On 1st April, Manish browses his company’s balance sheet.
He doesn’t feel like working on the factory floor. Not this week.Manish feels hopeful as he has laid down 13 new tactics at the start of this year.
Which of the tactics worked, and what failed?
Surely, he thinks a couple of new tactics would have brought mindblowing results and would be the secret sauce.
But as he reviews each document, his heart sinks. His business has plateaued. He has tried new strategies and worked tirelessly. But the results are the same.
He can feel the weight of the years creeping in – business hasn’t changed, and it feels like it never will.
Manish shuts his laptop with a sigh and stares out the window. Another financial year begins, and yet he wonders if this new year will be any different. Will he finally break the cycle?
Do you recognize the feeling?
Have you ever looked at your efforts and wondered why growth still feels out of reach despite the work you put in?
Start Exporting.
Manish’s struggle is something many entrepreneurs and small business owners face—getting stuck, year after year, without the growth they hope for.
Manish faces the harsh reality of a competitive domestic market, higher marketing costs, and shrinking margins.
You’re trying to grow your manufacturing business.
You’ve heard all the reasons why you should be trying to sell in international markets.
Talking to friends and browsing the internet are common methods for learning how to attract international buyers.
You’ve even run a test or two. Or seventeen.
Despite your best efforts, you’re still finding it challenging to form a clear action plan for reaching international buyers. We understand how frustrating this can be. And now, you might be feeling disillusioned with all these learnings from the internet.
You’ve come to the right place.
With over 25 years of experience, Sahyog Logistics has established itself as a trusted customs house agency, handling 56,790 delivery consignments with precision and expertise. Our extensive experience, combined with a portfolio of 200+ satisfied big-brand clients, showcases our knowledge & expertise in international trade.
The internet is saturated with countless variations of similar advice on how to attract international buyers.
These are all fine tactics, but we’ve found that all of this advice is based on a fundamental strategic flaw: they are piecemeal of information and not holistic, and all the suggestions are superficial and not deep-dive.
The information available is often fragmented and lacks a comprehensive approach, providing only bits and pieces rather than a full, cohesive strategy. Most of the suggestions are surface-level and fail to offer an in-depth analysis or actionable insights. Instead of diving deep into the intricacies of attracting international buyers, these recommendations only scratch the surface, leaving businesses without the thorough understanding they need to make meaningful progress in global markets.
As we’ll demonstrate below, the screenshots and videos on customer acquisition provide a deep dive into the subject, offering detailed and comprehensive insights. We take a holistic approach, systematically covering each point to ensure you gain a thorough understanding of every aspect involved.
Suppose you’re looking to boost your manufacturing leads and expand into international markets but find yourself overwhelmed by legal complexities. In that case, you can learn more about our agency here and contact us to explore how we can work together here.
How do you use LinkedIn to research international buyers?
Video Transcription.
Today, from the Shayog team, we wanted to show you something. Let’s say you want, you are looking for buyers from the United Arab Emirates. So, go to LinkedIn, and you must have premium search enabled. Go to Geography. Right, and feed the United Arab Emirates, right?
Please bear with me. Once you have given the United Arab Emirates in the premium search, go to the current job title. This is where you will feed import. So, you go here, and you feed import only the word import, and that is where you get the profile.
By loading, you get about 2000 profiles. Ideally, going through these 2000 profiles is, you know, suggested if you have that much time, right? And, you know, so, yeah. Look for end companies. You will also get agents and mediators, right? This one is an end-to-end customer, right?
That is good. So, you can look into these profiles. And, find out if something is related to you, your category, or if, say, you are doing helmets, if that is your product, you can try this Boolean search, and of course, the search will get very limited because many of them might not be writing that in their LinkedIn profile. So, this is how, and of course, now, if you go and find somebody who is relevant, then you can also find their email ID, and you can contact them, all right?
So, let us say if I go to Mohammed Ali. I click on this. I click on Mohammed Ali. Let that page load. You get the premium page opening. You should open it in view on normal LinkedIn because, in the premium, you need a filter, but the search and the reading of the resume are easy, and you know when you are on the non-premium profile.
This is where you get the company details, and you can, of course, look at the content. Company, see what they are importing and if that is in line with you, right?
In case this is in line with your needs, there are plugins that you can use to help you access it. For this case, it shows that it does not have The email ID, right? Though it is trying, there is another tool that helps you, which makes your laptop slide; LinkedIn is slightly slow, but it gives you, uh, the phone number.
So, one of the plugins is Apollo.io, which you found that I was just using. All right, now, another plugin, SignalHire, right, SignalHire, right, and, right, SignalHire Right, of course, this is slightly expensive; the next one that I am showing is LUSA. LUSA is somewhat costly, but SignalHire is not so expensive, and it also has a free account. That’s how you can go, and you will be able to if, right, they also help you get the mobile. In this case, it was not able to find, but most of the time, it is able to. You get the email ID, you also get the mobile number, all right, and then you can reach them over WhatsApp or messaging, uh, provided they are your right relevant. So, this is one of the ways of connecting and, uhh, searching, uhh, for people in the other country where you are targeting and, uhh, right, and researching.
You will have to research this slightly for the 2000 profile. You can further limit it down, right, with seniority level. You can tell that you can. You want people who are, see all filters; you want people who are senior enough, when I say senior enough, enough.
Years of experience are ten years plus more than ten years and six, ten, six to ten years.
10 years and 6 to 10 years. And that’s about, in 10 years, you get about 900 profiles, and you’re all researching on them. Is, uhm, and 6 to 10 years is about 500. So that’s about 1000, 1000 people. You can filth, you can further filter it out with your product and Boolean search, but that will limit it to 2, 2, so short. So this is one of the ways. Okay, to search via people. Either in the next video, uh, also show you how to research and find out companies. Once you find the companies, you can research the individuals of those companies. Right? Thank you.
Investigating through the Department of Commerce website.
This is a site where, of course, very commonly we go, and we can have a track, a general overview, just not in minute detail, but an overview. So, you can always go to commodity-wise all countries, and like that, let us say you have the HSL code. For example, you can search with the product name and HSM code. For example, I searched for the safety helmet HSM code. I got 650610. So, I am not sorry, yeah, I will go here, uh, I had already fed it, so I am just, and I will say, right, country name, current year, alright, uh, no start, that’s alright. Submit. And that’s where you get this report, you know.
You get the exports that we did, right? That’s the country-wise. So, you will find the report. The P’s value and quantity are thousands here, and that’s what you will find in China. It is this and what all the countries we have been exporting to, right? Helmets, safety helmets, right? And that’s how we get this. I have shared the URL link here. You can use that, right? Thank you.
Introduction to Account-Based Marketing to acquire new export customers.
There are essentially two broad approaches to marketing. The first is akin to fishing with a net, where you cast a wide net in a small pond to catch many small fish, representing efforts to reach a broad audience in hopes of capturing as many leads as possible.
The second approach is like fishing with a harpoon, where you venture into the deep sea with a specific target in mind, such as hunting a whale, symbolizing focused, high-effort strategies aimed at securing large, high-value clients.
The tactic you use to acquire international buyers matches with the workflow of hunting a whale.
In marketing, it is called account-based Marketing.
How to create a list of Accounts ( Potential buyers list) is the first step in Account Based Marketing.
In the video below, I shared how to create that list.
In the following video, we demonstrate how to create an account list across various countries.
For China specifically, we’ve created a separate video that outlines a different strategy from the one previously mentioned.
We hope you find it useful.
“I had never ventured into international sales before, so I was overwhelmed with self-doubt.“
This is how Manoj felt.
He had never sold internationally before, and the mere thought of it filled him with a growing sense of self-doubt. What if he didn’t understand the cultural differences? What if his pricing strategy failed in foreign markets? What if the logistics of shipping across borders overwhelmed him?
Every time he considered stepping into the global market, the questions piled up, and each one felt heavier than the last. He couldn’t shake the fear that he would be out of my depth, that his product wouldn’t resonate, or that he would miss crucial regulations and lose credibility before even starting. It was as if the enormity of the task was a constant reminder of what he didn’t know—and that uncertainty kept pulling him back from moving forward.
As they say, necessity is the father of innovation.
The situation compelled him to learn new things and try them out.
So don’t feel shy.
Do share with us wherever you are struggling.
We will create another blog to answer your query.