Expanding your business in European countries is hard. There’s a lot to take into consideration:
Cognism was well established in the UK, then expanded into two new European regions, the DACH market in 2021, and then later expanded into France in 2023.
And we as a GTM team have had our fair share of trials and triumphs during this expansion into European markets:
We wish International expansion were as easy as replicating your existing playbooks in a new region - what’s worked before will work again right?
Well, not necessarily. There are too many differing factors at play. And we learned it the hard way…
All too often, you hear amazing success stories from companies shouting about what they’ve achieved in various business goals.
We’re going to show you our journey, warts and all, to help you avoid making the same errors we did. (Don’t worry, it has a happy ending!)
Expansions have to be approached with their own dedicated business strategy. And even then, you have to be ready 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 cut down the time you need to spend on that crucial learning phase. Learn from some of our mistakes and successes.
The first hurdle of any international business expansion is to decide you’re ready for that growth step.
Moving before you’re ready, for example before you have an efficient engine or before you’re well enough established in your home region can add unnecessary stress and pressure on your organisation.
At the time when Cognism decided to expand into the DACH region, we did have an efficient engine and had a successful business established in the UK.
Plus we saw an opportunity to move into Europe’s largest economy. However, we didn’t do enough research before we jumped into this massive undertaking.
As it would turn out later on, it was much more difficult to market to both our target market personas, sales and marketing.
But specifically the marketing persona as the email data didn’t have the same value as it did in the UK and US (you have to double opt in to email marketing making it much harder to sell via email!).
Liam said:
“I’m not sure anyone had really considered that our ICP wouldn’t be as relevant as we’d expected moving into the DACH market.”
While we did still have our core persona, sales - we wasted time and energy trying to sell to marketers too as we hadn’t identified that we would need to adapt our ICP before moving into this region.
Once we had realised we couldn’t sell and advertise our email data asset the same way we do in the UK we focused on the LinkedIn audience targeting use case.
Liam added:
“And the use case for the Cognism product for the sales persona is completely different as well.”
“We can only really sell cold calling, we can’t really sell email at all in DACH like we would in the UK.”
Nicole said:
“We had to learn pretty quickly how strict DACH was about GDPR and compliance. We had feedback from our MDRs that GDPR was usually one of the first questions we’d be asked.”
“We also found that saying ‘yes, we are GDPR compliant’ was not enough. We had to pull together a one-pager with our legal team to explain exactly how we acquired our data to prove we were compliant.”
It would be easy to assume that because the UK and Germany were both in Europe (and at the time were both in the EU) that the laws would be very similar. But these small differences had huge implications for how we would win business and what information we needed to have available.
💡 To expand into Europe, you need accurate data - learn about top EU data providers.
We hired regional leadership really early on and allowed them to hire a team, getting sales boots on the ground right away.
Jonathon said:
“We hired a very senior person from a huge corporate - which sounds great -, but in reality, they were more ‘dashboard leadership’, which in practice meant in the day-today, they were too distant. We needed someone more hands-on for that stage in the development.”
At the same time, the confusion over our ICP in DACH led to the outbound team not being able to generate any revenue for quite a while.
Nicole said:
“We weren't qualifying leads properly from the start and booking in meetings with almost anyone who could be remotely interested in data.”
“The team also had to learn how to deal with a lot of ‘new’ objections. The UK team could only share their learnings from their own experience selling in the UK, but prospects in DACH have different objections and questions, especially around GDPR.”
Jon added:
“We kinda gave the sales team free rein when it came to targeting, with the mindset that we could find out what works. But that led to a lot of not great fit accounts that wouldn’t stick.”
More useful context at this stage is that Cognism in the UK had recently made the switch from lead gen to demand gen.
(To catch up on that part of the Cognism journey, you can check out this blog all about our pivot from lead gen to demand gen.)
However, it was still early days.
So when we dipped our toes into the DACH market, we started with a lead gen approach because our demand gen approach was still being established.
And while we had a functional lead gen engine in the UK, it didn’t have the same impressive conversion rates that we were about to discover by switching to demand generation.
So when we expanded, the decision was made to go sales-first.
So far, we had always been a sales-led organisation.
And for us, that involved heavy investment in SDRs first. Getting customers and traction through outbound.
In our first expansion efforts, it was assumed that we could replicate this same playbook - just in DACH. And that’s what we did. But unfortunately, we didn’t see the same success.
Liam said:
“It’s easy to assume that you can replicate the success of your core region but it isn’t guaranteed. You need to do your background research.”
Later, when the UK marketing team had proved out the success of demand gen, and it was rolled out into DACH too - it became clear that marketing was leading the majority of the revenue in this region.
And that we had missed a trick by not going marketing first into DACH.
(This was a mistake we corrected when we moved into the French markets - and we saw much more success this way! We will explain more about this later.)
During the timeframe when we moved into DACH, the economy was booming and Cognism in general was in a ‘growth at all costs’ phase.
Nicole said:
“I remember we had fairly little budget for the first 3 months or so. After we saw some really good results very early on, we grew the sales team and the marketing budget substantially. We tried to scale too quickly, we wanted too much too fast.”
“As a result, we tried to scale our marketing campaigns from one day to another without fully knowing our best channels yet. It meant our CPL exploded.”
Then, the economy changed, and we moved into a more efficiency-driven phase.
Which prompted us to reduce our monthly budget by 66%. But we realised we were getting around the same in terms of pipeline and revenue from this reduced spend, proving that we had not got to a place where we could efficiently scale spend yet.
The combination of these few mistakes:
Resulted in big questions over whether we could be successful in the DACH market in the same way we had been in the UK.
Liam said:
“It came down to the fact that we went in too fast and too hard without enough of a dedicated strategy for the region.”
“We hired people before we had a proper plan and we lacked consideration for how our ICP would change. And because we didn’t know who we were selling to we ended up selling to companies that weren't in the core of our ICP.”
“Now we think about 'warming up a market first' so that we can create demand in the market before we move into it fully. As we didn't do this, it made our expansion much harder, and hit us in expansion costs and morale.”
Now that we have peeled back all the layers and exposed our learnings - this is where we can share the success stories.
How we turned this ship around to grow DACH by 194% in year 2 of our expansion.
Plus how we redid the whole expansion journey, into France - but doing it the right way this time.
Over time, learning from initial mistakes - we have made massive strides in this region, and it’s now overperforming in terms of hitting targets on pipeline and revenue. Plus marketing regularly brings in 65-70% of the region’s pipeline and revenue!
Here’s how we did it!
In fact, DACH is one of our most efficient regions!
While we may have bled excess budget in the beginning, we were able to do A LOT of testing which allowed us to learn about our most efficient channels really quickly, leading to business growth.
Fran Langham, Global Head of Demand Generation said:
“In any other company I’ve worked for, when there’s been an indication of demand in another region, all we’d do is translate the website, marketing materials and sales enablement assets.”
“Because things were more complicated in the DACH region, we had to take the time to truly understand what the pain points and jobs to be done were.”
This meant we could go well beyond a simple translation of the UK website, instead we could tailor everything to this new market.
We have our own original content written specifically for the region, we have our own DACH podcast, we work with regional specific subject matter experts and our sales team have their own localised playbook.
Nicole said:
“We didn’t have much data to go off in terms of what content to create in the beginning. So we took the low-hanging fruit from the UK, e.g. content that had performed well and adapted it to fit our persona. Adding insights from experts within DACH that our audience might recognise.”
“Then we would get some feedback and data to go off, and it was much easier to start building our own content library based on what the region wanted to hear about.”
When our very senior sales leader left Cognism, we promoted one of our high-performing reps in the region as a stretch role.
Jon said:
“We spent 2-3 days with them going through all of the accounts and opportunities that they were working and scored them 1-3 in terms of fit. Anything that was a 3 (e.g. not a good fit) we cut. Any 2’s we looked at case-by-case. And the 1’s we focused in on.”
“This meant we had a refined list of what our ICP was and could train the team based on what a good ICP fit was for this region.”
You could say we failed fast, learned faster and now have a functioning arm of Cognism in DACH well ahead of other competition.
One of Cognism’s CMO’s catch phrases is ‘done is better than perfect’, and this has been built into our company culture. Idea is sometimes in order to learn fast, you need it to be out in the world.
We didn’t do things perfectly but it did mean we were there and learning in real time.
Essentially everything we had done wrong in DACH, we learned from and got right the expansion into our next European country, France.
In fact, we managed to get up and running in France in half the time it took us to get there in DACH.
This is how we achieved it:
Nicole said:
“We only committed to the move once we reached benchmarks for opportunities from the small amount of spend.”
We had also acquired a company based in France which prompted this expansion - similar to DACH. But we made sure to run the necessary tests to confirm there was demand for us in the region.
In addition, the company we acquired, Kaspr, is a very similar product to Cognism. So it was much easier for us to validate that there was demand for a data provider in France.
But ultimately we were being led by inbound demand.
Based on our experiences in DACH, and the demand generation engine we had seen so much success in both the UK and DACH, we had proved the need for a marketing-first approach.
Warming up the region first, before any sales boots were on the ground in France.
We wanted to build some brand equity and traffic to our website before anything else. This resulted in a number of organic inbound requests which further validated that we made the right move.
We were lucky to have some skilled workers who spoke French in our London office, so all inbound demand from this region was routed straight through to the right SDRs and AEs.
Again, avoiding unnecessary investment before it was required.
Jon said:
“By utilising someone who was already performing well in the team, rather than hiring someone new, we could guarentee this sales rep knew what a good fit account was. What processes we ran. They could just plug and play.”
“That’s why France got really good, really quick.”
In the UK, Cognism tends to aim for mid-market and enterprise-sized organisations. However, this approach changes slightly now when entering new markets.
Jon said:
“The policy I push now is to always start with SMB business when we open into a new region. Because then we speed up the sales cycle and get very quick feedback. We know what’s landing, what’s not landing and where the gaps are much faster.”
“And gradually as SMB starts performing we can promote our reps up to mid-market and enterprise as they're more experienced and trained. That’s how we naturally grow and move up-market.”
By starting in France in this way, we quickly learned that French teams are very hierarchical when it comes to the sales process.
You can’t go directly to the top decision maker, you have to progress through the various levels of hierarchy before you can speak to Heads of Depts.
If we had gone straight into mid-market and enterprise companies, we would have had far longer sales cycles than we were used to, wasted time trying to reach decision-makers off the bat, and found it hard to get any quick wins.
But by starting with SMB where there are less ‘levels’ to progress through, we learned this cultural preference quickly without too much wasted time.
Similarly to DACH, we took the time to research pain points, use cases, industry trends, local subject matter experts and influencers plus, importantly, local legislation.
And this gave us all the insight we needed to build out a tailor-made demand-creation strategy for the region.
Fran said:
“You need to be data-driven in your own region. And that’s why we’re set up with someone owning the region and driving the strategy based on the response in that place.”
Nicole added:
“We work with a lot of local influencers and companies for our lives and podcasts, helping to give our content authority and credibility whilst also increasing our reach.”
“We’ve also invested a lot in demand gen tactics and channels to start with and are now slowly moving more and more spend towards demand capture as we’ve ‘warmed up’ the market.”
Culturally, August is treated very differently in a lot of European countries versus how it is in the UK.
This is the month when most people in France and DACH will take their time off for the year.
Jon said:
“Our sales leader in DACH was off on annual leave for the whole of August.”
We have learned to manage expectations with the board - essentially not to expect much performance during August because not only are a lot of the team away during this period. So are our buyers.
Our budget started small and grew as we gained confidence in the machine we had built in France and our capacity in general grew.
Our focus here is scaling this spend efficiently, maintaining benchmarks for CPL as we slowly increase investments.
Hiring and scaling a skilled workforce when expanding into new regions is arguably one of the most important parts of your gameplay.
While we had to trial and error getting the right leadership in place for DACH initially, we have found that unicorn marketer to lead the team now. She oversees both the DACH and France arms of the business.
Under her, we have an SEO and content manager who works closely alongside a demand generation manager to carry out the regional demand creation strategy.
Liam said:
“This team works very closely with our core region teams, as they’re global, such as customer marketing, customer success, paid media and more.”
And regional leadership feeds back into a global leader to ensure they’re on track and feeding into wider business goals.
As we have discussed earlier in this story, we misplaced some bets on who to hire first, but in the end, we have come to a team structure that works for our business.
This experience led us to making a much more streamlined team hire in France, starting with our first team member who was a content and SEO manager.
This was because we wanted to focus on building out some long-term plays to ensure we could have longevity in the region.
This involved building out our organic SEO content plays, translating relevant content into French and starting to create net new thought leadership content specific for France.
Liam said:
“This also resulted in us having some opportunities in pipe before we had even really started to ramp up activity here.”
At this stage we made our second hire, bringing a demand generation manager on board who could start to compound on the initial successes by creating a regional plan and starting paid activity.
Once we were starting to build momentum through warming up the market with marketing, we hired a Head of Sales for France, who then brought on a couple of SDRs and an AE.
With any hire in this region, we were selective with who from the talent pool we brought on board.
They needed to understand the demand gen motions we were running - and they had to understand the specific dynamics and pain points that our ICP in this country would face. Plus understand the native language and cultural nuances to avoid any possible language barriers.
But equally as importantly, as new hires in a new region, they needed to be able to embody company culture and demonstrate a self-starter approach to their roles. It’s not an easy job building something new outside of a core region, so it requires someone who is up for the challenge!
Anything new will be a learning curve. That’s just the way the world works. But preparation prevents poor performance.
We have paid our dues when it comes to EU expansion and are now reaping the rewards of a successful expansion: