Scale Your Business Globally: All You Need to Know
The world is your oyster.
This is an era where nothing is out of reach. Access to the internet in the 21st century has shrunk the world to the screen of a mobile phone. You could be sitting on your desk in Australia ordering dates from the Middle East or Earl Grey from Italy - to receive the products within mere days! Such is the power of globalization powered by the internet.
The 21st century has brought with it the boon of the internet, connectivity, a multitude of different communication channels, reduction of time-to-market spans, and a lot more, inasmuch as commerce is concerned. Interesting, though, is to consider this as an opportunity for your business to cater to a consumer base just as widespread.
Internet and digitization have leveled the play field for local and global businesses alike. As the global biggies now tap into the local market, the local ventures have begun to expose themselves bit by bit to the global consumers.
Although it does sound a bit daunting to suddenly think beyond the borders of your hometown, there is great potential in every local business to make its name in the global field; it is because the tools that they need are now available easily, as services over the internet. It is just the strategy, a guidebook that is needed now to scale your business to a global level.
Let's see how it's done.
The 'What to Do' to Scale Your Business for The Global Market
Scaling your business for a global market isn't as simple as it sounds. Due to deliberations on the steps that you need to take, the things you need to do ensue. Let's take a look at the things that your business needs to get in order before proceeding to make the move to global.
Decide on Your Goals, Values, Vision, and Mission to Scale Your Business
A global market is a wholly different deal. A business venturing out of its home for the first time needs a clear reason to be out there - create this reason. What is your goal to achieve from this move? Rebranding your business to align with your new vision, new mission statements and values, your new goals, is a very important first step that you need to take. Until your business truly "looks" and "feels" global, it really wouldn't be.
Your hopes and dreams, your story, the image of your brand - everything need to be revamped for the global marketplace.
Educate and Train Your Staff to Scale Your Business
In order to make your global ventures successful, you need to upgrade the skills of your existing employees. They need to be brought up to speed with the expansion plans, their new roles, and responsibilities, their new consumer base, etc. Make it a point to conduct trainings in using new applications, equipment, software, etc., that you may be implemented for the big growth. Your employees are the most important part of your company; helping them build their capacities to deal better with the expansion move will work wonders for your organization.
Basically, your business and its practices need to transform at a cellular level into those that can support a global presence.
Get a Global Team in Place
Expanding to new geographies has multifarious implications:
- The cultural change
- The new languages
- The local practices in business
In order to cope with such a massive shift in operational methodologies, it is imperative to hire new talents who are well-versed in the local regime. People who know the language of your new target geography, who know how people do business, will become an asset for your company. Also important is to ensure that your new recruits are culturally sensitized so as to not make any controversial moves.
Get Ready to Tackle New Expectations
A new market always has new expectations unique to itself. For your business to start off on its best foot in a new place, a thorough study must be done to understand what your new consumer base is expecting from a product like yours. Find out how your new market moves, study its dynamics, and understand the implications of associated industries on it. This study will help you craft your marketing campaigns suitably, in ways that your new consumers can understand and relate to your product.
A local product scaling up to a global marketplace must work hard to convince the new consumers that it is worthy!
Work on Pricing to Scale Your Business
Local businesses find themselves stuck in the pricing conundrum ever so often. For a product that was developed, produced, and sold locally all its life, understanding global pricing becomes a bit confusing. From shipping to border permits, from currency exchange rates to customs, duties, and other levies, your business needs a dedicated team in place to study how to price the product.
The major issue local businesses face is when they fix a price for all markets alike - which causes the problem of overpricing certain regions while under pricing others.
A new market means a new audience, and pricing a product such that it blends into the market price trends helps give your global sales a good boost.
Create New Communication Channels for New Customers
Communicating with your customers is of dire importance. It is here that you get to know about the good and bad feedback for your products, where your business needs to improve, whether or not your customers are happy or if they have a question. Keeping a suitable communication line always open for the new audience is a great way to establish trust in a brand.
For example, while in India your business operates on WhatsApp for consumer queries, you can't use the same platform for your branches in China. You will need to use some other medium there.
Let's now look at how to scale your business globally.
The 'How to Do it' to Scale Your Business Globally
It may seem a bit overwhelming, but the things you actually need to do for scaling up to a global level are pretty logical and make total sense. Let's see what they are.
What are Your Milestones?
Setting milestones for each of the goals your company is targeting helps create a roadmap of sorts which makes the entire expansion process simpler and more trackable. Milestones such as budgets and spending limits, hitting a certain volume of sales, gaining new customers, making alliances, etc. can be put into the expansion roadmap to help your business navigate the global landscape better.
Additionally, milestones are quantifiable, therefore you get to see the performance of your global business in unmistakable numbers.
What are Your Risk Mitigation Measures to Scale Your Business?
Risk mitigation measures need to be backed by proper data-based evidence. These are primarily for the investors and venture capitalists to see the value of your company and initiate investments. The factors that help your company get sales in the global market are your enablers - compiling verified data on these numbers work as trust inducers in your new customers as well as investors.
Make it a point to periodically create growth graphs - whether growth is negative or positive - and hold meetings regularly to address the trends if not in favor.
Are You Seeing an Increase in Sales?
The surest indicator of successful scaling of business is an improvement in sales. With increased sales come new benchmarks of growth measurement parameters, such as Average Rate of Returns, conversion rates, and more. Mapping out these parameters is an essential part of scaling to judge your strategies and regroup when required. They help you see what you may have been doing wrong, where you need changes, and which strategies aren't paying off at all.
In order to give your sales a boost in the new environment, you can leverage various marketing methods such as pre-sales bookings, sneak-peak events, early-bird discounts, and much more.
Who Are Your Ideal Customers?
The most important step in moving your business to a new region is profiling your new consumer base to discover the demographics ideal for your business. However, it is best to put off profiling until your business has achieved some traction in sales - it gives you more data to work with.
Once you have your data, you can begin the analytics and reporting part which tells you the class of consumers that are buying your products most. This step is essential as it helps you realign your marketing strategy in a new area to align with the goals.
How Will You Sell to Your New Customers?
Once your business has the demographic data on the most favorable kind of consumers, you can start to target them specifically with all the marketing tools and options you have. Ask yourself this question: "Why would a so-and-so person buy my products?"
Especially with reference to the new locality, your marketing strategies will change based on the laws of the land, people's preferences, content relevance, and many other factors. You need to take cultural aspects into consideration to ensure your business's marketing efforts doesn't hurt any sentiments. It is best to have a local employee work on this, as he would know the tricks of the trade.
Do You Have Enough Workforce to Scale Your Business?
Often, global expansion measures either lead to a shortage of hands-on-deck or too many of them. To be able to grow sustainably in a new geography is a big challenge in itself; one that can be addressed by one simple solution. Don't hire new recruits unless you are absolutely sure you need more. This helps to economize on the recruitment front while your business is trying to find its roots in a new place.
On the other hand, stretching the business operations out in the hands of too few staff can also lead to potential loss of sales - you don't want that either. It takes some mindful calculations to figure out how many new recruits you are going to need and when.
Conclusion
Creating a global presence for your business is a task of dedication, mindfulness, resourcefulness, and immense patience. With the steps outlined above, you can take your business to new heights sustainably and by shouldering fewer losses than otherwise.
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Accounting can be easily managed Deskera Books and can help you keep track of your balance sheet, profit and loss statement and journal ledger. All this simplifies your accounting and tracking of your financial records, making it easy for your business to get business credit and to secure loans.
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Key Takeaways
Deciding to go global is never easy. It comes with its own set of challenges and problems - basic ones - that are possible to solve with a little planning ahead. Equipped with this information, you will be able to scale your business successfully in new geographies.
- Goals, vision, mission, and values matter
- Education and training goes a long way to help you scale your business
- Hiring local talents is always a great idea
- New markets are always unique, so must the strategies be, in order to scale your business right
- The pricing works differently in each market
- Communicating with customers effectively helps businesses create a brand presence
- Milestones help in measuring progress when you scale your business
- Risk mitigation discussion helps in preserving valuable resources
- Monitoring sales lets you know how well or poorly your business is doing while scaling your business
- Having the profile of ideal customers in place helps you create better pitches
- You need to find innovative ways to sell your products to your new consumers
- Always ensure that existing employees aren't overburdened, or the ones hired aren't too idle.
- Decide on your goals, values, vision, and mission to Scale Your Business
- Educate and train your staff Scale Your Business
- Get a global team in place
- Get ready to tackle new expectations
- Work on pricing Scale Your Business
- Create new communication channels for new customers
The global marketplace today features brands and products from around the world - there is no reason why your business can't be one of these enterprises. Success as a global brand largely depends on how well you and your team handle it. Just follow the guide and get started to scale your business globally!