How to build trust with enterprise clients in a new market

In a market that has never heard of your company, an enterprise buyer's trust is won one skeptic at a time. The campaign you built to make that market aware of you is aimed at the wrong problem.

The founders I work with treat a new country as an awareness gap. They buy reach against buyers who already know the field. But those buyers are weighing something else.

What they are weighing is whether they want to be the one who bet on an unknown foreign vendor. Once that is the question, the size of the launch budget stops mattering.

A startup with real proof at home picks a new market. It pours the launch budget into local ads, a launch event, and a stand at the industry conference. Months later, every deal is a polite meeting that goes nowhere, and nobody can say what stopped them.

The unknown startup that won a market's two biggest names

Dor Eligula is Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at Bridgewise, which sells investment-analysis software to financial institutions. I want to walk through how he took it into Japan, a market most Israeli startups leave for later. Bridgewise had reached its entire home market in Israel and needed a new country to keep growing.

Project Where To: how the data pointed to Japan

The marketing team ran the search. They called it Project Where To. The data pointed somewhere almost nobody expected: Japan.

The reasons were demographic and regulatory. An aging population was moving wealth down a generation. A tax reform pulled ordinary savers in. Interest rates sat far below the developed world.

I find that combination hard to argue with. When Eligula showed the research around, a skeptic who wasn't even an investor told him he had never seen a startup pull this off in Japan. I would rather a founder trust the criteria they set than a stranger's gut, and that is what Bridgewise did.

They went anyway.

The two Japanese giants that became clients

Today two of the largest institutions in the country are clients: the Japanese Stock Exchange and Rakuten Securities. Neither was an obvious win for an early-stage foreign startup.

"It wasn't quite a bet," Eligula told me, "but it was a gamble we had to make, an educated one." What matters is how those two names were closed, because the launch isn't what did it.

The enterprise buyer's first question is who gets blamed if this fails

The reason enterprise deals stall, in my experience, isn't the pitch. In a field with an established leader, the safe move is to pick the incumbent. No one gets fired for buying the market leader. Betting on an unknown startup is a call the buyer has to defend if it fails.

So the deals that stall are usually the ones where the buyer already understands you perfectly. Saying what you do in one clear sentence is table stakes here, not the gap.

A campaign can make more of the market aware of your name. It can't tell a nervous executive you will still be answering the phone in two years. And it can't promise they won't end up the cautionary tale in someone's next review. That reassurance is carried by people, one relationship at a time.

When they already know you and still stall, buy time in the room

Closing the two Japanese institutions came down to a handful of dinners the marketing team paid for and helped run. Each was small: ten people at a table, three or four hours, eating and drinking together.

Eligula ran two or three of them for executives in the market. The length was the point, and I'd spend the launch budget here before a single ad.

"By having 10 people around the table, eating and drinking together, you can tell the other side is here for a process, not just to close a deal and walk away." So host one long dinner for the real buyers. I'd treat it like a bold guarantee that is itself the pitch.

The dinner works only when you know who signs

The dinner pays off only when you can name the people who sign and get them to the table. If you're still guessing who the buyer is, or can only pull in the analysts sent to screen you, I'd keep the money in the bank. Three hours builds trust in someone who can't spend it.

What sitting across the table long enough buys you

The founder who understands this stops counting how many people in the new market have heard the name. They start counting how many of the right rooms they have sat in for an evening.

The two institutions in Tokyo came from being at the table long enough to stop being a stranger. No launch budget buys that on its own.