Part II · Chapter 19

Closing – Negotiation, Samples, and the First Order

How does a promising enquiry become a signed first order, and then a second? This chapter is for exporters who have found interested buyers and keep losing them somewhere between the sample and the contract. It opens with a pottery workshop that won a German buyer with its finest work, delivered its ordinary work, and never heard from him again. From there it traces the four places deals usually die: the sample, the quotation, the demand for a discount, and the silence that follows a proposal. It shows how buyers in Germany and Japan, the United States, the Gulf, Africa and Latin America, and China and South-East Asia each bargain over something different, and why resistance on price often hides a worry about something else. It ends with the moves that carry a cautious buyer over the line, every one of which lowers the risk he is taking. Afterwards you can judge what a hesitant buyer is really asking for, and answer it with certainty rather than a lower price.