You’d like to sell to Russia, but where do you start? It is a new distant market and your potential clients may have not yet heard about your business. However it may well be that it is your product or service that they are looking for.

Our Opening Doors service brings together you and your future customers in Russia. The service emerged from the needs of our clients who were finding themselves in a similar situation: they wanted to sell but did not have access to the market.

The process includes several steps to help you contact the local decision makers and raise awareness of your products and services in Russia.

We would work out together what actions would be most effective for your business, however here are the 3 steps that have proven to be of value to our clients:

Targeted contacts

Depending on the nature of your business you may wish to establish contact directly to potential clients or have a local agent or distributor.

Together with you we draw a profile of businesses or individuals you’d like to target. After that it is purely our job to identify target companies, get through to the decision makers and set up meetings with them.

A little note: any business works better when there is personal contact. For Russia it is even more true.
If you tried doing business with Russia in the past, you may have noticed that e-mail does not work – often there is simply no reply to your messages. Telephone works better, but mostly as a means of scheduling a face-to-face meeting.
Decision makers there buy from someone they know they can trust. Because of deficit of information about businesses in the emerging markets the way to gain trust is through face-to-face contact.

Once the meetings are set up, we can help you with getting the visa, finding a good place to stay and getting you a local guide and interpreter.

It is advisable to come with marketing materials in Russian. Not everyone you’ll meet will be fluent in English, and even those who will, would appreciate essential information in their native language.

Informing the Market

While sales trips are very useful for targeted contacts, it is equally important to let the local industry know of what you’ve got to offer. Decision makers, technical experts and supply chain specialists in Russia heavily rely on information in specialist magazines and online media.

With our contacts to editors in the specialist media the process is straightforward: all you need to do is provide the text, and we will coordinate the publication.
The articles do not need to be ‘selling’: people there like to go into technical details of machines and equipment. Examples from your existing clients, a good detailed explanation of the technology/equipment and their benefits will get many of the experts interested, prepared to recognise your product and are likely bring passive sales. The Russian text can be taken care of by our technical and/or marketing specialist translators.

Specialist Presence

Local exhibitions is a fantastic way to get direct face-to-face contact with a large number of potential clients. Only a fraction of them makes their way to the exhibitions in continental Europe or the UK, so it makes sense to go out there and meet them on their territory.

We will help you to chose the right event in the right city, sort out the paperwork, supply a stand interpreter and answer your questions about working the local visitors.
Being a speaker at the conferences that run in parallel with the exhibition is the quickest way to establish the relationship with the local customer base and we can facilitate the speaking engagement for your representative.

Any Questions?

Please give us a call on +44 (0) 161 850 6120 or email us read@russia-expert.com if you have any questions.