Entering a New Market Without a Sales Team: A Framework

The conventional wisdom on new market entry is to hire locally first. Find someone who knows the market. Build the relationships. Establish a physical presence. Give it twelve to eighteen months and see what happens.

For some businesses, in some markets, this approach works. But for the majority of mid-market companies with a proven service offering and constrained capital, it is expensive, slow, and carries a failure rate that rarely gets discussed openly.

There is a better model — one that is lower cost, faster to test, and scales only once validated.

The Infrastructure-First Approach

The core insight behind infrastructure-first market entry is that the most expensive part of entering a new market is not the market itself. It is the overhead you accumulate while you wait to find out if there is demand. Local hires. Office costs. Legal structures. Brand investment in a market you have not yet validated.

Infrastructure-first inverts this. Before you commit to any of those fixed costs, you build the outbound capability to reach the market and qualify its receptiveness to your offering. You run a structured validation program — typically sixty to ninety days — that tells you with reasonable confidence whether the market is accessible and whether your positioning works.

Only once that validation is complete do you begin making the fixed cost commitments that market entry requires.

The Five-Phase Framework

Phase 1: Market segmentation and ICP definition

Before any outreach, you need to define precisely who you are targeting. In a new market, this cannot be assumed from your home market experience. Different markets have different buyer structures, different procurement processes, and different competitive dynamics. The ICP that works in your home market may need significant adjustment for a new geography.

This phase should produce a prioritised account list of 200 to 500 target organisations, with specific decision-maker titles and seniority levels identified for each segment.

Phase 2: Infrastructure setup

Market-specific email domains, data sourcing from local databases, compliance considerations (CAN-SPAM, GDPR, or local equivalents), and CRM configuration for the new market segment. This takes two to four weeks when done correctly.

Phase 3: Validation campaign

A structured outreach program — typically three to four sequences targeting two to three stakeholder levels — run over sixty days. The objective is not to close deals. It is to generate qualified conversations and measure market receptiveness. Key metrics: response rate by segment, meeting conversion rate, common objections, win themes from qualified conversations.

Phase 4: Analysis and decision

At the end of the validation period, you have real data. Typical outcomes: market shows strong demand and your positioning works (accelerate); market shows demand but positioning needs adjustment (refine and retest); market shows weak demand (deprioritise and reallocate capital).

This is a fundamentally different decision than the gut-feel assessment most companies make before committing to market entry. It is based on actual buyer behaviour, not assumptions.

Phase 5: Scaled market development

For markets that validate, you now have a qualified pipeline, a set of warm relationships, and a validated positioning — before you have made a single fixed-cost commitment. The local hire, if you choose to make one, joins a functioning program rather than building from zero. The first year looks completely different.

What This Requires

The infrastructure-first approach to market entry requires a few things that many mid-market companies have not built:

• A scalable outbound infrastructure capable of operating across multiple markets simultaneously
• Local data sourcing and verification capability in the target market
• Compliance knowledge for the relevant jurisdiction
• Analytical capability to draw meaningful conclusions from a sixty-day campaign
• The discipline to make decisions based on data rather than sunk cost or optimism

These are not trivial requirements. Building this capability internally for a single market entry often does not make economic sense. This is precisely why companies work with GreyOps — to access infrastructure that would take eighteen months and significant capital to replicate, deployed into their specific market on a defined timeline.

Case in Point

In 2024, we ran a market entry program for a mid-market subcontractor entering the US commercial construction market from outside North America. They had no existing relationships in the US, no US entity, and a budget that precluded hiring locally before validating demand.

Over ninety days, we built their US outbound infrastructure, ran a structured validation campaign targeting procurement and project management stakeholders at general contractors, and generated 47 qualified conversations. Seven of those conversations were in active contract negotiation at the ninety-day mark. The total deal value of those seven opportunities was $4.7M.

They now have a US entity. But it was funded by contracts generated through the validation program, not by capital committed before demand was confirmed.