Zach Selch argues that reactivity kills export sales. Most companies chase random distributor meetings and trade shows instead of following a documented plan for target markets, goals, and ideal partners. Without discipline and strategy, results stay inconsistent and opportunities slip away.
Chapters
Hi, I'm in Plaza San Martín in the old city of Lima, Peru. Beautiful, beautiful colonial old city. Typically we get to the southern part of town where more of the business is being held. It's more modern, but I love coming down here every now and again. Behind me you'll see the memorial statue for General San Martín, who was probably the biggest hero from the Chilean in history and sort of one of the founders of the country and their— one of their heroes and founders. Below San Martín, you'll see a statue of a woman, and on that woman's head is a llama, the dromedary. And the story goes that in the specifications for the statue, the artist was told to put a flame on the woman's head, and because of a misunderstanding, he understood to put a llama on her head instead of a flame. And mistakes happen. So now we have a woman with a llama on her head instead of a woman with a flame on her head. People ask me all the time, what are the biggest mistakes that exporters do? Because they'd like to try and avoid them. And I sort of made my living fixing mistakes that people have made. You know, people typically have brought me into companies where they'd like to improve their exports, where over the years, to some extent or another, they've completely screwed up their attempts to sell internationally. And I've done different videos about different mistakes. I usually look at the 5 biggest mistakes. And the one I'm going to talk about today is being reactive. What do I mean by being reactive? Well, very often when you take a look at people who— at companies that have been exporting for years and never being successful, they've never had a strategy or a plan that they followed. Maybe they had a strategy or a plan, but they didn't stick to it. And you take a look at their distributors or the countries they're in, and they say, well, we're selling in this country because a distributor reached out to us, or we're working with a distributor because he came up to us at a trade show, or we hired this guy because he was a friend of a friend and they told us about him and he spoke Spanish or he spoke Japanese and he seemed like a nice guy. But they didn't really have a plan, and the plan is what brings everything together, right? So if you don't have a plan or you don't follow that plan, you're gonna be sorry about it later on. And I've seen this over and over and over throughout my life where people try to build up They try to build up an export plan, or they try to build up an international sales plan. And in the end, because they don't really have a plan, or they don't stick to that plan, they let themselves be pulled around. They don't follow a strategy. And nothing ever succeeds this way. So the best way to guarantee that you're going to succeed is to put together a plan, figure out where you want to go, why you want to go there, who you're going to hire, what the distributors you want are going to look like. Stick to that plan. That's the path to success. And remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
