

Everything I’ve learned about selling SaaS in Japan - pwim
http://www.makeleaps.jp/blog/en/2012/05/everything-ive-learned-about-selling-saas-in-japan/

======
harisenbon
In my experience this is the money quote for selling in Japan:

"Japan has a culture based around personal networks and connections. Japanese
consumers look for consensus and poll their friends in making a buying
decision."

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.

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.

(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.

~~~
jason_tko
As someone who grew up with the same ethos, I can completely relate to this. I
also relate to the frustration in trying to explain your mindset.

I've always loved the two diametrically opposite sayings that Japan/The west
grew up with:

Japan: "The nail that sticks out, gets hammered down." West: "The squeaky
wheel gets the grease."

A very telling set of proverbs..!

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patio11
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.

~~~
jason_tko
In the beginning, we definitely seeded our growth with my iPad. I still do it
these days because it's fun and because the app works great on an iPad, but
fortunately we've got several other customer acquisition channels right now
that don't involve just me and an iPad :)

As AVTizzle says below as well, it's a fantastic way to learn more about your
customers and the problems they're facing.

~~~
minikomi
I'd love to see a breakdown of what "kinds" of customers are using makeleaps,
even how that's changed over time. Also, how are you dealing with the "inkan"
situation? Maybe it's less of a problem than I think to use a digital
representation?

~~~
jason_tko
Currently we're targeting freelancers and small businesses up to 10 people, so
this is the majority of our current user base.

With the inkan situation, we allow our customers to upload both their logo and
their inkan. When printed, it looks exactly the same as a 'stamped' inkan.
None of our customers have had any problems getting their MakeLeaps invoices
processed, which is the important thing. For your interest, we have some
printed samples here:

<http://www.makeleaps.com/en/q-a/#topic-sending-by-japan-post>

~~~
davyjones
> When printed, it looks exactly the same as a 'stamped' inkan

Would it hold in court in case of a dispute?

~~~
patio11
It is the routine and widely accepted practice of many Japanese corporations
to use electronic reproductions of their company seal for routine business
correspondence such as invoices. Be forewarned, if you ask me for a source,
I'm going to cite 常識。

~~~
davyjones
I see. I was specifically told by UFJ staff that a printout of a seal will not
work for some of my bank papers. Hence was curious.

Aside, if you are coming to Osaka sometime and have a free evening, do let me
know. Would love to hang out. Besides, I have to thank you in person for some
excellent advice that worked out very well.

~~~
harisenbon
The key part of Patrick's comment is "routine business correspondence."
Banking (or anything involving city/prefecture laws) are definitely not
routine business, and would require the use of an actual seal (銀行印） that is
registered with the city office.

When I was applying for my house loan, the exactitude of the forms I had to
fill out was staggering, and each needed to be hand-written, in a specific
format, with my personal seal that is registered with the city office. Any
mistakes means I had to rewrite the form.

My invoices to clients, on the other hand, are generally printed and sent with
the seal on them already. However, all of my clients do require printed
invoices to be mailed to them.

------
ceol
That was a really informative post about the culture— business and otherwise—
in Japan.

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 _exclusively_ to a foreign market. Was it just
because you saw it was ripe for disruption, or something else?

~~~
jason_tko
Hi there, thanks for your question.

Actually, I've been living in Japan for 11 years. I started my first business
in 2003, and I had all sorts of problems with invoicing. I built some custom
software to scratch my own itch. People started asking me about it more and
more, and eventually I partnered up with Paul Oswald, my technical co-founder
to try to bring a multi-tenanted solution to the Japanese market.

So, it was very much an evolution. I didn't wake up one day in Australia and
decide to build this in Japan. I think it'd be tremendously difficult to build
a solution like this without having a lot of direct exposure to the problems
and pain points that people sending quotes/invoices in Japan actually go
through.

~~~
ceol
Thanks for answering! Very interesting information.

------
mattm
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)?

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?

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?

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?

~~~
jason_tko
Hey Matt,

Sorry, just realised that's not completely clear. We communicate 100% in
Japanese with all our customers.

Those two are examples to make it easier for the English-only speaking reader
to understand.

Developing your application completely in English might be very suitable for
an English Language teaching tool. But not so suitable for a business critical
tool.

We've had varying degrees of success with different ways to sell, but the one
clear way to achieve success in Japan as you mention is social proof.

Basically the idea is to look for any way possible to display and feature
users who are using your system to other potential users and customers. I've
detailed a list of a few ways to do that for our kind of application. You're
welcome to use those, or come up with an approach that's more suitable for
your product.

Best of luck though - let me know how you go.

------
swalsh
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 :(

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?

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wmboy
Looks to be down atm, here's the Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.mak...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.makeleaps.jp/blog/en/2012/05/everything-
ive-learned-about-selling-saas-in-japan/)

~~~
jason_tko
Wmboy, thats actually an old version of the article. Is it possible to remove
that link?

------
tagawa
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.

~~~
jason_tko
Right - that's a really good idea. We've been getting approached by people
running these kinds of seminars who are interested to promote us, which is
nice.

Doing our own seminars (online and offline) is big on our radar as well
though.

~~~
tagawa
Slightly related, I think you should make MakeLeaps a bit more visible in the
Hacker News meetups, even if it's just a logo on the door or reception desk.
Alternatively, hand out the stickers you mentioned in the article. I'm sure
lots of us would be happy to stick them on our PCs to show appreciation.

------
dmix
This about page is awesome, <http://www.makeleaps.com/en/about/>

It even tells you the bank they use.

~~~
harisenbon
It's also very common to put the amount of capital that your company has on
the about page. When looking for vendors, a lot of companies will judge your
strength by the amount of capital you have listed there, which is why many
companies have stopped putting that number there. ;)

------
jason_tko
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.

~~~
harisenbon
Jason, WP can be a right pain in the ass, can't it?

While I have your ear, I have a question about your comments regarding getting
feedback:

You mention that you ask for feedback in your welcome mail as well as on
Twitter and FB, which are both in English. Do you find that a large number of
your users are open to the idea of using the English versions of your FB &
Twitter accounts? If so, do you find that this is a product of being in the
Tokyo area?

I used to sell security software and many of our competitors were using
solutions developed abroad that in many cases were not translated, or
translated poorly. In our experience even when the competition was leagues
better than our solution, we won out contracts because of full-Japanese
support, and the image of quality that comes from that. This may be a result
of being in the Nagoya area, but I was curious about your experiences with
"Japanese Only!" customers / clients.

Also, cheers on a great product, and that amazing hockey-stick of growth.

~~~
jason_tko
Of course, always happy to chat.

Absolutely agree on that. We discovered very quickly it was extremely
important to our customers to feel like we're a Japanese company. That's one
of the reasons why we're very careful about our Japanese image, marketing and
communication.

Especially for something like a security tool (or an invoicing application),
image is critically important. I don't believe that's localised to Nagoya, I
think it's a Japan-wide thing.

We had almost zero engagement with our English Twitter/FB. Things turned
around when we went fully Japanese with Twitter and FB.

------
jetz
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?

~~~
jason_tko
Apple is kind of a special case for a few reasons. There are definitely
parallels though.

Apple shot to popularity in America first before Japan, leading the way for
Japanese consumers.

Insanely great customer service is definitely a big part of Apple's way of
doing business, considering the genius bar strategy.

They also have a large team on the ground here. Steve Jobs identified Japan as
a huge opportunity, and flew here to hire the Japan CEO himself years and
years ago.

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

~~~
jason_tko
We weren't actually planning to publish this on HN until later - we were fine-
tuning our cache in Wordpress, when it shot to #1 on HN. Doh! Good
advertisement to use a service like WP Engine.

Of course, all our users are still using the main application site with no
problems.

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

~~~
jason_tko
Cheers - thanks for the well wishing! :)

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

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

~~~
jason_tko
Because we view ourselves as more of a business automation service, as opposed
to a pure invoicing and quoting service.

The idea is that with a good online system, you can get rid of a lot of the
crappy work, and make leaps in your business.

------
bluedanieru
>Japanese consumers favour websites with very dense content, and little
whitespace.

It's not just websites, all their software is like that.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
culturestate
> Do they favor it? Or do they just put up with it?

They put up with it, for a couple of reasons. First is the absolute domination
of the internet by mobile phones running proprietary "versions" of the web,
and second is the language barrier - the newest ideas and techniques from the
west simply don't get translated, or get translated poorly.

I've recently taken a job running UI/UX for a Japanese software company, and
let me tell you - it's an uphill battle.

~~~
bluedanieru
You mean i-mode, ezWeb, etc? They aren't as dominant as they used to be
though, right? A mobile site has to support both an i-mode and a mobile web
version now, so i-mode is in a sort of IE6 situation? Not as far along yet of
course, but getting there.

~~~
culturestate
No, it's not as bad as it was in, say, 2007 ;) But it's still dominant.

For a large percentage of Japanese, the cell phone _is_ their personal
computer (and camera, and wallet...). If they own a desktop or laptop at all,
it's rarely used. Obviously iPhone and Android look, to us, like nirvana in
such a society but there's hesitancy there because (1) by and large they lack
some key features like NFC and (2) switching carriers in Japan is, to borrow a
Jobsism, a bag of hurt. It can be done, but you'll leave a lot of yourself
behind.

------
macspoofing
>Error establishing a database connection

Poetic.

