I will be starting the discourse on the 15Ps of export readiness evaluation criteria by focusing on the company's characteristics which include the promoter, product, pricing, predisposition and purpose as shown in the attached picture.
Today, I will be focusing on the promoters. These are the business owners who make decision on the vision of the company, set the goals be achieved, determine the strategies to be deployed by the company. The commitment of the promoter is therefore extremely critical the readiness of a business to go global.
There are sales managers who have targets to grow sales volumes and therefore want to expand their markets abroad but are unable to achieve much despite all their efforts because the business owners are not yet committed to doing business abroad.
For a business to be able to sell in international market in a successful and sustainable manner, such a business must have leadership that understands the export business process and stakeholders, interested in the export market and therefore ready to commit both human and financial resources to make it work.
Since doing abroad is capital intensive, the promoter must therefore have a budget for the development of the export markets and also commit funds to make the necessary adjustments in the product to suit the needs of the export markets.
One of the reason why many export business fail is because the owners are very satisfied with where they are and therefore do not see the need to go abroad since they are doing very well in the local market. However, this is a very wrong mindsets because export should be a strategy to generate foreign exchange, extend product life cycle, achieve economy of scale and survive recession in the local market.
So before your organization commences the journey to going global, ask this question: How will you describe the level of the commitment of the management to selling in the international market?
See you in the next episode
#exporters #business #businessowners
