Identify potential countries for a market entry with a sales organisation: A guideline for small and medium-sized enterprises

Master's Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, grade: 1,6, Leeds Metropolitan University, 38 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In a fast changing environment companies are forced to act so - namely fast. If a company grows, sooner or later the domestic market becomes too small. Then the company has to enter a new market to achieve sustainable growth. According to the experience of the author some companies decide rather on emotions than on facts. Especially small and medium-sized enterprises do not have the resources to invest a lot of money into market research or for expensive consultants. A logical consequence could be that SME invest in countries without checking the critical measurements which then leads to a waste of time, resources and money. If such companies do not have a stable financial foundation it can lead therefore to critical economic difficulties. The output of this project is a guideline especially for small and mediumsized enterprises. The author conducted interviews with internationally operating companies to get some practical best practise expertise. Not only the analysed key figures are an output of the interviews but also the interpretation of them and how a company has acquired them. Very often the problem is to get the right and reliable information for a market. In a second stage literature is introduced into the guideline to get a mixture of both - practical but also academic inputs. With the present project a SME gets an impression what happens in internationally operating companies but also a choice of tools to verify future market entry intentions.