Export Now: Five Keys to Entering New Markets

Co-author, Frank Lavin shares how small and medium companies can use this how-to and step-by-step strategy guide to exporting your products, and taking your company global

Even the best businesses sometimes find themselves in a difficult situation when it comes to exporting. For most firms, it is a new area involving a set of complicated challenges, including language, tariffs, and the toughest challenge of all: how to track down new customers. The pace of change in international business has accelerated dramatically within one generation, and many businesses that still have limited involvement in exporting need to take stock of these changes.

Many companies are going to need to sell their products into economies that are growing faster than the economy of their home country according to the key message in Export Now: Five Keys to Entering New Markets (Wiley; June 2011; 256 pages; Hardcover; also available in e-book formats) by Frank Lavin and Peter Cohan.

Export Now is designed to help leaders of small-or medium-sized enterprise (SME) to enter foreign markets and generate meaningful sales growth there. The concepts, cases, methodologies, and checklists presented in the book—drawn from over thirty years’ experience helping thousands of companies evaluate whether and how to expand into global markets, as well as from specific research conducted for this book—can boost their chances of export success. 

This book boils down the challenge into the "Five Cs" of exporting:

• Country: How to pick the right one.
• Customers: How they differ in new markets.
• Competitors: What to look for when you are away from your home market.
• Capabilities: What you need to win.
• Capability Gap: How to close it.

While there are many books that discuss the impact of globalization from a macro-economic or political perspective, those are few that discuss international market entry from a tactical perspective.

In Export Now, readers will learn the secrets of exporting from case studies including:

• Brewdog, the Scottish micro-brewery that used blogs to break into a new market.
• Legacy, a German company with superior products but the wrong export strategy.
• Eno, a Chinese youth clothing retailer started by two Americans, that succeeded by letting its Chinese designers pick popular styles.

The authors are uniquely qualified to help and this book distills their experience into practical steps that companies can use to identify, evaluate and profit from global growth opportunities.