By Ellie Edwards-Scott, Co-Founder of The Advisory Collective and ADvantage
There is a point in so many of the conversations that I have with founders where I hear a version of the same thing: “We know our product, we know our customers, we can do this ourselves.”
And I understand why they think that.
If you’ve built a successful business in one market, found product-market fit and created a repeatable sales model, it’s easy to assume that you can take what has worked previously and replicate it somewhere else.
But entering a new market isn’t simply about doing more of what already works. And the UK, particularly in the AdTech and MarTech sectors, can be a very unforgiving place to make that discovery.
You don’t know what you don’t know
Building an effective go-to-market strategy requires more than understanding your own product. You need to understand the market you are entering: who the real competitors are, how buyers make decisions, what they are prepared to pay, which relationships matter, where budgets sit and, crucially, whether your proposition actually resonates.
That requires experience across product-market fit, competitive intelligence, pricing, positioning, stakeholder mapping, communications and commercial strategy. It’s a fairly broad mix of expertise and one that rarely sits entirely within an early-stage or scaling business.
I recently spoke to a CEO who had decided to manage their UK go-to-market strategy entirely from their home market, without any local specialist input.
Could they do it? Probably. Will they do it well? Maybe.
But the more important question is: what might they not know to ask?
I’m not criticising founders or undervaluing internal teams. They do and should know their product better than anybody else. The challenge is that being close to your product can also make it difficult to see how somebody encountering it for the first time will perceive it.
I have a phrase I use regularly with founders: ‘nobody will tell you your baby is ugly, but they will probably tell me.’
It usually gets a laugh, or at the very least a wry smile, but there is a serious point behind it.
The value of an outside perspective
Potential customers are not always completely candid with founders or sales teams.
They might take the meeting, say the product is interesting and agree to stay in touch. What they may not tell you is that they don’t understand how you’re different from three other companies they’ve spoken to that month. Or that your pricing feels wrong for the market. Or that your proposition solves a problem that simply isn’t high enough on their priority list.
Those conversations are very different when they happen independently.
Over the years at The Advisory Collective, some of the most useful feedback we have taken back to clients hasn’t necessarily been what they wanted to hear. But it has often been what they needed to hear.
Because finding out that your proposition isn’t landing before you hire a UK sales team, commit significant marketing budget or spend twelve months trying to build a pipeline is considerably less expensive than discovering it afterwards.
Local knowledge matters
There is another reason an outside perspective can be valuable: markets rarely behave in exactly the same way.
The competitors you face in the US may not be the competitors you face in the UK. The job title controlling the budget may be different. Agency relationships may play a bigger role. Procurement can work differently. Your strongest use case in one market may not be the one that opens doors here.
And markets move quickly.
Buyer priorities change. Budgets move. New technologies emerge. Competitors reposition themselves. In AdTech particularly, today’s differentiator can very quickly become tomorrow’s standard feature.
A good GTM strategy therefore shouldn’t simply tell you where the market is. It should help you understand where you fit within it.
Credibility is hard won
Then there is the issue of reputation.
You only get one opportunity to make a credible entrance into a new market.
If the first impression buyers receive is a generic proposition, an irrelevant sales approach or messaging that demonstrates limited understanding of their world, getting a second conversation can be much harder.
This is particularly important in our relationship-driven industry. Agencies talk to each other, so do Marketers. People move between companies and reputations can travel surprisingly quickly.
Which is why commercial strategy and market reputation cannot operate independently.
You need clarity around your proposition, positioning, ICP and route to revenue. But you also need the communications, credibility and market presence that give people a reason to take the meeting in the first place.
Specialist support isn’t about outsourcing your strategy
Perhaps the biggest misconception is that bringing in external expertise means handing over your go-to-market strategy to somebody else.
It shouldn’t.
The strongest engagements I’ve been involved in have been true partnerships. The company brings deep knowledge of its technology, customers and ambition. We bring local market intelligence, relationships, deep expertise and, importantly, independence.
The objective isn’t to tell a founder how to run their business.
It’s to challenge assumptions before the market does.
Yes there is a cost attached to getting this specialist advice.
But there is also a bigger cost attached to getting your market entry wrong: senior hires, months (or years) of salary, marketing investment, events, travel and, perhaps most importantly, lost time.
So before asking whether you can afford specialist support, there may be a better question to ask:
How much are you prepared to spend finding out what you could have known before you started?
