Borrowing from an American saying, let's step back from the trees in order to look at "the forest" of your international effort. We need to start with some basic business logic:

• If you must obtain and retain upper management's buy-in to achieve success in international markets;

and

• If the "forest view" is the one most important to upper management;

then

• Your efforts need to fit both your organization and its strategic goals, because that's how upper management views "the forest."

Now we can address the following three questions to help you align your tactics and strategy with that of your organization as a whole:

1. How can you tune your global effort to your organization's broader strategic goals?
2. Why is this important?
3. What happens if you don't?

Obtaining Upper Management's Buy-in

Nothing thrives in the organization without the support of upper management (except perhaps gossip). Your international development, sales and marketing efforts live and die by this support (and maybe by gossip), which means you will need to sell and keep selling management on your ideas. Two eternal rules of successful selling will serve you well here:

1. Ask upper management what they want and expect from the effort.
2. Obtain commitments from them.

Ask Them What They Want

When you ask management what they want, start by asking what they want for the entire company. If your global effort does not fit with the rest of the company, it is doomed. Next, pour that answer through the filter of international products, and management will probably tell you that they expect profitability, and that they expect it fairly soon. After all, nobody wants to lose money in building foreign markets, and most people in management don't understand how much this is going to cost or how long it's going to take.

Management is also likely to be interested in:

(if you're big)

• cultivating company/brand name worldwide
• increasing market share through alliances and perhaps through acquisition
• international technology transfers

(if you're small)

• having more revenue against which to defray development expenses
• becoming a more appealing partner for OEM and bundling deals

You probably won't have anticipated priorities at this level - since you're usually focused on narrower, make-my-numbers goals - but you cement management's buy-in when you solicit and honor these priorities.

Obtain Their Commitments

You will also need to be creative in obtaining management's commitment to the program. Explaining to management what you need from them is a big step towards success. Try asking executive staff for commitments to all of the following (and more), and see how much you get:

• participation in a press tour
• quick turnaround on contractual issues
• additional discretionary authority for yourself
• respect for the "long view" towards profitability - it may take 2-5 years
• meetings with overseas customers, either at home or on the road

When you are successful, and management makes a commitment back to you, yours is no longer an isolated, unilateral effort.

Keeping Upper Management Plugged In

International efforts crave visibility. Not obsession, but visibility. For most U.S. companies, international markets are often still mysterious, so the less global experience executives have, the more likely they are to scrutinize and even mistrust your efforts. To avoid this, you should keep your international effort - both victories and defeats - as visible as necessary, with the goal of educating management on what it takes to build and run an international effort. Incorporate its status as a regular part of your presentation or report to management.

First and foremost, of course, you need to demonstrate how much additional money is in the company thanks to overseas sales. Beyond the quantitative dimension of finances, build into your reporting a qualitative element that gives your effort personality and brings the foreign reach back into headquarters.

• Your business plan should have milestones at the one-, three- and five-year marks. Keep these goals alive and call attention to your progress relative to them.
• Don't just announce the opening of your U.K. office; record a 5-minute tour of it and roll the videotape at the executive staff meeting and make it available via internal Webcast. Ensure that it contains "internationalia," i.e., trade show footage, the 4:00 teatime break, the workspace layout, the neighborhood near the office, ethnically clad passersby, etc.
• Don't just come back from a trade show in Hannover with purchase orders; bring 200 small bags of Gummi-Bären and place one on everybody's desk. Then follow that up with email on how the show went.
• Subscribe to the International Herald-Tribune or The Times of London or El Nacional and leave it where it can be shared.

Fit the Organization

In summary, your international vision must support your firm's strategic vision. If the strategic goal is to make the company as profitable as possible and sell it as soon as possible, the higher short-term cost of developing international business will soon prove incompatible with it.

Continue to communicate with upper management about any changes in the company's strategic goals so that you don't receive any unpleasant surprises, or you may find that your plans for a plant in Malaysia conflict with the newly unveiled goal of remaining a made-in-America company.

Set management's expectations for the international effort in line with the industry. Going international with software and hardware products, for example, has the pedigree of being "the thing to do," and targets of 40% of revenue or more from overseas markets are common. If your company's management doesn't realize that, it's up to you to educate them.

Now, Go Back to Looking at the Trees

These are ways to tune your global effort to your organization's broader strategic goals. Practicing this kind of high-level hygiene will help you pick your battles more intelligently and allow you to focus more productively on the international, nuts-and-bolts work at hand. Management that is not working against you, is working for you!

John White is responsible for Globalization and Worldwide Marketing at 1-for-All Marketing, a company that he co-founded. John has experienced the satisfaction of placing 200 small bags of Gummi-Bären on his co-workers' desks and can be reached at jwhite@1-for-all.com. Frank Martin, International Sales Consultant at 1-for-All Marketing, also contributed to this article.