Your first hire in Japan should not be a salesperson

Your first hire in Japan should not be a salesperson. I know that sounds backwards. HQ has decided to enter Japan, the entity is registered, the office is leased, and then comes the question I've heard dozens of times. Who do we hire first?

Eight out of ten executives say a salesperson. The logic is clean. We came to Japan to sell. Without orders, everything else is cost. Orders first, then people.

I don't buy it. In the cases I've watched, most entities that hired a salesperson first replaced that person within six to twelve months. The others kept the person, and the company barely moved in year one.

One I saw up close

A foreign company entered Japan and hired a salesperson first. After he joined, it turned out the industry requires a license in Japan before you can sell your own product. The license took a year and a half. For that year and a half, the only thing he could do was resell other companies' products for a thin margin and keep the lights on.

It wasn't his fault. He was hired to sell, and he sold what he could. There was just nothing of his own to sell, and anyone could have found that out before hiring him.

Sales can't sell what doesn't exist yet

HQ pictures the Japan salesperson walking in with the product and walking out with an order. What actually happens is that the customer asks a few questions, and he can't answer any of them.

Do you have Japanese product materials and a quote? Is the contract under Japanese law or a translation of the home version? If something breaks, who comes, and how fast? Does your invoicing and payment term match Japanese practice? Any customers in Japan? Does this need a license, and do you have it?

The salesperson can't answer any of these alone. HQ could answer some of them. But HQ doesn't know what Japanese customers ask, and the sales report just says "customer is considering." Between the two sits a gap that nobody owns.

Deals die there.

I wrote in What foreign companies struggle with most in Japan that the real gap between HQ and the entity is granularity. Language is the smaller problem. Hiring sales first hands the vaguest stage of the whole project to the person who needs the most detail.

The first hire is a translator

I don't mean a job title. I mean someone who can take what HQ has and turn it into something a Japanese customer can buy.

Translation here covers a lot. Product: which features work in Japan and which must change. Compliance: licenses, contracts, invoicing, personal data. Pricing: payment habits and price bands. And the delivery promise, meaning who stands behind it. Nobody knows all of that. The person you want knows who to ask for each piece, and can put the answers together into a proposal a Japanese buyer can read.

In Japan this person rarely comes from sales. The backgrounds I see most often are PMO or business development inside a foreign company's Japan entity, an overseas business division at a large Japanese company, or the number two at another foreign company's Japan entity. What they have in common is years of standing between two logics.

Once this person is in place, the second hire is the salesperson. By then there is something to sell.

Same logic, different industry

I once built an engineering team from zero in Shanghai. The first hire wasn't an engineer. It was a tech recruiter. The second was a junior engineer with little experience. The first tech lead was hire number five.

People asked why I didn't start with the strongest engineer. Because the strongest engineer doesn't know who in the Shanghai market can be poached, how to talk to them, or what they cost. The person who can build the team comes first. The people who produce come after. A first hire isn't there to deliver output. Their job is to make it possible for the next people to come in and work.

A Japan entity works the same way. The first hire doesn't close deals. They make it possible to close deals in Japan at all.

Finding them, and paying them

There aren't many of these people in Japan, and they're rarely looking. They don't send resumes and don't read job ads. Their current seat is usually fine.

I still start with a talent map. I mean a picture of the pool, not a list of names. Take the people who have been through zero-to-one inside a foreign entity in Japan, and find out which companies they sit in and at what level. Only then decide who to approach. I wrote about it in A talent map is not a list.

Executives also ask what to pay. This person usually costs more than the first salesperson. You can't make up the difference with commission either, because what they do in year one won't show up in revenue. I budget at the level of a GM candidate for a foreign Japan entity. The sales band is too low. Market context is in Japan's wages since 1945.

When sales first is fine

There are exceptions. If the product is already used in Japan, say through a distributor or cross-border e-commerce, and the Japanese materials, contract template and support flow have been through a cycle, then yes, hire sales first. Someone has already done the translation.

The other case: the product needs almost no localization, the customers are your home country's companies operating in Japan, and deals are done in your language, your way. Sales first works there too. But that isn't entering the Japanese market. That's doing home-country business in Japan.

All of this comes from B2B, with meaningful deal sizes and real localization work. For consumer goods, games or pure online SaaS, I haven't seen enough cases to say who the first hire should be.

When your company entered Japan, who was the first hire? Were they still there six months later?