Selling Internationally

One of the things that we look for in the companies at Sports Loft is a management team that operates with a global mindset. We want to see companies who have products that can be successful in multiple geographies and sales teams that want to embrace the fact that whilst national differences exist, sport and media is a genuinely global business. 

However, growing a global operation is not easy. Should you build in your domestic market first and then think about selling internationally or should you go global from the start? Can you sell from your home base or do you need “boots on the ground?” How do you get to really understand the cultural differences between college basketball, international tennis and IPL? If you don’t expand globally quickly enough, will local copy-cats interfere with your global ambitions? What people do you need? Will the value in your product be perceived differently between Canal+, NBC and Foxtel?

In the latest of the Sports Loft podcasts, we are joined by Pumpjack Dataworks' CEO Nick Goggans whose clients include World Table Tennis, Williams F1 and Miami FC, and Covatic’s CEO Nick Pinks whose clients include media owners such as Bauer Media. They discuss their experiences of building global sales operations, the cultural differences in the sports industry between US, Europe and Asia and whether operating internationally will necessarily increase your cost per sale.