Kick-Starting a Software Export Business?

An anonymous reader asks: "I've been asked by my employer to come up with a business plan to sell a software product of ours overseas. We are a fairly well-known Korean telecom operator, but have little presence overseas, and this is our first internally developed software product -- an e-learning management system. We believe South Asia and the U.S. will be strong markets, and that the product itself is competitive feature-wise. What is the best strategy to use to break into overseas markets? How should we go about finding distributors, and what sorts of partnership models should we expect?"

Comments

Use the Web

[khanyisa]

I'm from a software development company in South Africa, we target an international market (selling industrial software). We tried a method of using distributors in different countries, but it was actually much harder to get them to contact customers than it was to find the customers over the web. Our biggest customers / potential customers have been the ones that have come to us over the web. The reason? We have a good, simple web site with lots of product info and all the documentation for our products, so if people are searching they find it easily and can see that it's what they want. I would say use distributors if neccessary for the actual wrapping up of the sale, but don't expect them to generate sales for you, just put the effort in on your web site.