The Minimum Viable Go-To-Market Approach: Sjeel Koster’s Five-Phase Strategy for Global Growth

Navigating the complexities of international expansion in the business world can seem daunting, especially when aiming to balance speed and sustainability in new markets. Sjeel Koster, an experienced Fractional CMO, sheds light on this intricate process through her extensive career journey from burgeoning startups to substantial corporate entities. In this detailed exploration, we break down the essential phases and strategies of going global, drawing from Sjeel's wealth of practical experience.

Who Is Sjeel Koster?

Having started as the 16th employee at a company called SEOshop, which was later acquired by Lightspeed and scaled into a colossal 1,300-employee entity over her seven-and-a-half-year tenure, Sjeel Koster brings a rich tapestry of experience to the table. "I really learned how it is from going from startup to scale up to corporate going IPO and doing various M&A across Europe," Sjeel explains. Her journey didn't stop there. After Lightspeed, she worked at EVBox as the strategic right hand of the CMO, focusing on performance, growth, and marketing operations while targeting enterprise accounts and larger deals.

Sjeel then ventured into entrepreneurship, founding HolidayHero, where she spent two years building the company from the ground up. "What makes it unique, I think, is my journey from 0 to 1 and from 1 to 10 and from 10 to 100," she notes. This diverse background across marketing and operations gives her a comprehensive view of market expansion at every stage. Today, as a Fractional CMO for the past two and a half years, Sjeel leverages this experience to help startups and scale-ups navigate their next steps of growth.

Is International Expansion Really as Simple as Clicking a Button?

In an era where AI seems to promise solutions to every business challenge, there's a common misconception that international expansion has become as simple as clicking a button and deploying automated website translation. Contrary to this simplistic view, Sjeel insists that a successful strategy encompasses far more than technological tools alone.

"I think it definitely speeds up the process," Sjeel acknowledges, referencing modern platforms like Framer, Webflow, or WordPress, that offer automated translation plugins. However, she's quick to add an important caveat: "There's still some manual work involved with checking the copy and making sure that the translations make sense, because there are a lot of nuances for specific markets."

Integrating advanced tools does accelerate processes, but Sjeel highlights the importance of human oversight to ensure that the nuances and cultural sensitivities of each market are respected and adequately addressed. The technology may provide the foundation, but the expertise and cultural understanding remain irreplaceable.

How to Expand Internationally: Sjeel's The Minimum Viable Go-To-Market Approach

Delving into the mechanics of expansion, Sjeel introduces her Five-Phase Strategic Market Expansion Playbook, which she recently detailed on her Substack: an invaluable resource for any company considering crossing borders. As she explains, companies often decide to expand to a different market on the back of the success they are seeing in their home market. While she agrees that localizing products and expanding to new markets is a great idea, she finds that the approach followed by B2B SaaS companies is often lacking structure. Here’s how Sjeel recommends proceeding.

Phase 1: Strategic Foundation and Market Entry Planning

The first phase focuses on establishing the foundations necessary for scaling to another market. The most critical considerations in this phase are:

• Product Readiness: Is your product suited for the new market?

• Legal and Regulatory Requirements: Are there regulatory hurdles that need addressing?

• Market Size and Competition: How big is the market? How much potential does it have? How much competition do you have in that specific market versus others?

  
  

Answering these fundamental questions is the first step to establishing an effective expansion motion. Sjeel stresses that "the whole executive team or founding team or management team should be aligned on what market expansion actually means and what each team is responsible for."

Phase 2: Minimal Viable Go-to-Market Development

The second phase centers on a crucial question: Can your business model in the home market be replicated abroad? The key in this phase is understanding whether you have a repeatable go-to-market motion that you can rely on, and how repeatable this motion is if copied over to new markets.

She's emphatic about this requirement: "If you don't have that repeatability, then first and foremost it doesn't make sense to even expand." This phase focuses on proving the business model's viability in the new market with minimal resource expenditure.

Sjeel illustrates this with a practical example: "If you know that there are a lot of local partners in Germany that you can leverage as resellers to test out the markets prior to expanding with a huge budget and resources. Maybe that's the first way to start testing it". The key question then becomes: "What is the minimal viable go to market motion for your next entry market, and how are you going to test that?". According to Sjeel, applying the minimum viable go-to-market approach is the best way to contain costs and test assumptions in the initial stages of international expansions, as it allows companies to gather real-word data and adapt their expansion strategy for the specific market even further, based not only on what the company itself expects from the market, but first and foremost on how the local customer base is responding to the product launch.

Phase 3: Localization Strategy and Resource Planning

The third phase addresses one of the most critical yet often underestimated aspects of expansion: localization. In an age where many people consider translation an afterthought, or something that, thanks to AI, can be achieved almost instantaneously, at virtually no-cost, it’s important to remember that proper localization goes far beyond translation, involving the adaptation of marketing materials and strategies to fit the cultural and consumer specifics of each market.

Sjeel stresses the importance of localization strategy: "This can be anything, from how are we going to localize and what are the processes around that? What are we going to do with AI? Are we okay with AI translations?". Sjeel approach here is very pragmatic. In her view, there’s no right or wrong answers to these questions, as long as one is willing to take the consequences of their decisions, along with the benefits. She notes candidly, "I've seen a ton of companies that are just doing AI translations, and then I come to the site as a Dutch native person, and then I'm reading and I'm like, what is that saying?". The critical element here is alignment between expectations and budget: companies need to determine their localization standards and commit appropriate resources. Sjeel tells us that sometimes companies decide to use their internal team first, hiring a few freelancers to support with the localization needs for the linguistic skills they do not have in-house. In other instances companies set up a completely new localization department, or outsource localization as a whole. Whatever the strategy, one thing that is certain is that any localization effort requires a budget allocated to it. Thinking that just because a colleague is a native speaker of a certain language they will be able to take on their shoulders the weight of localization in that market is not only unrealistic, but also extremely risky, as it creates bottlenecks and prioritization issues between localization and the core competencies of the employee in question.

Another element that Sjeel considers vital is general awareness about the expansion effort and alignment within the team about the fact that this is a priority for the business as a whole, not just for the people that are directly involved in localization.  

Regarding ownership, Sjeel notes that organizational size plays a crucial role. "It depends on how big your team is," she explains. In startups scaling quickly into multiple markets, "usually what ends up happening is that marketing has most ownership of the localization, and maybe product also has some ownership of the localization of the product." She emphasizes that "as a CMO, you really need to take a stand and challenge the teams on what localization actually means, and then agree on the level of localization that you're going into."

Phase 4: Execution and Early Validation

The fourth phase involves implementing the strategies defined in previous phases while continuously monitoring and adjusting based on performance metrics and market feedback. This is where theory meets reality.

"The execution part is like the execution around the minimum viable go-to-market motion. And the early validation is asking: Is this actually working? Are we getting that repeatability in our motion?" Sjeel clarifies. The challenge lies in setting realistic expectations while maintaining accountability.

Sjeel warns against simply copying metrics from your core market: "You usually cannot calculate with the same budgets. You cannot calculate with the same conversions. You cannot calculate with the same cost per lead, because you're entering a new market." The reason is practical: sales teams, reps, or partners are still understanding how to sell your product in the specific market and how to speak to the most relevant pain points.

Her recommendation is to work with revenue operations specialists or CFOs to establish minimum acceptable benchmarks. "It's about setting some internal benchmarks that have a minimum rate that you would be okay with from a financial perspective," she advises. This might involve mapping your ideal customer profile in the new market and focusing initially on high-density areas to test and validate your approach.

Phase 5: Scaling and Optimization

Once a firm foundation is confirmed, the final phase focuses on expanding reach within the market, optimizing strategies, and reallocating resources for maximum impact. However, Sjeel emphasizes the importance of maintaining discipline even in this phase.

"The most important thing is seeing that repeatability in your motion that you are betting on for that market. If that isn't working, optimize it and then still set specific timelines for how long you're going to do that. Each month that you continue doing this, it's an investment in resources, in time, in budget."

Companies need to establish clear success and failure criteria to determine what is the no-go point in that go-to-market motion, so they know when to stop investing resources and budget in a market that is not showing adequate return on the investment.

On the other hand, when success is evident, the strategy shifts: "If you see that something is working, then of course you need to double down on it." This triggers different conversations about scaling and what additional localization efforts might be necessary to elevate the market to the next level. This gradual approach to localization is something we feel strongly about at Undertow, where we often advocate an approach that we call Minimum Viable Experience (MVE), whereby we recommend mapping the essential step of the customer journey and focus localization efforts on those first, to evaluate local response before expanding the scope of localization further.

Finally, Sjeel insists on the importance of documenting findings and processes accumulated during expansion: "If you have defined your repeatability in that specific motion when it comes to market expansion, document it right and take your learnings from that so you can potentially use it when you go into a next market." This approach allows companies to become more efficient with each new market they enter, because, even if each market has its own specific challenges and peculiarities, having an accumulated wealth of knowledge and a track record of how similar challenges were overcome in other markets is invaluable.

How Does Product Marketing Drive International Success?

The role of product marketing proves crucial in international expansion. "Product marketing plays a very pivotal role in understanding the market that you're entering," Sjeel emphasizes. She shares a practical example from her work with Female x Finance: "The two founders went to London and they had various conversations with their target audience and partners to really understand: ‘Are there certain nuances that we need to take into account?’"

The process involved recording conversations, analyzing them with AI, and comparing findings to existing positioning in their home market. "There were some very structural differences that we needed to adjust to. Even our way of expanding in the UK had to be slightly adjusted. Sometimes it's even informing you to change your pricing slightly," Sjeel reveals.

This research-driven approach can uncover competitive dynamics unique to the new market: "You might have different competition there that you don't have in the Netherlands or that you don't have in the US. And all of a sudden that competitor is maybe very much on the same line of your features and the way that they are positioning themselves." Product marketing must adapt positioning frameworks, messaging, homepages, industry-specific landing pages, sales decks, and pricing strategies accordingly.

How to Balance Brand Control with Local Adaptation

For companies working with reseller networks, Sjeel describes a balanced approach to maintaining brand integrity while enabling local adaptation. "To make this work, you really need to have very good product marketing in place," she states. The core fundamentals (brand boundaries, product positioning, and communication style) remain with headquarters, while localization is handled by loal teams (or sometimes even local partners or resellers), who have a deeper knowledge of the market.

At Aquablu, where Sjeel worked with an extensive European reseller network, they maintained a balance by working on the localization of the core website, while providing resellers with a comprehensive marketing package in English, which included all the assets and tools and branding materials they might need, so they could localize them as required. Sjeel also advocates for a certain level of control over the materials that are localized locally, to make sure that they adhere to the global brand guidelines.

From a budget perspective, Sjeel notes that localization for resellers typically falls under market development funds (MDF), though companies expanding rapidly into multiple markets might prefer maintaining in-house control through dedicated localization agencies.

Conclusions: Critical Lessons for International Expansion

Throughout the discussion, Sjeel emphasized several critical points that often go underestimated. First, the importance of organizational alignment: the entire leadership team must understand what market expansion entails and agree on responsibilities before execution begins.

Second, the value of market-specific product marketing research. "Once you really start investigating in that market and you start talking to your potential prospects and customers there, you might uncover certain realities that you could not have anticipated," Sjeel observes. This discovery process remains invaluable and, as she notes, "I don't think that that's something that, at least to my knowledge, you can fix with AI."

Third, continuous feedback gathering is essential, not only from sales teams, but also from customer success and support, as they are the ones speaking with the customer after the sale happens, so their feedback can be particularly useful to adapt the whole experience to address specific pain points reported by users in the market.

Regarding the question of tackling one market at a time versus multiple markets simultaneously, Sjeel is pragmatic: "It depends on the company." She outlines various scenarios: from Lightspeed's aggressive M&A strategy, to EVBox's reseller-focused approach, to well-funded companies that are under investor pressure to scale quickly and can afford to test multiple markets simultaneously. "There's not a right or wrong in that. It really depends on your capital and what the expectations are."

Her five-phase playbook is particularly helpful for those companies that are hitting growth plateaus in their current regions and preparing to expand into new territories.

How to Connect with Sjeel Koster

For more insights from Sjeel or to discuss market expansion strategies, you can reach out to her on LinkedIn, where she shares weekly posts on various go-to-market topics, or follow her recently launched Substack, where she covers subjects ranging from go-to-market expansion and ideal customer profiles to building go-to-market GPT stacks.

Scaling globally is an exhilarating yet challenging journey that demands more than technological solutions. As Sjeel demonstrates through her methodical Five-Phase Playbook, successful international expansion requires strategic planning, realistic validation, thoughtful localization, and continuous adaptation. At Undertow, we specialize in helping B2B SaaS companies achieve their full potential on international markets by designing tailored localization programs, implementing efficient processes and leveraging technology for scale. Get in touch to find out more.