When considering to enter a new market it is crucial to strategically evaluate that market. This equally applies to both existing products/services or new ones. Before investing any significant resources into penetrating a new market, you obviously need to make sure that it makes business sense for your company.
Start by defining your goals. Why do you want to penetrate this new market? Do you just want to grow sell to a wider audience or have a business strategy to expand into new markets? Whatever your driver for this sales expansion is, you will also need to figure out how you are going to measure success. When determining your goals, add in some targets and look at some benchmarks to help.
When it comes to new market penetration, research is critical. You can’t expect that your current sales tactics, strategy and even messaging will work in any environment. Treat any entry into a new market as if your company is a start-up. You must also consider new marketing strategies to help deliver success – successful companies are those where business strategy and the marketing plan are aligned at the start.
Research the following key areas:
- Urgency: Is there a compelling event for people to buy (e.g; legislative changes)
- Market Size: how many companies are actively purchasing similar products or services?
- Pricing: what pricing is appropriate for the market? One way of working this out, would be to research the highest average price a purchaser would be willing to spend for your solution?
- Customer Acquisition: how easy is it to acquire a new customer? Based on money and efforts, how much will one sale cost your company? Are there any legislative or cultural challenges that could make it difficult to get hold of basic sales intelligence (email addresses, phone numbers etc)
- Competition: What is your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and can all your employees articulate this consistently? Does this apply to the new market? How easy is it for competitors to duplicate what you offer?
- Up-Front Investment: how much will you have to invest before you’re ready to go to market?
- Cross Selling: are there related secondary offers that you could also offer your customers? Is this new offering the main focus or is it being used to open up the market for other products or services?
An area that you need to consider is the resources that you have readily available to you. Is it a case that you will need to just up train your current sales team? Perhaps you will experience language barriers, if this is the case, are you going to hire new staff to deal with your potential and new clients or are you going to outsource this to a specialised provider.
Tapping into a new market needs to be done so with careful thought and consideration. A lead generation campaign is a good opportunity to get more understanding about which market(s) you should focus your efforts on, based on results. The key thing here is to continually monitor and evaluate – don’t be afraid to pull the plug on markets which are not delivering what you expect, so you can focus more resources on those areas showing signs of success.
Exploring new markets to engage with? Why not speak to Maven TM to find out more about how we can help!
