No Half-Measures
TweetI’m a huge fan of Breaking Bad, so parallels to the series are not something from which I shy away.
Recently, I was working with a foreign company that wanted to launch their effort in the US. The effort is not going well. Not because their product isn’t good enough for the US. In fact, it’s probably the most comprehensive product on the market. It’s not because they don’t understand the value of the US market. In fact, they are very clear that if they have any chance of future success, it will be in the US and selling to US companies.
The reason they are failing and will ultimately fail, is that they are not committed to the effort. They are taking half-measures.
I have successfully brought foreign companies to the US and launched their efforts, but the companies that succeeded understood that they needed to make a real commitment to the effort. You can’t stick a salesperson in the US and then think that is all you need. You can’t sign up partners and not support them. Yet, this is exactly what this company is doing.
They don’t have local storage, local customer success teams, local sales support, local marketing, or even local thinking about the outreach effort. They are taking half-measures to try to short-cut the sales effort in the US, but it won’t work.
The worst part is they have a strong desire to fall back to the comfortable, and the easy – when launching an effort like this will not be comfortable… it will not be easy. Selling into a new market takes time and money and patience.
Unfortunately, I don’t think this company will figure it out before they waste a lot of money because ironically, they are not spending enough to make this work.
