Riding the global wave to international success

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), August, 1996

Companies that do not develop an account management strategy for customers doing business internationally will experience the "global wave" crashing over them in the next few years, warns Howard Katzen, vice president, Major Accounts Marketing, Xerox Corp. "If you have customers operating overseas, and you don't sell to them there, you are missing a tremendous opportunity. The primary reason to go global is because your customers are."

Katzen believes businesses are coming to the end of a "creative destruction period" in which the focus has been on downsizing, total quality management, building knowledge about the customer, and process refinement. He sees corporations entering the "information services era" as they explore the tremendous opportunities of globalization.

His organization's relationship with Alphagraphics is what Katzen cites as leading Xerox to the global marketplace. The 26-year-old business-to-business design/copy/print company began international expansion in 1986 with its first shop in Hong Kong and it now has 70 shops in 20 nations, averaging five new countries a year. Today, Xerox products are installed in 90% of the Alphagraphics facilities worldwide. "If you listen to your customers, they will take you where you should go," Katzen maintains.

At Xerox, whose global marketing organization started in 1988 with five accounts, the split of sales between domestic and international markets is moving from 70-30% to 30-70%. Katzen says that, in the information management industry, the split already is 50-50%. As their customers who are comfortable with certain products grow internationally, Katzen indicates they will want to take those products with them.

The steps necessary to the development of global partnerships for an organization begin with the establishment of a steering committee to agree on the definition of a global account and map out a strategy for marketing practices. The next step is the development of a network of operations, sales, and support people worldwide, responsible for the "care and feeding" of the global customer. Finally comes building a worldwide customer database and information system to facilitate account business planning, measure revenue and share increases, and provide data to customers.