Return on Investment

On June 25th we spoke with Michael Vigeant, CEO of Greatblue Research in a webinar we titled: What You Don’t Know Can Kill Your Business: Nailing Market Research for U.S. Market Entry. With over 20 years of experience in market research, we thought we’d begin by getting Michael’s perspective on how the industry has changed over the years. How has the market research industry changed? Back in the ‘90s, market research was big budgets and long timelines. “What we did in 8 to 12 weeks in the late 90s we do in 8 to 12 days today,” explains Michael. “It’s all about getting good information—the right information—quickly to help solve problems and answer business questions.” Providing high-quality market research at a pace and price point that the client demands requires a team with a wide variety of skill sets and business acumen. That’s what Michael strives for at Greatblue Research. It also requires that companies embrace data analytics as a methodology. But while the field has evolved in terms of how market research is conducted, it many ways it has stayed the same. “Today it’s still about asking the right questions to allow you to make business decisions, understand your audience, and meet or exceed their expectations.” For companies considering U.S. market entry, what type of market research should they consider investing in? According to Michael, the most important thing that companies looking to scale to the U.S. market need to learn is their audience—how their product or service is going to meet their needs while maintaining the agility and flexibility to respond to changes in the market. “Understanding your audience requires understanding expectations, specifically where they’re being met and where they’re being unmet. This allows you the ability to put together a strategic plan.” One of the biggest mistakes Michael sees is when CEOs try to take the same strategic plan they used to scale in their country of origin and simply replicate it in the U.S. “Sometimes the simplest business questions can answer some of the most complex problems. Doing a little bit of homework upfront and being humble enough to change your angle of approach based on what you learn about the U.S. market is key.” We followed up by asking Michael what happens when an executive or CEO disregards market knowledge, whether it’s for an entirely new market (like the U.S.), or simply a new product in their existing market. What happens when companies ignore market research? There’s a common misconception among scaling firms that everything is transferable—whether it’s a product, service, or decision. And they’re not wrong 100% of the time. As Michael points out, many CEOs refer to a “playbook” they use for making decisions that they hold in high regard. “If there’s anything that I’ve learned from audience measurement however, it’s that the playbook is changing because audiences are changing. Their expectations are changing.” In essence, the ‘I know my customer’ mantra is no longer enough. Customers are constantly evolving, making it necessary to repeatedly break down and refine your definition of satisfaction.” “For example, too many CEOs look only at the cumulative total of the top two tiers in a customer satisfaction index. From this, they’ll say, “90% of our customers are happy!” “In reality, the number of customers who are “very satisfied” may have changed over time from 70% to 60% to 50% to 40%.  The cumulative total is still there but people are moving in the wrong direction.” “Typically there are two reasons for this change: a) customers’ expectations have changed but the services they’re receiving have remained the same, or b) the customer does not understand how the organization has changed.” In both cases, the customer has lost touch with how your product or service is solving their problem. Diving deep into the data, staying in touch with your audience and the trends that are impacting their decisions, these are just a few of the things that market research has to offer. For more on this topic of market research and its unique value for scaling firms, check out our full conversation with Michael Vigeant here. For access to all of MEET’s webinar content on how to successfully scale your company in the U.S. market through trade shows and in-person events, subscribe to our YouTube Channel. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps international B2B growth companies soft land and scale in the U.S. through trade shows and in-person events. MEET’s processes help its clients ramp-up sales quickly and maintain a steady stream of high-quality prospects going forward.  Contact Bill Kenney for a no obligation conversation: bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.

When heading to a high-value event like SelectUSA, it’s important that you are equipped with the right tools to make the best first impression. In our last post, we talked about the importance of fine-tuning your value proposition and self-introduction to ensure that every interaction is congruent with how you want to be perceived. Another tool that is critical to maximizing ROI through every interaction is the opportunity one-sheet. Purpose #1 of an opportunity one-sheet The primary purpose of an opportunity one-sheet is to inform, excite, and remind your audience to take action. For example, you are attending SelectUSA and you’ve just finished a matchmaking session, met someone at a cocktail reception, or workshop. During that conversation, you shared your value proposition and the goals you’re aiming to achieve at the event. In addition to your business card, you want to be able to hand this person a one-sheet that serves as a reminder of your conversation and provides more detail into who you are and what you’re looking for. As these individuals go through the event or once they return to their marketplace, you remain with them and your information is easily shareable. Thanks to your one-sheet, they can now help you make connections within their network or provide a product or service to help you achieve your goals. The opportunity one-sheet is a tangible way to spread your words further faster. Opportunity one-sheets give the people you’re meeting the tools to propagate your message further, remember you longer, and make connections for you in the days, weeks and months ahead. Purpose #2 of an opportunity one-sheet If the first purpose of a one-sheet is to help people spread your opportunity throughout their network, the second purpose is to share your opportunity with their own team. Whether it’s with the individuals they’ve brought with them to SelectUSA or colleagues back in their home market, something tangible that can be distributed and even copied will help them remember your goals and distinguish you from the sea of interactions after a large event. The components of an opportunity one-sheet Though everyone will choose to format their one-sheets differently, we’ve identified nine components that we recommend including. Whether you choose a two-sided document, a postcard or a trifold, remember that portability, clean formatting, and clear images are important. Recommended components of an opportunity one-sheet: • Logo and one line pitch • Brief business history and summary • Management team profile • Target market • Reference customers • Competitive advantages • Resources/support needed (these should be aligned with event-specific goals) • Call to action with a deadline • Contact information and company URL Have questions about how to apply this format to your business? We’re happy to help. Who should receive your opportunity one-sheet and when? When thinking about who to deliver your opportunity one-sheet to, put the event hosts on the top your list. Having vetted every participant, they are your best bet for high-quality references. And because they rarely get asked for this type of information, they’re often happy to help. Here’s a complete list of who we recommend targeting with your opportunity one-sheet: • Hosts • Investors • Economic Development Officers (EDOs) • Exhibitors • Speakers • Other attendees As far as when to share your one-sheet for an event like SelectUSA, the simple answer is TODAY. The SelectUSA online portal and app are available now and each allows participants to upload their one-sheets. There are a million good reasons to introduce yourself to fellow participants before the event has begun. Perhaps the best reason is that pre-event meetings create space for higher-value second and third-level conversations during the event. Having a good supply of one-sheets during the event will also be important, as well as using them as a tool in your follow-up strategy or with those you did not have a chance to meet in person. For those interested in MEET’s entire SelectUSA toolkit and strategy resources for maximizing ROI, check out our 2-part SelectUSA webinar series available on our YouTube channel. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps international B2B growth companies soft land and scale in the U.S. through trade shows and in-person events. MEET’s processes help its clients ramp-up sales quickly and maintain a steady stream of high-quality prospects going forward.  Contact Bill Kenney for a no obligation conversation bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.

The task of building a U.S. market entry team is full of tough decisions. For example: Should we transplant key leadership from the home market or just hire locally? How do we maintain company culture and quality of service from so far away? What kind of investment is necessary to be a competitive employer in the U.S.? The answers to these questions will depend heavily on the industry you’re in and whether you’re a B2C or B2B company. Either way, you don’t have to figure it out all on your own. To explore this topic of how to build an effective U.S. market entry team, we spoke with Priscila Bala, Head of the New York Office for Octopus Ventures and the driving force behind Question the Questions, a comprehensive resource guide to U.S. expansion. Building traction helps Fortunately for B2C companies, it tends to be a lot easier to build traction entirely from Europe if you’re distributing via a marketplace or central distribution channel like an app store. According to Priscila, building initial traction is key to attracting top candidates. “Tech is booming in the U.S. and the best people have job offers from large and established tech companies and other successful startups from around the world. If you cannot demonstrate traction in the market, you’re unlikely to be able to attract the people that you want.  Anyone who has experience in scaling a foreign tech company from the ground has an abundance of options at the moment. It’s a buyers market in their favor.” Top candidates want to know that their walking into a well-structured company that has been highly strategic in timing their scaling endeavor. Traction helps to demonstrate that. You get what you pay for With U.S. market entry comes high compensation costs. To ensure that you’re getting the most qualified people in the market, you have to pay top dollar, which includes competitive benefits packages and stock options. Priscila warns that compensation is not the only investment scaling firms have to make in order to draw the highest quality candidates. “For B2C companies, in particular, you need extensive market data to be able to show who your customers are and how you’re attracting them. You’re more likely to convince someone really good to jump ship and help you build if their path to success is more clear.” Without that data, Priscila warns, it’s not only hard to attract top talent, but it’s also hard to know whether someone’s a good fit after a significant investment of time and money. “If you hire an American, it will take at least six months to figure out if it’s working out, what traction they’re getting, if they’re embedded in the team, and whether they understand the culture. By the time you figure out this person wasn’t the best fit, you’ve easily lost $1 million.” The importance of maintaining company culture Company culture takes time to build and is often rooted in a number of shared experiences that bond your core leadership team. Establishing a new presence with a newly hired American at the helm puts you at risk of jeopardizing those hard-earned intangibles that strengthen your company’s mission. “Frequently, we see firms ending up with two organizations operating under different cultural behavior sets of practices. That can create immense frustration and even slow down decision-making because you may not be sharing information due to lack of trust. It becomes really ineffective.” This division, Priscila warns, becomes especially harmful when one market outperforms the other. “Because the U.S. is a bigger market than most companies are used to, we’ve witnessed cases where once the American side’s revenues reach or exceed the home country’s, resentment starts to build. Feelings of, “we’re carrying a lot of the business but all of the decision-making is happening elsewhere,” is not uncommon.” Key advice for building a U.S. market entry team Octopus Ventures recommends having a founder or executive DNA on the ground in the scaling market. According to Priscila, the question comes down to whether this person is willing to sacrifice their existing responsibilities to travel back and forth to ensure U.S. market entry is successful. “People very often underestimate how painful those plane rides are going to be and how challenging it is to all of a sudden feel out of the loop in Europe because of the time they’re devoting to coordination and communication.” Building a strong team of people you can be honest and grow with is critical. One strategy that Priscila recommends is to develop a working group and set milestones. This will enable you to assess at three-month intervals how working as a divided team has affected your outcomes and make adjustments along the way. Priscila also recommends practicing what it will feel like to add 24 hours to any decision you have to make, as this will be the case when scaling from Europe to the west coast of the U.S. “Practice will help you figure out if you need an internal solution. It can be a creative and constructive process that might even make your domestic business better because now you’ve also learned best practices on flexible and remote working.” To hear more from Priscila about the challenges and best practices to U.S. market entry, check out our full interview: Reviewing Octopus Venture’s Treatise on U.S. Market Entry: “Question the Questions.” For access to all of MEET’s webinar content on how to successfully scale your company in the U.S. market through trade shows and in-person events, subscribe to our YouTube Channel. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps international B2B growth companies soft land and scale in the U.S. through trade shows and in-person events. MEET’s processes help its clients ramp-up sales quickly and maintain a steady stream of high-quality prospects going forward.  Contact Bill Kenney for a free, no-obligation consultation bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.

Succeeding at U.S. market-entry is such an enormous task it’s no wonder people look for shortcuts. And yet, it is these shortcuts, these efforts to predict success without the investment to prove it, that are the greatest source of failure for scaling firms. To explore this topic of how to avoid shortcuts to U.S. market-entry, we spoke with Priscila Bala, Head of the New York Office for Octopus Ventures and the driving force behind Question the Questions, a comprehensive resource guide on U.S. expansion. What is the riskiest shortcut a scaling firm can take? The riskiest shortcut is mistaking initial traction for product market fit. According to Priscila, “the challenge is when companies start getting to that $1-3 million mark, they’re feeling great, and they’re thinking we got this, we found our product market fit, now we can expand.” In fact, as Priscila points out, getting a certain number of customers doesn’t necessarily mean that your company will be able to meet the next scale-up milestone and the one after that. That’s because the bigger the market is, the larger the share of innovators who want to try new things and have the budgets to do so. Early success in this environment is crucial, but it also puts you at risk of misreading these results in terms of growth capacity. “Until you’ve had the opportunity to go through some periods of churn and repeatability to understand the patterns around what customer retention means for you, it is very difficult to know you’ve found product-market fit.” The benefit of an all-in approach Octopus Ventures works with some of the most successful European-based companies exploring U.S. market-entry. We asked Priscila for a prime example of an all-in, no shortcut approach to scaling. Here’s what she shared. “Graze, a UK-based subscription snack company, started initially shipping snacks to Americans from the UK. But in order to truly test the market, they invested in an Americanized website and customer service in U.S. time zones. The data signals they received from this were strong and because they were already doing $20-30 million in revenue at home, they could do it properly.” “In a matter of a year, Graze had scaled in the U.S. bringing in an additional $20 million. They not only got the testing right, but the timing as well. They were able to focus on scaling because the home business was secure.” Protecting yourself against a false positive result Even for those who aren’t necessarily looking for shortcuts, there’s always a risk of getting a false positive on your market-testing results. We asked Priscila how she helps clients protect against this. “The process of ensuring against a false positive is going to vary a lot depending on the context, the industry, and the stage the company is in.” Priscila points out that in instances where products have multi-year contracts or platform integrations that make it difficult for customers to walk away, retention data may be skewed. In cases where it’s easy for customers to walk away from your product, the process of ensuring against a false positive is different. “We want to see data like really high NPS (Net Promoter Scores), and what percentage of customer acquisition is word-of-mouth versus paid. It’s truly a matter of stress testing, looking at the sensitivities. If we’re wrong, what’s going to happen and at what price, and if we’re right, do we risk anything by waiting six months or a year.” Withstanding the journey of U.S. market-entry As Priscila points out, scaling into the U.S. market is a bit like the Odyssey. Odysseus knew where he wanted to go but it took him ten years and he had a number of adventures along the way. “You have the destination in hand but it’s important to be flexible about the journey.” Doing customer development right, without shortcuts, will take time. Part of success is being able to withstand the ride and seeing value in precision. To hear more from Priscila about the challenges and best practices to U.S. market entry, check out our full interview: Reviewing Octopus Venture’s Treatise on U.S. Market Entry: “Question the Questions.” For access to all of MEET’s webinar content on how to successfully scale your company in the U.S. market through trade shows and in-person events, subscribe to our YouTube Channel. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps international B2B growth companies soft land and scale in the U.S. through trade shows and in-person events. MEET’s processes help its clients ramp-up sales quickly and maintain a steady stream of high-quality prospects going forward.  Contact Bill Kenney for a free, no-obligation consultation bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821

Are you a CEO considering U.S. market entry? The decision to scale into the U.S. market, followed by the execution, is not for the faint of heart. That said, according to the World Bank’s Doing Business Project and statistics shared by SelectUSA, the United States ranks in the top ten overall for ease of doing business and number one among nations with populations over 100 million. Easy or not, everyone can use support when navigating a foreign market. At MEET, we help international B2B growth companies soft land and scale in the U.S. through trade shows and in-person events. To learn more about how we can help scale your business in the U.S. market, contact us today. To highlight some of the work our partners do to support companies endeavoring U.S. market entry, we spoke with Priscila Bala, Head of the New York Office for Octopus Ventures. Headquartered in London, Octopus Ventures operates as part of a venture capital investment group that manages over £8.5 billion on behalf of 50,000 investors focused on supporting entrepreneurs in three key areas: industry, money, and health. As one of Europe’s largest early-stage investors, the partners at Octopus realized that a significant amount of the money they were deploying in Europe was being spent in the U.S. This prompted the idea to open a center in New York specifically focused on supporting these firms with U.S. market entry. Priscila was Octopus Ventures’ first U.S. hire. Tasked with truly understanding the challenges and best practices that come with U.S. market entry, she jumped into action. “We went on a mission to interview over 100 VC-backed European companies that had expanded to the U.S. market and then documented their challenges and patterns of success. We then built a library of resources to support our portfolio of companies based on those findings.” Recognizing the immense value of this exercise, Priscila’s team decided to share the wealth of these findings by creating a reference guide to U.S. expansion titled: Question the Questions. Originally released in 2017, a 2nd edition was unveiled in 2018 with additional focus on fundraising and how to build effective teams. Before exploring all that Question the Questions has to offer firms currently exploring U.S. market entry, we wanted our listeners to get a better sense of how Octopus Ventures supports their firms in this endeavor. How does Octopus Ventures support U.S. Market Entry? Octopus Ventures sees itself as a soup to nuts advisor during international expansion. “At the outset, we provide strategic insights, asking the critical questions of: Does internationalization make sense? If so… Should it be the U.S.? If so… With whom, in how much time, and with what level of resource commitment?” “Once the U.S. market entry decision has been made, we provide an entire suite of resources to help them execute that expansion effectively. This includes a roster of service providers, discounts and benefits, even candidates that could join their team” Priscila’s goal is to help firms hit the ground running. Once these resources are secured, she offers support with go-to-market strategies. “These are bigger resources on how to operationalize and scale up processes that might be different from Europe. We help them think through the regulatory environment, then recruit, and even interview new team members.” Does Octopus Ventures offer support with fundraising? Fundraising can be one of the most time consuming and resource intensive processes for a start-up. As a result, Octopus Ventures has made fundraising support a strong focus of its U.S. market entry resource suite. “Once our companies are established in the U.S. we are able to broker connections with other U.S. investors that could syndicate with us and provide follow-on rounds of funding.” “We have a vested interest in creating as wide and as big a network of support for our companies as we can and so I spend a lot of time with my American counterparts thinking through what are their metrics and milestones for companies that really are a good fit to try and expedite that process.” To learn more about the challenges and best practices to U.S. expansion, check out our full interview with Priscila Bala: Reviewing Octopus Venture’s Treatise on U.S. Market Entry: “Question the Questions.” For access to all of MEET’s webinar content on how to successfully scale your company in the U.S. market through trade shows and in-person events, subscribe to our YouTube Channel. About MEET (meetroi.com) helps international B2B growth companies soft land and scale in the U.S. through trade shows and in-person events. MEET’s processes help its clients ramp-up sales quickly and maintain a steady stream of high-quality prospects going forward.  Contact Bill Kenney for a free, no-obligation consultation bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.