Opening up sales in a new country is hard... Here are the 5 things I got right.

Following up on my last article on entering a new geographic market as a founder.

I have done the following market entry in the last 8 years (in chronological order):

1. US Silicon Valley (fail)
2. NZ (fail)
3. US Washington DC ( Partial Success)
4. Canada (Success)
5. UK (Success)
6. US New York, Minnesota and DC (Ongoing)

As quick revision - here is what I got wrong;

1. I didn’t live in the market. “Fly in, Fly out” with no previous network, just doesnt work.
2. Sponsoring conferences is the wrong game.
3. I didn’t join any clubs that were connected to my interests
4. I didn’t have a repeatable sales process
5. I hired sales people too quickly.

So what went right in Canada and the UK?

First Thing I got Right - Build value added partnerships with big brands. In order to get market access spend the time required to find potential resellers that have networks, brand power and previous success. Write down a list of brand you think would add value and could be your outsourced sales team, ensure they can make money off what you do and swarm. Swarming is really important, you will get alot of nos until you can find someone who would like to grow their part of the business.

Second Thing I got Right - Build your own Customer Gartner to get market insights. Understanding historic projects of prospect that went wrong and that went well is absolute gold when doing outreach and discovery. I have found looking at intent tools doesn’t really work, alternatively I have found hiring previous executives of large prospects to act as retained advisors is a great way of building a unique approach to an enterprise acquisition and can drive business development. Real actionable market and prospect intelligence can drastically drive up speed to acquisition.

Third Thing I got Right - I built a pre-sales team. I took alot of our technology consultants and retrained them as pre-sales staff. The presales team ran an effective discovery process and templated it. This helped our CTO customer feel safer by working with a technologist early on in the sales process, increased ACV and improved project success.

Fourth Thing I got Right - We ran intimate events to kick off entry with our nominated channel partners. We worked with channel partners who cared about impact, built a directed campaign and kicked it off with an intimate event. This type of kickoff creates a more digestible and memorable story for foreign company entering a new market and can bind outliers to your cause.

Fifth Thing I got Right - Connecting disconnected peers. Alot of enterprise customers and government teams rarely get to connect on a particular problem or policy issue at the operator level. Remember, you are rarely a prophet in your own town but your data and customer relationships could be absolutely valuable to a foreign company or government department that is doing similar work and facing similar challenges. I spent the first few months proactively connecting customers with new prospects or stakeholders in the country

How right was it?

1. UK and Canada now account for 70% of all revenue at WYWM
2. Average Initial ACV per customer tripled in a two year period
3. Revenue in a new market is upwards of $7m in the first 12 months for much lower capital injection.
4. I flew much less.

In my next article, I will take you through how I figured my first pivot in my product by using the sales process and how it led to a $ms SAAS contract in weeks not months.