western sales techniques is to start enthusing about what a great help we can be and how we can do everything regardless of what they need. We are an omnidirectional wunderkind who can magically solve all of their corporate ills, because we are so awesome. This won’t work in Japan because it comes across as boasting, sounds like a lot of salesperson hot air and we should be avoided.

Once we get permission to ask questions, we can start with either where they are now or where they want to be. It doesn’t matter where we start, but we need to know the answer to both. We need this so that we can gauge the distance between the two points. A client who is really close to solving their problem internally believes they don’t need us, because they can do it themselves. We need to disabuse them of that idea if we can. Sometimes we can’t do that. In that event, we have to pack up our stuff up, get out of there and find someone we can help.

Once we know where they want to be, we need to find out what is preventing them from getting there. Hopefully, the reason we uncover will help us to position ourselves as the solution they cannot generate internally. The issue with knowing the blocker is that it is not enough. Most deals never happen because the buyer doesn’t have enough urgency attached to benefiting from the solution. If we just respond by saying we have the solution, that won’t be enough.


We need to explore the timing and the importance of speed. If we don’t do that, we will be left in limbo waiting for the buyer to get around to taking action. This is where pointing out the opportunity cost of no action is important, because clients assume no action has no cost. We can’t leave them thinking like that.
We will need to dig deep with the questions to understand their requirements, motivations, fears and concerns in this first meeting. In the next meeting, we will explain how our solution will take care of what they want. This is where we get into the nitty-gritty details of the solution and walk them though how it will unveil inside their company.

Just talking about the mechanics is not enough, because we need to connect the details of the solution to the benefits they will enjoy. That is also not enough because we need to describe what that benefit will look like inside their organisation. Buyers are sceptical of salespeople, so we need to lay out the proof of where our solution has worked elsewhere and preferably for a client very similar to them.

Finally, we ask them a question which is very mild but deadly, by saying, “how does that sound so far?” At this point, we don’t add or explain or dilute the tension we have created with that question. We just sit there with our mouth shut and listen for the answer. If they have an objection to our solution, we don’t jump in to defend it. We just ask sweetly, “why do you say that?” Again we shut up and hear them justify their statement. Once we have enough information from their answer, we will know how to deal with the pushback.

Maybe we can overcome that objection or maybe we cannot, but this is the process which works best. If we can answer it, we ask again “how does that sound?”, and wait to see if we have a deal or not. All of this closing in Japan is very soft and low key. Hard sell is impossible here, so don’t even bother going there.