How to scale a product across segments, verticals, and geographies without losing the commercial thread

Expanding into a new market is not a bigger version of what worked at home. 

One of the most expensive assumptions in B2B growth is that the go-to-market playbook that worked in the home market can be translated into a new geography with a different currency and a local hire. It almost never works that way.

I have been involved in market expansion decisions at three different scales, at Worldpay, where we were taking a global payment processing platform into new enterprise accounts across EMEA, North America, and Asia; at Farfetch, where the product localisation strategy had to account for genuinely different luxury shopping behaviours in Europe, Japan, China, the Middle East, and North America; and with smaller companies where the question was whether to enter a second European market before the first was fully proven.

Across all of those experiences, I've learned that, to expand successfully we have to treat each new market as a hypothesis instead of a scaling exercise. The reason being, when you validate through experimentation, you confidence goes up and it's easier to get stakeholder buy-in, the right budget and resource for a successful launch. 

What changes in a new market

Three things change in every new market, and all three need to be understood before the expansion begins.

The first is the Ideal Customer Profile. Even if the product and the core value proposition are identical, the buyer in a new market is likely to be different in ways that matter commercially. Their procurement process is different. Their risk tolerance is different. The internal champions who make the case for a new technology vendor are different. The triggers that make a problem urgent enough to act on are different. Mapping these differences is the foundation of your new market strategy.

The second is the buying process. Enterprise buying committees in Germany behave very differently from those in the UK, which behave differently from those in the United States. The number of stakeholders, the role of procurement, the relative importance of references versus product demonstrations, the timeline from first contact to signed contract, these vary significantly. A GTM motion designed for one environment will underperform in another.

The third is the proof required. What makes a new vendor credible in a market you have not yet won is different from what makes you credible in a market where you have an established reputation. Local case studies matter more than global ones. Local references matter more than international ones. The sales cycle in a new market is almost always longer than in the home market, precisely because the proof infrastructure is not yet in place.

What I learned from running Enterprise ABM programs across EMEA

At Worldpay, I initially designed the enterprise ABM programme to influence the RFP with Booking.com. When we scaled it across EMEA, the mistake we could have made, and in some cases did pre-ABM , was to apply the same account list, the same messaging, and the same channel mix to markets with very different commercial cultures.

Sales reps are a marketer's best friends

Thanks to my close relationship with the sales team, I had first hand insights into how to navigate the region, which I'm happy to share here with you:

• The French enterprise procurement process is considerably more formal and relationship-dependent than the UK equivalent. 

• The Dutch market is smaller but more technically sophisticated, which changed what the product conversation looked like. 

• The Nordics had high expectations for data security and regulatory compliance that required a different proof package entirely. 

Scaling the programme successfully meant adapting each of these dimensions. 

The accounts that we won in EMEA were won because we took the time to understand what made a credible vendor in each specific market. The ones we did not win quickly enough were almost always cases where we had applied the UK playbook without adaptation.

Building the regional GTM kit

The practical output of this thinking is what I call a regional GTM kit, a set of marketing assets and research that makes a new market entry manageable without requiring the local team to start from zero.

A regional GTM kit includes: 

• a local ICP profile (specific to the new geography); 

• a competitive landscape brief (who the local alternatives are and how they are positioned); 

• a buying process map (how enterprise decisions are made in this specific market); 

• a proof package (local case studies, references, or at minimum analogous cases from comparable markets); 

• and a channel assessment (where the target customer spends their professional attention, which conferences, which publications, which community networks).

Building this kit before committing significant resource to a new market is guaranteed to increase your chance of success. 

The companies that expand into new markets most successfully are the ones that are honest about what they do not yet know. They treat the first year in a new market as a learning phase, and they structure their investment accordingly.

As you plan your next market entry, what do you actually know about how enterprise buying decisions are made in that geography? And what are you assuming? The gap between those two answers is where the expansion risk lives.

DM me if you found this article insightful and if you have any specific questions on how to expand to new markets, whether hiring, finding local distribution partners or how to make your product resonate as new entry.