October 10, 2017 – On September 2nd, I was sitting in the car of a colleague in Bilbao, Spain. I missed out on taking in the beautiful scenery because I had my laptop open, doing a final check for the potential customer we were on our way to visit.
My plan for the meeting was to first show the customer how simple it is to place a booking with Twill, and second, to make sure we gained their trust to let us eventually ship their cargo from China to Spain at some point in the future. Shipping with us in the future instead became the present; the customer loved the tool and the way our people work so they immediately placed a booking in Twill!
Since then, in the period of one month, we’ve had customers from all around Spain placing bookings in Twill more than 50 times. Looking at this experience, and since we want to bring to Twill to more countries, I’ve asked myself: why is it working so well?
I’ve identified three factors that we must make sure are fulfilled when bringing a new product into a new country:
Sharpen your offering: Bring the product to a real customer and ask them for brutal feedback. Then, make sure you refine your offering to meet their needs. For example, we translated Twill to Spanish to make sure the customer feels confident about every step they take.
Tune your efforts: Make sure your team, your partners, and your suppliers share one goal and understand what is their specific contribution. In Spain, we had several conversations with different stakeholders to make sure they understood the value Twill delivers to customers and how they could contribute to make the introduction a success… and they did it! These bookings are their win.
Unleash your potential: Identify and remove roadblocks. You will be surprised how many roadblocks are actually ‘imaginary’ (created by you). Be like water, always flowing towards the sea. For example: In Spain we loosened up our definition of the customer target group to be able to reach all the potential customers we can actually serve.
I leave you with a short video in Spanish (with English subtitles) on our opening in Spain. You will see some views of Malaga (where besides meeting Twill customers, I also went on holidays this summer ☺).
Looking forward to Twill more countries around the World!
By Juan Cajiao, Twill Head of Growth.