Episode #242: I Like It, It Sounds Really Good, But I Am Not Going To Buy It

Why do well-run sales meetings still end with no deal?

Even when you win the appointment and ask smart discovery questions, deals can stall at the finish line. In Japan, this feels especially painful because earning the meeting often takes persistence and trust-building. The real reason many deals die late is simple: we fail to create true urgency.

Mini-summary: Great discovery isn’t enough. If there’s no urgency, there’s no deal.

Most salespeople ask:

• What do you want?

• Where are you now?

• Where do you want to be?

These are solid questions, but they’re incomplete. You must add one more dimension:

“What happens if you don’t get there fast enough?”

This creates urgency not by pressure, but by helping the client confront time-based risk.

Mini-summary: The missing step is exploring the implications of being too slow.

How should you ask the “future state” question to drive urgency?

A typical version sounds like:

“You’ve shared the current state. Where do you want the business to be going forward?”

Good, but not enough.

A high-impact version is:

“You’ve described the current state. Where do you want the business to be going forward — and what are the implications if you don’t get there fast enough?”

This framing shifts the client from whether change is needed to how urgently it must happen.

Mini-summary: Add the speed implication to turn a nice conversation into a decision conversation.

Why does “speed to results” matter so much for Japanese and multinational firms?

Clients may agree with everything you say and still think:

“We’ll handle this internally.”

But in reality, organizations move slowly:

• scarce resources

• internal approvals

• competing priorities

• bureaucracy

Meanwhile competitors don’t wait. In a market where speed to execution is decisive, delay has a real cost.

This applies to:

• 日本企業 (Japanese companies) facing domestic competition

• 外資系企業 (multinational companies) needing faster alignment across regions

• teams in 東京 (Tokyo) where decisions often require multi-layer consensus

Mini-summary: The client’s real competitor is time, not your solution.

How do you help clients see that doing nothing isn’t “free”?

The cost of doing nothing is not zero. It shows up as:

• lost revenue

• delayed market entry

• erosion of share

• missed talent or capability windows

Your role is to help them calculate opportunity cost in their own words.

Instead of statements like:

“Our solution will increase revenues quickly.”

Use implication questions such as:

1. “If applying this now could speed up revenue gains, would that be valuable?”

2. After “yes”:
   “And if those gains helped fund future competitive moves, would that matter to you?”

Let them persuade themselves.

Mini-summary: Don’t tell urgency. Elicit it through well-constructed questions.

Many clients want to be the hero who fixes the problem internally. That’s natural — but it risks turning them into your competitor for the solution.

The simplest way to challenge that false hope is speed:

• Can you do it yourselves? Maybe.

• Can you do it fast enough? That’s the real question.

When clients realize internal speed limits, your expertise becomes the advantage.

Mini-summary: Speed-based implication questions neutralize “we’ll do it ourselves.”

• Great discovery must include implications of delay to create real urgency.

• Ask: “What are the implications if you don’t get there fast enough?”

• Replace salesperson statements with implication questions that let clients self-convince.

• In Japan’s competitive environment, speed to execution is often the deciding factor.

Founded in the U.S. in 1912, Dale Carnegie Training has supported individuals and companies worldwide for over a century in leadership, sales, presentation, executive coaching, and DEI. Our Tokyo office, established in 1963, has been empowering both Japanese and multinational corporate clients ever since.