Comment by 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.