Monthly Archives: July 2013

The Art of Communications in Business

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Diagram of communication

Effective communication is not just about transmitting information but building relationships. With all of the new high tech available to interact today, don’t forget the power of simply sitting down face-to-face to do this effectively.

By:  Michael Kaiser

Despite the plethora of business communication software, hardware, social media, LinkedIn, etc., sources that literally increase by the minute, don’t we loose the face-to-face ability to communicate with our business and social interlocutors? Effective, successful communicating in the business world is part and parcel of Roger Fisher and William Ury’s classical “Getting to Yes. Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In”, first published in 1981. The book is not only very readable but it has, like all classics, survived the passage of time.  The following are examples of some sub-titles:

  • Negotiators are people first
  • Every negotiator has two kinds of interests: in the substance and in the relationship
  • The relationship tends to become entangled with the problem
  • Separate the relationship from the substance; deal directly with the people problem

Therefore, to negotiate agreement, you need communication skills.

The objective
And how do you deal with people in general, or more specifically, with a potential business one? We could say that thanks to webinars, teleconferences or e-mail, we do not need to sit in front of them and shake hands. That may prepare the ground for a good relationship between the parties, but let’s assume that inevitably there will be a need for a face-to-face meeting or presentation.  Your interlocutor may come through well in a video conversation, but is he/she the same in a personal meeting? Chances are that you will either detect something that you like or quite the opposite; do you feel comfortable? How about face-to-face contact? Is it pleasant and business like, or aggressive and arrogant? The bottom line is the proverbial “chemistry” factor between the parties.

In the business world, the success of presentations to small, medium or large audiences be that via PowerPoint, videos or speech, has one single objective: effectively communicating your needs as well understanding their needs, explained by Fisher and Ury as follows:

“Understanding their point of view is not the same as agreeing with it. It is true that a better understanding of their thinking may lead you to revise your own views about the merits of a situation. But that is not a cost of understanding their point of view, it is a benefit “

In other words, for presentation and/or communication skills to be effective, do not just talk, but listen as well.

Presentations, communications, what’s the difference?
Presentations are tactics, communications embody strategies. When it comes to presentations, from personal social and business experience, as well as the advice of seasoned experts and/or observing them in action, the following parameters served as useful guidelines:

First and foremost: Who is the audience? Executive? Middle Management? Sales? Engineering? Customer Service? For a presentation to be successful, it must be fine-tuned to the audience. A good presentation should include seven guideposts for success:

  • To inform
  • Pertinent anecdotes and examples
  • Be constructive and positive
  • Generate action
  • Communicate in clear, professional language (even if you have an accent)
  • Rehearse the delivery of the message
  • Study, and react to, your audience’s body language (and what a challenge it is…)

The successful presentation requires:

  • Not talking down to the audience, but seeking to be understood
  • Message should be worthy of the audience’s attention
  • Get feedback from the audience

Communications are part of the Advertising universe. And Advertising is one of the four P’s of marketing: Product, Price, Promotion and Place, all of them strategies.

Communications are a vital component of crisis management and change, such as M & A’s, product recall, emergencies. And for crisis management to be effective, you need training.

Building employee, customer and brand loyalty is one of the most immediate challenges facing global corporations. The impact of demographic diversity and outsourcing on the “loyalty” concept.

Communications is about transmitting ideas and solutions to individuals or groups. To be effective, communications must convey:

  • Leadership
  • Inspiration
  • Trust and Confidence
  • Accurate information
  • Objectives

Epilogue
Both business and social communications share the desire to connect, one for commercial purposes, the other for friendship or cultural interests. Apparently one of the best communicators was the former United States Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger. His accented, baritone voice may have been one reason, but surprisingly it was the slow, quasi-Thespian tone of his delivery that forced listeners to pay attention.

As far as specific business communications are concerned, it is clear that for all the welcome information technology available to us, the art of successful communications requires a unique set of individual qualities that can be translated and applied for the implementation of strategic objectives.

Suggested reading sources

Picture Credit:  Wikimedia Commons, Interaction comm model

Keeping the Patent Wolves at Bay: Three Tips for Protecting the Heart of Your Startup

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Grey Wolf

Don’t venture into the ‘wilds’ of commercialization without the protection of rock-solid patent protection. The tips here will insure that the time, effort and cost of doing this will be well worth it.

By:  Andy Golden, Ph.D.

I know several inventors and patent attorneys who have breathed a sigh of relief after realizing that a patent has missed an opportunity to impede their commercialization path.  For example, the patent claims of a prior art patent may contain unnecessary limitations on design or implementation; despite the absence of a preceding prior art landscape.

Although some patents are obtained merely to check a box or promote technology, most are intended to exclude competition from an invention space.  So why spend $10,000 to $100,000 for a patent that does not exclude competition?  Here are three tips for keeping the wolves at bay:

1.  Choose carefully 
Patent attorneys are not commodities so find a good one.  I usually find patent attorneys through the good recommendations of their peers.  Similarly, I have seen several companies benefit from auditing their current patent firm with a second firm.

Select a patent attorney who has the technical background to quickly understand your invention in detail, as well as its role in your business plan.  Understanding the invention is critical for drafting effective claims, enabling the invention and minimizing ‘design-arounds’.  Moreover, time is money and the quicker the patent attorney grasps your invention, the less you spend on patent drafting.

  • Years ago, a research group wanted to patent two inventions earmarked for two academic manuscripts.  The process in the first paper was used in the second to form a material for tissue engineering.  However, the second paper did not require the first, and the first was broader and more valuable than its application in the second.  De-conflating the inventions in the patent application, among other things, wasted many hours and thousands of dollars.  A weak patent application was submitted just before the deadline and then abandoned five years later.

2.  Tear down that wall
Don’t throw the invention over a wall – a good patent requires collaboration with the patent attorney.  Transforming technical details and business objectives into a legal document is an interdisciplinary process.  In particular, the inventor/scientist/engineer must actively participate in identifying novel elements and technical ‘design-arounds’ for protection, so that technically savvy competitors cannot pursue them.  It’s impractical (and costly) to expect the patent lawyer to understand your invention space as well as a specialist who has lived and breathed in the space for years.  A kickoff meeting can be an effective venue for brainstorming potential claims and ‘design-arounds’ with the patent attorney before documentation and billable hours accrue.  Here are a few questions that might lead to anticipation of technical ‘design-arounds’:

  • What are the ways in which you might practice the invention?
  • How might a competitor or potential licensee practice or design around the invention?
  • How might your invention evolve during the R&D process, production scale-up, or post-market surveillance?  In other words, what risks remain and how might they change the course of the product?
  • How might the patent benefit future product lines or adapt to a changing market?
  • What entities are the focus for infringement?  What entities are not the focus (e.g. a medical practitioner or a customer)?

In truth, it is often unlikely that the innovator can anticipate and prevent every creative design-around, but she/he can anticipate much of the low hanging fruit.  The lawyer should capture these technical and legal ‘design-arounds’ in the patent application.

3.  Keep your eyes on the bottleneck
Align your patent application with business objectives.  Focus on identifying the commercially valuable bottlenecks.  These bottlenecks are your invention – not the product that embodies merely an example of the bottlenecks.  Then, instead of describing each component of the product with equal weight and consideration, focus the patent application on protecting the valuable bottlenecks and associated ‘design-around’ risks.  Taking a stab at this in a detailed patent disclosure for the lawyer can improve the final patent application and sometimes reduce the billable hours required for drafting.

  • Theoretical example: An academic group develops a new label-free biosensor for potential use in drug discovery.  The main commercial advantage is that the label-free biosensor is not a destructive test, so, for the first time, the cells can be monitored for days, providing higher quality data.  At the kickoff meeting, the team decides the key bottleneck is long-term monitoring of cells for this particular cell assay.  In contrast, the label-free biosensor is a minor bottleneck; it is treated as one of several possible ways to achieve long-term monitoring, as other companies could conceivably develop labeled tests that are similarly nondestructive.  Although the patent does include claims on the biosensor, it focuses and expands on enablement and valuable embodiments of long-term monitoring, such as previously undetectable cellular events, data analysis, and methods to exclude dedifferentiated cells.

In brief, some people say that a good patent lawyer “gets into the head” of the inventor to extract the invention.  A counterargument is that with good collaboration and alignment of the patent application with business objectives, this may not be necessary.

Picture Credit:  numb – Up All Night to Get Lucky via photopin cc

A Socio-Economic Theory of Emerging Economies and Technology Development

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By:  Michael Kaiser

Old Sailing Ship

Understanding the socio-economic forces that drive the economies of international customers will help your company’s growth overseas

The Historical Precedent
In a previous article (New Globalization Trends = New Startup Opportunities) I described
globalization and its continuous fine-tuning of technologies, business and society. But globalization is not a recent geo-political or geo-economic phenomenon. Rather, we can safely say that the concept of trade between nations as we know it started with the Phoenicians, who were among the greatest traders of their time and owed much of their prosperity to their talent for commerce. Centuries later, international trade continued with Marco Polo’s trips to Asia, especially China. They preceded the onset, and set the tone, for present day global business standards by centuries. These two historical examples serve as an advisory to emerging economies that global trade is serious business (pun fully intended).

Two socio-economic theories, and the winner is…?
The late Neil Postman, a professor and media critic at New York University, postulated that “technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything”.

A respected humanist and media critic, one wonders if Postman reluctantly conceded that the old conflict between Dependency (Dependency Theory) and Modernization (Modernization Theory) ended in favor of the latter. Whereas Dependency can be described as a social model that condemned economic colonialism, Modernization is a closer model of evolving economies and technological development. Unlike Dependency, which reached its apogee in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Modernization remains a viable and applicable model to this day.

Basically, Modernization defines the positive impact of technology on societies where poverty is the standard rather than the exception. It is worth mentioning that Modernization preceded the advent of Dependency, but paradoxically, it was its failure of viable social and economic solutions that led to the rebirth of Modernization, with its eye to the future. Dependency had a legitimate socio-political argument, but one that attempted to find solutions to narrow the chasm between developed and under-developed or emerging economies at a time when PC’s, cell phones, internet, and the sundry information technologies assisting international communications in business and social affairs where not even available in developed countries. The first IBM PC was marketed in 1981, and by then Dependency had seen its better days. The next decades, to the present day, witnessed advances in technology and financial clusters that can be best described as moving from days and hours to mere nanoseconds.

The rebirth of Modernization is due to its emphasis on transplanting information and other technologies, higher education and communications to those countries approaching or designated as ‘emerging economies’. It can be argued that one unexpected contribution of Dependency lies in the very targets it was addressing, (the periphery or semi-periphery) because those countries  disavowed the theory itself and were forced by overwhelming new technologies and communication tools to modernize, instead of blaming the wealthy, developed countries for their perceived ‘westernized exploitation’ supremacy.

The example of two BRIC countries
Globalization has been the force that changed the policies of growing economies. Nowhere was the case for Modernization more evident than in two BRIC countries: India and Brazil. The most populated democracy in the world, with a population exceeding 1 billion, India is a country divided by politics, areas of abject poverty or great wealth, religion, social origin and language differences (although English remains the language of business and international relations). Starting in 1991 and continuing to the present day, the two major rival political parties of India committed to improve the economy and development of the country, and thus, India set an example for modernization success. The Indian Institutes of Technology, spread over several locations, not only compare with the most advanced ones in the Western economies, but earned a reputation for their rigorous R&D. The wave of information technology and life sciences specialists from India started in the early 1990’s and created a new wave of entrepreneurship and global companies, e.g., the TATA Group, InfoSys, Wipro, Cognizant, Mahindra Group, and international pharmaceutical companies like Ranbaky, Sun Pharma, Dr. Reddy, Lupin, Torrrent, etc. In addition, India hosts some of the largest American and European corporations.

Brazil is a different case, but equally interesting because it actually used to be at the center of Dependence theory led by local sociologists, as well as André Gunder Frank, Dependency’s most prominent academic author and analyst.

Their very different cultures not withstanding, India and Brazil made the decision to make radical changes to their economies in the early and middle 1990’s. By 1994, when Fernando Henrique Cardoso became the country’s President, the social theory that fought against the imposing strength of developed centers against the countries of the periphery and semi-periphery no longer played a role in the economic future of Brazil. In Henrique Cardoso’s two terms as President, the Brazilian economy took a significant leap forward and when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a union leader and head of the opposition Worker’s Party became President, he kept his country on an evolving economy track. Like India, Brazil is also known for dramatic, visible differences between the poor, the middle class and the well-to-do, despite being ranked as the most important economy in Latin America and one of the largest one in the world (Economy of Brazil) as well as a top automotive and international aerospace manufacturer, Embraer.

The University of São Paulo and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation are advanced academic institutions of research. The Butantan Institute is the largest producer in Latin America (and one of the largest in the world) of immunobiologicals and biopharmaceuticals. In 2001 it produced approximately 110 million doses of vaccines and 300 thousand vials of hyper immune sera. The institute produces 90% of the vaccines used in Brazil. The anti-hypertensive ACE inhibitor, lisinopril, is a synthetic structural analog of a peptide derived from the venom of the ‘jararaca’, a Brazilian pit viper (Bothrops jararaca). The Vale Corporation and Petrobras (Petroleo Brasileiro, S.A) are global giants, Vale in mining and Petrobras in oil and gas. This year a new wave of social discontent is emerging, one that could compromise Brazil’s hard-won economic growth. Time will tell.

Brazil’s close to 200 million inhabitants cannot compare with India’s 1.2 billion, but it has a significant advantage over its Asian partner: Brazil was and still is a country of immigrants. From the early Dutch and Portuguese, to Italians, French, German, Syrian, Lebanese and other nationalities, Brazil has benefited from that international influx, comparable to the U.S., Canada and Australia. India, on the other hand, stands out for its unique expertise in the field of information technology, pharmaceuticals and its thousands of entrepreneurs spread overseas.

Epilogue
Although the notion that America is the easiest country for technology startups and innovation financing is being challenged, it still deserves its place as the source of opportunities, innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, qualities that seem to hark back to the need for achievement, described by David McClelland in his 1961 magnum opus “The Achieving Society”.  Worth recalling Neil Postman’s observation that: “… A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything”. Does that mean that we are experiencing Aldous Huxley’s somber, satirical “Brave New World” and “Brave New World Revisited”? Or will countries with different cultures decide to adopt policies of rapid development for the benefit of their people?

Globalization was the target, the objective of both Dependency and Modernization. The evolution of communications and travel facilitated the improvement in the health care of both poor and emerging societies; this in turn increased the number of able workers in countries that could not absorb all of them, forcing large emigrations to the developed countries. By contrast, the developed countries witnessed the meteoric demand of their citizens for more goods and higher living standards as the prerogatives of better education and high-technology. Based on the importance of comparative advantages and their connection with free trade agreements between countries, it is safe to predict that Modernization will continue to fall under the magnifying glass of social and economic analysis and evaluation.

Recommended topical sources

Modernization Theory

Dependency Theory

Globalization

Indian Institutes of Technology

Brazil

Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons, Nanban Carrack

Content Marketing: Are You Using This Key Tactic to Win the Startup Arms Race?

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Classical Library

Effective content marketing is like building the world’s greatest library of resources in your field of expertise. Your audience (and customers) should find the materials there not only informative but entertaining and compelling.

By:  Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

The sooner you connect with your customers the better.  Most consider this to be when you have your first sales with them.  However, content marketing gives you the opportunity to connect with them in a meaningful way long before your product launch. You start the connections that will build the awareness and trust that leads to strong product sales in the future with this tactic.  These early relationships will provide you with insights not only on how to communicate with them but also help you to establish what offerings will delight them.

Effective Content Marketing can help startups win against larger established competitors Content marketing is an especially important effort for any startup company.  When you introduce game-changing products into the marketplace, you will be introducing something that is, by its very nature of being innovative, unfamiliar. Your content marketing efforts will be one of the best ways to transform this ‘unfamiliarity’ into the trust and confidence that wins new customers.  Large established companies with powerful brand names like Apple, Thermo Fisher or Coke have the ability to launch new and unfamiliar products by using the trust that they have established with customers by virtue of having a strong brand.  However, even these large companies rely on content marketing to accelerate the successful launch of their innovations (e.g.  Google Glass, https://plus.google.com/+projectglass/posts )  When effectively deployed content marketing, , will build the kind of trust with your future customers that will significantly shorten sales cycle times, reduce the cost of sales and augment the impact that your marketing  efforts have for generating new leads, closed sales and boosting revenue.

Why is Content Marketing missing from many startup companies’ business plans?
Content marketing is not often included in the tactics that many startups use because its true value and purpose are not well understood.  Part of the problem comes from the name itself. Content Marketing is not really marketing at all but telling a story or providing some valuable information without reference to the company’s offerings.  A content marketing piece is more like the article you read in a magazine or newspaper than the ads in the same paper.  As such, the ROI between the investment in time and effort of launching and maintaining an effective content marketing campaign are a significant challenge to quantify with traditional marketing metrics.  The full benefit of an effective content marketing campaign can take time to be realized so this can seem to be a luxury to be cut when cash flow is tight (especially in the early days).

Want to learn more about why you should give Content Marketing a second look?  Get additional insights and tips from this podcast on the topic with the author on the No Boundaries Radio Hour Podcast hosted and produced by Scott Graves Content Marketing Podcast

Building an effective Content Marketing effort that won’t break the bank
As mentioned earlier in this post, the full value of an effective content marketing campaign takes time to be fully realized.  As such the earlier you get started the better.  The following tips will help you to do this in an efficient way that that will build the trust that future customer’s value when they decide who to do business with.

  • Know your audience:  Your audience is your target market segment.  Be sure to read the articles, blog posts, news pieces and other content that your customers are reading on a regular basis.  This will not only provide you with a wealth of ideas for topics that you will cover but also allow you to further  your understanding of what  issues are critical to your customers and hence how you might position your traditional marketing efforts as well (an early ROI from this).
  • Create interesting content, not ads:  Remember that you want to connect with your customers as a subject matter expert.   Remember that you are creating content that is interesting and that your future customers want to consume.  (When creating new content, you should be asking yourself why would someone want to read (listen, watch) this?  Rarely do we choose to watch or read an ad.
  • Create what you know:  You need to tell compelling true stories.  Be authentic and write about what you know.  Create content that discusses the issue or problem that your product will fix (resist the temptation to promote your product here, that makes it an ad).  Each piece you create should be inherently valuable to your target audience by itself.
  • Regular delivery is important:  It takes some time for your audience to discover your content.  Once they have discovered and like it, they may share it with others.  It is important to have a regular delivery of the content that you create.  Whether this is once a month (e.g. newsletter or blog post) once a week or daily is up to you.  Consistent delivery is more important than quantity, especially at the beginning.  Pick a regularity that you can keep up with (perhaps start with a monthly, you can always increase the frequency later).
  • Content quality first, delivery media second:  Create something that will delight your audience first, and then select the way that you will deliver it to your audience. Boring and irrelevant content delivered by a flashy YouTube video, podcast, blog or newsletter is still boring content.  (Don’t forget traditional publications, many trade publications are hungry for interesting articles.  Some print publications may also promote and/or publish an online version as well which can provide an even greater level of exposure).
  • Don’t go it alone:  The effort required to do this effectively is not trivial.  There are many resources that you can turn to lighten your burden.
    • Ask Key Opinion Leaders, influential customers and other authorities to consider writing a guest blog post or newsletter piece for you.
    • Hire a firm to help you create the content.  There are many excellent content creation firms that will take your ideas and create publication-ready copy for your blog, newsletter, white paper etc.
    • Don’t’ like to write?  Consider doing a podcast.  You can do this yourself but consider using a professional that knows how to create compelling content for this medium.
    • Embedded video clips.  Convert one of your written pieces into a compelling 2 minute video.  Resist the temptation to show your product in action.  (Think TED Talks rather than Ad copy).
    • Produce slideshows and webinars.  You have worked hard to create talks that showcase your science to academic and technical audiences.  Why not capture these ‘talks’ using software like Camtasia and share them on your website?  Hosting a webinar can also increase the impact of your presentations by allowing you to reach larger audiences that are geographically distributed while also providing the opportunity to interact with them live.  The other advantage of this is that you can easily record the session and share it.

Additional Resources:

Picture Credit: Curious Expeditions via photopin cc

Distributors Demystified: Use These Insights to Help You Help Them Sell More

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business people and world map
Using distributors can be a key part of scaling up your sales reach. Be sure to budget the time and effort to make this tactic work for you.

By: Andrew Johnson, Ph.D.

Working with Distributors can be a great way to expand your sales reach as you grow.  This can be a very effective way to ramp up sales especially when you look to sell internationally.  It is important to have a good understanding of how best to support, motivate and manage your distributors prior to your product launch to make sure that you get the biggest bang for your buck here.

A few myths

  • Hire them and forget them.  Your distributors will require training, sales collateral and on-going support to be successful.  Whether you have a direct sales force or a distributor, they both require the same level of sales and marketing support.   In addition to this, you will likely need to plan on refresher training and customer visits with your distributors over time as there is turnover in their sales team and also to keep them motivated.
  • They will be excited to sell your new innovative product.  The business team that sold you on the contract will be excited about your product and its business potential.  The distributor’s sales team, not so much.  An unfamiliar new product takes time and effort to learn how to sell effectively.  When the distributor’s sales team member has a choice of selling an existing product versus a new one, everything else being equal, they are more likely to focus on what they already have confidence in selling.  Consider offering cash or other incentives for early sales for a period of time.  Once the distributor’s sales team has some success with your product, this challenge will become less of an issue.
  • Distributors will be less work than a direct sales force.  (see the first point in this list)  You will need to plan regular update meetings with your distributors to monitor progress and help them to succeed with your products.  In the early days, you will find that you need to provide more support to your distributor’s sales team as new sales people call with questions or issues.  With a direct sales team, you will not have to constantly deal with the same questions and issues.
  •  If you sign on with a big distributor, you will instantly have hundreds to thousands of sales folks selling your product.  The distributor’s business team will brag about the enormous size of their sales force, in practice the number of sales people that will actually learn and sell you product will be a fraction of that.  If you are lucky, you will have a few talented sales people that will have early success with your product.  They will tell their colleagues about this and interest in selling your product will increase throughout the sales force.  However, you need to make sure that you are not taken in by pronouncements of how ‘thousands will be selling your product every day’ this just is not true.
  • You can count on the experience, reputation and size of a distributor to mitigate some of your sales risk.  You can never outsource risk!  This is as true of sales as it is with any other risks that your business will face.  You will need to work with your distributor to help mitigate the risk of poor sales.  It doesn’t really matter if it is your own sales force or the distributor’s that is not closing sales.  In both cases there is a problem that you will need to address.

The number one thing that you can do to insure a good experience with your distributors is understanding that you will be expending a significant amount of time and effort (especially in the early days of the relationship) helping them to be successful with your product or service.  Whether you have a direct sales force or not, you will still need to plan on producing teaching materials and conducting training sessions so that your distributor’s sales force has a good understanding of your product and confidence to sell it successfully.  You will also need to provide them with a clear point of contact in your company that will handle all questions, concerns and technical issues in a timely manner (recommend that this be the Product Manager not one of your Sales team members).  You will also need to plan to travel with your distributors on a regular basis to insure that you are meeting their customers.  This will allow you to get critical customer feedback as well as motivating the distributor through demonstration of your commitment to support them.  Traveling with your distributors also allows you to further strengthen your connection with them and show them that you are not only actively managing them but are open to helping them be more successful.  In time, a supported distributor will put increasingly more effort into generating the leads and winning the greater numbers of sales that you expect.

Other advantages
Not all products are ideal for distributor based sales.  If your product is truly ‘game changing’ and requires a very technical sale, you will likely be better off with a direct sales force, at least in the early days after your product launch.  Once you have established enough sales with your direct team so that you have a good understanding of your ideal customer demographics, the most successful tactics for discovering and reaching them and the value proposition that has proven to be most effective, you are ready to consider bringing on a distributor to augment your sales efforts. 

There can be many other advantages of brining in a distributor other than expanded sales reach.  Keep the following in mind during your negotiations with prospective distributors.

  • Forward stocking locations:  This can be a particularly valuable asset to have when you start selling overseas.  Having your product warehoused in the same country where it is sold will insure timely delivery to your customers without the unpredictability and delays caused by getting through customs.  Being able to maintain stock at your distributor’s overseas warehouse will also allow you to take advantage of cheaper (and slower) shipping options like having your product delivered to them by ship rather than by air.
  • Shipping and handling services:  Distributors, especially larger ones, will be able to use their size and expertise to significantly reduce the costs of shipping and handling.  Your distributor already has the infrastructure and expertise in place for this, better to take advantage of this in the early days and save your money for other business expansion activities than customer fulfillment.
  • Marketing and Lead Generation Services:  Many distributors have their own Marketing Communications teams.  They can promote your products in their own marketing literature, at tradeshows or generate literature that has been translated for use with international customers.
  • Localized Promotions:  A good distributor knows the regional and cultural cues that will be most effective for your customers in their territories.  Work closely with your distributor to prepare custom promotions that are designed to appeal to their customers.   Discount and loyalty programs that are prepared for local and regional audiences are always more effective than a ‘one-size-fits-all’ global campaign.

Picture Credit:  © Svidenovic | Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images