We describe an anonymized but typical journey: how a row of data becomes a conversation and a conversation becomes a price inquiry.
An Estonian wood producer with spare production capacity and a desire to enter the U.S. market, but not a single contact. From the category data we screened out fourteen U.S. importers who bought a similar product from Latvia and Poland, placed between three and thirty orders a year, and had been active over the past six months.
Fourteen is not a big number, and that is the point: better fourteen right ones than fourteen thousand random ones.
For each buyer a short personalized email was drafted, referring to their existing supply geography. Two weeks later a polite follow-up went out. Of the fourteen, five replied, of whom three asked for a price list and one for product samples. By the end of the third month the first official price inquiry, for two containers, was on the table.
None of the steps here is magic. It is simply knocking on the right doors in the right order, and the doors were right because the data showed that people were already buying behind them.
First: the response rate depends on targeting more than on the beauty of the email. Second: a follow-up is not pestering, it is the norm. Third: three months to the first price inquiry is a good pace, and it is worth planning for, not waiting for a miracle in the first week. If you want the same journey with your product, we start from your category data.
The first consultation is free: together we'll see who in the US already buys your product and how to reach them.