 by Ori Ainy Founder of Beam Global Helping startups penetrate global markets and compete with global corporations Read the ENTIRE ARTICLE here. --- URL for this Post. At some point in every Israeli B2B software company’s journey, the founder – who is usually still running most of the international sales effort personally – faces a version of the same question: which international market do we actually focus on? They have a real product, paying customers, and a website that’s clearly aimed at the global market. What they don’t have is a systematic answer to which geography deserves their next six months. In my experience, that decision gets made in one of three ways. None of them are good.  The Three Common Mistakes
The first is the American reflex. The US is large, English-speaking, and full of companies that look like good potential customers. For a 30-person Israeli SaaS company with $1.2 million in ARR and no US presence, it also means competing in the world’s most saturated B2B software market against vendors who have headquarters there, local references, established partner networks, and sales teams that know the buyers personally. The US holds the largest share of the global B2B SaaS market and is characterised by a high concentration of major vendors and a culture of early technology adoption (Verified Market Research, 2025) – which is another way of saying that buyers have seen every pitch, have extensive benchmarking tools, and will move slowly with a foreign company that has no local footprint and no local references. The second mistake is territory by personal connection. Someone on the founding team has a personal connection in Germany, or a cousin in Australia, or a former colleague who now lives in Amsterdam. Connections matter in international sales – they genuinely do – but when the connection becomes the strategy, things go wrong. I’ve watched companies spend a year in a market they entered because of a relationship, only to discover that their primary competitor had its European headquarters in that exact city. A competitive mapping exercise that takes a day would have surfaced that. The connection didn’t. The third mistake is the one that’s hardest to see. It’s picking the same markets that well-known Israeli companies entered, on the assumption that if it worked for them, it will work for you. What gets ignored is the enormous difference in conditions. In the boom years of 2021-2022, around 60 local funds raised about $6 billion annually in Israel. In 2024, only 22 funds raised just $1.3 billion (Calcalist, 2025). The companies your peers are pointing to as inspiration often entered their first markets with $15-20 million in runway, a dedicated VP Sales already hired, and the ability to absorb 18 months of negative results in a new geography. That is a fundamentally different position than a founder-led company with a small team trying to close its first five international accounts. What Market Selection Actually Requires A few years ago I published a structured framework for territory selection that I use with clients – you can download it here. The core logic is worth restating: the goal is not to identify the most prestigious market, or the largest one, or the one that sounds most ambitious. The goal is to identify the market where your company has the highest probability of success given your current product, resources, competitive position, and go-to-market motion. Read the rest of this article here.
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