At present, most foreign trade enterprises are faced with many uncertainties, which come from the turbulence of the global macroeconomic situation, the repeated epidemic, the unsmooth supply chain and other factors. For traditional foreign trade enterprises standing at the forefront of international trade, the challenges are more severe.
For example, the boss of an LED lamp factory has a headache about getting customers. Before the epidemic, through the Canton Fair and industry exhibitions, we can gain a lot each time. But now the repeated epidemic has almost cut off their offline channels for customers, and the domestic exhibition has been postponed for some reason. Although several major customers on hand can be stabilized, he always feels anxious that the problem of difficult new customer development has not been solved.
Offline channels are limited, and online channels are becoming the main way for B2B enterprises to obtain customers. So, in the face of changes in the overall environment, how should foreign trade enterprises correctly embrace the trend of global trade digitization to achieve accurate customer acquisition?

Where is the difficulty of traditional foreign trade enterprises?

1. The customer base is scattered and development is difficult
When actively developing customers through online channels, foreign trade practitioners have the first problem of not knowing where the customers are. For example, some salespeople will use LinkedIn and Facebook to find target customers, but the retrieval process will take a lot of time and effort. In addition, these social media have gradually tightened their privacy policies, making it more difficult to directly establish contact with customers.
2. The quality of clues is uneven and difficult to transform
Order conversion has always been a difficult point in foreign trade work. An order needs a long follow-up period from inquiry to signing, usually about 1-3 months, which greatly tests the negotiation and marketing abilities of the salesperson. It is critical to accurately develop customers by adopting the corresponding marketing method.
However, in the process of obtaining customers online, the main problem for most foreign trade enterprises is that the quality of clues is uneven, the accuracy of customers is not high, and even there are a lot of false inquiries. The salesperson cannot accurately judge the intention of clues and customer needs, and cannot adopt the correct marketing method. This is why many salesmen often tease: "Customers always disappear after the quotation."
3. The customer data is complex and difficult to manage
In addition to developing new customers, the introduction of old customers can also help businesses improve the efficiency and accuracy of customer development, so customer service maintenance becomes very important. New customers need to follow up and old customers need to maintain, but there are many customer data. With the increase of online customer acquisition channels, the source of clues becomes more complex, and the management difficulty will also increase.
For example, customers may leave funds on independent stations and social platforms at the same time, but one uses a nickname and the other uses a real name. How do you want to check for duplicate clues? Or, in case of personnel turnover during order follow-up, how to ensure smooth handover and avoid customer information loss? Enterprises need a more efficient way to systematically manage customer information.

Difficulty in obtaining customers, transformation and management - how can foreign trade enterprises break through the bottleneck of growth under the new normal?

With the progress of global trade digitalization, more and more comprehensive information means more opportunities. The use of digital tools, based on reliable data analysis and summary, can more effectively help foreign trade enterprises solve the problems of customer expansion, transformation and management, and achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase.
You can use our GPM (tradens.vip) data query system to enter product keywords or HS codes on the data search page to view detailed import and export data and trade overview. Click the interested purchaser to view the details of the target purchaser.
Through the platform and tools, we can learn about the company's industry, brand, company background, business situation, turnover, etc., and select the target customers who are interested in our products.
At the same time, we can accurately find the contact information of the key decision-makers you need, WhatsApp social media data marketing, use overseas social media and the Internet to mine WhatsApp accounts of potential customers, mass marketing and potential customer communication, and online inquiry collection.
Most foreign trade enterprises have many problems in customer resource management:
▪ Incomplete management, resulting in personnel turnover and taking away customer resources;
▪ The follow-up contact is not timely or in place, resulting in the loss of customer resources;
▪ The collected customer information is not fully utilized, resulting in waste of customer resources and high cost of new customer development;
▪ Inadequate data statistics or no data statistics make it difficult for the management to make statistical analysis and arrange marketing strategies.
How can profits not be lost when there are so many management loopholes in such important customer resources? What should I do? First of all, through the CRM customer relationship management system, we should do a good job of follow-up contact with customers, and then we can manage and make good use of customer resources.
Establish customer files
Attended the Canton Fair and various exhibitions at home and abroad, and collected a lot of business cards and information; Or they have done a lot of network promotion on Alibaba and other B2B platforms and received a lot of customer inquiries. For these customer information, a detailed customer file should be established in time to record the customer's company name, contact person, telephone number and other relevant information. Create a "personality file" for each customer, and record the contact information such as contact information, transmitted documents, received or sent emails, faxes, and telephone calls.
Grade and follow up at any time
All customer information is stored together, rather than the salesperson controlling customer resources separately. In this way, when a salesperson leaves his or her job or needs to transfer customer information for other reasons, it is very convenient to achieve seamless connection and effectively reduce the risk of customer resource loss.
Our CRM intelligent customer management system conducts hierarchical management of customer resources, which can quickly distinguish customer types and carry out targeted follow-up maintenance. For example, the importance of customers and the promotion of transactions can also be grouped by region and company product category, so that different marketing content can be pushed for different customer groups, which can greatly improve the lead conversion rate.
Yizhijia has been focusing on the collection, mining, application and service of foreign trade big data for more than ten years; In order to solve the "many pain points in foreign trade", a new customs data query system, GPM system (tradens.vip), has been created to help foreign trade enterprises quickly find matching precise purchasers and precise procurement principals. It will spend 80% of its time on 20% of accurate customers, shorten customer development cycle and cost, and improve development efficiency and order completion rate.
For more foreign trade information, please contact us and follow the WeChat official account: E-home Tradess