When you are prospecting and building a sales pipeline, the response and success can vary depending on the regions you’re targeting. To optimize your results with cold outreach, it’s crucial to understand the market you are prospecting in to and the cultural nuances that come with it.
The better you understand the market, the better you can serve it.
Over the years, many RegTechs have utilised Gungho’s lead generation and appointment setting services to reach global audiences of target personas, build brand awareness, grow a robust sales pipeline and boost revenue growth.
We have been approached by many RegTechs who are struggling to expand their market and increase their sales funnels when prospecting into new geographies. Many of our clients who are wanting to enter the APAC market have come to us having faced similar issues; poor data quality, difficulty in managing the time difference, struggling to build rapport and trust from prospects, amongst an array of other issues.
Why You Need To Be Prospecting Into The APAC Market
The APAC region is one of the fastest-growing markets within the RegTech sector. As stated in an interview by Business Chief APAC, the global RegTech market is forecasted to grow at a rate of over 20% per year in APAC alone. (Interview: The state of regtech report in Asia-Pacific | Business Chief APAC)
The rapid growth, paired with ever-changing risk and regulatory frameworks, makes the APAC market a very lucrative market to penetrate and scale within. Despite this, due to the myriad of challenges that sales teams face, the APAC market is still untapped by the large majority of vendors within the sector.
This growth presents a huge opportunity for both new and well-established RegTech vendors to expand into the region, growing brand awareness and ultimately capitalizing on this fast-growing market.
Why Prospecting Into The APAC Market Is Seen As Challenging
We’ve partnered with many RegTechs that were previously struggling to move the needle in the APAC region, seeing a lack of ROI and little success in building strong brand awareness.
Over the past year, as our APAC calling team has grown in numbers, we have set a total of 926 qualified appointmentsfor our clients‘ sales teams off the back of 95,000 outbound activities.
During this time, we have been able to tailor our cold outreach within the region to mitigate the cultural differences and bypass some of the most common issues faced by sales teams when prospecting across Asia-Pacific. This has enabled us to connect our clients with key decision-makers to generate a strong sales pipeline and skyrocket revenue within APAC.
Here is an example of the number of activities and appointments generated across 8 countries within the APAC region over the last 12 months. Regularly reviewing conversion rates allows us to better understand the market and overcome any potential challenges.
Despite the blue ocean and huge growth opportunities, expanding into any new region brings its own challenges that sales teams must contend with…
1. Data
The strength of the sales funnel is usually pinned on the quality of the data at the top of the funnel. Whether it’s email marketing, telemarketing or social outreach, the data needs to be of the highest quality to really move the needle, drive ROI and fuel your sales teams success.
Gathering data in the APAC has historically been a challenge for marketers, with the industry being plagued with low-quality data, invalid numbers, out of date company information and incorrect email addresses.
The challenge, however, is how do sales teams have the time to obtain vast amounts of high-quality, relevant and up to date prospect data whilst also nurturing their existing pipeline and securing deals?
Enter our in-house data team. At Gungho we have an in-house data team that manually researches each prospect within our growing dataset of Compliance, Risk, Fraud and FinCrime decision-makers in the APAC region.
This provides our telemarketing team with the highest quality data to ensure we maximize their outbound activity and limit the need for endlessly hunting prospect contact details.
2. Building A Telemarketing Team
As the RegTech industry is rapidly growing, building a robust and experienced marketing team to appointment set for your sales team is a crucial part of the funnel.
The challenge for some RegTech vendors is that they don’t have a presence in the APAC market, nor the budget or bandwidth to put boots on the ground. The alternative to having a local presence would be to repurpose resources within other regions, to prospect into the APAC region – which is not effective.
Although the growth comes with huge amounts of opportunity, building an effective telemarketing team to tackle the APAC market requires a large budget and is often a lengthy process from start to finish.
We’ve built a dedicated team of expert telemarketers with a deep knowledge in the Compliance, FinCrime, Fraud and Risk verticals that are leveraging our extensive data set to reach key decision-makers in APAC. This serves as a cost-effective option for RegTech vendors to build brand awareness, penetrate new markets, scale sales pipelines and drive tangible revenue growth.
3. Cultural Nuance & Trust
The rapid growth in the APAC region makes it an interesting opportunity for RegTech vendors looking at global expansion, however, as with any new market, understanding the nuances and the key personas is a challenge that must be tackled to achieve an optimal return from lead generation.
Building trust is key with any cold outreach, regardless of the region you’re prospecting into.
The challenge is one of culture… Some cultures are typically less receptive to cold outreach than others. From analysing our metrics over the last 12 months, we need to generate a higher volume of outbound activity to secure conversations with prospects in the APAC region.
The better you can understand your audience, the better you can serve them. Our advice would be to use a blended approach of calls, voicemails and emails in tandem. We use this approach to create multiple touch points with a prospect and create deeper brand awareness.
This blended outreach approach has been instrumental in building trust with prospects, breaking down walls, and creating highly qualified appointments for sales teams in the APAC region.
In Conclusion – Prospecting Into The APAC Region
The market for RegTech in APAC is growing at a rapid rate yet it is still widely thought of as a challenging market to penetrate, leaving many RegTech vendors unsure of where to start and where best to focus their efforts.
Although one of the toughest markets, by leveraging high-quality data, experienced telemarketers, understanding key personas, building brand awareness and cultivating rapport with prospects, the APAC region remains a huge opportunity for new and existing Regtech vendors looking to grow their market share and skyrocket their revenue.
Struggling to get traction in APAC? Get in touch now to understand how we are building a sizeable and scalable pipeline within days of starting a campaign…
