Action to Uncover International Business Opportunities – Small Businesses Actions

Small businesses complicate their efforts in trying to uncover international business opportunities. Their own personal actions have far more impact on their success than relying on translators and looking for foreign joint venture partners.

The small actions you can take at home will have more immediate impact on your international business development than the services you can buy. Why is this? The more interaction you have in learning more about your foreign markets, the more you will be able to equate your acquired market knowledge with the products and services you sell.

Yes, you will probably end up needing the services from your target market. But the knowledge you can acquire from the countries where you would like to grow your business is priceless.

Sure translations are important. Adapting your sales materials to for a perfect cultural fit is important. But if you can start off from where you are, with what you have, you will learn a lot more in the process and you will make a better choice when seeking to get those foreign services.

Actions: If you already have some international clients or prospects:

Develop those contacts further, so that you can learn more about those clients. – Call them up.
Find the appropriate person to speak with.
Talk to him.
Ask him if he liked your products and why.
Ask how he finds your products different to what he can buy locally.
Ask him if he knows anyone else locally who could benefit from your product.

Actions: If you do not already have international clients and don’t know where to start:

Which market do you think your product might sell well in?
Or is there an international market that really attracts you?
Choose a country and start researching.
Google your competition in that country.
Use Google Advance Search to set the country.
Use automatic website translation software to read online.
Get a feel for the market.
Then pick up your phone, call your embassy in that country.
Are there any other associations in that country for professionals from your country living there?
Get on the phone and start talking to people.
If you feel you are not getting anywhere, change your conversation style.
Ask different questions.

You need to know as much as possible about each specific foreign market. Start off slowly, one country at a time. Make a concentrated effort to understand everyone’s opinion. You will begin to see a path to take.

Next Step

Once you have a basic understanding of your foreign market. Create a localized website, in your target country. Start with a mirror image of your main website.

You will need to adapt your communication to local cultures. Ask for local market feedback. Depending on your target market you may be able to do this in your own language.

You may want to set up a landing page with a survey for locals in their own language. It would probably be a mistake to translate your entire main website before getting feedback from your target market. Keep any translations to a minimum in the first stage.

Think of the actions you can take to build relationships with these foreign clients. Do not be afraid of language barriers. Simply present yourself truthfully and show your eagerness to learn how to do business in their culture.

When people see your willingness to meet them on their territory, they will notice you. The more action you take, the more you will be visible and the faster you will open your new international markets.

Are you committed to speeding up your international sales cycles?

Learn how to combine cross-cultural marketing tools and international sales strategies for faster sales.

Join us on the International Sales Road Map

Would you like to develop your international business?
Are you a beginner at international sales and marketing?
Read the Beginners Guide Discover Your International Business

Small Business Action Plan for First Time International Business Development

Adapting your business to a foreign country’s culture, is not an easy process the first time you try. You will not be able to anticipate the stumbling blocks that would not happen ‘back hone’. More importantly you will not know what you need to do to adapt yourself to the new challenges and tasks at hand. You will need to develop a Small Business Action Plan for your first effort with International Business Development.

Are you a small business and want to develop your international business?
Do you have a limited budget to develop your international sales?
Do you already have domestic clients but are just starting to reach out to international clients?

There are numerous strategies that exist to get you more international clients. A lot depends on your business and your commitment.
Here is an action plan to start your first international business development strategy:

1. Internationalize your website

It is important to make sure your website is not pushing your international visitors away from you. Bad or non-existent cross cultural communication can easily do this.

You can create a website specifically targeting an international audience, in your language. This is a business decision and will depend on the nature of your business and your clients. Companies in non-English speaking countries will often create an English language website specifically to target their international markets.

You may decide to keep your main website targeted to your domestic clients. There are still ways to tweak your website, with very small touches, to give a better experience for your international readers. Have a translation tool on your website. The online translation tools are far from perfect but they do bring your clients that one extra step closer.

2. Research your international markets

International business development is all about you learning to adapt. Adapt your business, your products, your communication, and your sales pitches, to each country you market to.

How do you start if you do not have any contact with your foreign markets? Use everything you have available to you and slowly build up your foreign market research. The beginning usually requires the most effort. It does not take as long as you expect.

If you are just starting out check out all of the associations, official groups for all international data you can find. Use the phone extensively. Do some online research. The goal is to simply become familiar, and feel comfortable, with your market. This is the time to eliminate all culturally inappropriate businesses.
The research that you do at the same time as you are marketing to your audience gives you the best results, but don’t get stuck spending too much time here.

3. Track visitors and results; adjust your communication

This step is very important. The better your analysis is, the stronger your international business potential will be.

Tracking and testing are key marketing tools. Your international communication is a process of testing, adjusting, inciting feedback and learning more about your audience. You have to be sure that you establish measurable goals before you begin testing. You must have a tracking system in place for your goals. And you must also track the responses your communication is having on your international readers. Remember, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

International business development is all about your capacity to adjust your business to the needs of people in another country. In order to make these adjustments and improvement you must know where you start and how to interpret results. You need precise things to measure.

4. Create a newsletter in English targeted for your international clients and distribute by email and on your website.

Internet marketing today is all about creating an online presence through content. Internet readers actively search for content. Your international readers are the same. One major benefit of publishing a newsletter is it provides a platform for consistency.

A newsletter helps you to stimulate market feedback, with links back to your website and other content provided through different media. Links to audio and video files, quizzes, surveys, free reports and other feedback generating tools published or advertised in your newsletter create reader interaction.

A regular newsletter targeted to a broad international audience will not be as powerful as content marketing targeted to one specific culture. But it is an easy and inexpensive way to start if you have no real idea where you want to market to.

5. Include tools to stimulate feedback

There are tools you can use to stimulate feedback. Quizzes, surveys, polls, questions, homework assignments, and contests are some tools you can use to stimulate feedback.

The key is to find out what your target readers want and need the most. As you learn more about your international prospects you will adjust your feedback tools and enticements.

You can grab hold of your readers by offering free or discounting items that are not information products, discounts available only to your readers. You will have a better response rate if you can identify what your readers really want.

You can encourage readers to participate with you feedback generating tools by offering them free white papers, case studies, reports, guides and other information useful to your readers. If your feedback enticements are information products, you have another platform to use in your internet marketing strategy.

A wise use of different media touches linked to your feedback stimulation tools strengthens your internet marketing. These tools will take some planning and strategy to put in place.

6. Track results and adjust your communication

This is a repetition of step 3. Tracking your results and analyzing your international responses is an ongoing process. International marketing is all about taking things one step and a time and making adjustments along the way.

The two processes of internet marketing and international marketing can be combined right here in the tracking and adjustment. This is also how you can learn about your foreign markets even if you live thousands of miles away and you don’t speak the language. This combination can be powerful at very first phase of your international business development.

Internet marketing is all about adjusting your message real time. It is about being present online in real time. If your communication is outdated no one will listen to you. You need to adapt to your foreign markets. When you start out, you do not know much about them. You must continually check and adjust your communication.

7. Identify a country to target specifically

You will get better results from your international communication if it is targeted to very specific markets.

This means you need to identify a country as a target to market specifically to; and there is no real way to choose which country you should start with other than saying the country with the best potential for real sales. There is no magical formula for choosing the first international target market that works across all industries. Find a country where you can reasonably expect a good client base.

There are obvious cultural obstacles for certain types of businesses. So check with all of the appropriate domestic authorities. They will have good insights into what goes on in other countries. Check with your countries embassy in the country concerned.

You can also base your decision solely on data: export data, industry revenue. You can also base your decision on where your competition is located or not located or if
they are considering entering into a market.

International business is all about changing your mindset. Choose a country and get started. The first learning curve is the hardest. So don’t be afraid, jump in and focus on the learning experience of getting to know your market in one foreign country.

8. Create either a blog or a country specific newsletter for that target country depending on your foreign market.

Now, once you have identified a specific country you want to target, you will need communication targeted to that culture. Custom content for one particular country, not old content repackaged.

A blog may be the easiest tool to get to know your target country. You can also do this with a newsletter published for one cultural audience. The important thing is to have customized content written for one cultural market.

There may be translation costs involved. A blog will probably cost you more than a simple monthly newsletter. But a newsletter can be repurposed into several different forms of customized content such as articles, emails.

If your communication is directly targeting one specific culture, you will get better results than with you broad international targeting. Having custom content in either a blog or a newsletter reaching out to one foreign country is your first real presence in a foreign market. And you do not have to have offices there.

9. Track results and adjust your communication.

OK. So now you have a real presence in your target country. Guess what you next step is?
Stimulate and entice feedback. Track results. Adjust your communication to what you learn from your readers. Give them what they want to know. Test and start over again. You need to adjust your communication to the culture and market you want to create a business relationship with.
This is a learning process. It is critical to your international success.

Your Action Plan Continues

Identifying which products and services you want to sell to your foreign markets is yet another action plan. Use good internet marketing practices based on providing information in the above plan. This gives you the possibility of creating other information products as front end sales for your foreign market.

Once you can recognize the international expertise you have acquired through this process, you are well on your way to developing your business internationally. Use this action plan to continue to expand into other countries.

After you have adapted your business to one country’s culture, the process usually gets easier. You will be able to anticipate stumbling blocks more easily. But more importantly you will know how to adapt yourself much faster than the first time around.

Are you committed to speeding up your international sales cycles?

Learn how to combine cross-cultural marketing tools and international sales strategies for faster sales.

Join us on the International Sales Road Map

Would you like to develop your international business?
Are you a beginner at international sales and marketing?
Read the Beginners Guide Discover Your International Business

Time Management Tips to Being Action Oriented

With an action-oriented, do-it-now attitude, supported by effective time management tips / disciplines, you get more out of your day.

When you complete the unpleasant or hard jobs first and act on the big tasks, little bites at a time, you trim anxiety and stress while gaining self esteem, self respect and self confidence.

After you exert this type of time management discipline long enough, you will establish a routine and make a new habit. Behavioral studies suggest that if you do something every day for 30 days, it becomes a habit.

Be action oriented for the next 30 days and you will master procrastination while helping you better manage your time.

Here are some effective time management action-oriented disciplines to apply each day.

Determine your most productive time of the day and dedicate it to “I” time. “I” time is for you to do whatever you have to do that will bring you closer to achieving your goals. It may be as simple as visualizing the accomplishment of your goals. The point is to dedicate the most productive time for the most important person in the world.

“My time” is one of the most important time management disciplines to becoming action oriented.

Once you have set your goals and have prioritized the actions take your annual goals and break them down into months, weeks and days. Do the same with each day’s activities. Break the large tasks down into small, manageable pieces. Try to accomplish some of these pieces each day. Before long you will have accomplished a large task.

Breaking down into smaller pieces is an effective time management discipline.

End each day by writing a prioritized to-do list for the next day. At the end of each week and month do the same for the next week and month. Get organized. Use a daily planner. You will be better organized if you write down everything.

Daily writing and prioritizing is an effective time management discipline.

Clear your mind of clutter. Solve problems while they are small. Whatever you do, do it once, to the best of your ability, and move on. Question all tasks to make sure they are worthwhile. Do the worst or hardest jobs first.

Staying focused and doing things once is an effective time management discipline.

Be decisive and remove time wasters from your activities. When evening comes and your next day’s to-do list is written, celebrate. Action that gets rewarded gets repeated. Do this for 30 days and you will be transformed into an action-oriented, do-it-now person.

Staying in control and removing time wasters is an effective time management discipline.

An action-oriented person is proactive. When you are proactive, you have initiative you can see a need, figure out how to best satisfy it, determine the appropriate time to take the right action, and proceed. When you are proactive, you lead. When you lead, you take control of yourself and get what you want out of life.

Being proactive with time is an effective time management discipline.

Use the visualization technique to help yourself become action oriented. When you set your goals picture something you want to have, be or do. Visualization is seeing the end result. It is a form of mental rehearsal. Through the use of imagination, what you see is what you will get.

Your vision of your goals must be clear. There is a difference between ‘dreaming about having something’ and ‘visualizing having it’. The power to believe makes the difference.

Visualizing implies a structured and disciplined view of what you are trying to accomplish. Through visualization you picture yourself in possession of your goal. You look at your goal from many different viewpoints. By examining your goal from all viewpoints you see the situation clearly and can act on aspects that will result in the greatest payback.

Visualization is an effective time management discipline.

The bottom line: these daily time management tips / disciplines will help keep you action oriented and give you the time of your life to live your dreams.