Are you planning to expand or take your business into new markets or new industries or new territories or new personas? You need to,

• Do a lot of analysis,

• Plan every detail

• Prepare an action plan

• And execute it properly

in order to efficiently capture a fair share of the market.

This blog sheds light on how to best take your business into the new and unknown markets.

Collect the market data and analyze it

It all starts with data. Just like the way a map guides you in a new place, market data guides you to navigate a new market. So, the first step is to get your field marketing team to conduct a field survey in the market that you want to enter.

In this survey, they should capture information about,

• The needs, challenges, pain points of the buyers

• Competitors’ influence in the market

• Who are the key decision-makers? Are they individual users or CEOs and CFOs of a company

• What are the policies, rules, and regulations in the market?

• What are the purchase drivers– factors that would influence the buyers in that market to purchase your product?

• Are there any budget priorities?

Once this data is collected, give it to your data analysis team and ask them to make an intuitive data report out of it. This report can then be shared with the sales, marketing, and product development teams so that they can get the market and buyer insights.

Engage key stakeholders and buyers on social media

Every market in an industry will have a few desirable customers that everyone wants to sell to. Or you might have identified a few potential customers during your field survey who seemed very interested in your product and are most likely to buy from you. Target these people first.

Get your marketing team to connect with these key buyers on social media and try to engage them with your brand. They can engage the buyers by sending content that would interest the buyers. This includes social media posts, email campaigns, text message promotions, newsletters, etc.

The goal for the marketing team here is to get these buyers to the first stage of the sales funnel where they,

• Create awareness amongst the buyers about your product and brand

• And get them interested in talking to a sales consultant

Prepare the reps to handle buyer personas

Once the marketing team brings in the field survey data and prospects’ data, it is now the duty of the sales team to take further action.

From the prospect’s list, assign a few prospects to each sales rep. Then train them on,

• The persona of each prospect assigned to them

• And how to efficiently sell to each one of them

This helps them to successfully sell in the new market

Focus on customer retention and loyalty

To successfully capture any market and establish your influence there, you should not only focus on acquiring the customers in that market but also focus on retaining them. You need to ensure that you serve them well and give them a good experience. To ensure this there needs to be seamless coordination and collaboration between sales, marketing, product development, and customer support departments.

Good coordination between all these 4 departments means that everyone in these departments are aware of each customer’s

• Sales journey

• Marketing content that they received from time to time

• Marketing content that they have shown interest in

• Product improvements or feature requests made by them

• All the conversation they had with the customer support

This coordination helps to ensure that the customers receive the right information or service at the right time from you. And this, in turn, helps in significantly increasing their loyalty for you.

Expand your reach in the market

Once you have a loyal customer base, try to expand your reach in the market through continuous marketing and sales efforts. Encourage your existing customers to bring in referrals (incentivize those referrals). Also, encourage your sales reps to try to upsell or cross-sell to the existing customers.

Learn how to gather competitive intelligence from the field

How to Gather Competitive Intelligence from the Field

Learn how to collect customer insights on your brand and products

Collect Customer Insights on your Brand and Products

Learn about the 6 important buyer personas and how to train your team to sell to them

The 6 Buyer Personas and how to train your team to sell to them