Plan Your Export Drive [antikvár]

PART I1 THE WORLD IS ONE MARKETWHEN THE CHILL WIND IS BLOWING ON THE HOME MARKET, A LEAN Chairman or Managing Director, hungry for the profits that once he knew, asks the way to the export manager's office and begs him to come out of retirement. Probably he expects him to fly off" to sunnier overseas markets and return with the orders. Don't smile. If this doesn't happen in your company you are one of the fortunate few. It is amazing how so many firms have the laws of nature all wrong. They force their export salesmen to hibernate when everything is rosy and they bring them out when the sun has gone down.If export lessons are learnt at these times, all well and good, but these lessons must be remembered permanently. They must not be forgotten when things recover at home and the overseas markets are less essential.The first step in any export drive is for the board to decide what they expect from their export markets long term, over the next five or ten years. In fact, the best approach is to disregard the word exports altogether. Many of the firms most successful in their exports have consciously divorced from their minds the concept of any division between home markets and export markets. They have looked at the whole world as a single market and treated each different area, home or abroad, on its merits.This approach has many specific advantages. It leads to efficiency and saves costs. If a product is designed to suit the requirements of a home market, as is the normal procedure in almost every company, it is only much later after its establishment that the product is looked at again to see how it should be amended in design to suit export markets. To do the job properly at that stage might require a new investment in research and