10 Things You Need TO DO Before Taking Your Business To America – PART 2 of 2

  1. You don’t need to speak English perfectly, but you do need to be able to communicate and get your ideas across like an American: directly, to the point and succinctly. Americans don’t like long winded arguments about why they should buy something from you, they just want the facts. If they’re interested they’ll ask questions or you can go into more details once they’ve indicated they’re interested.
  2. Make sure you and your team keep American hours. Make sure you’re available, at least most of the time, your customers are awake. And, don’t forget to be available on weekends (Saturday but not Sunday) and DO be available when you go on vacation!
  3. Make sure all of your marketing materials (and that means your website, business cards, brochures, and I mean absolutely everything) are in English and that preferably the first thing visitors see when they come to your website is English. While you’re at it, you should get a .com website and don’t forget to get a US phone number which you can get from Skype or from Google Fi. Of course, this will vary depending on your industry but generally it will be better to look as local as possible.
  4. Study your market. Know it. Know the customers. Do your homework. You can’t arrive in America and start discovering it when you arrive (although you will), you need to arrive with a strong base of knowledge so that your American customers will rapidly get comfortable with you, and you with them.
  5. Price everything in dollars. Make it easy for your customers.
  6. Answer your phone on the first or second ring. Answer emails immediately and if you can’t answer right away send them a note saying when you’ll get back to them. Give them your cell phone number and don’t be surprised if they call you on a Saturday.
  7. Get yourself a good attorney and accountant and expect to pay a lot more than in your home country – about 6 to 9x more. It’s not that America has complicated laws and accounting (every country’s laws and accounting can be complicated), it’s just that you’re going to have lots of questions and you’ll need someone to answer them for you. Before, speaking to any though, spend a bit of time on the web reading as much as you can about tax and accounting issues, it will be a better use of your time and much cheaper.
  8. Make yourself a budget. How much are you going to invest in this idea of Taking Your Business to America?
  9. Be fast, plan on several trips per quarter. Just going once a year isn’t expanding to a new market, it’s tourism. Okay, you say: “But we live in a COVID world”. Well, take advantage of that and Zoom constantly.
  10. And, last but not least: NETWORK, NETWORK, NETWORK. You must go “out of the building” – whether in person or on Zoom or on a social network – and you must meet your potential customers.

So, pack your bags or get your favorite chair ready for the next Zoom call. You’re going to America.

 

 

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