Everything I’ve learned about selling SaaS in Japan

In my experience this is the money quote for selling in Japan:<p>"Japan has a culture based around personal networks and connections. Japanese consumers look for consensus and poll their friends in making a buying decision."<p>When door to door salesmen or telemarketers try to sell me things in Japan, they always start off with "Everyone in your area is doing XX" or "You're the only one in your area that isn't on XX yet."(1) It ticks me off to no end, but my wife (Japanese) actually starts reconsidering sales propositions when she hears that everyone else around her is doing the same thing.<p>As an American, I grew up with the phrase "If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?" instilled in me. Talking with my Japanese friends, they seem to find that saying very odd -- if everyone else is jumping off the bridge, there must be some merit to it, they try to reason.<p>(1) A network provider tried to convince me that I was the only house in the neighborhood who was not yet on the optical network. My neighbors are pretty much all over the age of 60, and many of them probably do not own a computer more powerful than a cellphone.

If you learn one thing from Jason, I'd suggest the "customer development interview as sales.". It blows my mind, but he's getting that adoption graph largely by taking his iPad around Tokyo, demoing prospects, and signing them up on the spot. Never would have considered this myself.

That was a really informative post about the culture— business and otherwise— in Japan.<p>A question for Jason, should he read this: I'd love to hear your personal reason for developing with the Japanese market specifically in mind. I think it's unique for a company that's not well-known to break into a foreign market. Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc all have some presence, but I've rarely seen a company cater <i>exclusively</i> to a foreign market. Was it just because you saw it was ripe for disruption, or something else?

Thanks a lot Jason. This is very useful. As someone who does not yet have the ability to converse well in Japanese, would this hinder my ability to sell to Japanese people even if they speak English (I am developing a product for the English-language school market)?<p>You mention you "ask for comments in our welcome email, our support page, and also on Twitter (English) and Facebook (English)." Do you do this in Japanese as well or do you find that people are more comfortable giving feedback in English as opposed to Japanese?<p>Although I don't have much experience with Japanese companies, sometimes I get the impression that the Western benefits that are usually touted for products (save money or time) do not apply as well here. Have you had experiences like that?<p>If you are starting out and don't really have many (or any) customers to offer as social proof, what can you say to convince someone to make a change to your system?

This is probably a better thread than any to ask this question. My company recently began making some progress in the Japanese market. On my most recent trip, it began to be obvious why we were having issues earlier. One of our sales managers is consistently drunk while doing demos :(<p>Of course I, and the rest of my states side colleagues were astonished, but the japanese, and more importantly the customers did not see how this was a major problem. I'm still having a hard time seeing if this is true, can any of you who are more familiar with Japanese culture expand how japanese culture respects alcoholics in the workplace?

Looks to be down atm, here's the Google cache: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.makeleaps.jp/blog/en/2012/05/everything-ive-learned-about-selling-saas-in-japan/" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.mak...</a>

Thanks Jason - a great look into doing business in Japan and relevant for large as well as small businesses IMO. Especially interesting are the methods you used to break out of the no-users-without-social-proof vicious circle. Another option is to hold instructional events or seminars which could help potential customers feel more comfortable, both in terms of seeing others in the same position and being reassured of who they'd be buying from.

This about page is awesome, <a href="http://www.makeleaps.com/en/about/" rel="nofollow">http://www.makeleaps.com/en/about/</a><p>It even tells you the bank they use.

We were just in the middle of re-working our WP caching - unfortunately it was a bit early to get a HN blast...! We're working on it now.

Jason great post thanks. AFAIK, they didn't do most of what you say. Maybe because of uber-popularity of Apple. What is your take on Apple in Japan?

Wow, makeleaps.jp is completely down. A bunch of traffic to a blog post managed to take down the business' entire site. Hmm.

Jason &#38; Paul, great to see you guys ramping up the hockey stick. Always watching what you guys do, and best of luck!

A bit off-topic, but some of the Q&#38;A answers are missing spaces after dots.

How did you guys come up with "MakeLeaps" for an invoicing and quotes service?

&#62;Japanese consumers favour websites with very dense content, and little whitespace.<p>It's not just websites, all their software is like that.<p>Japanese sites just seem poorly put together in both design and implementation to me. Confusing layout (and I base this on watching Japanese use them, not just from using them myself), takes 20 clicks to do anything, shitty back-end tech, search results always seem to be awful, etc. Do they favor it? Or do they just put up with it? I suspect it's the former myself, as well, but if you've looked into it a bit I'd certainly like to hear about it.<p>It might be similar to what happened with cell phones here where for a long time the accepted wisdom was that the Japanese market demanded all kinds of quirky hardware bullshit that no one else in the world would care about, so you had to design phones especially for it. I guess you saved money on making the software because it was always terrible and an afterthought for those phones. Then Apple and Softbank came along and ate their lunch.<p>The Japanese consumer might be starting to become ever so dimly aware that software is important, too. There might be hope that the days of the shitty Japanese landing page are numbered.

&#62;Error establishing a database connection<p>Poetic.