How tech is helping export sales growth for B2B SMEs For many SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) export sales can be of some challenge to execute. Banks are unlikely to offer credit terms or cover risk at par with bigger companies, leaving small manufacturers and franchisors to go it alone. Thus eroding profitability as either they have to use other costly routes or get roped in to buy costly products.
Export Sales solutions have traditionally been accessible to small segment of premium customers at international banks or export regulatory institutions such as ports, customs etc. The smaller exporters had to contend with delays, cumbersome paperwork or were made to deposit costly guarantees thereby restricting working capital.
Going Digital
Online digital shift is enabling many tools to automate workflow and execute exports at fraction of a cost. These platforms are helping freeing up capital or investment in manpower or resources to manage complex export sales documentation and procedures.
Distributors increase order value 10x using credit tools
In general B2B buyers such as distributors, resellers or wholesale retailers have increased their order size once they get their preferred payment terms such as credit period, FX rate and minimum order quantity etc. Many distributors who have subscribed online applications such as “credit key” or “finbox.in” for their POS business customers are using the similar tools now to place orders on manufacturers or principle companies.
Digital collaboration improves Franchisors and Franchisee engagement.
There is always an inherent imbalance between plan and execution. In such an environment it is important to have a collaborative tool which helps to import and share digital document from a repository.
The remote working tools like MS teams or Zoom are not just helping employee engagements but also creating unique platform for franchisors and franchisee to implement processes in real time without sending emails back and forth. The new age digital tools have also brought in efficiency in workflow management, analyzing data to readjust offering against seasonal effects, customer preferences which further helps in improving customer engagement.
Selling in Overseas Marketplace
Many global online retailers ( for e.g. Amazon Global reseller program or Mercado Libre for Latin America, Rakuten Ichiba for Japan or Tokopedia of Indonesia ) are offering overseas marketplace targeting number of countries and offering lot of resources without worrying about shipping, taxes, and the general complexities of export sales.
Strategic Alliances
In today’s dynamic marketing environment building right strategic alliances plays extremely important role more so in export sales. The alliances can be in any form JV, Licencee, reseller or recruiting export sales managers for market entry projects.
Building B2B agreements involves lot of contractual legalities and specific clauses relevant to product or service or territorial requirements and may need multilingual translation for formalization as per country requirements.
These services were mainly preserving of the MNCs, however tech platforms like rocketlawyer have opened the market to SMEs at a fraction of cost.
Conclusion – Is tech really helping SMEs?
In B2C segment tech has created behemoth’s like Amazon, Noon or Alibaba heavily denting sales for small retailers across segments. Irrespective of product category such as consumer goods, electronics and now even daily groceries.
In B2B segment we can conclude that technology has greatly help to create a level playing field especially for export oriented SMEs.
