Preamble to ERRRQ Diagnostics

“…people evaluate the evidence of their everyday experience to make judgments, form beliefs, and decide on courses of action, and how they sometimes misevaluate that evidence and make faulty judgments, form dubious beliefs, and embark on counterproductive courses of action.”

 

Prof. Tom Gilovich

Research in heuristics and cognitive biases

Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University

 

Domestic biases about International Market Development (IMD) can be as tenacious as they are inherently schizophrenic. Thus, I am always worried that my hybrid, professional, IMD representative company could somehow, and in some way, be lumped together with some other professional, but purely domestic, rep firm. Even if a domestic rep firm has written no international articles about doing IMD, or created protocols in explaining the arcane nature of what they purport they can do for sometimes perplexed US SME’s, they still might end up getting the gig. Domestic biases are that powerful.

 

The irony is that the domestic Human Resources (HR) personnel, who are not trained or experienced on how to internationally spot, let alone assess, IMD candidates, by default usually end up getting the job of assessing IMD candidates. Anticipating this ongoing structural problem, I knew I had to not only write articles on the nature of IMD; I also knew that in order to bring light to various moving and dormant parts of the US SME’s commercial operations, I realized that I had to create an Export Ready, Rep Ready Questionnaire (ERRRQ). And, yes, to provide necessary context, I knew I then needed to create a preamble to explain the necessity and rationale of the ERRRQ to the prospective US SME management.

 

The reason for this is because without the feedback from the ERRRQ, the pioneering rep would essentially be compounding the overall risk by working on blind faith of the US SME’s self-attestation of being both ER and RR. More than US SME’s self-attestation is needed to not only assure my company that the US SME has the needed bandwidth, competencies and ethicality to work with a professional IMD rep. Just as important are the foreign principals, their increasingly professional procurement folks, bankers, forwarders, KOL’s and the foreign Custom’s challenges that the US SME will assuredly have to face on their own.

 

This context build-up about my hybrid, pioneering, IMD rep firm is purposeful. For any new, potential, US SME making really unusual products/services, they need to know that once the IMD contract with my company is completed, that US SME, by itself, is still going to have to know what to do, and what not to do, with the foreign distributors that my company will be formally locating for them. So the point of the ERRRQ is to help start fashioning the foundations of an Export Operating System (EOS) for the US SME that it does not currently possess.

 

The ERRRQ is invaluable for any skeletally staffed, US SME’s who are starting to realize that it will take years for them to, by themselves, come up with a system to find, attract and engage foreign distribution networks beyond the foreign customers they might already possess on a spot basis. For any US SME company that wants to coherently and systematically go after foreign markets with a professional rep firm, I hope that they can seriously consider what my company can offer them. I know that, given everyone’s incredibly busy schedule, it is tough to sit down and think through the questions that the ERRRQ has posed. Please believe me when I tell you that I am not doing it to make any particular principal’s life more difficult. The ERRRQ, in medical terms, is an invaluable diagnostic tool that highlights problems that the US SME might have otherwise overlooked or even purposely ignored. These are ER blindspots that could really screw up and even undo relationships with foreign customer networks.

 

The ERRRQ is also a kind of Adaptive Optics in that it helps compensate for, or correct for, the distortions coming from the domestic biases of the US SMEs. Export enthusiasm is great, but it can, at times, distort the Q &A information feedback regarding their actual ER & RR. If the US SME can be candid and truthfully answer the questions, this can lead to a more subjective-free image of the company’s actual, versus imagined, ER & RR. The ERRRQ embodies not just preparedness; it is also defensive in nature. No matter how many ways I say it, the US SME doesn’t know what they don’t know about efficiently and systematically accessing international markets, nor how to competently engage with hybrid, IMD reps. After the US SME goes through the ERRRQ, they start to realize, sometimes grudgingly, how much else they need to prepare to become ER. They will need to reconsider their proposals and/or what they will need to do to keep their products from piling up and collecting dust in the warehouses of foreign distributors.

 

Although the IMD rep has to perform first (in bringing the foreign customers into formal, triangulated, business talks with its US SME principal), the feedback from the ERRRQ will be vital. Without it, there is no assurance at all that the small US SME principal is actually ready and able to efficiently perform all of the moving parts necessary in working with the rep and the foreign distributors. In the dating phase of the talks between the US SME and the foreign distributors, they will be assessing not only how unique your company’s product’s technology is; they will also be assessing how internationally competent the US SME management and its personnel currently are in actually fulfilling purchase orders and the backside support of the US SME’s products when it is in the foreign country. The ERRRQ, whether the US SME and SPAP COMPANY LLC end up working with each other or not, amounts to invaluable consulting work that focuses in on a principal’s present export-infrastructure and level of across the board export savviness.

 

The US’ chronic and massive tree deficits are a combination of non-participation by millions of US SME’s and also by a fundamental misunderstanding of how IMD staff-deprived, domestic US SME’s know how to work with foreign distributors. The ERRRQ is the next step in the process. It is designed to do the following:

It is sometimes difficult to quantify a principal’s sense of urgency in prepping for, and diving into, not only the export process but in also being able to smoothly engage with IMD reps. The feedback from the principal in the ERRRQ can give both the rep and the principal some indication on how many new skills and expertise needs be made manifest by a principal to really work peer to peer with the IMD rep and the foreign distributors. Most US SME’s can usually hack their way through spot international business, but the gaping holes in their ERRR would become abundantly clear when multiple foreign customer networks are coming at the US SME simultaneously from dozens of countries.

 

The ERRRQ can also be seen as an inferred intent from the principal to become a pro in systematically going after foreign markets while also acting as a mature, level headed partner with SPAP COMPANY LLC. It is a vitally important part of the overall assessment. Going through the ERRRQ can also help highlight any tendencies or patterns by the US SME. It is hoped that these tendencies or patterns can be modified and put towards the overall betterment of the company in achieving supplemental revenues from foreign import/distribution companies. But in order to be able to really do that systematically, the ERRRQ’s main benefit is to reveal to the US SME and the IMD rep the number of blind spots that the company was, or is, currently working under. Instead of just wildly guessing what those blind spots are, the ERRRQ will lay it out clearly to the US SME and SPAP COMPANY LLC.

 

All of this helps re-conceptualize the ER and the IMD rep/principal dynamic for the US SME. It also allows the US SME to ask themselves the question of how many hybrid, professional, IMD rep firms are there in the world that have thought through these processes and the inevitable interactions that the new to export US SME will surely be facing? Among the points to consider:

If you have US patents and you are actively protecting them internationally, then you probably have a unique product line. Such IP-ladened products, so unique and transformational, the scope of the commercial possibilities so stimulating, should, in and of itself, via remote electronic presentation, help get the acute attention of desk-bound international distributors with gaps in their line. But you need to keep in mind that those same foreign distributors also know all too well from interacting with slick foreign vendors that something does not have to be true to be persuasive. If a US SME can come to the table with an IP-ladened, mind-blowing product line while also possessing an integrated Export Operating System, that is incredibly difficult package of attributes for any putative foreign competitor to match.

 

There is a cost-recovery fee to go through the ERRRQ.