August 2026 · Market entry · 9 min read

What I Actually Do in a New Market (And What I've Stopped Doing)

Thirteen countries in, I've made most of these mistakes myself. Here's what survived.

Sri Lanka

I once spent an afternoon in Sri Lanka with a tour operator who had never heard of the company I worked for. We didn't talk about a contract. He showed me his booking sheet, complained about how the season had shifted, told me which suppliers he trusted and which ones he'd quietly stopped calling.

I learned more in those three hours than in the six weeks of research I did before getting on the plane.

That afternoon changed how I approach new markets. Not because of anything he told me specifically, but because it made something obvious: you cannot desk-research your way into a market where business runs on relationships. You have to go and sit with people.

Here's what I do now, and the things I've stopped doing.

I stopped saying "we're expanding to X country"

At Draco in Dubai, we reached more than 250 companies across Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. On a slide that number looks great. In reality, almost everything that turned into a real conversation came from a much narrower slice: mid-sized retail and hospitality groups where one person owned both the customer data and the budget.

That last detail is the whole qualification criterion. Not company size, not industry, not revenue. If the data sits with IT and the budget sits with marketing and neither of them reports to the other, the deal will take nine months and probably die in month seven. I've watched it happen enough times to treat it as a rule now.

So I start with a list of twenty companies I can actually name. Building it takes about a week and looks like this:

• Ten from whoever already sells something adjacent to my buyer, asked directly: "who are your best five clients and why?"
• Five from association and trade fair member lists, filtered by who actually shows up
• Five that a local contact tells me are the ones others copy

If I can't get to twenty, I don't know the market well enough to enter it. That's a finding, not a delay.

I find out who has to vouch for me

The org chart tells you who to email. It doesn't tell you who has to vouch for you first.

In the Gulf, I watched technically excellent proposals lose to weaker ones because the other side had a sponsor inside the building. Nothing dramatic, no corruption. Just someone respected saying "these people are fine, I know them."

So before I send anything, I look for three people who can put their name next to mine: a consultant who already works with that industry, an association, or one well-connected operator who takes my call.

Goa, India · Singapore · Istanbul

Finding them is the easy part. The part people get wrong is what you ask for and what you give back. Asking someone to introduce you to five clients on the first call is asking them to spend their credibility on a stranger. It rarely works and it burns the contact.

What works, in my experience:

• Ask for a read, not an introduction. "Can I show you what I'm planning to send and tell me where it's wrong?" People enjoy being the expert, and you get the local translation of your pitch for free.
• Bring something they can't get locally. Market data from a neighbouring country, a supplier contact, an honest read on a competitor. Reciprocity has to come first and it has to be real.
• Let them see you again. One meeting makes you a visitor. Three over a few months makes you someone they can mention without risk.

At Ecodation I built a network of 110+ universities and institutions, and the pattern held in every city: the first partner was hard, the fifth was easy, because the first four had already talked about us. Warm introductions aren't a nice-to-have in these markets. They are the distribution channel.

I stopped trying to close in the first meeting

Early on I did this constantly. Fly in, present, ask for next steps, fly out. It felt efficient. It wasn't.

In Türkiye, a warm "olur" over tea often means "let's keep talking," and pushing for a signature the same day tells the other person you're not planning to stick around. In India, business frequently isn't mentioned until the second or third meeting, and treating those earlier conversations as wasted time is the fastest way to lose the deal. In the Gulf, things can move surprisingly quickly, but only once trust exists at the right level. Never before it.

Dubai, UAE

What I'm actually reading in that first meeting

I stopped measuring meetings by whether they ended with next steps. Now I watch four things:

• Who is quiet. The person who says least is often the one who decides. If someone senior sits in and doesn't speak, the meeting went better than it felt.
• Whether they ask about my other clients. Not out of curiosity, but to work out if they'd be my first experiment in this market. Nobody wants to be the pilot for a foreign vendor. Having one local reference, even a small one, changes this conversation completely.
• What they complain about unprompted. Volunteered complaints are real problems. Problems I raise are my problems, and they'll agree politely and forget by Thursday.
• Whether a second meeting gets scheduled in the room. "Send me an email and we'll set it up" is a soft no in most of the markets I work in. It's not rude, it's just how no is said.

I go and look at how the business actually runs

Indonesia · Sri Lanka

Walking through an estate in Indonesia. Sitting in a hotel lobby in Goa. Visiting offices in Baku and Kuala Lumpur. Every one of those trips taught me things no report contained.

Specifically, I go looking for four things that never appear in a market study:

• Where the margin actually sits. Often not where the revenue sits. In tourism it's rarely the headline booking; it's the extras, the local supplier terms, the currency spread.
• The real season. Not the tourist season, the buying season. Budget cycles, religious calendars, exam periods, monsoon logistics. Sell against these and you'll lose to timing you never saw.
• Payment terms. This kills more deals than price does, and almost nobody plans for it. A 90-day term in a market where everyone else offers 120 makes you expensive without changing your price.
• Who does the work. The person who will actually use what you're selling is often three levels below the person you're pitching, and their opinion leaks upward faster than your proposal does.

When I later coordinated a summit that brought together representatives from more than 60 of our international offices, the useful conversations weren't the presentations. They were the ones at the edge of the room with people who ran operations daily. That's where the real information lives, and it's the reason I still fly rather than schedule another call.

I stopped underestimating the local alternative

Your competitor is rarely the other vendor in your category. It's usually one of three things: a spreadsheet that works well enough, an incumbent with a fifteen-year relationship, or a local supplier who is somebody's cousin.

None of these can be beaten on features. All three can be beaten on a narrow, specific promise: something the spreadsheet genuinely can't do, or a risk the incumbent has stopped noticing. If I can't articulate that in one sentence, I'm not ready to sell there yet.

The related mistake is treating intermediaries as a cost to remove. Agents, DMCs and distributors look inefficient on a spreadsheet and are frequently the entire reason a market is reachable at all. In tourism I've seen a well-built network of the right intermediaries open a country faster than any direct team could, at a fraction of the cost.

I ask for something small

I've stopped opening with the big contract. It slows everything down and invites a committee.

Instead: one location, one pilot, one group of customers, one season. Something a single person can approve without a meeting about the meeting.

What makes a pilot convert rather than quietly die

• A named success metric agreed in writing before it starts. Not "we'll see how it goes." Something like: this many bookings, this response time, this reduction in manual work.
• An end date. Pilots without one don't fail, they just drift, and drifting is worse because nobody ever says no and you can't forecast around it.
• An internal owner on their side who benefits personally. Someone whose life gets visibly easier, who will defend it in a meeting you're not in.
• A price. Free pilots get free attention. Even a small fee changes who shows up to the kickoff.

The second deal gets priced on the first one's story. A small yes that goes well is worth far more than a large proposal sitting in someone's inbox.

I write it down the same week

Istanbul, Türkiye

This is the least glamorous habit and probably the most valuable one.

After every market I write down what I got wrong, which objections came up, who ended up mattering, what the local rules turned out to be, and what I'd tell someone doing it after me. Two weeks later you only remember your conclusion. You forget the reasons, and the reasons are the useful part.

At Hisar I turned those notes into an onboarding handbook for new international office coordinators. It cut ramp-up from months to weeks, and it's still in use. That document exists only because I wrote things down while they were still annoying and fresh.

Knowing when to stop

Not every market says yes. I've been in places where after all the meetings and the tea and the flights, the honest answer was that the timing was wrong or the product didn't fit how business is done there.

The signals I've learned to take seriously:

• Everyone is friendly and nobody is urgent. Warmth without urgency usually means the problem isn't expensive enough yet.
• You keep getting introduced sideways rather than upward.
• Every deal requires an exception to how you normally work. One exception is a customisation. Five is a different product.

A clear "not now, and here's exactly why" saves a year of expensive drift. It's a legitimate outcome, and reporting it honestly is harder than reporting a win.

The markets that did work all had the same thing in common: somebody local believed in it enough to put their own name next to it. Everything else, the pricing, the deck, the follow-up sequence, was downstream of that.