Soft landing is not a visit: why SMEs need structured support when entering foreign markets

Internationalisation is often described as a strategic move: a company identifies a market, finds customers abroad and expands. For many SMEs, this framing sounds neat, but it doesn’t match reality.

Going international is rarely a single “entry moment”. It is a transition into a new business environment, with its own rules, networks and expectations. This is why soft landing matters. Not as a symbolic activity or a study visit, but as structured support that reduces uncertainty and helps SMEs take their first sustainable steps in a foreign market.

A market is not just a place where you sell. It is a system. It includes regulation and administration, but also informal norms, industry networks, trust relations and established ways of doing business. Large firms can afford to explore this system through dedicated teams, consultants and long timelines. SMEs usually cannot. The cost of getting oriented is high, and the penalty for early mistakes is often higher than in a larger organisation.

One of the most underestimated barriers in early internationalisation is not competition. It is orientation. Even when a company has a strong offer, it can struggle to answer basic questions: Who are the relevant stakeholders? Which channels actually work here? How do customers evaluate credibility? What is expected in negotiations? Where do you start without wasting months?

Soft landing mechanisms reduce this initial confusion. They help firms translate a new market into something actionable: where to focus first, which institutions or communities are relevant, what is worth testing, and what typical pitfalls look like. This does not remove risk, but it lowers the cost of experimentation. For SMEs, that difference can determine whether internationalisation happens at all.

Trust is another barrier that cannot be solved with marketing alone. Products can cross borders quickly; credibility cannot. In many markets, a new foreign supplier is simply perceived as riskier. The company may have references at home, but those references do not automatically transfer. Soft landing support can accelerate trust-building by connecting SMEs through established organisations and networks. Being introduced via a credible intermediary changes how a company is perceived and can speed up early relationship-building in ways that cold outreach rarely achieves.

There is also a learning dimension that is often overlooked. Internationalisation is not only a sales project. It is capability building. Firms need to develop new routines: communicating across cultures, adjusting product and positioning, understanding compliance requirements, negotiating partnerships, and iterating based on feedback from unfamiliar customers. These capabilities are not built overnight. Soft landing is most valuable when it provides a learning environment, not just information. It allows companies to move step by step, test assumptions, adapt and return with clearer priorities.

This is where regional, ecosystem-based approaches become particularly relevant. Soft landing works best when it is embedded in cross-border collaboration between business support organisations. In the Baltic Sea Region, internationalisation often happens incrementally and through networks. Proximity, overlapping standards and existing cooperation structures can support SMEs, but only if firms can access them in practical ways.

Projects such as BSR Go-abroad contribute to strengthening these pathways. By connecting organisations across countries and creating structured support for SMEs, the project helps reduce barriers that are structural rather than purely firm-specific. It makes market entry less dependent on exceptional resources and more dependent on accessible support mechanisms, networks and guidance.

Soft landing is not a shortcut. It is a foundation. For SMEs, structured entry support reduces uncertainty, lowers the cost of early experimentation and accelerates trust-building. It turns internationalisation from an isolated challenge into a supported process.

BSR Go-abroad is co-funded by the European Union through the Interreg Baltic Sea Region programme.

Programme Manual Online

Choose