Blue Line Innovations' James McMillan. (photo by Etienne Ranger)

It seems like it ought to be easy to sell into the United States. Canada and the U.S. share a border, a language, and also a major trading relationship. So what, then, are some of the challenges of trying to market your product or service south of the border? The OBJ talked with James McMillan, vice-president of sales and marketing for Blue Line Innovations, to examine some of the struggles and strategies for expanding into the U.S. market.

OBJ: What does your company do?

MCMILLAN: Our company is a manufacturer of a device called the PowerCost monitor, a device that allows consumers to be able to see in real-time how much electricity they're using, both in dollars and cents as well as in kilowatts and kilowatt-hours. Armed with that information, consumers can then see exactly how much it costs them to operate various appliances and their house altogether. So it allows them to make intelligent energy decisions or purchasing decisions ... and allows them to be able to better manage their energy budget.

OBJ: Why market to the U.S. specifically?

MCMILLAN: It's a big, wonderful market; quite honestly the U.S. marketplace for our product is very large. You can either market right across Canada to 30 (million) people or if you were in Vancouver, you could make an eight-hour drive south to California and you'd have that same marketplace in one state. For us, a lot has to do with sheer numbers, the market potential is much greater there, and quite honestly, the customer that we deal with in Canada is a government-owned utility; in the U.S. it's typically an investor-owned utility, so the decision-making takes a different path and they may be interested in working with us on a different level than their Canadian counterparts.

OBJ: What's your experience been marketing to an American audience?

MCMILLAN: We think often that when we're dealing with Americans that we're just an extension of the United States. But when you look at most Americans and most American companies, they look at Canada as being a foreign land, as being a country that is different, that has different ways of doing things, and in some cases the way that we express ourselves from the point of view of the language of the business, the terms that we use in Canada might be slightly different terms than what are used in the U.S.

Often the American utilities will look at us and say, "You're a Canadian company, you've had some success in Canada, but that was dealing with a Canadian population and a Canadian climate, so it's different from what we're used to dealing with here."

Some of the test data we've got, because our product has to do with causing people to save electricity based on behaviour change, some of the utilities in the U.S. haven't accepted that and they say you know what, it's interesting but Canadians are different than Americans. So we've had to recreate some of our studies and some of our tests with American populations so that we can validate the savings and validate the actual findings of the product. I guess the biggest barrier for us is that they see us as being a foreign company and we need to redo some of the work we've done in Canada, re-prove ourselves, if you will.

OBJ: So what are some things that you've had to do to take your product down south?

MCMILLAN: For us, going into the U.S. marketplace means you've got to have a presence at U.S. tradeshows, you've got to Americanize your literature and your marketing, you've got to make sure you're pitching yourself properly to the American consumer.

We have an e-commerce website. Obviously it's got to be able to accept addresses in the U.S., it's got to be able to accept U.S. states versus provinces, you've got to be able to provide pricing in American dollars, and quite honestly what we've had to do to service our customers properly, one of the hurdles, is that we had to set up a U.S. facility to be able to service our deliveries and shipment of goods into the U.S. so that customers aren't having to deal with border issues and duties and taxes. All of those things raise a red flag ... Americanizing yourself as much as possible, for us as a company, has been one of the ways we've insured our success.

OBJ: But what about issues of nationalism and being a Canadian company and not an American company?

McMillan: I think you've got to swallow a bit of your nationalistic pride if you want to be dealing in the U.S. You can still be a Canadian company and maintain your brain trust in Canada and maintain the majority of your workforce in Canada and still have your presence as an organization here. I don't think that there's anything wrong from a point of view of nationalistic integrity or anything like that, it's just more what you have to do to be successful in a global marketplace. It's not that we've closed down our doors in Canada and opened up an operation in Ogdensburg, N.Y. and all of our employees are based in Ogdensburg or anything like that. Our approach is that we're a Canadian organization, Canadian technology, founded in Canada, run by Canadians, etcetera, but you've got to be smart if you want to do business in the U.S.

OBJ: What are some strategies for successful U.S. marketing?

MCMILLAN: Realize up front that you are dealing in a different country; make sure that you identify the appropriate language to use, the appropriate terminology to use. Make sure that you adapt your pitch and adapt your marketing materials, use the appropriate language so you're not continuously saying "Hey by the way I'm Canadian" over and over and over whenever you're talking to these customers. The more they see you as being an extension of the United States, the more likely they're going to want to do business with you, to accept your product.

If they don't want to see something expressed in metric, then don't express it in metric; put it in inches and miles per hour and Fahrenheit, make your product as adaptable and make your messaging as adaptable to that marketplace that you're dealing with ... Also, making sure that the product you're putting together is appropriate – for example, for us, our product has traditionally been labelled in both English and French but as we're doing more business in the U.S., we also have to label it in Spanish.

THE EXPERTS SAY

A lot of companies that are started in Ottawa or Canada are founded by technology specialists, as opposed to marketing specialists, and even developing a website that looks and feels like your larger competition based in the U.S. is often a good strategy ... The way that Canadian companies tend to promote their products, whether you're creating marketing collateral or content for your website, they tend to focus on the product features and how the product was made, they tend to make it more feature-centric as opposed to sales-centric. Americans care more than anything else about how you're going to put money in their pocket, so your headlines on your website should be very business-related, how are you going to save money, how are you going to be more competitive by doing business with us, as opposed to "made with the latest 802.11 efficiency"-type technical jargon. You see a lot of younger companies tend to celebrate their technology versus why it's going to benefit the customer.

Alfredo Coppola, management consultant, e-Storm International

Marketing and sales in general has always been about making people aware of the existence of your product or service, giving them confidence in your product or service so they would buy it, and making it easily accessible so when they decide to buy, it's easy for them to buy. And what's been happening for quite a long time now is that the first and the third have been getting easier and easier ... what's been getting harder and harder is giving them the confidence to pick your product because they have a wide choice now. They have a wide choice of things they can buy easily, and consumers don't want to spend a whole lot of time researching their choice ... So that's where the marketing and sales challenge is, and I would say nowhere more so than in the United States ... It's hard to get them to pick you and so the whole issue is confidence-building. Everything you say, everything you do is going to build that confidence or detract from it.

I'd build a portfolio of customers willing to step forward. When I get a customer who's unhappy, I see that as a challenge to turn that unhappy customer into a referral – not just one of many customers satisfied but a referral, and when I do that that it gives me confidence in my own product.

Bob Lyons, president, Terrapin Communications