This is the problem with what he calls positional negotiating, which is the norm in China. It involves starting at an inflated price and haggling down to 20 or 30 percent.

"The trick is not negotiating on price. It's negotiating on needs," Morgan says. "My book explains how not to drop your price four or five times, because that is Chinese people's habitual style."

In his briefcase, he carries a blindfold so he can make trainees think outside the box.

In the book, which can be read in a few hours, he deals with concepts such as mirroring, leading and pacing your customers to make them warm to you, while praising the art of "funneling" - asking structured questions to glean information and needs - rather than "story-booking", or giving a one-sided sales pitch.

He also recommends taking time to understand where your sales team and customers are coming from, and bending to the Chinese way. As such, he divides Chinese into four groups according to age: the balinghou (those born in the 1980s), "Children of the Revolution" (those born in the 1950s and 1960s, in time for the "cultural revolution" of 1967-1977), the "Old Red Guards" and the "True Reds". Each group comes with its own history, conditioning and ways of doing business.

Bending to the Chinese way means finding alternatives to, for example, overly strict targets that, instead of ramping up results, will simply lead staff to take face-saving shortcuts that sap morale and fail to generate optimum business leads.

Morgan gained much of his experience as a co-founder of ClarkMorgan Corporate Training, which he established in 2001 upon arriving in China. The firm now employs 35 staff at four offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Judging by the plaques and certificates lining the walls of its Shanghai office, it has built a creditable reputation. The China Staff Awards named it Training Firm of the Year in 2007 and 2008, while the Asia-Pacific Business and Technology Report recently named Morgan as its Business Leader of the Month.

As the window closes on our interview, and Morgan sells me on a trip to Yangshuo in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region by telling me how he met his wife there while backpacking, his rival shows up.

Within minutes, they are exchanging views on how interactive Powerpoint presentations are more effective than listen-and-learn sales pitches. Morgan says he finds it more productive to hand the mouse over to the client. His interlocutor, a South African man, then informs him of a new app that lets you plug in five mice simultaneously for group meetings.

"You see?" says Morgan. "It is a collaborative world."