Is two months too early to call a US market entry a failure?

Two cycles are running at the same time. The first is the diagnostic cycle: does the website sort US visitors into a qualified call, does the deck land on the second meeting, does the proof packet survive forwarding, does the price posture not break the deal. That diagnostic cycle takes four to eight weeks. The second is the actual sales cycle: discovery, technical, procurement, security review, legal, signature. For a foreign supplier, that runs six to twelve months for enterprise, three to nine for mid-market. Per Roland Berger Mittelstand 2025-2026, the structural sort happens early and the close happens late. Mixing the two is the most expensive error in US market entry.

What pulls firms out at month two is rarely the market. It is the founding team treating early silence as a verdict and the CFO running out of patience because the runway model assumed a US sales cycle that does not exist in the data. IMAP German Mid-Cap M&A 2026 shows that DACH-to-US firms that survive month six see a sharp pipeline inflection inside the next quarter. The firms that pull at month two never see it. The same product, the same page, in another quarter, would have closed.

A useful number: a typical first US close for a foreign B2B vendor lands at month 7-9. Anything calling failure before then is reading runway, not market.