Welcome to Accidental Exporting.
There are many aspects of successful exporting that require careful planning and meticulous attention to detail, from compliance with legal and contractual (such as letter of credit) requirements to financial control, packaging and freight management.
In this blog, I am looking at a very different aspect of exporting, and that’s the basic activity of developing business. I have to accept that there is as much a need for careful planning here as there is in the other activities I mentioned above. It’s just that when it comes to sales, the plans often don’t work out like I thought they would.
The reason for this is very simple; People. They rarely act in what I would consider to be a logical way. Every one of my customers is a complicated mix of emotions, prejudices and cultural baggage that makes it very difficult for me to accurately predict what they are going to do.
International business, like all business, is much more of an art than a science in my experience, and developing business is the art of the possible. I have been responsible for developing new business for my employer in Europe for the last three years, and the experience has always been baffling, if enjoyable and rewarding. The only thing that I can honestly say has gone right over that period has been that business has grown. Oh and that it has been profitable, too.
Take yesterday, for example. I received the biggest order I have ever won. It was from a brand new customer, too. Great news? Well, yes. But it also goes straight into the file in my memory entitled ‘baffling and unpredictable customers’. I have been, you might say ‘courting’ this customer for over two years now. I really thought he was going to be a certainty from the first time I made contact. He was using a material identical to one of our core products. We already sell to his competitors. Our prices are competitive and we offer excellent delivery. There was no logical reason why I couldn’t win this business. But I didn’t.
Firstly, this guy’s factory in Germany had an enormous fire. For him it was a disaster that threatened the survival of his business. For me, it was an opportunity delayed. Surely when he got his feet back on the ground, so to speak, he’d need to re-stock urgently and that would be the ideal time to turn to me? No it wasn’t, at least that wasn’t the way he saw it. Recovering from a major disaster like a fire meant taking no chances. It meant, among other things, choosing known suppliers over new kids on the block. The major objective was to return to business as usual.
Just when I’d well and truly given up on winning his business, and taken him off my ‘sales funnel’ list (more about that in a later instalment, probably) he came to me, quite out of the blue, and requested a quote for a finished product, one that I would never have even thought about pitching to him since, as far as I was aware, they don’t use them in Germany. I was right about that point, at least. He wants to buy them for customers in Scandinavia.
We quibbled and jostled about price for a few days, then yesterday he placed the order. And now he wants to talk about the materials I’ve been trying to sell him for the last two years, too.
This experience has been typical for me over the past few years. Sales that I think are in the bag often escape my grip, while others that seem like pie in the sky seem to just fall into my lap. I don’t think I’m alone in this. In working to develop new business in other countries, we are dealing with a lot of unknowns, not least the culture and working practices of other countries.
Some people try to tell me that Europe is a ‘single market’ these days. I have a word for that notion – RUBBISH! Across all kinds of sectors, national borders still mark the point at which people do things completely differently.
In the coming weeks I'll be sharing my experiences in developing export business. I’ve got things wrong in the past, and no doubt I will continue to make mistakes. But experience so far has shown me that provided I keep putting in the effort, the results can and will continue to come. Sochiro Honda, the founder of the Honda Motor company once famously said, “Success is 99% failure.” I think I know what he meant.
