Selling into Japan · Three gates, 1 of 3
They were positive in the meeting and then went silent.
In most cases the proposal was fine — the approval form was not fillable.
"They seemed genuinely interested. Then nothing." This is the single most common report I get from overseas companies working in Japan, and in almost every case the contact was not being polite or evasive. They meant it. The proposal then reached an internal approval process called ringi, and stopped there.
A ringi document is drafted by the employee who wants the purchase and then circulated upwards for approval, section head to department head to director. The part that matters for you is this: the name of the person who drafted it stays on it.
If the project later disappoints, the question "why did we approve this" is put to the drafter, not to the people who signed. So employees do not draft proposals they cannot fully explain — including proposals they personally believe in.
Your contact is not looking for a better argument.
They are looking for cover.
The exact form varies by company, but the fields are broadly the same everywhere. Overseas proposals are usually missing two or more of them.
Not what the product does well. The field has to connect to a problem the buyer already recognises internally. "An innovative approach to X" cannot be entered here. "The current X process takes roughly N hours a month and this reduces it" can be.
"Contact us for pricing" makes the document unwritable. Total, breakdown, payment timing. An estimate is fine; a number is not optional. A website with no pricing anywhere on it is unusual in Japan and is on its own enough to end an evaluation.
The heaviest field. A domestic Japanese reference is ideal, but an overseas one works if the industry and company size are comparable. If you cannot name the customer, an anonymised form — "a food manufacturer, roughly 300 employees" — is far better than leaving it blank.
Who responds, in which language, within what time. A blank here gets the document returned by the approver, every time. A supplier with no contact point inside Japan cannot fill this field at all — which is a structural problem, not a communication one.
What you prepare is a proposal. What the buyer needs is an approval document. A proposal argues why to buy. An approval document argues why buying is safe. They are written for different readers and they are not interchangeable.
In practice the most effective thing an overseas company can do is hand over material the contact can lift directly into their internal paperwork: in Japanese, with those four fields already populated, with numbers in it. I have watched stalled files move on nothing more than that.
Less than most of the alternatives. Companies at this stage often start discussing a Japanese subsidiary, a local sales hire, a distribution agreement. All of those may eventually be right. None of them is prior to this. A two-page Japanese document with a purpose, a price, a comparable reference and a support arrangement is cheap, and it is what is actually missing.
If a file has gone quiet after a good meeting
Send me what you sent them, and I will tell you which of the four fields your contact cannot fill — and what the Japanese version of that material needs to say.