A TURE STORY: GROWING WITH OUR COMPANY
The Voice of a young salesman in AMEC.
Celebrating CHANGZHOU MACHINERY & EQUIPMENT IMP. & EXP. CO., LTD.（AMEC） exported the goods of over 300 million US dollars in 2019!
By reviewing the year 2019, with the ups and downs of the Sino-U.S. trade negotiation and the decline of the agricultural machinery industry in general, the international trading experiences the turbulence. With both crisis and opportunities, it is prominent that we managed to achieve the historical high export volume under the wise leadership of executives.
It has been nearly four years since I joined AMEC. I have transmitted from a technical person to a business one with the help of AMEC platform. By taking the opportunity of the company’s success, I would summarize and share my own working experience.
Salesmen in international trading act as waiters. The main task is to serve customers well, coordinate suppliers, and show their values by our service. Our mission is to achieve the maximum of profit through this process. In order to achieve this, we should start with both subjective awareness and specific methodology.
Subjective awareness is the foundation where our efforts should be paid. Without the right direction and correct attitude, the efforts are meaningless. Hence, we should understand our own demand and set the right goals while constantly making adjustments. When we explore new customers and developing new products, Ms. Xu Wenyan, our sales manager, provides us a very worthwhile example. It is crucial to comprehend the customer’s needs and find a matching product by considering the costs and benefits. From the other point of view, targeting the customer by the main product from the high-quality supplier is an alternative.
Quality is the life of a factory, and integrity is the foundation of a person and a company. Integrity requires a long-term investment. As a result, it is important to keep integrity in mind when dealing with customers. Due to certain objective factors (e.g. rising price etc.), the volume of the order would be reduced, which is not controllable. However, customer's impression of us is controllable and a manifestation of long-term operation. The majority of AMEC’s customers have a long cooperation history and trust in AMEC as well as its salesmen. They are willing to grant us numerous opportunities. As our customers are getting prosperous, our business expands simultaneously.
Apart from the subjective awareness, methodology plays an important role as well. Negotiation is a vital part of international trading. It is an art to effectively communicate and get the deal done with the counterparty regardless if it is a customer or supplier. Taking customer negotiation for instance, an adequate preparation is inevitable before negotiation, such as the positioning of our products from the customer’s view (are we the unique supplier of the similar product?), the customer's psychology (reduce regular products price annually), and the pricing model (kg/price), combined with various factors to formulate our quotation and bottom line. Meanwhile, we should prepare as many chips as possible, such as technical support, product quality, delivery cycle, mold fees, etc. in order to facilitate the initiative in negotiations.
Another thing that impressed me the most is language. When we explored the new German customers, we often encountered the cases that customers did not respond to our promotion letter. But once our colleague wrote his promotion letter in German, despite that the customer was not interested in the products described in his letter, he received a feedback. From my personal perspective, if someone sends me this kind of letter in English, I may not bother to reply. However, if it is writing in Chinese, I may reply it. Therefore, we need to learn some basics in German and Italian for the consideration of our customers. In addition, the language of the promotion letter is preferred to be writing in customer’s native language, even if it is only translated by translation software.
Documenting files, data retrieving and summary are often encountered in daily work. I am willing to use some tools and methods to improve efficiency. For example, software ‘everything’ can search the files you need by the part file names (even letters or figures) instantly. Excel software is a useful and powerful tool for data management. I suggest taking some time to learn software, which improves the efficiency. For example, the Excel functions ‘vlookup’ and ‘sumifs’ help me a lot when there are many varieties of products, avoiding a lot of repeated work.
During our work and life, difficulties are everywhere. It is difficulty that allows us to identify our shortcomings. It motivates us to perform a better job by overcoming the shortcomings and learn from it, and hence to improve us.
Li Mi
