Going into the European market with your SaaS solutions have some tricky things to it. But in this blog we just want to highlight the positive things first.
1: Building a Digital Marketing strategy according to European market
You offer SaaS solutions, so you can already be found by European Customers. Here and there you may bump into the awkward European prospect. You probably will not need to do any R&D to enter the European market. SaaS solutions are in that sense super scalable. The game is in Digital Marketing, European Business Development and localization.
2: Manage Business in Europe remotely
You can do Business in Europe without making huge investments like Human Capital, going through expensive hiring processes and actually need to pay rent, you can easily manage it remotely, with ‘lite assets’ locally to support you, you just need to define your ‘critical mass’ before you want to go ‘all in’. This ‘critical mass’ is likely expressed in sales and should be between 2 and 4 million USD. ‘All in’ means a real office, people and a very aggressive European strategy. Before you reach that critical mass, you should aim for a satellite strategy in Europe. Growth Lensing is the perfect partner for this European strategy.
3: Get into the local fragmented market place
No matter what, you will be doing Business in Europe. But you need to start slowly and accept Europe is a very fragmented market place. Get local advise to do the basics like localization of your offering. Start from a central point and work your way down on a country to country basis. The Business Development skills need to have language and culture knowledge of Europe entirely. For example, by hiring a UK based Business Developer you already lost the South of Europe. This purely based on culture and we leave the Brexit issue out of scope here…
The below table describes the language proficiency as Google sees it.
4: Make your pitch compatible with Europe standards
You already have experience in Digital Marketing (of course). Take the best that works and go with a local European expert through a due diligence process. Make sure your pitch is compatible with the many different attitudes that exist here in Europe. Digital Marketing is without any doubt the most important starting point of getting more traction in Europe. Calibrate your budget and message on a country to country basis.
5: How to deal with localization?
Ok this one is not a quick win. It’s more like a warning. Localization has been mentioned a few times. The Growth Lensing definition of European localization consist of a few key tasks and deliverables. Make your website multi lingual to set yourself up for long term success. Do the much needed due diligence on GDPR and any other local privacy laws. You must comply to GDPR, it must be legit. Furthermore, build a Digital Marketing strategy per city. That’s right, per city, not per country. This is the ultimate way to target very specific areas with your offering. It creates excellent control over the Digital Marketing budget. Last but not least, where possible, try to back your lead generating machine with local language follow up and closing processes. It makes all the difference…
Above everything else, you need people that understand SaaS Business Development. People that challenge your processes and allow potential optimization of your own processes back home. Growth Lensing can help you with your European SaaS Solutions, here you can find how it all works.
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