Prove The Pipeline Before Hiring Abroad Or Risk An Expensive International Expansion

A company's first international deal can look like evidence that an entire region is ready for expansion. Many revenue leaders respond by hiring a local team and repeating the sales motion that worked at home. But pipeline in a new country often builds more slowly than the plan assumed, and a local hire costs more than a salary comparison shows. A company can limit the cost of a wrong call by validating the market and proving pipeline before it commits to permanent headcount.

Glenn Haertel is Chief Revenue Officer and Global Head of Sales at memoryBlue, working with B2B technology firms across North America, Europe, and APAC. His earlier roles include Senior Vice President at Displaydata and CRO at Blacklidge. Haertel first led an international expansion after relocating from the US to Europe, and he has also grown businesses in APAC and Central and South America. He recently hosted a webinar on building pipeline in new markets with three operators who have run expansions of their own.

"A lot of companies think it's going to be easy, and then they find it takes longer or they haven't figured out all the processes," says Haertel. "I've seen many companies stick their toe in the water but never get fully wet. They just spent money." Many of those companies pull back once the work runs longer than planned and walk away with little or no new business to show for it. Much of the risk comes from committing budget and headcount before the company knows how a new market buys.

Validating the regional ICP

Haertel starts an expansion decision with the ideal customer profile in each region, including how many target companies exist there and how they buy. A country that ranks as the second or third largest market for a product can look like an obvious early target, but size alone doesn't show whether a company can win there. He also looks at who local buyers already work with. "Are you going up against an established incumbent provider that's an expert in that market itself?" Haertel asks. "They may not be a competitor in the United States, but they're the dominant player in that European or South American market. How are you going to unseat them?"

Marco D'Ambrosi, Director of Global Business Development, EMEA at Intelex Technologies, joined Haertel on the webinar. When D'Ambrosi started at Intelex, the team had no native European-language BDRs, and outreach metrics across the DACH region, Southern Europe and APAC ran low. He rebuilt the team with German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French speakers, and says open and reply rates both improved. "If your first few wins are in the UK, for example, and you're expanding into Europe, that doesn't necessarily mean that now your entire strategic projection is going to happen," he says. "You've got to change things in other regions and localize your outreach."

Haertel's team can also size a region with market data before outreach begins. For a competitive replacement, the team can identify accounts running a rival product and prioritize the ones that may be nearing renewal. The team then chooses an outreach model based on how many target accounts a market holds. "If the market size is only 100 companies, that's going to radically change our approach to a really ABX type of strategy," Haertel explains. "We're going to align very tightly with the client's AEs and build a cohesive penetration strategy."

The full cost of hiring

A local hire costs money from their start date, but the pipeline that pays for the role builds over months. Haertel works backward from a company's cost basis to the size of pipeline it needs. He then factors in the sales cycle, win rates, and how quickly early-stage opportunities convert to the next step. "There's an upfront investment potentially that you're not recouping right away," he says. "But you have to be showing the pipeline growth in order to project that return on investment."

Local employment norms add costs beyond base pay, including more vacation days and holidays and extended parental and sick leave in some markets. Haertel ran into those norms with one of his first hires, an account executive in Germany. "He had a two-month notice period and started at the end of July. Then he called to let me know he was going on vacation for the first three weeks of August. Guess what, I'm paying for it," Haertel recalls. "If you need the production of 10 employees, you might have to add extra resources just to get the required productivity," he adds.

Some international markets make termination expensive, so a bad hire costs even more to fix. "In the US, if you make a mistake, you can rectify it pretty quickly," Haertel notes. "You can't do that in some of these other countries." Craig Downing, VP Marketing at Gainsight, chose an outside partner over building an in-house SDR team when the company expanded from the US into EMEA. "We all are perhaps familiar with legal and HR issues in our own market, but they're probably very different in Benelux than they are in Romania in terms of talent acquisition," Downing explains. "The cost of getting that wrong is frankly just too high."

Testing before committing headcount

An outsourced sales partner can gather market intelligence a company can use before it makes its first local hire. Haertel's team at memoryBlue reviews findings with each client weekly, holds a fuller review each month, and stays in daily contact through Slack or Teams. Prospects sometimes raise questions the client wasn't yet prepared to answer, so they capture all of that data and help the client build those answers into their value proposition. "We're testing their messaging in real time with authentic human connections in the local language," says Haertel. "We're seeing what's resonating, who's responsive, what do they say, what objections do we bump into?"

Nate Thiry, VP Product at BulkLoads, used an outside partner to bring software products overseas during his time at a previous employer. The firm lacked the time and capacity to build an internal team and wanted a faster route to market. "You're not going all in, especially in your first foray into that territory, but you're establishing a bit of a foothold with a low risk option," Thiry says.

Some companies expanding internationally have the financial backing to put more resources behind a new region. Others are expanding because their clients' footprint requires it, and they have less room for mistakes. Haertel points out that smaller companies can still win against larger competitors by responding faster and executing better. "The difference is money buys time," he says. "A company with deep pockets can absorb small mistakes while it builds that muscle and figures things out. Everyone else is better off leveraging a third party who already has that muscle built. It's about speed."

For most companies, the smarter first move is proving the market before building the team. Validate the ICP, test the message with real buyers, and let pipeline growth make the case for local headcount. When the numbers are there, hiring abroad becomes an investment instead of a bet.