CEOs of venture-funded and public firms grapple with the tremendous pressure to grow the business each and every quarter.
Sluggish Revenues, No Momentum
The figure depicts a common situation for enterprise software companies in Japanese markets: sluggish growth, negligible ARR growth, and lots of well-reasoned excuses.
The figure also depicts revenue acceleration of the main software company, introducing new products and services to its global portfolio.
However, Japan continues to flatline. They struggle getting new accounts, landing and expanding, and retaining the business.
In our work with US and EU software firms that sell into Japan markets, we find three contributing factors to sluggish growth and churn:
- Underperforming country managers
- Missing business capabilities
- Weak teamwork / talent pipelines
Probable Source of Sluggish Revenues
We also found that the missing business capabilities, weak teamwork and thin or non-existent talent pipelines track back to an underperforming country manager with these characteristics:
- Speaks and writes better English than closes deals
- Tolerates sub-par performance from reps and marketing
- Over-indexes on process metrics and does not build high-performing teams
- Does not inspire excellence and consistent unsupervised follow through by team members and partner
- Lacks initiative and creativity
So, now what?
Someone hired the underperforming country manager.
These comes done to three choices:
Let it bleed
Put a bandaid on it … but where?
Get after it → Schedule a 15-minute call and see if you are a good fit for how I work
Quick Fact Overview
- Metropolitan Tokyo clusters
- Metropolitan Tokyo clusters
• 37.46 million consumers, the highest density of middle class consumers in the world;
• 3,000-plus companies over $1B in turn-over; and
• 3.7 million small-to-midsize enterprises.
- Despite the sheer market size, a small technical labor pool and language barriers pose significant challenges in launching a country office
- Japan ranks 55th in English proficiency among 100 non-English speaking countries[4]
- This makes smooth entry a challenge.