How to find buyers for exports and My Experience with Trade data platforms after India trade data ban
I am a agent who works with exporters to find buyers and for me Trade data platforms are my daily bread and butter, and i am going to tell you how to find buyers for your exports and this post is not some AI generated post, i will write my own techniques what i have learned with my experince.Due to the recent India trade data ban It has become a bit difficult to reach out to exporters, but still the process remains same.
I've owned subscription of five different platforms And I'm going to review all of them in the end, Since too many people are coming in my DM to ask me how I find buyers And I hope that this thread will help all the new exporters who are trying to enter into the market but they don't want to spend their hard earned money on these trade data platforms without knowing how to use them.
And specifically, I'm going to rate my experience with one of the worst trade data platforms That literally scammed me.
How to find buyers for your exports: heads up - there is no magic, only hardwork.
1. Identify your product:
If you are very new into the export market and you don't even have a product decided, then first thing is you need to see the market trend and decide what product do you want to export. Trade data platforms can help you here to identify what types of products are trending, what types of products are not trending. They analyze the shipment volume and they can also actually help you to target the actual keyword. For example, organic honey might be more trending than normal honey. So you need to see what is trending.
2. Target country:
Once you have your products decided, The next step is to identify the geographic locations where you want to export. And many people makes this process a very complex process. For example, they directly target markets like USA, UAE, Europe and they ignore the low hanging fruits like Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh Where you save a lot of shipping cost because you are shipping through road. And again, Trade Intelligence platform helps you a lot in this part to check how much demand is there for your product in that country.
3. Finding buyers :
next steps here is to do buyer analysis for genuine buyers. The reason why this step is crucial is because trust me, you don't want to be stranded with a pending payment after sending your shipment to a unknown buyer in UAE, And get scammed. Now this is the main reason you would want to use trade data platforms as you can see who is importing your product in your target country and can check the buyer's import history.
4. Finding contact information:
Now once you have the list of buyers for your product, You will have to find the contacts for your buyers. Now, this is the tricky part as you don't want to grab the contact for their customer service desk. You want the contact for their import-export manager or supply chain manager, or if it's a small company, then the number of their owner. Trade intelligence platforms provide these numbers but don't rely on them because half of the time they will not be able to provide you any number or the number they provide will be generic.
For this part, you can use online lead databases like Apollo, Zoominfo or hunter.io , or If you don't want to purchase their subscription, then you can directly reachout whatever contact you have for that company and then try to contact the owner but that is a lot of work and hassle.
5. Buyer Reachout:
Once you are done with a excel list of buyers and their email and phone number, the next step is to reach out to all these buyers with a customised email, linkedin, whatsapp reachouts. And do not same exact same messages to all the buyers. Every message should be customized according to that buyer and trade platforms will help you to find out information regarding that buyer so you can customize your messages according to it.
6: Tracking reachouts and reply:
Finding a buyer for export is not much different than running a sales team. You have to basically build a sales pipeline where you can predict how many reachouts take to close one buyer. For me personally i am able to close 1-2 buyer per 80-100 quality reach outs, this number can vary significantly for different industries but the process remains same, some niche industries like chemical, pharma and machinery might have have high close rates then common industries like food and agro.
This is the part where most exporters get lazy and slack off because Tracking reach outs, tracking replies, managing all the emails manually requires a lot of work, and I would suggest you to use a free CRM like Zoho.
Trade data platforms:
- Volza: The big classic giant and the oldest company in India that sells Trade data. I have a very long history with volza. Volza was my daily go-to platform, but since after the India trade data ban it is now useless. There is no point in spending money to buy volza subscription now unless you take their SME plan which is like 4.5L, But only a few handful of companies have Malaysia data, including volza, and if you want specifically Malaysia data, then go for Volza.
- Panjiva: I have taken their subscription earlier in the past, and also I am currently using Panjiva as a shared subscription. This is the most renowned company for trade intelligence data. They have the most detailed data, The best part about them is deep company intelligence reports where they just not only look at trade data but they will also look at companies financials, risks and internal details, everything in most detailed manner. But the subscription costs are so high that a small exporter can't afford to take their subscription. But honestly, there is no better platform than Pangeva right now in the market. If you have money to buy their subscription, then go for it, it's a no-brainer, Also, they have recently introduced the AI shipment sorting. Basically, you can use layman sentences to tell how you want to sort the shipments or what exact shipments you want to see and their AI will give you the exact results which you want. Basically, I use panjiva to confirm the authenticity of trade data on any other platform.
- The dollar business: Do not even try to buy their subscription they will offer you some exceptional discounts. After the India data ban, I took demo from Dollar Business because they were giving some exceptional amount of discount but their software is very old and there is no data no extra features. They will try to give you full year subscription in like 40K but spending any amount of money on non existent data is same as wasting money.
- Shipscout: I came across this company while comparing alternatives after the data ban and this is a very new company so i was very skeptical about them since there is no review on internet for them but after taking demo of 5-6 platforms after the India trade data ban, I finally took subscription of shipscout and by far, they have the most detailed buyer data at least for Indian exporters (still mirror data only) for my industry (food and agro, gems and jewellery, machinery, chemical, handicrafts, pharma and machinery). But data was not the reason I took their subscription, I took their subscription because i was saving money on extra softwares like hubspot and apollo because they give buyer contact information in CRM inbuilt where you can send mail to buyer directly from software, so basically everything from finding buyers, finding contact and reachout can be done in one place only and I am genuinely able to do much higher number of reach out than manually sending mails. But still take it with a grain of salt, they also have some problem which I have realised after using 6 months. I know they are a new company but they keep changing UI and addin features on their software, so there are a lot of glitches, sometimes the intelligence report take 2-3 days but overall managable. plus if you report any glitch, they will solve it in a day or 2 and sometime give you bonus credits in reporting bugs lol.
- One company which scammed me (I will not take their name publicly, but if I don't get refund then I will highlight them later.), One day after India trade data ban, I took their demo and all the old India data was visible and I immediately took their subscription Because they were promising that They will still provide Indian customs data. I paid them 90k for one year. And after two days, all the India data was gone which they promised me and I am still asking them for refund, but there is no one who is responding to me. I have sent them multiple emails and now i have no option but to file a complaint against them, and this is a very big indian company as well.
Now the real question do you need to pay lakhs on trade data platform ?:
NO: If you are still in the very early stages, if you haven't figured out your manufacturing, supply, documentation Then taking trade data platform doesn't make much sense. First sort out all these things above.
YES: If you are serious about exporting and not just thinking to export, You have your documentation done or in progress and you have manufacturing or supply ready. Then there are majorly two ways on how you can find buyers. One is to hire an agent like me, whom you can pay who will eventually use the these data platform to find you buyers, or you can you learn to use the trade data platform, CRM and lead databases and find buyers on your own, Either ways, you are going to spend money.
I can easily sell my services here and tell you to hire me, but honestly, I am currently overloaded with client and I don't have any bandwidth, but I still want to help people in this community so i wrote this post that i hope will help many people and new exporters.