A French company wins at home, often with large enterprise customers, through relationships and local events. In France that works. Business is concentrated in Paris, the right people are in the same rooms, and a few strong relationships open many doors.
A year or two after opening in the US, the office is staffed, a few reps are selling, and the big events are on the calendar. But the target account list is long and buyers still haven't heard of the brand. The market is bigger and spread across the whole country, buyers research on their own, and the motion that built the company doesn't travel. The instinct is to push harder on it anyway: more events, more reps, and more waiting for relationships to form.
Capture the demand before you chase the accounts.
That's the situation I walked into at a company that had opened in the US but was still selling the way it did at home.
The starting point
- No demand team, no defined ideal customer, no growth operations
- A plan built with the head of sales
- An audit that found the fastest return: buyers already searching for what the company sold
Phase one · Capture the demand
- Website rebuilt for American buyers, then regionalized in English, French, German and Spanish
- Around 200 landing pages, built on each persona's keywords and value proposition
- Paid search and LinkedIn driving traffic to them
- One definition of a qualified lead, shared with sales, so volume turned into pipeline
- Major industry events used to learn who the US buyer really was
Phase two · Build the outbound muscle
Within a year, inbound had grown several times over, and a third became qualified pipeline.
- Two SDRs working inbound and prospecting
- First account-based programs aimed at the kind of enterprise accounts the company had won in France
Keep the product. Rebuild the go-to-market.
Usually travels
- The product — what it does and why it's better
- The core value — the outcome customers pay for
- Customer proof — if it's recognizable in the new market
- Operating discipline — how you measure and forecast
Usually gets rebuilt
- The ICP — which segment actually exists there
- The brand narrative — how you earn trust in a new market
- The message — what convinces buyers there
- The channel mix — how buyers find and evaluate vendors
- The sales motion — who sells, to whom, and how early
No two expansions are the same. These are the answers that change the plan.
Does your home-market motion depend on relationships that won't transfer?
Events, partner-led selling, and founder networks rarely cross a border intact. What replaces them decides the first year's budget.
How much of the demand can you still win, or do incumbents already own it?
If buyers are searching and a real share isn't locked in, capturing that demand comes first. It's the fastest return, and it teaches you who actually buys. If incumbents own the market, you're planning a displacement fight, which takes longer and costs more.
How much of your home-market ICP actually exists there?
It is often a smaller segment, or a different one. Your best customers at home rarely map one-to-one onto the new market.
Is your story working, or only translated?
Your narrative and messaging were shaped for buyers who already knew you. In a new market they have to land on their own, with different proof, a sharper value proposition, and sometimes several languages for one region. Translation isn't localization.
Do sales and marketing agree on what a qualified lead is?
Without it, new inbound volume swamps a small sales team, and soon nobody trusts the number.
If more than two of these don't have a clear answer, that's where to start.
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