Sales is different in Japan.

When Fastly entered the Japanese market, they quickly discovered that they had change their technology-driven bottom up sales approach to fit Japan’s top-down enterprise market.

Today we sit down with Doug Chuchro, the Japan head of Fastly who explains how he had to chance both the sales strategy and the corporate culture from that of the US, which a highly knowledgeable user base who understood the workings of their technology as well as the sales team to Japan, where they frequently found themselves educating potential customers about what a content deliver network is and how they are used.

We also explore the importance of partners in the Japanese market, and how those relationships can be very much a two-edged sword.

It’s a fascinating conversation, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

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Links & Resources

Learn more about Fastly here
Connect with Doug on LinkedIn
Follow Doug and Fastly Japan on Twitter @FastlyJapan (Japanese) or @fastly (English)
Contact  doug@fastly.com or the Tokyo team  japan@fastly.com (English or Japanese)
Read about Fastly’s partnership with Nifty Cloud (Japanese)
Read about Fastly’s partnership with SoftBank (Japanese)
Learn about Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator with Google Cloud Platform (English)
Sign up for a free Fastly trial account
Find out how to do stuff on Fastly from posts on Qiita (Japanese)

Transcript
 

Disrupting Japan, episode 70.

Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from the CEOs breaking into Japan. I'm Tim Romero and thanks for listening.

Today we’re going to talk about content delivery networks or CDMs, those services that cache your website locally around the world so that users can access it extremely quickly. Or more accurately, we’re going to talk about how Fastly has managed to sell them in Japan. We sit down today with Doug Chuchro, the Japan head of Fastly to talk, not so much about the company, but how you sell innovative technology to large Japanese enterprises.

We’ll explore why partners are all but essential in entering the Japanese market, but how those relationships can be very much a two-edged sword, you need to know what to expect going in and to try to manage the expectations of everyone involved. When you’re trying to convert a proven, bottom-up, technical sales process into one that is Japanese style top-down, and governed by long-term relationships and unseen alliances.

Even when done perfectly, your Japanese partner won’t always do what you want, but sometimes they’ll do what you need. But, you know, Doug tells this story much better than I can, so let’s hear from our sponsors and get right to the interview.

[Interview]

Tim: I’m sitting here with Doug Chuchro, the representative director of Fastly KK and thanks for sitting down with me.

Doug: It’s my pleasure.

Tim: Before we get into all the details of how you brought the company into Japan and how you grew it here, I want to take a step back. Can you explain what Fastly does?

Doug: Sure. We are a content delivery network. There are a number of content delivery networks out there. Many of them have been around for years and years. In fact, the space is close to 2 decades old. We are, essentially a content delivery network brings content closer to end users and increases the performance for those end users, and decreases the amount of workload that the customer’s origin has to do. So it essentially is a global caching network that the two major benefits are increasing the end user performance and decreasing the origin offload.

Tim: So just every individual around the world would,