Are you ready for international trade?

Here are a few thoughts to use and assess whether your company is ready for international trade.

  • Do you have a Euro or any other currency price list? If so, what coverage on exchange have you built into these product costs? It is unlikely you will sell into Europe without a euro offer, and you have to sell to the US in dollars except in exceptional circumstances.
  • Are there any safety standards in the target market which would apply to your products? Are they compliant with them? What is the cost impact of making them compliant?
  • Do you have a multilingual manual? One simple example of something that took time at Pacific Direct was the six language ‘how to mount’ manual for the dispenser system we sold to hold larger bottles of hand wash. This was very time consuming, and therefore costly.
  • Respect other cultures. Our ability to make friends all over the world through the seventeen different languages that team Pacific could converse in was critical.
  • Minimise the feel of a physical difference between you and a client abroad. We would be flexible with working hours for those staff involved in ‘other markets’. If they found that being in the UK office later than normal allowed them to make better phone contact with hotels in a time-zone behind ours, then they worked later hours (actually people at Pacific worked many hours and this was a huge reason for our success). The value of sometimes making the right call at the right time of day can be the difference between success and failure in international growth. If your new market is awake during the middle of the night, are you?
Topics: Export Concept
Export Action Plan