Thinking of taking your business international? You’ve crunched the data and led market research trips to justify your move across the pond. Armed with exec approval, a marketing budget, noise-cancelling headphones, and your trusty travel pillow, you’re raring to go. All you need now is a killer market entry strategy. We've got you covered. Check out these top 10 tips from General Assembly and oDesk for hitting the ground running!

1. TOP 10 TIPS
FOR GOING
GLOBAL

2. Top 10 Tips On Going Global: oDesk + General Assembly 2
You’ve crunched the data and led market research trips
to justify your move across the pond. Armed with exec approval, a
marketing budget, noise-cancelling headphones, and your trusty
travel pillow, you’re raring to go.
All you need now is a killer market entry strategy.

3. Top 10 Tips On Going Global: oDesk + General Assembly 3
Do your homework whilst still at home.
Before you leave you should have a tight value proposition and create a business model canvas that helps you lay out your strategy.
You’ll also want to use this handy-dandy international expansion checklist:
Create a SWOT chart matrix in which
you honestly evaluate yourself against any target market
competitors.
Who are your target customer
What makes you truly
special in the market you’re moving into? What are people
looking for? Where is the biggest opportunity? If an obvious
opportunity has not been realised in the market you’re moving
into, spend time to understand why.
Who will your biggest brand advocates
partners, and start reaching out before you move in.
Be sure to research employment laws, taxes, salaries, and
building licenses, desk space, internet, and printing.
Make sure the ‘basics’ work flawlessly.
Imagine your beautiful new office with swag all stacked up,
strategic partners and advocates on board, and all those
special extras ready to delight your new customers. You’re
all set for world domination and then… that CTA, projector,
or check-out button doesn’t work. #fail
Test the basics of your product and every brand engagement
until you’re 250% sure everything works. And then test again.
Lastly, make sure everyone on the team is accountable for a
potential ‘basics fail’. Communicate early, and do dry-runs
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At the beginning, do things that don’t scale (and don’t sweat it).
We get it. No one ever got promoted by investing in
you’re truly starting with zero customers in a new market,
you have to start building a prospective customer base
somewhere. Make sure to get executive buy-in to begin by
Additionally, if there’s low hanging fruit in a certain vertical,
or service might be perfectly tailored to startups, SMBs,
ready to attract teens, philanthropists, artists, or developers
after your sweet spot and branch out from there.
Start with marketing the top-performing products
or services in your portfolio.
Your product might have a laundry list of amazing
features and functionality. But you want to cross the
chasm from early (and often techy) adopters to mass as
Don’t rush into up-selling and cross-selling. Instead, start
with your star products that will sell themselves.
And keep focusing on what makes you different, per your
market research.

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Hire exceptional hustlers, good managers,
and subject ma er experts.
It has been said before, and it needs to be said again. In your
early days, each person you take on board will have the ability
to either make or break your business. Therefore your core
team should be truly exceptional, even if it’s just you and one
other all-star.
Look for direct experience, hustle, connectedness, knowledge
Your HQ culture should extend across the Atlantic. Train your
team in person. We recommend sending someone from HQ to
new employees to HQ for a stint to make sure they create
strong relationships that they’ll later need to succeed in their new
role (think designers, developers, IT, and customer support).
In the early days, at least one of the team members needs to be
an experienced manager and jack of all trades. The others can
If it doesn’t seem to be working out, cut your losses as fast as
possible; every day with a poorly delivering team member is
detracting from your success.
To stay hyper-focused on meeting key objectives, think about
delegating non-core tasks to a pool of freelancers, taskrabbits,
or interns.
Maintain brand consistency.
The most successful brands have a strong and consistent voice
no matter where in the world they are. While the UK tends to be
voice to logo treatments to your brand promise.
is exactly the same in each market, the intangibles will come
a welcome call, care package, dedicated account manager, or
breakfast meet up) work really well in your core market, and

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Partner up.
Try taking your existing partnerships global. Find partners with
similar brand attributes and values with whom you can partner
will expose your brand to a high volume of new prospective
customers.
Distribution partners deserve a special focus. To help yourself
grow, go where the elephants are. Focus on 5 to 10 big strategic
distribution partners that can help you spread the word and
partners’ user base, whilst helping the partners with their own
marketing or business needs. Don’t push. Be sure to listen. It’s
really all about the proverbial ‘win-win’.
you share your ideas about how they may be able to help you
and why. Keep meetings short and sweet. Be ready to pitch your
ideas and be clear about what you want out of the meeting in the
them down.
Localisation ma ers.
to which you need to localise depends on your core audience
businesses?) and your budget. At a minimum, you’ll need to
make sure your tagline, website copy, email campaigns, and
event topics resonate with your new audience. After the baseline
channels are nailed, you can consider localizing your UI, offering,
pricing, color scheme, packaging, etc.
If you don’t have the staff to conceive entirely separate
campaigns, start by taking HQ’s most successful campaigns,
double-checking that the value prop and call to action stand
up in your expansion region, and then having a local marketer

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A good PR agency is worth its weight in gold.
The team within the agency is even more important than the
agency reputation as a whole. Make sure you select the team
before you sign. Don’t fall victim to one group pitching and
another team becoming your day-to-day contact. Compare
apples to apples during the proposal process.
Agency contacts with journalists, analysts, bloggers and other
make a dent as a small team.
business, differentiators, and market direction.
Make them work for you. Demand results. Because of the
in our experience.
Be sure to keep your first few customers extra happy.
As discussed above, you may need to rely upon your personal
Incentivize action. Offer freebies, dedicated or exclusive
discounts, vouchers, trials and tasters to get your future users
power to help people want to talk about you.
Be strategic. Just like with partnerships, go after 5 to 10
guest speakers, bloggers or media references. Share these
wins via your site, campaigns, and events.
Create local success stories/case studies. Build marketing
collateral that demonstrates why other people think you rock
and how you’ve helped them rock, too. Once you get a few
strong stories under your belt, many doors will suddenly open.
key improvements.
Show small acts of kindness. You want to go after word of
by human conversations and brand ‘delighters’. Send your
new customers or clients a personalised card (or jam jar like
or customer support call), and remember that every interaction
you have is the cornerstone of your brand experience.

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Nothing is more exciting
& challenging than
conquering a new market.
You will make lots of
mistakes, but never forget
to celebrate your victories,
both large and small.
!
at home, you’ll have to treat your expansion to the new market
as an early-stage venture. With so much to do, crystal focus is
key to your success.
Understand, plan, and agree on the What, Who, and
12 months.
Communicate with HQ as often as possible, and in as
constructive a way as possible.
Don’t waste time focusing on just reporting and feeding
and actions that you can review with your local team
and then with HQ.
much as the HQ can give you cookie-cutter tools with the best
local market. Help them help you, don’t rely on copy paste,

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educational institution that is building a community of
individuals empowered to pursue work they love, through
instruction and opportunity in technology, business and design.
We offer classes, workshops, full-time immersive programs and
online educational programming on the most relevant skills of
the 21st century economy, including web development, user
experience design, digital marketing and data science.
oDesk is a leading online workplace, where savvy businesses
and talented freelancers work together to get the job done.
Companies come to oDesk to hire, manage, and pay talented
freelancers from around the world, and a global community of
freelancers join oDesk to get access to jobs that are personally,

10. THANK YOU
Share your tips with
@oDesk and @GA_London on
#goingglobal