Becoming Number One in Global Sales

Two speakers, opposite directions. Sangchul Kim, who goes by Yeoul, is the CTO of ThePlato, a Korean startup taking its product Tiro to Japan and the US. Yejin Son runs Korea for Workato, a global enterprise automation company, from Singapore. They ended up betting on the same thing.

Turning conversations into assets

Tiro started as an AI meeting recorder and now positions itself as a product that turns conversations into assets. Anyone can build a meeting notes app today. Selling one to an enterprise is a different game, and this team decided to walk straight into it.

A 200-question security review

He will never forget the first B2B customer. A team lead who already used the product personally reached out when his company opened an AX division. Meeting notes turned out to be a lucky product: the value converts directly into labor hours, so the ROI math is instant.

But B2C and B2B run on different logic. In B2C, people try it and pay if they like it. In B2B, the game is eliminating reasons to say no. No security certification, cut, regardless of how good the product is. Passing one enterprise security review, two hundred questions long, took six months.

So this is where our moat is

Why would a startup take that on? His answer was the first key line of the night. Early on he realized that the ability to build software fast is no longer a moat. So where is it? In the very checklist his team was suffering through. The security reviews and enterprise sales process that everyone else avoids became the moat. Clear the wall once, and what is behind it flows in.

Why they raised in Japan

A Korean startup that raised first in Japan. The product had to be global from day one, and filtering by time zone, travel distance, and culture left Japan. One cofounder recently moved to Tokyo outright. To make your first customers extremely happy, you have to live with them, which is the same logic that grew the product in the first place.

Nothing about the stack was secret either. ElevenLabs for voice, language models routed regularly by benchmark. The metric that matters is activation, defined not as signup but as recording more than ten minutes after joining. Token costs for free users are counted as marketing spend.

She joined because she liked being on planes

Yejin grew up entirely in Korea, landed a Boeing internship by chance, and built her career in Singapore from there. Six years into a big company she felt herself stalling, pulled a list of Series C, D, and E companies in Singapore, and joined Workato. The switch fit her: nobody tells you what to do, they just ask for results.

Sales calls on the treadmill

She started as a solutions consultant covering APAC, and Korea sales began with a single line: you speak Korean, just try it. Her most practical habit followed. She hunts for what she does not know. The company records every sales call worldwide, so she listened to them on the treadmill, over meals, in taxis, absorbing how every other market pitched the product.

Of 500 problems, 490 can be solved without you

Korean sales came down to finding the problem that only Workato can solve. A customer has five hundred problems. Many can be solved with the product, but four hundred ninety of them can be solved some other way. Of the ten that remain, maybe one is worth the price. Finding that one is the job.

Why do you think you cannot do a one million dollar deal?

The path to becoming the global number one started with a leader in Singapore poking the pride of the team: SaaS teams celebrate deals of one or two hundred thousand dollars, so why not a million? The team worked backwards. A customer spending that much needs to see ten times the value. The answer was hiding in existing customer interactions. When a trusted customer casually asked about another vendor, she did not let it pass. She booked a meeting to ask why they were asking. That question became the deal.

Selling it is also a problem

What happens after a huge deal? Her answer was unexpected: it was brutal. A customer who invests that much expects that much. Closing is not the end. Closing is where it starts.

The real bottleneck of Korean AX

She held first meetings with about fifty enterprises in the first half of this year. Two difficulties stood out. First, defining the problem: everything sounds good, but knowing what to do for what effect is hard. Second, and this got the most nods in the room, change management.

What people like us mean by AX is building things with Claude Code. What a field worker means by AX is thinking a little less inside the same Excel window they see every day. Walk in with a solution without understanding that spectrum, and you will get many meetings and no contract.

I have not gotten over my burnout

The most honest answer of the night came on work-life balance. She said she wonders herself how everyone else survives. She burned out and keeps running without having recovered, so she has no good advice, except this: colleagues and small goals that let you bounce back are what slowly rebuild the ground under you.

Why Korea, why now

How do global companies see Korea right now? Purchasing power is finally visible in the numbers, and these companies do not move until the numbers show it. Opening the Korea entity took four years of proving it.

Roundtable: the rejection you remember most

Rejection turned out to be a perfect roundtable topic. An AI educator shared how audiences first complained his sessions were too technical, then later demanded more depth, teaching him to show the outcome before the buildup. A group with no salespeople widened the definition: if sales is the exchange of value, even a compliance officer is marketing themselves. Someone driving internal AX shared the hardest sell of all, convincing your own engineers.

They both bet on the same spot

Opposite directions, same bet. Tiro made a moat out of the security reviews and enterprise sales gauntlet everyone else avoids. Workato spent its time finding the one problem in five hundred that only it can solve. Neither bet on features. Both bet on the threshold others refuse to cross. And both ended up living where their customers live: one cofounder moved to Tokyo, and one country lead put her child to bed and caught the night flight.

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