When conducting marketing and sales activities in Japan, it is most important to approach the right person in the right department in order to achieve results efficiently. The question is how we can identify such key people in the Japanese market?
In this article, we will look at how we obtain such information in the course of our regular marketing projects, i.e. what kind of preliminary research we carry out before the actual marketing and sales, and we will also summarize some examples of the information we obtain from our preliminary research.
We assist overseas companies who are trying to obtain CMO contracts from Japanese companies or who are planning to expand into the Japanese market. If you need preliminary research or do not know where to start, please contact us. We will be happy to provide you with a simple proposal for your project.
The Case
An EU pharmaceutical company was trying to win CMO contracts in the Japanese market. They had been trying Google ads with keywords related to CMO for half a year, but got no results.
Preliminary Research
#1 Understand the situation
- Given the highly specialized nature of the pharmaceutical industry, the number of companies that should be targeted is expected to be extremely small compared to other businesses.
- The amount of searches on Google Japan for CMO is not high, and it is expected that measures based on Google (Google ads, SEO, content marketing, etc.) will not produce results.
- The same applies to SNS, and it is expected that there will be no effective channels, including LinkedIn.
Based on the above, we conducted an interview survey to find out how Japanese potential customers select candidate companies & what kind of decision-making process Japanese companies go through when ordering CMOs.
#2 Interview with a potential customer
Interviewee profile
In charge of supply chain management and procurement at the Japanese branch of a foreign pharmaceutical company. Before joining the current company, he/she worked in the supply chain management department at one of Japan’s five largest pharmaceutical companies.
Q&A
What is the decision-making flow when placing a CMO order?
Procurement has a list of potential companies. The list is made up of a list of companies compiled by an external research company and companies identified by procurement staff through visits to trade shows. From this list, the person in charge of supply chain management (not the manager) selects companies based on production capacity, past performance and whether or not they have additional production capacity in case of an emergency. The person who actually makes a decision (signs a document) is the head of the supply chain management department.
Who is the best person to contact for CMO orders?
First, the procurement department. Next, the person in charge of supply chain management. If you think your company is not on the list compiled by the research company, you should try to contact them to get yourself included. However, it is possible that only the largest companies use this type of research company. In medium and smaller companies, there are cases where the same person holds two positions for both procurement and supply chain management.
Where do you gather information?
Trade show (Interphex Tokyo). I think that people from the procurement, supply chain management and R&D departments go there from the person in charge level to the decision-maker level. When exhibiting at an exhibition, it is better to have both sales and technical people at the booth. I can’t think of any influential trade publications. I have the image that sales people read Nikkan Yakugyo (https://nk.jiho.jp/). I have never had a case lead to a deal from online information gathering.
Does sales through advisors or referral sales work in the pharmaceutical industry?
If you’re targeting a large company, hiring an ex-employee of the target to do the sales for you might be a good choice. But there’s probably an employee who has moved to your company from a Japanese pharmaceutical company. Since this is an industry that doesn’t have a culture of outbound sales, I think it’s a good idea to have someone as a buffer.
Summary of the interview
- The key people you should approach to win CMO projects are: 1) the person in charge of the procurement department, 2) the person in charge of the supply chain management department, and 3) (if you are targeting a large company) the third party research company.
- They don’t gather information online. Exhibitions are a very important place to gather information.
- It’s recommended that you first look for people within the company who have changed jobs from Japanese pharmaceutical companies and try referral sales.
#3 Hypothesis derived from the preliminary research
- As it is thought to be difficult to acquire leads from Google searches and SNS, it may be possible to exclude these from the options of the marketing measures.
- In order to win CMO contracts, we should approach (1) each company’s procurement department, (2) the person in charge of supply chain management, and (3) (if you target large companies) third party research companies that develop and provide CMO supplier list.
- There may be people within our client’s company or their existing business partners who can be asked to make introductions to the target companies as referral sales.
- The most efficient channel for inbound sales is Interphex Tokyo.
Conclusion
In marketing projects, regardless of the industry, identifying the key people to approach by preliminary research is very important in order to get results in the most efficient way.
In this case, through preliminary research, we learned that it is difficult to acquire leads through Google search and SNS to win CMO contracts, and that approaches should be made directly to the procurement departments and supply chain management personnel of each company and perhaps the third party research company.
Typically, we then proceed to plan the specific methods for approaching each key person based on the information obtained from the preliminary survey.
If you would like to know more about the specific methods we have proposed in this case, or which marketing methods are effective in the Japanese pharmaceutical industry, please contact us. We look forward to helping you make your project a success.