If you’re expanding into Japan, alignment between sales and marketing needs to be built around how decisions actually move inside Japanese organisations, not around how your UK pipeline is structured. Most UK teams operate with a fairly standard model. Marketing generates demand, sales qualifies opportunities, and both functions are measured on visible progression through pipeline. That works reasonably well in markets where buying decisions move through direct commercial con

I’ve seen UK companies make the same mistake in Japan more times than I can count. The website gets translated, pricing is adjusted, someone bilingual is hired, and then everyone waits for things to move. And they don’t. The issue is rarely the translation itself. In most cases, the translation is accurate. What doesn’t carry across is everything around it - how your argument is structured, what counts as proof, who's delivering the message, how relationships develop, and the

The mistake most companies make when they enter Japan is treating it like a localisation exercise, when in reality your proposition itself usually needs to change. You translate the positioning, adjust your sales deck, bring in a partner, and the early signals look fine. Meetings happen, people engage properly, nothing gets challenged in a way that forces you to rethink anything, and there's enough positive feedback to assume the core message is landing. Internally, that gets

Entering Japan often starts well enough that it’s easy to assume you’ve got things broadly right. Meetings happen, people engage, and the proposition makes sense without much resistance. There’s no obvious pushback, nothing that suggests you need to re-think what you’re doing, and the overall feel is that you’re getting traction. At that stage, most businesses assume the fundamentals are in place and that what follows is just a matter of execution. Then, the pace changes. No

There’s a moment many agencies experience. A client wins business in Japan. Or decides to expand there. Or is acquired by a group with Japanese operations. Suddenly, the agency is expected to “ support Japan .” The team can arrange to translate assets. They can adapt creative. They can brief local partners. But beneath the surface there’s uncertainty: Are we positioning this correctly? Will this resonate? Are we about to make an expensive cultural mistake? This is where white

When a client tells you they’re entering Japan, the instinctive response inside most UK agencies is operational. Translate the website. Localise the deck. Find a PR partner. Test some paid media. None of those things are wrong. But none of them, on their own, determine success. The real risk in Japan isn’t language. It’s misalignment between proposition and buyer expectations, between sales velocity and decision culture, between Western confidence and Japanese caution. If you

Most UK businesses expanding into Japan start with their website. That makes sense. It’s visible, tangible, and feels like progress. It’s also where many of them quietly lose momentum. Pages get translated. A Japanese domain is added. Navigation is tweaked. Sometimes a local agency is brought in to “make it feel right for Japan”. And yet, months later, the same pattern emerges. Traffic arrives, but engagement feels thin. Sales conversations take longer to get going. Buyers se

Most Western case studies are written to impress. They’re designed to be skimmed. Big logos. Clear challenge. Strong result. A neat before-and-after story that proves value quickly and confidently. In Japan, that approach often lands flat. Not because Japanese buyers don’t care about outcomes - they do - but because outcomes alone don’t remove risk. And in Japanese B2B buying, risk management is part of the job. Why Western Case Studies Feel Incomplete When UK companies take

Entering the Japanese market is rarely held back by lack of ambition. More often, it’s slowed down by poor partner choices. I’ve seen UK businesses invest heavily in Japan, with a good product, a committed leadership team, and a real market opportunity - only to stall because the agencies and partners around them weren’t aligned, weren’t briefed properly, or weren’t equipped to work across cultures. Japan is not a market where you can outsource and forget. It's a market where

Most UK companies expanding into Japan don’t realise their sales deck is part of the problem. They’ve localised the website. They’ve hired a distributor or agency. They’ve translated the pitch. The slides look professional. The messaging is clear. And yet, sales cycles stretch. Meetings feel polite but inconclusive. Follow-ups stall. The instinctive response is to push harder. Add urgency. Clarify the value. Sharpen the close. This is just one of the many Japan go-to-marketi

When Western B2B companies try to enter the Japanese market, success rarely comes from launching the same campaigns that worked at home with language swapped out. Too often, the result is a well-translated, poorly received message - a classic example of “lost in translation”. The problem isn’t vocabulary. It’s context, culture, and business norms. Japan isn’t just another market - it’s a relationship-driven, consensus-oriented business environment with communication styles t

Japan is one of the most attractive B2B markets in the world. Large enterprises. Strong balance sheets. Long-term supplier relationships. High expectations of quality. It's also one of the easiest places to burn a year’s marketing budget without getting close to revenue. Many UK firms approach Japan as if it were simply 'another region' to launch into. They translate a website, appoint a distributor, run a few ads, attend a trade show, and wait for pipeline. When that pipelin

Japan is an attractive market for many B2B businesses from the UK. Large economy. Sophisticated buyers. High willingness to invest in quality. Strong long-term customer relationships once trust is established. And yet, I repeatedly see companies stall, burn budget, or quietly withdraw after 12-18 months with little to show for it. In most cases, the product wasn’t the problem. The opportunity was real. The issue was how the go-to-market approach was designed. Here are the mos

One of the most valuable and unexpected lessons in my career came from learning Japanese - not as a linguistic exercise, but as a way of understanding how language, culture, and meaning interact in marketing. It’s one thing to translate words. It’s another to 'translate meaning' in a way that resonates with the audience’s worldview. For example, when I worked on reviewing the Japanese edition of The Ideas Book , written by Kevin Duncan - comparing it to the original English v