Monthly Archives: February 2018

Choosing the right product to export: How to make a cost-efficient entry in an overseas market and boost your chances of success.

This article is a campaign against what we have seen a couple of times: A small business is approached online by an overseas distributor. So happy to potentially start exporting, the small business signs up the distributor straight away! It is a very common mistake. My message is BE PICKY!

To grow your sales in Europe: should you hire a rep to generate sales or generate sales before you hire?

A few years ago I made the difficult decision to cease working with a client. I had started exploring opportunities for his company in a European country, visiting end-users, generating initial leads and connecting with potential partners.

Having the right partner is an essential part of your strategy when expanding to Europe. Thus you have to evaluate them carefully. Here are a few things to take into account when choosing your partner .

Now you have engaged your distributors on a plan for the year. More often than not, then companies forget to manage that programme!

In the initial stages, you may not need a very sophisticated distributor programme. The focus will mainly be hand-holding your distributor. Remember that they have other products to sell and naturally their sales representatives won’t focus on a hard sell. As a new product in their range, they may feel that it is a harder sell than their usual products range.

In this third episode, we will uncover a critical step when working with distributors. This step sets the basis for either success or failure. This is where small businesses often don’t know how to frame their approach to distributors or partners.

In the first Episode, we have looked at profiling your distributor. Now we will focus on selecting your distributor. Too often, I have discussed with small Australian businesses that just signed up a distributor that approached them. They just had not gone through a selection process