Paper info

Japanese Sales Management? No, It’s "Eigyo"

Ken-Ichi Hosoi, Kiyoshi Ohnishi, Masaaki Takemura and Yi-jen Wang

The paper was published at the 21st IMP-conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 2005.

In this working paper, we conducted a survey in the field of Japanese industrial companies, using thestrategic marketing framework that IMP provided, trying to find out a distribution in it. As our finding,Japanese industrial companies incline to use mutual project as their marketing strategy. This finding isrelated in the cell of “customer development” in the strategic framework of IMP.However, most of Japanese industrial companies neither fit their organization to the strategy they took,nor adopt the sales management system. Therefore, this condition makes the mutual project difficult tokeep and drop them from “customer development” cell into “customer adjustment” cell soon.We will discuss the reason why Japanese sales management does so with Luhmann’s trust framework.According to the discussion, Japanese business style depends deeply on the salesperson’s individualcompetences. This style is called as “Eigyo.” It’s the characteristic of sales activities that Japanesecompanies used to take. And, Eigyo sometimes is used in irrational way by salespersons. We showthe reason it by introducing several works some Japanese researchers did.