Apr 07 2009
USA Export: How Much Will It Cost?
Now that you’ve committed to exporting your products, let’s look at the financial resources USA export will require from your organization. Consider these things when you establish a budget for your international sales department.
Start with additional salaries. If you don’t have the time or the desire to do the job successfully by yourself, you need to hire an expert. How much does an international expert cost? Is $100,000 a year too much or not enough? http://www.salary.com lists the salary for an International Sales Manager to be between $79,000 and $106,000 per year, or between $6600 and $8850 per month.
Next, establish a USA export plan for the timing to enter the foreign market. It easily takes 6 times as long to sell a product overseas than it is in the USA. If your sales cycle is now 45 days, it will most likely take 270 days or nine months to start seeing orders. So, before you actually start selling anything, you will have paid your International Sales Manager $6,600 x 9 months = $59,400 just in salary.
Add to that, the costs of shipping samples overseas to the prospects. Most manufacturers decide to offer a free sample to prospects as long as the prospects pay for the shipping. However, most prospects aren’t willing to bear the costs to make you rich. It’s strongly recommended that you pay for the shipping to get your samples to your customers.
You can of course depend on the US Mail Service plus the foreign mail service to deliver your packages. Unfortunately, there’s no true guarantee your samples will arrive at their intended destinations. Depending on the size of your products, you can easily expect to pay as much as $100 to send a sample via UPS or FedEx. It adds up.
On the USA export blog, we’ll be posting information to help you understand more about the ‘ins and outs’ of exporting. We hope we’ll be able to answer most of your questions in our blog posts. But if there’s anything else you’d like to know about export management or distribution contact us at the XL Group.
