In the 23 years that Koji Shiratsuki has worked for Hinoden Electric Industries Ltd., the company hardly ever asked customers to pay more. Now it needs to — and nobody there knows how it’s done.
So the 44-year-old at the control-panel maker in western Japan took an unusual step. He joined a class on negotiating higher prices, a given in most of the rest of the world but a forgotten skill in the Asian country, where decades of deflation had kept prices and salaries frozen in time.
