A major thing that holds us back and will continue to do so in B2B (coming from someone whose last startup failed): differences in language/customs/needs linked to the multitude of cultures in the region.
We hired someone that could sell in Italian, French, and Spanish. Her profile is fairly rare, given she had a good understanding of the customer. I can't believe our CEO let her go simply because of a 4-days at the office obsession…
LLMs can't really fix this. Even though she could speak Spanish, the culture and customer needs for Spain will be a little different than those for Italy. Traditions will be different. She's a wonderful human being, but imagine a customer in France not liking her “Belgian accent” and tanking a sale… She was really losing motivation because of that. The 2 other people on sales struggled more or less with the same issue.
All hail LLMs, if you want, but Europe's issues are not that easily fixed. We end up obsessing about the wrong stuff, as if compliance and regulation was the Big Problem, instead of a boogeyman that neoliberals love to hate.
Yeah the standard advice for European startups is to sell in the US first and worry about the local markets later, language and culture barriers are still huge.
It wouldn't work for us, plenty of entrenched competitors. In the EU? Zero direct competition. We focused on France and expanded later, France is a good enough market for some stuff. Can't imagine trying to compete in the US!