Know what it can do for you, and what it cannot.
| The short version A U.S. trade mission buys access, not a sales program. It is built to serve the whole delegation, so it cannot identify every prospect, arrange every meeting, or turn introductions into customers for you. The return depends on your own preparation and follow-through, and it is not always a contract: sometimes it is learning, early and cheaply, that part of your U.S. plan needs to change. |
I recently ran into a founder who had joined one of my trade missions in the mid-2010s. He thanked me for changing his life.
The truth is that I only opened the door. He walked through it. We introduced him to an accelerator. He applied. His pitch was good enough to win funding, and he used that platform to scale his business.
That is a useful way to think about what a trade mission can do for you in the United States, and what it cannot.
I have conceived, organized, or overseen dozens of trade missions, including during my years leading the UK Government’s Los Angeles-based economic development team. I continue to deliver them as an outside project manager.
A good trade mission can give you access to people you might find it difficult to reach on your own and an early education in the U.S. market. But it is designed to create value for a delegation, not to provide a custom sales program for every participant. What you get from it depends heavily on what you bring to it and what you do with the opportunities it creates.
A trade mission buys access, not a sales program
Governments and economic development agencies can bring the right people into the room.
A well-organized mission can put a relatively unknown overseas company in front of executives who might otherwise be difficult to reach. It can provide market intelligence, credibility, context, and introductions. Sometimes those introductions lead to substantial business.
But if you arrive expecting the organizers to provide a complete U.S. business-development package, you are asking too much. A mission cannot identify every relevant prospect, arrange every meeting, refine and validate your pitch, and then turn those introductions into customers for you. That is not what it is designed to do.
Its primary purpose is to create opportunities that would be difficult, slower, or more expensive for the participating companies to produce entirely on their own.
The program is built for the delegation
Trade teams are designed for breadth. They usually cover every industry their country or region counts as a strength, and they are not sufficiently staffed to have deep expertise and relationships in every market niche. On any particular mission, the team delivering it has to divide its time across every company taking part.
On a typical mission, there might be only two or three people supporting 12 or 15 visiting companies. At the extreme, I once delivered a program for 53 companies. Even an excellent team cannot build 53 individual U.S. business-development programs.
Instead, the organizers try to design a program that creates value across the delegation as a whole. The more focused the mission, the easier that becomes. The UK’s L.A. Sync Mission is a good example. Its purpose was tightly defined: help British music companies pursue opportunities in film, television, advertising, video games, and other visual media. Because the participating companies were looking for similar types of buyers and partners, a meeting useful to one company was likely to be relevant to all the others. That is why a 53-company delegation still worked, although we did keep subsequent delegations a bit smaller.
Broader missions are harder. If the only common theme is something like “Technology,” the organizers need to find activities that create multiple possible points of access. They might approach a large accelerator, for example, or the innovation team at a major studio and ask them to host the delegation, as we often did.
Not every meeting will be equally valuable to every company. But that does not necessarily make the meeting a waste of time. A conversation that produces no immediate sales opportunity may still teach you how a major U.S. company evaluates new technologies, introduce you to someone useful, or point you toward a better target.
The important thing is to understand what the mission is trying to provide.
The organizers have objectives too
Economic development teams are not simply assembling interesting meetings. Their programs exist for a reason. Governments fund trade activity because they want companies to export, invest, form partnerships, create jobs, and generate measurable economic results. At the UK’s former Department for Business and Trade, we were measured on the monetary value of “export wins,” meaning business deals we had supported or facilitated. Trade missions were one of the tools we used to help generate those outcomes.
Understanding the organizers’ objectives also helps you understand what they can realistically do for you. They are trying to create conditions in which commercial outcomes can happen across a group of companies. They are not trying to replace each company’s sales team.
The more clearly you understand that division of labor, the more useful the mission becomes. The organizer opens doors. You still have to know which doors matter to you.
Learning can be a valuable outcome
There is another return from a trade mission that is easy to undervalue. Sometimes the most useful result is discovering that something you believed about the U.S. market was wrong.
You may learn that you are targeting the wrong customer. Your pricing may not work. The competitor you barely noticed in Europe may be firmly established here. Your proposition may need to change. You may discover that the sales cycle is much longer than you expected, or that the opportunity is larger than you thought.
I saw companies participate in missions and realize that they needed to adjust their offer, build more capacity, or rethink part of the business before trying again. That can feel disappointing after investing time and money in a U.S. visit. But it is often much cheaper than learning the same lesson after hiring people, signing a lease, or spending a year pursuing the wrong market.
A trade mission can therefore create value without producing an immediate contract. A good one should give you some combination of:
- access to people you would find difficult to reach on your own
- better market intelligence
- greater credibility as a new entrant
- feedback that improves your proposition
- relationships you can continue developing after the mission
That is a broader definition of success than the number of meetings in your calendar.
What you do with the opportunity is up to you
The companies that benefit most from trade missions treat government support as leverage for their own business-development effort, not as a substitute for it. They understand that a mission is not a packaged route into the United States. It is a way to accelerate work they still have to do themselves.
That is also why preparation matters so much. The more clearly you know who you want to meet, what problem you solve for them, and what you want to happen next, the more useful the organizer can be. That is the subject of the next article in this series.
A trade mission can get you into the room. What you learn there and what you do with the opportunity is up to you.
If you are considering a U.S. trade mission and want to understand how it should fit into a broader market-entry effort, Traksjon can help you assess the opportunity before you commit resources.
