Supposing your company is neither a Leader nor a Challenger, but a Survivor... at least, in Spanish-speaking countries (the territory we are considering). 

Remember: a Survivor's products and brand are unknown, or barely known, in the target market. Things get more complicated if the company has not sold anything in these markets. In this case, there's no sales performance history to make informed decisions. 

Not to mention the added difficulty of language and cultural barriers if the Survivor's home country is not Spanish-speaking.

A Survivor will rarely choose to establish its own branch in these foreign and distant markets, staffed by employees whose salaries and labor costs must be paid, plus the office's monthly expenses.

Two reasons prevent Survivors from establishing on their own in such territories: (a) the budget is very limited for developing business in faraway territories; (b) high uncertainty about sales performance in these countries, further discouraging them from investing significant resources to develop business there.

A Survivor has typically two options to sell in these territories: (1) to sell directly from your home country to prospects in these distant territories or (2) to partner with local distributors to resell your products in these markets.

Let me tell you next why both options almost always end in a frustrating waste of time and money.

• The «Know-who Barrier»

Option (1) will fail due to a «bidirectional lack of knowledge».

Remember: by definition, a Survivor’s company brand and products are unknown or barely known in the (targeted) markets. Therefore, their company and products will be virtually invisible to potential customers… just like another «water drop in the ocean». Also, a Survivor does not know «who's who» in targeted markets: all what they can know comes from external sources, such as the Internet, which are often outdated. 

This two-way lack of knowledge maximises their chances of failure.

• The «Intentions vs. Results Barrier»

Aristotle said that humans are social animals, meaning that we are designed by nature to live in groups and interact with other members within the group: family, friends, and co-workers, and with other groups.

Fulfilling our life goals depends on others, and these dependencies apply to our business activities.

It is part of our human nature to strive to be accepted by social groups that are key to our success (and survival), so we'll always try to show others the best version of ourselves, omitting our weaknesses. The same goes for others when they interact with us: they show us their best version while trying to hide their worst.

This socialisation strategy is a fact of life, and we must also account for it when we establish business partnerships with channels in faraway markets. In other words, no potential partner will speak badly about themselves in front of us, and we won't tell them either about our weaknesses.

The problem is that we never know beforehand if a partner we've chosen to sell our products in their market will sell them at the end of the day, that is, if their intentions will turn into results.

The partner might be doing an excellent job selling other products of their portfolio, but might do poorly at selling ours: a good sales performance history with someone else’s product does not warrant a good sales performance with ours.

Adding to this is another problem, which I call the «effective partner paradox».

An effective partner is selling well before we contact them. A partner that sells well is very busy serving their customers, has many qualified prospects in the sales pipeline (for their existing portfolio), and has other daily issues to deal with. This means a heavy workload that lets the partner little or no room to address other things and invest their valuable resources (people, time, money) in more things… like positioning and selling a new product (ours).

Worse yet, our product is a «question mark» for an effective partner: they have not sold it yet, so they cannot know its sales performance... i.e., high uncertainty that will discourage them from promoting and selling our product.

This vicious cycle is what I call the «effective partner paradox», a vicious cycle that proves very difficult to break.

All these factors compound to build this high «Intentions vs. Results Barrier», the second cause of failure of most plans to sell in Spanish-speaking countries.