A CRM Built for Bilingual Business

The Japanese enterprise software market has unique requirements that most Western CRM vendors overlook. TokyoCRM wanted to build a CRM that felt native to Japanese business culture — not a translated version of an English product.

Our team, led by our Tokyo office, started with extensive research into how Japanese sales teams actually work. The keigo (formal speech) levels in client communication, the importance of meishi (business card) management, the seasonal business calendar with its fiscal year cycles — these aren't features you can bolt on.

The CRM we built supports full kanji, hiragana, and katakana search with phonetic matching — a critical feature for a language where company names can be written multiple ways. The interface is truly bilingual: users can set their preferred language, but individual fields retain the language they were entered in. A deal note written in Japanese stays in Japanese even when an English-preference user views it.

TokyoCRM launched to their first 200 enterprise users and achieved 89% adoption in the first quarter — remarkable for enterprise software in a market known for slow technology adoption. Deal cycle times dropped by 45% thanks to the automated pipeline management that respects Japanese business customs like year-end rushes and obon schedules.