309: Pitching Preferred In The Japanese Sales Call

<p>In modern economies, asking the buyer questions to understand their needs would be considered the most basic of the basic skills of a salesperson. This isn’t happening as much as you would expect in Japan, the world’s third largest economy.  Most salespeople everywhere are untrained and are left to work it out for themselves.  Japan has what they call OJT – On The Job Training  - as the main teaching method.  In this busy boss life, that is now reduced down to taking the new salesperson with them on a couple of sales calls and then the salesperson is on their own.  If your boss is an ace salesperson, then this sounds reasonable.  If only that were the case.</p> <p>From our real world research across the classes we run reaching sales to Japanese employees and my own buyer experiences, it is obvious the skillset to ask the buyer questions hasn’t been well developed.  Pitching the features is the mainstream technique.  That lazy shotgun approach makes little sense though, so why aren’t Japanese salespeople asking the buyer questions, to be able to zero in on their needs?</p> <p>Here are six reasons why Japanese salespeople prefer to pitch.</p> <ol> <li>The buyer is not King in Japan, but God.</li> </ol> <p>God doesn’t tolerate pesky salespeople asking questions, so the pitch seems safer.  In Japan, relatively low ranking people in very large companies, are treated as superior by the Presidents of much smaller firms.  Social hierarchy is very defined here by both the size of the company and the rank of the individual.  That is why business cards are so predominant – you need to work out the stranger’s rank to know how to deal with them. The buyer always outranks the seller.  The salesperson’s role is to pitch their offer. The buyer’s role is to shred it in order to eliminate all risk.  No questions brooked by God in the sale.  Therefore salespeople are in no social position to be asking anything of the buyer God.</p> <ol start="2"> <li>Don’t embarrass the buyer</li> </ol> <p>There is the fear that the salesperson