Daisuke Tanaka on Building SaaS Business Units: From Player to Leader

Medley CLINICS head Daisuke Tanaka explains the operations obsession and people skills that define effective SaaS business unit leaders.

• Tanaka joined Medley in 2016 as sole marketing hire for the CLINICS online-diagnosis SaaS launch, coming from Google Workspace evangelism and inside sales.
• He started with fax campaigns and direct mail — formats that actually work in Japanese healthcare — before running early webinars when that was still rare in B2B medical.
• Responsibility expanded from marketing → inside sales → field sales within the first year; full division ownership came around the two-year mark when Medley added a cloud EMR product.
• Medley’s founding sales team was 4–5 licensed physicians, which shortened trust-building with clinic customers but required Tanaka to train them on CRM and sales basics.
• His core hiring signal for CRO or business unit head candidates: genuine obsession with micro-operations — can the person articulate exactly how they improved 1% productivity in their own function and did they enjoy doing it.
• Tanaka treats inter-department friction (IS vs. FS, product vs. revenue) as inevitable and embeds that assumption into team culture rather than trying to prevent it.
• His delegation rule: take the blame upward himself, give the team full autonomy downward, and only intervene when outcomes look genuinely at risk.

2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube