The timing of international sales visits can be affected by
so many things, and with most businesses doing most of their business between
February and early July and again between September and early December, they
naturally take into account the traditional holiday periods in the summer and festivals
such as Eidh and Christmas. It is important to be aware of the multiple
religious and cultural festivals that take place around the world, because if
you arrive in a country on a public or religious holiday you are likely to find
it very difficult to find people to do business with, often for several days as
people take additional holiday days to be with their families.
A mix of knowledge of the market that you travelling to and
good planning will help you to keep your business travel days to times when
your customers are most likely to give you their best attention. And that is an
easy thing to do. However, there are some events that can have a deeper and
longer lasting impact on our ability to do business internationally, and this
Tale focuses on a couple of incidences where my own business and those of a
client were affected by national elections.
The most recent of these occurred when I was helping one of
my clients to achieve the right technical certification for their products to
enter the US market. The company manufacture hygienic wall cladding and they are
relatively new to international business. They had received a number of good
enquiries from distributors and installers in both the USA and Canada, keen to
represent their unique products. However,
their ability to do so was significantly held back by the fact that the company
had not yet achieved the ASTM fire retardance standard. They had all the
necessary EU certification, for which the tests are probably more rigorous than
the ASTM tests, and therefore assumed that achieving ASTM would something be a
formality.
Their application was immediately rejected, and when they
asked me why I thought that was, I said ‘it will be the Presidential Election’,
which I don’t think they quite believed. However there was good reason for me
saying that The world had just come through the most serious economic crash
since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and President Obama was seeking
re-election in its aftermath. A large part of his campaign focused on helping
manufacturers in the USA and in helping US citizens back into employment,
therefore anything that might get in the way of that, specifically competitive
imported products, was not going to be encouraged. Quite simply, it was
protectionism.
My point was proven absolutely just weeks after President
Obama’s re-election, when my customer resubmitted their application and it was
immediately accepted. The trouble is, that by that time their potential
distributors had lost in the region of $70,000 of business because their wall
cladding had not achieved ASTM where competitive products did, and because they
had expended a lot of time and resource in trying to win that business they
were less than enthusiastic when my client approached them again with the
appropriate certificates in hand. The moral of that particular sub- story is
that you should not enter a new market until your certification is in place.
Back in the late 1990’s I was selling carpet tiles
throughout Europe, and at the time I was working with our distributor on a
project to supply new government offices in Budapest. The timing of
specification selling relies initially on the tendering process, and later on a
whole range of issues such as the progress of construction programme and the
continuing availability of funds. Everything appeared to be going well. Our distributor
had made several excellent sales presentations between late 1997 and early 1998,
and while we were almost certainly not in pole position to supply to this
prestigious project we were still in with a sporting chance.
A parliamentary election in May 1998 caused the whole
process to grind to a halt. For at least six months before the election, it
seemed that all budgetary decisions were put on hold, causing delays to the
progress of the project. We had to wait for several more months while the new
administration formulated its spending plans. In the end we failed to win that
business, although we believe we came a close second! However, we had expended
a huge amount of time and effort and cost in the process, and our distributor
had done at least twice the work that we had done. Accepting that even with
projects like this there are winners and losers, the prolonged process will
have sapped the resource of every one of the suppliers. That election created
uncertainty for the best part of a year.
So when you are formulating your five year plan for exports,
look carefully at each of the markets you are targeting and at the potential
impact of elections, and for that matter any other significant political
activities.
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