The initial phases of international business expansion are often full of surprises meaning you cannot control many things in your international markets. Careful planning is important, but it does not prepare you for everything. Cultural differences come up all of the time.

The Advantage Of Measurement

This is why conducting your initial phases into foreign markets through an online approach has distinct advantages. Internet marketing gives you control over several areas. Or at least it gives you the means to adjust quickly to your market. You can measure your marketing and sales efforts easily.

You can do many things to control your international lead generation process online. Here is an outline of what you can do:

* Use internet marketing to get more inquiries.
* Easily document your online touches.
* Measure the results of
* your online touches.
* Learn where to adjust your communication easily, through practice.

International market feedback is easier than ever before to set up and stimulate online. As you get to know your foreign markets better, you refine your process to work better for you.

Use your website to create on online international lead generation system. But first, you need to set up a process you can document, measure and refine as you go along.

Your First Step

Before you set up a structure to work with, you need to spend some time defining important elements of your international marketing pipeline. You need to define:

* what a lead is to your company
* what qualifies your leads
* how best you can nurture all of your international qualified leads and work on improving this over time.

This may seem simple and you might even think you have the right answers. But it is well worth the time to review these definitions again. And make sure all of your team agrees with you.

Difficulties and fuzziness appear when there are different definitions or a lack of definition within your own company. You need to define a common language. You also need to define what it is you want.

This is important to do before creating your international marketing pipeline. That is what I will be covering later in this series.