5 Steps to Building Immediate International Scale with the Department for International Trade

Good morning, everybody, or good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. That's the— one of the few benefits of the pandemic state is that we can join each other from so many places. So I'm, as Caitlin said, the UK's tech envoy to the United States and the Consul General in San Francisco. And this is a new role for UK government highlighting the importance of tech on the global stage and wanting to have these sort of relationships, particularly here on the West Coast and across the United States. which is of course such a, a great historical partner of the UK's in technology. Um, unusually for a senior diplomat, uh, I actually have a career in the private sector. Uh, for the first 15 years, I was a founder and built out a, my own SaaS business, which I built to $150 million ARR, uh, before setting up and running a fund, uh, which I did building a portfolio around about $3 billion. In fact, sharing an investor, uh, with Jason M. Lemkin and the SaaS team. So know those folks. Well. But the reason I'm here doing this is this is about the UK on the global stage. This is about the relationship between the United States and the US. This is about the UK as a partner of choice and expansion. And I think that for us as technology leaders in this space, in this post-pandemic world that we're hopefully heading into, the responsibility we have as tech leaders makes a real difference on the global stage. I've got two great guests with me this morning from Highspot. John Pereira, the CMO, and Julie Levine, who's Director of New Accounts. I'll let them both introduce themselves in a minute, we'll jump straight into questions. They've already crossed this chasm into the thorny issue of international expansion, so perhaps, John, perhaps why don't you tell us a little bit about Highspot itself and where you are on the business journey?

Yeah, thanks so much, Joe, and welcome to you all. Highspot is a sales enablement platform. And it's specifically focused on helping companies get the most out of their sales teams. And essentially what we do is a couple things. One is sales content management, using AI to make sure the right level of content is serviced to your sales reps. We have sales play capability that's backed by deep analytics, content, uh, training and coaching. And then finally, we offer engagement intelligence And so we have really deep analytics and insight into what's the content and what are the sales plays that are performing the best with prospects and clients.

Fantastic. And, and why don't you tell us a little bit about your role in this, particularly in relation to international expansion, and then I'd love to bring in Julie as well to tell us her critical part of the story.

Sure, thank you. So, uh, I am the Chief Marketing Officer for Highspot. I also am responsible for our partner alliance work, and interestingly, international expansion. So of course, when you're a startup— I joined about 2 years ago, we had about 100 employees. I think we had less than 1% of our revenue from outside North America. They were like, John, you know, you've spent a great deal of time doing business abroad, go lead our international expansion strategy. And that kicked off with our very first opening of our office in London. And then we've subsequently rolled on in Munich, we've got big plans ahead.

Fantastic. And Julie, you were pretty critical in that first phase. Why don't you tell us a bit about your role and how you were involved in the story?

Yeah, thanks, Joe. So I've been fortunate to be with Highspot for almost 5 years. So I've had the opportunity to see a lot of the processes develop into what they are today, have a lot of context on why things are the way they are, and was really fortunate to be given the opportunity to go over to London actually 2 years to this date. 2 years ago, I moved my pack pack my bags, moved to London to be the HiSpot ambassador for our international expansion over there and was able to implement, you know, a lot of these processes, help bring over our, you know, our guiding principles and our culture and help grow and build the team for a year. So yeah, it was really exciting to be the ambassador over there.

So they made you do the hard work. So let's just reverse slightly. I mean, John, I'd love to hear a bit about, so when you came into this this position, and as you say, the company framed for you to think about this global challenge. How did you start thinking about that, and why was the UK your initial point of landing outside of the US?

Yeah, so like many of you on the call, we're a very high-growth SaaS B2B company. We did exceptionally well in places like Silicon Valley— Adobe, Workday, DocuSign, Okta. But we did an analysis around peer companies that had gone public in the B2B space. And in particular, when we looked at their financials, we studied what percentage of their revenue came from outside North America. And from that peer group analysis, maybe it was about 20 or 25 companies, it became really clear that all of them had somewhere between 15 to 20% of their total ARR from outside North America. So we knew that our growth depended on international expansion. And then, you know, just to your point, where do you go first? And there's no necessary recipe or guidebook for this one. But we looked at a lot of things you'd expect: GDP, GDP per capita. We followed where Salesforce went in their journey. We have a product that, you know, sits really well with them. We looked at things like cloud vibrancy and intensity. Quality of the talent pool. And we also wanted to sort of balance this idea of like just not biting off more than we can chew. And so we looked at about half a dozen countries and cities. We ended up in London for our EMEA headquarters and launched that office in March of 2019, as Julie just mentioned. And I think for us, what was important about London was the ability to tap into local talent, in particularly on the go-to-market side, where there's just such a rich concentration of that. And when we thought about our ICP, a number of the companies that we wanted to go after headquartered within about an hour to an hour and a half of London. And we just knew that that would also be a long-term jumping off point for our EMEA headquarters. One of the really great things about the UK for us is that the size of the market for UK and Ireland is substantial in terms of the addressable opportunity. but it's also very easy to target the Nordic region, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Benelux, from the UK as well. So it just became a really logical starting point for us.

That's great. And I love the distinction of both the EMEA headquarters, as well as just that first jumping off point into Europe, because I think that Europe is often a place where people will end up with multiple offices, and you've mentioned your expansion into Munich already. But where you put that centre of gravity is important. And how did you think about talent when you chose the UK? I mean, we have a rich ecosystem of, you know, 4 of the top 10 universities in the world and a strong research base and tech scene. Did that play into it, or were there other factors on the talent there that were attractive to you?

Yeah, we, you know, just from a go-to-market engine and from a people and organisational capability, we knew it was important to have people that were early in career, as well as people that were seasoned veterans of sales and marketing and go-to-market approach. We certainly benefited from a deep network. I'd spent 20 years at Microsoft where I was based out of Europe for several years. There are a lot of people that we knew we could tap into immediately that had sort of been there, done that. A second component of that was we need, you know, I think when you're growing your business internationally, and you're hiring local talent, it's critical to get people who know what it's like to work for a headquarters company in the US, because it's hard, it's tricky, there's a lot of stuff to really navigate, you have to be an advocate for your team. And so we wanted people that really experienced, and then just in terms of early in career, we wanted to tap into that university pipeline in London. That was really critical. I think one more thought is that places like Ireland with Dublin, as well as London, you've got a really good set of multi-language capabilities as well. So we actually have people that are bilingual or fluent German, fluent French, etc. And that was really critical for us as well.

No, that's great. And that leads quite nicely in. So the pieces you talk about early in career and the energy and the culture and some of those challenges of working for a US organization. So Julie, you had to bring much of that with you and build out that local team. Can you tell us a little bit about that in terms of, you know, your arrival into London, where you were based, how that was for you personally, and then how you set about building up that team and transporting that culture, which I know is so important to the way that the business runs?

Yeah, absolutely. So I to kind of set my roots in Shortage. And that at the time was close to our office. So it was nice. I could just walk into work and I had everything around me that I needed. In addition, you know, had this full support from my friends and family to really make that transition go smoothly. But then once we started to build the team, at the time the MD and I hired our first account development rep. So we started the 3 of us. And we grew the team. I think today there's about 30 employees in our UK office. And so I think a big part of it was, you know, taking what I knew about Hi Spa, our guiding principles, our learn-it-all mentality, you know, the ability to collaborate across boundaries with each other, and then in this sense, you know, literal boundaries across the pond. And, you know, trying to look and look for that as we were hiring, but at the same time, this is their office, right? This is a new team that they're building, and it's just as much their culture. You know, it's really important. So letting them know that, you know, they have a say in this and that they can, you know, provide their input and their feedback and build the team just as much as what I was doing. So that was a really important piece too, that, you know, they were eager and excited to be building something up from the ground as well.

And I heard you managed to blend some of the UK Silicon Valley culture by adopting pub trips and that sort of thing. I'm sure you were.

Yes, yeah, yes, that was very important. You know, on a Monday or Wednesday, whenever it was, you know, 4 o'clock was pub time. But, you know, also being respectful to the UK culture that I was emerging myself into was just as important. So yeah, they taught me a lot about work-life balance that I'm, you know, forever grateful for and, you know, now take it back into my day here.

Good ducktail, that one.

Glad to see we offered that to you. And in terms of the operations, I mean, working across 8 time zones is always a challenge. I mean, how did you find that, Julie, in terms of keeping the direction of the mothership in Seattle while also developing the business in the UK and beyond?

Yeah, that's a great question. So early on, you know, we realized that there is a small window of time, right, that is really, you know, optimal for us to work together. And I think earlier on, the US meetings and the UK meetings didn't quite align. So it was something that, you know, we worked with John and the leadership team to call out to say, hey, we only have this small gap of time that's, you know, our afternoons and your mornings. We need to make sure that all those meetings that occur during that time are the right meetings with the right team so that we can be the most efficient as possible. So that was something that the leadership team addressed early on, and the whole kind of business, you know, rejiggered their schedule to make sure that we were making the most out of the time that we had together.

And in terms of, so you were there building out your team, obviously, to develop more customers. How did you go about attracting customers both in the UK? And did you start that European push from the UK, or did you open up the Munich office before you you addressed customers on the continent as well?

Yeah, so we, our US team actually supported us throughout this transition. So they were also working some of those UK accounts. And then once we had an account development team in the UK, you know, fully up and running, we made the transition solely just to the team within region. And a big part of that was, you know, always wondering, you know, is our messaging landing? Is it landing with the marketing persona, with the sales? Are these templates, or, you know, is this content landing? And, you know, we're really fortunate to use our own platform Highspot to kind of observe and A/B test a lot of that messaging within region. And then once, you know, we knew what was successful, what was most effective, we were really able to capitalize on that, you know, and make a big leap into some of these accounts and then secure some of those, you know, amazing customers within region. And then the following year moved into the DOC region.

Great. And in terms of growing that business in the UK, you said that there's now about 30 people. How quick was that? Did you scale up that UK part of the business? And how is that now accounting for kind of global sales in terms of, you know, returning the kind of interest you were after, customer growth and so on?

Yeah, maybe I'll touch on this, and Julie, you should chime in as well. The, you know, the most important decision we ever made was who do we hire first, because they're going to set the bar for customer acquisition, for sales excellence, the culture points that Julie made. The next thing is, well, what's the initial footprint? How many of each role do you need? So we actually started off with the idea that we would have 2 to 3 ADRs, 2 to 3 account executives, an SE, a marketer, and a services lead, as well as a head. So pretty traditional footprint. And we actually have sort of a pretty sophisticated model in the US for exactly how many people it takes to drive how much ARR revenue. So a whole set of algorithms that we have against that. We deployed that against the UK to understand how fast would we need to scale people to hit next year's revenue. So, you know, the first 6 months, we had a footprint of about 8 to 9 people. By the end of the first year, we knew that we needed to add people like a human resources lead, we needed a dedicated sales enablement professional. And then to scale the business, we realized we're gonna have to scale people even faster than the incoming revenue to achieve— and once people get off ramp, then they start to perform, etc. So we were always a little bit ahead of the curve on that one. So 2 full years in, you know, we went from 6 or 7 to 15 to 30. And we expect that kind of growth to continue. And we are always probably investing a certain number of headcount above where the revenue is, because we're always thinking about next year's revenue and pipeline. And we need to build that. And you're always going to have, you know, any healthy company is going to have, you know, somewhere between 10% and 20% churn of your employee base. So for that initial footprint, you know, we always— and one more thought I'd just pass on is that we always hired in pairs. Because you could have a high performer or a not so high performer, or somebody decides to leave, and you don't want to leave the business hanging. So that was a good sort of insurance approach for us.

No, that's definitely a great approach, particularly when the team is small, where one additional, one subtraction can make a big difference. One question that's just come in about GDPR. Masato asks, was there any GDPR-related challenge going into the European market or the UK? And I also I've been told my camera's fallen off the internet, but I'm sure it'll be back. I'll crack on that in the background. But so GDPR—

We can visualize you, Joe.

Good. I haven't changed.

Yeah, so a couple of thoughts on this one. Specific to GDPR, we thought rather naively that we had it sort of all figured out. And it was a hassle. We had to wipe out our entire marketing database. We had to implement new policies. We had to retrain ourselves. It was more work than we thought it was, but we're like, okay, we're done. And then we opened up offices in Germany and we're now working with one of the largest companies in Germany dealing with a large team of IT as well as legal teams. And we sort of thought we had it all figured out and we really didn't. And so we've had to actually go above and beyond to build out policies and procedures. Germany, I think, has the highest bar of probably any country in the EU for privacy and data standards. So that was hard, and it's mostly work in terms of documentation for our side. A few other lessons learned that are related to that: we were behind the curve in terms of building a data center in the EU, which is typically required for data residency for many of the European countries in particular. We ended up building out in Dublin which still counts as part of the EU. And so that was good. Other little gotchas along the way, the ability to transact in non-US currency. If you're dealing with a large enterprise, they don't want to pay you in US dollars. We want to pay you in British pounds or euros. Why don't your billing systems, your contracts, your whole system needs to be accommodating on that one, as well as just having a local bank. System setup. So there's a lot about, you know, sort of GDPR data center, data residency, local currency, deep localization of your work that we, we've learned along the way. I wish I knew a little bit more of that a year and a half ago, but, uh, we've been able to pull it off.

No, there's a great, um, operational guts to come across. Um, is it worth saying that the UK has just received data adequacy agreements with the, with the EU? So despite the leaving the EU formally as part of Brexit, there is now a data agreement in place between the two. The currency issue is, as you say, is operationally a real challenge. It's interesting, Niklas Zennström, who is the founder of Skype, published a paper a couple of years ago about the time to localize of European companies versus U.S. And I think European companies often have to transition multi-state, multi-territory access very early in their career to get the scale. Whereas the benefit you have in the US is having such a large internal market. So it's interesting that those challenges do come as part of global expansion, but they're worth thinking about. Julie, perhaps we can finish off with you and any more questions that come in there. Did you enjoy your time in the UK? What were the lessons that you kind of learned there that you brought back to the US? And do you still get to visit? We miss you.

Yes, I absolutely had a blast. You know, really, really grateful for the opportunity. It was the first time I'd ever lived alone, the first time I'd ever lived outside of the United States. Um, so I think, you know, what helps me through this is just having that really strong support system behind me, both, you know, personally with my family, but also internally within the business. Um, and so something that was really great at Highspot that helped me feel, you know, really supported was that the leadership team, um, actually was able to visit quite frequently. So we had, you know, at least one member of the leadership team, whether that was John or VP of Revenue Strategy or even someone on legal. They came over once a month. And not only did that make me feel supported, but the team there that they were building, that we were building, had a really strong connection to our leadership team. And making those connections was just as vital. So I would say that, you know, something I learned is it's okay to ask for help, even if you make a mistake, you know, learn from those failures, bring that up with your leadership team. You know, they're They want to see this international office be just as successful as you do. So, you know, they're your partner, they're your friends, and definitely reach out to them if you need help.

Sounds great, and it sounds like that was quite a career development piece for you as well in terms of both leading that cultural charge into another territory, but also, as you say, the regular contact with senior leadership team. Have you found this has been beneficial to you in your career, both within Highspot and beyond? Yes.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, such a great experience. And I learned so much from the, you know, the hires that we brought into our office. They came from great backgrounds, great career experiences. And so just having those, you know, friendships and bonds was also just as important. But yeah, I learned a lot about myself. I definitely learned, you know, it's okay to dive head deep into something, but especially in this environment, learned a lot about, you know, leveraging data and analytics to make, you know, data-driven decisions. Overall, just a phenomenal experience.

Fantastic. Well, look, guys, it's been such a real pleasure talking to you, and I love your story, particularly going into the UK and beyond. I love the way that you approach that, the very market-based, data-based idea, but then also enjoying the benefits of London and the UK, particularly as an EMEA headquarters. John, Julie, were there any final points that we hadn't covered you just want to get across to folks if they're thinking about making this transition?

Yeah, I'll add a few, Julie, if you've got some as well. Some lessons learned for us: having an ambassador from your US office to spend 6 to 12 months in your very first international subsidiary is critical path. It's about culture as well as process and connection. Second thought was, you know, do budget executive bandwidth to focus on your very first team over there. They need it. It can't just be something you launch and leave. And then, you know, maybe the last idea would be to take a long-term approach. You probably won't see, you know, positive returns in year 1 or 2. But I always describe it as like planting an apple tree. In the first year or two, you don't get too many apples, but like 5, 10 years, you're really excited that you planted that tree. And so we know that the UK and Europe are gonna be phenomenal engines of positive revenue growth for us. I mentioned at the beginning, we had less than 1% of our revenue 2 years ago from outside North America. As context, today we're just shy of 10% in less than 2 years.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] And you were thinking about that strategically also, I think when we talked before about how this benchmarked against peers of yours as they scaled SaaS businesses globally, and particularly on that run towards IPO, what they look like at that sort of stage.

That's right, and the sooner you start, the better.

As is often the case. So Julie, any further thoughts from you, or final thoughts on your London experience?

Yeah, yeah, I have quick— 3 quick takeaways from the experience. So one, make sure you have developed an onboarding program for your new hires within region that is connected to your US headquarters or wherever your headquarters is. That's a way for them to meet the team in where the headquarters is, to have those connections and learn a lot about the same philosophies that we're onboarding both teams. That was really instrumental for us. Another thing is partner really closely with that revenue operations team that's going to help you operationalize a lot of the internal systems. There's going to be leads that have to be routed differently within region, account assignment is going to be a little bit different. There's a lot of heavy lifting that goes in behind the scenes. So that was something that, you know, we wanted to be really prepared for. And then lastly, if you do decide to have an ambassador, also do a similar thing that I did. Don't forget about the succession planning that follows that. And, you know, always be looking to find your replacement because unless you want to stay forever, but if you decide not to, make sure that there is an individual—

And you're welcome to.

Yeah, that can earn, earn that next challenge as well.

One more quick thought, Joe. If anybody in the call wants more information, Julie and I are happy to provide it. Just shoot us a note on LinkedIn.

Fantastic. And likewise, we have a full team in the UK Consulate in San Francisco covering all of the West Coast and a few other states and across the US of professionals who support US companies expanding into the UK. I think last year we supported more than 100 US tech companies set up their first office in the UK, and we have a short Q&A session taking place with me and some of those folks just after this.

Thank you, guys. Thank you, Joe, John, Julie. We much appreciate it. And as Joe just said, we have a networking session taking place after this that you're welcome to join in on, possibly get some of the questions answered that we didn't get to now, or we have some that we can answer for you. And if you have new questions, feel free to throw them in the chat. Again, John, Julie, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it, and we appreciate everyone joining us at SAS or Build. And if you want to stay for the networking station, you do not have to move. We're just going to give Joe maybe a second to see if we can see his face again. But again, thank you, John. Thank you, John and Julie. We appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thanks, John and Julie. Thanks, Caitlin. I'll be back in a sec.

Awesome. So guys, for you waiting, we are going to do a Q&A here in just a minute. We are going to give Joe a second to see if we can see him. Like we said, we would love to see his face for this Q&A. We're going to be doing this like you have before, so feel free to throw Q&A into the chat. Um, or you can raise your hand, and if there's time, we can call on you. Again, we want this to be engaging, so feel free to leave your camera on, um, and we will move it over in just a minute. I see Joe back.

I'm back. Exciting.

You're back. So Q&A officially, networking session that we're calling it, officially kicks off in 2 minutes, but I know we have some people still in the room and possibly we can start answering the questions that maybe we didn't get to already. Or Thedra, Matthew, if you have a different way you want to kick it off. We just want to keep this as engaging and informal as possible in a good way.

Well, I've lost my chat history on my refresh too. Oh no.

Let's see. Did we—

So if someone has a question, then—

Yeah, I can kind of try to pose some of these. For Joe White, there was a question: we have a SaaS application being used in two countries by FCO for peace and conflict programs. Who can we work with to build this across programming?

That may be one that we should take up. If you're talking about with the UK's FCO, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, then if you're working with us in several territories, then that's obviously great news. Thank you and congratulations. It may be that we should pick that one up offline to figure out where the best place to channel it, that within the civil services, to try and see what other opportunities there are for you.

Yeah, I would encourage any specific questions to come visit the booth and chat with us directly. Obviously, this is a pretty open forum right now, so any, any specifics to your business that you might not want streamed on YouTube. So we can have those conversations afterwards. There's a question for Highspot that we didn't get to, but maybe, Joe, you can answer this in your own experience having brought your business here. What were your most successful routes to gaining new clients when you moved abroad?

Well, I think this is— so our business was a B2B SaaS company, but had a lot of the dynamics of a B2C as we use a lot of online marketing tools and techniques for direct acquisition as opposed to having a dedicated sales team. So I think these things will vary depending on what type of business it is. I mean, for us, using those online techniques, it was the case expanding some of the techniques we're already using, whether it was, you know, the traditional PPC type approach or developing more of the SEO approach. Funnily enough, the point that John was making about server hosting, there are these minor differences around site speed and location which actually affect things like your rankings on search engines, as in, you know, search engines will gear responses around the geographical territory in which your site is hosted as a proxy for where your customers are. So actually having a global footprint on the way that you structure your business actually helps you perform well in those different markets. given that search is, of course, such an important part of discovering any piece. But, I mean, a lot of the techniques, I think, as John was saying there, in terms of the B2B sales scale-up, a lot of the metrics that they were using, a lot of the ways they thought about hiring folks to balance the revenue targets, they could transition that some across from the US into the UK and other territories. So a lot of the mechanics you will have for how you develop the business should be applicable. That you'll need to tweak them a little bit as you go.

Thanks, Joe. It's nice to hear a British accent, by the way.

There you go. Hey, pleasure.

I really like that, the point 4B that they put on the slide, which is around kind of take what you've done in kind of existing markets and apply it elsewhere, which is actually quite tough at times because sometimes you sort of question, is this going to work? Is this strategy going to be the same? And sometimes you feel like you're cheating a little bit because you're just almost replicating exactly what you've done previously and just think— Am I going to get caught out or something?

But yeah. Well, I think if you start from what you know and then iterate away from it if it turns out not to work quite as you expect, I think, you know, again, my personal experience having built out business in the UK and then expanding into France, into the US, into Latin America and so on, there are always gotchas you have in terms of techniques that don't quite work the same. And that's where hiring the local team is important. Doing the cultural transport that Julie represented is incredibly important, but then adding in that local vibe to understand the culture will help you sell.

Yeah, sorry, I don't want to monopolize the conversation, but it's interesting hearing people talking about going to Europe as well. Obviously, you know, we're from the UK. We actually haven't really expanded into France, Germany, Italy, because for us it's actually easier to come to America because of the reasons we talked about, you know, the language, similarities and the cultural similarities. To really do well in those different regions in Europe, you have to have even more so have a localized presence, I think.

Richard, just to follow up on that— sorry, Joe— I see that in chat you mentioned you relocated to Dallas just a few weeks ago. I would definitely love to connect afterwards and make sure you're connected to our Department for International Trade team that's based over in Texas, so that we can offer further support to you and your company, for sure.

Yeah, thanks. I think we spoke earlier this week, didn't we?

I think so, maybe.

I think we've hooked us up already. I think it was Lisa.

Actually, Thedra, do you want to outline the kind of support that we offer across the US network for US folks that are thinking of relocating to the UK or beyond, or indeed from UK folks who are looking at setting up an office in the US?

Yeah, I can start off and Matthew can definitely pick up where I miss. So we are located across 9 major cities across the US network, helping both US companies expand to the UK but also UK companies expanding out here to the US market, interested in the US market. The tech team, which Matthew and I both sit within, are in all 9 cities. Very help— very willing to help any company interested in their international expansion. Services can vary company to company, but we're always here as a helpful voice in your expansion to help bounce ideas off of, provide some information, some insights that you might not have had access to, but also do fun events like this with Joe.

And Matthew, we, we helped around 100 companies last year, 100 tech companies from the US expand into the UK. Is that about right?

Yeah, right across the US network, we definitely supported over 100 companies to expand to the UK, which was great. And a large part of those came from San Francisco and the Bay Area, Pacific Northwest as well. As you might imagine, the West Coast being kind of a hub for tech. I was just going to quickly highlight kind of the 3 main reasons that we see companies moving, you know, to open international offices. And just so that you can all kind of get a broad overview. Probably the primary reason is that you're all in software, it's so easy to naturally acquire your products, procure your products online. And suddenly, you know, as you're growing, you get this natural acquisition of customers in Europe. And so at some stage of your company, it makes sense to have some type of support mechanism or additional sales mechanisms in the European time zone to support that business that's already been naturally generated. So it's probably one of the number one reasons we see people go, the UK. The number two reason, we all know there's a talent crunch, especially on the West Coast in the Bay Area. So, you know, UK's talent landscape is very strong. And, you know, some of the world-class universities pumping out tech talent. And, you know, not the— it's not the low-cost world option, but definitely compared to the Bay Area, you can get very qualified, you know, engineering talent at kind of fraction of the cost of Bay Area talent. So getting the same quality at a, at a little bit of a discount. And so we see people going to the UK, building up big engineering teams, dev teams, and going to places like Northern Ireland and Scotland and Cambridge to build these teams out. And then the third reason is, you know, you might not have customers in the UK yet, but you know that there's a good product market market fit for you. You've done that research similar to what Highspot did, and you determined that by putting a little bit of resource in, you can get a lot of reward. And an interesting fact that Highspot told us is that of the international markets that they researched, and when they were looking at competitors, if 25% of their revenue was coming from outside of North America, of that, of that over 70 or something percent was coming from the UK. So it's definitely a benefit to have your, you know, UK operations there.

So, and supporting that, I would say the opposite's true too, going from the UK to the US market, the exact same reasons we see often from companies. I think that's just the reason international expansion in general for the most part, not just unique to the US market.

So I, I can speak to the, the talent, um, aspect of things.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, because I, I just, um, opened up an, uh, well, we didn't just— we opened up a few positions in Glasgow, Scotland, and, um, and they were for tech positions, and, and I was astounded by the, the quality of the candidates that we were getting. And I'm originally Irish, just to let you know, and I moved over here to Seattle, Washington. And so I'm now interested in doing business in Europe. And so I've started, you know, I'm hiring one, I've hired one UX researcher. We couldn't get that person locally here for the price that we needed to. And we hired someone straight out of university over in Scotland that was Fantastic. And now we're looking at hiring an account manager over there as well, because we've got some accounts with the Scottish government. And yeah, we're super happy with it. So just to give you my—

that's super helpful. And I think, as you say, it's worth saying is that the UK has a lot more outside of just the London area. Manchester has a huge tech scene growing. The BBC has recently relocated one of its main offices up there, and therefore you have a burgeoning tech and media scene there. Up in Scotland, of course, Glasgow and Edinburgh have great universities as well as tech scenes. Companies like Skyscanner, which, you know, which some of you probably know for flight bookings and so on, is a big Edinburgh-based company. So there are pockets of this, and I think the advantage US firms have to a certain extent is once you've reached critical mass in the US, in order to expand to the UK, you've got pretty interesting structures, processes, culture, training, where you can, you can pick one of those locations. As Vernon's saying, actually, the tech talent you can get in Glasgow, choosing to locate there, being a, you know, a US international employer offering the kind of cultural norms that are part of the US tech companies, is actually incredibly exciting opportunity there. And scooping up the best talent in some of those regions. Is really an option. And some of these folk are, you know, super smart. And, you know, people have said it before, it seems much relatively cheaper than Bay Area, both living and therefore salary costs. So it can be a good thing.

Yeah.

And don't forget Wales as well, Joe.

And Wales. Yeah. Can't forget Wales.

We were looking at Northern Ireland for our support, our customer support. And the reason why we like it is that we can put all of our UK customers through UK, you know, it's the first question that people, our customers have is like, where are you located? You know, when they're working with their customer support and they like that local, you know, feel. So we couldn't, so we're doing better, you know, we feel as if we can just open more positions in the UK and there's good ROI on it. And places like Northern Ireland are very competitive in terms of pricing for customer support, both on the phone and on chat support.

So yeah, no, I think that's right too. And the point the Highspot guys were making about also language skills, and I think, you know, the UK generally, which has such an influx of folk from all over the world, particularly— this is particularly in the London area you can really hire native speakers of almost any language as part of a team. So, you know, we had French, Spanish, all kinds of team members specifically to support the language needs of our international users, which we could quite easily get hold of in parts of the UK. So that was a pretty strong benefit too.

Joe, I wanted to bring up another question that was in the chat. That says, what is the typical revenues of a B2B SaaS company in the US that is wanting to start considering international expansion? I'm happy to take that one.

I mean, you've probably seen a bunch of them. Let me just say one thing about that. International expansion, I think, has got to be part of your general business development. And I think sometimes people think you're in a market, maybe you're not growing as fast as you'd like to, you think, I know, I'll expand internationally, then I can get hold of more customers and grow faster. That's, in my experience, usually not the problem. If you can't crack the market you're in to start with and get those, those, that flow of the product market fit and the customer acquisition and so on, then if, you know, adding additional, you know, language, cultural, currency complexity won't solve that growth problem. I think particularly for US customers, you do have a— companies, you do have the benefit of being such an enormous internal market that winning— I don't say winning the market, but getting to real scale momentum inside the US would be an important thing to give you then the firepower to go into Europe. You know, for European companies, slightly different. Again, you want to be able to crack some of those problems in your own market. Before you add the complexity of internationalization on top of that, because it's not straightforward. It is necessary to get to that real global scale, but it does add complexity to your business. Matthew, you probably have some better benchmarks about the revenue levels.

No, I think that's very sage advice, and definitely I would agree with that. I think I can give you kind of some harder numbers around where we typically see companies, kind of the average company that we end up working with. Just based on their preparedness and eagerness to enter an international market. I would say though that these are, these are the average companies. We work with companies that are as small as 2 people when one co-founder wants to move to the UK, as small as one person if that person founder wants to move to the UK, you know, as well as public companies who have, you know, gone public and they haven't internationalized and they do it post-IPO. So it really runs the whole gamut. But I would say the majority of companies that I work with are probably around probably 50 to 200 people in terms of size of employees. And then have— although the series rounding is getting bigger every day, it feels like. But I would say traditionally, Series A, Series B, area, maybe $10 to $20 million in funding for a SaaS B2B business is a very kind of average place where we see people looking at that. But again, like companies who have, you know, over hundreds of millions and they haven't gone international, just depends on the business model. You know, if you have a B2C or not a B2C, a B2B business, but you know, you have launch new markets and it's very costly to do that, then it's going to take you longer. So it really depends what those, what those models look like.

I would also just add that if you're in the situation where you're being pulled to a new country because of current clients you already have where they want more of a local support system, that then kind of shifts that. You're not necessarily looking at am I a Series A, Series B company anymore. Do I actually have to be in-country to support my current clients? Are they insisting on that regardless of what stage you're at?

Yeah, I think that that was a point that John made in one of our pre-calls about the speed at which they localized into more languages, and the second they started picking up international customers, they found that those customers then needed support in multiple languages that they hadn't expected to get to yet. So it does start to pull. And, you know, all these things are— I mean, again, back to my first point, going international won't solve your sales problem. It's a function of after you've got that sales problem, that sales process really running, it's then what allows you to keep developing your business to real scale. So, you know, if you think adding an extra market will help help improve your sales. It'll probably just add more complexity. Whereas getting those metrics crunching in your first market and then being customer-led, as Theodora says, if you have international clients dragging you into other markets, then, you know, that's a great sign. But look at it carefully in terms of the balance of, you know, should you disappoint that client to pick up 3 more in your domestic market, or is it time to use that client as the pull to bring you into that international market to further develop there.

And we've, we've had clients that we worked with before who've had to sell, you know, they've had big accounts with, say, like someone like Microsoft, which is a big multinational, they have a big presence in Reading. And Microsoft said, we're using you in the US for all this, whatever X it is, and we want to do it in the UK. And the company said, well, we're not ready to provide that in the UK yet. But we will work on it, and we think that we can meet this deadline of a year and a half. And so then we go and, you know, we work with that company, and then they're able to provide that service to Microsoft in a year and a half. They're not just agreeing to do it immediately because they didn't feel prepared. But, you know, then they were able to, you know, because they were able to have that conversation with Microsoft to say, you know, you gotta find an interim solution for, you know, a year and a half, or use what you're currently using. Until we can get there. And but didn't just like agree to it without being able to support them. And I think that that was really smart by the— on the move of the company, because, you know, they could have lost the whole Microsoft account if they were under-delivering in the UK market.

Vernon, you just said there in the chat that you were pulled into the UK market because you're looking at government entities. How did you make that choice about whether it was right to follow the customer or stick with your first market?

So, um, what happened with us? So what happened was we couldn't do any business with the UK government because they required, um, that we had people on the ground. And so what was happening, so any kind of government, um, work that we were going after, um, we couldn't even bid on the work. So a lot of our work was getting picked up by other agencies that worked with the government, and then they were outsourcing, they were reselling our product to the government. So what we said was, what we said was, okay, um, is there a way that we can cut out this middle person? And, uh, also, so we work with the Scottish government, right, the education department, and we work with the NHS as well. And then the other side of things was that staffing level, staffing costs were less. And because I know the region very well, because I've grown up in Ireland, so I was very comfortable in going there. But yeah, so there was, yeah, so we just had a lot of leads in there and we couldn't really grow the business without being there. And then looking at our staffing levels, It was kind of like, oh yeah, it is, you know, there's as good of people over there as there are over here. You know, we should make the move. But yeah, so we knew there was a lot of other people making money off of reselling our software over there. And so we wanted to jump ahead of that. We were kind of at their mercy.

It's always good if someone's using your software in other places. Even if you need to wrestle it back under control.

Yep.

Matthew, was it— was there anything else that you thought it was worth talking about in terms of DIT services and support or things that we've seen work for that kind of expansion?

Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing to remember, I guess, or to know is that all of our services are free and confidential. So, you know, come, come visit us at the booth, come email Pedro and I. We're happy to talk about, you know, what your company needs or direct you if we're the wrong people to help you. We have, you know, hundreds of people right across the US who can help and indeed in 200 global offices to support that. If you're a UK company and you want to kind of learn more about the US market or other international markets, And you can connect with an international trade advisor. They can help you plan your international exports strategy, which is what we would definitely recommend. And we're happy to help you as you grow on your journey.

Awesome. Well, Joe, this has been a lot for you guys, but— and, and Phaedra and Matthew, but we can't thank you guys enough for, you know, A, doing the session, and then B, taking part in the networking session. And there was definitely some great questions and I think feedback on that are coming in. So we really, really appreciate it and we hope you guys enjoyed your time.

No, thanks so much, Caitlin. And, um, I'm sure that SAS2 is such a great event. I wish it was around when I was doing, uh, my SAS business.

We need to go back in time. Yeah, push it back. Um, hopefully we'll be around for, for a while because we've got such a great community and people like you helping us out. So we definitely appreciate it. And guys, if you have any questions, you know, I don't— people put up their contact before, Thedra and Matthew, and if they're here for you guys, and I know some things can't be said online because like we said, we're recording, but I know they're there for you guys, and we hope you join in on other SaaS or Build sessions. Thank you, Joe. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Matthew.

Pleasure.

Thank you, Thedra.

Good luck with the rest of the, rest of the event.

Awesome.

Thank you, guys.

Bye.