When is the right time to expand into new markets?

Kevin is the Chief Revenue Officer of Abnormal Security, where he leads worldwide revenue generating activities. In this class, Kevin lays out the steps required for building a best-in-class sales organization, starting from early sales hires all the way to expanding to a larger team. He brings strategic and operational experience with over 20 years of success leading global, high-performance sales teams at companies including Vectra AI and Proofpoint.

Depends on many factors, but, if you think about, for example,a company in a past life of mine,would build physical servers, physical appliances, and, those physical appliances would sit in the data centers of enterprise companies.

Kevin Moore: Well, with that type of, offering because every, and it was a network based company, you can really open up international markets whenever you felt like you had the capacity and the personnel to do so because there's very few privacy regulations like GDPR, for example, or, or other regulations around data sovereignty, because they own the actual data it's in their data [00:32:00] centers.

Whereas a SAS based company, for example, where the data is being hosted in,in maybe public cloud services like AWS or Microsoft, then you have, you have, other set of variables that you have to deal with internationally. if you're going to sell into German companies, maybe they want, those data centers to be within the borders of Germany.

For, and then there's also regulations around GDPR. And then here at abnormal there's other factors like adoption of Microsoft office 365 or G suite,to,other factors as it relates to, the way that our. Our software processes data. And so I just think you have to outline what some of those variables are based off of the stage you're in, and then identify, again, looking back at your capacity plan, if it's time at that point, if you're getting closer to maxing out, maximizing the potential of the theater, you may be in to enter some other theaters that ultimately will pay and yield dividends fast.

Kevin Moore: So w lots of factors that go into that. another one would be for [00:33:00] example, selling to the federal government. So as a SAS based company, there's a set of guidelines and regulations that you have to adhere to before you can actually do that. It's called fed ramp, for example, is one example. you have to do fed ramp.

The challenge with fed ramp is that you have to invest in that. You're not going to yield a return for at least two years, because that process takes six months to a year. But then ultimately,once you can go through that process and you build a team to ultimately go sell into that market, It could yield tremendous results, right?

It's particularly a cybersecurity they're spending close to $22 billion, but, oftentimes it gets challenging for founders and an executive staff of young companies, because that's a long-term strategy play versus the tactical when you're juggling all of these different tactical things.

you have to balance what, what the immediate needs that you have to, what's going to yield the fastest results in three. What are you going to do for the longterm? I think here at a normal security, we do a very good job of balancing all of those variables, but, I guess the right answer is it really boils down to what are some of those key factors, and [00:34:00] how quickly can you see a yield from those investments, at when you should start expanding into new territories.

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