Is your leader enterprise or channel?

What is the right background for a Japan country manager?

I had lunch with a founding partner at a venture capital firm recently, and over the same couple of weeks I sat down with a few country managers and regional vice presidents.

The conversation kept landing in the same place, how you actually win in Japan. That is most of my job, because what I am doing for clients is screening for people who can deliver it.

The question that comes up almost every time is whether the leader should come from high touch enterprise sales or from channel. Someone will argue for another function, but it comes back to those two, because whatever else it is, the Japanese subsidiary of a global company is a sales office, no matter how big it gets.

The case for channel is straightforward. The system integrators and the large resellers already hold the enterprise relationships, some of them going back decades, and those relationships are personal as much as commercial. They will open that access, but only once you have product market fit and they can see something in it for themselves.

The case for high touch is that it is the only way you control your own message. You are in front of the customer yourself, supported by field marketing, rather than relying on someone else to explain what you do.

The answer changes with the stage of the business.

If you are early and nobody knows your name, you need both, and high touch is the part you cannot skip. You have no brand, so you have to create the customer interest yourself and then deliver through the channel. That is also how partners learn your sales model, by watching you sell it. Once they start winning on their own account you can bring more partners on and it starts to build.

At the other end, a large business with real brand value in Japan can run much more of its revenue through the channel and hire a channel oriented leader to do it, as long as there is a strong high touch sales leader underneath.

The hard part is the middle. You have proven product market fit and now you have to scale, and you are choosing between building a large high touch sales team, which is expensive and risky, and hiring AEs in this market is hard enough on its own, or putting that money into channel enablement and partner marketing instead.

Looking at the IT vendors that have really scaled here, the partners were critical at that stage. But the earlier high touch work is what made it possible, because it produced the proofs of concept and the first deals that got partners off the ground, and once partners can see money in it they start training their people and assigning more of them to you.

So when I take a brief for one of these roles, the first thing I want to settle is which of those three stages the business is actually in, because that is what decides the background I should be screening for.

A related shift comes up in the same conversations, from feature led selling to solution selling. I will do that one separately.