When you make an impact, you help improve outcomes for healthcare professionals and the patients they serve.
Wolters Kluwer Health's clinical decision support and drug data solutions — including UpToDate, Medi-Span and Lexidrug — are used by clinicians and healthcare institutions across Japan and worldwide to make better decisions at the point of care.
Our AI-enabled clinical decision support capability is bringing a significant increase in the value that we offer new and existing customers.
The Director, Japan is responsible for driving growth, market development, and commercial execution for Wolters Kluwer Health in Japan. Reporting to the VP Sales, Health International, this role is accountable for achieving bookings, revenue, retention, and strategic growth objectives.
As the senior commercial leader for Japan, the Director will build strong customer relationships, lead a high-performing team, and work across the organization to deliver customer value and business results.
Your first twelve months
Retain the base. Renewing a large existing customer base with no material erosion. Deliver the AI rollout. Meeting our adoption target for AI-enabled capability across existing customers. Grow new business. Delivering new institutional customers against plan.
UpToDate： UpToDate Pro | Clinical Decision Support for Medical Professionals | Wolters Kluwer
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and execute the Japan growth strategy aligned with International segment priorities.
- Deliver bookings, revenue, retention, and pipeline targets.
- Lead strategic customer engagements, enterprise opportunities, and public sector tenders.
- Build executive relationships with healthcare providers, academic institutions, government agencies, and strategic partners.
- Develop and grow channel, distributor, and alliance partnerships.
- Drive sales excellence through effective pipeline management, forecasting, and execution.
- Partner with Marketing, Product, and Customer Success to accelerate adoption, retention, and growth.
- Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing commercial team.
- Provide market insights and competitive intelligence to support business strategy.
Qualifications
Required
- Significant sales and commercial leadership experience in technology, information services, or enterprise software.
- Proven track record of delivering sustained revenue growth and exceeding business objectives in Japan.
- Demonstrated success growing revenue within an existing customer base — price realisation, expansion, and renewal negotiation at scale, not solely new logo acquisition.
- Strong leadership, communication, negotiation, and stakeholder management skills.
- Experience leading and developing a direct sales team, including hiring, coaching and performance management.
- The judgement and self-direction to operate as the senior WK Health leader in-market, within a global matrixed organisation.
- Native or near-native Japanese, and business-level English.
- Bachelor's degree.
Desired
- Advanced business qualification (e.g., MBA).
- Deep understanding of the Japanese healthcare market and procurement environment.
- Experience leading complex enterprise sales cycles and strategic account relationships.
- Experience managing channel, distributor, or alliance partnerships.
- Clinical decision support, healthcare information, digital health, or EHR/EMR experience.
How we will measure success
- Net revenue retention and total revenue against plan.
- Growth in average contract value across the base.
- Clinical usage and engagement across the customer base.
- AI capability adoption among existing customers.
- New business bookings against plan.
- Forecast accuracy and pipeline quality.
- Progress toward a functioning Japan partner ecosystem.
- Team engagement, capability growth and retention.
To maintain a fair and genuine hiring process, we kindly ask that all candidates participate in interviews without the assistance of AI tools or external prompts. Our interview process is designed to assess your individual skills, experiences, and communication style. We value authenticity and want to ensure we’re getting to know you—not a digital assistant. To help maintain this integrity, we ask to remove virtual backgrounds and include in-person interviews in our hiring process. Please note that use of AI-generated responses or third-party support during interviews will be grounds for disqualification from the recruitment process.
Applicants may be required to appear onsite at a Wolters Kluwer office as part of the recruitment process.
Skills Required
- Significant sales and commercial leadership experience in technology, information services, or enterprise software
- Proven track record of sustained revenue growth and exceeding business objectives in Japan
- Experience growing revenue within an existing customer base through price realization, expansion, and renewal negotiation at scale
- Strong leadership, communication, negotiation, and stakeholder management skills
- Experience leading and developing a direct sales team, including hiring, coaching, and performance management
- Judgment and self-direction to operate as the senior in-market leader within a global matrixed organization
- Native or near-native Japanese proficiency
- Business-level English proficiency
- Bachelor’s degree
- Advanced business qualification such as an MBA
- Deep understanding of the Japanese healthcare market and procurement environment
- Experience leading complex enterprise sales cycles and strategic account relationships
- Experience managing channel, distributor, or alliance partnerships
- Experience in clinical decision support, healthcare information, digital health, or EHR/EMR
Wolters Kluwer Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Wolters Kluwer and has not been reviewed or approved by Wolters Kluwer.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time away benefits are positioned as broad, spanning vacation and sick time plus paid holidays and other covered leave types. Paid parental and caregiver leave, bereavement leave, and a volunteer day contribute to a more comprehensive time-off offering.
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Retirement Support — Retirement support is framed as meaningful through access to a 401(k)/retirement plan paired with company matching and additional contribution features in some descriptions. This is reinforced by mentions of profit sharing and other long-term savings-oriented programs.
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Parental & Family Support — Family-oriented support stands out through adoption assistance and paid parental leave provisions. These benefits are described alongside other caregiver supports that extend beyond basic leave categories.
Wolters Kluwer Insights
What We Do
Wolters Kluwer (www.wolterskluwer.com) is a global leader in information services and solutions for professionals in the health, tax and accounting, risk and compliance, finance and legal sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with specialized technology and services. Founded in 1836 and headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands, the company serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries and employs 18,600 people worldwide. Wolters Kluwer reported 2019 annual revenues of €4.6 billion. Listed on Euronext Amsterdam, Wolters Kluwer shares (WKL) are included in the AEX and Euronext 100 indices. Wolters Kluwer has a sponsored Level 1 American Depositary Receipt program. The ADRs are traded on the over-the-counter market in the U.S. (WTKWY).
