Leading Your External Partners In Japan   For many companies it makes no sense to fund their own sales force in Japan.  The money, expertise and time available within the organization is insufficient to the task, so a partner is required.  This could be an equity partner or a distribution alliance.  The penalties for getting this wrong though are high.    Poor partner selection can ensure your product or service never gets anywhere in Japan by design. The big player looks attractive as a distributor, but they are partnering with you to kill your business. They have a preferred product or service and the last thing they want is for you to disrupt the market.  The best way to do that is partner with you and then just idle the business.  They know it will take you years to figure it out, if you ever do.   When the agreement period for the partnership is set long, the pain is sustained and there is nothing you can do about it.  Desperate or ignorant company representatives sign long contracts with insufficient milestones.  Ideally what you want are clear performance targets in the agreement, which if they are not met, would allow the contract to be ended.  Expect strong resistance on this idea.   The poor levels of due diligence on these types of partner arrangement are astounding.  When talking to business people, I am always amazed at the number of supplier partnerships which occurred because the foreign seller happened to sit next to a Japanese businessman on the plane.    Even presuming you didn’t get stuck with an evil partner trying to kill your business, the case often occurs that they are killing your business anyway, through incompetence. They might be well minded but still incompetent.  The partner’s sales team’s interest in your offer can be an issue.  Basically, they aren’t interested.  Japanese sales people prefer to visit clients and collect orders for established products, rather than having to actually sell anything. Your product by definition is new. The preferred methodology is to get you to take a whack on the price, as an incentive to get clients to buy it. This is pure laziness on the part of the partner’s sales organization.   Selling from a value perspective is key, because Japan is a tough market to raise prices in, once you start low.  The buyers have fixed their mental temperature at a low level and resist your efforts to raise the temperature.  Often we may assume that the partner’s sales organisation can sell. That would be too generous. Usually, salespeople in Japan are either poorly trained or under trained when it comes to selling.   This is where you need to provide some training for their sales team on how to sell.  You might think that all you need is to train them on the product features etc., but that is too optimistic.  They won’t be much good in designing questions for the buyer to attract interest in your product.  They won’t go much beyond an introduction of the features.  They won’t sally forth into the sunny uplands of benefits of the features, the application of the benefits, the evidence of the application and chancing their arm with a trial close. They won’t know how to deal with objections when they come up and they won’t ask for the order.  Apart from those small details they will be fine.   Getting sales people who already handle a multitude of other products to become interested in yours is a struggle.  However by providing value, such as excellent training that benefits all of their job, they feel a sense of appreciation.  It needs to be set up though.  Don’t rely solely on the leaders of the partner organization to do this for you. You need to speak to the salespeople directly about how much you admire their work, how committed you are to seeing them succeed and explain why you have introduced this broad based training, beyond just the product specs.   You might be thinking that the partner’s sales managers can lead the team but again, you are being too generous.  Like many countr