3 factors to make great teamwork across countries while playing a regional role (2)
In the previous article, I have introduced what are the 3 factors to play a regional role well, and have details on the first factor, “understand the difference”. In this article, I continue on the second factor “leverage the same “ and give some examples from my previous experience.
Leverage the same
As a regional role, you need to understand the difference through some dimensions, the key is to ‘separate territories’. However, while moving to the next step, you need to integrate all the information you get. The key to ‘leverage the same’ is to ‘make strategy and take action as a whole region’. Why? because you have a final goal of your business, and you need to think about how to separate the goal to each sub-region. Meanwhile, you have a range of resources, and you got to allocate to different regions based on the information you get. For example, when we get reliable news that one country will come out with strong demands for a specific product, we start to arrange the production(in the US) and supply plan (Asia center in SG and local center in the country) for the coming demand. The production and supply capability is fixed, and you still need to share the capability with other regions such as EMEA, LA, or NA) that is why we need to plan it in advance. Actually, it is the same concept as you allocate resources to different cities in a single country. The following are the sectors you can refer to for the resources leverage.
Best practice
As you have the information from the first sector ‘understand the difference ’, you may have the idea of best practice in your region. The best practice could be the most powerful tool for your business. You can have an experience sharing including product success story, how to fulfill the orders, lead time, tech supports, and customer service. The best practice is also a reference for you to evaluate your pricing/cost strategy, and the most important thing is, you can use the best practice as the undoubtful performance to sit the position in the globe.
Resources
As the capital investment (data center/warehouse/factory/ expert) may not able to build in each country, how to require and allocate the resources plays an important role in regional business. According to the information you get from ‘understand the difference’, you need to prioritize those needs and leverage the sharing resources to fulfill the priority. For example, we have sold a product worse more than 1M USD in a country, definitely inspiring news for the team. After the order, we need the experts to support onsite installation and technology transferring, so we have to discuss booking the resources and transfer the skills smoothly to the local. Meanwhile, we have leveraged some factory capability to produce the consumable without building a new line.
Synergy
The information collection for ‘understand the difference’ is not a one-time effort, it is a rolling adjustment process. So you must consider the information from all of your territories and come out with some decisions to create synergy. For example, in the surge of COVID, we realized some countries have product requests but they were in lockdowns and have border control or restriction to specific countries. In this case, we need to investigate the inventory in the whole region and allocate the availability to avoid the influence of restriction. Same for the commercial side, to think about each opportunity you win and try to think one more step to see the potential of bringing extra business within the region from the opportunity. Create synergy and maximize your business possibility in your region is a nonstop learning process.
Again, this article is not under ‘MECE’ categorization and there are more examples that will be added on top of my daily work. The important concept here for ‘leverage the same’ is to create synergy by control your sharing capability well. We are not possible to have unlimited resources, our picture is the whole region, start with the regional goal and consider the business in each sub-region, adjust your strategy and make the short by grabbing the strong based on the sharing resource allocation. I have covered ‘understand the difference’ and ‘leverage the same’ these are high-level points of view, and I will go into an execution level of how to execute the strategy through transparent communication with the local team, stay tuned.
