Every founder we talk to eventually asks some version of the same question: "We have a good product. Why is it so hard to find the right customers over there?"
It's a fair question, and most generic B2B advice doesn't really answer it. Plenty of guides will tell you to "build an ICP" and "run cold outreach," as if the process is identical whether you're selling to a manufacturer in Taichung or a distributor in Warsaw. It isn't. When you're working across the Taiwan–Europe corridor, the real obstacles aren't sales technique — they're language, trust-building norms, and simply not knowing who the right 200 companies even are. This is the part of our B2B lead generation work that people underestimate until they've tried to do it themselves.
So here's a practical walkthrough of what actually works, based on what we do with clients moving in both directions — European companies entering Taiwan, and Taiwanese companies entering Europe.
Start With Who, Not How
Most companies jump straight to outreach tactics — cold email templates, LinkedIn scripts — before answering a more basic question: who, precisely, are we trying to reach?
An Ideal Customer Profile sounds like a marketing buzzword, but stripped down it's just a specific, falsifiable description of your best-fit buyer: industry, company size, region, the title of the person who actually signs off, and the problem that's currently keeping them up at night. Skip this step and every other step gets more expensive — you end up cold-emailing companies that were never going to buy from you, which is exhausting and tells you nothing useful.
Cross-border, this step also has to include a market-fit question most domestic guides skip entirely: does this product even need local adaptation to sell in Taiwan or in Europe? We've seen strong products stall for months because the pitch, the pricing structure, or even the payment terms weren't adjusted for the market. This is closer to digital marketing and positioning work than it is to sales — it happens before a single outbound message goes out.
Where the Prospect List Actually Comes From
Once you know who you're looking for, the sourcing itself usually comes from a mix of:
- Trade databases and registries — company registration records, industry association directories, chamber of commerce listings
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator — still the most reliable way to filter by title, company size, and region, though it takes real skill to use well rather than just running broad keyword searches
- Trade shows and delegations — Taiwan Expo in Warsaw was a good example of this in action; a few focused days of in-person conversation can do more than months of cold email
- Prospecting tools like Apollo.io or ZoomInfo for building and enriching lists at scale
- Dormant contacts — leads that went quiet six months ago aren't dead, they were probably just early
None of these sources is inherently better than another — the mix depends on the sector. Industrial and hardware buyers in Taiwan still respond well to warm introductions and trade show contact; European SaaS buyers are often easier to reach cold on LinkedIn. Knowing which channel to lean on for which market is honestly half the job.
Qualifying Without Wasting Anyone's Time
Once you have names, the next question is whether they're actually worth pursuing right now. The classic framework here — budget, authority, need, timing — still holds up, mostly because it forces a useful discipline: don't pitch until you understand whether this person can buy, wants to buy, and has a reason to buy soon.
In practice, across the corridor, "authority" is the one that trips people up most. Decision-making in Taiwanese companies is often more consensus-driven and layered than a typical European org chart suggests, and the person who replies to your first email is frequently not the person who signs the contract. Same problem shows up in reverse — a European company entering Taiwan will often misjudge who actually holds budget authority on the other side. This is one of the genuine cultural gaps we cover in more depth in our piece on business culture and negotiation norms in Taiwan, and it applies just as much within Europe — business culture varies more across the EU-27 than most non-Europeans assume.
The First Conversation Matters More Than the Script
There's a temptation to over-engineer the cold outreach script. In our experience, the structure matters less than most guides claim — what matters is:
- Respecting the person's time in the first ten seconds
- Being specific about why you're reaching out to them, not a templated version of them
- Asking one real question instead of pitching
- Proposing a small, low-friction next step — a 15-minute call, not a demo
Across a language and culture gap, that first point does even more work than usual. A message that reads as slightly too aggressive, too casual, or too vague about intent will get ignored — or worse, quietly damage trust before you've had a real conversation. This is exactly why local presence and native-language nuance change outcomes so much; it's a big part of why companies are increasingly paying attention to Taiwan as a serious market rather than treating it as an afterthought behind China.
Track the Right Numbers, Not All the Numbers
Most teams either track nothing or track everything, and both are useless. The metrics actually worth watching:
- Conversion rate at each stage — first contact to meeting, meeting to proposal, proposal to close
- Sales cycle length, and whether it's shrinking or stretching
- Reasons for "no" — this is the most underused data source in most companies. Every rejection tells you something about positioning, pricing, or targeting, if someone actually writes it down
If your cycle length is quietly doubling on cross-border deals compared to domestic ones, that's not a fluke — it's usually a signal that trust-building is taking longer than your process accounts for, which is common and fixable, not a reason to give up on the market.
Build a System, Not a Habit
The single biggest difference between companies that grow steadily across the corridor and ones that stall is whether business development is a repeatable process or something one motivated person does when they have spare time. A documented list-building method, a qualification standard everyone uses the same way, and a simple lead-tracking system (hot, warm, cold, with a clear next action for each) will outperform a brilliant individual working from memory, every time.
If your company is expanding into Poland or elsewhere in the EU specifically, this is also the point where the operational side — company registration, tax compliance, contracts — needs to be lined up in parallel, not bolted on after the first deal closes. We handle a fair amount of this through our corporate, tax, and legal support work in Poland, precisely because sales momentum dies fast when the legal entity isn't ready to actually invoice the customer you just won.
A Few Tools Worth Knowing
Beyond LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Apollo.io, a solid CRM — HubSpot's free tier is a reasonable starting point — makes the tracking piece above far less painful than a spreadsheet. For understanding macro timing, keeping an eye on where the underlying economies are headed matters more than people think: Taiwan's growth trajectory, for instance, has been outpacing expectations lately, and its GDP per capita overtaking Japan and South Korea is exactly the kind of signal that should shape which markets get budget priority this year.
The Honest Takeaway
None of this is complicated in theory. It's slow, it's detail-heavy, and cross-border it comes with extra friction that most generic sales advice simply doesn't account for — language, decision-making culture, and the fact that trust often has to be built in person before it can be built over email. That's true whether you're a European manufacturer trying to find distributors in Taiwan, or a Taiwanese tech company trying to land its first few enterprise clients in the EU.
If you'd rather not spend the next six months learning this the hard way, get in touch — this is what we do, day to day, on the ground in both directions. You can also read more about how we work and the kind of companies we've helped make the jump.
Polylocal supports brands and companies building their presence and growth across Europe and Asia. Get in touch to talk about your project.
