SaaS

This Bay Area B2B SaaS company (NASDAQ listed, market cap around US$ 15 billion) asked us for help for the “third restart” in Japan. The company had started in Japan about 10 years earlier, was not growing as fast as hoped and asked us to create a new “go-to-market plan”, and strategy for their “third restart” in Japan.

We determined the company’s competitive positions, market shares, true market positioning, recommended focus on priority verticals, talked with Japanese customers to understand Japanese customer’s pain points with the company’s products, found several problems of the company’s products which needed fixing, recommended an acquisition to address missing functionality needed by Japanese customers. We created a go-to-market plan focussed on priority verticals, and addressed issues with the management structure for Japan, holding back growth in Japan.

We prepared market entry to Japan for a leading Silicon Valley marketing automation company. We prepared qualitative and quantitative understanding of Japan’s marketing automation market landscape, Japan’s Software as a Service (SaaS) market and trends, we prepared success stories of comparable companies, in particular we prepared a detailed understanding of how salesforce.com built its business in Japan and lessons to learn, and we made detailed recommendations on how to build the business in Japan, which our customer followed.

In particular, we answered the question “is Japan ready for SaaS cloud solutions” and created market entry scenarios as alternatives.

As Board Director and Member of the Supervisory & Audit Committee of the stock market listed SaaS and cybersecurity group GMO GlobalSign Holdings KK (Tokyo Stock Exchange No. 3788) for four years, Gerhard Fasol contributed to the decision making of the company, including new business incubation, streamlining, improvements of existing businesses, and M&A decision making.

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