In Japan, the first meeting is not discovery. The shortlist already exists.

Your Japan rep runs the global first-call playbook. Rapport, then discovery: what problem are you trying to solve, what have you tried, what does it cost you today.

The meeting goes well. The notes are thin. The deal is forecast on the rep’s confidence, and eight weeks later it is still in the same stage.

The playbook is not wrong about selling. It is wrong about when it is being run. In a large Japanese purchase, the buyer finished the discovery phase before your rep was in the room.

The buyer arrives with the problem already defined

IDEATECH, a Japanese research firm, and Hiroyasu Kitagawa (Demagen Research Institute, formerly an executive officer at Microsoft Japan) surveyed 307 respondents between 23 and 26 March 2026 and published the results on 16 April 2026. Every respondent had been one of at least two people involved in a B2B purchase worth 3 million yen or more in annual contract value in the previous twelve months.

By the point of first substantive contact with a vendor:

• 70.4% had completed or largely completed the definition of the problem to be solved
• 49.5% had completed or largely completed the shortlisting of candidate vendors
• the buying process was, on average, about 40% complete
• 91.2% had used AI search or generative AI somewhere in the evaluation, most often to compare vendors (47.6%) and to research typical pricing (46.9%)

Two caveats belong in any use of these numbers. The sample is restricted to large, multi-stakeholder deals, so it is not a representative figure for Japanese B2B buying overall. And IDEATECH published the study to promote its own research service.

Neither caveat changes what it means for a first meeting. When your rep asks what problem the buyer is trying to solve, roughly seven in ten are being asked to repeat, out loud, an answer they finished writing weeks ago, often with a language model.

The shortlist has two or three seats, and one is still open

The same survey contains the finding that should change the meeting rather than cancel it.

More than eight in ten respondents added a vendor to their candidate list that they first learned about through sales contact. 34.2% said that vendor made the final shortlist. Meanwhile, the final comparison stage came down to two or three vendors for roughly 70% of deals, with only 6.8% deciding without comparing at all.

So the first meeting is not discovery and it is not hopeless. It is the audition. The comparison table exists, it has two or three rows, and one of them can still be yours.

Discovery questions do not get you onto that table. They tell the buyer you have not read the table.

Five questions, in this order

The reordering is small and it changes what your CRM knows about the deal.

1. What would make this hour worth your time? Fixes the buyer’s expectation before you spend it. In Japan a first meeting that ends warmly but without an agreed next step is the most common way a deal dies.
2. What is each of you responsible for in this evaluation? Decision maker, operational owner, or information gathering. Your global playbook asks for the economic buyer, which assumes a person. Here the honest answer is usually a set of departments.
3. Which vendors are you comparing, and on what criteria? The reasons buyers dropped a vendor were insufficient fit to their specific problem (39.1%), a sense that the vendor was wrong for a company of their size (34.5%), and no reference customer resembling them (26.4%). Run the standard demo without asking, and you will never learn which of the three removed you.
4. Whose approval is needed internally before this can be signed? In the same survey, 60.9% of deals passed through two approval stages, more than 80% through two or more, and roughly 80% involved between two and four departments. This is the question that determines the forecast, and it is the one the global playbook never asks.
5. Why now? The deadline or external event creating urgency. Without one, a Japanese deal does not lose. It stays under consideration indefinitely.

Discovery of the pain comes after question five, and it comes as your hypothesis for the buyer to correct rather than as an open question for them to answer from scratch.

Note what is not claimed here. There is no published primary data on the number of individuals in a Japanese buying committee. Figures circulating on that point come from a US study and are quoted as though they were Japanese. Departments and approval stages are measured. Headcount is not.

What headquarters should change

Add two fields to the deal record: competing vendors and number of approval stages. Both come from questions three and four. Both are objective. Neither depends on how the rep felt about the call.

Stop scoring the first meeting on discovery notes. Score it on whether the rep learned the comparison set and the approval path, and whether a specific next meeting is in the calendar.

Do not let the local team translate the global discovery script. Translation preserves the sequence, and the sequence is the problem. Reorder it first, then translate.

Read a thin first-meeting note as a process failure, not a language barrier. If the record says the buyer is interested and nothing else, the rep ran a script written for a buyer who has not yet started.

In Japan the first meeting is not discovery, it is the one chance to be added to a shortlist that already exists. Ask about the comparison set and the approval chain before you ask about pain.

Related reading

Once you know the approval chain from question four, the next deliverable is the document that travels it, which is covered in In Japan, your champion cannot write the business case. Write it for them..

Other notes on the same problem are collected under Sales process.