Six-plus years embedded in APAC markets — the agencies, holding groups, brands, and decision-makers who determine whether your product gets shortlisted or ignored.
The largest number of agency and brand decision-makers in South Asia. English-language business. Fast decision cycles by regional standards. And a programmatic and AdTech ecosystem that punches significantly above its weight.
They go direct to brands before building agency relationships. In India, most brand marketing budgets are planned and allocated in consultation with their agency of record. If the agency doesn't know you, the brand won't shortlist you — even if the CMO is enthusiastic. The right sequence is: trading desk relationship → agency endorsement → brand conversation → pilot. Skipping steps one and two adds 6–9 months to every deal.
The Indian digital market moves fast once relationships are in place. The mistake is trying to shortcut the relationship-building — it always costs more time than it saves.
Decisions are made in Singapore even when budgets sit in Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, or Bangkok. Build relationships at the regional hub first — the in-country conversations follow. The deals are larger, the cycles are longer, and the relationships are stickier once established.
They underestimate the importance of the Singapore hub and try to run individual country strategies simultaneously from day one. SEA looks like six separate markets — but the budget authority and vendor evaluation for most enterprise categories sits in Singapore. Win Singapore, and the in-country rollout becomes a much shorter conversation. Try to run six in-country strategies at once, and you spread your relationship capital too thin in all of them.
Southeast Asia is not a market — it's a region with one strategic entry point. Get the Singapore relationships right, and the rest opens up.
Dubai and Riyadh. Brand budgets are large, appetite for new technology is high, and deals move faster than SEA once relationships are established. But physical presence is non-negotiable — video calls don't close deals in the Middle East.
They try to cover it remotely. Every Western company that has successfully entered the UAE B2B market has done so with in-person relationship investment — dinners, events, face time. Sending marketing materials and following up by email is invisible in this market. The Middle East rewards commitment — showing up at GITEX with a proper presence signals seriousness in a way that no digital campaign can replicate. The ROI on one well-executed event trip typically exceeds six months of digital outreach.
In the Middle East, showing up in person is the product demo. The technology conversation comes later — after trust is established face-to-face.
Built and executed the US GTM strategy for a leading Indian AdTech company — from zero to active pipeline with US holding groups and programmatic platforms. The product worked. It just needed to be repositioned and introduced through the right doors.
Most Indian B2B tech products that struggle in Western markets have a positioning problem, not a product problem. The features are competitive. The pricing is often better than local alternatives. But the way the product is presented — the proof points, the case studies, the pitch frame — is built for an Indian buyer and lands flat with a US procurement team or EU agency strategist.
The product that won in Mumbai needs a different story to win in New York or London. Not a different product — a different story. That's what global GTM is: building the right story for each room.
The 30-minute discovery call starts with one question: which market, which ICP, and what's the 90-day target. Everything else follows from there.