Go to market strategy Australia: a 10-step B2B outbound plan

The short answer

A go-to-market strategy for Australia is a plan for which businesses you will sell to, at what price in Australian dollars, through which channels, and in what order. For an outbound-led B2B company the core is simple. Pick a narrow customer profile, build a verified list from public registers, and run a sequence of calls, emails and LinkedIn touches. Fit that sequence to Australian calling hours and to the consent and suppression rules. Measure each stage and change one thing at a time.

This guide is written for UK and other overseas B2B companies entering Australia, and for Australian companies planning their first outbound push. It runs as ten steps, ending with a 90-day plan. This is a plain-English summary, not legal advice.

Step 1 Define your ideal customer profile

Start with the customers you already win. List your best ten accounts in any market and write down what they share: industry, headcount, the job title of the person who signed, the problem that made them buy, and how long the deal took. That is your first profile. Then ask which parts will hold in Australia and which were local to your home market.

Keep the first profile narrow. "Australian SMEs" is not a profile. "Property management firms with 20 to 199 staff, where the operations manager owns tenant communications" is. A narrow profile gives you a list you can finish, a message that fits, and results you can read after a few weeks.

For each profile, write down the trigger that makes a company look for a product like yours, the person who feels the problem, and the person who signs. In smaller firms these are often one person.

Step 2 Size the market from official sources

The Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes a count of actively trading businesses each year. Its release of 18 August 2026 put the total at 2,814,778 businesses at 30 June 2026, of which 996,203 employ staff. The employing businesses split by size like this:

Source: ABS, Counts of Australian Businesses, including Entries and Exits. The release also breaks the count down by industry and by state, which is the next cut to make for your profile.

Use these figures to sanity-check a plan, not to forecast revenue. Firms with 200 or more staff number a few thousand across every industry, so that is a named-account market where each call is researched. Firms with 5 to 19 staff form a large pool, and the work is filtering it down to those with your trigger.

A simple sizing sum: profile count, times the share you could plausibly reach in a year, times your expected win rate, times your average annual contract value. Put your own assumptions in and write them down, so you can check them against real numbers at day 90.

Step 3 Price in Australian dollars and handle GST

Quote in Australian dollars. A price that moves with the exchange rate is harder to approve. Use Australian reference customers in your positioning as soon as you have them.

Goods and services tax is 10% on most goods and services sold in Australia. A business must register once its GST turnover reaches A$75,000, and business.gov.au states the same threshold for an overseas business selling imported services or digital products to Australian consumers. Once you are registered, your invoices must be tax invoices. Selling only to businesses can change how GST applies to an overseas supplier, so take advice on your own position before you set prices. Whatever the answer, say on every quote and price page whether the figure includes GST.

Step 4 Choose your channel mix

Most outbound-led teams combine several of these channels.

If you are coming from the UK, the mix will look familiar. The UK version of this plan is in go-to-market strategy for the UK, and the calling craft for Australia is in how to cold call in Australia.

Step 5 Source and verify your data

Australia has good public registers for checking that a business exists and who runs it. ABN Lookup shows whether an Australian Business Number is active, the entity name and type, whether it is registered for GST, and the state and postcode of its main business location. ASIC's registers hold company and business name records. Together they let you remove dead companies from a bought list and confirm that a sole trader is still trading.

For people and phone numbers you will usually combine a commercial contact database, LinkedIn research and the company's own website. Treat every number as unverified until a call or a lookup confirms it. Record where each contact came from, because you may be asked for the source later (step 7).

A dead number check (an HLR lookup) asks the mobile network whether a mobile is live, switched off or dead, so the team stops dialling numbers that cannot answer. It works on mobiles only, and some networks, Telstra among them, do not return a live status, so those numbers come back undetermined. How the lookup works is in HLR lookups explained, and the TPSClear dead number check is on the features page.

Pay attention to mobiles. Under section 14 of the Do Not Call Register Act 2006, a number can go on the register if it is used or maintained mainly for private or domestic purposes. A pure business line cannot be registered. A sole trader's mobile can be, if it is used mainly for private purposes, which is why B2B teams still wash mobile numbers. The registers are compared in TPS vs Do Not Call vs DNCR.

Step 6 Manage consent

The law in brief. Section 16 of the Spam Act 2003 bars commercial email and SMS with an Australian link unless the recipient consented. Under Schedule 2, consent can be express or inferred, and clause 4 infers it from a conspicuously published work address, published with the person's or organisation's agreement and with no statement refusing marketing, as long as the message is relevant to their role. For calls, section 11(2) of the Do Not Call Register Act lets you call a registered number with the account holder's consent.

In practice, hold a consent field on each contact with four values: express, inferred from publication, none, and withdrawn. For inferred consent, save the page where the address was published and the date you saw it. A generic address scraped from a directory is not the same as a named person's address on their own company's team page.

At events and webinars, ask for express consent on the form and record the wording. That turns a cold contact into one you can email and call without relying on inference. The UK side of the same question is covered in calling a TPS number with consent.

Step 7 Keep suppression lists

The law in brief. Section 11 of the Do Not Call Register Act bars telemarketing calls to registered numbers. A caller who washed the number through their own submission in the 30 days before the call, with a result showing it was not registered, has a defence under section 11(3). The Spam Act requires an unsubscribe facility in every commercial message (section 18), and an unsubscribe takes effect five business days after it is sent (Schedule 2, clause 6).

Run three lists, and apply them in this order before every campaign:

1. Your own do-not-contact list. Anyone who asked you to stop calling or emailing. Under the Telemarketing Industry Standard 2017, section 13(1)(b), the caller must end the call when the person asks. Log the request against the number and email address the same day.
2. Email unsubscribes. Action them well inside the five business days, and keep the unsubscribe address working for at least 30 days after each send (section 18).
3. The Do Not Call Register wash. Wash every number you intend to call, and wash again before the 30 days run out. Keep the wash result with the date.

One detail matters if someone else washes for you. The section 11(3) defence covers a list "submitted by the person" making the call. If a supplier washes on its own ACMA account, you rely instead on section 11(5), reasonable precautions and due diligence, and section 11(6) puts an evidential burden on you to point to that evidence. TPSClear offers both routes for Australia: a managed wash, and an integration that runs on your own ACMA account so the section 11(3) defence stays with you. Details are on Australian pricing.

Businesses with turnover over A$3 million (section 6D of the Privacy Act 1988) may also face Australian Privacy Principle 7, which steps aside where the Do Not Call Register Act or the Spam Act applies (APP 7.8). How UK teams run the same lists is in TPS and CTPS suppression explained.

Step 8 Design sequences around Australian calling hours

Section 8 of the Telecommunications (Telemarketing and Research Calls) Industry Standard 2017 sets the hours for telemarketing calls:

• Weekdays: not before 9am or after 8pm.
• Saturday: not before 9am or after 5pm.
• Sunday: no calls.
• No calls at all on New Year's Day, Australia Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Anzac Day, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, or on a weekday given in lieu of one of them.

The time that counts is the time at the account holder's usual residential address (section 8(4)), not the time where your caller sits. Perth is in a different time zone from the east coast, and not every state moves its clocks for daylight saving. Store a time zone on every contact and let the dialler enforce the window. The hours can be lifted for a particular call only where the person gave express consent in advance (section 8(5)).

For a UK team, the overlap is narrow. A London morning is the east coast's evening, close to the end of the weekday window. The usual options are to hire a caller in Australia, use a local partner, or run an early-morning UK shift aimed at Western Australia and use email for the east coast until a local hire starts.

A workable first sequence for B2B over three weeks:

1. Day 1: a short email naming the trigger and one result for a similar company.
2. Day 2: a call. If there is no answer, no voicemail on the first attempt.
3. Day 4: a LinkedIn connection with no pitch in the note.
4. Day 7: a second call, at a different time of day, then a voicemail.
5. Day 10: a follow-up email with one piece of local proof or a useful resource.
6. Day 14 to 21: two more calls, then a short closing email.

Every email in that sequence carries your identity and an unsubscribe line. Every call starts with the identification in step 9.

Step 9 Run the sales process

Opening the call. Section 9(2) of the Industry Standard sets what the caller must say as soon as the call starts. That is their given name, their employer's name, the name of the business the call is for if different, and the purpose of the call. On request, they must give contact details including an Australian number that takes voice calls in business hours (sections 9(4) and 11). Section 14 requires calling line identification to be on, and the number shown must lead back to that information. A hidden number or a number nobody answers breaks the Standard.

These duties apply to telemarketing calls to Australian numbers whether or not the number is on the register. A B2B call to a business switchboard is still covered by the hours and identification rules.

Working with partners and agencies. If you pay a partner or call centre to call for you, section 11(9) of the Do Not Call Register Act treats you as having caused those calls. Section 12 requires the contract to contain an express provision that the caller will comply with the Act, and will take all reasonable steps to make its employees and agents comply. Put the clause in before the first call, and ask who washes the list and on whose account.

From meeting to contract. Define stages by what the buyer has done: meeting held, problem confirmed, proposal sent, verbal yes, signed. Ask early who signs, whether procurement is involved, and whether the buyer needs an Australian entity, local data storage or local support hours.

Give buyers a named contact they can reach in their own working day, with an Australian number. The UK calling method is in how to cold call in the UK.

Step 10 Measure the funnel

Track a small set of numbers weekly, per profile and per channel:

• Records sourced and verified. How many contacts passed the ABN check, the wash and the consent check.
• Dials, connects and conversations. Connect rate is conversations divided by dials. Low connects usually mean bad numbers or the wrong time of day.
• Email replies and unsubscribes. A rising unsubscribe rate means the message or the profile is wrong.
• Meetings booked and held. A gap between booked and held means the meeting was not qualified.
• Opportunities, proposals and wins. With the time each stage took.
• Opt-outs and complaints. Every one logged, with the campaign and the list it came from.

Change one variable at a time: the profile, the opener, the email, or the time of day.

A 90-day plan

At day 90, compare the sizing assumptions from step 2 with what happened. If the win rate or deal size is far off, change the profile before adding headcount.

Notes for UK companies

The Spam Act can reach messages sent from outside Australia. Under section 7 of the Spam Act, an email has an Australian link if, among other things, the person receiving it is in Australia when they access it. A UK company emailing Australian prospects from London is inside the Act.

The UK and Australian rules differ in ways that trip up teams running both. In the UK, business numbers can sit on the CTPS and B2B calls to them are covered; in Australia a business line cannot be registered unless it is used only for faxes. The UK has a 28-day rule tied to registration; Australia has a 30-day rule tied to your own wash. If you run campaigns in both, screen each list against its own country's register and keep the results apart. UK numbers can be checked one at a time on the free TPS checker, and the UK legal background is in PECR explained.