Kick-Starting a Software Export Business?

An anonymous reader asks: "I've been asked by my employer to come up with a business plan to sell a software product of ours overseas. We are a fairly well-known Korean telecom operator, but have little presence overseas, and this is our first internally developed software product -- an e-learning management system. We believe South Asia and the U.S. will be strong markets, and that the product itself is competitive feature-wise. What is the best strategy to use to break into overseas markets? How should we go about finding distributors, and what sorts of partnership models should we expect?"

Just a tip

[__aafkqj3628]

Just a couple of tips here -

Probably the best avenue to go down would be the internet (and it doesn't matter what you're trying to sell).

The worst place to try is popups and popunders.

Re:Just a tip

[jo42]

...one more:

Sell one copy. The rest will be pirated.

Let me get this straight...

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

You're a Korean company and you want to sell your product in the US and you want the (predominately US) programmers who read Slashdot help you sell your product here. In the midst of a serious economic downturn with many of us unemployed.

Right.

Partners!

[itwerx]

I had a similar challenge a few years ago. Except that we wanted to get into almost a dozen countries!
The biggest lesson we learned from our experience is that one should find a well-established company with a good reputation in that country to partner with.
I could give you a whole list of reasons why, ranging from local name-recognition to political/industrial connections, but believe me, you don't want to do it any other way!
Good luck...

Use the Web

[khanyisa]

I'm from a software development company in South Africa, we target an international market (selling industrial software). We tried a method of using distributors in different countries, but it was actually much harder to get them to contact customers than it was to find the customers over the web. Our biggest customers / potential customers have been the ones that have come to us over the web. The reason? We have a good, simple web site with lots of product info and all the documentation for our products, so if people are searching they find it easily and can see that it's what they want. I would say use distributors if neccessary for the actual wrapping up of the sale, but don't expect them to generate sales for you, just put the effort in on your web site.

Business in South Asia

[jsse]

I'm sure what you mean by South Asia refering to Korea, Taiwan, Japanese and Hong Kong, etc.

I think I can help but first you must answer the following questions:

1) Where is your company located? It matters to clarify the term 'oversea'. :)
2) What kind of e-learning management system are you selling?
3) You mentioned your company has a connection with a Korean telco. Does your software product has something related to mobile business? I'm not sure whether a Korean Telco could help you otherwise.
3) To identify the best strategy, you must tell us your goal and your target customers. Say, you'd have completely different strategies in dealing with corporate and public customers.
4) About finding of distributor, first you must answer 2)
5) The nature of partnership that could give you maximum profit may vary from one market to another(e.g. telco might demand huge share of profit in partnership, depends on the degree of monopolization there), and again, you must first answer 2). :)
6) Does your product support Unicode? Forget about South Asia market otherwise.

If can't figure out any of the above then I think you should seek help from professional consultants, or approach the local Government directly. E.g. you could seek help here [info.gov.hk] for the question concerning international business in Hong Kong. Probaly you could find info in doing business in China there.

Re:Business in South Asia

[jsse]

Hmm, i hate to reply to myself but I seem to make a mistake. You ARE the telco. Please forget about question 1) and 3)

Then I must ask why you've problem in extending your business in South Asia. :)

Re:Business in South Asia

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, to answer your questions:

1) You figured it out, we are the Korean telco
2) It is a web-based system that supports a bunch of different content formats and database backends. It is designed to be used in a large enterprise, and is correspondingly expensive -- several tens of thousands of U.S. dollars for a licence of several hundred users. A comparable product would be Saba or IBM Mindspan -- although we are somewhat less expensive.
3a) See 1
3b) Good question. The system is suitable for both corporate and public users, but our only current customer (other than ourselves) is a large government department.

We figure target customers will depend on the country. For example, the IT training sector is growing quickly in India and those companies could make use of this type of software. Generally though, financial companies, tech companies, and government departments will probably make sensible targets for this type of solution.

6) Yes, we support Unicode. For much of S. Asia though (e.g. Malaysia, Singapore, India), English is good enough.

By the way, I should problably point out that I consider South Asia to mean south of China. I would consider China, Japan, Korea, etc to be North or East Asia.

We use resellers

[RhetoricalQuestion]

I'm a marketing minion, and at our company, we primarily handle our international sales via software resellers. (Especially in Asia.)

Which reseller is best for you depends largely on how your product fits with the other products they sell. We make development tools. Some of our bigger resellers are Programmers Paradise (North America) and GrapeCity (SE Asia.)

A few issues to consider: packaging and branding (our Japanese resellers have the right to rebrand our products -- in the US they do not), localization, marketing collateral translation, differing ways of selling software in different countries, sales management for resellers, specialized marketing programs, overlap with any of your field or inside sales staff, reseller sales compensation/incentive plans, exclusive distribution rights, etc.

One way to find resellers for your product is to find out if complementary products to yours are sold through a reseller channel (check the websites) and talk to those resellers. It's a good sell for them -- their sales staff can offer more product that way.

Alternatively, try partnering with complementary organizations who have an existing sales presence in the countries you want to sell to -- you may want to offer an incentive program to their customers. This is much more complex to do and manage, but may be more successful.

Note that a lot of this depends on whether you're selling commodity products; these are easier to push through a reseller channel. Larger products -- those requiring extensive field sales/SE involvement -- may be better served by actually having a remote sales office. This is an expensive option, but for some products it's the best way.