There are two different levels of success in an overseas market, there’s a superficial level of success, initial leads, a few sales, a distributor has started selling in a given country for 50K$ of products. And on the other side of the scope, there is being truly successful in a market.
One of the reasons I love what I do at Exportia, is that I get to work on a daily basis with brilliant minds. Founders and CEOs of small companies (they are often both) are amazing to work with, they are passionate about their business. They inspire their team and they create a vision and direction for the business. This is why they often are the best person to articulate the sales pitch. They know precisely what problem their business is solving and they know what makes a person buy their product or solution.
Price is an element of the mix that is quite important when introducing a product into the European market. It will determine the level of profitability of this line of product for the years to come. I often have this debate with one of my customers, who is quite anxious to get early sales, but at the same time, his CFO and I keep telling him we don't want to discount. The CFO thinks of long term profitability and I just don't like to discount too soon and without a good reason. Here is why.
My world of export started with driving 10,000 km a month and through to doing a Paris/Frankfurt–Sydney flight once per month. That’s my export career in a snapshot. I started in this extraordinary industry 20 years ago and in that time, I’ve learnt a great deal. And that’s what I’m going to share in this article, but I also what I share in my books.
Often in Europe, you have a set of norms and standards that are defined at the European level that you have to comply with. This is something that is set and you have to comply with these standards if you want to sell. To lobby for a change in a standard is a long-term undertaking. We, small businesses, need to generate revenue right here, right now. We cannot wait for this to happen before we start selling.
I often get the question from Australian companies: how are we perceived by European customers as Australians. There is a bit of an Australian.
Several Australian customers of ours are now at a stage where they either have just reached the million Euros in sales or are beyond. At that stage in their development, we are looking for leverage of their current European customer base. That means growing our sales with these current customers.
As I am being grounded in Australia for almost three months now, while running my export business- Exportia, I feel it's a great time to share what my team and I have learnt in the last few months. As we have continued to successfully push for sales in Europe for our Australian technology customers, we are very positive about this period. During our last team meeting, I was just asking what I should write about this week. We came to the consensus that we should share with you the reasons why we think it is a great time to export to Europe.
It’s extremely hard to end an employment contract for non-performance in Europe. In some markets like Germany or France, it can be extremely long and expensive to engage a dismissal process. One of our Australian customers reported to us that it did cost them close to 250,000 euros to dismiss one of their German senior managers.
As Exportia is providing an outsourced European sales & marketing team to Australian innovative SMEs, we have had to adapt our approaches to make sure our customers continue to thrive in Europe in such a bumpy climate. Our goal remains unchanged! We still to take them to their first million Euros in Sales and we are not planning to be stopped by COVID-19. We want our customers to push through and succeed.
