Pekson.com » solution http://pekson.com The Internet is All About Conversations Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:44:05 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 How to Sell and Market Internationally http://pekson.com/2011/04/02/how-to-sell-and-market-internationally/ http://pekson.com/2011/04/02/how-to-sell-and-market-internationally/#comments Sat, 02 Apr 2011 19:37:23 +0000 Raffy Pekson II http://pekson.com/?p=252 Photo by oecd at Flickr.com

In 1999, Thomas Friedman came out with a book entitled “The Lexus and the Olive Tree” where he postulated that the world is currently undergoing two struggles:

  • The drive for prosperity and development, and
  • The desire to retain identity and traditions.

In the same book, he came up with a famous theory, the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, where it stated: “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.”

Though some small businesses (in the Philippines) try to mimic the western world in its style and manner of selling globally, it fails to consider one of the important postulates of Friedman: retaining one’s identity and traditions. That cultural difference makes the business stand above the rest, especially coming from a developing country. Even as you find the fastest and most cost-effective route to market and sell your products and services, who you are make a huge difference.

The micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSME) in the Philippines employ 70 percent of the country’s workforce, with a large concentration in the domestic sector, i.e. wholesale and retail trade, manufacturing, and hotels and restaurants, with 50 percent alone in the wholesale and retail trade. Of 1,000 firms currently exporting abroad, 70 percent are SMEs. The entire MSME community accounts for 25 percent of the country’s total export revenue, mainly through subcontracting arrangements with larger firms or as suppliers to export companies. (1)

But why is it that many MSMEs feel a huge challenge to exporting their products and services? The Global Facilitation Partnership for Trade and Transport (2005) lists fourteen barriers to internationalizing small and medium-sized business:

  1. Lack of entrepreneurial, managerial and marketing skills;
  2. Bureaucracy;
  3. Difficulty in accessing information and knowledge;
  4. Difficulty in accessing financial resources / a lack of capital;
  5. Lack of access to investment (technology, equipment and knowhow);
  6. Nonconformity in standardization, a lack of quality awareness and a lack of mutual recognition schemes;
  7. Product and service range, and usage differences;
  8. Language barriers and cultural differences;
  9. Risks in selling abroad;
  10. Competition from indigenous SMEs in foreign markets;
  11. Unfair behavior of multinational companies against domestic SMEs / a lack of government supply-support programs;
  12. Complexity of trade documentation;
  13. A lack of government incentives for internationalization of SMEs; and
  14. Inadequate intellectual property protection.

Many of these hindrances stem from self-development and plainly dependent on the discipline and perseverance of the small business owner. There are many business courses, both short and long, that the MSME owner and his small team of loyal employees can attend to further its ability to sell abroad. Books and industry periodicals are also a means to keep one abreast of the latest techniques being employed in general management or industry-specific accounts. However you look at it, it’s up to you to make the changes – you are in control of these things.

Some items in the list depend on government units to help the small business owner have access to financing or a faster way of selling to the global market without the red tape or bureaucracy that exists today. However, to wait for or lobby government to provide these is a waiting game and does not allow the small business owner to gain much.

Photo by maniladailyphoto at Flickr.com

Technology is one thing that has gained momentum through the years that allies the small business owner to become bigger than he is. Creating a web page similar to the behemoths of the world, functionalities that mimic Amazon or eBay, online marketing pages and streams that look like Nike or Coca-Cola, up-to-minute updates on your Facebook Page or Twitter account – the internet has propelled small businesses up the playing field of the big boys. However, many MSMEs are missing the point. The moment the customer sees your message, what then? What is the next thing that they’re suppose to do?

In providing the best service to the customer – your customer – convenience and ease are the two magic words that should come blaring into the picture. So, to put yourself in the shoes of your prospect, you have ask: is it easy and convenient for me to “decide to buy” or not? Yep! The other magic phrase is “decide to buy.” It’s not “to buy.” Or you can also ask it as “decide to join” if you’re a country club. Social media, podcasts, on-demand video, web ads, message blasting – the list goes on with the types of internet-based marketing campaigns you can dream of selling to the outside world. But as I postulated above, once they get your message, what next?

My personal web site or blog clearly states the clue to succeeding in the world wide web: “The internet is all about conversations.”(2) How easy is it for your prospect and customer to conduct a conversation with you? Do you think they love typing on the keyboard all the time through e-mail? Is a chat window the best way to do it? SMS or text-messaging? Going hi-tech, do they really want to be seen in their pajamas while they video-talk with you?

I’m sure you’ve guessed where I’m going to with this – you have to “talk” to your prospects and customers, meaning verbal conversations. The easiest and most convenient means your prospect will ever decide to buy from you is if they can call and talk to you anytime of their waking day. They understand that you’re probably half-way around the world and couldn’t make the red eye to meet them in person; or it’s too expensive to set up shop for something that’s uniquely specific you sell. But the ability to talk closes the gap as instantaneous as your prospect can say “I’ll buy a ten dozens.”

You don’t have a US-based toll free number? Get one! It costs $5 a month and a penny a minute for toll charges. Get an IVR solution so your buyer can leave you important messages, at least, that you can respond back in a few hours, or a call routing system to find the best available person to answer his call in the middle of the night. Everyone in your small business is a sales person, a marketing person and a customer service rep all combined in one. For every expense you put into the ease and convenience of your prospect and customer, the returns become multiple-fold. The juggernaut and balancing act of financial expenses and revenue is up to you, and technology fits the bill for both cost and revenue-generating.

Cloud-computing has gone a long way to allow the small business owner to leverage himself to playing field of the large enterprises – in sales, marketing, public relations and so on. But to force your prospect and customer to make it difficult to talk to you? You will forever miss the boat. The cloud (it’s call that way because the internet has always been visually sketched as a light-colored, cartoon-drawn cloud) will be your best friend in your desire to market and sell to the global world – places where there are McDonald’s branches, where you can retain your identity and traditions, where being in a developing country is a plus, and where your prospect and customer can easily grab a phone and talk to you anytime of the day. “Talk is Cheap!” is one slogan I’ve held dear to my advocacy to the call center industry, and it is if you do it using the cloud.

The cloud-based technology for allowing you to transform yourself to be a 24×7 call center is what  Kunnect does best, the best value-for-money hosted solution around. But that’s another story.

]]> http://pekson.com/2011/04/02/how-to-sell-and-market-internationally/feed/ 1 Do You Have the Solution to Your Call Center Problem? http://pekson.com/2009/11/03/do-you-have-the-solution-to-your-call-center-problem/ http://pekson.com/2009/11/03/do-you-have-the-solution-to-your-call-center-problem/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:14:43 +0000 Raffy Pekson II http://pekson.com/?p=26 If you were an entrepreneur bitten by the bug of setting up a call center, would you do it?

Maybe, your management team is seriously contemplating setting up a business center – an internal call center – to spearhead a full-blown marketing campaign aimed to destroy competition and capture your market once and for all?

Are you a managing director of a small or mid-sized center looking for a better way of doing things so that the speed of executing a client’s campaign is less than a day and the resulting issues will completely vanish?

Could you be the CFO or the business development head of a “larger than mid-size” call center seeking a solution to accept more campaigns without incurring a large cost of expanding your technology infrastructure?

How about the COO of a large, multinational call center who need a standby call center solution that’s capable of the entire suite of features and functions of your existing system, as part of a “Disaster Recovery” plan?

In any business like the call center business, there are three basic things people like yourself look for:

* Solutions to existing problems or issues;
* Solutions to bring the cost of doing business down some more;
* Solutions to create new businesses.

Here’s my standing offer: just give me thirty minutes of your time to find out if my solution is the solution you’re looking for. I guarantee you that in 5 minutes, you’ll know whether I should continue or not, and just let us enjoy our cups of coffee while it’s still hot. It’s not an inconvenience, not a hassle to accommodate me, not a big preparation like it was a wedding event, not much people needed to harness the message to my story. A small, simple “meet and greet” that can turn out to be a social encounter or the solution you’ve been looking for.

Like many consumer products, there’s always a “look and see” or test phase so that all theoretical analogies aside, will this solution really work on my kind of live operations? I’ll make sure you have that if you need it.

There are only two guarantees I can give you about my solution

1. It’s a robust and redundant full customer contact solution using the best technology available, and

2. It’s back by a global Tier-2 class carrier doing 350 million minutes a month or 6 billion calls a year.

Contact me today and I’ll make the time for you.

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