Getting a deal done in a single meeting is an extremely rare event in Japan. Usually, the people we are talking to are not the final decision-makers and so they cannot give us a definite promise to buy our solution. The exception would be firms run by the dictator owner/leader who controls everything and can make a decision on the spot. Even in the…

Value is a difficult thing to pin down. In any audience, there is bound to be a wide range of interests, needs, and wants. How do we decipher that array into a presentation which meets all expectations? Well, we can’t. There are too many variables at play, so we have to work on hitting the target for the majority of those who have assembled to hear…

Previously Ahbijay was Vice-President of Development for IHG Japan, Australasia and Pacific Region, Director of Development Planning AMEA for Whitbread PLC Singapore, and Director of Development Middle East, Africa and South Asia for the Jumeirah Group. He has a Master’s Degree from Erasmus University’s Rotterdam School Of Management…

The Master of Ceremony (MC) goes to the microphone to get the programme underway but the audience are simply oblivious, caught up in their own riveting conversations. The situation is much worse at receptions where alcohol is already flowing and the people down the back are generating a roar, a positive din, that drowns out the speakers. Here are s…

Do leaders have to be perfect? It sounds ridiculous to expect that, because none of us are perfect. However, leaders often act like they are perfect. They assume the mantle of position power and shoot out orders and commands to those below them in the hierarchy. They derive the direction forward, make the tough calls and determine how things are to…

We often hear that people buy on emotion and justify with logic. The strange thing is where is this emotion coming from? Most Japanese salespeople speak in a very dry, grey, logical fashion expecting to convince the buyer to hand over their dough. I am a salesperson but as the President of my company, also a buyer of goods and services. I have been…

We love another acronym, not! It is a handy memory jogger though, so let’s persevere with yet another one. Whenever you are in a situation where you need to get collaboration, support, funding or agreement, then the EAR formula is a very effective tool for presenters. It is simplicity itself in terms of understanding the formula. The delivery thoug…

Prior to her Japan posting Simone was VP Marketing International Business Unit in Indianapolis, VP and General Manager Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Chief Marketing Officer Japan, Managing Director Austria, International Marketing Leader Cardiology Indianapolis, National Sales Director Germany, Austria and Switzerland, New Product Planning Mana…

Usually this isn’t even a question for most presenters, because the organisers have already set up the room when you arrive. Our speaking spot has been designated for us. But have we been designated a spot by experts in public speaking or by the venue crew who usually just haul chairs, lug tables around and set up the stage? Sadly the coalescence b…

Here is a handy success equation which is easy to remember: our mindset plus our skill set, will equal our results. This is very straightforward and unremarkable, but we get so embroiled in our day to day world, we forget to helicopter above the melee and observe the lay of the land. A great mindset coupled with lacklustre skills, won’t get us very…

I recently launched a new project called Fare Bella Figura – Make a Good Impression. Every day I take a photograph of what I am wearing and then I go into detail about why I am wearing it and put it up on social media. To my astonishment, these posts get very high impressions and a strong following. It is ironic for me. I have written over 3000 art…

Where is the line between referencing our experiences and insights and just talking about ourselves? I attended a talk recently where the speaker had a perspective to share with the audience, to add value to their careers and businesses. What surprised me was how much of the talk was cantered on the speaker rather than the audience. I was thinking …

David has been with Bain his whole career, starting as an Associate to Partner, becoming a Partner and HR Leader Switzerland, Partner and Healthcare Practice Leader, Senior Partner and Regional EMEA Practice Leader for Transformation and Change, Senior Partner and Global Leader Change and Implementation Practice.…

To succeed in our own business, we need three critical skills: the ability to master our time, to clone ourselves and to be persuasive. Time: Poor time control leads to inefficiency, wasted efforts, stress and missed opportunities. Entrepreneurs are geniuses at trying to do too much. This means they are run ragged with time demands and no good solu…

Public speaking spots are a great way to get attention for ourselves and what we sell. This is mass prospecting on steroids. The key notion here is we are selling ourselves rather than our solution in detail. This is an important delineation. We want to outline the issue and tell the audience what can be done, but we hold back on the “how” piece. T…

I was recently reminded of the importance of openings and transitions when presenting watching a new speaker in action. They were using the occasion to establish their business here in Japan. Like this speaker, most of us face an audience who don’t know us when we start speaking. They may have glanced at the blurb from the organisers listing our ac…

It is very common to hear from expat leaders here about their frustrations with leading teams in Japan. They get all of their direct reports together in a meeting room to work through some issues and reach some decisions. All goes according to plan, just like at home. Weeks roll by and then the penny drops that things that were agreed to in the mee…

Prior to starting the Swiss Prime Brands company in Japan, Luca was an Assistant Manager at Masuda Infinity Japan, a Junior Associate at Goldwyn Partners Group AG, a Consultant at Het Buitenhuis. Be honest – are you a great leader or are you a mediocre leader? How can you become a leader people actually want to follow? How can you be the leader who…

There is an old truism in sales, “sales is nothing more than the transfer of the enthusiasm of the seller for the product or service to the buyer”. What are we doing when we are speaking? We are selling! “Hang on a minute there Greg. I am a professional, I am not a car or vacuum cleaner salesman”, you might be saying to yourself. That sort of self-…

I was reading an article by Anjli Raval in the Financial Times about the transition for CFOs to the CEO job. She quoted a survey by Heidrick & Struggles which showed a third of CFOs in the FTSE 100 firms became the CEO. This is up from 21% in 2019. Raval makes an interesting observation, “research shows that CEOs promoted from the CFO job do not dr…

Finding clients is expensive. We pay Google a lot of money to buy search words. We pay them each time someone clicks on the link on the page we turn up on in their search algorithm. We monitor the pay per click cost, naturally always striving the drive down the cost of client acquisition. If we have the right type of product, we may be paying for s…

When we are planning our talk, we have to decide what is the purpose of this presentation? In business, typically, we most often deliver the “inform” type. We will pass over information we have come across in our travels and research for the edification of the audience. They have turned up to learn something they didn’t already know and expect valu…

Eddie’s coaching of Japan to defeat South Africa against their hometown advantage in South Africa, was a breakthrough moment for Japanese rugby, which until that point had never managed to win a game at that level. Eddie started his coaching career at Randwick as an assistant coach in 1994. He coached Tokai University as an assistant coach in 1995-…

Having a buying need and doing something about it can often be quite disparate ideas. When the buyer is looking at the gap between where they are now and where they want to be and they judge it is pretty close, they don’t feel any urgency or need to buy. They will have certain drivers pushing them along in their role in the business, but this gap p…

It sounds very obvious, doesn’t it, to remind the team what we are trying to achieve, but are we doing it? Yes, we had that team Town Hall a few months ago and as the leader we outlined where we need to be at the end of the financial year. After that session, we have all been head down and getting on with it. “They know right? I told them everythin…

Salespeople are good talkers. In fact, they are often so good, they decide to do all the talking. They try to browbeat the buyer into submission. Endless details are shared with the client about the intricacies of the widget, expecting that the features will sell the product or service. Do we buy features though? Actually, we buy evidence that this…

Navigation is critical in presenting. This is how we keep the audience with us and keep reinforcing our key messages. Years ago, I attended a speech by a serious VIP. He had jetted in from the US to visit Japan and made time to give the Chamber of Commerce members the benefits of his insights. It was a seriously meandering and confusing talk. I was…

Previously Gaspard was Port Cities Managing Director Mexico, Managing Directors Indonesia, Ethnicraft Project Manager, Carmeuse Group Supply Chain Analyst. Gaspard Graduated from the Louvain School of Management, Universite Catholique De Louvain

Sadly, not everyone is like us – wonderful, charming, amusing, attractive. Despite our best efforts to be a role model of perfection, setting them a good example, others persist in being a major pain. Here are some selective tips on negotiating with the difficult amongst us. 1. Meet on mutual ground Try to meet, rather than engage in a protracted e…

Japan has had a very low degree of mobility in employment. Large companies hired staff straight out of school or university and expected they would spend their entire working life with their employer. That has worked for a very long time, but we have hit an inflection point where this is less something we can expect. Mid-career hires were frowned u…

I am very active networking here in Tokyo, scouring high and low for likely buyers of our training solutions. I attend with one purpose – “work the room” and as a Grant Cardone likes to say, find out “who’s got my money”. I have compressed my pitch down to ten seconds when I meet a possible buyer at an event. My meishi business card is the tool of …

Does introducing emotion when presenting mean sharing a good weep with the audience? No, that is way over the top in a business context and would be the death knell of the speaker’s credibility. We are not turning up to your talk to see you burst into tears, carried away with your lack of emotional control. We are there with you for one of four rea…

Jean Pierre has spent most of his career at L’Oreal. Previously he was Senior Vice President L’Oreal Luxe APAC, Managing Director L’Oreal Luxe Europe, General Manager L’Oreal Luxe Thailand. He is an MBA Graduate of emlyon business school.

Leaders now face a pivotal moment in business in Japan. Do they continue to cling to the past? Do they replay what they went through when they were younger and lead as they were taught by their seniors or do they change the angle of approach? Japan rebuilt itself after the devastation of the war. The workers slaved away, adding a notch to their col…

The chances of speaking to a 5000 person business audience happening and happening regularly in Japan are remote for most of us. Nevertheless, in case you find yourself in front of a very large audience, here are a few hints on how to adjust to the increased size of the event. Get there early and go and sit in some of the most far-flung locations. …

Access to social media has really democratised salespeople’s ability to sell themselves to a broader audience. Once upon a time, we were reliant on the efforts of the marketing team to get the message out and, in rare cases, the PR team to promote us. Neither group saw it as their job to help us as a salesperson, and they were more concentrated on …

I was reading an interesting LinkedIn post about how at the start of your presentation in Japan you need to have slides on your background and credentials to get the trust of the audience. Let me quote from the post, so that you can get the flavour: “Most of the presentations I’ve seen by Japanese professionals tend to start with a detailed profile…

Geoffrey has started his own company Shining Prince Entertainment, currently he is Japan Representative for Drylab Media Tech. Previously he was Co-Founder and Head of Sales for V-Net Solutions Japan, General Manager HBO Max Japan, Japan Country Manager for IMAX, Strategic Advisor for 20th Century Fox Japan, Advisor to LAIKA LLC, Advisor to Netflix…

In sales in Japan we chill, cruise and take the foot off the pedal. We get lazy. We start cutting corners. We get off our game. The temptation is when we get to a certain level of success we think well, we have done enough. We have to facedown “average is good enough” self-talk. We need to make sure we are doing the basics like a demon on fire. The…

As leaders, we are busy bees. We are buzzing around, going from meeting to meeting. We are getting together with clients over lunch, touching base with HQ, handling the media, talking to HR about our people and a host of other important activities. Usually poor time managers, we are constantly hemmed in by the demands on our schedules. The upshot i…

Japan is facing a serious shortage of staff in many industries. The job-to-applicant ratio rose to 1.28, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare announced recently. The ratio means there were 128 job openings for every 100 job seekers.The figure has not yet reached the pre-pandemic level of 1.6 in 2019. The hospitality sector in particular, lost …

It was a big affair. Many supporting organisations had promoted this expert dual speaker event and the large audience filed into the prestigious venue. I was sold on the advertising too. I was intrigued by the pairing of topics and according to the blurb, the speakers’ backgrounds looked the money. The MC kicked things off and handed the baton off …

Maxime founded his company in 2007 in China and now has offices in Tokyo, Paris, Vancouver and New York. Before starting Ekohe, he was the R&D Manager at Labbrand in Shanghai. He has a Master’s Degree in Engineering from Centrale Lille Institute and another Master’s Degree in Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition from Shanghai Jiao Tong U…

The classic movie half-time locker room Churchillian oratory from the coach, whipping the team into a frenzy for the coming onslaught is now gathering dust in Hollywood’s archives. Today’s most successful coaches are masters of human psychology, combining insight with superb communication skills. What about leaders in business in Japan? In my exper…

There are many paths to the mountaintop in the leadership area. Today, let’s go back to the practical realities of getting others to listen to you and, even more importantly, to follow you. My favourite quote on leadership is from Yogi Berra, the American baseball coach rather infamous for murdering the English language. He said something profound …

Sales people are in massive competition today, with all the distractions that are out there for the client’s attention. We want to get our message across about how we can help build the client’s business, but it is a tough row to hoe because of all the competition we face from meetings, emails and social media. There are so many things that are occ…

I hesitated to use this title, because it smacks of click bait, doesn’t it? To hell with it, live dangerously, I say! What flagged this question for me was an article in the Financial Times by Anjli Raval about Wall Street earnings calls. She mentioned that researchers from the University of Bergen and Said Business School analysed the question-and…

Guillermo has spent most of his career at Chanel as Country Manager Singapore, Regional President SE Asia, Global Marketing Director (cosmetics), Japan Cosmetics General Manager, Japan Fashion General Manager. He graduated from the University of the Basque Country (Spain) and is also a graduate of the EU’s Executive Training Programme in Japan (ETP…

When we stand in front of an audience, we are representing our personal brand and our firm’s brand. People evaluate us and our companies based on how we perform. Think back to the presentations you’ve seen and I’m sure you’ll agree that many speakers are missing passion and commitment to the topic. Don’t be like that. Typically, we speakers enter a…

You would think that organisations choose their leaders because they are skilled in communication. What is the job after all, but communicating with the team to make sure everyone is clear about what they have to do and to encourage them to do it? Well you would be wrong! Leaders are usually selected for promotion because they are very good, often …