Ron McFarlandのPersonal Journey (23) : 初舞台はシンガポール。大切なのは学ぶ姿勢！

RonさんはGMのコンサルタントやトレーニングから多くを学び、いすゞのトラック販売用の営業トレーニング・プログラムを開発。
1985年、ついにシンガポールで最初のセールスセミナーを開催。Ronさんのグローバルな仕事の始まりです。

当時、私も念願叶い1983年の末から米国IBMサンノゼ研究所に家族と共に赴任。
米国人の向上心、独立心の高さに感銘を受け、その後の人生に大きな影響を受けました。

GMのコンサルタントと関係者からの学び
There was a Japanese domestic market GM Consultant from Chevrolet, Gardner Glenn, who was trying to improve Isuzu’s sales in Japan and spent time in Chevrolet’s training operation in the United States. When I approached him, he thought we could complement each other very well, as I was a Japanese speaker, and he had just arrived from the US with little background about Japan. Through our many discussions, he provided me a wealth of material from GM’s old training programs. That was just the raw material I needed to write my own international commercial vehicle and car sales training program.



Also, Gardner had recruited the John Williamson Company to provide seminars in Japan. John Williamson owned a group of dealerships in the southern part of the United States. At that time, they had 22 dealerships and an in-group training center in Birmingham, Alabama. Now, there are mega-dealers owning hundreds of dealerships, but in those days dealership groups were rare.

米国のトレーニングに参加し大きな収穫
John Williamson invited me to his training center to attend one of his normal US domestic 2-week salesmen courses and spend a week observing a dealership of my choice. That was very productive three weeks, as I then had all the material and techniques I needed to do it all myself. Also, I received, for free, great material for a dealership sales manager seminar, my second program.

Over and above that, I read a dozen books on basic salesmanship.

As I had worked in Isuzu’s overseas sales promotion department and was a pretty good Japanese speaker at that time, I had a pretty good understanding of the Isuzu products, particularly the trucks. What I did not know, I could learn very easily by going into Isuzu’s Engineering and asking about it. One of the functions of sales seminars is to help the retail salesmen sell and to do that, they had to know the features and user benefits of buying the vehicle. Therefore, teaching about the product was critical and not just teaching basic salesmanship.

シンガポールで最初のセールスセミナーを開催
After a year of study and writing, I conducted my first sales seminar in Singapore, in 1985. It was not the best seminar I ever gave, but I learned a great deal from that program and from that point the seminars improved and improved. While I was teaching, I was probing the best salesmen as to what made them so successful. I not only shared their thoughts with the whole group, I took that knowledge and used it to improve the future seminar.




First sales seminar, April 1985

世界各地でセミナー開催
From that first seminar, my training activities exploded, and I started traveling worldwide, particularly in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. I gave seminars in Europe only a few times and a couple of times in Canada. But, most of the time I was working in the jungles and desserts of the world. As of this writing, I have traveled to over 80 countries worldwide.

それにしても、何故、GMをはじめとして米国のメーカーは、日本市場で生き残れなかったのでしょうか。
ヨーロッパのメーカーであるメルセデスやBMW、フォルックスワーゲンなどは一定のマーケットとステータスを築いてていますね。
ブランド戦略の違いでしょうか。気になり始めました。