In this spoken presentation, the speaker reflects on the historic role of Kuwait’s fish market as a centuries‑old trade hub, noting the cultural expectation of haggling in Middle Eastern markets. He then shifts to his core expertise: negotiating with international distributors. He warns against the common mistake of demanding large upfront purchase orders, explaining that such financial promises are unreliable if the distributor fails to sell. Instead, he advocates using pre‑signing leverage to define a concrete set of activities the distributor must perform—such as hiring specific staff, training programs, trade‑show participation, CRM reporting, and a minimum number of sales hours. By making compliance with these activities the cornerstone of the agreement, the distributor is compelled to generate sales, leading to sustainable revenue growth. The talk concludes with a call to action, inviting listeners to seek his help in expanding their international sales.
Chapters
So I'm here at the Kuwait Fish Market. There's been a market here for 2,000 years, more or less. Sinbad would have unloaded goods here on his trading voyages. Why did they have a market in Kuwait? Well, if you take a look at the geography, of Kuwait. Kuwait is where the ocean-going ships that have come up from India and China and the Spice Islands are now going to change, and they're going to put goods on river-going ships that are going to go up to Baghdad and to Damascus. And when we're in a market in the Middle East, we're always going to think about negotiations, right? Just like in the movies where they're like, oh, it's not fun if we're not haggling. You have to haggle with us. And that's not far from true— from the truth, right? Everybody expects to haggle in the Middle East. Middle Eastern market. And I spend a lot of my time over the course of the year negotiating. One of the big things I negotiate is the conditions that apply when I hire a new distributor. And I've spoken on different videos about how I find distributors and what I want from a distributor and how I manage distributors. But there's a sensitive issue of the discussion before I hire the distributor that I'm going to tell the distributor what I want from them. We're going to negotiate that. And very often we make the mistake and we say, I'll tell you what. Give me a million dollars worth of purchase orders and you can be my distributor. And that seems like a great idea until you realize that then they can agree to that. They can agree to give you millions of dollars every year for a couple of years, but when it comes time to collect, you're not sure you're gonna get it if they're not selling. What's really important is to get the right activities, because if you get the right activities, then they're gonna do business. If you don't get the right activities, You're not going to get business. You're not going to get business. And once they've given you money, if you've asked them for a certain amount of money and they gave it to you, you can't come back later and say, but I really want you to do these activities. Your leverage is in the beginning before you've signed an agreement with them. So what you really want to do is in the negotiations when you're first talking to them, say, look, let's not talk numbers. Don't tell me you're going to give me a purchase order of $1 million every year for the first 3 years. Let's hold off on numbers for 2 years, but these are the activities you have to carry out. And I'll typically give people about 2 pages worth of activities that I want from them. I'm going to tell them what type of people I want them to hire. I'm going to tell them how I want them to train their people. I'm going to say what trade shows I want them to be in, how they report information, right? If I want them possibly to use my CRM or to connect With my CRM to issue different reports. I might even say, I'm expecting this many sales hours a year from you. And if they don't give it to me, then they're not in compliance with their side of the agreement. Right. So it's very important to clarify what the activities are that you want from your distributors. It's more important than asking for a specific amount of money. Because in the end of the day, if you ask them, say, for half a million dollars a year for 3 years, and they see that they aren't selling, they're going to terminate the agreement. They're not going to pay you that money. But if you ask them for a certain amount of activities, they're going to produce sales. And in the long run, you're going to see a lot more revenue. So 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.
