Researching a New Market: A Lean Method for Decision-Makers

Most new-market decisions are made one of two ways. Either a leadership team commissions a long study that arrives after the window has moved, or it skips research and lets one distributor conversation or one trade-show visit decide. Neither is a method. What most owners actually need sits in between: research that is cheap and quick, fits around a working calendar, and ends in a decision the board can defend.

This guide sets out that middle path. It uses four sources of evidence that any company can reach without a research budget: official statistics, platform audience data, a competitor audit built from public ad libraries and search results, and a small round of buyer interviews. Each stage has a clear output, and the whole process ends in one of three answers: go, test or wait.

1. Write the decision before you collect any data

Research without a defined decision expands to fill whatever time it is given. Before anyone opens a database, the leadership team should agree on a one-page brief that answers four questions:

1. What exactly are we deciding? “Should we enter the UAE?” is too broad. “Should we sell our industrial pump range to contractors in Dubai and Abu Dhabi through a local partner from next year?” can be researched.
2. What would have to be true for us to go? Write three to five hypotheses, for example: there are enough target buyers to support a sales team; buyers are dissatisfied with current suppliers on at least one dimension we can win on; we can reach them through channels we can afford; and our price can sit within the range they already pay.
3. What would make us stop? Agree the deal-breakers in advance, such as a licensing requirement you cannot meet, or a market where every buyer is locked into multi-year framework contracts.
4. Who owns the decision, and when? Put a date on it. A research sprint with no decision date becomes a permanent project.

Writing the deal-breakers first matters more than it looks. Once a team has spent weeks on a market, it wants the answer to be yes. Criteria agreed before the evidence arrives are the best protection against that bias.

2. Size the opportunity from official sources

Market sizing for a decision does not need to be precise. It needs to be accurate enough to tell you whether the opportunity is worth a sales team, a partner or nothing at all. Work in two directions and compare the results.

Top-down: the macro picture

Start with country-level context: economic growth, inflation, population and the outlook for the next few years. Three free sources cover most of this, and their access terms are worth knowing before you put their figures in a board paper.

For your purposes, macro data answers one question: is the market growing, stable or under pressure? It does not tell you how many customers you can win.

Bottom-up: count the buyers

The more useful estimate is built from the buyer upwards. Take a distributor of commercial kitchen equipment, for example, considering a new city. The calculation is: number of target establishments (restaurants, hotels, central kitchens) multiplied by the share likely to buy in a given year, multiplied by a realistic order value. Establishment counts can often come from national business statistics, chamber of commerce directories or licensing registers; the purchase share and order value come from your own sales history in comparable markets and from the interviews in step 5.

If the top-down and bottom-up figures differ by an order of magnitude, do not average them. Find out which assumption is wrong. That gap is often where the most important insight sits.

3. Read platform audience data without fooling yourself

Platform data tells you whether you can reach buyers digitally and at what scale. It is also among the most commonly misread evidence in market-entry papers.

The free DataReportal country reports, published by Kepios, compile internet adoption and platform advertising reach by country. Its Digital 2026 report for Saudi Arabia was published on 8 November 2025 using data available as of October 2025. It shows why the caveats matter: it reports 38.6 million social media user identities in Saudi Arabia, equal to 111 percent of the population, and states plainly that user identity figures “may not represent unique individuals”. The same report quotes Meta’s own warning that estimated audience size “is not a proxy for monthly or daily active users”, and notes that LinkedIn reach is based on registered members rather than active users.

Use platform data in three disciplined ways:

• As a reachability check, not a market size. If the advertising reach for your target job titles or interests in a country is tiny, digital acquisition will be hard. A large number does not mean demand.
• As a comparison between platforms within the same market, keeping in mind that each platform counts differently.
• Alongside search demand. Google Trends shows relative interest scaled from 0 to 100, not absolute search volumes, so it is useful for seasonality and for comparing terms or regions, not for counting buyers. Google’s Keyword Planner gives estimated monthly searches, but requires a Google Ads account with billing details set up, and very low-volume keywords may not be shown at all, which is common in niche B2B categories.

Search in the buyer’s language. In Arabic-speaking markets, research Arabic and English terms separately; the gap between them is often a finding in itself. Our guide to Arabic keyword research for B2B covers dialects and spellings.

4. Audit the competition from public sources

You can learn a great deal about how established suppliers sell in a market without speaking to any of them. Two free transparency tools do much of the work:

• Meta Ad Library. In 2019 Meta expanded the library to include all active ads any Page is running, not only political or issue ads. Search for each competitor’s Page and record what they are promoting, which offers they lead with, what language they write in and, where the library shows it, when each ad started running.
• Google Ads Transparency Center. Google’s Advertising Policies Help describes it as “a searchable repository of advertisers and the ads they’ve served” across Search, Display, Gmail and YouTube. You can look up an advertiser and filter its ads by date and targeted location; advertisers are labelled as verified or unverified.

Then search the way a buyer would: the main category terms in both languages, in the target country. Note who ranks, who advertises, who appears on maps, and what their websites, company profiles and LinkedIn pages promise. Capture everything in one sheet with the same columns for every competitor:

The aim is not to copy anyone. It is to find the position that is still open, which is the starting point for brand positioning if you decide to go. For a fuller study, see what a useful B2B competitor analysis should deliver.

5. Talk to buyers: a short interview guide

Desk research tells you what the market looks like. Only buyers can tell you why they buy, from whom, and what would make them switch. Aim for conversations with people who actually make or influence the purchase: procurement managers, technical managers, owners. Include a few who would never buy from you; their reasons are often the most useful.

There is no universal correct number of interviews for a decision like this. A practical rule many teams use is to keep going until new conversations stop producing new reasons, and to make sure each important buyer type is represented. Treat the interviews as qualitative evidence, not as a survey with percentages.

A 30-minute guide you can adapt to most B2B categories:

1. Tell me about the last time you bought [category]. What triggered it?
2. Who else was involved in the decision, and who had the final say?
3. Which suppliers did you consider, and how did you find them?
4. What made you choose the one you chose? What nearly made you choose another?
5. What frustrates you about your current supplier?
6. What would a new supplier need to prove before you would consider them? (Approvals, references, local stock, after-sales service.)
7. How do you prefer to receive information: WhatsApp, email, a visit, an exhibition, a website?
8. Roughly what range do you pay today, and how is payment usually structured?
9. Who else should I speak to?

Ask about past behaviour, not hypothetical intentions. “Would you buy from us?” invites politeness. “What did you do last time?” produces evidence. Summarise each interview the same day against your hypotheses from step 1.

6. Make the call: go, test or wait

Bring the evidence back to the brief. For each hypothesis, mark it supported, contradicted or still unknown, and check the deal-breakers. The decision then usually falls into one of three outcomes:

“Test” is the most underused answer. Many companies treat entry as all or nothing, when a test focused on the riskiest assumption usually costs far less than a full launch and turns guesses into data. If the answer is go, the research becomes the basis of the plan: the segments, messages and channels are already in your notes. Our guides to building an annual marketing plan and launching as an exclusive distributor in Saudi Arabia pick up from there.

At RX, this kind of market and competitor research sits at the start of our marketing strategy and research work. Once a market decision is made, the brand and launch work follows, as in our GCS case, where we built the identity, launch system and sales tools for a new fire-safety brand entering Saudi Arabia.

The first step costs nothing: write the one-page brief from step 1 this week, with the decision in one sentence, the hypotheses and the deal-breakers, and have the people who will make the call sign it. If they cannot agree on the deal-breakers, the research is not ready to start.