By Michael Tessler, Managing Partner

At True North Advisory, our mission is to help entrepreneurs and enterprises scale their businesses. This usually involves helping them with the following 5 journeys;

1. Defining the company strategy and its mission/vision

2. Building and aligning around a messaging framework

3. Planning and executing a go-to-market strategy

4. Examining the Product and offer for market fit

5. Offering advice to the CXO team around leadership, fundraising, partnerships

Most of our work falls into one of these journeys and we have developed detailed frameworks that help us accomplish these. 

An area that many of our clients ask for our advice on is how to expand their business into new geographies. Frankly, between the five partners at True North we have lots of experience making lots of mistakes and we took all of that learning and created two work streams that help our clients plan and execute these expansions. Whether it's one of our Asian or European clients who wanted to expand to North America or vice versa, we have found these two work streams to be helpful.

The two work streams around geographic expansions include Go to Market as well as the Operational/Corporate topics. 

The GTM work stream comprises the following components:

1. Learn - identify buyer persona, create value matrix, define sales funnel

2. Build - select sales strategy, decide how to generate product demand, develop a content marketing strategy

3. Execution - develop sales organizational model, assist in building higher performing sales force

4. Tracking - use metrics to hone sales process, continued alignment and partnership

To increase the success and speed to revenue, the True North team works closely with the team on the ground to provide  introductions to key channels, strategic partners, key customer contacts by vertical, as well as any in-country support.

The Operational/Corporate work stream comprises the following components:

1. Entity Formation 

2. Commercial Structure

3. Immigration Strategies 

4. Specific Geographic Strategies and Product Requirements 

5. Contractual Employment Structure 

At True North, our focus is to assist our clients with revenue acceleration, and our ability to assist in opening new markets, whether geographic or vertical, is a best practice for us. In today’s fast growing CX marketplace, the ability to expand with a strategy and framework is a key to success. 

Feel free to share any best practices you have experienced in opening new geographies. Of course you can also share what doesn’t work as we can all learn from each other's challenges.