The second geography

The plan is familiar. We own our home market, the product travels, we need a country manager and some introductions.

What gets underestimated is rarely the effort. It is the assumption that the competitive set travels with the product. Often it does not. The incumbent in the second market is a local company nobody in the deck has heard of, with 15 years of relationships, native-language support and a compliance posture built for that jurisdiction. Being better on features is not the contest being held.

Where the second market actually differs

The buying process. Procurement thresholds, tender requirements, approval chains and the role of consultants and resellers vary across European markets. A sales approach built for direct selling into mid-market companies in one country can meet a market where the same segment buys through integrators, and the pipeline model has to be rebuilt rather than translated.

Data protection and residency. GDPR is uniform in principle and less so in practice, because supervisory authorities differ in emphasis and enforcement, and sectoral rules layer on top. Public sector and regulated buyers increasingly require data residency in-country or in-region, which is an infrastructure commitment before it is a sales question.

Sovereignty, which is the part that has changed most recently and the part most likely to be missing from a diligence pack. The European Commission published its Cloud Sovereignty Framework in October 2025, setting out 8 assessable objectives covering legal jurisdiction, operational control, data location and supply chain transparency, written so that procurement officers can put them directly into tender specifications. The Commission then used it on its own procurement, awarding a sovereign cloud contract worth up to 180 million euros over 6 years to 4 European providers in April 2026.

That is the shift worth understanding. Sovereignty questions used to be raised in the security review and negotiated. Increasingly they arrive as scored criteria in the tender document, and a vendor without a documented answer on where data sits, who operates the infrastructure and under whose jurisdiction can be scored out before the product is evaluated. Residency alone does not settle it: a provider with an EU data center and a non-EU parent still has a jurisdiction question to answer.

Language and support coverage, which sounds trivial and turns up in win rates.

Why this is a board conversation

Because it fails slowly. A geographic expansion does not collapse in a quarter. It produces a plausible pipeline, a country manager, encouraging early conversations, and then a second year in which nothing closes and everyone has a reason. By the time it is unambiguous, 2 years of investment are gone and the opportunity cost is larger than the spend.

The questions that catch it early are simple and have to be asked on a cadence. Who are we actually losing to in this market, by name. What is the win rate here against the win rate at home. How long is the cycle here against the cycle at home. What did the last 5 losses have in common. Is the pipeline being built by the country manager’s own network, and what happens when that network is exhausted.

None of these are hard questions. They have to be asked by someone whose job is to ask them every quarter, and who was in the room when the expansion case was originally made.