1. What Japan sales outsourcing actually means
Japan sales outsourcing is an arrangement in which a specialist local firm performs the sales function on behalf of a foreign company. It covers everything from generating meetings and negotiating in Japanese to steering your proposal through the customer's internal approval process and managing the account after signature.
The quality and volume of leads varies a great deal from one sales agency to another. Quite a few will ask for a signing fee at the point of contract. Some will bring you low-quality leads with very little chance of ever converting — and you may still have to pay for those, counted as appointments delivered.
2. Why capable companies stall in Japan
Foreign companies rarely fail in Japan because their product is weak. They fail largely because their sales approach is wrong for this market. Selling with your own staff is not necessarily the right answer in Japan. In the launch phase especially, it is essential not only to hire a salesperson with real selling ability but also to engage an agency with a proven sales record.
The decision maker you are talking to is not a decision maker
Outside Japan, a sufficiently senior buyer can commit on the spot. In Japan, any purchase above a certain size passes through ringi, a formal approval process in which the proposal is circulated to build consensus among everyone involved. This process is particular to Japanese business culture and is not well understood elsewhere. Before the decision maker rules on it, there are several rounds of meetings and often a PoC or similar trial. The decision to adopt comes only after that ringi process has run its course. That takes anywhere from six months to around two years.
It is common for your contact to go quiet after a meeting that felt positive. That is not a lost deal; it is a sign that your service is under consideration. During the silence, the decision makers and your contact are discussing the service internally, again and again. Hearing nothing does not mean there is no interest. When a service is genuinely of interest, the contact will almost always email or call while the review is under way. That said, if there is no contact for more than a month, the deal has almost certainly been lost.
Trust is a precondition for the meeting, not an outcome of it
When you enter the Japanese market, an unknown foreign company emailing a large Japanese enterprise will, as a rule, get no reply. The same is true even for major international companies. So how do you get replies, and get the people who actually hold the decision to come back to you? If you would like the answer, please get in touch. We are happy to talk it through by email or in an online meeting.
Evaluation criteria are different, not just stricter
Before a Japanese company will buy, your support structure and whether your business fits Japanese commercial practice become extremely important factors. Capability and return on investment matter too, of course, but they are not enough on their own. The support you provide when a problem occurs matters especially. If there is no Japanese-language support for service problems, the barrier to adoption rises sharply.
The language barrier is actually the lowest one
The real difficulty of entering Japan is not the language barrier. It is Japanese business culture. Language is one obstacle, certainly, but translation services are good enough today that it is not a major problem. What does the damage is a foreign company that runs the same playbook it uses elsewhere without knowing Japanese business culture — that loses the trust of the very companies that could have become its customers.
3. The four market entry models, compared
There are broadly four ways to take a product to market in Japan. Each one fails in a different way.
| Model | Time to first meetings | Who owns the customer | Why it fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hire a country manager | 6–12 months | You | A hiring mistake leaves you with someone inexperienced: cost accumulates, the product does not spread, and you bleed money. Many candidates can speak English but have no sales track record, so take care. |
| Appoint a distributor | 1 month | The distributor | They carry other products, so they never focus on selling yours. They negotiate commissions and terms with your head office in their own favour, which makes losses easy to run up. |
| A Japanese-speaking salesperson sells remotely from HQ | 6–12 months | You | Meetings are hard to obtain, and when a face-to-face meeting is requested you cannot attend, which undermines confidence in the service. |
| Sales outsourcing | Weeks | You | You lose control. Compliance breaches occur, and a gap opens up between the partner and head office intent. |
None of this is meant as a blanket criticism. Once the ways each model fails are clear, the order in which you enter Japan becomes critically important. Trying sales outsourcing for a short period is what minimises the risk of failure. Then, based on the results, it is best to decide whether to hire a country manager or to have your outsourcing partner establish a Japanese entity for you.
Get the order wrong and you burn time and money without results. Hiring a country manager first — the most common choice — locks in more than 20 million yen a year, which is what a single hire costs. On top of that, dismissal is difficult in Japan, so a bad hire turns into a large loss. The organisations that already hold volumes of leads and a pipeline of realistic prospects are sales agencies and distributors. Building the pipeline through a sales agency first, and only then considering a country manager, gets you to success in Japan faster and at lower cost.
Thinking about Japan?
"We want to enter Japan but do not know where to start" is a perfectly good place to begin. Tell us about your product and we will give you an honest read on your chances here, at no cost.
Talk to us