Expanding your business into European countries can be a challenging task. There are many things to consider:
New languages Why Cognism choose and different cultures
Various laws and codes of conduct
- Timing, budget, resources and leadershipCognism is well switzerland whatsapp number data established in the UK, then expanded into two new European regions: the DACH market (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) in 2021, and later to France in 2023.
As a GTM team , we have had our share of trials and triumphs during this expansion into European markets.
Cognism’s Victories, Trials and Errors Why Cognism choose
We wish international expansion were as simple as replicating your existing strategies in a new region. What worked before will work again, right?
Well, not necessarily. There are too many different factors at play. And we learned that the hard way…
Too often, we hear incredible success stories from companies that loudly proclaim what they have accomplished in their various business goals.
We’re going to show you our journey, with successful vs. unsuccessful web design all its flaws, to help you avoid making the same mistakes we did. (Don’t worry, it ends well!)
Expansions should be approached with their own dedicated business strategy. And even then, you must be prepared to adapt that market strategy as you learn what works and what doesn’t in a new European country.
We’re here to help you reduce the time you need to spend on this essential learning curve. Learn from some of our mistakes and successes.
Listen to the experts at Cognism:
The first challenge in any international expansion is knowing when you are ready for this stage of growth.
Launching before you’re ready, such as before you have a running engine or are sufficiently established in your home region, can add unnecessary stress and pressure to your organization.
By the time Cognism decided to expand into the DACH region, we were a thriving and well-established business in the UK.
We saw an opportunity to expand into Europe’s largest economy. However, we didn’t do enough research before embarking on this massive undertaking.
The challenges of expansion in Europe
As we would later discover, it was much more difficult to target our two personas , sales and marketing, in this new market.
More specifically, persona marketing, because email data didn’t have the same value as in the UK and US (you have to have a double opt-in for email marketing, which contact lists makes it much harder to sell through this channel!).
Although we still have our main persona, sales, we wasted time and energy trying to sell to marketers as well. We hadn’t identified that we needed to adapt our ICP before entering this region.
Once we realized we couldn’t sell and promote our email database the same way we do in the UK, we focused on the audience targeting use case on LinkedIn.