This book is a battle manual on building a successful international business. It will help seasoned international marketeers to audit and re-engineer their international distribution channels for a radical improvement in performance. It is vital reading for those in the early stages of building an international export organization. Selling Through Distributors sets out a formal programme for identifying appropriate distribution structures for your business, finding and choosing the very best distributors, and then managing them in a structured way to get the best in dealer performance and sales growth. You will learn how distributors think and what their sweet spots are. Equally you will understand the pitfalls and deceptions that are endemic in middleman relationships. In summary, this book teaches how to engage with distributors, internationally and domestically, so as to gain the edge on your competitors and win sales battles. You won’t find any tables, charts or diagrams. Just a hard-hitting pragmatic roadmap for choosing and managing middlemen anywhere on the planet.

The author, John Griffin, has spent over forty years in building international businesses in consumer appliances, electronics and medical devices. John has managed extremely successful national sales and marketing operations in Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa. He has worked at the coalface and learned how to succeed in developing international markets from scratch, bringing them through strategic channel development to multi-million dollar direct local sales and marketing subsidiaries. John has conducted many successful public seminars and has contributed to various journals, publications and organisations on the challenges of building international sales.

John retired recently as Vice-President International for the Welch Allyn Corporation – a global brand leader in medical diagnostic and monitoring systems.