In part three, we consider how to find good salespeople in Japan.

            Once you have the makings of a management team in Japan, building a sales team may be your next task. It may also be your most difficult.

            More than any other position, I’ve found it necessary to use personal connections to hire good salespeople, and today all of my sales staff hires are recommendations from existing members of the team. So your best bet here may well be to see if your management team can bring some salespeople with them, and then to have those people recommend former colleagues. It is worth being generous in rewarding staff for their recommendations, because you can easily spend tens of thousands of dollars in a fruitless search on your own.

            In Japan as elsewhere, remuneration is usually the key incentive for sales staff. As always, you’ll have to find a balance between the base and the incentives. Japanese are very concerned with job and life security, so go too low on the base, and candidates won’t be interested, and may not trust your incentives or targets. But go too high, and you may have someone who is happy to coast. I’ve found that a base just enough to cover living expenses combined with healthy commissions that kick in from the first sale has worked best.

            If personal recommendations don’t work, one approach to hiring sales staff is the “temp-to-perm” arrangements offered by temp staffing (called haken in Japanese) companies. You can try out the salesperson for a few months on a temporary arrangement, and if you like them, switch to full-time, with a commission that often decreases based on the number of months they have been working as a temp staff. The only problem with this is that it can be hard for the staffing agencies to find candidates themselves, so you’ll need to be vigorous in pushing them.

            In future entries, we’ll look at some of the costs and other issues associated with employment in Japan.