Achieve Good Results From Sourcing Exhibitions in China – Part 4
By Diana Wang
Exhibitor analysis
Based on market research, you may already be able to get a list of remarkable Chinese suppliers. Then you cross-reference with the exhibitor list to see which remarkable Chinese suppliers will attend the show in China and which will not. It is likely that there will be some exhibitors which are not covered in your market research. You need to do some web research on each of them to see if they are remarkable as well. For all the exhibitors you are interested in, you may conduct some research and get some basic understanding on what product they supply, where and how many they export, what position they occupy in the industry and whether they can supply you.
By browsing the exhibitors’ websites and from conducting the research, you may find more information and get a better understanding of how you can cooperate with these suppliers. You may need to prepare a list of questions for each supplier regarding their company situation and their products, especially the questions not answered by their websites and any confusion you need to have clarified.
- Appointment making
Once you have drawn up a list of the exhibitors you are interested in from exhibitor analysis, you should start to contact the exhibitors as soon as possible and make appointments with them. You may find from your previous experience that the senior people, or the managers, or the decision makers, or the company staff who can speak English will not always stay in their booth. Some of them leave for home early to save costs or to visit clients in the city or even travel around and relax. So do not expect that you can discuss whatever you want to know with the proper persons at any time. Ideally, therefore, you need to find out the proper contact person, their mobile number, and the proper time and place to meet before you leave for China.
In the next posting, we will talk about the follow up work after the exhibition.
Diana Wang, The China Sourcing Blog
This is the fourth part of “Achieve Good Results From Sourcing Exhibitions in China”. Here you can find Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.
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May 15th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Agree buyers need to have enough conversation before signing contract with vendors.
However, I think under most cases, buyer can find the one speak english on site as vendors spend lots money on the exhibition and they are more careful meeting clients.