SERVICES

WHAT IS THE COST OF GOING GLOBAL?

For many tech companies, expanding into overseas markets is a natural path to growing your business and widening your global audience. The cost of setting up your organization in a new country can be significant, and once established, this is just the first of many steps in your journey to growing globally.

That is why we are here to help. 

When we partner with you, we create a tailored go-to-market strategy based on your product, needs, and goals. We work with you, advocating for your technology and navigating you through the various road bumps along the way. At the core of what we do is creating long-lasting partnerships and helping to build your value in foreign markets. When we look at your organization and your product we want to ensure that your organization is set up for success.

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When we ask ourselves what is the cost of going global, it isn't just about the financials. The cost we see is the total cost of ownership of going to business in a foreign market. It's the holistic view of all the interconnected parts which can make or break a business. 

From our years of experience and working in overseas markets, we have seen cases where new startups or existing foreign subsidiaries experience stagnant growth as well as missed opportunities due to a multitude of reasons. These challenges can range from business cultural differences, misalignment of strategic vision, use cases not being adapted for certain countries and business cultures, hiring for the wrong roles, even hiring the right people and not knowing how to utilize them effectively, or pushing the wrong technology into the wrong market at the wrong time. We value transparency with our customers and in some cases certain technologies may or may not be the right fit for certain markets at certain times. 

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There are always exceptions, but when technology products struggle to grow in foreign markets, the root cause is almost never about running out of financing. Running out of financing is usually the consequence of not addressing something which might have been preventable.

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In going into foreign markets here are some considerations we make and questions we ask to help you on your journey: 

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Technology Foundation

• ​Summary: Looking deeply into your core technology and product offerings helps us get a clearer picture of your product readiness in overseas markets. Understanding if there are any showstopper issues or other technical roadblocks will help better assess whether a particular market is ready for your technology. This helps in preventing costly overseas deployments which could result in increased escalations for your engineering teams or stagnant growth. This also helps your teams to strategize and better prepare for global market entry proactively. 

•  Some questions we may ask:

  • Have you evaluated your technology in detail for each country you are entering?

  • How is your data encoded?

  • If you have AI / ML technologies have you tested it against foreign language data sets?

  • Does the cloud vendor your technology rides on have data centers within the region? If not, will there be latency issues?

Localization and Internationalization

• ​Summary: Translating your product is just the first step in getting your technology ready for foreign markets. Your business collateral including your product slides, sales deck, white papers, web presence, or product documentation, also may need translations and be adapted to foreign business cultures. For example, the use cases you present may not be be useful in foreign markets and may need to be rewritten. Beyond translations, having a closer look at how your users interact with your product from the UI/UX side may need to be expanded for your global audience. 

• Some questions we may ask:

  • Do your sales decks reference use cases which might offend foreign business cultures?​

  • Do your translations reflect the voice of your target users? Do you want to use the masculine or feminine voice, or polite language or casual language?

  • Does your UI/UX design consider demographics of regional users?

Hiring

• ​Summary: Who you hire, in what region, and why you are hiring those individuals are always important considerations for any organization. To help ensure your success we want to better understand what approaches you are taking to hiring into specific regions. For example, in relationship heavy cultures like Japan, you may not want to hire a traditional 'head of sales' and instead hire a 'relationship manager' for channel partnerships with sales experience, but this really depends on your product offering and how your current strategies might take shape in your target region.

• Some questions we may ask:

  • Are you hiring the right people for the region?

  • Do the new hires need to speak your language?

  • In relationship-heavy cultures, do you want to hire a sales person or key relationship holder?

Management

• ​Summary: There are always challenges to managing an overseas team from your current location. We want to ensure success and help guide you in potential management strategies and expectations. On one hand we want to prevent your current local management staff from suffering due to timezone differences and having to manage an overseas team by working the midnight shift. On the other hand, if your foreign team can be managed from your current location, then you not only save in hiring costs, but also get better first hand insight into how your teams are doing. 

• Some questions we may ask:

  • Are you able to effectively manage your team from overseas or do you need a local team to do so?

  • How do you create cohesive and transparent communication between your regional team and HQ? What are some acceptable practices in managing regional teams?

Business/Corporate Culture

• ​Summary: One of the most overlooked areas where we have seen challenges is in understanding and balancing out bi-lateral business/organizational cultural differences. These differences can result in mismatched sales expectations or misunderstanding in product expectations and deliveries, If there are struggles between business or corporate cultures, we try to identify them to help build a more synergistic environment between both parties. 

• Some questions we may ask:

  • ​Do the foreign business cultures align with your own?

  • Your sales process may not be a quick as expected or in some case too quick that your teams aren't able to keep up.