Happy CEO

Why do you go to work every morning?
Why do you manufacture and sell these particular products or services?
Why do you export? What is the essential reason?
What is your real and root cause through the process of internationalization?

If you don’t know how to answer these questions, your future foreign clients will certainly want to know how you are different from others and how you work.

Differentiation is key

At international level, you need to create a competitite advantage and think about a differentiation strategy.
This is why in exporting, it is not enough to write press releases in English, to send spam and to hire salespeople. That, any company can do or already do.

You can always spend more on the communication budget. Does it really make a difference?

One of the techniques we use to spend less and attract more clients and partners for free is education, training.

Share your knowledge, experience, thoughts, ideas, learnings.

Of course, there is product training for customers, but we’re not talking about the post-purchase process.
We are talking about using information sharing, content management, as a tool for international conquest.

To gain export market share, you can:

• Teach techniques on your website or podcast.
• Organize virtual or real masterclass.
• Offer courses via email, telephone and video conference.
• Share white-papers, manuals, technical datasheets, FAQs.
• Feed a blog dedicated to your business expertise and share the content on social networks.
• Create a channel of educational videos on youtube.
• Share your presentations on slideshare.
• Create an interactive discussion groups on Linked-In.

It is this qualitative and interactive content that allows you to accelerate your relationships that no other traditional marketing medium can offer. It’s free and the returns are incomparable with the usual communication strategies. This method also ensures the loyalty of your audience.

Your skills are proof of your expertise.

Your knowledge and skills are the reason prospects will become customers. So be sure to show them.
Why deprive yourself of it?

Teaching encourages people to trust you and increases your visibility and global credibility. You have to show your cooking recipes like the great chefs do.

Efficiency lies in cultural adaptation and alternation.

Among the educational tools that we like to use, there is of course the written content transcribed orally in the form of presentation. You have to limit this type of educational tool because in the world as it is now, people zap too quickly and drop out. Three minutes on average if the content is read…

You will therefore have to condense your messages into powerful presentations that you will have worked-on hard in a theatrical way.

Maximum twenty minutes of oral intervention.

No more than 10 general ideas themselves divided into 3 keywords.
Above all, the conclusion must be memorable and admirable.

Slides in PowerPoint or printed on paper must be uncluttered and imaged. Use visual thinking.

One concept = One image.

Select your ideas with a simple and precise speech. We always say that you have to express yourself as if you were talking to ten-year-old children. Especially when exporting with people whose mother tongue is not English. Little text, lots of diagrams or images.

Videos work well.

Often translated in English to be shared everywhere, try to make subtitles in the language of the country if possible. In any case, take time out to explain or comment the video.

The quality of group work

This is our preference because it offers the levers of collective intelligence. This is an important step in the management of your distribution network in our opinion. We often divide our assignments into sub-groups of salespeople, agents or distributors in order to have them work on a specific subject of creativity, brain-storming on a theme to be improved. The result is then presented orally by each of the groups.
This is an opportunity to compare the results, the points of view, to discuss the different angles of progress.

This technique allows us to :

• Identify the driving and key elements of the system (Leaders, adapted, performers).
• Work on the cohesion and encourage communication in the group, in particular to identify where areas of blocking of expression are located (for example, knowing if a leader monopolizes power and blocks the expression of others).
• Carry out a feedback of information and ideas thanks to the creativity encountered between the members.
• Make the members work orally in a theatrical way to work on interpersonal skills.
• Highlight the cultural differences, the behaviors generated by these differences and the consequences on the group’s operational approach.

Writing a Hollywood screenplay

We often ask for a summary of the work to be done and write our presentations ourselves in the form of a Hollywood script.

THE PROTAGONISTS > THE DRAMA > THE INTRIGUE > THE HERO > THE ENDING

Out of PowerPoint or laptop ?

Last technique, drawing. Draw it. Draw your ideas.

Have you noticed during your appointments abroad the number of diagrams that it is possible to make, created on tables, walls, notebooks. It engages customers and prospects in the creative process during meetings. It’s incredible. Technical diagrams, module ideas, process deployment, architectures, machine operation, etc.

It is essential to know how to express yourself by drawing on the board, flipchart or on white sheets. This very visual method makes it possible to conceptualize ideas without the technical limitations of software and computers.

Selling your ideas means knowing how to conceptualize. Especially for export. Make sketches.

“Differentiation is simply a teacher attending to the learning needs of a particular student or small groups of students, rather than teaching a class as though all individuals in it were basically alike.”

Carol Ann Tomlinson