When a company has done its homework, signed good business in the home market and has good customer cases, usually the focus shifts to other markets. If your home market is small, you have to go abroad earlier, but this has its pitfalls as well. In order to fully execute your international, go-to-market plan, you need to have muscles to do it. Unfortunately, small companies coming from small home markets start with poor resources, unrealistic budgets, and poor funding.
Conquering new markets requires not only good financials but an experienced team to execute properly. In case your team lacks these experiences and skillset, you need to hire new team members. Trying to sign new customers and partners in a foreign market is much more difficult than closing business in your home base. Do not make the mistake of trying to get there with a too thin team. If you don’t have experienced people in your team, get them on board before starting.
One common mistake many companies do is to, lightly and opportunistically, try few markets, do a deal with a telemarketing company to book meetings and fly in and out to try to close business. This method rarely works, and there are reasons for this. A company from abroad approaches the decision maker and proposes to meet. The decision maker has never heard of this company and do not know what they do. However, an early adaptor might agree to do a short meeting, but still has some doubts. Where is this company coming from? Do they have a local presence to support us? Are they seriously entering our market or are they only scratching the surface? Are they planning to stay here, or sign and fly back home? Of course, it depends on your product, but especially B2B products that require in-country sales reps, usually need to have local people in the team. You need to be able to convince your buyer that you are here to stay…
The world is full of really cool and sexy innovations and products. However, the winner is the one who can build a solid execution. There are lots of moving parts. You need to have solid traction in your home market, good customers, case studies and growing revenues. You need to spend time on your go-to-market strategy and sales plan. You need to analyze whether your team is built to conquer new markets, hire more salespeople, pre-sales and other professionals etc. Getting business with a B2B solution in a new market could take a year and if you have a channel strategy, even longer.
So, you have your first ten customers who are happy to use and pay for your product. Maybe they’re even brand advocates, willing to go on the record about what they like about your product. But how do you go from those first ten to your first 50, 100 customers? What about thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers?
See, those first ten or so deals are usually closed by founders. That makes them easier to close. After all, who knows your product better than you? What’s difficult is converting those first sales into a repeatable model. And founders may be too busy scaling up the home business to be able to handle sales and global expansion all on their own.
And, eventually, sales slow. Then what? It’s time to create your go-to-market team. You know, the one that truly gets to the crux of local culture and tech sales. A team that understands how to create a repeatable sales model.
In order to successfully launch new markets, you need to have a solid, documented gotomarket plan. The GTM plan describes your spearhead services, target market(s) and verticals, target accounts and/or partners. It also tackles details such as sales plan, sales team profiles, target setting and budget. A properly executed GTM plan is your guidebook on entering a new market.
We help our customers to build solid gotomarket plan to ensure that strategy is properly and efficiently executed.
If your strategy is to build your international business through a partner channel, you need to do your homework. Selling through partners means you need to sell twice, first to acquire good reliable and performing partners and your partners need to sell to their end-customers. You have to be able to attract the right partner candidates, sell your value proposal to them, board and train them efficiently and jointly plan business for the future. In addition, you should build your partner program, prepare your agreements and supporting materials. Doing business through partner isn’t always easy, that’s why good planning is vital.
Our partner strategy service helps you to cement your GTM with partners and to avoid common pitfalls in executing the plan.
Rinne & Partners helps you to build up your international sales team, to start execution without any delays or bottlenecks. We’ll find the right sales professionals from the target market and assist in launching and kick-off. Our services include:
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In this 30-minute call, we’ll go over your situation and see if we are a good fit to work together. I promise, this is not a sales call.
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