ExChina Limited

I wrote a sales letter for ExChina, a Dublin, Ireland, supply chain management consultancy devoted to building trade relationships between clients and suppliers in China.

Sales Letter

Dear Mr. Owner:

We have identified your organisation as one that can potentially save at least 40 percent—perhaps as much as 70 percent—on the costs of certain products and services vital to your operations, at virtually no risk to you.

We are ExChina, Limited—a full-service supply chain management consultancy devoted to building safe, profitable trade relationships between our customers and qualified suppliers in China.

ExChina is in the business of lowering the many, seemingly insurmountable barriers to successful trade relationships between small and mid-sized businesses and China while virtually eliminating the likelihood of failure. The sourcing solution we offer is risk-free and complete, from initial research and sourcing through delivery of high-quality finished goods to Ireland—even to your doorstep, if need be.

There are no weak links in the ExChina supply chain. With the help of the Chinese natives working on our staff in both the UK and China, we have established the networks and personal relationships so fundamental to successful trade partnerships in China’s vast and complex business culture. We established a presence in Ireland for one simple, compelling reason:

Any Ireland-based organisation currently acquiring goods through traditional channels—including yours—can almost certainly benefit from trade with China.

With the opening of our Dublin office, we bring China’s vast and very profitable business opportunities directly to you—risk-free—through our proven procurement network.

The Opportunity

Why should you and your Irish colleagues pursue trade relationships with China? Consider just these three of the many reasons:

• Chinese manufacturers and suppliers are eager to do business with the world.
• Chinese labour costs are low, and both natural and human resources are plentiful.
• The Chinese government is committed to maintaining full employment while sustaining the phenomenal nine percent average annual growth rate their economy has experienced over the past 26 years.

But before you schedule your first Shanghai shopping trip, we strongly urge you to consider this:

The largest international concerns succeed at doing business in China only by making substantial capital investments in factories and maintaining staff on-location there. Mid-sized and smaller companies attempting to establish trade relationships on their own are extremely vulnerable to any number of pitfalls.

For example—

Business owners anxious to make expensive, time-consuming trips to China pay off have sometimes been pressured into bad deals with poorly qualified suppliers.

Visitors to trade shows have ordered merchandise without making an on-site inspection of the suppliers’ plant. Long after making their initial deposit and returning home, buyers ultimately received defective, shoddy or simply the wrong goods—or no goods at all—and found it too difficult and costly to secure replacements or a correction.

Finished goods of all quality levels and descriptions have frequently become tangled in legal restrictions and logistics problems that prevented timely delivery to UK buyers.

Rogue agents have lured unsuspecting westerners into business relationships, only to disappear after extracting a hefty initial payment.

Corrupt officials and unscrupulous “middle men” have skimmed away profits by unnecessarily inserting themselves in an individual small-business concern’s inadequately managed supply chain.

As a result of all-too-common incidents like these, business owners right here in Ireland have lost substantial investments, placing their organisation’s very survival in serious jeopardy. By now, you may well have concluded any possible rewards you might realize by developing trade links to China simply do not justify the risks.

But with ExChina’s arrival in Ireland, the potential risk-to-return ratio has radically shifted in your favour!

For your mid-sized or smaller firm to tap into the abundant opportunities for profitable trade with China, you must first overcome the many barriers to doing business half a world away and effectively minimize the substantial risks involved.

First on the list of major difficulties is the language barrier. Unless you and your technical staff are fluent in Chinese, you will almost certainly need ongoing help to communicate effectively with Chinese vendors.

ExChina eliminates the language barrier by employing people who are fluent in both English and Chinese throughout our organization, both here and in China.

Then, there is geography. China is huge, with thousands of manufacturers and suppliers scattered throughout the land. Just as Dubliners are starting the workday, workers in Shanghai are nearing the end of theirs, the seven-hour time difference leaving only a few shared hours in the business day for immediate interaction with Chinese trade partners.

Our employees are strategically located to maintain close proximity to UK customers as well as their trading partners.

Not only are ExChina’s China-based employees in the same locations as our customers’ suppliers, they are in the same time zone, allowing us to work on your behalf every day, long before the Irish business day has begun.

Even more forbidding than the language and geographic barriers are the vast cultural differences between western and Chinese business people. Unless you are a native or a very long-time resident, your innocent misunderstandings and mistakes can permanently alienate and offend your potential business partners. How you walk into a meeting room, where you take your place at the negotiating table, your dress, your body language—all are potential deal-killers.

Because so many of our employees are Chinese natives, ExChina’s entire staff has become intimately familiar with the Chinese culture.

Although the Chinese government is working hard to ease restrictions and minimize the red tape involved in doing business with their country, there remains a complex tangle of rules, regulations, taxing and licensing requirements that must be met by foreign business partners. If you are like most small- to mid-sized business owners, you are not prepared to hire—or become—a specialist in Chinese business law.

ExChina employs genuine experts in all facets of Chinese business law, trade and licensing requirements. With ExChina as your partner, you can be assured you are in compliance with all applicable local, regional and national regulations pertinent to your transactions.

Quality control issues are a constant concern in any long-distance sourcing relationship, but particularly in China, where standards can differ markedly from our own. The only truly viable solution is personal, on-site monitoring at every stage of production—a generally impractical, prohibitively costly proposition for the individual mid-sized and smaller business.

Both here and in China, ExChina has fulltime, permanent employees on the ground, including superbly qualified technical experts—both western and native Chinese—in a number of industries and product categories.

Finally, there is the critical issue of guanxi—pronounced “gwan-she”—a uniquely Chinese concept of business relationships fundamental to any and all successful sourcing projects in China. As any Chinese native will advise you, you either have guanxi or you haven’t. And without it, your chances of success in China are infinitesimally small.

We definitely have guanxi, and you, as our customer, will most assuredly benefit from it! With guanxi, we have the connections and the trusting relationships needed to negotiate successfully. As a result, we secure for our customers merchandise of a quality and a price often reserved for Chinese buyers.

Your Safe Bridge to China

ExChina is here, now, in Ireland, to help you. Your future as a profitable trading partner with China begins with your call to ExChina to schedule a free consultation.

Our team arrives at your location at the appointed time and if, based on our initial consultation, we truly believe you can benefit from our services, we request payment of a fully refundable, risk-free deposit of €3,000.

With your deposit, you gain immediate access to the full resources of ExChina. Once we have received your good-faith deposit, we provide you with exactly the same level of attention and care as we afford any of our most valued, best-established customers.

Well before the sourcing process begins, we make sure we understand your business. Our experts speak with your experts to identify your specific needs and determine your most exacting specifications, tolerances and standards.

We may find we already have precisely what you want in our extensive catalogue, featuring more than 20 broad product and service categories ranging from audio and video equipment to trimmings and fabric. Whether you are looking for an amphibious backhoe, fine porcelain desk clocks, all-terrain vehicles, exotic bath salts or kitchenware, our ever-changing catalogue is an excellent resource with which to begin our search.

Should you require custom manufacturing, the product and category specialists assigned to your team proceed to identify the best-qualified manufacturers and suppliers among the 100,000 sources listed in our database. And because we have qualified inspectors based throughout China, an employee from the ExChina staff personally inspects each potential supplier before we consider recommending the best source to you.

Once your product goes into production, our China-based quality-control and inspection experts return to the supplier’s location again and again, throughout the manufacturing process, to be absolutely sure we have successfully communicated your needs and to head off unexpected problems so the finished goods precisely match your specifications before shipping.

In fact, we at ExChina are so confident of our quality-control processes, we offer you a money-back quality guarantee on any product we help you procure.

We continue our on-location work through our fully-developed logistics network, making sure your goods move quickly and cost-effectively to their final destinations, arranging warehousing, custom palletisation, order picking and onward delivery as you require. Even if your quantities are relatively low, we help you minimize freight costs by consolidating our UK customers’ orders at our warehouses in China and selecting the most cost-effective shipping channels.

The amount of savings you ultimately realise will depend on the nature of the goods you need and variables such as freight costs. With our transparent pricing policies, you will know exactly what you are paying for the goods we procure and exactly what you are paying us for our value-added services.

In the unlikely even we are unable to establish a profitable relationship between your organisation and sources in China, we will advise you immediately and refund your deposit in full.

With so much to gain from a trade relationship with China, you owe it to yourself and your organisation to schedule your free, no-obligation consultation with ExChina today.

Given today’s increasingly competitive business environment, your failure to act on this opportunity, or worse—a decision to “go it alone”—may well have a devastating negative impact on the continuing strength and vitality of your firm.

Remember, you risk absolutely nothing by calling us to schedule a free consultation and absolutely nothing by making your initial deposit to access the full services of our firm. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

[signature, name and title]

P.S. To maintain ExChina’s superior quality and service standards, we will strictly limit the number of customers we accept through our Ireland office. If you are seriously interested in this opportunity, we strongly encourage you to call us without delay.