This is a real excavation. Names and companies have been anonymized.
We are successfully selling our SaaS platform in Italy, and we decided to expand to German and Spanish markets. Unfortunately, the campaign didn't go well and there was no much interest from those countries. Also, in Germany people didn't want to talk on the phone and sometimes got angry that we called them. Spain doesn't seem to be interested in our platform at all.
Leadership made the expansion decision based on Italian momentum and treated market fit as a company property rather than a market-specific condition. This meant the German and Spanish campaigns were never structured as discovery — they were structured as execution of a playbook that only works under Italian market conditions. The team on the ground had no mandate, no budget, and no time to answer the question "why would a German or Spanish buyer say yes?" before being told to start selling.
Path B: Retrofit discovery in Germany and Spain now
Instead of continuing or killing the current campaigns, convert them into structured learning operations. Hire or contract two local market consultants — one German, one Spanish — for 60-90 days with a specific brief: talk to the prospects who rejected you, talk to prospects who never responded, talk to companies using competitor solutions, and come back with a clear answer to "what would make companies in this market buy a platform like ours, if anything?" This gives leadership actionable intelligence rather than a binary succeed/fail narrative, and it may reveal that one market is viable with a rebuilt approach while the other is not worth pursuing at all.
Timeframe:
Addresses: the fact that you already have failed campaign data and rejected prospects in both markets — which is actually a discovery asset if you treat it as learning rather than failure.
Requires: budget for two local consultants and leadership's willingness to pause active selling in those markets for 60-90 days while you gather intelligence.
Works if: leadership would rather understand why the campaigns failed than either double down on the same approach or abandon both markets entirely.
Learn more about the method: Read the blog