When Yutaka Fujimoto joined Zendesk Japan in November 2016, he was not walking into a blank slate. Before him, Kan Kunimura served as the inaugural Country Manager. As Zendesk Japan’s first employee, Kunimura grew the customer base to roughly 700 accounts. With the SMB motion established, he was tapped to move into the APAC organization to lead SMB sales across the regions. Three years into the market, headquarters wanted the next growth engine for Japan: enterprise adoption.
Fujimoto’s background fitted the brief. Before Zendesk, he had spent years running enterprise businesses at Oracle and Microsoft, and most recently had built ServiceNow Japan from the ground up as its first Country Manager.
“I liked that this was framed as a positive expansion, not a coup,” Fujimoto recalled. “In Japan, leadership changes at foreign subsidiaries often feel like quiet blame. This one felt like a win-win mandate.”
That framing mattered. It gave him room to act decisively without destabilizing what already worked.
Day three, a flight to Singapore
When Fujimoto arrived, the local team was small. Excluding Kunimura, it consisted of three sales representatives, one engineer, one business development role (roughly inside sales), and an office manager.
The instinctive response in many global organizations would have been to add sales headcount. Fujimoto resisted that impulse. He had learned that upmarket in Japan is often a credibility problem. Enterprises adopt when there is visible proof that choosing the vendor is a defensible decision, internally, reputationally, and operationally.
At Zendesk Japan, there were no widely referenceable Japanese enterprise case studies that customers could point to when explaining their decision up the chain. So on his third day on the job, Fujimoto got on a plane to Singapore to push for marketing headcount.
Manufacturing proof
At the same time, he was confronting another reality. Zendesk’s SaaS operations did not yet meet Japanese enterprise expectations. Stability incidents happened, updates occasionally caused disruption, and incident reporting lacked the level of formality expected.
In his second week, Fujimoto found himself traveling north to apologize to a local customer after a service issue. That experience reinforced his conviction that going upmarket in Japan needed to be a sequence, not a straight line.
Rather than chase the largest logos immediately, Fujimoto studied the existing customer base and filtered for a specific profile. He looked for companies that are large enough to signal seriousness, “digital-forward” to move quickly, and culturally comfortable betting on modern solutions before it became the default. Among them were Recruit (Japan’s digital conglomerate, parent to Indeed and Glassdoor), GMO Pepabo (a web-native subsidiary of the GMO group), and Lancers (one of Japan’s leading freelance platforms).
Together with a newly hired marketing lead, Fujimoto worked closely with internal champions at these companies. Their stories were turned into concise, practical case studies (website features, PDF flyers, sales collateral and selected media interview coverage) designed for Japanese consensus-building.
Product champions as co-authors
Because the deal sizes were still modest, the team doubled down on turning customer stories into growth infrastructure. Because the deal sizes were still modest, the team doubled down on turning customer stories into growth infrastructure. Zendesk Japan continued to host small, deliberately intimate sessions with just a few dozen participants, creating hands-on environments where customers could learn from real use cases. In parallel, it actively supported a user-led community driven by product champions, where existing customers taught other customers how they actually used Zendesk.
“Come in, touch the product, learn something concrete, leave with confidence.”
To learn how a mature, customer-driven community operates and to bring those practices back to their peers in Japan, Fujimoto and the marketing manager brought Japanese customer champions to Zendesk’s flagship events in New York. Some even joined at their own expense. These champions were not passive guests. They actively compared sessions, debated best practices, and pulled the Zendesk team into their learning loop. Each day ended with informal debriefs where customers and Zendesk staff reflected together.
Fujimoto emphasized that making it real required far more effort than planning it. It was the champions’ and the marketing manager’s commitment and energy that made the community sustainable. In fact, he still remembers the early champions by name. The relationships went beyond transactional reference calls. “When your champions trust you,” he said, “they put their name on the line for you.”
Betting on partners
Partner sales did not emerge at Zendesk Japan as a strategic preference. It became necessary once the limits of direct outbound selling were clear. The reason lay in the nature of Zendesk’s sales motion, which differed fundamentally from the enterprise playbook Fujimoto had seen succeed elsewhere. At ServiceNow, outbound inside sales worked because the product sold executive-mandated change into organizations already primed to listen. Zendesk, by contrast, sold improvements rather than mandates, and cold outreach often reached people who neither owned the pain deeply nor had the authority to act.
Partner sales helped close that gap by reframing the conversation from a vendor pitch to a locally contextualized recommendation and absorbing part of the reputational risk of early engagement.
Initially, APAC leadership pushed for an RFP-style partner selection process, the posture of a large vendor asking integrators to apply. However, this failed. In Japan, strong partners do not join because of the process. They join because they choose to bet their identity on a product.
“The hardest part is whether partner teams and in-house sales can actually trust each other,” Fujimoto explained. “If sales doesn’t trust the partner, they stop introducing them. If the partner throws everything over the wall, sales resents them.”
In one case, individual consultants became such strong Zendesk advocates that they eventually left to form a company dedicated almost entirely to Zendesk implementations. That professionalization changed the dynamic. Sales could confidently hand off work. Partners could hire specialists, focus on verticals like e-commerce, and scale in step with Zendesk’s growth.
“In the early phase, you should focus on finding a few partners with obsession, and then integrating them socially with your sales team.”
Lessons from Zendesk’s Japan upmarket play
By the time Fujimoto stepped away in 2020, Zendesk Japan had quietly crossed 3,000 customers, up from roughly 700 in 2016. Reflecting on the journey, he offered three lessons to founders and country managers considering Japan.
First, be honest about investment. Many foreign companies treat “investment” as headcount, usually sales headcount. In Japan, earlier investment is often needed elsewhere. It could be marketing that produces proof, or partner enablement that makes delivery credible.
Second, respect the time axis. Japan moves on institutional cycles. Senior leadership decisions cluster around December and January. Departmental structures settle toward April. Planning Japan on an 18-month clock almost guarantees underinvestment or local team churn before momentum has time to compound.
Last but not least, align mindsets. “Think big but act local” only matters if both sides truly mean the big part. Fujimoto observed many foreign vendors in Japan that settled into a comfortable equilibrium of “small, healthy, and happy”. Once that mindset takes hold, real growth almost never follows.
“The difference is not culture or character, but intent. If founders and country managers implicitly agree that “being small but fine” is acceptable, Japan will stay that way. A sustainable scale requires constructive impatience on both sides, aligned on the belief that Japan should matter, even when progress feels slow.”
What changes and what doesn’t
We asked Fujimoto to step back from Zendesk and reflect more broadly: as more B2B companies lean into product-led growth, what does it take for that model to work in Japan?
His answer was not a prediction of convergence, but a clarification of boundaries.
“When buyers are large, requirements are deep, and failure carries visible organizational cost, trial alone is not enough,” he said. “People need to evaluate delivery capability, organizational seriousness, and accountability.”
That is why RFPs persist in Japan. not as ritual, but as a rational way to manage responsibility and risk.
“Where value can be understood simply by using the product, just like Zendesk, bypassing formal enterprise processes could benefit both sides,” he added.
For founders, the harder question may not be whether PLG works in Japan, but which side of that boundary their product truly belongs on, and whether their Japan strategy reflects that reality.
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Who we spoke to
Yutaka Fujimoto is Vice President, Japan at DoiT International. He previously led Zendesk Japan’s upmarket efforts after building ServiceNow Japan as its first country manager. Earlier in his career, he held senior leadership roles at Microsoft Japan and Oracle.
