The first ninety days in a new market

Whether the new market is a country, a vertical or a new line of business, the first ninety days have the same shape. The companies that open markets well do not do more in that quarter than the companies that fail. They do fewer things, in a stricter order.

Days 1 to 15: decide what you are not doing

The opening fortnight is spent narrowing. Three things get written down and signed off by the people who will be judged on the result.

• The ideal customer profile for this market, which is rarely the same as the profile at home. A mid-market IT services buyer in Germany does not look like one in Texas, and the trigger events differ too.
• At most three segments and one message per segment. A new market is not the place to test eight value propositions. Pick the one that worked best at home and the one most likely to land locally, and keep a third in reserve.
• Who the closer is and what a qualified meeting means. If nobody has the calendar to take the meetings, there is no point generating them. We have written out our definition of a qualified meeting; it goes in the plan before the first message does.

The account list that comes out of this is deliberately small: a few hundred accounts chosen on evidence, not a few thousand pulled from a database. A list is a point of view, and in a new market you want that point of view to be sharp enough to be wrong quickly.

Days 16 to 45: build the ground

This is the research and data phase, and it is the one most companies skip because it does not look like selling. It is where the quarter is won.

• Every account on the list gets a one-page map: what the company does, what has changed recently, who owns the problem, who signs, and where the plausible way in is.
• Every contact is verified by a human, because the directories are weakest in the markets you know least.
• The local presence is set up: a number in the market, cover for its working hours, and language where it matters. Buyers can tell when they are being called from another continent at 3 a.m. the caller's time.
• The first sequences are written in the local register. The home-market deck is translated, not transplanted.

Days 46 to 75: start the conversations, and read them

Outreach begins across the channels that fit the market: email and phone almost everywhere, LinkedIn where buyers live on it, events where the calendar allows, and in person where the sale needs it. The discipline in this phase is to treat every reply, including every refusal, as research.

A weekly report goes to the client with what was sent, what came back and what we are changing. We change one variable at a time: the segment, the message or the channel, never all three in the same week. Otherwise nobody learns anything, and the quarter ends with a pile of activity and no opinion.

Days 76 to 90: judge it honestly

The last fortnight is for decisions, and they are easier to make if the first fortnight was done properly.

• Which segment produced conversations with the right people? That segment gets the second quarter's budget.
• Which message did buyers repeat back in their own words? That is the one that survives.
• Does the market need someone physically present? Some do. Trust-led markets and relationship-heavy sectors often do not move past a certain stage without a handshake, which is when feet on the ground earn their keep.
• Is the closer keeping up? If meetings are being booked faster than they can be taken, the plan changes before the pipeline rots.

The question at day ninety is not "did it work?". It is "what do we now know that we did not know at day one, and what does that change about quarter two?"

The four mistakes that lose the quarter

1. Launching with the home-market deck. The product is the same. The buyer, the trigger and the objection are not.
2. Measuring activity instead of conversations. Ten thousand emails is a cost, not a result.
3. Changing three variables at once. When the first fortnight of outreach is quiet, the temptation is to rewrite everything. Change one thing and wait a week.
4. Hiring a local account executive before there is a calendar for them. An expensive hire with nothing to close leaves within a year, and the market gets a reputation internally for being hard. It was not hard. It was early.

What this looks like as an engagement

For most clients the first ninety days combine strategy in the first fortnight, research and data through day forty-five, and lead generation from then on, with a decision at the end about in-market presence. The pieces move in that order for a reason, and we are wary of any plan that starts with the outreach.