Meet Ching Ching Dai: Providing George James Training in Asia-Pacific

In this special episode, Steve Vaughan welcomes the newest member of the George James training team, Ching Ching Dai, joining us from Singapore.

With more than a decade of experience in laboratory instrumentation sales, product management and sales leadership across Asia-Pacific, Ching Ching shares her journey from an introverted Food Science graduate who never imagined a career in sales to becoming a successful sales leader responsible for developing teams across the region.

Together they discuss:

•  Why sales is far more about listening than talking. 
•  The importance of solving customer problems rather than simply selling products. 
•  Why so many new salespeople struggle during their first few years. 
•  The transition from successful salesperson to successful sales manager. 
•  Why professional sales training can dramatically accelerate confidence and performance. 
•  The growing life science and laboratory market across Singapore and Southeast Asia. 
•  What motivated Ching Ching to join the George James training team.

Contact Qing Qing through her LinkedIn profile : https://www.linkedin.com/in/qing-qing-dai-764825a3/

Steve Vaughan, Jonathan Cooper, Pru Layton, Christian Walter, Pascal le Floche,  Jayne Green  and Jonathan Slasinski are Sales Trainers from george james ltd.  You can email the show at:  Podcast@georgejames-training.com

 The trainers on LinkedIn:

 Steve Vaughan https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-vaughan-salestrainer/
Jonathan Cooper https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-cooper-18716b1/
Pru Layton https://www.linkedin.com/in/pru-layton-b46a3528/
Christian Walter https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-walter-a1857b1/
Jayne Green https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayne-green-salestrainer/
Pascal Le Floch-Riche https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascal-le-floch-220ba46/

Jonathan Slasinski https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-slasinski-449a655/

george james training website https://georgejames-training.com/

Transcript

Steve (00:04)
Hello again and welcome to The Luxury Choice, a B2B sales and business podcast brought to you by the training team of George James Limited. My name is Steve Vaughan. I'm a member of the training team here and I'm also the host and producer of this podcast. And I'm coming to you from a very warm little office here in North Oxfordshire, but I'm delighted to be talking to a brand new colleague of ours here at George James, a new member of our training team. And her name is Ching Ching Dai.

and she's based in Singapore where I'm sure it's equally as warm as well. Ching Ching, how are you?

Qing Qing (00:38)
Hi Steve, hi everyone. I'm doing great. Yes, it's pretty warm here like it is 365 of the year. So yeah, I'm doing great. Thanks.

Steve (00:46)
Great to hear. And of course we

met up a number of months ago. I was running a training course in Singapore and we met for a coffee when you were possibly interested in coming to work with us. And I can vouch for the fact Singapore is normally pretty warm. It's a fantastic part of the world. One of my favorite parts of the world. So welcome to the team and welcome also to the podcast. So what I'd really would like to do today, Ching Ching, really is for our listener to find out a little bit more about yourself.

your background and then I guess really why you've joined Joyce James and what you're passionate about, what your interests are regarding training and seeing people develop. first of all, just tell us a bit about your background. So you've worked in the scientific instrument industry, I know for a number of years and you know our colleague Christian Valtowell as well. So just tell us a bit about your background.

Qing Qing (01:36)
Yeah, sure. maybe a little bit of...

about myself as well. I'm married, I'm a mum of a four-year-old toddler and actually I have another one coming soon so it's really really exciting. Yes and professionally I graduated with a degree in food science and technology and after I graduated I was thinking like I don't really want to work in the lab because I found it a little bit boring for myself. So I asked my dad that time like you know dad what should I do you know for career and he actually suggested

Steve (01:39)
Please.

Wow.

exciting.

You

Qing Qing (02:07)
for me to go into sales and you know at that point of time I was like you know that are you out of your mind because I was kind of an introvert you know I don't really like to talk a lot of things and I always had this mindset that sales is for people who just talk and talk and talk and talk but anyways I did it anyway I found a job and as a sales rep and product specialist for a company called Chemo Science so they are a distributor for laboratory instruments in Singapore

company actually still existing. ⁓ yeah, and actually the first year I was really struggling because I didn't know what I was doing. I was just like really having difficulty to talk to customers. But after the first year, I got much better at it. And I think the change in my career really happened two years when I was working. That's when Buhi, which is the brand that was distributed by Camel Science, which is also the product

Steve (02:39)
Sure.

you

Right.

Qing Qing (03:04)
that I was being the product specialist for. So they decided to start their own direct representative office in Singapore. And they basically approached me and asked me to join their team. So I started with Wehee in 2014 as kind of their first person in Singapore and also their sales rep in Singapore. And I helped the company to kind of build up the business here.

Singapore. Hams.

Steve (03:34)
And that's when you would have met Christian Volta, I guess,

because he was a boogie at the time, yes? Yeah.

Qing Qing (03:37)
Yeah, so Christian,

I believe he also joined Buhi in same year as I did. Yeah, but I didn't report to him directly until a few years later. So in Buhi, I actually got to do a lot of different roles. So I started there as a sales rep and then a few years later, they moved me to regional product management. And after that, I got the chance to be a distribution manager for our distributors in Southeast Asia and Asia Pacific.

Steve (03:42)
All right.

Okay.

Qing Qing (04:07)
And then later, I also took over the responsibilities for our direct representatives in Malaysia and Singapore as the general manager. yeah, lots of different roles, different job responsibilities. So overall, I've been in Bukit Mu for more than 10 years. I left last year. So yeah, it's a really exciting times. I got to meet and work with a lot of great people and obviously a lot of great customers as well.

Steve (04:14)
Okay, wow.

Yeah,

sure. Absolutely. So great, great to get your career background and, you know, great, progression through the company. And, and I know from sort of doing business in your part of the world, there's a lot of geography there as well. A lot of travel and a lot of, a lot of countries and a lot of areas to be responsible for. So looking back on your, on your career, you said at the start of the chat that you thought sales was about talking a lot.

Looking back on that now, I think we both agree it's not. What would you say to yourself now if you were to go back and talk to yourself about selling before you started? What would you say now? How would you convince yourself now about selling?

Qing Qing (05:09)
Yeah, you know.

Yeah, and I think that's also something that a lot of people have when they first started sales as a career because a lot of salespeople that come into this business, they are actually fresh grads, so they're really new to this and lots of them, they tried out for one or two years and then they leave because they feel that sales is such a difficult career because it's something that you have to be really, really persistent. You have to keep on knocking doors, you have to deal with lots and lots of rejections and not only that, but you have to deal also with like fluctuation.

Steve (05:25)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Qing Qing (05:43)
income right because sales is something that's more of commission-based so you don't have a fixed income every month and yeah so I think it's for lot of people it's quite difficult and I think for especially for people in science where you know you've really not sold anything as you were studying so I think it's a difficult career path for a lot of people but I think in my opinion sales is not just a job where you know talk about the product and try to convince the customer to buy the product.

Steve (05:48)
Yep. Yep.

Absolutely.

Qing Qing (06:11)
but it's really

listening to customers and helping to solve customers' problems. And for me, was very important because I wasn't very much motivated by the money in sales. think a lot of people say, yeah, if you're in sales, you must be motivated by the money. But I guess I'm not so much personally motivated by that. But for what motivated me personally as a salesperson is that I really want to help people, right? I don't want people to buy a product because I kind of convince them to buy.

Steve (06:17)
Yeah.

Yeah, no, that's not true.

Yeah.

Qing Qing (06:39)
but I want them to buy because it helps them to solve a problem, it helps them to improve a process and when people put themselves in that mindset as a problem solver or someone, a solution provider for the customer, I think that would really help them to develop better in their career.

Steve (06:56)
I love that.

couldn't agree more really. You know, it's the best job in the world when you can help people solve problems or make things more efficient or reduce costs or whatever. And when you think about the people that we work with or our customers work with, you know, they're people who are working on serious diseases or whatever, you know, and it's a fantastic career really.

But you should never go into sales with the mindset it's all about making a lot of money. know, that's not why people should be thinking about a sales career, certainly. And I totally agree with you on that. So why the move into training? Moving into sales training is a different role. We have to sell as well, of course, so we're still salespeople. But in terms of moving now into selling training, you're selling yourself to some degree, your knowledge, your experience, as opposed to selling a physical product. Why did you?

want to come and join us and why the interest in training.

Qing Qing (07:48)
you

Yeah, I think there's two reasons professionally and also personally. So professionally wise, mean, I, when I first started sales, I think I was hitting a lot of walls because I didn't really know what I was doing. And, you know, I had great product training, you know, a lot of materials about the products that I was selling. But on the other hand, very little information about, you know, the sales process and how to be a better salesperson, how to do better prospecting, you know, how to be more confident in prospecting.

Steve (07:51)
Sure.

all.

Qing Qing (08:18)
So doing training, I wish to bring this to more young salespeople out there, to make them feel that they're not on their own, there is a process, they can get better at this. It's not like you're either born with it or you're not. It is not true. So to be able to provide this type of sales training, especially to the salespeople in our field, which is the scientific, laboratory, life science salespeople, I think it really brings a lot of value and can make more young people to the

Steve (08:24)
Yeah.

Qing Qing (08:48)
to stay in this career as a career path rather than something that they tried for a couple of years and then quit and do something else. for me that is really important and training was something that I also did for my people when I was a general manager at BH. realised that to be able to do training by yourself in your own company is actually not easy because you need to find content, you need to think about how to make the training stick.

Steve (08:55)
Absolutely.

All right. OK, good. Yeah.

Yeah.

Qing Qing (09:18)
And

of course you have to find time to do that. And I believe that not many companies have the luxury to have the time and the resources to be able to do this by themselves. So having a company to offer this to these scientific companies will be definitely a benefit and something that I would like to be able to bring to the region, especially to Singapore. And personally-wise, yeah.

Steve (09:29)
Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And of course, Singapore is a good central base

for all of Southeast Asia, really, isn't it? And I want to remember, of course, is Singapore is obviously, it's like a hub for that part of the world, isn't it, really? So geographically, you're perfectly positioned. Yeah.

Qing Qing (09:54)
Yeah.

For sure,

and Singapore is such a big hub, not just in terms of location, especially in terms of research, in terms of life science, lot of companies are based here, the regional headquarters are based here. I was just looking up, just from the back of my head, how many scientific companies there are in Singapore. I thought it may be 20, and I was doing my research, I realized there's more than 40 companies that I could think of already who are based in Singapore. So even though we are such a

Steve (10:03)
Right.

Yeah.

Wow. Gosh, yeah.

Qing Qing (10:25)
country, just an island nation, but you know there's a lot of happening already here in Singapore and obviously there's so many other countries in the region that you know it's easily assessed through Singapore.

Steve (10:31)
Absolutely.

Sure,

sure. Now, of course, you've only just recently joined us. You're going through your own training yourself, of course, right now. But in terms of your particular interests in training, is there a particular field of sales training that you're especially passionate about or where you feel you've got particular expertise that the listener would find of use?

Qing Qing (10:58)
Yeah, for me, think I'm still kind of feeling around because I just started for about a month. But I mean, again, it comes back to my personal experience. Like, you when I was starting off as a salesperson, I wish I could have gotten all the sales skills I needed when I was very fresh. And so that's actually a passion of mine to be able to train salespeople who are new to this field, know, new to sales, to be able to acquire the skills they need to sell well in their field.

Steve (11:02)
Of course.

Qing Qing (11:26)
Another thing that think is really important is also for sales management because I think a lot of people in our field, they were good salespeople so that's why they got promoted to sales managers. But it's one thing to sell by yourself and another to manage other people who are selling. Sales management requires a different set of skills and I would also like to share and train these skills too.

Steve (11:32)
Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Qing Qing (11:54)
sales managers as well.

Steve (11:55)
Yeah, that's so

true. mean, ⁓ big step up from being a salesperson into your first sales manager's job is a massive step. often the best sales people don't always make the best sales managers, as I'm sure people on the podcast can relate to listening to the podcast, I say. And outside of work, what things do you enjoy doing? What are you passionate about outside ⁓ of work, outside of doing business?

Qing Qing (12:18)
Yeah, I mean, I'm a mom, so most of my time outside of work is spent with my daughter. Yeah.

Steve (12:20)
Keep you busy. ⁓

Qing Qing (12:25)
They do, she does keep me very very busy and with the second one coming, I don't know, it's going to be really exciting. ⁓ But personally I love to cook, I love to bake, so I do that a lot and it's great. The family enjoys what I make. ⁓ And I also love to gym and yoga, so it keeps me fit. It's good exercise and also good as a recovery from all the hassle of everyday life.

Steve (12:31)
That's it.

Fantastic.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah,

Qing Qing (12:53)
you

Steve (12:53)
absolutely. Something I need to explore more actually is yoga, but that's topic for another day. Ching Ching, it's been great having you on the pod and I you'll join us regularly as a country contributor to our regular series of podcasts, which we'll be coming back to in the...

post summer period really now. Enjoy your onboarding. And for the listener, we'll put your contact details in the show notes so people can find you. And obviously you're on LinkedIn, of course, as well. But you'll put your contact details in there as well. So thanks again for joining us and we'll see you on a team call soon.

Qing Qing (13:28)
Thank you Steve. Bye.

Steve (13:31)
And if you enjoyed this episode, listeners, don't forget to give us a review on Apple or Spotify. does help us in lots of weird and wonderful ways. We will be back with one more podcast where we have a bit of team get together before we do have a short break for the summer period. And we're back again with our next series of The Luxury Choice from September onwards. In the meantime, happy selling and we'll talk to you soon.