Entering the US market as an international company.
Your product works. A large US company has taken the meeting, or a program put you in front of one, and the conversation has been friendly for weeks. But nobody has told you who signs, or what has to be true before a pilot turns into a purchase order.
Key takeaways
- Entering the US market as an international company means surviving a screen most founders never see coming: security, legal, IT, and procurement, funded from a budget set months earlier.
- The person who is enthusiastic about you, the champion, is rarely the person who controls the budget.
- A demo shows your software runs; a proof shows it moves a number the buyer already tracks, using their own data.
- Pilots that die usually died because success criteria were never written down and agreed in advance.
- A corporate pilot typically runs through seven stages in sequence, which is why it takes longer than the pilot itself.
How it shows up
- A corporate innovation team is enthusiastic and nothing has moved since the first call.
- Your champion is genuinely excited but can't tell you who controls the budget.
- A security questionnaire arrived and nobody on your team has answered one.
- The pilot ran, everyone said it went well, and no purchase order followed.
- Procurement wants a US entity, tax forms, insurance certificates, and a data agreement.
- Your price is set against competitors at home, and the buyer can't map it to any budget line.
- Every reference you have is outside the United States, and the buyer wants one they can call.
- A second group inside the same company wants a demo, and the first group has gone quiet.
What is usually underneath it
The champion and the budget owner are different people
The person who found you is rarely the person who can spend. A budget owner holds a cost center, a plan that was set before you turned up, and a boss who asks what the money bought. Until you know that person by name, you're selling to someone who can't say yes.
A demo is not a proof
A demo shows that your software runs. A proof shows that it moves a number the buyer already tracks, using their data. What they need is evidence that survives a skeptical colleague who was never in the room.
Success criteria were never written down
Most pilots that die were never scored. Nobody agreed up front what the pilot had to produce, by when, and who would decide. So at the end the champion likes it, finance asks what it proved, and nobody can point at a page.
The gatekeepers add time nobody budgeted for
Security, legal, privacy, IT, and procurement each hold a queue and a veto. None of them care about your roadmap, and they run in sequence unless your sponsor asks otherwise.
Technical superiority is rarely the deciding factor
Corporates buy the option that's defensible to the person who signs. Put a better product carrying unfamiliar paperwork next to an adequate one that already clears every review, and the second wins more often. Being better is necessary, but it isn't what closes.
How we work it
- 01
Diagnose
We establish how the buyer you're chasing actually decides: who owns the problem, who owns the budget, which reviews the purchase has to clear, and where a company like yours tends to stall. What comes out names the constraint, and more often than not it's the buying process rather than the product.
- 02
Advise
Eleven 186 recommends the sequence: which buyer to pursue first, what to price against, what to build before you sell, and what to refuse. Price gets anchored to what the problem costs the buyer today. Eleven 186 has worked across multiple verticals, so the comparison set is not one industry's habits.
- 03
Build
Eleven 186 builds the missing pieces. A written success-criteria document the sponsor can carry internally. Security and data-handling answers prepared before anyone asks. A pricing model tied to the buyer's cost of the problem. Where the gap is software, the constraint goes into the architecture first.
- 04
Execute
We stay through the pilot: stakeholder coordination, procurement support, scheduling the reviews, and the conversion conversation at the end. And when a question needs a domain specialist, the firm draws on an advisory network across business sectors.
What changes
- You know the name of the person who can actually spend money, and what they're measured on.
- The pilot has a written definition of success that both sides signed before it started, so the conversion conversation becomes arithmetic rather than opinion.
- Security, legal, and procurement stop arriving as surprises, because most of what they ask is answered before they ask it.
Questions before you commit to the market
How do large US corporates select startups for a pilot?
Selection starts with an internal sponsor who owns a problem and heard about you somewhere. That sponsor then has to survive a screen: security and data handling, legal terms, IT integration, procurement onboarding, and a budget owner funding it out of a plan set months earlier. Founders read the early enthusiasm as the decision, but it's really the start of the queue.
What does a corporate actually want to see in a proof of concept?
A number the buyer already tracks, moving in a direction the buyer cares about, measured in a way their own finance and operations people accept. So that's a named metric, a baseline, a test period, a threshold, and a plan for what happens if the threshold is met. A demo shows that your software runs; a proof shows that it works here, with their data.
Do we need a US entity before we start selling?
It depends, and this isn't legal or tax advice. Some buyers will run an early pilot with a foreign entity. Others can't onboard a supplier at all without a US entity, US banking details, tax documentation, and insurance that meets their standard. Ask the buyer what their vendor onboarding actually requires before you spend money on a structure, and then take that answer to qualified counsel in the United States.
How long does a corporate pilot usually take?
Longer than the pilot itself, because the pilot is one stage of seven. Sponsor identification, written success criteria, security and legal review, procurement onboarding, the pilot run, the internal readout, and the budget decision for the following period. Reviews run in sequence more often than in parallel, and the budget decision follows the buyer's planning calendar.
Tell us the problem
Describe the opportunity, the buyer, and where the conversation stopped moving, and we'll tell you what's blocking it.