Mexico and LatAm Market Entry: The First Ninety Days

Market entry into Mexico stops at finance more often than at marketing. A B2B buyer cannot expense an invoice that is not a CFDI issued against their RFC, so a developer tool billing from a US entity with a PDF receipt reaches a signed pilot and then dies inside accounts payable. On the consumer side the equivalent is meses sin intereses: high-ticket furniture moves on twelve and eighteen month interest-free bank installments, and a checkout without them is competing on price against rivals competing on monthly payment. We settle both in week one, before anyone opens a channel discussion. The ninety-day plan: Sequencing rather than a list. What has to be true before the first peso of demand generation, what has to be true before the first local hire, and what can wait until the second quarter at no cost. Entity, invoicing and payment rails: SPEI for business transfers, Mercado Pago and installment providers for consumer, cash payment at OXXO for a segment that still matters more than most foreign teams expect. A privacy notice under the LFPDPPP, which is not GDPR and carries its own required wording. PROFECO exposure on comparative and promotional claims, which is where imported advertising copy usually breaks. For physical goods, NOM commercial labeling arranged before inventory lands rather than after customs holds it. First customers, named: Not a persona. An actual list of accounts or a defined retail footprint, with the route to each and the person who owns that route. For developer tools this usually means engineering leadership at a small number of named companies plus the regional cloud and systems partners already selling into them; Spanish documentation matters less than most teams assume and regional latency matters considerably more. For furniture it means showroom-adjacent geography, Mercado Libre and department store retail as demand sources before your own site earns any, and a delivery promise you can keep in a city where a same-week window is itself a differentiator. Pricing for the market: Not a currency conversion. We set the local price against local willingness to pay and against who you will actually be compared with, work out what that does to your global price floor and your existing contracts, and tell you honestly if the answer is that this market cannot carry your product at a price you can accept. Two recent engagements ended on that recommendation. Both clients returned for other work. Not included: Launch PR and press relations. Legal and tax filings, which need local counsel and a contador; we specify what has to exist and work alongside whoever you retain. Recruitment, though we will write the brief for the first hire. Creative production. Media buying. Nothing in the plan routes to a service we sell you afterwards. The wrong engagement if: You want a market-entry deck for investors or a board. That is a different document with a different purpose and we do not write it. Your launch date is fixed to a trade show, so the plan has to fit the date rather than the readiness, in which case you need a producer, not us. Or you intend to enter four Latin American markets simultaneously, which is not four times this engagement but a different and worse idea, and we would argue you out of it before quoting. Languages: English and Spanish. All local research, including conversations with distributors, banks and partners, is conducted in Spanish.