How do you achieve and sustain sales growth in the international arena?

The questions of scaling and sustainability pose a continual challenge to companies as they encounter customers from various environments, with different expectations, value propositions and development patterns.

An obvious challenge is that companies have to adapt their sales model and operations from a developed country model to a methodology which captures the realities of developing and emerging countries. This is not an easy task, since the sales and scaling environments are so different. In developed countries, processes and organizations are reasonably transparent, which allows a company to model, forecast and scale effectively. In emerging and developing countries, transparency is often lacking and decision-making is highly personalized. Accordingly this complicates the predictability upon which models rely.

Many companies choose hold fast to their developed country models and pretend that they will function in the emerging effectiveness drops from a roughly 80% address rate to about 20%. This is not a formula for sustainable success.

The components of successful sales operations need to be adjusted to succeed in such markets. From even the beginning steps, there needs to be an additional layer or layers of triangulation to ensure that a company’s assumptions are correct around key elements such as:

• Customer vision and demand for products and services
• Understanding your addressable market
• Certification
• Distribution and channel development
• Supply chain management
• Payment
• Strength of legal environment to ensure contract execution, intellectual property rights, etc.

These are just a few of the components that must be evaluated and adjusted for each priority market.

Blacklin Associates will work with you to ensure that these challenges are addressed in a manner which will empower you in these markets—to see, act upon and predict the multiple opportunities in emerging markets.

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy”
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
“All organizations tend to become institutions.”
Carroll Quigley

The business-world corollary to this famous military observation would be, “No plan survives first contact with reality”. The business-world corollary to the second observation is “Businesses tend to love their models more than their customers.”

Reality is the field where our ideas about value propositions, customer preferences, resource allocations, delivery logistics and so forth are put to the test of engagement. And we might add, the challenge comes not only from the first contact with reality, but from the fact that reality intrudes on the world of plans and ideas constantly.

Engagement means entering into sustained contact with others. It has as its core element the quality of dynamism. Human beings, whether as individuals or groups, are marvelously unpredictable, and therefore any engagement unfolds a reality which could not have been fully anticipated. Engagements challenge plans, expose gaps and open opportunities.

Yet without planning there can be no ability to coalesce and grow the power to impact a market. Planning and modeling allow enterprises to predict, to prioritize, to scale.

There is therefore a dynamic tension between the planning/modeling side of a business against the flows and eddies of constant inputs from multiple external engagements. Every paradigm, every plan, every model is under the constant assault of reality. This is a taxing set of circumstances for any company to manage, and often they decide that it is easier to continue relying on “tried and true” methods, which unfortunately will address a market share which can only diminish. An even worse course presents itself when this decision is made by not deciding.

The Information Revolution has provided numerous benefits to businesses with dramatically increased access to data, much lower cost of communications, marketing and content delivery, and especially, speed of route-to-market. Flows of everything – information, capital, products, services, labor – have increased dramatically in the past few years. But our intellectual and business paradigms have not kept pace.

Our customers in the global market are also absorbing these new flows of information, resources and ultimately choices as they procure goods and services in pursuit of their own output objectives. The good news is that the volume of sales opportunities has correspondingly expanded. Less encouraging is the fact that businesses have not changed their modeling and planning methodologies to address, or even identify, this dramatically expanded range of opportunity.

The real significance of this increase in the size and pace of these global opportunities is that businesses can no longer plan, model, address and manage the multiplicity of these engagement points on their own. Accordingly, businesses consciously need to develop engagement strategies designed to reach out and enlist many entities which together can amplify and sustain their impact in the global market place. Expressed another way, businesses with global aspirations must create a range of external engagements and ecosystems, which will supplement, not replace, their traditional go-to-market planning. This need is inescapable, since few companies have the resources to bring these essential success components in-house – and even if they do, the digestion and alignment time costs blunt the positive impact of so doing.

These ecosystems can be long-term, short-term and/or even ad hoc, and should reflect the shifting requirements of companies as they confront these very rapidly changing dynamics in the global market. What should become a constant in business planning is not any given partnership, syndication or ecosystem, but rather operationalizing the continuing need to create flexible and low-cost combinations of external resources which will maximize awareness of, and impact on, the customer world.

As we analyze the global roll-out of infrastructure and services, the list of customer “care-abouts” should be the guide posts for a company’s creation of any given ecosystem. In the External Resources tab, we list some of the donor and development resources which shape, fund and drive significant portions of this roll-out. Each element has valid goals and objectives designed to help drive development on a global scale. Unfortunately, the development agenda and resources of the donor institutions, governments and NGO’s are not sufficiently coordinated to be really helpful to the recipient government. Of equal import is that very few of the recipient governments themselves have even a marginal ability to understand and absorb these inputs.

Helping your global customers achieve this and optimize their use allows you to become render a tangible and enduring service to them. Your company will no longer just be “another vendor” You can become a trusted partner in development.

With many decades experience in these markets, the professionals of Blacklin Associates have developed unique methodologies for engaging these customers, clarifying and accelerating their domestic and international vision and strategies, and empowering them to make maximum use of the manifold U.S. and international development resources to reach their national objectives.
These resources, enhanced by a unique and flexible approach tailored to a company’s value proposition, can dramatically extend the effectiveness of any company’s go-to-market model, achieve enduring customer intimacy as well differentiation from your competition.

What makes up your customer’s wallet and how can you stretch your share?

In the private sector, that question is relatively straightforward. It comprises cash-on-hand and lines of credit based on a balance sheet and governed by an expense budget. These components are usually knowable through research and sometimes even directly from the customers themselves. Moreover, the groups within your customer’s organization responsible for procurement are very aware of the constraints and flexibilities afforded them. The process to a sale is clearer, and shorter. It is also more crowded with competitors.

In the public sector where most of the global roll-out is occurring, it is a very different proposition. In many cases your end-user customer can articulate their requirements, but the commercial process is only imperfectly controlled by them. In developed countries this is handled in most cases through an established RFP (request-for-proposal) process, where adherence to strictly controlled technical specifications, commercial conditions and ultimately pricing determine the winners. It is also an environment rich in competition where the special advantages of your technology, services and/or go-to-market approach cannot be absorbed.

The majority of the world’s infrastructure and services expenditures are being done outside these two segments described above.  Emerging countries are outpacing the developed world in this roll-out, and this trend shows no signs of abating in the foreseeable future.

Almost all such countries are actively engaged with the multilateral and bi-lateral development, donor and funding institutions, some of which are listed below. These organizations represent just some of the external inputs into your customers’ budgets. In most cases, your customer will not have a clear understanding of how these funds and financial instruments can be used to optimize the effectiveness of their procurements. Even in cases where the customer affects not to care about such inputs, they will indeed care if other in-country players benefit from that which is not currently being addressed. By developing a command of the volumes and dynamics of these resources, you can transform customers’ view of your company – from just another vendor to a trusted partner in development.

Organizations which supplement your customers’ budgets (partial list):

• The World Bank
• The Inter-American Development Bank
• The African Development Bank
• The Asian Development Bank
• The International Financial Corporation (IFC)
• The European Union
• Bi-lateral development funds
• NGO’s and Foundations

U.S. Government Agencies, including:

• U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
• Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)
• US Trade and Development Agency (USTDA)
• Export-Import Import Bank of the United States (US EXIMBANK)

It is noteworthy that all the groups listed above have representation, if not headquarters, in Washington D.C. Each group attracts a constellation of private sector financing, systems integration and logistics management firms which can be orchestrated around the key opportunities arising from emerging countries.

Blacklin Associates will enable your company to identify, shape and manage country-specific ecosystems of public and private resources firms. With such an approach, your company will be able to a shape and address customer demand at the highest levels, increase and accelerate customer spend, and create a strategic platform with your key customers which maximizes demand generation and pipeline/funnel development.