GSM Medica Master Class International Sales Growth

Welcome to the Global Sales Mentor Podcast for conversations that drive growth. When you are ready to grow your international sales, join the conversation with your host, Zach Selch. Welcome to another episode of Conversations That Grow Global Sales with Global Sales Mentor. Today we're doing a special podcast episode because it's not a conversation, it's essentially a monologue. I did a webinar recently on having the most most profitable Medica trade show ever. And there was a lot of requests for me to make this into a podcast episode. So here I am. This is essentially me presenting on my favorite trade show, Medica, and how to have the most profitable Medica ever. So welcome to this episode. And I hope you find this Not helpful. Now, Medica, as some of you might know, is the biggest medical device and healthcare trade show in the world. Takes place in Düsseldorf. And I have been going to this particular trade show since '99. Luftballons was a thing and people in Germany drove around in Trabants for quite some time. Over 30 years I've been going to this trade show. I've done quite a lot of business at this trade show. And therefore I am going to be doing the briefing on it. I think I have a very good position on this. I'm sure there are people who have been to more Medicas than I have. There may be more people who, people who have been to more Medicas and conducted more business with more distributors, with more countries. I don't know, but here's the deal. I've been going for just under 35 years. I've conducted hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business, and I've interacted with somewhere between 500 and 1,000 distributors at Medica over the years. So I've done quite a fair amount of business in and working for 12 or 14 different companies in one capacity or another. So I have a fair amount of experience. In Medica. So that said, I'm not sure what you're expecting from this presentation. Over the years, I've been asked to do briefings for the Commerce Department as well as a variety of different states and other organizations. And sometimes I focus in on more what you can expect from the trade show itself, how to find things, how to get set up. Düsseldorf, the countries you're working with, etc. This year, I'm really going to be focused on how to get the most, the best results, the best sales, the best growth out of your trade show. Okay. Now, if what you were looking for was a little bit more practical information about Medica, about the message in Düsseldorf, about Düsseldorf, etc. Do reach out to me. I'll be happy to talk to you. I also have 3 books available specifically for Medica attendees. Global Sales: The Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Leveraging Medica to Grow Your Healthcare Product Sales in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. Global Sales: Identifying the Right Market for Your Medical or Healthcare Product. Global Sales: Selling in Europe Now. Selling in Europe covers the issues with selling. It gives a country summary for every country in Europe. Identifying the Right Market for Your Medical or Healthcare Product is something that nobody else has. It's 120 markets around the world, digging deep into the healthcare market and what markets might be good for what products. There's nothing like any of these books out there, and you just reach out to my website and you can get a copy for free if you'd like in the short term between now and Medica. And I don't like to brag, but who the hell am I to tell you how to have a good Medica? The only thing I can say is I'm the guy who has multiple times grown a company by over 1,000%, one time by 4,000%. And well over a dozen times by hundreds of percent. Okay. So, um, you don't have to listen to me. I might not be right, but the chances are that I, what I know about how to grow your sales at Medica is going to be something that's helpful for you. So with all that, I'm going to put that aside and I'm going to jump right in to talking a little bit about how to get the most profitable Medica ever. And of course, I don't like talking without jumping in and talking a little bit about this guy who is a real hero of mine. He is the guy who, the Japanese person who was the champion of Hot dog eating, Takeru Kobayashi. And when he got into hot dog eating professionally, he was a 120-pound student. He had never seen a hot dog before. Now, why do I talk about him when I talk about Medica? Because he essentially reinvented the whole concept of professional eating, competitive eating. When he started out, all the people who were competitive eaters were 300-pound white guys from New Jersey who would eat a hot dog essentially the same way you would eat it, just faster. He looked at the rules. He registered. He went there. He took a bowl of oil, a bowl of water. The rules said you could have any condiment you wanted and as much water as you wanted. He dropped all the sausages in the vegetable oil, all the buns in the water. He then took the sausages and sucked them down, lubricated and swallowed them whole. He took the buns, squeezed out the water, and ate it like mush. He was able to eat 50 hot dogs in the time that the champion before him ate 20 hot dogs, and they didn't even have the signage to mark how many hot dogs he ate. It was so unexpected. Okay. Now, the reason I like to talk about him when I talk about business is Everybody you know goes to trade shows and does the same thing. And they typically don't get very good results. 80% of the people who will go for the first time and have a booth at Medica, 80% of the Americans will stop after the first or second year and they will decide that the international market isn't for them. Okay. Why? Not because the international market isn't for them because they didn't really do the right things. They did what everybody else did. They didn't get results and they got discouraged. Okay. So what we want to learn from Takeo Kobayashi is that you don't necessarily have to do what everybody else is doing and then expect that you're going to get good results from this. Okay. This is David Bradsford. Now, David was the Olympic coach for the British Olympic bicycle team. Until he came into that job, the British, Brits had never won any type of awards for bicycling. They hadn't won a Tour de France. They hadn't won an Olympic medal. He came in and he did essentially the opposite from Kiro Kobayashi. He didn't change everything all at once with this big gesture. What he essentially did was he looked at what people were doing and he changed a whole lot of little things, one thing at a time. He changed the underwear they were wearing. He changed The type of toothpaste they were using. He changed the color of the inside of the van, how they cleaned their bicycle wheels, all those little things. And those 1% incremental changes piling up on each other created a situation where they won Tour de Frances, they won Olympic medals, they were fantastic and well regarded. Okay? Now, between these 2 heroes of mine, what I want you to pick up from this is Don't think about what you've always done at a trade show. Don't think about what anybody else is doing at a trade show. Let's think about how do you get the most profitable METICA that will drive sales growth that you've ever had. And that's what we're talking about today. So now I'm going to talk about the show. So Harvard Business Review published an article by a London Business School professor named Marcus Alexander talking about failures that companies had trying to expand internationally and how expensive they were. And then UCLA put out a doctoral thesis a couple of years later dealing with that same subject. And the subject basically was that while it's great to expand globally, it is a very dangerous and expensive thing. And all these people I was talking about, these 80% of American companies, Or let's put this in perspective. 90% or more of American manufacturers don't export at all. Of the ones that try to export, 80% of them stop before they become profitable. They give it a half-assed try and then they fail. Okay? And Harvard Business Review basically said, well, when you try and fail at exporting, the cost is enormous, much higher Than the cost of like hiring a salesperson and giving up after a couple of years. The cost can be catastrophic to a company because it takes away from resources they could be using in other areas for growth. It delays growth by years. So what we want to be doing is thinking very carefully about how we're going to do this right in order to really drive actual growth. Okay. Now. This is a Medica briefing document of mine from 2007. I'm hoping that you can't read all the details, not that there's anything terribly secret, but this is an actual document. Okay. And it was something like 14 pages. I want to say every year when I go to Medica, I have a document like this. It lists what our messages are, what our goals are, what the personnel are doing. What hours they're going to be, what we expect from everybody, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Everything about what's going to be on the booth is in this document. Now, think carefully how many of you really print out a document like this and give it to everybody who's going to be on the booth. How many of you think this stuff through? For me, I think through a trade show very, very carefully. I know Exactly how much every minute on the booth costs me, including the opportunity cost, the salaries, the flights of everybody, all of that, because I want to be clear on how much value I'm getting. I know exactly what I'm trying to achieve, et cetera. Okay. And that's where you want to be before you leave home. Actually, probably by this point, weeks before Medica, you should know this and you should have everything Ready. Okay. Why are you going to Medica? Okay. And I don't mean to be silly here, right? What are you thinking? Because if your statement is, well, I want to sell, that probably isn't good enough, right? What I want to know is what's the, what is the goal or what are the goals, the biggest goals out of showing up at this trade show? Okay. Now, the way I see it, There are a couple of things that you can do to drive explosive, profitable, permanent, predictable growth in your international market, right? You can sell into the correct markets. Okay, so what we might be doing at Medica is adding correct markets, right? And why do I say correct markets? Because adding bad markets Doesn't help you grow. Adding bad markets actually is a liability. What we want are engaged, competent, accountable distributors with the correct level of bandwidth. Okay? So we can be adding or we can be improving distributors. Now, the third thing that we can do to grow and to, to do this explosive profitable, predictable, permanent growth is we can put in place systems for growth and have a cadence of accountability. I do this at trade shows, but honestly, this is a little bit— what we're doing today is a masterclass. This is sort of a master master play. So again, you can read about this in my book. You can talk to me about it. I will have additional webinars going forward talking about the cadence of accountability at trade shows. But I don't have time to deal with it today. This is sort of an on top of, of what we're doing today type of thing. Okay. So let's jump into this selling into the correct markets. All right. This is a bingo machine. How many of you choose the markets you are going into using a bingo machine? And I'm sure all of you say, I don't do that. That said, how many of you go to a trade show, set up a booth, And are willing to work with any random stranger that comes into your booth. Okay. And I'm going to suggest, and it is very possible that a lot of you are doing this. Okay. So what we want to be thinking about is, is this the best way for you to be expanding into the new markets? Okay. Because I don't see a difference between this and working where I, I don't see a difference between bingo and a trade show where you're just sort of standing around and somebody comes up to you and says, I would like to be your distributor in Portugal. And you say, hey, that's great. I wasn't planning on hiring somebody from Portugal, but if you'd like to be my distributor from Portugal, I'm good with that. Okay. I want, when I go to the trade show, to know which countries I am looking for partners in, which countries I want to work in. Okay. Now, how do you choose the right country? And this can be very difficult, and I know people struggle with it. I also believe that most people I talk to say, I'm pretty good. I thought this through. I have a good reason. But very, very seldomly do I hear people have a good rational reason for the countries they're working with. Now, a few years ago, I was at a conference with some people who were diplomats and people from the Treasury Department and so on. And there was a guy on stage talking about markets in the Middle East and so on. And somebody from the audience raised their hand and asked a question and said, so I only have enough money to go into one market in the Middle East. Which market should I go into? And this guy said, well, you know, I'm a diplomat in Morocco and we just signed this treaty with Morocco. It'll make it easier for you to repatriate your taxes, your money after taxes. And there are all these good reasons because of this treaty that you should do business in Morocco. And I raised my hand. I said, I have to ask this. I said, the market for medical supplies, for medical devices in Saudi Arabia is over $2 billion, whereas it's less than $200 million in Morocco. Are you saying that this 3D is actually worth a tenfold difference in market size to this company that can only go into one Middle Eastern market? And the guy backtracked and said, well, no, that isn't what I meant. But I guess when you look at it that way, if what you're trying to do is make money, then yes, maybe you should be going into Saudi Arabia, not Morocco. But if you want to enjoy the benefits of our treaty, and he just sort of fumbled around. So, and this, my wife says, this is why I don't get invited to more parties. But my point being, you don't always want to trust people who seem to be well positioned, who are telling you what markets to go into. When I was a kid, I played the saxophone. I played it very, very badly. And I came home one day and I said to my mother, you know, my saxophone teacher says that if I had a new saxophone, I'd play better. And my mother said, well, where does your saxophone teacher make her money from? And I said, well, we pay her for lessons. And my mother said, yeah, we pay her $7 a lesson. Where else does she make her money from? And I said, ah, she sells saxophones, right? So what you want to be thinking about is when you talk to people and they say, well, you should go to Japan or you should go to China or you should go to Portugal, think about where they make their money from and where their incentive is to drive you into a specific market. Okay. There is, there should be one reason and one reason only that you are going into a new market. And that is because that is a good market. For you to do business in. Okay. It shouldn't be because your wife wants to vacation there, which I hear a lot. Shouldn't be because you think it's going to be fun in that market. It shouldn't be because a friend of yours told you to go into that market. We should be looking to find the most profitable markets for you. And when you go to Medica, you're going to be dealing with people probably from 60 or 70 potential markets. You should already know how many markets you could afford to go into. And which ones you want to be going into. Okay. Now let me tell you a couple of stories about choosing markets and how important it can be. I sold a product once many, many years ago. It was called a capnograph, which is a CO2 monitor. And it's, it's a very accurate tool. It's a wonderful tool. It's just a little bit difficult to read. It takes a little bit longer than a pulse oximeter. Which gives you less information, but is easier to use. Okay. And we are, the founder originally thought that people would buy this instead of pulse, of pulse oximeters. What we found was people wanted to buy it essentially the year after they had bought a pulse oximeter, right? And they would use them together. They would get more information from ours, but faster information from, from the pulse oximeter anyway. What we found was if we could identify the markets where pulse oximeters sold very well for the year before, and that was easy because these were publicly traded companies selling pulse oximeters, we bought a share of stock, we got their book, we could see where they were selling. We knew exactly which markets to target and it was fantastic for us. So that's one example. Another example is I sold a product once, which was a ventilator. That worked off of batteries. And originally we thought we would be looking at Western countries to use these ambulances, but ambulances have very good electrical systems. What we found was countries with poor electrical systems that were prone to blackouts wanted our ventilators for their critical care hospitals. So Looking at countries that had poor electrical grids became our target, and we sold an awful lot of ventilators that way. Okay. Identifying the right market can be key in figuring out, you know, where you should, how you grow. So what's the correct market? Well, I want to figure out why people buy my product, who's buying it, when they buy it. What they're trying to solve in terms of problems. I want to build up an ideal end-user profile or an ideal customer profile, and then I want to take that and figure out where there are a lot of people there. Am I aiming at growing middle class? Am I aiming at a growing number of people with diabetes? Am I aiming at a lot of people who have, who suffer from infectious diseases? All right. Am I looking for women of childbearing age? Those are all things that will tie up to different medical products, and you can figure out the demographics of your market and how to find them. Now, what are some good tools? The CIA World Book. I use that all the time so I can identify some economic and demographic markers that will help me figure out who my ideal end user profile is, or my ideal customer profile is, I will then go to the CIA World Book. I will go to the World Bank website, and those will help me find where there are a lot of people who are similar to what I'm looking for. Okay. I'll throw out another one, hofstedeinsights.com. This is a fantastic website that digs into Business culture of places, right? So, so once I've identified, say, 20 good solid markets that might be really good for my product, I might take a look and see if there are any red flags, laws that might keep me out, or cultural issues that might make this not easy for me, right? Now, I'm also putting down my website, Global Sales Mentor. I have About 120 market briefing documents. I have a lot of material there, all free for anybody to come in and take. And though that material will help you, if you'd like, identify some of those markets, I actually have a free tool which helps you find your first 5 markets too, and various other tools you can find there. So feel free to go to Global Sales Mentor. Now, having just talked about how important it was not to deal with markets that aren't intentional, I'm going to say something that sounds a little contradictory. I also have a secondary and a tertiary list of markets. So if I have a market like, say, Brazil or Colombia or Saudi Arabia and Qatar that are my number one markets, I will also have secondary markets that are typically in proximity to those markets, share some elements of those markets. So for instance, if I'm selling in Chile and I'm selling in Colombia, I might as well be selling in Peru and Ecuador, maybe Paraguay, maybe Bolivia. They have the same language. The culture is very similar, and I might not want to focus on Paraguay, but if I'm already going to be in Chile and I'm already going to be in Colombia, I might as well add a few other countries to that because it gives me just a little bit more market range. Okay? But again, I want to think this one through. I don't want to do this by an impulse. And a very, very important rule that I will say is I don't want to put all of my eggs in one basket. I like to spread out risk with markets. Okay. And very often people come out. I've heard some of my fellow international sales experts who say, well, in the first couple of years, why don't you choose one big market and focus on it? And I'll tell you what, that is a disaster that comes from not having any experience in the real world. Here's the thing. I would say what you want is to spread your risk enough so that if there is a major weather event or a major political event or something like that, your company doesn't decide to give up on international sales altogether. Okay. Because something could happen. You could go into the United States and a political event or a hurricane destroys your market. You could go into Oil-producing countries and the value of oil drops dramatically and you suddenly decide that maybe you shouldn't be exporting. You lose so much money over this. In 2014, the Arab countries, the oil-producing countries were my best, most profitable markets. They represented about 60% of my revenue, but it was also very profitable sales. Okay. My CEO said, well, why don't we phase ourselves out of some of these less profitable markets and put all of our focus internationally on the oil-producing countries? Because they seem to be the ones that really are most profitable. And I said, you know, that would be a disaster. We argued about it. He gave in, he let me do this. Now, the following year, oil prices dropped dramatically. And our sales died out completely for about 2 years from oil-producing countries. What that meant was I had to really hustle. Now, fortunately, I still had the distributors in place. I still had a funnel and I was able to build up sales to make up for the loss of sales in the non-oil-producing countries. But if I hadn't kept those distributors and hadn't kept that funnel, it would've been a disaster. We probably would've decided, That international sales wasn't something that we wanted to be involved in. Okay. So you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. So let's just quickly summarize identifying new markets. Why, when, how do people buy from you? Where are there a lot of people like that? Are there restrictions or limitations? And where is the cultural low-hanging fruit to identify those markets? Okay. Starting up with this, you should be able to put together a list of countries that, you know, and as a rule of thumb, a regional sales manager or one person should be able to onboard and manage 8 to 10 good distributors over the course of a year. Maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less, but that's sort of what you're looking for. Okay. Now the next step is we want to build in an organization of engaged Competent, accountable distributors with the right level of bandwidth. Okay. And let's assume to begin with that we don't have distributors in place or we don't have engaged, competent, and accountable distributors, and we're looking to find distributors. So what do we do to find our distributors? Now, from my perspective, the distributors are the cornerstone of our business. If you are, say, under, in my opinion, under about $500 million, You are selling B2B or B2G, not necessarily, uh, to consumers. You're not like an e-commerce company selling candles or something. You need to have distributors and the distributors are the cornerstone of your business. Okay. So the better our distributors and the better our distributor mindshare or focus, The better we're going to sell. Okay. Now, the first step in finding distributors from my perspective is I want to mirror the way that the end user buys. Okay. So let's think about the purchasing process of the end user and how does he want to go about buying my product or my solution? And why do I talk about this? Because I want to build a sales process. And from my perspective, the sales process sort of fits on top of the purchasing process and is sort of like a mirror image of it. Okay. Then I'm going to build up my sales process from this. Now, you may have multiple ways of building up your sales process. You don't have to use mine. Okay. There are very different ways of building a sales process map. But for this, for the purposes of this session, we're going to talk about my system and we're going to, we're going to use that. But any system you want to use that will help you map out your sales process is good for me. So I like to say there's the The section of finding customers, building trust, helping the customers internalize that we help them solve their problems, and delivery. Okay. And delivery, I mean, actually getting the product up and running in the customer's facility or where the customer is and making sure we get paid. Okay. These are the, the big pieces of the sales process. And then we're going to build a sales process map. And imagine that the different colors here represent the different sections, you know, finding customers, et cetera. But the shapes represent the different people or the different organizations. So for instance, we might have headquarters, we might have the distributor, we might have the RM, we might have the VP of international sales, or, you know, various other organizations or groups or units. Within this map, but we build up a map and now we know what we expect from the distributor. Okay. And again, in the same way, I don't want you to say I'm going to Medica to sell. I don't want you to say, well, I'm hiring a distributor to sell, right? Well, how is he going to sell? Does he have to find the customers himself? Does he have to do demos himself? Does he have to train himself? Does he have to install? You should know this before you get on a plane to Manica, right? You should have a plan because you want to understand what the distributor should look like. You should build an ideal distributor profile in your mind. Okay. Now, from my perspective, there are 3 legs of the distributor, just like a triangle or a stool. There's Bandwidth, which is how many people or how many sales hours he can put out into the market. There's focus, how much he's focused on your product or engagement, you could call it, or mindshare, right? And then there's competency. Now the competency part is just what we were talking about, the elements of the sales process that we expect the distributor to execute. For us. For instance, if what we want is good prospecting, well, the distributor has to be a good prospector. If what we want is good demos, then that distributor needs to be able to do that. Okay? What I'm going to say is very often we think, well, in order to be a distributor of our product, you really, really have to understand radiology. Well, think about that. Maybe you do, maybe you don't, right? If you have to sell to a large hospital through their purchasing system, maybe you need to understand radiology, maybe you don't. Maybe you just need to understand how to sell to that hospital. Okay, likewise, very often people come to me and they say, well, my distributor really needs to be able to install this product. It's a very difficult installation. And that's the most important thing. I get it, but you can always hire somebody to turn a screwdriver to do an installation. If your distributor doesn't know how to sell, you're screwed. Nothing else will matter if your distributor doesn't know how to sell. So I would say, think about the competencies that are involved with selling, choose your distributor off of that, and then say to him, if you want to be my distributor, you have to hire somebody with these technical skills. Because the opposite doesn't work. If you hire somebody with extremely good technical skills and you say, but you have to hire a salesperson now. He's not going to know how to do it, right? It's a lot easier to identify the skills needed for a technical person and find that technical person. And it's a lot cheaper to hire that technical person than it is to find somebody who can sell. Now, when I talk about bandwidth, how do I understand the proper level of bandwidth? Well, I'm going to use a very simple set of math right now. So let's say I'm going into Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has 400 hospitals, mostly spread out. You know, there's some of them are spread out, but there are a lot of them are in 2 cities. So what I'm saying is, okay, to hit 400 hospitals in a year, that's essentially 400 meetings in 200 working days in 2 cities. I probably need at the absolute minimum 2 half-time people, one in Jeddah and one in Riyadh. To properly cover this market. Okay? That's assuming 2 hospitals a day for 200 days out of the year. So 1 full-time person would cover 400 hospitals, but I'm not probably going to get 1 full-time person, and I want that split up between Jeddah and Riyadh. Let's say, okay, this is just an example. Okay. But what I want to do is think about how many targets am I aiming for in that market? How much, how many sales hours do I need to hit those targets? And then do the crude math to make sure that I can get it. Because, you know, let's say I'm looking at a place like Mexico with something like 5,000 hospitals spread out all over the whole country. Now, if all those hospitals are my target and somebody says, yeah, I'm one guy based in Mexico City, he's never going to do it. Now, if he comes back and he says, let's talk this through, you're really only looking for critical care hospitals that have an ICU, that cuts that number down dramatically, right? If he says, look, I'm working in Mexico City, but I work with 5 sub-distributors who are in different cities. That makes the whole bandwidth make sense. Okay. So what we're trying to do is understand what is the bandwidth requirement. Now, you know, the countries you want to go into. Now you do the math. What is the bandwidth requirement for those countries before you get to Medica? Engagement. What do I mean by engagement or focus? Well, how many products is the company selling? How do I know they're going to engage with me? All right. Now, if a company's selling, very often we get tied up. We go, wow, this company has fantastic bandwidth. They have 1,000 salespeople. They sell 6,000 products, right? So you have zero focus. What we're looking for is a good balance between bandwidth and focus. And then the competency, well, we talked about the competency. You take that from the sales process map and you figure out what you require. Okay. And now it's like the dating game, right? You basically, you're going and you're talking to different distributors. Hopefully you have set up meetings. I mean, this, this is what I'm looking for is you want to set up meetings before you get to the trade show. You've identified who the proper distributors should be. You've reached out to them. You've set up meetings at Medica. Now they're coming in and we're talking to them. Now. You want to be as attractive as possible to these people before you start asking them questions. I like, I want everybody to want to be my distributor because then they're going to really try and put their best foot forward. And as I ask them a lot of tough questions, okay, so what do I mean by that? What are they interested in? Okay. We very often come to these things and we say, well, you know, our company was founded in 1910 by an immigrant from Italy and he really cared about this. And our philosophy is that, and we have a really Nice equitable force that's very diverse and we make a product that's beautiful and aesthetic. None of those things interest the distributor. There are 2 things that interest the distributor. How is he going to make money from selling your product? And by that, I mean, is there a market? Are you easy to work with? Will it be, will there be tools to help him sell? He wants to make money with your product. You want to tell him how he's going to make money with your product. Then the second thing is, are you going to screw him over? Right? And I can guarantee you that every distributor you ever talked to has been screwed over by an American company. What does that mean? He contracted with the company and then that company decided they wanted more than one distributor in that market after telling him that he would be exclusive. Or a company, they started to sell very well and the American company decided to go direct. Or the company's, you know, sold very well. Things were going very well and they decided to go with a bigger distributor or something and cut them off. Everybody's been screwed over. What you want to do is show them why they can trust you, either you, Zach, personally, where you can say, look, I have a history of never screwing over the distributor. You can look on LinkedIn. You can reach out to anybody who knows me, reach out to any of my connections. You can I promise you, you're never going to find anybody who tells you I screwed them over. Or you can say, as a company, we have a history of not screwing people over. And you could talk to these distributors who will tell you how good we are about this, right? So what you want to do, 2 things. How are they going to make money? How can they trust you not to screw them over? Everything else is really frosting on the cake. Okay, so let's go over recruiting good distributors. We wanted to build an ideal customer profile. Let's use websites, LinkedIn, the commercial service, attendee lists of trade shows, et cetera, to find those candidates. What do I mean by this? Well, let's talk about a few little tricks. And again, I have additional trainings, including free webinars that really dig into how do you find distributors, but What I do is I say, well, my ideal customer profile is probably selling these 5 companies right now. So I'll go to those companies' websites and I will see if I can find their distributors. If I can't, I'll call up and I'll talk to the VP of sales or the director of sales. And I'll say, hey, you don't know me, or maybe you do know me. I'm not a competitor, but I would like to identify your distributors because I think they'd be good for me too. Now, sometimes they'll give them to me. Sometimes they won't. Sometimes I'll get a little tricky. I'll call up commercial service people and I'll say, hey, I am looking for the distributor in your market of such and such a product. I can look on that, look for that on LinkedIn too. Okay. Very often people who distribute a certain product used to work for that company in the past as an employee. You can look at past employers. And you can look in that territory, in that geographic territory, and you'll come up with some lists, right? You can friend people from those companies, and then you can look at their contacts in the countries you're interested in, because the distributors will probably be their LinkedIn contacts. These are all some tools. Uh, you can reach out, like I said, to the Commercial Service. You can look at attendee lists of trade shows, because you can guess that most distributors in these markets have attended trade shows. You can buy the list. You can look at that country. You know, let's say there are 50 people from Bangladesh who attended a certain trade show last year. You can check through, find how many of them were distributors. You can look at their websites or their LinkedIn, see what they sell and see if they're good. I use all of these tools. They've all netted me good distributors over the past. Reach out, set meetings before Medica, and have a solid pitch. What does that pitch include? How you're going to make money, how, why I'm not going to screw you over. And have the right questions, ask the right questions, and document the answers. You might meet 20 or 30 or more. I've had shows where I've met 50 new distributors over, you know, 4 days, right? You want to make sure you're documenting all the answers correctly and that you know what you're doing. Don't choose lightly, but as soon as you choose, move fast. I like to send an LOI, a letter of intent, as soon as I decide who I want to be my distributor so that I can move quickly with that. All right. So these are some tips for recruiting good distributors. Now, what's the flip side of this? Engaged, competent, accountable distributors with bandwidth. When I already have distributors now. I'll tell you something. For most, for half of my career, I was very quick, a little bit less than half my career, but for a big chunk of my career, I was very quick to fire distributors. And then I had this CEO who had a horrible group of, well, an ineffective group of distributors. They were all very nice men, but they were ineffective. And my, my CEO said, look, I've known these guys, some of them for 30 years. I played golf with them for 30 years. We watched their kids grow up. They've been to my kids' wedding. I've been to their kids' wedding. Don't fire them, please. And I ended up firing one distributor who was really difficult to turn around. I threatened to fire a few others, but I was able to turn around all the other distributors and get them to grow their sales by a minimum of 300% within 3 years. Okay, these are distributors. In some cases, they had been selling our frontlets for 30 years and they had been chugging along without putting any real thought or effort into it. And boom, I got them to dramatically increase by working hard with them. And I learned from that, that you don't necessarily have to fire distributors. So if you have distributors and they're not engaged, competent, and accountable, how can you leverage a trade show? To drive the engagement, competency, and accountability. Okay. Now take a look at this. This is my chart of engagement and competency. Okay. The size of the bubble represents bandwidth. What we really want are people who are in the top right-hand corner for highly engaged and highly competent. But what, but if we have everybody in the Lower left-hand corner, what we're going to see is as we drive engagement, competency will follow. Okay. It's very hard to change bandwidth. We'll touch on that for a second in the end. But if we can drive engagement, we're going to have better luck at improving competency. Okay. So let's start. How do we build engagement? The traditional age-tested thing is good meals and drinking. I'm going to invite people out for a nice meal, drinking, et cetera. Everybody loves that. And and that's pretty valuable. Okay, let's take that a step further. How about a coat room and a lounge in the booth? This is my personal favorite because think about Medica. I don't know how you know some of you haven't been to Medica before, but if you've been to Medica, it's typically cold outside. You come in, you're hot. You want to take off your coat, and in the morning, about ten o'clock in the morning, there there can be an hour of wait. To get to the cloakroom at 6 o'clock at night, there's always an hour wait to get to the cloakroom. So what we want is to help people out. And if we say to all of our distributors, hey, you can drop your bag and your coat off at my booth every morning and, and leave it with me, you will be the first stop of all the distributor salespeople in the morning, and you'll be the last stop in the evening, and they will love you and they will hang out with you. Now take, now this costs you 2 meters of space, which costs a lot of money, right? That could be a couple of thousand bucks, but the return on investment on that is huge. Now, what about a lounge? For most of the time I've been going to Medica, I had a third of my booth dedicated to a lounge with 2 couches, a water cooler, a little fridge for beer, and a coffee maker. So people could come at any time of day, have some water. Have some beer, have some coffee, sit on the couch and talk. And this meant that all of my distributor salespeople were hanging out at my booth. It was fantastic because it drove up engagement. Now, aside from everything else, they enjoyed this. They talked about my product and they talked with other distributors from other countries and they became sort of like a A tight-knit team or family, and they loved each other. And they did. And this also made the distributorships that sold my products sticky, right? I was the, the owners of these distributorships liked me because I was making their salespeople more interested in staying in their distributorship because they had friends who were selling my product in other countries, right? So having a lounge in the booth Probably was worth $100 million in direct sales over the course of different years. Just that one little frick, right? And it cost me, it cost me $7,000 a year in real estate, something like that, to put that in. In that neighborhood, $7,000 to $10,000, it was a very worthwhile investment. And then training tools not related to your product are really valuable. Why do I say not related to our product? Because we're going to talk about training tools related to the product in a second. But when you give a distributor salesperson tools that they can use to sell any product they sell, right? Training on, you know, I'll do training on storytelling. I'll do training on humor in sales. I'll do training on questions in sales. I'll do training on time management for salespeople. Now they know that I'm giving them tools they can use to sell any product. This makes me more and more valuable in their eyes. In terms of the value as a principal, because I am giving them tools that will get the money from all their products. Okay. Building competency. Product training. Okay. I see competency as directly related to product training. I see engagement as directly tied to non-specific product training, to general sales training. Product training will build up competency. And we can use the trade show to talk to people. First of all, we can use the trade show to understand where people's weaknesses and strengths lie, but we can also use it to really dig into specifics about product training. Funnel reviews. I do meetings that do funnel reviews. Now, from my perspective, I want to dig into why people are winning and why people are losing. I will do that at a trade show. And those meetings will lead me to really know those. Very often I'm dealing with 300 salespeople who work selling my product for my distributors. These funnel reviews allow me to know everybody's strengths and weakness. Okay. So if you dig into that and trade shows are an excellent time to do these funnel reviews. And then end user meetings and visits while at Medica. So most years when I'm at Medica, I will go to visit hospitals and end users before and after Medica. So I might start off in Scandinavia. I might start off in Austria and Hungary, Czech Republic. I might start off in Spain and/or Italy, Portugal. And then as I leave, I'll flip that and go someplace else. So I might do a number of hospital visits with the salespeople. I see how they talk. I can help them improve their talk, but it also gives me a good feel for what's going on in the market. And it's really good to add it to a trade show like Medica because I'm very busy, like you're probably very busy. And this means that I can cut down on the number of times I have to leave home. If I'm already going out, adding a week to visit some end users with my distributors isn't hard shit. Building bandwidth. I said that was the hardest thing, but let's talk about a couple of tricks. I'm talking to senior management and owner discussions at Medica, right? And the senior owners and management are the ones that are going to decide if they're going to hire additional salespeople, et cetera. I can pull together data that comes up in the funnel review. And by that, I mean, let's say I'm looking at this and I say, look, You are obviously not covering where you're getting too many new prospects, which you're not getting to fast enough. You're not following up between, you know, the demo stage and the proposal stage. These things are related to not enough bandwidth, right? And if you had more bandwidth, you would be selling more. And I can— the funnel review gives me the data. To point this out to people and really say, look, this, these are the facts. You can see it. This should help. And then bring owners together for social events, right? What I find is I might tell somebody they should hire more salespeople and they won't listen to me. But if they hear from another distributor owner how successful that distributor owner is, they might decide to hire more people. And if I can put people together at a trade show dinner or a trade show drinking event or something like that, Those owners talk to each other, there's a good chance that I can drive people hiring, owners hiring more people. Okay. So that's pretty much what I wanted to talk about. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to discuss, you know, the, the fun elements or the trade, the MESA elements of the trade show itself, et cetera. If you have any questions about any of those things, Please feel free to reach out to me. Like I said, you can download a lot of material from my website. You can reach out to me and ask me questions. I am, you know, I'm basically very happy to meet with anybody who wants to meet with me at Medica. Now you have a couple of choices here. You can go, you basically get off this webinar and you can say to your spouse, hey, I just heard a really crazy idea from a guy who looks like Santa Claus. And I, you know, none of it was really valuable to me, right? Or you can decide that you really want to grow your international sales. You can take to heart what I said. You can study what I said. You can look through my material, my book if you want, or just go over this, think about how you can apply it. And I guarantee you that you're going to drive up your sales because I've done this over and over and over again for companies I've worked for as well as clients. These are the tools that will get you explosive, predictable profitable, permanent sales growth with your international markets. Okay. Now I teach people this. You can find courses on my website. I guide and coach people, right? So I have a lot of clients who come to me and I, I give them coaching services and I essentially hold their hand while they're growing. And I can do all the heavy lifting for you. So if you say to me, hey, Zach, can you set up a distribution organization for me? Because I don't think I can do it myself. I can do it and then hand you the keys at the end. These are things that I do. So you can find me on LinkedIn or at globalsalesmentor.com. Please do reach out, set up a meeting at Menigo. We can talk about how I can help you grow your international sales. And I'm not looking at growing them by a couple of percent or 10%. I'm looking at big 100% growth in a year or 2, 50% growth easily in a year, 100% growth in a couple of years. And, you know, 700% to 1,000% growth over a 5-year period is very, very doable. Thank you very much for your time. And again, feel free to look me up if I can help. Also, please do remember to join us for additional episodes of Conversations That Grow Global Sales. Have a great day.