Accelerate ROI From Overseas Acquisitions

During the boom times of early-to-mid 2000s, many medium and large business houses in India, China and other emerging markets invested heavily to acquire companies in Germany, France, UK, USA and other developed countries. Many such companies are now grappling with the challenges of different business and work cultures that prevail abroad. Long used to growing at double-digit rates in their home countries, they now face the harsh reality of single-digit growth rates that have been the norm in the overseas markets for decades. With their traditional near-24/7 working styles, they find it difficult to come to terms with the heightened importance attached to work life balance among their overseas executives.

To realize planned ROIs that were predicated upon double-digit growth rates, acquiring companies have to think out-of-the-box and take several measures immediately. One of them being to take a fresh look at their go to market strategies for different overseas markets with the realization that what worked in the home market might not work in developed countries. Failure to do this could debilitate the health of parent companies some of whom over-leveraged themselves to fund their acquisitions. The present economic downturn has exacerbated the situation with some acquired companies struggling for survival.

GTM360 can help acquiring companies realize ROIs from their high value acquisitions by designing and executing country-specific go to market strategies. Using our insights in success mantras in emerging markets and the rich experience of launching new high-tech businesses in developed markets, we will work closely with acquiring companies in emerging markets towards

• Evaluation of marketability of the offerings for each overseas market. Because different markets value different attributes differently from one another or from the home country, the resulting list of marketable offerings could look very different from one market to the another. For example, some countries attach tremendous value for convenience, while others hold security as key. Expect personal finance managers to be highly marketable in the former and two factor authentication solutions in the latter.
• Re-positioning value proposition to suit local business culture. Emphasize speed to market in those markets that bestow advantage to early movers but reusability in others where quality is perceived to be inversely proportional to speed.
• Re-packaging offerings to match local expectations. Don’t skip installation and usage documentation or training — not everywhere in the world do users tend to ignore them or learn how to use a new product or service on-the-job.
• Setting realistic timescales for various go to market activities mindful of typical lead times for appointments for meetings, length of vacations and other local realities in many developed countries.
• Best practices / pitfalls during contracting with sensitivity to the omnipresent role of laws and regulations in business as well as many other facets of life in many developed markets.
• Overall cultural training.