Welcome to the homepage of Yogendra Puranik 'Yogi' from Japan. This site has multiple pages.
Written by Yogi (Yogendra Puranik), PhD
When I worked in sales for a global IT company in Japan, I did many of the things that a salesperson is normally expected to do. I generated leads, contacted prospective customers, maintained relationships, sent greetings, arranged meetings, made presentations, and responded to requests for proposals. We had technology, expertise, and global experience behind us. Yet getting from a good meeting to an actual contract was remarkably difficult.
Looking back, one question becomes important: How much of our time with the customer was spent explaining ourselves, and how much was spent truly understanding the customer? Foreign companies entering Japan are often eager to establish credibility. The first presentation therefore contains the company history, global locations, employee numbers, major customers, awards, technology platforms, delivery capabilities, and twenty slides explaining the product. By the time the salesperson finally asks about the customer's problem, forty minutes of a sixty-minute meeting may already be over.
The salesperson believes, “I need to convince them that we are capable.” The customer may be thinking, “But do they understand us?”
This distinction matters in any market, but it becomes particularly important in Japan. Japanese customers may not immediately challenge your assumptions or interrupt your presentation to tell you that you are solving the wrong problem. They may politely listen until the end, thank you for the information, and say that they will consider it. You leave satisfied that you delivered the entire presentation. The customer leaves without having told you what would actually make them buy.
The solution sounds almost too simple: stop selling for a while and start listening. But genuine discovery is much more than asking, “What are your challenges?” It requires research before the meeting, careful questions during it, attention to what is not being said, and the discipline to redesign your proposal around the customer's reality rather than around your sales brochure.
Listening starts before the meeting. One of the quickest ways to weaken credibility with a Japanese customer is to ask questions whose answers could easily have been found on the company's website. “What does your company manufacture?” “How many locations do you have?” “Which countries do you operate in?” These may be legitimate questions in a broader discussion, but arriving without basic knowledge signals that the meeting is more important to the seller than the customer.
Before meeting a prospective customer, study the company. Read its website, recent press releases, annual or integrated reports where available, management messages, medium-term business plans, sustainability initiatives and major technology announcements. Understand the industry. Look at competitors. If the company has publicly announced a digital transformation, overseas expansion, restructuring, productivity program or new factory, think about how those developments might relate to your offering.
But research should generate questions, not conclusions. Suppose a manufacturer has announced a major DX program. A weak salesperson arrives saying, “We understand that your challenge is digital transformation, and our platform will solve it.”
A stronger salesperson says, “I saw that your medium-term plan places considerable emphasis on digital transformation. May I ask which areas are currently receiving the highest priority?” The first statement tells the customer what their problem is. The second invites them to explain it. That difference is crucial.
You should also prepare hypotheses. Perhaps the customer has multiple factories, and you suspect that data is fragmented between locations. Perhaps a bank is trying to reduce manual processes. Perhaps a retailer is struggling to integrate online and physical channels. These hypotheses give direction to your questions, but they should remain hypotheses until the customer confirms them.
This approach also demonstrates humility. Foreign vendors sometimes arrive in Japan with global success stories and unconsciously communicate, “We have solved this problem everywhere else, so we already know what you need.”
Japanese customers may respect your global experience while simultaneously believing—sometimes correctly—that their organization, systems, and operating practices are different.
The better message is: “We have seen similar challenges elsewhere. We would first like to understand how they appear in your environment.”
There is another advantage to preparation. It allows you to spend valuable meeting time discussing things that cannot be found online: internal priorities, frustrations, decision criteria, organizational constraints and concerns.
The first meeting should therefore not begin with thirty slides about you. After brief introductions, explain why you are there and turn the conversation toward the customer. “Before introducing our solution in detail, may I first understand your current situation?” That single sentence can change the quality of the entire meeting.
Customers do not always begin by telling you their real problem. A customer may say, “We are looking for a new CRM system.” The inexperienced salesperson immediately opens the CRM presentation. The experienced salesperson becomes curious.
Why are they looking for a new CRM? What is wrong with the existing one? Is the problem technology, user adoption, data quality, reporting, or integration? Is management dissatisfied with sales visibility? Are salespeople refusing to enter information? Has the company recently reorganized? Is the current vendor too expensive? Is there actually an approved project, or is one employee simply researching possibilities?
The first stated requirement is often only the entrance to the real conversation. This is why good discovery moves gradually from broad questions to specific ones.
Start with the current situation:
“How is this process handled today?”
Then explore difficulty:
“Which part creates the greatest burden for your team?”
Then consequence:
“What happens when this process is delayed?”
Then scale:
“Approximately how much time does the team spend on this each month?”
Then priority:
“Compared with your other initiatives, how important is solving this during the current fiscal year?”
And eventually, decision:
“If you were to introduce a new solution, what would be most important in evaluating it?”
Notice that none of these questions begin with your product.
The customer is gradually constructing the business case in their own words.
This is particularly valuable in Japan because there may be several layers of concern. Management might want cost reduction. The department manager might want standardization. Frontline users might simply want fewer manual steps. IT might care primarily about security and integration. Procurement may focus on price and vendor stability.
There is rarely one “customer.” There are multiple people experiencing the same proposal differently. The salesperson therefore needs to listen not only for problems, but also for stakeholders. Ask, respectfully, who uses the current system. Which departments are affected? Who would need to participate if the project moved forward? Has a similar initiative been attempted before? The last question can be especially revealing.
If the customer tried something similar three years ago and the project failed, you have discovered something much more important than another feature requirement. The organization may now be afraid of repeating that failure. Your proposal must address that history.
And when customers finally reveal concerns, resist the temptation to answer immediately. A salesperson hears, “We worry about offshore support,” and instinctively launches into a five-minute explanation of the company's twenty-four-hour global support center.
Instead, ask: “May I understand what specifically concerns you about offshore support?”
Perhaps the customer's previous vendor had poor English communication. Perhaps escalation took too long. Perhaps documentation quality was inconsistent. Perhaps the issue has nothing to do with offshore delivery itself. If you answer before understanding the concern, you may give a technically perfect answer to the wrong question.
Listening has little value if everything the customer tells you disappears the moment you return to your standard sales deck. A good proposal should make the customer think: “Yes. This is our situation.”
Before presenting the solution, summarize what you heard. “From our discussions, we understand that there are three main issues. First, reporting currently requires significant manual work. Second, information is maintained separately by several departments. Third, any new system must integrate with the existing platform without disrupting daily operations. Is our understanding correct?” Then stop.
Let the customer correct you. Perhaps they say, “The first two are correct, but integration is not the main concern. Security approval is likely to be the greatest difficulty.” Excellent. You have just learned something that could save the deal.
Now your presentation can change. Instead of spending fifteen minutes demonstrating advanced functionality, you may need to spend ten minutes explaining security architecture, implementation controls, and previous approvals in similar environments. This is where discovery becomes co-creation.
You are no longer saying:
“Here is our product. Please buy it.”
You are saying:
“Here is what we understood. Here is how we think we can address it. Let us check whether this approach makes sense in your environment.”
That language is less aggressive, but it does not mean the salesperson becomes passive. Good salespeople still lead the process. They challenge assumptions when necessary, introduce ideas the customer has not considered, and recommend a direction. The difference is that the recommendation is grounded in what has been learned.
This also helps the internal sales process discussed in the earlier essays. If you understand why the project matters, who is affected, what risks worry them, and what outcomes are expected, you can prepare documents that your contact can actually use internally.
Your one-page summary might say:
Current situation: Monthly reporting requires approximately 120 staff-hours.
Issue: Data from four departments must be consolidated manually.
Business impact: Reports are delayed, and experienced employees spend time on repetitive work.
Proposed approach: Automate one reporting process in a limited pilot.
Evaluation: Measure staff-hours, error rate, and reporting lead time before and after implementation.
Now the proposal is no longer a collection of product features. It is an argument that can travel through the organization.
There is another important benefit. Good discovery tells you when not to sell. Perhaps the customer has no budget, no internal sponsor, and no intention of changing the existing system for another three years. Perhaps your product genuinely does not solve the problem. A salesperson who has spent the entire meeting presenting may leave believing that the opportunity is alive. A salesperson who has listened carefully may recognize that it is not.
That is not failure. It is qualification. Time spent chasing a permanently polite “maybe” is time that cannot be spent with a customer who has a genuine problem.
The hardest part of discovery, therefore, may not be learning which questions to ask. It is changing the salesperson's mindset. We naturally want to demonstrate our knowledge. We want the customer to see our technology, experience, and achievements. We fear that if we do not present everything, we have somehow wasted the meeting.
But customers rarely buy because we managed to finish all fifty slides. They buy because they believe we understand something important about their situation and can help them improve it without creating unacceptable new risks.
In Japan, where communication may be restrained and decisions may involve many people, discovering that reality can take time. That is precisely why listening is so powerful.
A salesperson who talks well can make a good presentation. A salesperson who listens well can discover what presentation needs to be made in the first place.
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