Zach Selch explains how to pitch to distributors: they care about two things only, profit and trust. Your elevator pitch should be two sentences that prove you can make them money and won't undercut them. Show market size, margins, and your track record with other distributors.
Chapters
I typically say international sales for most small and medium-sized companies are going to be through distributors. You are going to be pitching to distributors. You're going to come into contact with distributors in various conferences, meetings, by accident. People are going to introduce you, and you should have a short, essentially an elevator pitch for distributors. Now you might have a longer presentation, you might have a variety of different pitches, you might have an email, but you want want a quick pitch. The elements of that pitch are really just 2. How can they make money easily selling your product? And how can they trust you not to screw them over? Those are the 2 things that interest a distributor. Everything else you can elaborate on afterwards. Everything else is sort of the fluff. Okay, but what's really important is how do I trust them not to screw me over and how do I make money easily? And that's what you want your pitch to be about. You don't want your pitch to talk about your quality materials, or the quality of your product, or how the history of your company, or anything like that, unless those are relevant to how the distributor can make money easily selling your product. Okay, and it might be. Maybe what you're basically saying is, look, you know how come you can make money easily selling our product? Because we have a really good product developed by people with 50 years R&D experience from these big companies. Maybe that's what you think is the basic selling point. Maybe that's part of why you can trust us. You can say, look, if you're familiar with such and such a company, all of our people have worked there, and that company has an excellent reputation for not screwing over distributors, so we came with that same philosophy. That might be part of it, but really, you want to keep it simple. I know what the market looks like. This is what I believe the market is like. The product will sell to this market. These are the people in the market who will buy it. These are the steps you have to take in order to bring in a purchase order. It's going to require this much labor, I believe, which means— and your profitability could be like this. We're selling in different markets that are similar to your market, and let me show you how much money they're making. So I think we can understand that you have the potential for making this kind of money from this market with this much effort. That's one part. Then the second part is And I have a personal reputation of not having screwed over distributors. You can talk to these people who know me. We have a company policy. We are not selling— for instance, we're not selling direct anyplace. The average amount of time we've worked with a distributor is more than 5 years. We haven't terminated more— you know, we terminate less than 2% of our distributors every year. Those type of things. What you want is to be able to come up and somebody can read it and say, okay, that makes sense. It looks like they don't screw over their distributors. Ah, that makes sense. Looks like I can make money easily. Great. And then you can continue forward. This is your first date. This is your introduction. This is your, this is your, your online dating profile, if you were. Something you can say in an elevator. Something you can say in 2 minutes. Something you can say in a 100-word email. You want basically to be able to say those 2 things. You're going to be able to make money easily with my product. I'm not going to screw you over. Remember, when you're ready to 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.
