yes, outsource

By all means, outsource. I did.
But choose the right provider. I didn't.

This is a short, measurable story about call centers. One of my most solid presumptions was shattered: that English will take you anywhere.

When planning campaigns / events abroad and approaching companies, you might have the illusion that English works everywhere. It doesn't. You might even think that, if you're calling medium & large companies,  English is sufficient.

But if you imagine this will not affect your success rate, you are wrong.

I've measured the difference.

I've worked with an English-speaking call center for a project addressing companies in a German-speaking country, calling multinationals. In the database qualification phase, their success rate was 35%.  Most of the rejections sounded like:
- we're not interested
- we can't provide any information over the phone
- we don't speak English
- they hung up / transfer failed.

Taking the same project to a native call center made the difference. 96% completion rate. Where the companies were previously rejecting any form of collaboration, now they provided the requested data.

So there you have my conclusion, in measurable form: use native speakers when cold calling the companies.

foreign direct investments: Austria -> Romania

This is one of those posts with statistics about Romania's commercial relationships with other CEE countries - Austria, to be more specific.

The source for this statistics is this study released by the Commercial Service of the Austrian Embassy in Romania:

• Austria is the second foreign investor in Romania, after The Netherlands
• more than 1,000 active Austrian investors are present in Romania
• Austrian investment amounts for 9.35 BLN Eur and represents 18% of the FDI in Romania
• more than 6,100 companies with Austrian equity are established in Romania
• these companies employ over 100,000 people
• main sectors are: Resources | Agriculture | Industry | Services
• Austria is market leader in Banking and Insurance
• Austria is Top Investor in CEE: Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia.

local offices - autonomy vs. control

I always wondered what's the healthiest amount of control Headquarters should exert over their offices abroad.

I'm not talking legal or administrative; I'm not debating branch vs. subsidiary as incorporation form; I'm wondering about the intricacies of headquarters' control over the local offices - how much freedom should the latter have in terms of market strategy?

Working in subsidiaries, I sought independence in some marketing decisions and had to fight for it; working in Headquarters, I'm looking for absolute control over the communication and actions, although I'm fully aware of how important local business culture knowledge is.

estranged press releases?

This post is about my experience with how to improve your chances for the publication of press releases when you're sending them to foreign publications.

Say your company Headquarters is located in some country in CEE.

Say your company has commercial interests in other European countries, without having established a direct presence. So you have no local staff.

Say your marketing actions are handled centrally from your company's headquarters.

Say you've done your homework and built a list of relevant publications from the targeted countries.

How do you get these media channels to support you and publish your releases?

the silver bullet

The competition analysis provides valuable information about the strengths and weaknesses of your company, ultimately helping you answer the client's question: Why should I work with you, rather than with your competition? 

Do you have in place a system to collect and disseminate information about your competitors? 

Or do you occasionally trip on articles or pieces of data you'd like to keep, but haven't quite found the right storage format? 

visual introduction to Int'lMkt blog

intlmkt blog prezi on Prezi

online research: industry

Following my previous post on online research - where to search for country information, today I'm writing about how to search for industry data.

This is a summary of what, how and where to search for when you want to gather data on an industry from another country.

Valuable, quality data is not difficult to find online, even for free, when you know where to look.  

I'll work on an example: let's assume we're looking for information about the automotive manufacturing industry in Czech Republic.

So here are the Whats, the Hows and the Wheres:

associations: the hands-on type

Following my previous post on key bodies and assessing them on how up-to-date their statistics are, I'll add several other signs that you can rely on these sources in your online industry searches.

The local key body is the main authority that gathers and publishes yearly the industry overview and the local market statistics. That being said, you should expect to find 2011 data on their website or in their publications.

However, before taking this source into consideration, first check their number of members and what percentage of the industry to make, to make sure their facts and figures are relevant and that their representation warrant comes from the majority of the industry players.

where to start your int'l career

A franchise is an excellent place to start learning international marketing, and I'm not just saying that because it's how it happened for me.

A well established, serious franchise organization is built around unitary concept, has a standard product, a clear business model, and an operational system in place.

In my company's case, the business logic was that the more countries were covered by the franchisees’ network, the stronger the overall service was.

direct marketing: you're doing it wrong

If you're a beginner in direct email campaigns, read the 10 items below to see if you're doing it wrong.

Three important things about this post:

- it addresses rookies
- it refers to cold campaigns
- it speaks mainly about preparation & sending, not about content.

Read below what are the basic mistakes to avoid if you want your emails to catch the eye of the targeted person. The first two are the worst, I'm sort of stating the obvious with them:

it's who you're connected with

LinkedIn Visual Network Mapping Tool – InMaps

I'm going to document several dilemmas I've had for a while and publish the info I've gathered, with the prospect of putting them in action.

So these posts come less from my experience and more from research; I'll follow up on these actions and explain what has indeed worked for me and what hasn't. Or you can visit my LinkedIn profile and know I've succeeded if I have 500+ connections.

Today's question is how to connect with target professionals on LinkedIn and transform them into leads.

LinkedIn European demographics

LinkedIn describes itself as the world’s largest and most powerful community of professionals, with members from over 200 countries and 170 industries.

Some countries more than others, indeed.

Ever wondered about the demographics on LinkedIn? I did, and today I saw all this useful data about usage per country, industry, company size, job function, and members’ age.

LinkedIn is almost 10 years old, and it has reached 147 Million members in 2012. Apparently, 2 new users sign up to LinkedIn every second.

lost in migration

OK, 'Lost in migration' is the name of a brain game I like to play, but this post is about bumps a company can hit when migrating its brand into new markets.

Since these days I'm working on registering brands at international trade marks institutions, I remembered having read about unfortunate trade names meaning when you translate them into another language.

allow me to multinationally introduce

This one's going to have lots and lots of figures, but bear with me, as I realized I've never properly introduced Romania's international business environment to my readers.

Let's start on a positive note from E&Y, with Romania being the 6^th most attractive European country for investors in the next 3 years [Ernst & Young - 2012 European Attractiveness Survey].

Looks like business leaders across the world consider Romania to be  a valuable destination for investments.

key bodies: call it like it is!

This one is about how I assess the key industry bodies before starting a dialogue with them or using them as data sources.

Typically, these organizations have a website where usually there's a description of the association and its scope, its initiatives, list of members, market trends, a section with press releases, and a calendar of events.

If you intend to work with such organizations for your marketing actions, you must discern the difference between active channels and dead ends. 

online research: country

Today I'm letting myself easier off the hook and casually drop few lines from the comfort of my favorite subject - online research & market data collection. Say somebody from work comes to you and says: "Yes, but have you thought about Kazakhstan?"

Surely you have a country study content you're trying to fill in with information, as much as possible from free research.

If you're relatively new to this subject, you need a structured source for making your acquaintance of each new geographical entity you're starting to chart.

searching for clients abroad? so am I

As I'm indexing in my mind my the topics I should write about next, I feel the need to explain why there will be a significant number of posts about web directories, databases, direct mailing, online and social networks for b2b. That's what happens where you're trying to reach for estranged potential market for your product or service.

I was lucky enough to start my professional career in a company that was managing a huge worldwide B2B directory of companies.

So I was part of a huge network of companies in seventy-something countries, each contributing locally to this central web database, plus I was promoting to my home market the access and usage of such marketing-purpose database.

regional decision makers for CEE countries sit in Austria

This year, Vienna is a hot topic for my company and myself as International Marketing Manager. Last year, over 120 international companies were established in Vienna, and this year our group opened its Austrian subsidiary.

Austria is an interesting case when it comes to b2b marketing actions: you will be advice to address the entire DACH region with your marketing actions, not just the one country. But I tried to take my time and understand the reason why this country is known to be the regional decision-making center for many multinationals.

clearly misunderstood, or who speaks what

Two non-native English speakers can make a conversation quite funny. I should know, I'm one of them.

I recently had a very loud conversation over the phone with someone from a neighboring country. This person was trying to compensate the terrible English with voice volume to improve my understanding.

This reminded me how confusing it gets sometimes when you have two people from different non-English speaking country trying to understand each other. Not to mention having such attempts over the phone.

with best compliments, to UK

Being the active marketer that I am, I have poked my nose, respectively my contact data, into various websites, associations, groups, publications, networks and event organizers.

You know, to read some news, download a free study, ask for a media kit, start a debate, what we marketing people do: draw attention to ourselves and our products.

This kind of interaction has happened with people from various countries in Europe, giving me the occasion to learn about certain specificities and the local business culture. But I was particularly impressed by the consultative selling skills of professionals in the UK.