You know what works at home. Will it work there?

The situation

A company that has found what works at home decides it is time to build an internationalisation strategy and go abroad. The reasoning is often simple: the model has worked here, so it should work there too. A market or a shortlist of markets gets picked, sometimes by instinct, sometimes because a competitor is already there, sometimes because one market happens to be where the team has a contact.

What follows is usually a mix of web search, a general AI chatbot, a couple of purchased reports and calls with people who know a market, pieced together by whoever on the team has time for it. It is a legitimate way to start. The strain shows up once the decision needs the same depth across several markets, a source behind every claim, and a result the leadership team can compare side by side rather than take on one person’s word.

By the time a shortlist of two or three markets exists, the gaps tend to show up together: one market was researched by someone in sales, another by someone in finance, and the two write-ups do not ask the same questions or cite the same kind of source. Leadership is then asked to compare conclusions that were never built to be compared.

Why the usual approach falls short

Two habits make the usual approach weaker than it needs to be. The first is the default first stop: many companies, especially from outside Europe, start with the market that is easiest to read in English and assume the rest of the continent will follow a similar pattern. In the Sales Art & Science journal, Enno Lückel describes why that market is a poor stand-in for the rest of continental Europe, and why the first market choice deserves its own analysis rather than a default. See European Market Expansion for SaaS: Why Starting in the UK Is the Wrong Move.

The second is treating “going international” as a bigger version of the growth the company already knows. It describes a different job, with its own triggers and its own way of going wrong. He also points out that early wins, for example from a warm introduction or a generous discount, are not proof that the model works in a market; they can look like traction while the underlying questions, pricing, channel, local competition, stay unanswered. See Startup Internationalization: The Timeline No One Budgets For. Treating every market with the same ad hoc process also means the markets stop being comparable to each other, which is exactly what a leadership decision needs them to be.

Both habits share a root cause: without a fixed set of questions asked the same way in every market, each market write-up ends up shaped by whoever did the work and how much time they had, rather than by the market itself. A leadership team reading three such write-ups side by side is comparing writing styles as much as markets.

What the research covers for your internationalisation strategy

An internationalisation strategy is only as strong as the evidence behind it, so every market in the case runs against the same fixed question set, organised into three research phases. Each phase is the same set of questions for every market you name, so a difference between two markets is a real difference in the evidence, not a difference in who happened to look.

Findings for a later phase are parked rather than skipped, so the case can go deeper on a market without starting over. Markets are ranked on weighted criteria your case sets, and the evidence behind every score is one click away. See how ranking and weighting works and which markets are covered.

What your team provides

The research runs on public evidence, so the main thing your team supplies is the thesis itself and the markets to test it against. Where a finding needs client input, for example a known constraint on budget or headcount, each contributor answers from their own role: product, sales, legal or finance, rather than one person guessing on behalf of the others. Client-stated input is always labelled separately from what the research found, so the committee can see which is which.

The quality of that input still matters: a vague thesis or a contributor who skips their section leaves a gap the research will name rather than guess at.

Because the question set is frozen once the case starts, everyone answers the same questions in the same order, and a market added later still gets the same questions as the ones already in the case. That is what keeps the comparison fair once the committee sits down to read it.

How it fits: two layers, one method

The three research phases above run as either of two layers, using the same method and the same fixed question set.

Only need the first layer? See startups.