EN
Japan Market Entry & Sales Support for Foreign Companies
SalesBuilder is a 35-person Japanese sales team that sells for foreign companies entering Japan: exhibition support, marketing, and outbound and inbound sales development. No local entity required.
Japan Market Entry & Sales Support
Your sales team
in Japan.
Real reps. Real meetings. Real deals.
SalesBuilder is a 35-person Japanese sales organization that sells on behalf of foreign companies entering Japan. We staff your trade shows, build your demand generation, and run the outbound and inbound motion that turns interest into signed business. You do not need an entity or a single local hire to start.
+470%
Lead creation growth across client engagements
+700%
Growth in qualified meetings booked
50+
Industries sold into by our reps
35
Sales specialists on the team in Tokyo
Why Japan
The world’s fourth-largest economy, and one of its least contested.
Japan spent four decades as the world’s second-largest economy, and it still carries the purchasing power that came with it. What makes it unusual is the buying behavior: Japanese companies change vendors slowly and stay for years. That makes the first contract hard to win and remarkably durable once you have it. Foreign competition remains thin, mostly because the entry work is unglamorous rather than because the demand is not there.
Nearly 60% of foreign-affiliated companies already operating in Japan name hiring sales and marketing talent as their single hardest challenge, more than any other function. JETRO, 2025. Japan does not need more good products. It needs someone who can sell them.
Entering Japan alone is harder than it looks.
The product is rarely the problem. What stops foreign companies in Japan is that there is no one here to carry the commercial motion, and the market gives very little credit to companies operating from a distance.
Nobody here to sell it
Japanese buyers and distributors move on trust and introductions. Outreach that arrives from overseas, in English, from a company with no local presence, mostly goes unanswered. Hiring your own Japanese sales lead takes six to twelve months and is the hardest role in the market to fill.
The follow-up window is short
Interest from a trade show or an inbound inquiry cools within days. Japanese buyers expect a same-day, Japanese-language response, and read a slow reply as a signal about how you will behave as a supplier.
Translated marketing does not land
A translated deck reads like a translated deck. Japanese buyers evaluate vendors through different proof points, formats, and levels of detail, and material that converts at home routinely reads as thin or unserious here.
What We Run For You
Three services. One accountable team.
Use one service or all three. Every engagement is scoped to your target volume, product complexity, and the stage you are at in the market.
01
Exhibition Support
Booth traffic, on-site selling, and follow-up
We run your Japanese trade show end to end: booth design, PR to drive traffic before the doors open, native reps selling on the floor, and same-week follow-up on every card collected.
Learn more02
Marketing Support
Demand generation built for Japan
Landing pages, sales collateral, video, seminars, paid media into an SDR motion, taxi advertising and OOH, and influencer work, all produced in Japanese.
Learn more03
Sales Support
Outbound and inbound, run as your team
Native-language outbound to open new accounts, distributors, and trading companies, plus an inbound desk that answers and qualifies every inquiry on Japan time.
Learn moreWho Sells For You
The people who built modern B2B selling in Japan. Working as your reps.
Our reps come out of the companies that define Japanese sales. Keyence runs one of the most profitable direct sales operations in the world, selling without distributors at operating margins above 50%, and its sales training is treated in Japan the way an investment banking analyst program is treated elsewhere. Recruit, the owner of Indeed, produced the playbook most Japanese sales organizations still run today.
That matters because you are not buying translation or introductions. You are buying people who have carried a quota in this market, know how a Japanese purchasing committee actually decides, and can hold a technical conversation on your behalf on the first call.
35
Sales specialists in Tokyo
3
From Keyence, the benchmark for Japanese direct sales
2
From Recruit, the parent company of Indeed
3
Former sales directors at major staffing firms
Working language with your head office is English. Chinese and Korean are available on selected engagements. All selling into the Japanese market is done by native Japanese speakers.
How It Works
A go-to-market plan first. Then the people to execute it.
We do not start dialling on day one. Every engagement runs through the same six steps, and you see the strategy before anyone contacts the market on your behalf.
Discovery and ICP
We start with a working session on your product, your best existing customers, and where you already win. From that we define the ideal customer profile for Japan, which is rarely a copy of the one that works at home.
Hypothesis from proven plays
We map your case against engagements our reps have already run across more than 50 industries, and form a hypothesis about which buyer, which message, and which route into the market opens fastest.
Go-to-market strategy
We build the Japan GTM plan: positioning, pricing posture, whether you go direct or through distributors, and the order in which segments get attacked.
Target list from 10M+ companies
We extract your target account list from a database of more than 10 million Japanese companies, filtered down to the ICP rather than bought as a generic list.
Inbound and outbound execution
Outbound opens accounts and distributors, marketing and PR generate the inbound, and the desk answers and qualifies everything in Japanese on Japan time.
Find the growth pocket, then push
We review weekly where the response is genuinely strong. Once a segment shows real traction, we concentrate resource into it and drive it hard instead of spreading effort evenly.
Not a vendor. Your Japan growth team.
| Capability | Interpreter | Booth agency | Local hire | Trading co. | SalesBuilder |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Native sales professionals, not greeters | – | ○ | ○ | ● | ● |
| Live on the market in weeks, not quarters | ● | ● | – | ○ | ● |
| Exhibition, marketing, and sales in one team | – | – | – | – | ● |
| Outbound account and distributor development | – | – | ○ | ● | ● |
| You keep pricing and the customer relationship | ○ | ○ | ● | – | ● |
| Scales up or down without a headcount decision | ○ | ○ | – | ○ | ● |
● full · ○ partial · – none
Japanese enterprises trust us with their own sales.
This is the proof point that matters most for a foreign entrant. Selling in Japan is not a translation problem, it is a credibility problem, and the companies below chose us to carry their own revenue in their own market. If Japanese enterprises trust our reps in front of Japanese buyers, that is the same capability we point at your product.
We work with foreign companies selling into Japan, including Aikido in security software, and with cross-border engagements such as Etria, the Toshiba Tec and Ricoh joint venture.
Company names are shown for reference of past and present engagements and do not constitute an endorsement. Results such as lead and meeting growth reflect outcomes from our Japanese-market engagements and vary by period, product, and conditions.
How Engagements Work
Priced like a team, not like a project.
We are transparent about this because the alternative wastes everyone’s time. Running a real sales operation in Japan has a fixed cost, and any partner who tells you otherwise is either not staffing it properly or is charging you elsewhere.
Setup
A one-time fee to scope the market, rebuild your materials in Japanese, and brief the reps who will carry your product.
Monthly retainer
Covers the team running your motion, scoped to the services you use and your target volume. Engagements run annually.
Performance component
Exhibition work additionally carries performance-based pricing, charged per qualified appointment generated on the floor.
Exact figures depend on the service mix, target volume, and product complexity. We will give you a specific number on the first call rather than after three meetings.
Before you talk to us.
How do you charge?+
A setup fee plus a monthly retainer, scoped to the services you use, on an annual engagement. Exhibition work additionally carries performance-based pricing per qualified appointment. We give you the specific numbers on the first call.
Do we need a legal entity or local team in Japan?+
No. SalesBuilder acts as your on-the-ground sales presence, so you can prove demand and build a pipeline before you commit to an entity or a local hire.
Who actually does the selling?+
Japanese native sales professionals from Keyence, Recruit, and major staffing firms, working as your reps. Your head office deals with us in English.
How fast can we start?+
Setup runs across the first two weeks. Live selling begins while Japanese-language materials are still being finalized in parallel, so you are not waiting on collateral to reach the market.
What if we only need one service, not all three?+
Exhibition Support, Marketing Support, and Sales Support each run standalone or combined. Most companies start with the show they have already committed to, or with outbound into a defined account list.
Do you sell through distributors or direct to end users?+
Both, and the right answer depends on your category. We open distributor and trading company relationships where that is the efficient route, and develop end users directly where it is not. You keep pricing and the customer relationship either way.
Which industries do you work in?+
Our reps have sold into more than 50 industries. The strongest current momentum for foreign entrants is B2B SaaS and AI, healthcare and aging care, industrial and manufacturing, consumer and food and beverage, and pharmaceuticals.
Let’s Talk
Tell us what you sell. We will tell you how it sells here.
A first call is a working session, not a pitch. Bring your product and your target buyer, and you will leave with a read on the Japanese market, the likely route in, and a specific number for what an engagement costs.
Prefer email? aron.umezu@salesbuilder.jp
Your sales team in Japan
