[s1mplicissimus]

> 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

[rtpg]

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.

[aurareturn]

There is always that one person who writes that Europe is many countries. Yea, we know. But European countries also collectively represent themselves to the world through EU. Look at how Europe talks about the Greenland issue. It’s always a collective.

[s1mplicissimus]

I'll try to express this as a programming analogy:

You are correct that to the outside the EU market negotiates as a single entity, like, say, an interface:

  interface Market {
    interact(string payload)
  }

on the inside though you will quickly realize that the payload format is XML in one country, Json in another, a completely custom format in a third. And that's not even talking fields, names, types, semantics etc. Hope this could clarify the confusion.

[otabdeveloper4]

> As if the european market didn't consist of dozens of languages, legislations, cultures and histories.

Not really. They just use whatever the Americans give them. What are they gonna do anyways? Europe is a captive market. (As is the third world.)

[s1mplicissimus]

You seem to imply that the trade is only going in one direction. A quick lookup gave me (2024 data)

€334.8 billion worth of EU imports from the US

€532.3 billion worth of EU exports to the US

which shows a) that trade is heavily bidirectional and b) that US is importing more from EU than vice versa. So that doesn't add up to support your statement at all.