Export Experts: Finding and Managing International Partners
Five experienced exporters share tips on finding and managing international partners, including how to screen for quality, length of time it takes, places to find international partners, how the U.S. Commercial Service can help find international partners and the VIPER method for managing international partners.
Transcript of this video –Â
0:06Â Finding and managing international partners [Jon Engelstad] One of the things that I do
0:27Â when I’m looking at a market, and I’ve had great success with this, is I will,
0:31Â through our local U S Commercial Service office contact the Commercial Service offices
0:36Â in the countries I may be interested in and then start a dialogue that way.
0:40Â They’ll start researching that market for me, we can maybe do an Initial Market Search
0:44Â or develop it into a Gold Key but, you know, we can sit down and talk
0:48Â about what I’m looking for, what my product is, the kind of customer that I’m looking for,
0:53Â and they’ll help me research that and kind of narrow things down so that when it comes time
0:59Â to make those contacts I have the right people to talk to.
1:02 Â [Greg Moll] It’s the quality and vetting if these people even have an address,
1:07Â and using the Commercial Service was probably our number one way of easily vetting
1:14 Â down a client rather than, I call it “chasing rabbits.”
1:18Â It avoids chasing rabbits or throwing darts on a wall.
1:21Â It’s an easy way to find out if a client is valid.
1:24Â [Heather Ranck] What I found a lot of times is that small businesses
1:27Â and small manufacturers are best partnered with other small companies overseas.
1:32Â Sometimes companies make the mistake of thinking that they should partner with someone