The short version
Entering a market means you showed up: a website in a new language, a few conversations, maybe a local event. Penetrating it means you know which institutions matter, who inside them decides, what each of them is worried about this quarter, and you have a repeatable way to reach them. Most expansion plans stop at entry because entry is visible and penetration is a slog of research, prioritisation and follow-up.
The test I use is brutally simple: can you name your top 50 accounts in the new market and the three people who matter at each? If not, you haven’t entered it, you’ve visited. Penetration is a map before it is a campaign, and the map is built from boring public sources: annual reports, regulator filings, conference speaker lists, hiring pages and local press.
Building the map from public sources
Start with a spreadsheet, not a sequencer. One row per institution, with columns for type, size band, ownership, current technology or vendor if visible, a strategy or transformation theme pulled from the latest annual report, and a link to the source. Annual reports, regulator registers, tender portals and conference agendas are free. Two analyst-days per twenty accounts is a reasonable planning figure.
The hiring page is the most underused source. A bank advertising three data-governance roles is telling you where its budget is going this year, in its own words. Copy the exact phrases into a column called “their language” and reuse them in outreach. Nothing signals local knowledge faster than repeating an account’s own vocabulary back to it.
Naming the three people
For each top account I want an economic buyer, a day-to-day owner and a likely blocker. In a bank that is often a head of a business line, a product or operations lead, and someone in risk, compliance or IT security. Sales Navigator and the institution’s own leadership page get you most names; where a role is vacant, write “vacant” rather than guessing, because a guess in a CRM turns into a fact within a month.
Tag every name with a confidence level: confirmed, likely or inferred. When you later review coverage, the inferred names are your research backlog. A sensible target is two confirmed stakeholders per top-50 account before any outreach begins, because a single contact who goes quiet leaves you with nothing.
Sequencing remote and in-person effort
Travel is expensive and calendars in a new region fill with other visitors. I run the first two touches remotely, by email and LinkedIn, and only propose an in-person meeting once the account has shown a signal: a reply, a profile view, a forward to a colleague. A sample line: “I’ll be in the city on the 14th and 15th; if a thirty-minute conversation on your lending workflow is useful, I’ll come to you.”
Cluster meetings geographically and by week. Five accounts in one district in two days is a trip; five accounts across three cities is a holiday. Build the trip around whichever three accounts have the highest fit score and fill the remaining slots from the second tier, never the reverse.
Reading penetration week by week
Coverage is the number I would put on the wall: the share of top-50 accounts with at least two stakeholders contacted, and separately, the share with at least one two-way conversation. Expect the first figure to climb steadily and the second to lag by three to five weeks. If both are flat after a month, the problem is list quality or message relevance, not volume.
Keep a short account log with one line per touch and a “what we learned” field. After a quarter, the log is your market insight: which personas answer, which objections recur, which institutions are already locked into a long contract. That insight is what lets a second-quarter campaign be sharper than the first.
Worked example (illustrative)
A hypothetical software vendor opens a new country with no prior contacts and measures coverage on a 50-account target list over one quarter.
What changed: The jump comes from mapping before messaging: once the names and the account’s own language were in the sheet, each message took minutes and landed on the right person. Nine accounts being ruled out is also a result, since it frees time for the rest.
Do it: the steps
Tick them off as you go. Your progress stays on this device.
Traps to avoid
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Counting localisation (translated site, local phone number, a distributor) as traction. None of that tells you whether the right people know you exist.
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Mapping only the senior buyer and then losing the deal when that one person goes on leave or changes role. Two confirmed contacts per account is the minimum.
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Hiding unknowns. A sheet where every cell looks filled in cannot be audited; mark guesses as guesses so the team knows where to research next.
What to track
- Stakeholder coverage
- top accounts with at least two confirmed stakeholders divided by total top accounts; aim for 80% before scaling outreach.
- Account conversation rate
- top accounts with a two-way reply divided by top accounts contacted; a common early range is 15 to 30%.
- Research-to-meeting lag
- median days from first touch to first meeting per account; track the trend rather than a fixed target.
Benchmarks are typical planning ranges, not guarantees. Calibrate to your own data.
Questions people ask
How long should account research take per institution?
A common planning range is 20 to 40 minutes for a top-tier account: one annual report skim, one hiring-page review, stakeholder identification and one dated trigger. Go beyond that only for accounts you expect to be strategic. If every account takes two hours, you are researching to avoid sending, and the list is probably too long.
Do I need a local partner or distributor to penetrate a market?
Not necessarily, but you need local credibility from somewhere: a reference, a local event, a named advisor or a partner. A distributor helps with logistics and trust, yet it does not replace your own account map. If you hand the market over entirely, you lose the learning about who buys and why.