Preparing the groundwork for scalable growth
Long distances from headquarters, infrequent in-person meetings, and remote-only weekly updates induce Japan teams to overfocus on short-term goals.
When an “over there” vacuum combines with insufficient marketing aircover (leads), inadequate sales enablements (presentations, explainer videos, etc.) and limited bootstrapped resources, Japan teams find themselves putting out fires.
Short-term focus may deliver lots of tactical results and will certainly feel “busy and productive”. However, this limited focus flattens bold goals and aspirations into “getting by” and settling for “good enough”.
Most international software firms will pay the full cost, plus compounded interest, of not instilling core values in action from the start. In Japan, that translates into a lot of pain six to nine months later.
This makes it even more important to have a country manager with sound judgement who can stay building the growth foundation for long-term success.
More than just experience, it’s a mindset.
Earning the right to win recurring revenues
The pressure to bring in short-term revenue can be so great that local Japan teams will, if not led by an effective and mature country manager, to structure deals with customers at the last minute and under unfavorable contract terms.
Deals slip at the end of the quarter with little more than articulate “explanations”.
Working backwards from strategic outcomes – recurring revenues, net retention of 105% and the sustained ability to scale the business – preempts cutting corners and taking huge haircuts just to make a quarter happen.
Often this means pre-packaging technology, professional services and new feature development into a customized solution with a performable business case.
Enterprise Japan customers will pay a fair price for tangible value.
In a cold-start to land the first five customers, the country manager and team focus on selling deliverable solutions, not technology.
To scale with increasing efficiency beyond a handful of early adopters, country manager and team on pipeline health, accurate forecasts and team selling.
Success flows from a persistent focus on the “end-use customers of enterprise buyers, building a culture of excellence and weeding out chronic low-performers.
Scaling profitable growth with 105% retention
The steady week-over-week progress toward building recurring revenues, what we call Retention Kaizen, solves most of the traditional issues that plague an “over there” country operations: opaque updates, inconsistent performance, and eroding credibility.
We recommend one overarching goal for scaling growth: Achieving a net retention rate of 105 percent.
This accommodates weeding out unprofitable customers, sins of the past: the by-any-means necessary cold start or attempts to gin-up quarterly sales results.
Excellence in account-based marketing, sales, and customer success provide the foundation for profitable growth.
However, excellence requires having hard conversations with under-performers, always-be-recruiting top talent, and doing the right thing even when tempted by short-sighted wins and inducements.
We address this head-on: many otherwise great executives succumb to pressures and daily whirlwinds. They’re busy, working crazy long hours but are not focused on the ONE THING to accomplish in any given day.
The Total Mindset team becomes a wingman and steady beacon of strategic progress for the country manager and key team members.
We focus on systematizing land-and-expand tactics and playbooks.
We speed the development of data-driven customer acquisition systems, building an interactive executive dashboard that summarizes pipeline health and lead velocity as well as team and role-based KPIs.
