Expanding your B2B business to a new country can be daunting. Obviously, you need a solid market entry strategy, but also you need to develop a deep understanding of how B2B sales are done in market you're eyeing.
Vainu expanded to new markets a few years ago, so we thought we'd like to share our story and how we did by answering these ten common questions about expanding a B2B business to the Nordics. We'll take our expansion to Sweden as an example.
It's not about nationality, but actual sales skills. For example, we have both Swedish and Finnish people in our team in Stockholm and they all do a great job with customers. If we look at the top four individual sales performances, it’s 50/50 between Swedes and Finns.
We've seen a slightly higher hit rate and conversion rate with local language. However, most people are fluent in English as well, so it does work. For a stronger local presence in the Nordics, we recommend you use local language in your material and content as much as possible.
For the first three months, we sold to Sweden remotely from Finland without having a local business entity registered in Sweden. Once we had acquired the first 10 customers, we decided to open up an office and set up a local subsidiary fully owned by our Finnish company. Not having a Swedish organization naturally adds uncertainty with some prospects, so it’s good to have a plan in place to set up a local company as soon as possible.
In general, getting a hold of people and booking meetings over the phone is relatively easy in all the Nordic markets. In that sense, expanding to the Nordics is easy. Additionally, if you use a data-driven approach and try to make sure you reach out to prospects at the best possible time, you can boost your numbers up a lot. Based on our own data, you need to do 50-100 percent more phone calls/emails per meeting in Sweden, but the numbers are still very low compared to the UK or the US, for example.
The Swedish market is twice the size of Finnish market. Once you've found your sweet spot, it's easier to scale your business in Sweden, because there are more companies in almost all segments. We have also noticed that a lot of our customers make their Nordic decisions in Sweden, so the probability to close international deals can be higher.
As an example, this is how we did expand our business to Sweden:
When looking back at the 15 months after our market entry, it is obvious that we could have scaled our operations even faster when it comes to recruiting local people and building up the B2B sales and customer success teams in Sweden.
In Sweden, there are often more people involved in the decision-making process. It took us some time to figure out the best way to facilitate the sales process when there are multiple stakeholders involved.
Our first hires in new countries are always sales people, who then form the "founding team". After 50-100 clients, we established customer success team. Our sixth hire was the first full-time marketeer.
We've found our people through LinkedIn, our own networks, job fairs, startup events, referrals and many other career sites where we placed our job ads. In some countries we also use staffing agencies who focus on finding strong sales professionals.
Map out your short list of potential partners by using a smart company database such as Vainu. After that, our recommendation is to pick up the phone and set up meetings with them. The best way to understand a new market is to meet as many potential customers and partners as possible.
Business culture is very similar in both countries. As mentioned above, the decision making process seems to be slightly different, but smart sales organizations can adapt to it very quickly.
Next: Download our Guide to Sales Prospecting.