The Spanish-speaking LATAM market
Spanish-speaking LATAM countries is a huge market of ≈430 million citizens and +15 million business establishments, located in an area of ≈11.5 million square kilometers. This market poses several challenges for technology providers. We mention below just four of them:
Large regions, few roads
LATAM's irregular orography, long distances between sites, defficient roads in many regions, are among the problems that can make it difficult for people to access sites where their business data is generated and/or stored, or directly prevent them from reaching them. Remote monitoring and management is a key need frequently cited by the market.
Eventual security issues
Citizens and property insecurity are among the main problems in many LATAM cities and other places, and these issues affect business processes, like taking onsite data readings from field devices such as meters, sensors and the like. Technology tools for remote monitoring and management is an absolute must.
Language barriers
«According to the English Proficiency Index, “Latin America is the region [with] the lowest levels of English” as of 2020.» (For instance) «according to the index, some of the Latin American countries with the lowest rates of English proficiency are Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Mexico.»
(source: https://borgenproject.org/english-learning-in-latin-america/).
Budget constraints
Technology adoption in LATAM faces severe budget constraints, driven by high implementation costs for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), limited local venture capital, currency volatility, and tight public sector fiscal limits. Customers must carefully measure ROI for every dollar spent on cloud, AI, and digital infrastructure.
To sell in this market a foreign vendor must have four enablers
Some uniqueness
The vendor's portfolio must have at least a single, unique sales proposition (USP) that sets it apart from competition. But this can often be «wishful thinking»: too frequently sales messages claiming a «unique advantage» is marketing «fluff». A real unique advantage must be clearly perceived by the market as such.
Relevant market reach
Emailing or social networks campaigns usually prove to be ineffective efforts to sell in markets where vendors name and products are unknown or barely known. Another problem with market reach is the «Know-who Barrier», a metaphoric term to describe situations where your company doesn't know «who's who» in the market, which ends up in wasted time and money in trying to sell to real prospects, as too often you'll find «false positives».
Cost-effective offer
No matter how powerful and feature-rich your might be, if your price is above the market's acceptable spending budget, you won't sell. Now, knowing what the acceptable spending budget is becomes the «one-million question»... which leads us to the Relevant Market Reach enabler. Without a throrough knowledge of the market, your best answer to the question will be a (likely wrong) «guesstimate».
Consistent support
If your company doesn't devote support resources to backup your market sales activities, you better don't try to develop that market at all. Yor support plan must include a clear pre and post sale policy based on support metrics that should be understood (and followed) by everybody involved: customers, local channels, your company.
To sell in this market a holistic platform is needed
Our end-to-end, application-agnostic and device-agnostic IoT platform was designed to overcome the four challenges mentioned above and other business development barriers found in Spanish-speaking countries, while includes the four enablers of above, plus other advantages.
See the Solutions section.