SaaS Sales Pitfalls, The Model Misconceptions, and Mental Health in Japan B2B

Shunsuke Mukai, founder of Well Direction and former App Annie Japan CEO, shares the most common SaaS sales mistakes he sees as an advisor and how a near-depression episode changed his approach to work.

• Mukai spent 20 years in B2B IT sales, including 13+ years at three foreign multinationals where he was a five-consecutive-year top performer.
• The most common sales pitfall he observes: salespeople use ‘we/I’ as the subject throughout meetings, crowding out customer questions and preventing real discovery.
• Japanese sales roles cover what US companies split into marketing plus sales, making individual performance hard to measure and career pride difficult to build.
• The Challenger Sale model (2015) is now outdated, Mukai argues; today’s pace of change means even the customer’s stated business goal may itself be wrong and needs questioning.
• The Model (SaaS org split into marketing, inside sales, field sales, CS) fails when teams treat it as factory-style division of labor and stop collaborating on edge cases.
• Economic buyers — the executives who can actually approve or veto the budget — are often never contacted directly, leaving deals vulnerable to reversal at the last stage.
• Mukai went to the edge of clinical depression 10 years ago chasing external validation; he frames sales burnout as a symptom of living for others’ approval rather than one’s own purpose.

2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube