Pick Japan webinar topics from first-meeting questions
HQ marketing sends Japan the quarter’s webinar calendar: an industry outlook, a product launch, an analyst session. Japan translates the slides, adds a Japanese speaker, and gets a respectable number of sign-ups.
Meanwhile, in almost every first meeting, the Japan account executive hears the same question. “After we buy this, who on our side does the work, and how much of it?” The AE spends close to half the meeting on it, for example, and answers from memory. The answer is not in the webinar deck or on the Japanese site.
Marketing is looking for topics that draw people. Buyers are stuck on something else.
Pick Japan webinar topics from the questions Japanese buyers keep asking in first meetings, not from the global calendar. The questions are already written down in the AEs’ meeting notes.
This note is for the Japan marketing lead who owns the local webinar calendar, and for the HQ field marketing team that funds it. What to count after a webinar, instead of attendance, is in “Your Japan webinars fill up. Your pipeline does not move.” That note says to narrow each webinar to one problem you can solve. It does not say where to find that problem. This note does.
Before meeting sales, buyers in Japan get stuck on running the thing, not on the market
A joint survey by IDEATECH and Hiroyasu Kitagawa of Demagen Soken (published June 2026, fielded 25 to 26 May 2026, n=330; an online survey of people in Japan who took part, with at least one colleague, in purchases of B2B software, SaaS, IT infrastructure or security with annual contract value of 5 million yen or more) asked what the buying side found hard to judge on its own before talking to a vendor’s sales team.
The top answer was estimating the operating workload after go-live, at 56.3%. Feature comparison followed at 47.1%, and ROI estimation at 41.5%.
In the same survey, the item most often named as having no effect on the purchase decision was general industry trend reports, at 49.5%.
The survey was run by a firm whose business is survey-based PR, and it covers only large purchases with several people involved. Read the figures as rough magnitudes. What they do suggest is that the questions buyers in Japan carry into the first meeting are about life after go-live, not about the industry. The survey does not compare Japan with other markets. The point is not that Japanese buyers are unusual; it is that your Japan calendar should come from Japan’s questions.
The rest is my view. An outlook webinar is not wrong. It serves people who have not yet put their problem into words. The people who are stuck have already put it into words, in front of your AE.
Pull candidate topics from the last ten Japanese first meetings
A survey asking attendees what they want to hear next reaches people who already attend, and the answers drift toward broad topics. Start from what buyers actually asked.
- Take the last ten first meetings in Japan. Any that have notes, a meeting summary or a recording transcript attached to the deal. Include lost deals
- Write down each question the buyer asked, one per line. Only what the buyer asked, not what the AE presented. Keep the buyer’s wording, in Japanese. If there is a recording, note how many minutes the question took
- Group questions that mean the same thing and count them. A question that comes up in three or more of the ten is a candidate
Japan marketing drafts the list, and the AE who ran each meeting confirms “yes, that is what they asked.” Marketing often cannot see deal notes or call recordings, so agree the purpose and access with the Japan sales lead or CRM admin first, and check what the recording consent covers.
If notes are thin, asking each AE for one question from each of their last five first meetings is enough to start. Do not add a new field for this.
A list might look like this, sorted by count:
| Question the buyer asked (example) | Meetings | Do we have an answer? |
|---|---|---|
| How are you different from the vendor we already use? | 7 of 10 | Depends on the vendor |
| Who on our side runs this after go-live, and for how many hours? | 6 of 10 | Yes, a breakdown of the work at existing Japanese customers |
| How much of our current Excel data can we move? | 4 of 10 | Yes, the migration steps and examples of what was left behind |
| Do you support generative AI? | 2 of 10 | Too few; not a candidate |
Make a topic only of questions you can answer with numbers and steps
Choose by count alone and “how are you different” becomes the topic. It does not work as a webinar. The comparison changes with every buyer, so an hour cannot answer it for everyone. Leave it to the first meeting, after the AE has asked which vendor the buyer is comparing against.
Turn a question into a topic only when you already have the answer and can give it as numbers or as steps.
- “Who runs this, and for how many hours?” can be answered. Show, within a range that does not identify anyone, which roles took on which tasks in the first three months at existing Japanese customers, and what work went away
- If the honest answer is “it depends,” make the topic how to work it out. For operating workload, something like “three tasks to count inside your company before you estimate the effort.” Buyers leave able to produce their own number, which is the same idea as in “Give Japanese Buyers an ROI Model They Can Edit Themselves”
Title the webinar in the buyer’s words. Not “Best practices for CRM adoption” but “After go-live: who runs it, and for how many hours?” Someone who asked that question in a first meeting should recognise it as theirs. The Japanese title matters more than the English one here; write it from the Japanese wording on your list, not as a translation of the HQ title.
Judge the webinar by how the question changes in attendees’ first meetings
If the topic came from a question, the result can be checked against the same question.
Look at the first meetings that attendees reach within 90 days of the webinar date. Read the notes: does the buyer still ask the question from scratch, or does it come back as a check, such as “Using the numbers from your webinar, how many people would that be for us?” The 30-day “next step” count in the earlier note decides who to contact and when. The 90 days here is only the window for reading what happened in the deals that followed.
Check four things before you start:
- Is attendance in the CRM? Actual attendance, not registration. Whether it arrives through the webinar integration or a manual import depends on your setup
- Can you get from an attendee to a deal? In HubSpot, through the contacts associated with the deal; in Salesforce, through opportunity contact roles or campaign influence. Open one record and check; this depends on configuration
- Which date counts as the first meeting? Deal creation date or the first scheduled meeting. Pick one
- How are records matched? The registration email is often not the address used in the deal. Decide whether you match on company
If the records are not connected, matching the attendee list against the Japan AEs’ first meetings by hand once a month is a fine start.
Decide what to compare against: the ten meetings you used to pick the topic, and first meetings in the same quarter from people who did not attend. Attendees lean toward people already interested in the subject. There will not be many meetings, so skip percentages and count only how many came back in the check form. Where there are no notes, ask the AE one question: did it come up, and was it a check?
Do the read-through in the existing Japan sales and marketing sync, ten minutes, not a new meeting. Change topics once a quarter, when you redo the list. If attendees’ meetings show no check-form questions for two quarters in a row, change the topic or how you answer it. If last quarter’s question is still on top, take it again from another angle.
If you noted the minutes in step 2, you can also show the effect in AE time.
What we chose not to do
Mapping competitors’ webinar topics to find a gap. Sometimes a gap exists because nobody is asking. It has no buyer question behind it.
Using the attendee survey’s “what would you like next?” Useful, but secondary. Only attendees answer it, and the people stuck in a live deal are underrepresented.
Choose Japan webinar topics from the questions Japanese buyers keep asking in first meetings, not from what draws a crowd. Keep only questions you can answer with numbers and steps, and judge the webinar by how that question changes in attendees’ first meetings.
This week, open the notes from three recent first meetings in Japan and write down what the buyer asked. If the same question appears in all three and you can answer it with numbers or steps, your next topic is already chosen.
Related reading
Once the topic is set, who to contact after the webinar, and when, depends on what attendees did rather than on the fact that they attended. How to count that is in “Your Japan webinars fill up. Your pipeline does not move.”
Other notes on the same problem are collected under Marketing.