Free E-Book

Launching a SaaS Business in Asia Pacific: Pitfalls, Challenges and Lessons Learned


Sales and marketing leaders from Sumo Logic, Talend, Optimizely and SurveyMonkey on what standing up an APJ presence actually costs — from the outside looking in, and from the regional hot seat.

Free. 12 pages. No form to fill in

SaaS APAC market entry challenges start after the decision

Most guides to Asia Pacific (APJ) help you decide whether to go. This one starts after that call has been made, when someone has to build the function on the ground.

Standing up SaaS field marketing in APAC is complex, expensive and easy to underestimate. The toolkit that worked in the home market  — tested pricing, proven creative, settled processes, a known cost of acquisition — transfers less cleanly than it looks. Content written for the US market frequently jars in-region. Brand equity built at home may not carry. And a regional office of a few people has no redundancy when something breaks.

This guide covers the pitfalls that recur when scaling SaaS in Asia Pacific, and what the leaders who have run these launches would do differently.

Building a local marketing team in APAC: who this guide is for

  • Regional GMs and Country Managers carrying a number that reads as a rounding error at HQ, and struggling for bandwidth because of it.

  • VPs of Demand Generation weighing an agency against a first in-region marketing hire.

  • CMOs whose head-office content is landing badly across APJ markets and who need to know what to rebuild.

  • Founders and CROs treating Australia as the easy test market. The guide explains why that assumption is right less often than it looks.

The five essentials of APAC expansion

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Strategy — built to the locale, not ported from the US or Europe

Communication — bridging the gap between head office and the region

Audience — mapping profiles and partners to in-region equivalents

Content — local context as a signal of commitment, not a translation exercise

Execution — in-country delivery, and the cost of getting it wrong

Bridging HQ and regional marketing teams: what they got wrong first:

"We tried to write our own content or to use the content that headquarters created for us. We literally copy-paste corporate content into our regional communications. That didn't work."

Wouter Koch,
Former Head of APAC, SurveyMonkey

The guide is candid about what did not work before it gets to what did:

"If we were getting 20 per cent value from our spend before, it feels like 100 per cent now that we are working with Accelerato.

Paul Wilcox,
Vice President and GM Asia Pacific, Sumo Logic

Read it before you make the first hire

Twelve pages of lessons from leaders who have already made these calls in APJ

PDF. Opens immediately, no form required.
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SaaS International Expansion Guide: EMEA & APJ