Doing Business Internationally

This is a heavy duty post for all you MBA people ;-) and business people , entrepreneurs wanting to know a little bit about what goes into trying to do business abroad.

How does one do it ? How to go about it ? Is it possible ? Will i see a positive or a negative outcome from all this on the first go ? Will i see results?

These are some of the many questions that came into the mind before venturing into it. Well , it took a lot of research , lot of good contacts , lot of luck a little bit of risk and lot of moolah to do it :-)

What im about to say is solely based on my experience and relative to my field of publication business . It may or may not help in a different field of work.

I personally believe it is very essential to do a LOT of research in your area of field before going into to do something of this sort. By research i mean trying to find out if something like this has been done by someone else you know ( persional experience of someone ) or dont know off ( on the internet or a book ).
If you dont get much or any information , then i guess you have to evaluate the pros and cons and go ahead accordingly and be the first :-).

Try to get information of your prospective clients before hand like contacts which may be the most difficult part. You can try to get them by local contacts ( best bet ) or online ( may or may not be there ) or use international market research agencies whom you would have to pay to get information. There are many online information directories which can offer you information however they generally charge a hefty amount for it. Getting the phone nos and email addresses is the biggest obstacle and once you have done that , you are ready to go to the next step.

Next up is a plain old Business plan with which you will be contacting your prospective clients. You must obviously release as much information to your prospective clients about your business and basically ,What you can offer to them and how they will benifit. In the end of describing your business and what kind of services your are offereing , what might be helpful is a description of how you can take it to the next level as they say by communication to them

1) How you can offer them things which other might not be able to to ... in terms of pricing , quality , time factors etc and ease of doing business. A lot of time clients dont like to get involved with compicated businesses which involve a lot of risks , time consumption , excess loss of revenue at their end etc. Keeping it simple is the best way of going about it , which means you do the hard work of doing the most so that your prospective client has to do the least.

2) Also if possible you can include your vision about this project i.e how it will be mutually benificial to both , yourself and your client . A lot of times , clients are not able to comprehend or see what you have in your mind with this project. They sometimes miss the point of this whole deal. Although this can be a risky move as it can be taken in a wrong way that they assume you are being a smart ass with all this visionaory talk and that they are morons who cant understand business , it can be dicy and you basically have to go by your instincts as to how much you should open your mouth :-)

Then sending all this information via email is the next step. Give a period of some days/weeks and see if the clients respond.If they do , well and good and you can then go accordingly. If they dont , then telephonic conversation comes next. When it comes to international clients from non english speaking countries , you have a problem on your hands. It so happens many times your contact knows english but people in the offices like telephone operators , receptionists , assistansts dont know much english. You have to make a lot of effort in this case to somehow reach to your MAIN person. In one case , i must have talked to 4 people before i was handed to the right guy , so i hope u get it :-). Now that you are in conversation with the person , it all depends upon you and your skills. There are people who can get a client while calling on the first try. Then there are them who would have to follow up a couple of times to see if something is possible or you have to actually fix an appointment with the client to tell them " you mean business with all this and im ready to travel 1000's of miles to talk to you in person".

At this point of time , you should have contacted all your prospective clients .Once you have an appointment fixed with atleast one of them , you can use that as a leverage on your other clients so as to say - i will be there from this time period in your country , lets have a causal meeting .Key here is getting atleast 1 appointment so that you know all the money and effort you are spending , its worthwile . Most of the time , clients are willing to give you atleast 15/ 30 mins seeing the effort you are putting in to visit them personally all they way.

People abroad are very very professional . Here in India , if you got to do business , most of the time it is initially developing a personal bonding with your client like a trust , a friendliness personality match between the two and then when all this done , you move on to the actual business part ( although nowdays all this is becoming obsolete as most of the people are becoming more proffesional in the approach of doing business ). One of the meeting clients in another country was one such professional encounter. From the moment i sat down , i knew this product manager meant business and business only[ a lady at the other end :-) ]. She just wanted to know 2 things : a) financially , how much will it cost them b) Sum up your whole proposal to me in 10 mins as i have a meeting to attend.
What im trying to say is 90% of the time , people inernationally and now very much here in India wont have the time or even feel the need to do getting to know you as a businessman , your personality and would just want to talk business straight up and say goodbye for the next meeting ( if your lucky) or forever ( dont call us , we''ll call you types ).

Then its down to your skills in that meeting to strike a deal , negotiate there and there itself with very intelligent clients ( varied intresting personalities ) who will try their best to get the most of it while you are trying to keep a healthy profit in mind too [ Cmon , you got ot earn money , isnt it ;-) ]. Sometimes , it helps when you let them know that your are talking to other clients ( their competitors ) so that they could be looking at a loss if they loose out on the deal or an indication that dont try to be a major stuborn with the deals as you can go to someone else [ which is the last resort as you always try to get the person you are talking to seal the deal right there :-) ]. And all said and done and with the meeting over , you may or may not have succeded , if you have ... give yourself a pat on the back for doing it correctly or if you havent , take the experience of the whole thing in your stride and then move on to the next client :-)

In the end , Keep it Real and Simple and give it a shot . Who knows you will succesful the first time or maybe on the 2nd try or maybe not this time but sometime in the future after learning from this whole experience. You wont know unless you TRY :-)