U.S. Expansion Strategies for EMEA-based B2B Businesses

In this practical guide, you’ll discover efficient U.S. expansion strategies that are used by European and Middle Eastern B2B businesses.

July 10, 2023 —

The 6sense Team

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

Determining the Expansion Opportunity

Chapter 3

How to Uncover Demand and Prioritize the Right Accounts in the U.S. Market

Chapter 4

Generating Demand and Building Pipeline in the U.S.

Chapter 5

Aligning Your Revenue Team for Efficient Growth

Chapter 6

Conclusion

Chapter 1

Introduction

Whether the economy is booming or shrinking, international expansion is a go-to strategy for B2B businesses seeking to ignite growth.

As the largest software market in the world, the U.S. remains a favored expansion target for European and Middle Eastern B2B businesses.

By employing smart U.S. expansion strategies, European and Middle Eastern businesses like Stripe, Pipedrive, Klarna, and monday.com have already tapped into North America’s substantial market, wealth of tech expertise, and funding options to achieve unicorn status.

While these trailblazers have demonstrated what’s possible, market conditions and expectations have evolved. Today’s investors and B2B businesses have switched from a growth-at-all-costs mindset to prioritize efficient growth. Now, rather than gambling on a large upfront investment, businesses are approaching U.S. expansion with limited budgets and a measured approach.

But this doesn’t mean ambitious European and international B2B businesses can’t target the U.S. market with confidence. With clear prioritization, lean go-to-market teams, and an intelligent data-led account-based approach, businesses can take an efficient approach to uncovering, creating, and converting pipeline in the U.S.

This guide will give you practical advice on how to achieve just that.

Chapter 2

Determining the Expansion Opportunity

Before you consider launching in the U.S., get a handle on the true size of the opportunity for your business. Briefly shelve dreams of U.S. domination and apply a pragmatic data-led approach to evaluate factors including market size, growth potential, competitors, and prospective customer needs.

In the past, this was a time-consuming internal undertaking, or an expensive task to outsource. Today, with access to the right data, AI-powered revenue intelligence can do much of the hard work for you.

Calculating U.S. TAM

Total Addressable Market (TAM) is the entire universe of potential customers for your solution. With its rich B2B ecosystem, the U.S. is likely to form a healthy percentage of your TAM — but it’s important to determine exactly what that percentage is so you can plan accordingly.

Calculate your U.S. TAM by taking the total number of potential accounts in the North American market for your product and then multiplying that by your company’s average annual contract value (ACV).

TAM = Number of ICP Accounts in a Market x Annual ACV

To understand the first part of the equation, you need to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). You may already have an ICP defined for the European market, but it’s worth revisiting as you consider expanding to the States (or any other new market).

For example, your company could have sourced a large percentage of business in Europe by replacing a widely used piece of legacy technology. But if this tech has a limited footprint in the U.S., it’s going to eat into your TAM.

To get an accurate picture of your TAM, your ICP should cover some key areas, including:

Company revenue
Employee count and growth
Location
Firmographic data
Industry trends

Private equity investments
Technographic data
Competitors they’re already using
Complementary tech they’re using

You can use tools like 6sense Revenue AI™ for Sales to quickly find companies that match your ICP. Once you’ve built out your ICP and found the number of applicable accounts in the U.S., it’s time to multiply the number of accounts by your ACV to estimate your TAM in North America.

Get a Clearer Picture of the Opportunity with Intent Data

TAM helps revenue teams understand growth potential, but it’s not perfect.

Taking your U.S. TAM at face value ignores a couple of key factors. Firstly, only about 10% of your TAM is in-market and primed to buy at any given time. That’s before you consider factors like competitors, product limitations, and capacity for internal growth, which will also impact your opportunity size.

To get a more realistic measurement of accounts that are likely to purchase your product, you’ll want to calculate your Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM). SOM gives you a more nuanced picture of demand by accounting for details such as competitors, prospects’ budgetary restraints, and market conditions.

But there’s a hitch. Accurately calculating SOM also relies on knowing your Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) from the previous year. (Read a full guide to TAM, SAM, and SOM here.) While you won’t have this data for the U.S. market yet, the good news is you can still get a handle on your addressable market with intent data.

Sales intelligence tools like 6sense help you identify latent intent and interest in your category or product within a region. You can then see your market size in the U.S and determine whether there’s potential to expand internationally.

Chapter 3

How to Uncover Demand and Prioritize the Right Accounts in the U.S. Market

Once you’ve proven there’s an appetite for your product in the U.S., it’s time to test whether that appetite translates into pipeline.

Selling your solution for the first time in a sprawling market like the U.S. can feel overwhelming. But lean sales teams need focus. To hit the ground running, your salespeople need to know exactly where to prioritize their time.

Identify Your Target Account List (TAL)

It starts with selecting the right accounts.

Picking accounts shouldn’t be based on the biggest U.S. logos, salespeople’s egos, or hunches. Instead, your list should be agreed on by marketing and sales, and created by analyzing data around:

Past performance in accounts similar to your U.S. ICP
The kinds of deals you’ve won (or lost), and
How prospects move through your buyer journey

You can do this analysis yourself, or use AI-powered intelligence to define your TAL and point your team in the right direction. A new breed of sales intelligence tools can pinpoint buyers in new markets, surfacing accounts that are a likely fit for your services.

If you already have a TAL for the U.S., AI can help you build upon this with the newest data and spot any gaps or inaccuracies in the accounts in your CRM.

Prioritize the Right Prospects

We know that only around 10% of your TAM is looking to buy at any time. Getting a clearer picture of which accounts are in-market for your solution is like a cheat code when entering the U.S. market.

Intent data and sales intelligence tools can uncover which prospects are primed to buy right now.

The sweet spot in your prospects’ buying journey, and the ideal time for your sales team to engage, sits between the Consideration and Decision phases. Capturing an account’s intent signals based on their anonymous research reveals when they’re in-market for your solution.

These signals include:

Visiting product pages on your website
Researching topics about your product or industry
Comparing you to competitors on third-party review sites
Actively researching solutions like yours

By accurately matching these activities to accounts, a sales intelligence platform shows your sales team:

Where an account is in their buyer journey
Whether they’re a good fit for your business
When accounts are ready to buy
Who to contact
What they’re interested in

This intelligence removes guesswork and wasted time researching the wrong prospects. Instead, your sales team has a list of ready-to-buy companies they can prioritize.

Focus Reps on the Right Accounts

The next step is making sure your reps approach these hot accounts while they’re still primed to purchase.

At 6sense, we rely on a combination of “6QAs” and dynamic territories to identify high-quality in-market accounts and help our sales team get after them.

6sense Qualified Accounts (6QAs) are accounts that meet your Ideal Customer Profile and have just reached a critical tipping point — moving from the Consideration stage to the Decision/Purchase stage of the buying journey.

Dynamic territories show reps only the accounts that are interested right now by periodically removing accounts that are showing no engagement. This helps your reps focus only on accounts that are likely to convert. Read more on how to use 6QAs and Dynamic Territories here.

Tailor Outreach

Now that your reps know the accounts to go after, don’t undermine your advantage with forgettable cookie-cutter outreach.

Use Keyword Insights

Use insights from intent data to win over prospects with relevant, empathetic messaging.

Best-in-class solutions show your reps the keywords that personas are researching and the content they’re consuming. This makes it easy to tailor messaging for individual personas within an account and grab their attention.

Engage In-Market Buyers

Teams that prioritize engagement with buyers in the in-market sweet spot average a 120% improvement in revenue generation. By delivering relevant messaging that addresses their specific needs and concerns at this critical stage, you increase the chances of capturing their attention and closing the deal.

Multi-thread to Build Awareness and Consensus

B2B buyers hunt in packs, with as many as 19 individuals from a single account involved in a buying group for a large deal.

By engaging and influencing multiple stakeholders in an account, you massively increase your chances of closing a deal. Engaging multiple stakeholders helps grow awareness and build consensus within buying teams. This matters more than ever in the U.S. market, where many prospects may be less aware of your brand and solution.

To multi-thread effectively, tailor your outreach to address the unique perspectives and priorities of each persona within the team.

Read how Bynder sets their team up for outbound success in EMEA & North America

Chapter 4

Generating Demand and Building Pipeline in the U.S.

While intelligent ABM tools can help you uncover prospects, succeeding in a new region requires you to increase awareness about your product or service. Enter the marketing team.

Just as sales can’t waste time and resources chasing your entire TAM, marketing can’t use the spray-and-pray playbook to raise awareness. Today, smart B2B marketers who’re raising awareness in the U.S. aren’t considering splashy billboards or sponsorships — they’re testing the market with targeted ads to ideal prospects.

But this approach is only viable if you can make digital ads more efficient. Currently, 60% of digital marketing spend is wasted, and 15% of advertising spend is untraceable.

Thankfully, the same intelligence leveraged by sales can be used by marketers to take a tailored, efficient approach to moving prospects along the buyer journey.

Hyper-Targeted Digital Advertising

One of the biggest challenges is making sure your audience is tightly defined so that every digital advertising dollar spent represents a sales opportunity.

AI-powered ABM tech helps you pinpoint businesses that need your product — eliminating wasted time and money on those that don’t.

Define Your Audience Segments

Buyer-based segmentation is an efficient way to identify prospects and create targeted campaigns. To segment effectively, it’s best to start broad and gradually narrow down your audience. This is especially true when targeting a new U.S. audience that lacks knowledge of your product or service.

Start by narrowing down segments based on ICP fit. For example, good fit, better, best fit.

At the next level down, you can apply firmographic segmentation, including:

Geography-based, such as a specific territory in the U.S.
Industry-based
Company size

Next, you can layer on account intelligence around keyword research, website activity, or buying intent stage to further refine your initial ICP buckets. For example, your segments could target:

All best-fit ICP accounts in the awareness stage in a specific region
Better and best-fit accounts that have researched specific keywords related to your product in the past 30 days
Accounts who’ve visited key inbound pages on your website in the past week

You can layer your account segmentation in whichever ways best fits your goals. What really matters is that rather than sending generic campaigns to broad audiences, you can whittle down your audience to create highly targeted, personalized campaigns.

The Right Ad Channel for Buying Stage

The medium for your message also matters as you look to raise awareness through advertising in the States. While a LinkedIn campaign that advertises a custom demo makes sense for audiences near the end of their buying journey, it’s an ineffective and expensive way to raise awareness.

At 6sense, we usually don’t pay accounts Target-stage accounts much attention, preferring to engage them a little further along the buying journey. However, when launching in a completely new region, many of your accounts will be in the “Target” stage.

When we launched a new territory in EMEA, we faced this exact scenario. Here are the digital ads we used, by buying stage, to quickly raise awareness.

Buying Stage	Advertising Method	Notes
Accounts in target and awareness	Display advertising	Cost-effective way to raise awareness
Accounts in awareness and consideration	Linkedin ads	Using 6sense filter to target strong-fit accounts in these stages
Accounts in decision and purchase	Linkedin ads	Targeting all in-market buyers in the decision and purchase stages

Content Type for Ad Buying Stage

You’ll also need to tailor content for your ads depending on a prospect’s buying journey. Here’s an example of the kinds of content to map to your ads.

Buying Stage	Objective	Content
Awareness	Help buyers identify their problem	Top of the funnel blogs
Consideration	Help buyers explore their options	How-to guides
Decision	Help buyers see how their peers use your solution	Case studies, Analyst reports
Purchase	Help buyers build a business case	ROI tools, One-pagers, Demos

Beyond Ads: Tailored Events and Content

Once your prospects engage with your ads, marketing needs to continue moving them down the buyer journey with relevant content.

To create content and events that strike a chord with your prospects, analyze the keywords being researched by your ICPs in the States. Use these insights to develop engaging and informative content like guides, roundtables, and webinars that address these keywords and resonate with your target audience. Learn how 6sense customers use and manage keywords in our community forum, RevCity.

Continue to build awareness and pipeline by:

Coordinating quarterly events that align with your target audience’s interests and provide opportunities for engagement and interaction.
Promoting your content and events through various channels, including digital marketing, ads, landing pages, and targeted nurture emails tailored to specific buyer personas.
Incorporating compelling CTAs such as invitations to dinners, webinars, or other relevant events to encourage engagement and participation.
Making sure messaging, branding, and value propositions are consistent across all touchpoints. Give sales and BDRs a helping hand with U.S.-specific templates and snippets.

Tailor Case Studies and Assets

Where possible, tailor your content to the U.S. audience. Share case studies that best align with your North American audience’s industry, use case, or company size. In time, prioritize creating U.S.-specific case studies to give prospects confidence.

By embracing a holistic approach with ads, content, events, case studies, and sales outreach, you can create a compelling and personalized experience for your ICPs in the U.S.

Chapter 5

Aligning Your Revenue Team for Efficient Growth

If you’re going to build an efficient revenue machine in a new market, aligning marketing and sales teams is crucial.

Businesses can see initial success in greenfield markets with a small team of salespeople and limited processes or marketing support. But once they try to scale, it usually reveals a lack of alignment between teams. Fostering a culture of alignment from the outset is worth it in the long run.

Alignment goes beyond acknowledging that you’ll work together. Marketing and sales need to align on accounts, planning, workflows, resources, technology, metrics, and results. Basically, everything.

Align Engagement at Every Stage of the Journey

Once you’ve agreed on target accounts, sales and marketing should also align on how you’ll combine to engage with prospects to move them along the buyer journey.

Knowing a prospect’s buying stage (and having a shared language on these stages) makes it simpler to agree on this engagement. Salespeople focus their time on decision and purchase accounts — when accounts are in-market — and marketing is responsible for progressing accounts down the buying journey.

Marketing and BDRs engage early stage target accounts and progress them to in-market
Sales converts in-market target accounts to open pipeline
Teams combine to support the progression of open opps to closed-won revenue

Leverage Scalable Workflows and Orchestrations

This approach to engagement can be made scalable with the right technology. When AI can use buying signals to highlight the buying stage of accounts, and dynamic workflows help automatically move buyers from prospect through purchase, your team can get more done and grow more quickly.

Orchestrations, a coordinated series of automated actions triggered based on logic, can help. These triggers use data and segments to indicate changes around behaviors, contacts, buying teams, opportunities, and other factors.

Here’s how a unified approach from sales and marketing can leverage orchestrations during an example prospect journey:

1. Marketing sets up segments of best-fit ICP accounts

2. A dynamic segment that tracked ICP accounts for signs of life automatically adds new accounts when they hit your pre-defined criteria

3. The dynamic segment’s audience is enrolled in tailor-made display campaigns

4. An account engages and is added to your CRM, MAP, or sales engagement platform

5. The account is enriched with buying team contact data automatically acquired from third-party sources

6. BDRs are alerted to reach out using keywords and intent to tailor messaging

7. Buying group members are invited to an event, webinar, or roundtables based on keywords

8. Sales reps are alerted when the account shows increased engagement and comes in-market

9. BDRs and sales multi-thread key buying group personas

10. Your direct marketing platform triggers gifts to key personas

11. Account books a meeting with an AE

By integrating technology systems and workflows across departments, sales and marketing can be closely aligned, spend time in the right areas, and quickly scale as you grow in the U.S.

Chapter 6

Conclusion

Expanding internationally can be a game changer for B2B businesses. The U.S. market still holds untapped potential for European and Middle Eastern companies. But in this era of considered budgets, successful U.S. expansion relies on a focused and measured approach.

Start on the right foot by empowering your team to make smart choices about where to prioritize their time and effort. For sustained success, lean into AI-powered technology that aligns your revenue team and sets you up for scale.

Case Study: See how Talend powers ABM at scale in EMEA and beyond with 6sense.

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The 6sense Team

6sense helps B2B organizations achieve predictable revenue growth by putting the power of AI, big data, and machine learning behind every member of the revenue team.