Find new clients abroad and sell your products globally
Finding clients and developing your business abroad is always a challenge. Selling in a country that you are not familiair with is always harder and takes more time than setting up sales in your home country.
The first question always is: can you deliver to your end users directly, or do you need someone in between? For most consumer products and for standardized B2B products, you may need to find a distributor.
This article focuses on direct sales to businesses or governments, where you ship and service your products yourself from your home country.
The right plan for your business development
International business development is in structure not different from the marketing you do in your home country, but getting the right information and reaching out in the right way may be more difficult.
Just as for other marketing plans you need a target group first, a well defined offering (with product, price, place and promotion) and then concrete actions to reach out and start selling.
First of all the difficulty is in getting the right information about potential clients and about your local competition. Luckily AI-tools have made it easier to search in other languages.
I strongly recommend to engage with a few potential clients first before investing too much in marketing and product adjustments. Only then you will understand the market better and find your niche.
Contact a consultant in the country where you want to do business
Possible channels for Business-to-business sales
Direct sales can be a good option for a B2B product or solutions, especially if customisation is needed in the product or the delivery conditions. If direct sales is not feasible because of the number of potential clients, you may want to work with agents that represent you, or with local offices.
Direct sales
- If you product can easily be delivered and serviced from abroad (like software) this may be a good option.
- Video conferencing is more accepted now and can limit travel.
- Lead generation may be done with SEO, advertising and email marketing.
Agents
- Agents represent you in the country and have a limited negotiation room.
- They often sell not only for you, but also for other parties.
- A good agent already has a network in your target market and can start selling directly.
Local offices
- Local offices are a costly option, but give you full control on your sales.
- You have to send someone over and hire local staff and office facilities.
- This gives the opportunity to do local marketing and business development from within the country.
Translate your website and check your SEO
Even if your business is really international, it may be wise to set up local website translations and check whether your text aligns with the culture.
People prefer reading in their own language and also search most of the time in their own language. Therefore you need to include the relevant keywords in your texts, and these may not be a direct translation.
Also here, use AI-tooling to translate your pitches rather than direct translation tools. This will help you adjust your tone of voice to the local standards. You can translate ‘Buy now!’ into Japanse als ‘今すぐ購入！’ but it may be too direct to have any success.
With regards to content, my personal experience is that if you have a successful blog topic in one language, it is likely to do well also in other languages. Don’t reinvent the wheel, just make a proper translation.
Translate your Wordpress site with WPML
For targeting a country you may need website translations that go beyond Google translate. You can do this with WPML.
WPML is a Wordpress plugin that helps you set up different translations of your web pages. This can be with automated translations, but you can also choose to have manual or adjusted translations or even specific content on the language pages.
Agent commission rates
Sales agents are an effective way to start sales in a foreign country. It is imperative for your sales agents to have sufficient knowledge about your product and a decent market reputation to sell your product.
Agents get a commission on the sales they do for you. But what fee or percentage should you pay to your agent and how to contract him?
This very much depends on the normal margin that you would make on the product. Agents can get up to 50% of this, depending on the difficulty of the job.
Shipping your products
If you sell physical products, getting them to your customer abroad may be a challenge.
First of all you may have to pay import duties or settle VAT. This can be complex if you don’t have your own legal entity in the country.
There may also be non-financial barriers, like certifications or approvals to be obtained. Especially for food, cosmetics or medicine this may be the case.
Check this in advance, even before you invest in your marketing, and make use of parties who do this as their core activity.
Getting your products imported and delivered in a specific country can be a challenge. I have good experience with Tecex, who can act as your importer of record and even physical distributor. If you leave your details, they will contact you.
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Frequently asked questions
For us is important that we do not just match companies with each other who have a casual conversation. The companies must be interested in each other, be informed about each other and have the meeting prepared. This way the meeting has much better chances of being succesful.
First learn about the structure of the industry in the country? Who are important players and how is distribution organized. Only then pick the companies that you want to research and meet to explore collaboration.
A joint venture is a term for many types of collaboration and especially internationally setting up a joint legal entity can be difficult. We mostly recommend to set up a contractual structure, in which parties can also share revenues and costs.
If you mostly sell through the internet, then setting up a local website with the right local SEO is a first step. If your sales is more personal, then you need a local representative that hunts for new leads. We can be that party, or we can find you a local agent or sales representative.
In the United States there are many freelance sales reps and you can find them online, but in other countries this is more difficult. We often recommend searching for smaller companies with an existing network in the right industry who can be your agents, or we can fulfil the sales rep role for a period.
