When you’re doing business globally, you might find yourself traveling on Easter and giving presentations on Sunday morning.
Founding and growing a company is romanticized. Well, it’s actually a lot of hard work.
Founding and growing a company that does business globally adds some complexity that outsiders don’t see when you tell them you took a quick trip to Southeast Asia on short notice for a vendor presentation.
I’m not looking to describe the generic difficulties of doing business globally; they are well-known. Rather, I am trying to share some less-known, real-life experiences that we have experienced in our international business activities at Yonder, a B2B SaaS company.
For us, doing business globally often involves RFPs or tender processes. Not two of those RFPs are alike, which requires a hand-crafted response in each case.
Answering RFPs all over the world has its own set of challenges, which I described in detail in an earlier article.
Once an RFP response is handed in, the challenges continue. Here are some real-life examples.
1. On-Site Vendor Presentations
During COVID-19, most RFPs were canceled, and our pipeline was suddenly empty. In the first two years after COVID-19, a few RFPs were taken up again, and vendor presentations were mostly done through online meetings.
In 2024, the RFP frenzy came back in our industry. So far this year, we have answered 10+ RFPs on 4 continents.
In contrast to 2022 and 2023, on-site vendor presentations came back in 2024. That’s great. Presenting a software product in an online meeting is possible, but building rapport and reading the room is not. Plus, on-site meetings often include a less formal lunch break or an informal after-meeting with some of the participants. I’ve never seen this on Zoom or Teams.
However, on-site vendor presentations are often happening at the most inconvenient times. I spent the Easter weekend on a plane, to be ready for an on-site vendor presentation on Easter Monday in Southeast Asia. Remember, when you’re doing business globally, not everybody cares for the European bank holidays.
On-site vendor presentations are always announced at short notice. So of course I had to change my private plans for the Easter weekend. One of my sons asked me if I could ask the prospect for a different date so that we could spend the Easter weekend together. I explained to him that the contract value at stake was about the same price level as the cost of our house. Without hesitation, he said: “So I guess it’s not a good idea to ask for a different date.” Exactly.
2. Daily Commercial Negotiations
On-site vendor presentations are usually free of commercial discussions. It’s about your product’s ability to fulfill the prospective customer’s requirements, and about your company’s ability to create trust with a new customer. Especially when you’re venturing into a new geographical market, creating trust is very important but not easy at the same time. Showing on-site presence helps to establish trust.
Once the requirement and trust checkboxes are ticked, the next phase is a commercial discussion. Once again, you have no control if and when these discussions take place.
After spending Easter in Southeast Asia, the commercial discussions with this prospective customer happened exactly in the week I was on vacation with my daughter. We held four rounds of commercial negotiations, all within one week.
Thanks to the time difference between Europe and Southeast Asia, I spent the early mornings on calls from Monday to Thursday, finishing before breakfast with my daughter every day. Thanks God the Earth is not flat.
Could I have delegated these negotiations to somebody else? In a world of unlimited resources, yes. In reality, no: at the same time, there was another on-site vendor presentation happening halfway across the world, in the United States. That’s the price we pay because the Earth is not flat.
Somebody has to bite the bullet.
3. Letter of Award
It paid off eventually. One morning, I woke up and found a Letter of Award in my inbox: We have won the RFP and with it a major customer in Southeast Asia.
Even before we celebrated the win in the office, I told my daughter. She said without hesitation: “So it was worth to get up early during the vacation every day.” Absolutely.
4. From Letter of Award to Contract
A letter of award is not a contract. It’s a formal statement that you were selected as a vendor. Now the contract negotiations start. In some cases, the RFP documents specified a contract template. In some other cases, you first have to agree on which contract template to use — the customer’s or yours.
Irrespective of the contract template you will agree, the contract will go back and forth between the parties numerous times. It’s not uncommon that additional requirements are brought up during the contract negotiation phase, or that your competitors underbid your last offer, and you’ll have to submit a new version of your best-and-final offer. What an irony to the term.
At the same time, the business representatives will already want to start the implementation project, as the letter of award has been signed for weeks.
5. The Signature
When the signature of the contract has finally landed in your DocuSign inbox (or in the paper mail in some rare instances), the real work can start.
