“I want to energize Japan through the power of digital technologies.”

This is what Tsugumasa Egawa (@tsugu) says as he looks back at the career choices he made to work for various well-known tech companies, such as Rakuten and GREE. At Rakuten, he was in charge of business strategy for the fashion domain, and at GREE, he had such experiences as leading the marketing business and subsidiary companies. Currently, Tsugumasa is leading the enhancement of Mercari’s sales structure and the establishment of Mercari’s advertising business. What potential does he see in Mercari’s future? What sort of changes is he trying to achieve at Mercari with his efforts in sales and advertising? We asked him about his current work, and the twists and turns in his career.

Strengthening sales in four steps to grow each business even further

—Can you tell us about the domains you manage?

As VP of Mercari Business Solutions, I work on strengthening Mercari’s sales for businesses and on establishing our advertising business. I am trying to use the power of sales and advertising to its maximum potential to deliver Mercari’s various refined services to our users in even better ways.

I believe we can achieve even greater growth in all of our businesses by following these four specific steps. First, build sales teams in each company and create mechanisms to improve performance. Second, integrate and organize all business partner information currently retained by each business. These two steps help establish the base for taking on sales efforts in the Group as a whole.

The third step is to build a structure for sales strategies that span multiple Group companies. Mercari, including the advertising business currently in preparation, has four business domains. These are advertising, e-commerce (Mercari Shops), payment (Merpay), and human resources (Mercari Hallo). These four services should give us access to almost every sector in Japan. We are now putting together a team that can formulate strategies for approaching clients by using these services as catalysts, so that we can eventually enter new business domains.

—What do you mean by “using these services as catalysts”?

We recently approached a food delivery business to pitch them Merpay as a method of payment. At the same time, we also inquired into their needs related to Mercari Hallo and our new advertising business. We were told that they may be interested in using Hallo to recruit delivery people, and that they are looking into new advertising platforms to resuscitate the declining effectiveness of their existing ads. In this case, our payment service was the initial catalyst that allowed us to pitch them our advertising and recruiting businesses. If we can repeat such examples, we can increase the productivity of our sales efforts.

As another example, when we are in negotiations for Merpay’s take rate, we can put forward the condition that the partner company uses Mercari Hallo to recruit their part-time workers. Instead of keeping our sales efforts separate for each business, we can grow the profits of the entire service at once. This is the power of the third step.

—What is the fourth step?

The fourth step is to establish a structure for selling ads. It overlaps with the third step a little bit. In the fourth step, we sell advertisements while pitching that each business increases its productivity and gross margin ratio per salesperson. Thus, we can increase our number of salespeople and achieve speedy expansion when we launch a new business in the future. We are imagining various scenarios for strengthening the sales efforts of Mercari as a whole and accelerating the growth of our businesses to a new level.

—What is the most important aspect of making these scenarios a reality?

The most important aspect is to increase the value we provide to our users. This is expressed as “Be a Pro” in Mercari’s values. The goal of sales should not be merely selling. It should be solving issues faced by users and partners and going beyond their expectations.

Experiencing the rapid growth phases of Japan’s leading tech companies

—How did you come to learn of the importance and potential of sales and advertising?

It goes without saying that I have experience being a salesperson myself, but beyond that I would say that my time at Rakuten was essential in building my foundations as a working person. When I joined Rakuten in 2003, it was a company of around 300 employees and nowhere near as well-known as it is now. I went to work for them because I empathized with their mission of empowering Japan by growing the proceeds of all businesses through e-commerce.

I worked as a sales operative in my first two months there, and I had to make 200 calls a day to be allowed to go home. Sometimes, when someone hit their goals, a hanging banner with their name on it would be hung from the ceiling. I’m speaking now as if they are fond memories, but there is no way a workplace like this would be allowed today. (laughs)

However, it is there that I learned how to achieve objectives no matter what. Rakuten’s values of “Speed! Speed! Speed!” and “Hypothesis -> Execution -> Testing -> Mechanism” also taught me a lot.

—What other kinds of experience do you have beside sales?

I’ve done many different things. My roles included supporting businesses in opening e-commerce shops, managing a service to match potential e-shop owners with freelance web producers, and growing the revenue of shops via marketing as an e-commerce consultant in the fashion domain.

My time working for the B2B matching service is especially memorable. At the time, there were approximately 3,000 shops on Rakuten whose owners where paying monthly fees, but they were not tech-savvy enough to build their own online storefront. Because of this, I asked freelance web producers and web production firms to create packaged services where everything necessary for actually opening the online shops would be included. We were able to rollout this package to these 3,000 potential shops all at once and see them actually start their online businesses. It was my first ever success.

After I had amassed a certain number of achievements as an e-commerce consultant, I moved on to establish the Nagoya branch, where I gained another two years of experience. Following that, I established the Yokohama branch as well. There, in cooperation with the Yokohama City Hall, I did marketing for government events and supported some non-profit foundations in adopting e-commerce. I eventually returned to Tokyo, where I was put in charge of the fashion domain, working on alliances and corporate acquisitions.

—You later joined GREE. What led you to this decision?

Six months after a close friend and colleague went to work for GREE, they invited me to join them. I wasn’t that deeply interested in social games, but GREE was in a phase of rapid growth back then, sometimes even passing Rakuten in terms of monthly sales profits. This piqued my interest, so I decided to join.

My involvement in advertising truly started at GREE. As the lead of marketing, I gained experience working on TV commercials and digital marketing. I also became the president of a subsidiary, where I reorganized the company and the business. Toward the end of my time at GREE, I built up some experience in the advertising industry as the president of GREE’s social media marketing subsidiary.

Because I worked at Rakuten and GREE during the rapid growth phases of both companies, I had many opportunities to take on new challenges. I experienced failure as well, of course. Still, what I learned and built at these two companies made me what I am today.

The potential of Mercari’s ecosystem and how it doesn’t “encircle” users

—How did you join Mercari?

My first contact with Mercari was through the introduction of an acquaintance. As I learned about its businesses, I saw great potential for growth if an advertising business were to be added to the mix. At the time, there was a trend where companies with retail media, like Amazon and Rakuten, would launch advertising businesses to grow their profits. I thought Mercari could do the same.

Another reason is that Mercari Shops was about to be launched. I knew from my experience at Rakuten that the B2C domain goes well with advertising businesses. Since Mercari also has Merpay in the payment domain, we can grow our reach with offline marketing as well.

Now that Mercari Hallo has joined the fray, we can even cover demand for personnel. E-commerce, payments, personnel, and finally, advertising—with these four domains, we can cover almost every touchpoint to reach businesses in Japan. By combining the advertising businesses with our existing businesses, we can further accelerate the circulation that Mercari has achieved so far.

—It is exciting to wonder how far our ecosystem will reach. What do you think is unique about Mercari’s ecosystem, and what is its potential?

In my personal opinion, the ecosystems provided by existing platform providers are designed to “encircle” their users. They are built in such a way to be a solution for all needs of the user, growing the platform’s ARPU (average revenue per user) completely within the ecosystem.

On the other hand, Mercari does not try to encircle users, and its design allows users to come and go freely. Mercari’s ARPU keeps growing as our users circulate in and out of the ecosystem. This is what makes our ecosystem unique.

I think a major reason for this is because Mercari is not just a platform for buying things, but also selling things and turning your free time into money. Users can buy something on Amazon, and then sell it on Mercari. Allowing our users to come and go freely and without trying to encircle them with our ecosystem accelerates circulation and causes Mercari to grow even further.

It’s not about building a career, but making an impact

—What is your future outlook for your career?

I never had a strategy for building my career, and I don’t think I will in the future. One thing that has not changed, however, is that I want to energize Japan through the power of digital technologies.

I’ve had that notion since my university years. My older was in an MBA exchange program in the US, and when I went to visit him, companies like Amazon and Microsoft were already big. That’s when I felt the potential of the internet first-hand. After coming back to Japan and joining Rakuten, I saw many cases of small-town shopping district shops and farmers without successors rescuing their businesses via e-commerce. At GREE, I witnessed the birth of a new market in social games and watched companies grow with the power of social media marketing. These experiences have fully convinced me that digital technologies have the power to change society.

I intend to keep working with companies holding such assets to create businesses that can energize and re-energize our communities. For me, it’s not about building my career, but very much about making an impact.

Bonus: How I use Mercari!

I use Mercari mainly to organize my books. I buy a lot of books. The books I read and enjoyed, I keep. Everything else, I sell on Mercari. If they are still new enough, I can sell them for just under their cover price. I read a wide variety of books, from business to education, and buy famous or recommended books very quickly. Without Mercari, I wouldn’t be able to manage my library.