Expanding to the US: How to Build a Go-to-Market Strategy for New Geographies

Summary

In this webinar, Shiv Narayanan, Founder and CEO of How To SaaS, explains how to expand into a new country or region without taking on more risk than you need to. He covers when geographic expansion makes sense, the five models companies use to enter new markets, and how to build a go-to-market in a new region in the right order.

Key takeaways

• Maximize your core market before expanding. It’s easier to grow where you already have customers, referrals, data and campaigns that work.
• Geographic expansion is one of the lowest-risk ways to grow your total addressable market, because the core product and business stay largely the same.
• Decide how aggressively to expand before you start. That choice changes what marketing, sales, product, pricing and support each need to do.
• There are five models, from lowest to highest investment: passive expansion, scaling inbound channels, a full company strategy shift, a localized presence and team, and M&A.
• Most companies can capture much of the value with the first two or three models. The last two are big bets.
• Build your go-to-market in a new region in the same order as in your core market. Start with late-funnel paid media, localized landing pages, email sequences and case studies, and move on to broader content and in-person events later.
• Prove each step works, then use the results as the business case for more investment from your CEO and board.

Transcript

Speaker: Shiv Narayanan, Founder and CEO, How To SaaS. Lightly edited for readability.

Should you expand before you’ve maximized your core market?

Welcome to this webinar. One of the reasons we decided to do this topic is that I meet a lot of clients and private equity investors investing in companies that want to expand their regional footprint into different countries or regions. A good example would be an American company that wants to expand to Europe, or vice versa: a European company that wants to expand to the US because there’s a lot more value to capture there. We initially positioned this as “How do you expand to the US?”, but it’s a general talk. If you’re focused on a specific region and you want to expand to a different part of the world, what’s the best way to go about it?

As a disclaimer, and some of you who have taken my C-level marketing course have seen this, we’re going to focus on the approach and the overall strategy. I’m not going to go too deep into tactics, because the tactics will be very different depending on the type of business you operate, the types of customers you have and what you sell. I want you to walk away with a way to think about this problem, so you can work out the order of operations for your business and how to capture the value that’s sitting there for your companies.

Before we jump into the geographical side, I want to set the stage. When we talk about expanding geographically, we’re talking about one of many avenues available to a business to grow. As a baseline, there are only three ways to grow any business. One: you get more customers. Two: you increase your average value of sale, or how much you sell per deal. Three: you have more repeat business or better retention. Together, these three things create more customer value.

Depending on the type of business you’re in, we can split those three buckets further. It could be expanding existing accounts, landing more net new revenue, cross-sell and upsell, pricing, new products, new verticals, or maybe M&A. You have all of these levers available to you. The question is: where do you start?

I’ve shown this framework before. It’s based on an idea called “Profit from the Core”: you want to maximize your core business before you expand to other adjacencies. An adjacency could be geographical, but it could also be different products or different segments. A lot of companies get this wrong because they do things in the wrong order. They start expanding to adjacencies before they’ve maximized their core.

So if you’re thinking about expanding internationally, one of the first questions I’d ask any company is: have you maxed out your go-to-market budget, or your overall spend, in your core markets? Is there more value to capture there? It’s easier to grow in a market where you already have a footprint. There are customers, referrals and good word of mouth, there are campaigns you can scale up, and there’s data you can build on.

Why is geographic expansion such a powerful growth lever?

Let’s assume you’ve done that work. Then the question becomes: how do we find additional levers of growth? In every business this looks different. You can expand through new channels, new segments or new geographies, which is what we’re talking about today. You can also expand by investing in new value chain steps, entering a new type of business or offering new products.

Depending on your business, one, two or three of these will make more sense than the others. But as you move along that list, the risk and the resources required to capture the value change dramatically. If you enter an entirely new line of business, you have to invest in new infrastructure, people, business processes, go-to-market and product before you can capture that value. A basic example would be Amazon launching AWS. AWS is an entirely new business, even though it’s considered part of Amazon. Its go-to-market is very different from Amazon’s, and so is everything else involved: the product, the people and the infrastructure. On the flip side, if all we’re talking about is investing in new channels, the risk is quite low. All you may have to do is increase your program spend.

Geographical expansion is one of the most powerful levers to scale, because it’s on the lower end of the risk scale and it expands your total addressable market considerably. That’s probably the number one reason to expand geographically. You have a product, service or solution that customers want, care about and are willing to pay for. There are other markets where the same product could be sold, but you’re not present. There’s either local competition or other alternatives, or maybe no solution is being offered in that market at all. By entering a new geography, you increase your TAM significantly without needing to change other core components of your business.

Here’s a way to visualize it. Say a business has 5% penetration in Europe, 2% in North America, 2% in APAC and 1% in Latin America. They might look at their potential targets in each region, and at their current net revenue retention or CAC payback. They could find that although they’re more penetrated in Europe, there’s far more opportunity in North America, and the unit economics or net revenue retention are better there. So why not expand to North America? Or even APAC, if the investment and risk are low enough?

How aggressively should you expand?

Assuming you’ve done some of this work and can see the opportunity, the key question becomes: how aggressively do we want to expand geographically? This is something people get wrong or don’t think about enough. Expanding geographically requires the whole organization. Depending on the model you choose, there are different levels of commitment and change for each department. Marketing will need to do things, sales will need to do things, you might need to change your pricing, or your product might need to change. How aggressive you decide to be changes how involved each part of the business needs to be. I don’t hear companies talk about this enough, or even the people inside companies who are pushing for these ideas.

As a basic example, say you’re currently in North America and you want to offer your product in APAC. Let’s say you have a support phone number customers can call. If you don’t have a local support team, your hours of operation won’t line up with customers in that market. It’s very simple to understand, and the same thing applies across every department.

What are the five models of geographic expansion?

It’s important to look at geographic expansion on a spectrum, from low investment to high investment. There are five models I’ve seen work effectively, and you have to work out which one applies most to your business.

Number one is completely passive expansion. You continue business as usual, and companies based in a different region may come into your pipeline opportunistically. You let them convert because they happened to come in.

Number two is scaling your inbound presence in those markets, because that’s one of the easiest places to deploy more.

Third is a full company strategy shift, where you say, “I do want to be active in these markets, and I’m going to invest resources to get there.”

Fourth is a localized presence or team in markets, verticals or solutions where local presence matters: local partners, local sales reps and so on.

Finally, there’s M&A. Instead of building it yourself, you buy a company that already has a local presence in that market. That obviously has far more risk and investment: debt, integrations and everything else involved.

Understanding the spectrum is step one: which model is most accessible to your business, or the right fit for your company? Your company strategy should inform which avenue you choose. Depending on what you sell, it should almost force your hand. Several factors help determine which of these five options you should choose:

• market dynamics
• your business model
• your overall go-to-market
• product complexities, including compliance, legal and regional issues like language

Let’s run through each one with some examples.

Model 1: Hands-off and passive

This is best for companies that are usually smaller, so they’re strapped for resources, and that haven’t maximized their core markets. In these cases, expanding geographically is just another idea or project that can distract from the core business. What you want to do is continue business as usual and be opportunistic with the inbound opportunities that come through. You don’t change the product, customer success, your overall go-to-market or your pricing, and you keep offering things in the same language.

An example: you offer services in the UK and you expand opportunistically to other places where people speak English. People from Germany, Australia, India, the US or Canada might come through, because that’s the language all your marketing is in. Your pricing is the same. For some of those markets it might be too expensive, but you say, “That’s what it is. This is what we offer, and we have other things we’re focused on.”

An example from my past is Wild Apricot. That’s how we first expanded internationally. We were focused on North America, and then people started free trials from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Germany, Malaysia and other countries. The conversion rates were lower, but we had an inbound PLG motion, and people would convert.

A lot of companies fit into this bucket. If you’re a PLG business, it can work quite well, because you don’t need a sales force to handle demos. If you have a demo-and-AE model and you’re doing enterprise B2B sales, it can be more challenging. Again, that comes back to business context: what is your business model? In this case it works because the business model allows us to be passive.

Model 2: Scaling inbound channels

This is where you acknowledge that you don’t want to go fully into a market, but you can see your product fits that geography, so you expand how much marketing you do there. We have a lot of clients who operate like this. They launch paid media campaigns in different regions with dedicated landing pages for the local market. They might adjust their pricing, but it’s not necessary. There might be some basic product updates, for example in onboarding, where you identify which country someone is in because that affects which features matter. But the bigger change is scaling your go-to-market through self-serve inbound channels.

At a high level, you know the market you’re targeting, it’s the same ICP, and the go-to-market change is increased spend and programs. The product and pricing stay largely the same. This works well if not much about your product needs to change from market to market. Trello is a great example. Whether you’re here, in Germany or in the Netherlands, as long as the landing pages are in the right language, what the customer needs to experience in the product is very similar. For a lot of companies, especially where compliance and legal issues aren’t involved, scaling inbound channels is probably the healthiest, lowest-risk step. It lets you capture a chunk of the value in that market.

Model 3: A full company strategy shift

Third is a full company strategy shift, which changes how you position yourself. Here you’re acknowledging that the TAM in these markets is massive. Yes, you’re maximizing your core market, but there are just as many buyers in these other markets, so you need a dedicated go-to-market strategy for each country and region.

That means customizing your strategy and positioning. You might do competitor research to see where you fit in the competitive landscape. You’ll have to adjust pricing to fit the region, and look at all the channels you can use to reach customers in that market. That needs to be combined with product updates, so you’re relevant in those regions and competitive against the alternatives. You also need support and help content that helps people find success with the product.

At a high level, this might mean:

• targeting new segments
• regional messaging and positioning
• increased spend
• regional sales reps or regional sales enablement
• updated pricing
• regional support and CS

It often suits companies with a demo-led rather than self-serve model, especially where compliance and legal issues are involved.

QuickBooks is a good example. Accounting laws and approaches differ by region. There are different standards you’re held accountable to, taxes are filed differently and reporting is done differently. QuickBooks needs different versions of its product for different markets. That’s a far bigger investment than for, say, Trello, where project management looks roughly the same in most markets. To make this kind of decision, QuickBooks would have to say: we target bookkeepers, accountants and CFOs everywhere, and there are CFOs in every market. The TAM is massive in Spanish-speaking countries, French-speaking countries and other regions where people are trying to solve the same problems. We have a phenomenal product; we just have to adjust it for each region.

Especially as a marketer, it’s important to know whether your company fits this model or the “scaling inbound channels” model. If you try to enter a market with a full go-to-market shift but don’t have the product support that market requires, the strategy fails. This is a whole-company initiative to go after that market.

Model 4: A localized presence and team

In some markets, a local presence is essential, because without a local team or office it’s very difficult to sell. That applies where relationships are very important, or where you’re doing enterprise sales with very long sales cycles. It also applies where you’re selling into large government entities or nonprofit organizations with a lot of nuance in how they buy. In those cases, a local presence means local partners, a local team, a local office and a local P&L. You’re almost running it as its own business in that region. A lot of companies do this in large international markets. Brazil and India are examples where you need a local presence to make inroads.

Here you’re investing not only in language and product changes but in a physical presence. That’s a much bigger investment than translating your product or updating it for compliance, because you have to manage an office and a P&L in that market.

A very large example is Amazon investing a huge amount in India to build AI data centers. Instead of serving that market from data centers in other regions, they’re investing capital in India to capture it. For certain industries this is required, and companies build out teams and offices there to improve their local footprint.

Model 5: M&A

M&A is an obvious avenue, but it’s the last one you want to pull. Instead of building everything from scratch, you buy a local vendor that already does this exceptionally well. It’s a strategic way to bypass years of building the asset yourself. Over time, you have to integrate the products and create a unified go-to-market. You might have differentiated pricing or target different segments with the new acquisition, and you can enter the market much faster. There’s risk involved, but you also get the asset that comes with the acquisition.

I know a lot of private equity investors who have expanded into international markets this way. Even in your own companies, you may have bought a company in another market because it gave you exposure to that geography. A good example of this is Uber. They recently, I think last week, bought this massive food delivery service company called Delivery Hero. One of the biggest things is that it gives them access to 99 more markets, and presence in certain countries where Uber Eats does not have as big of a footprint. For your business, there will likely be acquisitions like this. The question is where that sits in your priorities against all the other options.

Which model should you start with?

To summarize: work out which of these models likely applies to your business, and what each one requires across every area of the business. That tells you what conversations you need to have with each key stakeholder about the investment approach you want to take, whether that’s your Chief Client Officer, your Head of Sales or your CEO.

In general, if you’ve never done this, the best strategy is to start with the first two models and maybe inch towards the third. Most expansions can be done within the first two or three. The last two are massive bets you make because you know it’s going to work. In some cases it works out great, or it’s worth the investment. But in most companies, you can do the first three and capture a big chunk of the value.

How do you build your go-to-market in a new region?

The same principles apply when you expand geographically as when you build any marketing engine. If you’ve followed my content, you’ve probably seen some of this: building the right strategy and having the right focus areas is a key element. I’m a big fan of doing things in the right order, and that’s what we teach our clients.

If you’re expanding internationally, ask whether you have all the foundational elements to penetrate that market. If your approach is to scale inbound channels there, you may need to adjust pricing, make slight changes to the product and scale some of your paid media or content efforts. Immediately, the question becomes: do you have every element of your go-to-market built out for that region? That might mean the following, all done in the right order:

• landing pages
• sales enablement materials
• product updates
• product marketing and positioning
• basic demand gen campaigns
• basic nurture content
• maybe webinars

At the same time, you want to work backwards on every channel you decide to invest in. Depending on your average deal size, certain channels matter more than others. I’d add that, depending on the geography, certain channels can become more important too. Channel partners may not matter in your core market, but in a new region they can be very powerful, because they may be the way into certain accounts.

Combine that with the model you’ve chosen. If you’re scaling inbound channels, step one might be updating core landing pages or core email sequences. It might mean launching late-funnel paid media campaigns and SEO content that ranks in those geographies. You might not change your pricing at first, just to make sure it’s working, or you might adjust certain onboarding workflows. Those are the lowest-hanging fruit for entering those markets.

If you’re doing a full company strategy shift and investing heavily in a market, you might fully overhaul your messaging and positioning for that market. You might prioritize certain product features to penetrate it, and update your onboarding, your pricing strategy or which channels you scale.

The same principles apply, and that’s why I try to connect all these things, especially if you’ve been to our other sessions or read the books I’ve written. All of these concepts are connected.

Take paid media. In your core market you might have branded campaigns and retargeting campaigns, be on listing sites and run competitor campaigns. You want to run the same campaigns in the same order in the markets you’re expanding into. If that’s APAC, make sure your branded campaigns are performing there. Make sure you’re retargeting customers in those regions from those landing pages on social platforms, and targeting customers in those regions.

If you’re running ABM campaigns to named accounts, make sure they’re targeted in those regions in the right order. Maybe you start with people who already know you, or existing customers where there’s white-space opportunity.

The same applies to content. Localize case studies and examples before you start creating random blog posts. Have localized demos and localized sales nurture campaigns, and work your way backwards on every marketing activity. That’s how you enter a market gradually and build your positioning there.

For each area of marketing, whether that’s paid media, your website, ABM or partners, there’s a basic version you can do and an advanced version. Most companies have never done any of this. Wherever you are, there are things you can do today that will help you enter markets in a very low-risk way. Late-funnel paid media campaigns are easy to turn on in every region, and you should be doing that. You should have localized landing pages. They’re easy to create because you already have the solutions pages, and with AI and agentic workflows you can stand them up quickly. Do the same for your email sequences, webinars and account-specific ABM, because those are low-hanging fruit.

As those start working, you move to the advanced stage and run more campaigns to take it to the next level. For example, if you’re running localized online webinars, you might run an in-person event or a roadshow targeting the large or named accounts you want to penetrate. Try filling this out for your business: what are the basic things you can do?

How do you scale geographic expansion from there?

The goal is to capture the increased TAM in the least risky way possible. Identify which model you want to start with and prove it out. As it starts to work, use that as the business case to move further along the spectrum over time. If your inbound side works well, you can push product to develop more features. If that works, maybe it leads to a localized presence and team, or to M&A or another strategic bet. It should happen gradually, and you should prove things out along the way. That helps you get more budget, more support and more sponsorship from your CEO and your board.