Why entry decisions run ahead of their evidence
A market entry is one of the few decisions where the people proposing it will also be the ones running it, which builds advocacy into the analysis from the start. The market sizing is typically top-down (a share assumption applied to a country total) when the question that decides the outcome is bottom-up: how many specific customers can be reached, through which channel, at what cost of sale, against which incumbent relationship. The gap between a large addressable market and a small reachable one is where entry business cases break, and it rarely appears on the approval slide.
What entry cases habitually underweight
Regulation and employment law are treated as compliance details when they shape the whole operating cost: terminating an underperforming country manager in some jurisdictions takes a year and a settlement. Incumbents are modelled as static; in practice a credible local player defends its base with price and relationships the moment you win a visible customer. Pricing is translated rather than rebuilt, ignoring what the local market actually pays and how it prefers to buy. And the first country hire, the single decision with the most influence over the outcome, is often made quickly from a thin field because the entry timeline was announced before the search began.
The interrogation the case should survive
- Name ten specific target customers in the new market and explain, one by one, why each would switch from their current supplier to an unknown entrant.
- What is the fully loaded cost of sale in this market (channel margin, local presence, compliance, travel), and at what revenue does a customer become profitable?
- Who has entered this market in the past five years and withdrawn, and what do we know about why?
- What will the strongest incumbent do in the quarter after our first visible win, and what does our plan assume they will not do?
- How long are we prepared to fund losses, in a specific number agreed now, before the entry is judged to have failed?
- If the answer to the previous question causes discomfort, is that because the number is wrong or because nobody wants to own it?
Pressure-test the mechanism, not the ambition
The ambition, being present in the market, is not testable. The mechanism is. Test the channel assumption by attempting to sign one distributor or win one lighthouse customer before the full commitment, and treat the difficulty of doing so as data. Test the price point by quoting real prospects, not by benchmarking competitor list prices that nobody pays. Test the organisational assumption: entries staffed as a side responsibility of an existing regional team fail differently, but no less often, than entries given expensive dedicated structures. And test the withdrawal path, because an entry without pre-agreed exit criteria does not get stopped so much as starved, slowly, while consuming management attention that has a cost the business case never carried.
What people who have run entries, and exits, add
Operators who have opened markets, and especially those who have closed them, consistently puncture two comfortable beliefs. The first is transferability: the assumption that what won at home will win abroad, when the home advantage was usually built on relationships and reputation that do not travel. The second is timeline: internal cases almost always model the ramp on the best historical comparison rather than the median one. Independent perspectives at this stage tend to either shrink the entry into a cheaper, faster test of the core assumption, or surface a mode of entry (partnership, acquisition, licensing) that the internal team dismissed early because it was less exciting than building.
