HOW TO SELL OVERSEAS

The U.S. Has the Opportunity & the Tools

WHY have U.S. exports fallen? The popular complaint of businessmen is that the U.S. is being priced out of world markets by rising labor costs.

But many foreign-trade experts are convinced that the biggest problem is a plain lack of salesmanship: the U.S. businessman has simply not tried hard enough to sell his products abroad.

Says Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney Martin Jr.: "Our foreign business is the neglected child of American business." Even though the traditional spread between U.S. exports and imports has narrowed dangerously, comparatively few businessmen have stepped up foreign selling efforts. The lag is not for any lack of opportunity. In recent years the U.S. has made great strides in persuading foreign nations to lower tariff barriers. Yet the Commerce Department reported that only 10,000 firms out of the 4,600,000 in the U.S. have any interest in exporting. Many companies, added Commerce, do not answer repeated letters of inquiry from prospective foreign customers.

Big corporations such as General Motors, International Business Machines, and National Cash Register, which have full-scale international divisions and plants abroad, know how profitable trade can be. But smaller companies, which cannot invest millions to make millions, tend to shrug off export sales, regard them only as a dumping ground for surplus domestic production. When there is an export department, it often operates at the lowest management level.

Just about every U.S. company extends credit—as liberal as possible—to its U.S. customers. But overseas, the same companies often demand cash on the barrelhead. Nor does the U.S. businessman research his foreign market as he does at home; he is nowhere near as anxious to serve each customer's special needs, is reluctant to modify his product to fit export needs.

Germany's DEMAG steel construction company recently won an order for a steel mill in Portugal because it offered a "complete, individualized package," while its U.S. competitors offered only a standard job, take it or leave it.

Says DEMAG: "The Americans pull out a blueprint, but we do a hand-drawn design specifically tailored to the customer's wishes." The U.S. also often falls down in the quantity and quality of its salesmen abroad. European and Japanese traders flood their markets with salesmen, make sure they are well-educated specialists with a solid knowledge of the language and the market. By contrast, the U.S. company often sends a man who does not even know the language, has so much ground to cover that he can answer queries only by mailing off a catalogue—printed in English as often as not. Many companies do not send a salesman at all, but turn their wares over to jobbers who operate as mere order takers. In Singapore, for example, one agent handles 70 companies.

The U.S. company too often sells more on price than with the emphasis on quality that makes it more economic in the long run to buy American.