How to find customers in the world?
How to find customers in the world?
One of the biggest difficulties for a company to start exporting is to find customers or potential customers abroad. This is one of three export barriers that a company faces to enter international trade.
The world works permanently in the supply-demand function, because countries never produce everything they consume. The “law of comparative advantage” also shows that some countries are far better – and at lower costs – in producing one commodity than others. Therefore, the entrepreneur has to know how to seek this information.
Export is the opportunity to diversify your consumer market and make your company less dependent on the swings in the domestic economy, as well as avoiding the problems of default and credit that many companies currently suffer.
There are many forms of prospecting in the foreign market. But before doing so one must have knowledge about its productive capacity, financial resources, human resources for production and development, and export planning.
Dominion of languages, english and spanish, and to have access and dominion (website) in the internet is also important.
When possible try to attend events, fairs and business rounds that aim at the qualification of the businessman to act in foreign trade. You can also use the channels of chambers of commerce of the countries.
Search for customers worldwide
But, it is also possible to discover suppliers outside international fairs or that are not part of Alibaba. There are several national and international directories that have information about manufacturers and merchants who can be your customers. Among these directories are Kompass, Europages, Globalsources and Lynkos, among others, and many are paid.
Even if you do not subscribe to paid services, it is still possible on some sites to do free searches, and use Google to search for manufacturers and merchants. By Google you will find thousands of results, but it is a dynamic information that will be updated with what is available on the web.
To facilitate this search for overseas customers, Intradebook has developed a tool called InBusiness that performs a selective search. You do the Google search, with result filters and tariff classification by the Harmonized System, and then you save this information in your own directory. In addition, the Intradebook platform also has the InTrade (to make business) and InService (search for logistics services) modules, all connected together.
See other export barriers in this post.
Thanks! I use Facebook and the software called cucomm helps me a lot. It automatically sends messages to users and can add them to friends. This is very convenient and helps in finding new customers, I advise you to try and install it.
Thanks, Tom.