Leveraging Partners to Better Connect With International Customers
If you are new to selling to European audiences, your channel partners may bring valuable insights. Take this opportunity to connect with your partners and ask them about go-to-market activities appropriate for the culture. Use these insights to refine your marketing and partner playbooks, as well as your expectations around timing and preferred communication. This analysis would benefit direct sales, too.
To accurately gauge the success rate of your strategies, make sure to segment data by region when leveraging Channel Sales Insights. For example, a playbook that drives significant sales wins in the US may yield entirely different results with European audiences, so it’s essential to understand which approaches work where.
Working with American vs. European Customers
Each person and organization is unique. While your best bet will be to get to know your partners and customers in each region, there are a few general differences between American and European buyers.
- Americans appreciate a narrative; Europeans prefer proven data. So while fantastic presentations and game-changing success stories may wow your American customers, European buyers focus on metrics and a clear value proposition for the bottom line.
- Europeans tend to be more cautious. American buyers may brag about their cutting-edge, risk embracing decisions. Meanwhile, European buyers lean towards risk aversion (and rely on numbers-backed evidence).
- Compared to Americans, Europeans are more likely to place greater emphasis on in-person interactions. This may impact your sales enablement materials and how you distribute your marketing development funds. After all, European partners may be more inclined to attend conferences or travel to meet with prospects.
- The attention-grabbing nature of American marketing may be too assertive for European tastes. European advertising, in general, tends to be less-flash, more-substance. That bolded, aggressive headline ending in an exclamation point may grab American readers but turn off their European counterparts.
Enhanced Security Needs
As our digital footprint grows, data privacy is becoming more of a concern for many governments. In Europe, Schrems II found that once data has been transferred to United States sources, it’s not possible to maintain the same level of data protection required in Europe.
What is GDPR?
GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation and is self-defined as the “toughest privacy and security law in the world.” Put into place in mid-2018, GDPR levies significant (tens of millions of euros) fines for those who violate the privacy and security standards put in place.
At the core of GDPR are the seven protection and accountability principles for data processing, including:
- Lawfulness, fairness, and transparency
- Purpose limitation
- Data minimization
- Accuracy
- Storage limitation
- Integrity and confidentiality
- Accountability
GDPR may seem like a lot and, as you expand into Europe, someone in your organization should take the lead on familiarizing themself with the entire regulation. However, with the right tools, complying is entirely achievable.
Complying with GDPR
While the US and European governments are collaborating to bridge the gap between data security efforts and ensure information can be transmitted securely, an essential strategy for ensuring compliance is using European-based data centers. Instead of transferring data to the United States, you can manage all data securely in a European data center when working with EU partners.
Allbound recently introduced a European instance of its PRM, providing users with the option of storing their data in the US or the EU.