In today's global markets it gets more and more imperative to extend your business into established markets as well as into emerging markets. The need of expanding the current business of a company towards these new markets presents the different companies with a whole range of problems. This problems start with the language differences, the different social and political environment, and the finding of qualified personal who can support and expand your business into this new markets. Following we will describe the two main traditional ways of performing an international expansion and its inherent problems.

These expansions have been done so far in two main ways:

1. Companies send some of their qualified HQ staff into this new markets in order to open a new branch office, arrange joint-ventures or set up distributors.
    
2. The Company hires an outside consulting firm to perform this task.

This two main ways of approaching the expansion into new markets presents any company with several problems:

1. In the first described case, several problems arise for any company, which decides to use this path, are many. First of all, the company has to dispatch important people for this new project. This workforce will not be generating any business on the old markets, because they will be to busy with their new tasks. In addition to this, even though this HQ staff could have had great success in their native market, this does not guaranty success in the new markets. The reasons for that could be, but not limited to, the difference in languages, the different social aspects of doing business in these new markets or the administration differences regarding government requirements. The other main difficulty in this kind of expansion project is the large financial investment needed in order to cover all expenses needed in this kind of expansion.
2. If an outside consulting company is hired to perform this expansion task into new markets, many of the before mentioned problems are being solved, like the lack of understanding the local ways of doing business, languages, etc. These companies can be effective in performing this kind of business development tasks. The main objections are mostly the large consultancy fees charged by the consulting company, and once the project has concluded the set objectives, the initial consultants do normally not stay within the newly developed company in the new market.

Having listed the two main traditional ways of expanding a business into new markets, it is obvious that this is easily said but difficult to perform. There is a third avenue on how to address the expansion into new markets and support of the resulting customers, which can be in remote world locations. This new way of approach is called CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

CRM as a general thumb of rule, addresses the problematic of how to deal with the different business areas, needed to be covered in any market. These Systems should include at least three main functionalities like End User Support, Sales Force Automation, Marketing Automation Management.

By using this approach, a company, which desires to expand into a new market, can utilise the current HQ resources to cover the necessities, both in support and in sales, to expand their business into new markets in a flexible way. Having said that, at this right moment, the solutions offered by the main CRM developer companies so far are very expensive, and have a very long and costly implementation period. SETUP prices can reach easily 1.000.000 Euros and the implementation periods can take up to several years. For these reasons, the companies who can benefit of this kind of new technology are very few, and medium companies find it still easier and cheaper to use the old expansion alternatives.

Over the last several months some IT companies have emerged to address the large market of companies that would like to utilise the new CRM technology at an affordable cost, both in SETUP prices as in the implementation process. This companies cover most of the functionality’s covered by the large CRM providers, but do not integrate as much in the existing legacy products. These new CRM providers are more processes driven rather that data driven as its alternatives.