Most people study a market in the wrong order.
They start with the customer and open the cost stack last. Get that order wrong and you can spend months selling something the arithmetic had already ruled out.
Here is what the wrong order hides. The two questions do not cost the same.
Your landed cost is the cheap question. Ex-works price, freight, duty, clearing, finance. Most of it sits in documents and tariff schedules. You can have it inside a day without a single meeting.
The customer is the expensive question. It takes months, a trip, and your credibility. And by the time you get to the cost, there is a relationship to protect and every reason to want the answer to be yes.
So the order is not a preference. It is arithmetic. Before any call, four things, in this order:
The duty rate, and where you got it.
Who manufactures locally.
Whether an origin preference applies.
What is already selling, and at what level.
Only then the customer.
Answer the one day question before you spend the quarter. That is the whole rule, and it is the one most people skip, because the customer is the interesting part and a tariff schedule is not.
That day of desk work ends in one of two answers. Either your landed number sits below what is already selling, and you walk into the first meeting knowing the arithmetic is on your side. Or it sits above, and you have learned in one day what would otherwise have cost you a quarter. Both answers are useful. Only one order gets you the answer before you have spent anything.
Why it works: if the landed number comes out above what is already selling, nothing downstream fixes it. Not a better relationship, not a longer visit, not a sharper pitch. You are asking someone to pay more for the same thing, and they will not. It is like measuring the garage door before you buy the car. Once the car is in the drive, no amount of liking it makes it fit.
Before tomorrow, pick the market you most want to enter and write down its duty rate, with the source next to it.
Chasing teaches the buyer to go silent
"I need to think about it" is almost never the real reason. Behind it sits a worry the buyer does not feel safe saying: the price, their boss, another supplier already in the door. The usual answer is to email every few days. Each reply gets shorter, then stops, and three weeks later the deal is gone with no reason attached. Chasing does not bring the worry out. Ask instead, one to one: what would stop you going ahead? Then say nothing and let them fill the silence.
Name the person, not the company
A market does not place orders, and neither does a company. A person does. Say your target list has twenty companies on it. Ask who decides at each one. If you can name four, you have four real opportunities and sixteen names still to find. Finding them is fine. Counting those sixteen as sales is the mistake. Before your next proposal, write two things next to each company: the name of the person who decides, and their job title.
One question for you. Which of the four do you usually find out last: the duty rate, the local makers, the origin rule, or what is already selling? Hit reply and tell me in one line.
P.S. Weighing a new market right now? The scorecard I use before I commit to one is free for readers: seven questions, about fifteen minutes, and it ends in a verdict, go, no, or tender only. Open the scorecard. The full method is in my book, Do not be fast to sell, a Hard Markets book, a Skill to Scale publication: see the Complete Edition.
Nazem