How? Where? look for potential business partners abroad. Cooperation with foreign partners How to find a business partner abroad

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When developing your business, you often have to deal with foreign suppliers, investors and partners, but not everyone is ready to immediately make contact. Heads of successful Russian companies shared their experience with “Theories and Practices” - how to make useful contacts, communicate on social networks, establish cooperation and not stop after the first refusal.

Almost from the beginning, our company's goal has been to become a premier wholesale supplier of designer gifts, accessories and home furnishings. Since we are based in London, EnjoyMe's first suppliers were only English companies. At some point, we started working with a large carrier, figured out the intricacies of customs clearance and began to develop our wholesale sales. Suppliers included small design studios and several fairly large local companies: Luckies, Black+Blum, Suck UK, Thabto. The following year a couple of good mid-sized European brands were added. It was not difficult to negotiate - at that time we did not enter into exclusive contracts, but simply did what we loved.

One day I saw Nest bowls from Joseph Joseph and fell in love with the brand at first sight. Then I decided that these products should appear in our store, and wrote them a letter. In response, I received a questionnaire and was a little surprised - it turned out that making a regular order is not so easy, the company must be sure that their goods are sold in a decent place. Our EnjoyMe, unfortunately, was not suitable for this, but we did not give up. In three months, we created a platform (www.famouskitchen.ru) specifically for kitchen accessories and again contacted Joseph Joseph. They were surprised that someone had created a website just to sell their brand's products, and they allowed us to place our first order as a simple wholesale buyer. Their representatives came to Moscow, and we needed to show EnjoyMe in the best light. To do this, we had only 10 days - we organized meetings with all potentially interesting chain stores and major clients, and held a series of successful negotiations. This helped in further development, but Joseph Joseph chose another distributor - a large company that has been working with tableware for more than 10 years. This first small defeat forced us to make a powerful leap forward.

We began working with chain stores using the brand name, but supplying them with fewer products from suppliers, honing our skills in working with large clients and building our company with a full-fledged wholesale sales department. A year passed, we got stronger, and suddenly we received a call from Joseph Joseph - the distributor they had chosen did not live up to expectations. Then we were asked to meet again. The company was impressed with how we had grown, and we moved into negotiations for exclusive distribution for a year. Several other companies from the tableware market competed for this right, but by some happy coincidence they chose us. This brand has become a ticket to big business. After we held Joseph Joseph for a year, and then a second, other large companies began to come to us. When we proved that we could cope with the Russian market, it became easier to negotiate.

Alexander Platonov, Founder and CEO of Marakuya

Here are some tips:

If you are looking for a specific company, you need to identify the key decision makers in that business. Find them on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Most foreign managers are active on social networks in one way or another. Follow them, see what they tweet, who they follow, like their posts, comment, ask questions about their posts. If you are original, they will notice you, and you can carefully approach them. If a person has 5,000 followers, a hundred likes and fifty comments on each post, analyze who and whose posts this person retweets or shares the most. You can always find a way to reach someone he considers an opinion leader. And through it you can contact the person you need.

Try to meet one of the star foreign entrepreneurs right away. It may seem impossible, but not so long ago Richard Branson invited an entrepreneur with a better idea to pitch a project to him personally on his own island, and then participate for free in the largest US exhibition - CES.

Another way to find a partner is to have a well-known US news resource write about you, which is read by the person you need. For example, TechCrunch editor Mike Butcher enjoys writing about Russian startups. He even made up perfect option letters that I would like to see.

After selling my business in Russia, I had two opposing tasks. On the one hand, I wanted to invest part of my money in some foreign project from the real sector of the economy. On the other hand, he wanted to attract foreign investment in his new Internet project. Joint investments reduce the risk of each partner, and I just wanted to attract Western money - there is a different approach and standards. I had to study, rack my brains, improve my English, and practice pitching about the project. However, as often happens, the investor was found among friends. I simply went around to my American acquaintances, whom I knew from Facebook, from conferences and personal contacts, talked about an interesting project, and asked my friends to help me find investments. Instead, one of my friends suggested joining the project. As a result, I received not just an investment, but an excellent partner. I myself invested in a construction project in San Francisco, also on the advice of friends. True, I hired a lawyer and conducted mini-investigations. I looked to see if there were conflicts or legal proceedings around these people, and how they went through the years of the crisis of 2008-2009. Since in the USA all information is open, you can bring up all the cases for all the companies with which potential partners are associated, and then sit down and study them.

Veronica Taraba, Deputy General Director of KROK

Chance helped us. When we decided to expand beyond Russia, there was a feeling (based on pre-sale attempts) that we were more interested not in the Old World or Eastern Europe, but in the neighborhood on the other side, where there were more dynamic markets. We already had experience working with Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, and we wanted to go further. They weren't specifically looking for anyone. One of our managers was contacted by a supplier of specialized IT solutions for a company that was being purchased by a CROC customer in Turkey. This supplier was discussing some kind of joint business with us, and it was he who introduced us to an IT company that was also working with this client and was looking for opportunities for faster development. It was a Turkish system integrator NGN, a company with five years of experience. We studied the market (demand in the computing outsourcing market, its dynamics and specifics in Turkey), the capabilities and characteristics of the Turkish company (finance, personnel, clients, vendors). We communicated with their key vendors and clients, understood the needs of their clients in Turkey and abroad, made a business plan for the construction of a data center and entered into partnerships.

At some point, we saw that our clients had requests for PR support abroad. In addition, many of our employees spoke about the desire to undergo an internship in another country, as is done in large network agencies. Since the market is very competitive, we needed to keep up the bar - we began to look for a partner abroad. We have opened a global rating, The Holmes Report, where the largest PR agencies in the world are represented - we started with them. At that time, we only had 25 people working for us, and our turnover was just under $2 million. Most did not answer us at all - we wrote a hundred letters, and received about 20 replies, mostly with refusals, which stated that the companies already had partners in Russia. Then we started writing to international associations of PR agencies. The situation was approximately the same - there were many refusals, but there were still responses. We went to meetings with Global Alliance and IPRN. Filled out a questionnaire, provided customer and employee references and financial statements for the last two years. When we joined IPRN, Global Alliance found out about this and refused us, although it was not initially agreed that we could not be members of two associations at once. It was frustrating because we wasted a lot of money and time.

At the same time, we understood that we still needed a partner. Then we took a different route - we started writing blogs for heads of foreign agencies. So we contacted Andres Witterman, vice president of the global communications agency LEWIS PR and tried to establish a dialogue. For example, he wrote a post about the market growing. We answered: “Cool, the market is growing, and we know that LEWIS PR does not yet work in Russia. We want to invite you to work with us. What do you think?". In the end, everything worked out. We transfer our clients to them, and they transfer theirs to us - now we are in the third year of our work together. We also send our employees on internships. They have already been to France, Australia, Germany, and Great Britain. We're glad the blog method worked. Since then, I have been actively communicating with heads of PR agencies around the world - mainly through social networks.

Most modern companies sooner or later face the problem of expanding their sales markets, for which management decides to look for partners abroad. Foreign suppliers can help expand a business, open a new direction, a foreign investor can help implement a start-up and develop an already successful business, a wholesale buyer from another country will help with the promotion of goods in other countries.

In any of these cases, if you need a foreign partner, you will need to go through several mandatory steps:

• Find a potential partner;
• Establish a connection with him;
• Negotiate with him;
• Conclude a business agreement.

If all these stages are successfully completed, you can reap the fruits of your efforts in the future, because foreign partners are the right investment in the future development of your company.

How to look for a foreign partner?

Before you begin the process of finding a partner from abroad, you have to responsibly prepare for this, because success in achieving your goals will largely depend on preliminary preparation. At this stage, it will be necessary to collect information, assess demand and supply in the segment of work of potential partners. In addition, you will need to prepare presentation documents, moreover, in the language of the potential partner or at least in English.

After this, you need to move on to the search process itself. The simplest and most obvious way today is to search for foreign partners on the Internet. To do this, you can use fairly well-known international communication portals - Facebook and Twitter, as well as professional networks - LinkedIn, Xing and others. Moreover, LinkedIn is better suited if you are looking for partners in English-speaking countries or companies that speak English well. But Xing.de is a portal that is actively used by partners who speak German. Considering that German ranks first in the EU in terms of the number of Europeans who speak it, this network contains a huge number of potential partners. Recently, the b2b platform has gained great popularity among Russian-speaking businessmen who want to find partners in other countries, the features of which will be discussed a little later.

The third stage will be establishing contact with a foreign partner. This can be done via e-mail, Skype, mobile instant messengers or the already listed professional networks. At the same time, the main thing is to present your company correctly - to show your idea, direction of activity, the advantages of your proposal for cooperation, as well as the benefits that the partner will receive. To do this, you should prepare a presentation in which you indicate:

• The uniqueness of your company and its competitive advantages;
• Which of these unique features may be of interest to a foreign partner;
• Outline the target audience that will be interested in your offer in your partner’s country.

At this stage, the main thing is to convey to the partner why cooperation with your company will be beneficial for him.

The last stage is negotiations and signing of an agreement and, probably, this stage is the most difficult, more difficult than searching for a potential partner. After all, your goal is to sign a long-term agreement that will be as beneficial to you as possible, while your partner’s desires are exactly the opposite. Business negotiations are an art and much will depend on the ability to understand someone else’s mentality. Some prefer quick negotiations, others prefer slow and thoughtful negotiations; in addition, each culture has its own formalities that must be respected during negotiations.

Features of interaction with the site

Naturally, the entire process of finding a partner takes a lot of effort, time, and sometimes nerves. This is why the platform became so popular immediately after its opening. After all, every stage of finding partners from other countries is much easier here. For ease of search, all companies offering partnerships are grouped by country of location, as well as business sectors, which significantly saves time. In addition, the platform user can create his own proposal for cooperation and they will search for it, which is much more effective.

For serious users of the platform there is a BIS-agent service. In a nutshell, this is outsourcing the partner search service, that is, placing this mission on the shoulders of platform employees. You only need to create a request to search for a foreign partner, indicating the features that are important to you. Our employees will select the best options for cooperation from companies from more than 4 dozen countries around the world. All you have to do is choose the best offers in your opinion, negotiate and conclude an agreement.

If you do not have established relationships with a supplier (manufacturer) / buyer of certain goods or services, or your existing supplier / buyer does not meet your business needs, LCM GROUP employees, who speak several foreign languages, will select for you the best counterparty for import or export, will conduct pre-contract negotiations on your behalf in order to obtain the optimal commercial offer from the supplier / buyer and prepare the basis for concluding a foreign economic contract.

These services are provided within the framework of contractual relations. The interaction is carried out as follows:

1. You decide on the characteristics of the product whose supplier you need to find. The product must be described in such a way that specialists have a clear opportunity to identify it during the search process. Additionally, the client can provide characteristics of the potential supplier (company size, productivity, age of the company, whether the supplier should be a manufacturer of the product). It is mandatory to define the search region. It may refer to a specific country or group of countries. The more specifically the initial task is formulated, the more likely the success of finding a supplier.
2. Before starting work, specialists of the logistics company LCM GROUP analyze the reality of implementing the task set by the client.
3. The search for foreign suppliers is carried out with the involvement of agents of the international holding LCM GROUP in various countries, as well as using open and closed databases. Usually specialists find several suppliers of the desired product. To determine the compliance of the supplier and the product with the characteristics declared by the client, foreign trade specialists conduct preliminary negotiations with representatives of the supplier’s company, as a result of which an idea is formed about the supplier and possible commercial terms of cooperation with him.
4. If necessary, it is also possible to collect information about the supplier from third sources in order to check its reliability and business reputation in the market, as well as a qualitative analysis of the terms of cooperation that the supplier offers you and compare them with the conditions of alternative counterparties. We recommend checking at all stages of work, especially before signing the first foreign economic contract and transferring funds to the account of the foreign supplier.

Your pleasure from foreign economic activity is our pleasant concern!

For many companies, in the short or long term, the topic of bringing their company to the global market or working with foreign business partners remains relevant. Business partners are needed to start an enterprise, open a new direction, promote your own products or develop a project.
If you want to start a business (project) in a foreign market, then after you have decided on a new market, you will need to find a potential business partner in this market, establish contact with him, build relationships and negotiate before the transaction. New business connections are an investment in the future of your company and its development.
When searching for business partners, company executives and top managers face difficulties associated with:

• with a lack of understanding of the most effective and less expensive methods of searching for potential business contacts abroad or the incorrect use of these methods;
• lack of a structured communication algorithm for building relationships with a business partner in order to conclude a deal on mutually beneficial terms;
• with difficulties in communication related to the specifics of communicating with representatives of another culture, as well as the language barrier;
• with the lack of a qualified team of specialists to conduct negotiations in order to achieve the most favorable terms of cooperation.

There are two strategies for finding foreign business partners: “You search” and “You are found.” Of course, the second one is more profitable and interesting for you. It is more effective and is likely to bring maximum results - with minimal financial investment on your part.
However, no matter which strategy you choose, you will need to pay attention to five main steps. We recommend that you initially use a kind of step-by-step algorithm to find partners. This algorithm is a generalizing model of the actions necessary to achieve set goals through coordination and optimal distribution and planning of the entire process.

A step-by-step algorithm for working with business partners abroad: from search to transaction

1. Planning and preparation.

At this stage, you select a foreign market and collect the information you need to assess supply and demand in the segment you need. You will need to answer the questions: who are you looking for; why are you looking for them; and how you will search for them (choose sources of information and search strategies). Next, based on your idea of ​​the desired segment, prepare presentation materials in a foreign language, in which you do not forget to pay attention to the positioning of our company in the international market.
You also need to realistically assess what tools and knowledge you lack. It is imperative to appoint a person in charge who will oversee the entire process of working on the project.

2 Search for business partners.

At this stage, you already have information about the resources with which you will search and you have a search plan.
You can search on your own: on the Internet (online) or by calling potential partners by phone or visiting exhibitions (offline), or you can attract qualified specialists to search.

Search offline

Your project can be presented by taking part in or visiting an international exhibition, where during a personal meeting it is convenient to conduct preliminary negotiations and exchange experiences. Also at exhibitions you can see the development trends of the product group that interests you. Other important sources can be networking (forums, congresses), internships, business missions or assistance from various government agencies, associations, or contacting a consulting company in the country with the business partners you want to work with.
Involving a consulting company in searching for partners has certain advantages:

• the fastest way to find business contacts;
• the possibility of using specialists who know the language and specifics of searching for business contacts well and can establish contacts in accordance with local business culture norms.
• you can receive qualified advice regarding positioning and presentation;
• increases the level of trust in your company on the part of the counterparty;
• you don’t need to go anywhere - all your issues in the country will be resolved for you.

The search for foreign partners service may be accompanied by additional services: analysis of the market segment of a product or service, marketing research, organization and holding of business meetings and events.

Search online

We include social networks (Facebook and Twitter) and international professional networks such as LinkedIn, XING.com, Viadeo as online resources.
For example, LinkedIn is the most popular professional network in the world. The best way to find foreign business partners. LinkedIn can be extremely powerful, yet very few people know and use this marketing tool effectively.
There are many thematic business platforms, for example in Europe - Europages, Asia - Made Chine, Alibaba. Corporate exchanges also operate in EU countries as tools for finding partners.
The main advantage of using professional and social networks, as well as other Internet resources, is that your financial investment in finding foreign business contacts is zero.

3. Establishing contact and interaction with a potential partner.

This stage can occur through personal meetings, professional networks, social networks, Skype, email or cold calling. When contact is established, a presentation of your project is made. Important: clearly tell about yourself and your company, while attracting the interest of your interlocutor. Show your idea, direction of activity, proposal for cooperation and, of course, benefits for your partner.

4. Presentation of the project.

At the preparation and planning stage, you have already prepared all the marketing material and presentation of your company (project), now your task is to correctly present yourself and your company to a new foreign partner.
Work it out carefully for yourself once again. next questions:

1. What is unique about your company/brand compared to your competitors in both the domestic and foreign markets?
2. Which of these features might be most important to your potential foreign business partners?
3. Which of these features are not common to your competitors or anyone else, but are important to your potential customers?
4. What is the best way to present your project or company offer to your target audience in the country with which you are going to work?
5. Who can help you translate your USP into a foreign language and adapt the content to the mentality of a particular country?

Your main task now is to convey this to your potential business partner.
And remember... That if your USP is not something that will bring tangible benefits to your potential partners or clients, then you can be sure that they will find someone who can satisfy their needs.

5. Negotiation process.

Negotiations are also an important factor in building business contacts. Your goal is a successful transaction and contract on the most favorable terms. And do not forget that you must plan ahead - since the partner will always be more loyal to consider the contact for the long term.
Business communication is an art, and a lot depends on cross-cultural communication as you work in an international market.
It is worth remembering: “When you speak to a person in a language that he understands, you speak to his head. If you speak to a person in his native language, you speak to his heart.” - Nelson Mandela
Cultural differences and differences in mentality play an important role. For example, for negotiations in one country, time is money. In another country, on the contrary, slow negotiations are better, because make the other party more trustworthy. Culture also has a profound influence on people's behavior, the way they think and communicate. It also affects the negotiation process between representatives of different countries.
For example, when negotiating with the Germans: they work out their position very carefully in advance, and during negotiations they like to discuss issues sequentially, one after another. They, as a rule, enter into only those negotiations in which they reasonably see the possibility of finding a solution. Much attention is paid to diagrams, numbers and graphs.
While the Chinese usually clearly delimit individual stages: initial clarification of positions, their discussion and the final stage. At the initial stage, the Chinese pay great attention to the appearance of their partners and their manner of behavior. Based on these characteristics, they determine the status of each of the participants, and then focus only on people with a higher status, both official and unofficial. 80% of the time is spent on building personal relationships, only at the end the conversation switches to a business direction.
Each culture has its own formalities that negotiators must respect. Therefore, before attending a business meeting with foreign partners, careful preparation is necessary. This will help you easily reach mutual understanding with people from other countries, build a strategy for cooperation with foreign partners, and may play an important role in concluding a profitable contract.
Therefore, in conclusion, I would like to say that the main secret of success is a clear, well-developed algorithm or strategy for working with foreign business partners: from search to transaction, with special attention paid to the peculiarities of the culture and specifics of doing business in the country of your potential business partner.

We talk about the topic in more detail in our webinar “Where and how to look for business partners in EU countries?”

Inna Armstrong, international business consultant, expert with 15 years of practical experience in international cooperation and negotiations with business partners in Germany and China. Founder and director of NueVenture Global, General Representative of the Soyuzconsult network of international experts in Germany. Leading expert of the portal "Exporters of Russia". armstronginna.com neuventure-global.com

Daria Reker, international business consultant with 13 years of practical experience, specialist in starting a company using the bootstrapping method, specialist in international sales and marketing. Member of the Association of Irish Consultants, owner of several businesses, General Representative of the Soyuzconsult network of international experts in Ireland. neuventure-global.com