Asselin Bannon

Strategic Management Consultants

Division of La Société de gestion et de formation GEXIMTM Inc.

(This text is the sole property of Ronald Bannon – All rights reserved © 2015)

Ronald Bannon is a Certified Management Consultant (CMC) since 1997 and

involved in international sales & marketing of innovative products and

solutions since 1984. He carries out a long experience on how doing business

abroad and promoting your latest innovation in markets where often

Canadians have never showed up. In 2014, he was appointed Fellow for its

contribution to promote the CMC designation and his excellent reputation.

Globalizing your business

Why entrepreneurs need to extend their business abroad?

By Ronald Bannon MBA, C. Adm., FCMC

Quebec, Canada, April 20th 2015

For many years the Quebec and Canadian entrepreneurs are asked to promote their products or solutions

abroad. Both levels of government have promoted the opening for the development of international markets

through financial assistance such repayable loans without interest and in some cases, grants up to 40% of

eligible expenses. Some of these grants are no longer available. Many entrepreneurs also talk about their

success in newspapers and benefits earned with the increased awareness of their brands. To the opposite, it

is unusual to hear of difficulties or even failure. Yet many of those are trying to sell abroad but several do not

make it. Let's have a look at the reasons for this enthusiasm and the causes that could explain these failures.

What is the advantage to distinguish your business into international markets while the domestic market is at

hand?

There are numerous reasons why it is sometimes advantageous to prosper abroad. Among the major

incentives we encounter in our practice, here the ones that occur most often:

• Diversification of products and solutions offer that could have or has reached maturity in the

domestic market;

• Products or niche solutions that require companies to look abroad because of the innovative nature

of their newest harvest and only few buyers are present in the local market;

• Globalization and increased of web tools that provide instant proliferation of products or solutions

and visible online as soon as they are available and generate inquiries from new customers from

across the globe;

• Demand for distribution in areas not served by intermediate countries that manifest themselves with

introductory emails;

• The attraction and curiosity of discovering new markets.

Asselin Bannon

Strategic Management Consultants

Division of La Société de gestion et de formation GEXIMTM Inc.

(This text is the sole property of Ronald Bannon – All rights reserved © 2015)

The reasons which will allow a distinguished appearance in a new relevant market are often linked to

intrinsic factors that few entrepreneurs have mastered upon arrival and constitute barriers to entry that

may be difficult to overcome: language, culture, regulation, presentation, packaging, choice of colors,

words and images in advertising, pricing, distribution, to name just a few. Those that represent the most

laborious barriers to entry that we see are:

• The presence or absence of a market (are there interested buyers to the product or the solution?)

• The non-existence of intellectual properties (protection of copyright, trademarks, industrial designs,

innovations through patents, etc.)

• The lack of cash flow to finance international operations (especially expenses related to marketing

and sales management) whose profitability cannot be expected in the short term

• The adaptation of a product or solution to facilitate its adoption from consumers with different

values and markers of us

• The insufficiency of essential training of the first resellers to understand the meaning and scope of

the message in order to adapt it to the new buyers.

If your prestigious trademarks are unknown in new targeted markets, the difficulty of getting through will be

greater to a point that you will need to invest smartly and be patient to find partners that will bring you their

support in building the credibility of your brand and the appropriate market coverage. To generate new

opportunities, the effort to move outside of your comfort zone and to manage risk accordingly is not new.

Your presence will be required on a regular basis to maintain relationships with your supporters (or

eventually champions) and also to understand the behavior of the consumer in the new market.

Besides market intelligence shown briefly and logistics to deliver your products to the targeted markets, the

Canadian government has negotiated free trade agreements to facilitate market access by lowering or

eliminating tariff barriers. Canada has signed more than a dozen such agreements over a period of 10 years,

and others will be added shortly. The largest announced to date, and in the process of coming into force, is

the one with the European Union. This should make one barrier less to worry about your international

business strategy to be well-defined. For more information about these free trade agreements, I strongly

invite you to visit the following web site: http://www.international.gc.ca/trade-agreements-accords-

commerciaux/agr-acc/fta-ale.aspx?lang=eng

Next subject: Which market should you target first?

Asselin Bannon Strategic Management Consultants is a firm of professionals dedicated to the sales and the

promotion of innovative products, solutions or processes issued from applied R&D into multi cross channels.

We provide services to entrepreneurs locally and abroad in a way to help them identify business

opportunities, building added value offers and business models and constructing their commercial plan. In

certain cases, we also provide assistance to facilitate adequate funding required for commercial expansion.

To date, we estimate our involvement in near 1,000 commercial projects. Asselin Bannon brings you into

new markets where nobody has ever gone before.