How to Establish HiTech B2B Sales in Asia

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For Western companies, the Asian countries like Japan are often exotic but scary. From the other side of the globe, Asia is typically seen as a unified block of countries with similar differences as the countries in Europe or states in the USA. This stereotype couldn’t be more wrong. Asia is a geographical area of countries, even regions within the countries, that have much more distinctive and different features as e.g. between Spain and Finland or Dallas and New York. How to tackle this when you are going to expand your coverage to markets you know very little about?

All strategic moves should obviously start with a strategy. Bigger companies have separate organizations to probe new markets and make related plans, but SMEs can’t afford that luxury. Neither can they afford a failure as it would easily deplete their resources from other areas. Luckily there are easier and faster ways to approach the Asian markets than extensive market studies, test marketing and establishing own presence in the region.

During my 20+ years in Asia I have learned some tricks how to speed up the expansion process and get things either moving or stopped before it’s too late. First of all, you can replace a heavy and costly market study by a simplified method: approach existing local representatives (here onwards reps - covering distributors, agents, system integrators and other sales representatives). Reps are already in the market, are approaching your target end-customer departments and have ongoing business with them. A very important and often forgotten detail is that in order to have the first P.O. from a reasonably sized Asian customer will take at least a month from signing the agreement. No P.O. can be submitted without the customer having established a supplier “account” and that is usually a heavy and bureaucratic process without any relation to the user’s needs. These reps have valid end-customer accounts and can bring in the P.O. immediately after the contract. They are right now selling similar or supplementing products or services to exactly the teams you’re after. But how to find the “right” rep, a.k.a. sales channel?

In many of my projects I have applied a three-stage approach:

1. Internet Search to identify as many as possible potential rep candidates.
2. Direct Contacting to meet and rank the short-listed candidates that are interested and to prepare a “Final List” accordingly.
3. Joint Meetings with prepared agendas as F2F sessions together with the principal and each “final” candidate, followed by the selection of candidates to open negotiations with.

While this “funnel” efficiently narrows down the amount of required contacts, it also shows fast how much real market there is for a specific product or service. When done professionally, each stage takes typically about a month and - for the benefit of all parties - the project can be stopped after any stage if the reality proves bleak. However, in most cases the “best” rep(s) are found, contracts made and sales efforts start in a few months after the project has started. No local investments, no own local organization - a localized “shepherd” can frequently push the rep(s) to your wanted direction if remote control is too weak - nor leaps of faith are required.

One example about a very easy, cheap and fast market study. Without any offense to anyone, governmental trade promotion organizations are often considered not the best way to find sales channels. In Asia even more so. I recently placed a very vague “ad” on one of such market places in order to probe initial market interest. The result was quite staggering. In one week, I had three “definitely interested” rep candidates. And when I got the first statistics, I found out that in the first week the ad had collected 165 clicks and out of them 28 had logged in to see the details. 50% from the target country but the other 50% from elsewhere in Asia. Knowing that a small  minority of industry players are following such sites and what were my chances to get any attention for my camouflaged post, I was truly surprised of the volume and sources of interest!

If you don’t want to stand here alone, experienced help is available. One of them you can find at www.mikAdvance.com.