Domestic impulses usually inform, that is misinform, United States principals who are thinking about opening up international markets for their products. By inadvertently incorporating domestic biases and assumptions into the long game of international market buildout and expansion, their general tendency will be to look through a distorting mental prism of what is actually involved in being able to identify, attract, retain and smartly engage with foreign procurement people.

Entrenched in a domestic, commercial logic, these principals are mostly unaware of the warping effect it has on processing international information and thus how out of sync they can be with … Read the rest

Before, it had always been in the abstract for me when I learned via verbal or written reports from other reps when they described their challenges in dealing with a principal’s new management team. In my more than two decades of repping U.S. companies in foreign countries, I had never experienced an extensive purge of management of my principal’s staff — until now. Adding to the challenge I now faced was the fact that my agency was considered part of the old regime and thus under suspicion of harboring ideas of the recently departed management. As this management turnover started … Read the rest