Help the Japan buyer prepare a draft business case
Your Japan rep reports a strong meeting. The evaluator loves the product. Headquarters asks the standard question: has the champion started building the business case internally?
Three months later nothing has been submitted. The rep says the customer is still preparing the paperwork, and the deal quietly ages out.
Some deals die of budget freezes or shifting priorities.
But in many, your champion is not stalling. Your champion is being asked to author a document they have never written before, for a product they have owned for six weeks, in a format your company has never given them.
The unit of decision in Japan is a document, not a meeting
Global sales methodologies assume a champion who advocates in rooms. Japanese purchase decisions run through a ringi (稟議): a written proposal that circulates for approval, gathering sign-off at each level before the spend is authorised.
That changes what your champion needs from you. They do not need to be more convinced. They need text they can paste.
Research by Professional Tech Soken (Bengo4.com), surveying 312 CloudSign users between 25 September and 31 October 2024, found that 65.2% see problems with their own approval process.
The top three: too many people involved in completing the approval (41.0%), time spent on consultation and groundwork before the document is even written (35.9%), and too broad a range of decisions requiring one (31.6%).
Note that these respondents already use an electronic contracting service, so they sit at the digitised end of the market. The typical Japanese buyer’s experience is heavier than these numbers suggest.
The second figure is the one headquarters never sees. The groundwork happens before the document exists. Nothing appears in your CRM during that period, because nothing has been submitted.
The people who stop the deal are people your reps cannot reach
A survey by ProFuture and Macromill of 103 B2B marketing professionals, conducted 3 to 4 February 2026, asked which departments are hardest to reach from outside. The respondents are sellers describing their own reach, not buyers describing their approval routes, so read this as supporting colour rather than a map of who blocks a ringi.
The top three were corporate planning (29.1%), IT (27.2%), and HR and general affairs (23.3%). Finance and legal followed.
In many markets those functions are consulted. In a ringi they are on the routing path.
Their objection does not surface in your discovery call, it surfaces as a document that comes back to your champion with a comment, weeks later, without ever reaching your rep.
The same survey found only 9.7% of companies feel they reach decision-making executives directly. That is again a seller-side self-assessment with a small sample, 103 respondents, published by a company that sells media access to executives, so treat the figure as directional.
The operating conclusion holds regardless: design the deal on the assumption that your reps will not be in the room when it is decided.
What to hand over
Not a translated deck, and not a finished document either.
In the second wave of a joint survey by IDEATECH and Hiroyasu Kitagawa (fielded 25 to 26 May 2026, 330 valid responses, online panel), buyers named the ROI calculator as the most useful decision material at 55.4%. “Approval application support material” scored 14.2%.
A polished approval text does not get used just because you wrote it.
What gets used is material the buyer can rerun with their own numbers. Read those figures as rank order, not precision.
So hand over a Japanese-language skeleton at paste-in granularity, with blanks for the customer’s own figures, covering four things in the order objections arrive:
- The cost of doing nothing, in the customer’s own numbers. This goes before the benefit case
- The alternatives considered and why they were excluded. Japanese procurement expects a comparison. If your champion has to assemble it alone, the document comes back
- Anticipated objections and the answers, written for IT security, legal terms, and payment conditions. These are the departments above
- Days to go live and the hours required from the customer’s side. Left blank, approvers assume the worst case
Localisation here is not translation. A ROI slide built for a single economic buyer does not survive being pasted into a form that several departments read in sequence.
Two new fields, and one question your forecast is missing
Make the handover visible on the deal record rather than in the rep’s head. Most of it does not need a new field. Every field you add is more typing for the rep.
| What to track | Where and how | Who enters it | When it is required |
|---|---|---|---|
| How far the approval has climbed | No new field. Use the single approval-progress field on the deal: frontline agrees / manager approved / executive approved / decision final | Deal owner | When the deal moves into the approval stage |
| What to confirm with the customer next | No new field. Write it in the standard next-step field | Deal owner | Updated after every exchange with the customer |
| Decision deadline | New date field: the customer’s internal deadline, not your quarter end | Deal owner, asked of the customer | When the deal moves into the approval stage |
| Champion support level | New picklist: shares information / explains it internally / will submit the ringi | Deal owner proposes, manager checks in the weekly deal review | When the deal moves into the approval stage |
| Business case / ROI material sent | No new field. The email and attachment activity log covers it | Deal owner | When sent |
| The draft skeleton itself | No new field. Attach it to the deal; whether it was delivered is visible from the attachment | Deal owner | When delivered |
Do not create a separate approval-status field for the ringi handover. The same approval held in two fields means one of them goes stale.
How the approval-progress field feeds the forecast is covered in Forecast your Japan pipeline on approval progress, not rep confidence.
Neither of the two new fields can be answered when the deal is created, so require them as stage-exit criteria, not at creation.
The decision deadline is the one that changes forecasting. Headquarters asks the Japan team for a close date, and receives a date derived from your fiscal calendar.
The date that governs the outcome is the customer’s budget cycle and the submission deadline inside their approval process. Nobody has asked for it.
For headquarters
Three actions.
Fund the Japanese draft as a market-entry deliverable. It is a written asset, not a translation task, and it is the difference between a champion who wants to help you and a champion who can.
Add the fields before the next quarter, not after the post-mortem. Deals lost this way are recorded as timing or budget, so the pattern never reaches the executive summary.
Change the question in the pipeline review. Instead of asking how confident the rep is, ask how many of the open Japan deals have an approval draft attached. If the answer is none, before blaming the customer’s budget or priorities, you still have at least one move of your own left.
Many Japanese deals stall because the buyer has nothing to paste into their internal approval document. Ship a Japanese-language draft skeleton the buyer can fill with their own numbers, and track it on the deal record.
Related reading
How to keep those approval stages in your revenue forecast rather than in a rep’s confidence rating is covered in Forecast your Japan pipeline on approval progress, not rep confidence, which is the reporting layer on top of the handover described here.
Other notes on the same problem are collected under Japan market entry.