Zach Selch shows how to pitch to international distributors by proving your commitment to their market. Distributors fear foreign suppliers will abandon them, so bring business references, show your manufacturing and R&D, and present a clear financial case. This builds trust and makes distributors compete to work with you.
Chapters
I'm in front of the beautiful Hotel Metropol in Moscow. Let's talk for a minute about pitching to a new distributor. So I've decided on who I want to be my distributor. I have a shortlist of 2, and now what do I do? What do I say to them to get them to want to be my distributor? Because what I want is I want to blow them away. I want them now to do everything in their power to compete to be my distributor, so I'm going to give get the best out of them, and also I can negotiate the best possible terms in my contract. If I don't get them excited now, everybody's going to pay for it later on. So what do I do? Well, think about what the distributor needs to see and wants to see. From a trust perspective, they don't know that you're committed to their market or to the international market at all. And I know that might sound funny to you, but the cost to a distributor of an American company coming into their market and then leaving, if they represented is huge. It makes them lose face. There will be actual costs that they've sunk into onboarding and training. They might hire people. They might go through registration. All these things. And it is not uncommon for foreign companies, especially American companies, to say, hey, I'm going to go into the Colombian market, pull back a year later and say, this was just a little too difficult for me. I'm contracting my markets, or I'm going to focus on one or two international markets, or I'm going to get out of the international all. They've— every single good distributor you're ever going to meet has been burnt already. So what you want to do first of all is show them your commitment. You want to show them that you've done well in other markets. Now it could be you haven't done well anywhere else but the United States yet, or your home market. So you want to show them how well you've done in the United States with some references, both business and actual end users. So if you can come and say, hey, here are some end users you can talk to, here are some of my present distributors, come let's talk to them, we'll work out a way so you can get a little bit more confident. About the business case on this. They want to know about your manufacturing facilities. They want to know about your key personnel, how much you spent in R&D, all these things. Now, if you can come up with this upfront as part of your pitch, you're going to save yourself time, energy, and stress later on because they might say, well, you know what, Zach never raised this. Maybe I should go take a look at the factory. Maybe we should do some more due diligence, etc. If I can come in and say and wow them from the very beginning, and talk about my facility, talk about our experience, talk about our commitment to the market, talk about how well we've done making money for distributors in other markets, those type of things from the very beginning, I'm going to show them a really strong business case and take away a lot of their worries. 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.
