There are around 200 countries in the world you could sell your goods and services. But your resources are always limited and it’s impossible to enter all countries simultaneously. How to understand what country should be your TOP priority?

In this explainer episode your host Dmytro Shvets, the international expansion consultant, is sharing his experience in choosing the right market for your international expansion.

You will get a step-by-step instruction on how to prioritize your potential markets and focus your resources in the most efficient way.

This podcast is made in a partnership with Do Business With Ukrainians, the platform of Ukrainian business teams you can work with now Work with verified teams.

Create your international expansion strategy with Start Global, your guide to foreign markets. https://www.start-global.biz/

Mentioned URLs:

Import export statistics: trademap.org

World Bank: data.worldbank.org

Statista: statista.com

Food and Agriculture Organization: fao.org

Full episode transcript:

The second step of the journey is to understand where you would sell your goods or services and choose the focus market for your international expansion.

So, today I will share with you the approach that I use in my consulting practice and show you how to choose your markets based on facts and not emotions.

Every country, every market has its own rules, languages, and specifics. Entering one single country may take from one year to several.

And now answer the question: How many resources do you have? And whether they would be enough to do all these things simultaneously in the whole world?

So, the only way to deal with limited resources is to focus.

But how to do that? How to select from the nearly 200 countries? Well, the first thing you need to do when you are looking for something is to clearly understand what you are looking for. You need to describe the market that would be the best match for your product. In other words, to make a list of criteria that will help you to filter all the markets and select the best one for your business.

To simplify the approach, you have two very basic criteria. Where is the biggest number of your clients and where it would be the easiest to enter. So, you can start from these criteria and decompose them further, thinking what will show you that the market is exactly what you are looking for.

To make this easier I usually split the list of criteria in 2 tiers. The 1st tier for data easily available in the open-source statistics databases. For example, the average income, population or imported goods. You may find the links in the description of this episode.

These data will help you to narrow down your search to the 5-7 countries where you can look for more detailed information in local sources according to the second-tier criteria. The second-tier criteria may be already more country specific, for example number of distributors and retail networks, prices for your products, certification needed to enter or local business culture.

Now you can collect the data needed and organize them in one table. The first column of the table will consist of countries names and the first table row - of your criteria. Having done this, you will get your focus markets and your next step would be to analyse them deeper to understand how to enter them.