How to find overseas customers and sell in other countries

“ Globalization ” has brought with it both positive and negative things. Among the positive things, there is certainly the possibility of being able to sell and export one’s products more easily. Even those who produce and sell “niche” products that may struggle in a national market, can certainly make a significant turnover by expanding their clientele to other nations and perhaps throughout the world.

It is also worth considering that some products that are not in great demand in one nation, can represent a real indispensable resource in another.

In theory, everything seems simple, but in practice, how do you sell abroad ? How do you find overseas customers to whom you can offer your services and/or products? In this article we want to delve deeper into the topic because, in our opinion, it is very important and many small and medium-sized companies could emerge from the crisis thanks to this global “ marketing strategy “.

How to find overseas customers to sell your products

There are not many ways to find customers in other countries. In fact, there are only two possibilities to find information about customers of other nationalities:

Way 1. Website & Online Promotion

The Website represents the showcase of products and services that are sold by any company or firm. Having a well-indexed website means that it can be easily found by customers (based on the keywords used in the search engine) and therefore you can receive purchase requests directly online. In Italy, most companies have an official website but few of them have decided to create an “international” version (e.g. in English) of the site. By creating a version in English, French and/or German, the site could also appear in the search engines of other countries and therefore you could easily acquire customers abroad.

Unfortunately, creating a website and indexing it in the best possible way in the various search engines (even international ones) is not always feasible. Even SEO experts rarely guarantee reliable results regarding indexing. Because of this difficulty and high competition (especially for some keywords) of appearing in search engines, many people rely on promotion or advertising services (e.g. Google AdWords) that allow their site to appear in the search results of any country and in the desired language. This last solution works but has costs that are sometimes prohibitive.

Way 2. Retrieving information from potential overseas customers

If the method described in point 1 may seem complex or at least not immediately “applicable” (because indexing the site in foreign search engines could take months or even years), a faster and lower-cost way is to recover (always online) the information of potential foreign customers and then directly propose your products and services to them (via email marketing campaigns , direct marketing, SMS, and so on). However, this method works well for those looking for potential “ business ” customers, i.e. other companies that could be interested in your products. It does not work with “private” customers because it is practically impossible for them to find information from the web (for obvious privacy reasons).

But how to find potential foreign customers online? Very simple, just use one of the following programs, designed specifically to search for companies from public directories such as yellow pages, google maps, Bing, and so on.

#2. YELLOW LEADS EXTRACTOR

“Yellow” is not a coincidence. It is in fact a program designed to capture valuable information directly from the “ yellow pages ” sites of different countries.

Download Yellow Leads Extractor — free demo version

With this program you can recover email addresses, telephone (also WhatsApp) numbers or fax numbers of other companies in the world that could be interested in your products. Once you have downloaded and installed this program, from the home screen you will have to choose the country you are interested in (e.g. yellow pages Germany, Spain, UK, USA, UAE, etc..) and then do the desired search. Finally, you just have to click on “GET DATA” and the program will start to extract all the data of all the companies in that category and location.

#2. G-BUSINESS EXTRACTOR

This innovative tool is instead able to analyze and extrapolate company data directly from Google Maps. Among the captured data you will surely find the address, email, telephone number and other details.

Download G-Business Extractor — free demo version

Even in this case the operation is trivial because you just choose a category to search (e.g. hotel), choose the country/city and start the search. All data can be saved in Excel or CSV.

#3. Google/Bing Data Extractor

This last program that we want to point out is instead a “spider” that captures data directly from the results of the most popular search engines, namely Google and Bing. You can download it from estrattoredati.com website.

As you can see from the figure below, after having done a search (even for companies abroad), you just have to click on CAPTURE and useful data such as email address, website URL and telephone number will be extracted.