Global Expansion for B2B Tech: Opportunities and Challenges
Most locally successful companies get stuck on their road to global expansion because of too many unknowns involved. However, a structured and confident way to the global arena is possible. To give you a glimpse, I’ve prepared a summary of my observations, and long talks with the companies I’ve partnered with.
You’ve become a powerful player in the domestic market. As a leading company within the industry, your offering includes a wide range of products and services with many prestigious customers and had many upcoming ones in the pipeline.
Now you are ready to step into the global arena. With this goal in mind, you defined the key company objective for that year: becoming a global company by generating the majority of the revenue from abroad.
Of course, the road was full of challenges to be overcome. Even if you had your early adopter contracts, the pipeline was primarily based on the domestic market, and there isn’t a structural plan to grow it.
Here are some suggestions that you can use to overcome the challenges on the road.
A dedicated team and cross-functional alignment towards global expansion
Expanding to foreign markets offering bigger opportunities requires strong teamwork. Establishing a completely dedicated team is essential for global expansion. In addition to the dedicated team, other departments need also be aligned with their KPIs as it would only be possible with their collective effort and contributions.
Plus having an all-star team, having a single tone of voice, and telling a unified story across channels were necessary to position the company most effectively. All sales and marketing materials should keep the consistency of the brand.
The online presence of your company, like a website or LinkedIn profile, is usually one of the initial points of touch for the customers, and they require to be optimized to make visitors’ journeys more convenient. Landing pages, to collect lead information should be designed to give your benefit quickly and convince visitors to talk with you.
After making every customer touchpoint consistent, it is time to build up a multichannel strategy.
A multichannel lead generation strategy addressing each step of the customer journey
The biggest challenge is primarily building up a solid lead generation strategy that will seamlessly work across international markets. Creating awareness and building trust in those markets is essential to generate more leads. The marketing and business development teams should set up a roadmap developing different tactics for each step of the customer journey; including awareness, consideration, and decision.
The first step is to create an international, comprehensive, and dynamic target company database. Target countries, middle-to-top prospects in those markets, and key decision-makers are identified and listed with a deductive approach.
Putting the customers at heart, the global business development team and the marketing team should come together to develop a content strategy, addressing prospects' pain points and the exact solutions you can offer. With the regular, consistent, and high-quality content, customers' engagement is dramatically increased. It is used for collecting customer data by requesting contact information in exchange for comprehensive reports regarding the industry. In this way, the customer database showed significant growth in a short time, with quality leads.
There is also an exceptional opportunity on LinkedIn. As a more direct touchpoint allowing your team to send a message to the prospects, it has the potential to bring more conversions. Therefore, both email marketing and LinkedIn ads can be combined in the process. Based on data collected from each channel, the team can optimize every single marketing and sales effort. As a result, the number and frequency of conversions will increase significantly.
You are not alone in this journey. In the meantime, you can build and maintain fruitful relationships with possible partners across the world. The global partners can specifically be selected from the same ecosystem, complementing your solutions.
Account-based marketing to increase conversions
Your team can utilize the account-based marketing strategy based on all initiatives mentioned above and beyond. Prioritization of customer relationships and open dialogue should be overselling products and services. With a consultative approach hyper-focused on the customer, you would position the solutions in a more compelling and effective way. The relationships built on mutual trust and understanding brought more opportunities for up and cross-selling. The more time customers spend with the company, the more trust they build and the more likely they become to buy the products and services.
As a result, a dynamic and multichannel lead generation strategy with an account-based marketing approach can be combined. The exceptional spectrum covering cold reach, content marketing, digital marketing, events, partnerships, and many others will allow you to make data-based decisions providing increased awareness, trust, and excellent satisfaction in global markets.
As a summary,
A holistic approach to marketing and sales is just beyond creating awareness and generating leads. This structure can pave the way to reaching out to many new customers along with opportunities for up-and cross-selling. When all of your departments worked in a coordinated and aligned manner towards a business objective, you will officially become a global company.
If you are thinking of expanding your business globally, we can guide you through the process of creating a competitive analysis and the implementation of a global expansion strategy to help you achieve success.