Ask a management team why they are entering a particular market and you usually hear a story: a trade show, an inbound lead, a competitor’s move, a distributor who called at the right time. Stories are how entries start. Evidence is how they should be chosen.
Reliable market selection walks a ladder of questions, each of which can kill a candidate cheaply:
Each rung costs less than the one below it. The expensive mistake is entering a market and discovering, in month seven, a fact that was discoverable in week two.
Teams often pick the mode — distributor, partner, own entity — before questioning the market, because the mode is concrete and the market is abstract. The order should be reversed: the market evidence dictates which modes are viable, then the mode is chosen on speed, control and cost. A distributor is a fine answer — as a conclusion, not an opening position.
The last piece is written before the launch: what result, by what date, would make us stop or change course? An entry without kill criteria is not a plan — it is a commitment to spend the whole budget before evaluating it.
That sequence — ladder, mode, kill criteria — is exactly how the market entry practice runs.
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