Forbes: Atlantic Crossing - What’s The Secret Of Selling Tech To U.S. Buyers?

If you run a European tech startup and have international ambitions, the chances are you’ll have your sites firmly set on the U.S. market as a source of future growth.

And that’s not surprising. As things stand, U.S. buyers account for around 40 percent of global software sales and everyone – well almost everyone – wants a slice of that. In some tech segments – notably enterprise software – scaling up successfully is more or less dependent on establishing a presence in the North American marketplace.

But here’s the thing. Finding buyers across the Atlantic will never be a walk in the park. In terms of face-to-face meetings, the distances that need to be covered are vast. What’s more, the business culture is different, and there is a huge amount of competition from domestic players.

So what’s the secret of cracking North America? One relatively young European company that has done just that is Celonis. Founded in Munich back in 2011, the company applies analytics to the digital processes of its customers to uncover inefficiencies that can be addressed and eradicated. An enterprise software play, the company has achieved around $100 million in annual sales and has successfully established a niche in the US market where its customers include Uber, Coca Cola and Exxon Mobile.

So when I recently spoke to co-founder Alexander Rinke, I was keen to ask him for his take on how European startups can successfully achieve sales on the other side of the Atlantic.

A Question of Resources

As Rinke explains, Celonis’ expansion into the U.S. market didn’t happen by accident – pushing the company in an unfamiliar geography required commitment. “A lot of companies achieve success in Europe but they don’t put the resources into the winning U.S. sales. You can’t treat it as a side project. When we decided we were going to do it, we told each other that we were going to do it for real,” he says.

But what does that mean in practice? Well, in Rinke’s view, any business devoting time, money and energy on opening up a new geography has to move fast to gain momentum. “We felt that we had to find customers quickly,” he says.

To be more precise Celonis set out to find flagship customers that would essentially say we are here and on the map. Rinke cites Uber as an example.

That begs the question of how a European company gets on the radar screen of a US enterprise? How does it make its voice heard above the competitive noise? As Rinke acknowledges, with European clients such as ABB using its product in various territories Celonis already had something of a global profile. But it was also limited profile. The challenge was to win customers headquartered in the U.S. market.

Raffling A Harley

“So we had to be creative,” he says. “One way to do that was to work with several partners and they leveraged us. We also marketed very aggressively.”

That included at least some guerilla marketing. “For instance, we raffled a Harley Davidson at an IT conference,” Rinke says.

Slightly more prosaically, the marketing effort also involved the usual hard slog. “We did a lot of cold calling,” Rinke says. All this went hand in hand with creating a value proposition that made sense to American buyers who didn’t (and don’t necessarily) respond to the same pitch as their European counterparts. A whole new pitch deck was required. As Rinke sees it understanding the motivations of the buyer is key.

One Company Culture

Establishing offices on the ground and hiring local teams was also essential. Despite building a U.S workforce, however, Celonis has striven to maintain a common culture across the business – and one that is rooted on home turf. That involves bringing the global workforce together in Germany. “This year 100 people from all over the world will join us in Munich,” says Rinke. “We aim to be one company.”

I’m talking to Rinke in a blustery, mid-October United Kingdom where there is no clear resolution in sight to the problem of how Britain can leave the European Union without tanking the economy and running a coach and horses through the Irish peace process. But Brexit is focusing minds. According to those who advocate it, the divorce from Europe will set U.K. companies free to trade around the world. Trade deals are at the top of the agenda and a deal with the U.S. is the most glittering prize of all. But it’s important to remember that trade deals in themselves don’t work miracles. The secret of breaking a new market is commitment and an understanding of the requirements and motivations of buyers.