IT companies with growing revenues and strong mindshare in their home market need to determine early-on when to start their internationalization processes.
This question has become much more time sensitive and strategic as the cost of information has gone down significantly. Barry Downs and Paul Nunes, in their 2014 book “Big Bang Disruption” captures this issue well when they state:
“Consumer no longer have any excuse for making and uninformed purchase”
“The cost of search has fallen below the cost of regret”
Downs’ and Nunes’ book tackles the broader question of the customer adoption curve in the context of Big-Bang Disruption powered by exponential technologies: cloud, mobile devices, software and big data. They propose that digital business, which today is found immerse in most industries, has made the traditional customer bell shaped curve, cross-the chasm model obsolete, and replaced by a shark fin shaped curve, big disruption model where winners take all and fast. The shark fin curve is the result of the right business model combined with the right technologies to generate a fast take-off of the business. Peak demand happens much faster than in the past (“the Big-Bang”), and then comes the somewhat slower drop of demand (“the Big Crunch”), generating this compressed version of the bell shaped curve that looks like a shark fin.
LinkIT LATAM thinks that this framework has significant value to understand how a company should embark on its internationalization process. In the past, information travel slow and companies communicate their offering to dozens or hundreds of target customers at a time through yearly trade shows or by setting up partnership in different countries sequentially. In those day, answering the question “In which market to invest next?” made sense. But today, when thousands of prospects can search in blogs, articles, and other on-line searchable material which are the leading solutions for their requirements, the most relevant question to answer is “How to tap the world-wide market demand profitably?”
Company executives must acknowledge there is an opportunity to capture revenues across the globe that will also generate a positive feedback loop towards faster WW revenue growth and market dominance. The most successful companies will be ones that adopt internationalization practices that leverage their established reputation in the home market and choose an international business model(s) that shorten the go-to-market and accelerate revenues, while maintaining cost and risk low.
LinkIT LATAM captures these strategic imperatives on our value proposition that offers profitability and referenceable accounts in Latin America in the first year of operations. And we do have a successful record delivering this promise to our clients.