What other options are available to develop a European market?
Directly targeting prospective customers by an Asian sales team.
While this approach may be the lowest cost option and allows you to be in total control, whilst retaining all the profit, your sales team will have to overcome the below:-.
- No face to face contact making relationships hard to establish.
- Cultural barriers
- Time zone barriers
- No local market knowledge
Reps or distributors.
This is probably the most common approach, however due to numerous reasons, some which are detailed below, many SME’s have wasted years unsuccessfully maximising their growth in Europe.
- Promotion of multiple lines and products.
- Isolation from the customer base.
- Loss of margin.
- Ineffective marketing strategy.
Regional Office.
Setting up a regional office is often thought as the most secure way of ensuring 100% focus is put on developing your European business, whilst still retaining 100% margin and control. However this approach also has major draw backs.
- Setting up a legal entity is a mine field.
- Setup costs and risk of failure are high.
- Finding and retaining good staff is challenging.
- Management of the regional office is difficult
The below table summarises the advantages of the MARKETbuilder service over the alternative options.
| Feature | Branch Office | Distribution | MARKET
builder™ |
| Proper legal trading company | Yes | No | Yes |
| Razor sharp focused and experienced marketing | No | No | Yes |
| Dedicated, hungry and motivated salespeople | Maybe | No | Yes |
| Highly skilled local product development and support | Maybe | Maybe | Yes |
| Tried and tested local sales skills | No | Yes | Yes |
| Retention of margin | Yes | No | Yes |
| Ability to build multiple channels | No | No | Yes |
| Low cost back office support | No | - | Yes |
| Ability to realise value through company sale over time | Yes | No | Yes |
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