Choosing where to place your bets
Expanding into new markets – even those close to home – is fraught with risk. There are a number of fundamental considerations that every business needs to weigh up before starting the journey.
Areas for consideration include the prevailing market conditions, the economic outlook, the regulatory and tax framework, the logistics, the competitive landscape, the cultural and linguistic hurdles. You need to understand whether your services or product are going to resonate in that market or what feature changes you need to make. And that’s all before you start taking on staff, leasing premises, looking for distribution partners…..the list goes on.
Fundamentally you have to manage the risk and limit the costs until your new market is looking like a safe bet.Â
Over the years we have helped a number of companies do the research and due diligence they needed before committing time, people, resource and major expenses.
We ran a six month market mapping exercise for a B2C software company in London. They had customers locally but needed to know where best to deploy their sales teams to get national coverage. We researched target customers in 11 different regions. We plotted all the prospect data on interactive maps – so that the sales teams could choose a patch, click on the pin on the map to get all of the prospect details (which our team had researched) and then do their job. In six months the customer trebled their customer base.Â
We helped a global cloud services software provider research over 20 global locations. They needed to know everything about each location including the legal frameworks in each territory for telecommunications providers. They have already opened up one of these new centres.
Every market and every sector has its own idiosyncrasies. To keep your risk to an acceptable level we help you with a lot of the initial detailed research. We provide you with reports tailored to your market and industry. This covers desk research, industry reports, on the ground interviews, whatever is needed to give you the confidence to take the next steps.