Or, what to do First when Scaling International Revenue.
First. Get close to your customer.
Product Market Fit (PMF) is a prerequisite to scale.
What does 'getting close to the customer" mean for B2B SaaS?
Let's assume in the early days of your expansion into international markets you have run with the hypothesis 'what worked here will work there'. Let's further assume you have been successfully adding paying customers each month. But why is it so hard? Why are there so many objections and why is the sales cycle so long?
If this sounds like you ... ethnographic, or cultural, differences are likely leading to sub-optimal PMF. To scale customer acquisition, it’s critical to understand what problems customers really have, and how they currently solve those problems. Put another way - get close to the customer.
The goal of customer research at the early stages of a start-up (scale-up) journey is to validate/invalidate any assumptions made when believing that because we know what customers want in our home market, international markets will be the same.
Real World Example: A B2B SaaS offering with a consumption-based pricing model (the more you use the more you pay) found the sale always slowed down, and often stalled, "what do you mean you cannot tell me a how much it will cost". In Australia consumers were used to variable pricing as mobile phone plans were all consumption based ... but this was a complete anathema to the US market.
Real World Example: An Australian company launched with metric units and "back to front" date format, assuming they could change that later. Wrong. US customers immediately lost confidence in the offering. How can you understand my business if I have no idea what you are talking about? I mean what exactly is a centimeter, or is that centimetre?!?!
There are so many more examples, from regulatory environment (in the USA: Federal, State, County, City and Special Purpose District … and each State in the US is different) to terminology differences to business models which simply don’t resonate.
I know what you are thinking…sounds good, but how do we get to the real reasons customers do and do not buy?
Regardless, if you plan to conduct the research yourself or if you plan to add some expertise to your team, in either case be prepared to ask why, why, why, why, why. This great article explains the need to use up to 5 why questions to get to a real answer.
Is that all? Well ... no.
Step 1: Get closer to the customer.
Step 2: Ensure your customer facing team(s) are organised in such a way to be hyper-relevant to customers. We once came into a company in which the team were spread across all customer segments. In any given day they might speak to a buyer from a government agency, a sole trader, an OEM partner and then a fortune 500 enterprise ... and anything in between! They had no chance of being hyper-relevant to any of those buyers!
It's not going to surprise you to know this led to feature selling - "let me tell you about how great our new feature is" rather than uncovering business challenges.
Even learning and using sector specific jargon and terminology was no chance.
No wonder sales cycles were so long and conversion rates so low!
If you are thinking "I really need to train and enable my people to be hyper-relevant to our Ideal Customers" … you would be right.
Enablement is a whole topic in and of itself (this is worth a read). For now, let's agree having poorly trained customer facing teams who do not understand the customers context and business issues is a sure-fire way to throttle scale.
So, do I need to hire a bunch of people to train and enable my team?
Yes and No.
Yes - as you scale dedicated enablement resources are crucial.
No - in the early days there are a bunch of ways to improve your knowledge of customers without impacting burn rate.
Arrange your customer facing teams into logical groupings so their customer engagements are similar (not like the example above).
Implement deal reviews, why did the customer buy, or not buy?
Schedule knowledge sharing and best practices learning opportunities.
And most of all, be curious.
Oh, and that company with the team that were spread across all customer segments? 10x revenue (ARR) in ~3 years!
To take the first step towards 10x growth of your international revenue please get in touch.
#internationalexpansion #USA #saas #metrics #communication #organisationalculture #corevalues #growth #b2b #culture #performance #global
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