The Harvard Business Review recommends “to get to market as quickly as possible with a product that customers will keep”. And recent successes of companies like Uber and Airbnb demonstrate that, in many cases, the market is global.

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So, when you have started to successfully sell an innovative product or service that disrupts your local market, you have to ‘go international’ as fast as possible. The challenge for many small- to medium-size businesses is to find the necessary time and money to expand simultaneously on several fronts.

The traditional approach to international expansion is very time consuming and full of risks of different nature. Opening a foreign subsidiary and finding the right people can be complicated and often frustrating, for you have to face different financial regulations, social laws, languages, cultures and ways of conducting business. All these factors considerably reduce your speed to market.

A solution to solving these problems is to consider outsourcing your international business development to a specialized Sales Agency that works in partnership with your sales and marketing team to represent your product or service correctly and effectively, while adapting to your way of doing business and, above all, minimizing the time you need to spend on ‘international’.

Sales Force Europe (SFE) is such a Sales Agency. We allow you to operate at lower costs and with highly reduced risks compared with hiring direct. In addition, Sales Force Europe representatives are immediately available and known entities. They are local professionals who deeply understand their country’s business culture and have extended contacts in the target market sectors.

And they offer you the critical success factor: speed. They are trained and selling in 1-3 months versus typically 6-12 months when hiring direct, generating revenue in 3-6 months from start, with no additional costs or legal overhead. Consequently, you can expand much faster and leave your competitors in the dust.

This is the option chosen by Livefyre, one of Sales Force Europe most recent and innovative clients. After establishing an office in London, Livefyre realized that they could expand faster in Europe and in Latin America through Sales Force Europe representatives with expertise in digital media. This case study describes how this expansion happened.

So, instead of hiring permanent local employees, you can outsource sales to well qualified representatives, starting quickly on a small basis and grow. Sales Force Europe can offer you representatives with suitable experience in all major countries. The following map show where we operate and where from our clients come:

In conclusion, when in fact international business development requires a local presence, you don’t necessarily have to establish a local subsidiary with all the costs and risks that such a major commitment represents. By partnering with a sales outsourcing organization such as Sales Force Europe you can initiate a productive long-term relationship and quickly develop solid international foundations.