You are Elena Arrieta and you run Plumeline.io's international negotiation pod. It is 06:14 on Monday, April 27, and at your kitchen table in Madrid you are reading an email from Tokyo about a US$6.3 million contract. Before anyone replies, you have to decide what it means.
The situation
Plumeline sells a collaborative document-editing platform to large companies: US$88 million in annual recurring revenue and some 520 people across San Francisco, Madrid and Bogotá. The chief executive, Andrés Quintero, promised the board that international business would reach 30% of bookings by the end of 2027; today it is 12%. In February three buyers received the same offer: US$2.1 million a year for three years.
One of them is Mitsuyama Trust Bank in Tokyo, with about 22,000 employees. Nobody there signs alone: the decision circulates in an approval document on which each department head stamps a personal seal. After eleven weeks there are eight of eleven seals; Compliance, IT Security and Risk are missing. The department general manager, Tanaka-buchō, orchestrates the consensus; section manager Aoki-san is the deal's sponsor. Quintero says this contract carries the Asia-Pacific story for the next funding round.
Aoki-san writes that the proposal "is receiving serious consideration" and that the Compliance and IT Security departments "have raised some clarifying questions".Below it, in red, Yumi, Plumeline's cultural advisor in Tokyo: she reads it as a polite signal that the deal is at serious risk.You have closed deals on three continents, but never in Japan. Your pod puts the chance that Mitsuyama signs at 25%. At 06:48 Quintero's message arrives: he wants a fourteen-day plan.