Unstoppable Expansion: Overcoming borders and barriers
My co-founder Dorothy is put on the hot seat in this interview with G-P and Tech in Asia
How can it already be 2024?!
Silicon Jungle Chronicles had to take a breather in December as I relocated with the family to sunny California.
It was a much bigger adjustment than I thought it’d be. And that’s an understatement.
I’ll share more about the experience later this month.
Meanwhile, Dorothy’s been busy picking up the slack (thanks Dorothy!!) and was put on the hot seat recently by Tech in Asia and G-P in an interview.
If you’ve ever been curious about EngageRocket’s journey, the struggles and wins we’ve had over the years, and where we’re going next, she packs it all into a 17min conversation.
Read/listen more below:
This interview was originally published on Tech in Asia.
It’s crucial for businesses to set the right foundations before attempting to scale their operations, and making sure that everything revolves around the customer is a solid way to begin.
But how can businesses build on top of that? How can startups turn knowledge about their customers into concrete business success?
Dorothy Yiu, co-founder and CEO (International) of EngageRocket / Image credit: Tech in Asia
In the second episode of Unstoppable Expansion, G-P Asia-Pacific general manager Charles Ferguson and Tech in Asia Studios managing editor Winston Zhang speak to EngageRocket co-founder and CEO (International) Dorothy Yiu. They discuss what she learned from expanding the insights and engagement platform into markets that couldn’t be more different from each other.
Timecodes:
00:00 – How can businesses build on being customer-centric?
00:54 – Welcome to Unstoppable Expansion
01:14 – Introducing Dorothy Yiu, co-founder of EngageRocket
02:00 – Even if you have a golden idea for a business, you might still fail
04:14 – Conquering home ground before setting its sights on the world
05:37 – Deciding on the first foreign market to enter
06:42 – Entering Indonesia
08:54 – Indonesia is very different from Singapore as a market
10:52 – Breaking into the US market – an entirely different beast
10:31 – Businesses need to do the legwork and get on the ground
16:05 – How do you ensure you’re bringing the right people onboard in a market expansion attempt?
16:51 – Thanks for listening – stay tuned for episode 3!
Hosts:
Charles Ferguson, general manager for G-P’s Asia-Pacific operations
Winston Zhang, managing editor of Tech in Asia Studios
Featured Interviewee:
Dorothy Yiu, co-founder of Singapore-based employee insights and engagement platform EngageRocket
Transcript:
Charles Ferguson:
Hey Winston, how are you doing?
Winston Zhang:
Pretty good, Charles. Actually, I’ve got a question for you.
Charles Ferguson:
Fire away.
Winston Zhang:
Well, last we spoke, we talked about how it’s crucial for businesses to set the right foundations before attempting to scale their operations and expand into new markets. And we determined that making sure that everything revolves around the customer is a solid building block to begin with.
Charles Ferguson:
That’s right.
Winston Zhang:
But what are some concrete ways businesses can build on top of that? I mean, knowing your customer and centering every decision you make as a business is a given, I think, for any budding startup. But once a business has that baked into its DNA, how can you turn that knowledge about your customer into concrete business success?
Charles Ferguson:
That’s a good question and, as promised, I’ve got some thoughts to share from someone who I caught up with recently, whose experience illustrates just that. But before we get into it, how about we bring in the show?
Winston Zhang:
Don’t mind if I do. Welcome to Unstoppable Expansion, a podcast by Tech in Asia and G-P, where we’re going to discuss some of the strategies every business needs to know to be able to thrive in any economic climate. I’m Winston Zhang, managing editor of Tech in Asia Studios.
Charles Ferguson:
And I’m Charles Ferguson, APAC general manager of G-P. And for the benefit of those of you who didn’t hear this in the last episode, here’s a short excerpt of my conversation with Dorothy Yiu, co-founder of Singapore-based employee insight and engagement platform EngageRocket.
Dorothy Yiu (Recorded Interview):
If you want to start a business, an idea is not good enough. You need to have an advantage, an edge – be it connections to markets that other people don’t or very deep expertise and know-how that other people don’t – so that you can actually solve a problem better than anybody else, right? And ideas are just not going to guarantee that success for you.
Winston Zhang:
Honestly, it’s hard not to agree with that. Even if you have a golden idea for a business, it might still fail if you don’t have a competitive edge, the right go-to-market strategy, or the best talent.
Charles Ferguson:
That’s exactly right. And the reason I bring up Dorothy in relation to your question about what businesses can do beyond just knowing their customer in the pursuit of business success is that EngageRocket has a presence in over 16 countries around the world, with each market as different as the next, and Dorothy and her co-founder, CT, have had to navigate that to ensure their expansion efforts aren’t for naught.
Winston Zhang:
Wow, I mean, that’s amazing. How’d they go about that?
Charles Ferguson:
Well, before we talk about that, we first need to understand a little about EngageRocket and what it does. I’ll let Dorothy tell that story.
Dorothy Yiu (Recorded Interview):
So CT, my co-founder, and I – we met as ex-colleagues, right? So we were both heading up the regional business for a global HR consulting firm back then, and it was during our time there servicing Fortune 500 companies that we actually saw the gap that EngageRocket solves today. So we felt that, fundamentally, HR as a department serves a very strategic value to any organization – big, small, medium, doesn’t matter which industry you’re in. As long as you hire people, HR brings that strategic value because it is managing the most valuable asset that organizations have: people.
But yet, unlike marketing and procurement or even sales, data was just not used enough. The right data wasn’t collected and, actually, they’re just not used enough in general. And a lot of the people decisions that were being made, a lot of them were still being made using gut feel.
So when we looked at the consulting model, it has its merits, but we felt that technology was really the missing piece in HR using data and analytics more for people decisions.
Winston Zhang:
So I gather that Dorothy and CT developed a solution to be able to address that issue and it just took off from there?
Charles Ferguson:
Not quite. Remember in Dorothy’s own words, an idea isn’t good enough. EngageRocket didn’t just magically launch in 16 countries overnight. It took a lot of hard work.
Winston Zhang:
So how’d the company go about achieving that?
Charles Ferguson:
Before setting their sights on the world, Dorothy knew that EngageRocket had to first conquer home ground.
Dorothy Yiu (Recorded Interview):
We wanted to have the confidence that we could win in our home country first before even thinking about, you know, going beyond Singapore into other markets and other regions. So it probably took us around two years. We started in 2016, and we formally looked at market expansion around 2018 – late 2017, early 2018.
We were very deliberate about the decision because there were still a lot of valuable lessons that we needed to learn, and we wanted to build a company with core DNA that centered around really listening to the feedback of our early customers. We want to build a product that solves real needs, right? Not just something that sounds good and exciting, you know, you slap on. We want to really hear the pain points of our early customers and keep innovating and keep improving so that we can actually diversify and serve a larger set of customers.
So we wanted the foundation to be laid and also because we are a young startup, right, so we have limited resources. So we felt that between speed to market versus having more insights on the space that was evolving and slowly maturing, we felt that the latter was more important to us.
Charles Ferguson:
Once the team had achieved concrete successes on home turf, it was then time to set their sights on an expansion. But the question arose of where would EngageRocket set foot first.
Dorothy Yiu (Recorded Interview):
We wanted to understand a few criterias, right? You know, when we looked at the different markets, did we have already existing advantages in those markets, for example, pre-existing, privilege relationships, or we have familiarity with how procurement make their decisions? Or do we already have a few customers that were in market that may have come organically?
And the other thing we wanted to look at is the size of market, you know, how big it is? What is the TAM, SAM, SOM (total addressable market, serviceable addressable market, serviceable obtainable market), you know, the typical things that you want to size up? And then on the challenges side, we also want to understand, is there any natural barriers? Like, OK, is language going to be a problem? In Asia it’s just countless languages, right? But from a business language perspective, can we still use English, right? Because translation is just going to be another whole challenge that we will need to take up. And did they have very strict data protection rules?
So we made a list of soft criteria and kind of rated every market that we looked at. And based on that, what made sense to us at that point of time was actually Indonesia.
Winston Zhang:
Ah, Indonesia. What’s not to love?
Charles Ferguson:
Exactly. It’s got a huge population, a mature startup ecosystem, a ton of investors, and so much more. That said, it’s still no easy feat for a startup to enter the Indonesian market, especially one coming from Singapore, and Dorothy and her team wanted to be doubly sure before making any moves.
Dorothy Yiu (Recorded Interview):
At the point of wanting to enter Indonesia, I think we had about three customers already in market. But still, we weren’t fully convinced, right? We want to be sure that Indonesia is the market, the first market to kind of go into after Singapore. So we ran experiments.
So what we did is we hosted an EngageRocket-branded event in Indonesia. Now, we’re not new to hosting our own events. We were doing it in Singapore already. And to paint the context, in Singapore, we would host like EngageRocket events, maybe bring in like 30, 40 HR decision-makers or influencers to kind of host a panel so on and so forth. So the mandate to our marketing team was to do something similar in Indonesia. I was telling them if 20 people, 25 people turn up, that’s good enough because what I wanted to do is to have direct organic conversations with these potential buyers to understand if the value proposition that we were bringing to the market resonated with them, right? And I wanted to see if these can then translate into actual prospect conversations after that.
So they had, like, three or four weeks to put the event together. And then within the first week of marketing that event, we had 200 signups – we had to cap it off. So we were quite a surprise – pleasantly surprised at the overwhelming response. And we had to change venue twice, this was pre-Covid, so we’re talking about in-person, we’re scrambling, my team was freaking out, because how are we going to host all these people?
That validated that there was demand, right? There was definitely demand and interest in the market. And ultimately, I think about 120, 150 people showed up to the actual event. And that also led to a lot of meaningful conversation post-event. And that was how, ultimately, we decided on Indonesia as the first market that we enter.
Charles Ferguson:
And so began EngageRocket’s expansion. But very quickly, the team realized how different of a beast Indonesia was compared to Singapore.
Dorothy Yiu (Recorded Interview):
Indonesia is a relatively big market. There’s actually a lot of companies there, and people often think that oh, they may not have the appetite to pay, but actually, that’s not true. They can actually – they do have pretty sizable budgets, especially for the larger organizations. But what was key is that even though the top of the funnel might be very big, Indonesia as a market itself for SaaS adoption maturity is relatively low, right?
So they respond very well to our content marketing, our thought leadership pieces because that’s what we needed to nurture a relatively immature market. But for Indonesia, very quickly we found out that the playbook to win was to cut through that overwhelming positive responses that we’ve gotten, including that event that we hosted, right, with 200 signups. How do we cut through those interests to actually finding that very few buyers who have the willingness to pay and a maturity to understand the value that your product is bringing? And for a marketer, Indonesia, that will be through connections, right?
So then we found out that the playbook to cut through the noise effectively in the shortest amount of time, we needed to hire for local connections. So you prioritize people with seniority and connections directly to decision-makers, and even less so for the experience – and maybe tech or B2B SaaS – deprioritize that, but prioritize their connections, right? Because then very quickly, they are able to then get insights through a phone call or through a coffee chat, whether or not that interest can actually lead to genuine buying decisions. So that qualifying conversation that needed to happen often happens very organically in those casual conversations.
Winston Zhang:
Wow, that’s some detail on their customers.
Charles Ferguson:
Hey, knowledge is half the battle, as we established in the last episode. But what struck me about EngageRocket is that this isn’t just a mindset the company ditched once it got to a certain level of growth. Right now, the team is working on breaking into the US market, and they still employ the same strategies to determine what the best go-to-market strategy would be. And what they found out is that the US couldn’t be more different than Indonesia as a market.
Dorothy Yiu (Recorded Interview):
So now we’re trying to break into the US market, and the US SaaS market is the biggest in the world. I mean, if you look at stats, I think the US contributes to over 60% of the global B2B SaaS spend, right? The second market is Europe, and Europe contributes about 20 plus percent. So, you know, between the first and second is like three times bigger than the second largest market.
But the difference between the US and a country like Indonesia is that you don’t really need preexisting conversations, they will have a conversation with you. But because it’s relatively more mature, what that meant is you have a lot more players. So competition is a lot tougher.
So then the key to the US was less about, oh, we need to find the right person locally that has the right connections. It was more about how do we come up with a strategy that will help us rise above and stand out in the sea of players to get the attention of companies and to build trust in a very quick manner such that they will then continue the conversation with us because we are relatively unknown. With every market entry, you’re basically going in cold, like, nobody knows your name, nobody knows your brand name. You can bring up customer logos that they might be familiar with, but they don’t know you, right?
So for the US, we found out after I think two quarters that, OK, we really need to cut through the noise and stand out and find a way to connect directly with potential buyers in a less salesy way. And for us, it’s inviting them for joined thought leadership pieces, right? Or inviting them to do a podcast like this. I want to hear your thoughts. Just kind of a more indirect way to then build a relationship and then build trust so that they can then carry on conversation and hopefully move down your sales funnel.
Winston Zhang:
That’s interesting, especially the part she mentioned about showing the logos of client companies. I would’ve imagined that association with known names would bring some level of trust into the conversation.
Charles Ferguson:
That might work in a less mature market, but when you’re talking about the US, having clients in the big leagues doesn’t exactly set you apart, as Dorothy explains.
Dorothy Yiu (Recorded Interview):
I think because the US is probably the most mature market when it comes to buying software for businesses, it’s very clear-cut. They’re very clear about what they are looking for, they know exactly the value that you’re bringing, they know the feature set. I think very much in Southeast Asia, when we are pitching, we have to explain a little bit right? You have to kind of go value-based selling and do less feature-based selling. Really explain what is the problem that we can solve for you – kind of use their language to sell to them, the HR language to sell to them. But in the US, it’s very different. They get features, they understand very immediately how it works.
So then it becomes a really tight or close fight because then you’re kind of going through feature-to-feature comparison with some of the competitors. So how do we kind of shape our unique value proposition was what we had to work on. And almost to the extent that we needed to prepare our product team to innovate even faster, right? We’re already innovating very quickly for Southeast Asia, but expectations in the US to stand out is even faster, it’s so high, right? Because there are new companies popping up every day, right? And the tech talent there is definitely strong.
So in a lot of ways, we have to move very quickly, we have to be very agile. And that’s also partly why this year, my co-founder’s also relocated, so he’s moved to the US to have one founder in-market just so that we can make quicker decisions, closer to the action, and hopefully stand a chance of cracking this large SaaS market in the US.
Winston Zhang:
OK, I think I’m getting it a little bit more. Prioritizing your customer based on everything you can find out about them is one thing, but businesses also need to do intensive research on what’s already available when it comes to the solutions they’re hawking or risk getting beaten to the punch by the competition.
Charles Ferguson:
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Winston Zhang:
That feels like a lot, though. How does one even begin to grasp all of that?
Charles Ferguson:
Well, you’ve got to do the legwork and get on the ground.
Dorothy Yiu (Recorded Interview):
I think one thing that we always kind of fall back on as you’re kind of entering the market, just be shameless about asking for coffee, right? Like just any connection that you have. Let’s say, we’re entering the US market. Anyone that we know that remotely has some experience or has some connection in the US, we’re like, “Can we just buy a cup of coffee?”
And I think those coffee chats is… actually it’s critical, right? Because every coffee chat will say that at the end, like, is there any other people that you think I should speak to. And that’s how you build your early network. And that’s also how you can potentially find your first hire, right? I think that’s actually – our first hire in the US, our VP of growth that we found, and he has been performing great so far, has been phenomenal, was actually through all this. “Oh, let me connect you to this person, then connect me to that person,” and then we ultimately got connected to him to build partnerships.
Winston Zhang:
Makes sense. Getting the right person to kickstart operations is definitely crucial to ensuring success in any scaling startup.
Charles Ferguson:
That’s right.
Winston Zhang:
How about beyond that first hire in the market, though? How do you hire and ensure that you’re bringing the right people onboard who can drive your company to success?
Charles Ferguson:
Well, a friend of mine might have something to say to that.
Allen Jaeyoon Lee (Recorded Interview):
I do think we shouldn’t think talent is an isolated topic. I think in an ideal world, it needs to come from the top, meaning the vision and the mission of the company. So where do we want to go, why we are here, and that would be very, very different across different organizations, but I think it needs to start from there.
Winston Zhang:
Hearing a different voice probably means we’re only going to dive into that snippet next episode, doesn’t it?
Charles Ferguson:
Right as always, Winston. So to cap this off, I hope you – you, the listener – enjoyed this episode. If you did, make sure to follow us for more episodes of Unstoppable Expansion, where Winston and I will dive into some of the strategies every business needs to know to be able to thrive in any economic climate.
Winston Zhang:
And if you like us enough or have any thoughts on this episode, make sure to let us know by giving us five stars and a nice review on your podcast platform of choice.
Charles Ferguson:
Of course, if you are a business leader and thinking of – or in the process of – scaling your business and you’d like to know how we at G-P can help you in your expansion endeavors, make sure to visit our website at www.globalization-partners.com. Until next time, I’m Charles Ferguson –
Winston Zhang:
And I’m Winston Zhang.
Charles Ferguson:
– and we’ll catch you next time.
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