You might be forgiven for thinking that achieving overseas growth as an Australian tech company would be easier now than it’s ever been; English is the lingua franca of the global economy, the tech growth path across borders is fairly well trodden, and the cloud makes geographical borders largely irrelevant for SaaS anyway. So, if your product solves common problems experienced everywhere, then you can easily sell it anywhere, right?
As a tech startup lucky enough to have customers in Germany, the UK, US and Norway, whilst those factors have undoubtedly helped us, growth into Europe, in particular, has come with its own set of requirements. The good news is they have also created their own set of opportunities. But it’s important for SaaS companies like us at SalesPreso to recognise they will find themselves needing to adapt their products and services for their large European clients.
On the whole, the business leaders of our German customers speak enviously great English. Almost all of their internal meetings are in English. While this obviously makes it easy for us to do business with them on the other side of the world, when their sellers interact with their customers using our platform, almost everything switches to German. So internationalisation of our platform and our customers’ content became a significant requirement.
At the time, we just saw this as the cost of winning our first European enterprise customer. However, no sooner had we launched them than an existing Australian and UK customer informed us they were suddenly “really big in Norway”. Their Norwegian content was released shortly thereafter and our multilingual opportunities started growing through a forced requirement of expansion.
The most recent and publicised change requirement, however, has been GDPR compliance. Articles have been written, consultancy firms launched, and European companies panicked over this grand legislative change. We’ve recently gone through the process of making SalesPreso GDPR compliant for our European clients. One of our platform’s biggest benefits is its ability to provide deep insights into what best practice looks like by continually analysing what content resonates with customers. So being able to track how our customers’ salespeople and their customers are interacting with the content is critical—and exactly the type of activity that GDPR was designed to regulate.
Whilst the compliance updates were significant, they have actually brought the power of our analytics into sharper focus for our European clients. As a result, they’re now benefitting from more actionable insights, evolving their interactive sales stories and further improving productivity and performance.
By meeting the language requirements of our clients and with other territories sure to follow with their own version of GDPR, we feel our European journey has better prepared us for further overseas growth.
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