Word of advice: don’t do SaaS anymore. It’s over.
Selling SaaS in Japan
11–20 of 45 posts
Re: Selling SaaS in Japan
#12The "download service documents here" (something like サービス資料ダウンロード) call to action part is true. But everything else sounds like a marketing fluff for the company in the article. Like yes, the process is longer, but it's mostly due to risk-aversiveness of most of the companies.
Re: Selling SaaS in Japan
#13I run a successful SaaS biz in Japan. Its possible, but its waaay hard. The article is right in principle. Unless you are 110% all in on localizing and hiring lots of local staff, to the extent that you will give up priorities in other markets, its not worth trying. Otherwise its a waste of blood and treasure—a local player will eat your lunch.
A consultant like Nihonium or whatever wont be able to help you really. Like any good consultant, they will be there to tell you things you already know. The motivation to do it needs to come fundamentally from your own company.
And even after doing all that, VCs will still undervalue your company vs a similarly sized US company.
Re: Selling SaaS in Japan
#14> The process is different. You just can’t treat sales and go-to-market as a whole in Japan the same as you would in North America or Europe. As if the european market didn't consist of dozens of languages, legislations, cultures and histories. > When should a SaaS company consider reaching out to Nihonium? Aah, that's what the article is about
I think a big difference between Japan and many smaller markets is you are going to have local competitors in almost every sector that have some sort of buy in.
Even if you win on a feature matrix in theory (and is your feature matrix actually tailored to a local market!), the general sort of "well, local companies will be more responsive to our needs" is going to be very present.
Obviously people use Microsoft products for example but Microsoft has a _huge_ presence in Japan to support that. I have been on the receiving end of SaaS's trying to roll out their Japan sales strategy, and all the ones that got a nice and strong footing basically hired loads of local sales talent to do it.
Obviously Europe has a lot of fragmented business process things, but I think that many smaller European companies will be pretty habituated to buying services from outside the country because... well, there's no Salesforce Dot Com alternative based in Italy for example
(There are several SFDC alternatives in Japan)
Anyways the short thing is "buying services from abroad" is a perceived risk for Japanese enterprises because they will often not have to confront that issue, because the local market is "healthy"[0].
[0]: People will whine about the Japanese options being worse, but the options are at least there.
Re: Selling SaaS in Japan
#15Word of advice: don’t do SaaS anymore. It’s over.
Stripe's billions of dollars per year would suggest otherwise.
Re: Selling SaaS in Japan
#16[dead]
Re: Selling SaaS in Japan
#17The "download service documents here" (something like サービス資料ダウンロード) call to action part is true. But everything else sounds like a marketing fluff for the company in the article. Like yes, the process is longer, but it's mostly due to risk-aversiveness of most of the companies.
it is the "marketing fluff for the company in the article". Not sure why it got posted, just water is wet marketing text with no value.
Re: Selling SaaS in Japan
#18Brilliant article and thank you for sharing. Local payment methods seem to be a really huge thing. For instance, I'm told that in India most people want to use Google Pay, and even street vendors have QR codes at their stalls. If anyone can weigh in on that I'd love to hear about it.
Working in that area in Japan. I think I can provide some answers. Payment: CC are mostly used for BtoC but if you are a BtoB SaaS you want invoice and a local presence (ie no tax or currency shenanigans for your customer). Hand on sales: Don't expect customers to sign up for a free plan and convert. Your conversion rate will be close to 0. Mostly scammers. Instead: Contact form, Cold call, go out to events, lots of…
> Many people do not speak English
More like noone speaks English, plainly put
Re: Selling SaaS in Japan
#19Word of advice: don’t do SaaS anymore. It’s over.
What would gurus advise to do?
Re: Selling SaaS in Japan
#20It is interesting to see how the Japanese market validates the idea of sharing information instead of hiding it. I get annoyed when companies hide their features behind a contact form because I just want to do my own due diligence. Giving people the information they need to research independently seems like a much better way to sell software.