Consumrz
A B2B2C startup wanted to enter three European markets. I built the go-to-market strategy, the marketing that carried it, and the workflows to run both.
The situation
Consumrz is a B2B2C technology startup preparing to expand into Europe. I was brought in to lead business development for the European market.
What I found was the usual condition of a fast startup. Real momentum, a genuine product, and almost no shared structure underneath it. Country managers held the market knowledge in their heads, the development team was building against enthusiasm rather than sequence, and nobody could say which market should come first or why.
How I framed it
I was hired as a business development lead. Taken narrowly, that job is a pipeline job: find the partners, open the conversations, close the deals.
The trouble is that you cannot sell into a market nobody has chosen. Every question I needed answered to do business development at all sat upstream of it. Which countries, in what order, to which personas, with what evidence. So rather than treat marketing and data as somebody else's problem, I took both on, because the brief I had been given was not deliverable without them.
Asked for
Lead business development for the European market.
Actually needed
Decide which parts of Europe, in what order and on what evidence, then build the machine that can actually go there.
What I built
Everything started from analysis rather than opinion, because the sequencing decision was the expensive one to get wrong.
- 01
Agree the roadmap with the founders
Short and medium-term vision for the European market, with explicit KPIs, so that every later decision had something to be judged against. Without this the rest is preference.
- 02
Get the market requirements out of people's heads
I ran sessions with each country manager to understand what their market actually required, for both sides of the B2B2C model. The assumption that one European experience serves all of them does not survive contact with the countries themselves.
- 03
Turn that into a development sequence
Those insights went into sessions with the development team to produce a prioritised roadmap with reachable milestones, ordered by business value rather than by what was interesting to build.
- 04
Design the marketing per country, not per translation
Each of the three markets got its own strategy: the top three to five personas there, the channels that actually reach them, and creative written for those channels rather than adapted from a master version.
- 05
Build the workflows that keep it running
Structured operating workflows across application development and maintenance, product development, business development, customer support, content creation, reporting, and management.
The marketing was built around the journey rather than the launch date. Each stage of it got its own campaign, so that the plan kept working after the first burst of attention.
The real constraint
Four months, and a small team who would still be running this long after I left. That argued against anything clever. A strategy nobody can operate is indistinguishable from no strategy, which is why the workflows mattered as much as the analysis.
What shipped
- Strategic roadmap with agreed KPIs
- Go-to-market strategy for European expansion
- Market, competitive and financial analysis
- Prioritised product development roadmap
- Marketing strategy for three countries
- Content calendars, 30 to 90 days per market
- Operating workflows across seven areas
Where it stands
A four-month engagement, from July to October 2024. Everything above was delivered and handed over.
What a company does with a strategy after the engagement ends is theirs, and I would not claim the outcome as mine. What I will say is that the workflows were the part I was most confident about, because they were the part designed to work without me in the room.