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

Partners!

[itwerx]

I had a similar challenge a few years ago. Except that we wanted to get into almost a dozen countries!
The biggest lesson we learned from our experience is that one should find a well-established company with a good reputation in that country to partner with.
I could give you a whole list of reasons why, ranging from local name-recognition to political/industrial connections, but believe me, you don't want to do it any other way!
Good luck...