The Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership (WMEP) and the state Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Export Management are helping small- to medium-sized manufacturers in the state expand their export sales through Expor Tech.
The program helps companies identify markets on the global scale that they might be able to sell their products to and assists them with connecting to those customers, said Roxanne Baumann, director of partnerships and alliances with WMEP.
“Within Expor Tech, we’re trying to get companies to understand their global value proposition,” she said. “We want to help them tell customers why they can benefit from that value proposition, find global customers who care about that and hook them up.”
During the Expor Tech program, eight non-competing companies share three full-day sessions that are held one month apart. Mentors and coaches work with participating companies one-on-one for seven hours between each of the sessions to help develop individual strategies.
WMEP and the state Department of Commerce put on the first Expor Tech program last year. This year’s Expor Tech program will launch in October.
State officials believe export education is critical, given the high percentage of manufacturers located in Wisconsin and the significant growth that emerging markets are seeing today, Baumann said.
“Ninety-five percent of the consumers are outside of the U.S. The Baby Boomer generation that has been buying things is now retiring, and there is a demographic shift with new people that will buy stuff shifting to the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China),” she said. “If you’re a small manufacturer trying to get started, you can get lost in the sea of all this stuff. We try to pull up to the executive level, to the strategy level to figure out where the customers are, what the best countries are and how to attack that country.”
Companies that put careful thought and strategy into their export plans tend to have success, Baumann said. She pointed to a study by the U.S. Commercial Service and the national Manufacturing Extension Partnership that showed that companies who create an export strategy grow about 10 percent, increase sales by about 20 percent and tend to grow 2.4 times faster than companies that only dabble in exports.
“Putting thoughtful strategy behind it is the key to getting it right,” Baumann said. “There’s a huge opportunity lying out there.”
Milwaukee-based Perlick Corp. took part in last year’s Expor Tech program, and its export strategy has evolved significantly because of it, said Jeff Wimberly, vice president of sales and marketing.
“We’ve been doing some international sales for many years, but attending the WMEP class really helped steer us in the right direction toward certain countries,” he said. “It’s on us to do the execution of it.”
