Sales Force Europe
Personalized and Localized Global Expansion for Tech Companies

The wider you cast a net, the more fish you catch. But, when it’s time to throw a net over uncharted waters, things can get a little tricky. Think you’re ready to cast your net abroad? Global expansion isn’t one-size-fits-all. And with the limited budget you have to take your tech abroad, you can’t think of it that way. Effectively, creating local demand for your product in a new international market translates to creating personalized experiences, building relationships or leveraging existing ones.

That’s just what Sales Force Europe helps you do. By taking advantage of local market knowledge and customer contacts, Europe-based SFE provides on-demand local sales professionals who help you personalize and customize your offering to new markets. SFE helps small to medium-sized companies rapidly and profitably launch their businesses to new international markets without the usual costs, risks and delays associated with opening foreign offices and hiring local employees.

After managing sales teams in Silicon Valley, Europe, and Latin America for more than a decade, Rick Pizzoli grasps the need for a more flexible, faster path to global expansion. That’s why he founded Sales Force Europe in 2003 and has helped hundreds of tech organizations successfully expand ever since.

“I quickly realized that you can waste a lot of time and money trying to build a new market from the ground up in a new country. It’s much easier and faster to engage local salespeople or teams who have a proven track record selling tech in that culture and target vertical,” Pizzoli said.

Most expanding teams look to Europe through a London-first lens. Then they spend a lot of time and money setting up local headquarters, filing and paying local taxes, and juggling local laws and regulations as they look to hire and fire locals or to displace and relocate sales stars from where they’re already winning. And they target the often over-saturated UK market without researching the best place to start.

With more than 75 hand-selected active sales and marketing professionals — each with over a decade of experience selling tech to local companies and cultures — SFE provides an effective alternative to staffing dedicated sales offices throughout Europe.

“We are the largest business development team in Europe right now. We’ve built a team of regional sales managers across 12 different European markets that help our clients work strategically. We leverage existing customer relationships to open new ones,” Pizzoli said.

These tech executives represent you, the client, as on-demand sales professionals and field reps, country managers, account directors, and channel sales managers. This is alongside inside sales and lead generation resources with expertise in sales assessment, sales strategy, and market analysis.

You can waste a lot of time and money trying to build a new market from the ground up in a new country. It’s much easier and faster to engage local salespeople or teams who have a proven track record selling tech in that culture and target vertical

During the initial phase of collaboration, SFE assesses your international readiness. This analysis helps you identify gaps in your existing sales and marketing strategies so that you can build a repeatable international market strategy. After recognizing the best markets to expand into, SFE can then create your inbound and outbound marketing campaigns to drive awareness across your main verticals. Through its regional sales management, the company also helps in localizing and personalizing tech products in accordance with your new targets. Inside sales and field sales executives drive the process through to lead generation and deal closing. Throughout the engagement, SFE employs platforms such as HubSpot to define your sales funnel, and to create specialized marketing and communication with your target countries and verticals, depending on the size of companies and personalities of the prospects.

Look at how Livefyre, a leading social depth platform, had a good run in the US market. The decision-makers at Livefyre had aggressive sales targets, and they wanted to expand internationally. However, past experiences taught them that hiring sales staff in Europe and South America can be riddled with potential pitfalls. Therefore, to achieve their international growth objectives more quickly, with less risk and lower up-front cost, they outsourced the job to Sales Force Europe. SFE built a team for the SaaS company and booked 40 meetings with highly qualified prospects, all within a month of their first meeting with Livefyre. Within three months, SFE closed a large strategic deal with Timeout magazine in London worth $300,000. In under a year, SFE had closed deals worth 1.6 million USD in revenue. The success has been so good that Livefyre only used SFE for sales outside the USA from that engagement onwards. Soon after, Livefyre was acquired by Adobe, including turning the SFE sales team into permanent hires.

“We help our clients remain competitive in new markets by leveraging our deep tech domain expertise and having already learned from assisting more than 300 companies in expanding globally,” Pizzoli said.

He continued that “We support sales and marketing from a personal perspective by engaging professionals in the market to drive speed with this whole extensive process.”