Succeeding in Japan Part 5: Hiring a Country Manager

The two biggest sources of frustration and failure when entering Japan are:

• Treating Japan as an extension of your US GTM (Strategic error)
• Hiring the wrong county manager (Execution error)

We covered the first bullet above in the last article, so this article will cover the second: how to hire a country manager.

A few quick notes before we start:

1. We will assume for this article that you are hiring your first country manager and are just getting started in Japan.
2. These days (September 2025) many companies are trying to balance the opportunity they see in Japan, with the need to conserve capital. We are, in fact, working with several companies now on alternative Japan entry options that delay hiring a country manager. Whether sooner or later, however, proper execution in Japan will require a strong leader in Japan so these best practices will be good to keep in mind regardless of short-term plans.
3. Like the previous article, we want to prioritize function over style so it might get a bit long, but we didn’t want to leave out any important details.

Here is a list of topics to be covered in this article. Note they represent the most common questions we receive from our portfolio companies regarding this topic:

1. Country manager role and responsibilities
2. How to evaluate your country manager
3. Who should report to the country manager?
4. Who should the country manager report to?
5. Recommended hiring process
6. Common backgrounds for country manager candidates
7. Common missteps in country manager hiring
8. When to change your country manager

Okay, here we go:

Country manager duties

It is the primary role of the country manager to execute the Japan entry strategy. As such it is critical to always remember that Japan entry is fundamentally not a sales execution problem but rather a product market fit and credibility building problem.

So while the country manager needs to be able to build pipeline and generate revenue, they must simultaneously be focused on working with HQ to 1) deliver a localized product (Japan MVP) and 2) build a local customer success team to meet the unique requirements of Japanese customers.

This encompasses a broad set of duties, including hiring great talent, signing and onboarding channel partners, landing early adopters and then working with HQ on product and customer success localization. Necessary skills and attributes include sales execution, strategic planning, excellent communication in English and Japanese, lots of coordination with HQ, a hefty amount of missionary zeal and strong leadership skills to make sure all of the efforts above are well coordinated to deliver a very specific set of results as efficiently as possible. Organizational excellence is a nice-to-have but not a must at this stage.

Evaluating the country manager’s performance

Prior to hiring your country manager it helps to keep in mind how they will be evaluated.

Standard sales metrics are always important, but in the beginning, they are not always the most reliable measurement of progress. Just as important are the other execution milestones mentioned above (hiring, signing partners, landing early adopters, etc.). So clear goals should be set regarding these activities and country managers should be held accountable for delivering results.

With regards to hiring, getting talented people to change jobs in Japan is much more challenging than in the US, so if your country manager is able to consistently secure good people this should be appreciated as a positive sign of their leadership. The opposite of course is also true: if your country manager struggles to attract good talent, then that can be a negative sign, requiring investigation.

Similarly, signing reputable partners is another activity that will help establish credibility with end users, so while time-consuming, it is critical and a good indicator that you are on the right path, even if revenue is not yet being generated. So setting goals regarding how many partners to sign and by when should be a core part of the Japan entry plan and performance evaluation for the country manager.

As stated previously large deals may or may not come in the beginning and that is okay. More important to crossing the Japan chasm are the quality of the logos and the strength of the relationship with new customers. As such, some important sales activities to measure include:

• Creating a thoughtful and focused named account list
• Meticulous account planning and execution
• Landing new logos from the named account list
• Building a local post sales support and customer success team that can consistently deliver a high level of customer satisfaction to ensure upsell and cross-sell opportunities as well as generating compelling case studies.

Standard sales metrics (ACV, ARR, consumption, revenue, etc.) are, as stated above important and should be part of the compensation plan. However, they should be modified appropriately during the entry period and combined with the other goals above as this combination of sales metrics with strategic business objectives will give the clearest picture of success. This is not about taking it easy on the country manager. This approach ensures that the country manager and his/her team are focused on the right set of activities and that they are held accountable for delivering agreed upon objectives that ensure the company properly crosses the chasm and unlocks the full potential of Japan as quickly as possible.

Who should report to the JCM?

Functional leaders in Japan should all report to the Japan Country Manager to reinforce their leadership role and ensure that all teams are aligned.

Success in Japan requires the full support and alignment of global functional leaders as well. So a matrix with a strong dotted line reporting to HQ should also be strongly enforced.

If there is a discrepancy between what the functional leaders in HQ and the country manager want/need, they should talk directly to resolve their differences so that the local functional leaders do not get conflicting instructions.
Larger more established organizations (MSFT, APPL, SFDC, etc.) are in fact often organized globally by function, but that usually only works after reaching a significant scale. During the early entry phase and even well into the growth phase, it works best when everyone reports up through the country manager.

That said, there are exceptions: when the Japan business reaches scale and local legal and finance resources become necessary, they should, for obvious compliance reasons, report directly to their functional leaders in HQ. One other exception is product. A local product manager can be an extremely important asset to the Japan business, gathering product requirements to ensure that they make it into the product roadmap. Because of the unique way product teams operate, the Japan PM often is more effective as a member of the global product team.

Who should the Japan Country Manager report to?

We have seen the Japan Country manager report to the CEO, VP of International, VP of Partnerships, VP Business Development, CRO, and regional VP. In our experience, any of these arrangements can work as long as the strategy, expectations, budgets and timelines are agreed upon by top management beforehand.

However, by far the best arrangement for the entry period of Japan is to report to a senior executive at headquarters (not a regional executive) for four reasons:

1. There are generally very little synergies or even similarities between Japan and the rest of APAC (other than time zone) so adding Japan just adds complexity to an already difficult region
2. Even for experienced and well intentioned regional executives, high-pressure quarterly sales cycles naturally encourage discretionary time, effort, budget and headcount to be allocated away from Japan and towards other regions that generate better short-term results. This can result in a self-reinforcing negative spiral of underinvestment in Japan. More importantly, critical Japan issues also get ignored or filtered and are not communicated properly to HQ with the necessary urgency and don’t get resolved further delaying a successful crossing of the Japan chasm,
3. Some of the best country manager candidates will hesitate to report to a regional executive for the reasons above so that structure could unnecessarily shrink the available talent pool,
4. Japan should ultimately be your second largest market globally so hiring accordingly is important. That doesn’t mean you need to or should hire a senior executive as your first country manager, but pushing Japan lower in the organization tends to end up in hiring leaders that are too junior.

As is the case with all hiring decisions, the organizational structure and reporting lines are critical to success and Japan is no different. Ensuring that the Japan strategy gets the proper visibility internally is of course important, but perhaps more important is the quick resolution of Japan issues as they arise day to day and that is best facilitated with a direct communication path to key decision makers at HQ.

Our recommended search process: Retained search by a reputable recruiter

Before we discuss why, here are some stats from our portfolio companies and how they hired their 33 country managers:

• Direct (personal networks, internal recruiters): 10
• Search firm: 11
• Internal promotion/transfer: 7 (2 for first country managers and 5 for temporary or replacement country managers)
• Not known: 5

In all honesty, we have seen just about everything work and we have seen everything not work. No one method is foolproof. However, the practice that we have seen maximize the probability of success is a retained search by a reputable recruiting firm. It is expensive, but in our experience, it consistently produces the best results.

Reputable recruiters not only have large candidate databases, but they also understand how to properly run an executive search process to maximize the probability of success. This starts with casting a broad net to view the most potential candidates, then narrowing the candidate pool down to those that are available and interested and finally, shepherding the top candidate across the line to a successful close.

We suggest this process even if you know a candidate or two from your own network. If you are sure they are the one, then of course, just closing them directly can save on hefty recruiting fees, but if you think there might be a better candidate out there somewhere, then just throw your contacts into the mix and see how they match up against the others. Even if you end up choosing your original contact in the end, the process of looking broadly and interviewing multiple candidates can bring clarity and confidence to the final decision.

While each recruiting firm uses a different process, in general, here is a high-level overview of what it will look like:

1. Meet with the recruiter to align regarding requirements, expectations, timelines, etc.
2. Agree on the job description for the country manager
3. Scan the market for all potential candidates
4. Identify the best potential fits based on 1 and 2 above
5. Reach out to top candidates to check for interest and availability
6. Finalize a short list of top candidates who are both available and interested
7. Hold interviews with the top HQ and regional executives (should include all customer-facing executives: sales, marketing, customer success, account management as well as product, legal, finance, etc.)
8. Have top 2 or 3 candidates present a business plan
9. References/backchannel checks
10. Make a final decision and negotiate
11. Sign your new Country Manager (we have seen candidates back out even after signing. This often happens because a spouse protests, or sometimes the spouse’s parents protest, which is a difficult hurdle to overcome in Japan. A good recruiter knows these possibilities exist and will remain engaged until the candidate is firmly on board and has started at the company.
12. Start and onboarding

The exact details are not as important as being committed to the process. More often than not, the hiring of the country manager is personally overseen by the CEO, but usually involves many senior functional leaders.

Identifying beforehand who will be part of the process and making sure they are all thoughtfully prepared when they meet the candidates is very important. In the tight labor market in Japan, “interviewing” country manager candidates involves selling the candidate on the company, just as much as it does evaluating the candidate. So putting forth a few of your top executives who know how to tell the story of your company is also a common best practice to make sure the top candidates understand your value proposition and get excited about the opportunity.

Common profiles/backgrounds for a country manager

• The up-and-comer: No country manager experience but solid experience of 5+ years of relevant director-level sales leadership with a solid track record of hiring great reps, building pipeline and hitting quota. These candidates may require some mentoring, but they often bring enthusiasm and energy, which is necessary for the 0 to 1 stage in Japan.
• Repeat/serial country manager: Someone with previous country manager experience at a reputable firm with a track record of success. These candidates obviously bring more experience to the table, but you still need to check for cultural fit and moreover, there are many repeat country managers who greatly embellish their resumes and also interview very well, so make sure you always do your back channel checks to make sure they are who they say they are.
• Big company executive: Some startups have a bias (and some have explicit policies) against hiring from certain large IT companies (like MSFT, GOOG, IBM, etc.). While in general these policies are not wrong, in Japan with the limited talent pool, candidates from these companies should still be considered.
• From left field: We have seen candidates (in fact one of our best-performing country managers) come from outside of IT completely, with no country manager or even IT sales experience. We would consider this a fortuitous event and the exception to the rule. Most likely, your country manager will come from one of the first three sources above.

Common red flags and missteps in the search process

• Prioritizing for English: This is perhaps the most difficult to avoid since people naturally feel more comfortable with candidates who can communicate better in English. English is, of course, very important as the candidate needs to be able to communicate at a high level with HQ. However, more important is a candidate’s ability to execute in Japan, so it’s important to work closely with the recruiter to make sure you are not optimizing for the wrong skill.
• The bad apples: Unfortunately, there are a few country managers out there who are not very good — some are power harassers, some are just downright immoral. The problem is that these candidates may also have some reputable companies on their resume and so can be difficult to detect. Usually, particularly bad candidates will be screened by well-informed recruiters, but some can still sneak through. The problem is that they can also be charismatic and skilled interviewers. The way to avoid these candidates is as you would in other geos, by doing reference checks, backchannel checks, and scrutinizing their resumes for red flags such as short tenures (see bullet point below) at too many of their previous jobs. Also, try not to get too attached to any one candidate too early in the process.
• Short tenures: I like to see an average of 5 years at their most recent jobs. Preferably more, perhaps 7 years. Anything less, often indicates some problem or lack of commitment. Average tenures of only 1-3 years are a red flag.
• Hiring for organizational excellence too early: The person who can run a 100-person organization at scale may not be the best person to take the company from zero to 1. It is an entirely different skill set. Sometimes candidates can do both, but they are few and far between. While you want someone who has the experience and broad industry connections, you also want someone who can roll up their sleeves and do the heavy lifting required for a new startup.

When to change your country manager

• Not performing: This, of course, assumes the right strategy and goals were assigned as outlined above. But if the country manager cannot deliver on the agreed-upon goals, then of course, they need to go.
• Transition to growth: Despite great performance, as the business naturally transitions from the entry to growth phase, the scrappy evangelist attributes that serve country managers well in the zero to one stage often do not translate well to the growth phase. The growth phase requires more organizational building, strategic planning, people management, and establishing processes and systems to consistently execute at scale. Especially as you cross the chasm and your technology goes mainstream, then of course Japan will merge with the global GTM and high volume lead generation, pipeline management and quota achievement will become the norm. If your current country manager can make this transition that is ideal, but if they cannot, despite them having been a great leader until that point, you may need to make a change. Proper internal coaching and mentoring can also prepare a young country manager to make this transition smoothly if they have the natural capacity to do so.
• Your product or strategy change: We have had situations where our portfolio company’s product and strategy changed to such a degree that even though they loved their country manager and they were everything they initially wanted, the changes just required someone with a different profile and so they made the necessary change.

Conclusion

Your Japan country manager is basically a representative of the CEO in Japan. That doesn’t mean they need to be a CEO-level candidate, but they also should not be thought of as purely a sales executive. The small talent pool in Japan, language and time differences all make it challenging, but as outlined above, defining the role, structuring reporting lines properly, and following a tried and true search process all will maximize the probability of success.

At Geodesic Japan, helping with country manager hiring (including re-hiring and transitions) is one of the most important things we do. From introducing reputable recruiting firms to doing interviews and assisting with back-channel checks, and just serving as a sounding board through all stages of the search, is something we always prioritize. I personally was a country manager for 7 years, and now at Geodesic, having the additional perspective of working with our portfolio companies has added another layer of perspective to our collective outlook on country managers. We hope you will reach out to us as you embark on this most important step in your Japan journey.