Selling into Japan
After a Japanese trade show,
the conversation stops
The cards were collected and the response was good.
Then the show ends and the replies stop coming.
Selling into Japan
The cards were collected and the response was good.
Then the show ends and the replies stop coming.
I hear the same account repeatedly from overseas companies that have exhibited in Japan. The show itself felt good. The stand had visitors. Three months later, not one opportunity has moved.
Most of them conclude that Japan is difficult. What is actually happening is simpler than that.
Most of the people who come to a stand at a Japanese trade show are there because collecting information and bringing it back is their job. Engineers, junior staff from planning departments, trading company researchers. They have no approval authority.
That is not a waste of your time. Their internal circulation is how an evaluation begins. But everything they then do is invisible from the exhibitor's side — which is why it looks like no response.
What they brought back is compared against everyone else's material. If all you gave them is in English, it stops at this step, because the people above them cannot read it.
In a Japanese company, nothing starts until the contact locates the department that actually owns the pain. That search takes weeks to months.
Most fiscal years begin in April. A product found at an autumn show is frequently budgeted in the following fiscal year, not this one.
The silence is not a refusal.
It is movement you cannot see.
If the structure above is what is happening, the work list is fixed.
Doing nothing after the show. Most exhibitors take the cards home, return to domestic work, and six months later record Japan as unresponsive.
From the Japanese contact's side, however, you are the company that spoke to them at the show and then never wrote again. While they were trying to build internal support, no further material arrived, and the file quietly disappeared. Nobody refused it.
Someone can continue the correspondence in Japanese after the show. There is a one-page Japanese document. There is a small, low-commitment first step to propose.
No named person owns the follow-up. The material exists only in English. The only thing you can offer is a full contract. In this state, the number of shows you attend does not change the result.
A trade show is a good entrance. The problem is usually that there is nobody standing behind it.
If you have exhibited in Japan and the cards have gone cold
Tell me what you collected and what has been sent since. I will set out which contacts are worth pursuing and in what order, and what the Japanese one-pager needs to say.