EXPORTING WITH DIGITAL TOOLS
Digital tools are now fundamental elements in the export manager’s toolbox. In September, I published a guide on the subject on the Export Best Practice website.
To these tools I have to add a new one. Since October 2022 I have subscribed to the platform: Matchplat Explore. I wanted to use it for a few months and I’ve found it very interesting. Today I want to introduce you to it.
WHAT IS MATCHPLAT EXPLORE?
It is a subscription-based platform that uses artificial intelligence to carry out searches in 196 countries. A real virtual analyst to find customers, distributors and agents. Explore crosses official databases and Web sources and returns a list (that is downloadable in Excel) with the personal data of the identified companies, the connected mailboxes and the names of the people present on Linkedin. The inputs that must be entered to start a search are: the Nace and Naics codes, the company dimensions and the keywords that distinguish the profile of the type of company we are looking for.
I did over 20 searches: for agents in India in textile machinery, industrial pizza manufacturers in Germany, yarn manufacturing companies in France, etc. and the results are very satisfying.
The greatest difficulty lies in learning to use the filters that the system makes available to you, especially when the names identified by the system are in the order of a few hundred: you fish with a very large net but not all the fish are good; a selection must be made. Once again, it’s practice that helps improve web searches and I think I’m on the right track. It is a service that I obviously make available to the companies with which I work.
NEW MANUAL OUT
8 Digital Tools for SMEs: A Manual for Improving Export Strategies. This is the title of the ebook written together with my colleague Claudia Zarabara which will be released in February through the Egea publishing house.
As already mentioned, digital tools to support exports are always a work in progress. In this guide we talk about the main tools, trying to give operational ideas and thinking, above all, of small and medium-sized enterprises. In our opinion it is important to take stock of these issues, because the great deal of talk surrounding them has created some confusion.
Happy reading!