Question

Assume you just graduated from a university with an MBA and were hired by a small American company generating 100% of its $20 million revenue from domestic sales. Your job as International Sales Director is quite simple: to make sure international sales generate as much revenue as domestic sales within five years.

Where do you start?

What are some of your first initiatives? Why?

Answer 1

We will first start with understanding the business and product of the company and take note of the unique selling points that the company has.

Then, will start searching for potential markets of the product and existing market structure of those countries in the same or similar industries.

We will also do research on :

• Existing players in those markets and their products.
• How the economy is working in those countries?
• What is the status of the ease of doing business there?
• What are the cultural differences?
• What is the economic and political stability of those countries?
• What model of business we will work on? etc.

We will also study our existing customer base and their characteristics:

• What are there preferences?
• How elastic the demand is to price?
• They want the product cheap or of good quality
• How much they are willing to pay

Then we will try to match the characteristics of our existing customer with that of our potential customers in foreign countries.

Will then form a plan of action and project report with a clear requirement of resources and working capital.