Close cross-border B2B deals without giving back the margin you fought for.
A field manual for selling physical goods across borders. It covers buyer qualification, Incoterms, payment structures, fraud patterns, and the cross-cultural moves that keep a signed deal profitable.
You won the deal. You just don’t know what it cost you yet.
You quoted at a margin you could defend. The invoice cleared, and the number that reached the account was smaller.
Somewhere between the handshake and the wire, something moved. The shipping term put freight and customs clearance on your side of the line, and nobody priced it. A certificate reached the bank four days late, and the letter of credit stopped protecting you. The buyer paid on time, into bank details that were not yours.
None of it was bad luck. Each failure has a cause with a name and a control that costs less than the loss. This book writes them down.
The back cover
What you will be able to do
- Test whether a buyer is real before you ship, and catch the late change of delivery address
- Choose an Incoterm knowing which costs and risks you just accepted
- Assemble the documents your payment depends on, in the order the bank reads them
- Price in a currency that is not yours without giving away the margin
- Read the room in Riyadh, Frankfurt and Singapore before you lose the relationship
Built to be used rather than read once, with an Incoterms comparison table, document sequences, worked cases, and practice changes at the end of every chapter. Written for anyone who sells physical goods across borders.
Who it is for
Export managers, international sales professionals, sales directors and business developers. Also procurement, purchasing, supply chain and logistics managers who carry the other side of the same transaction, and owners of small and mid-sized companies selling physical goods across borders.
Many of the subjects sit where sales, purchasing, logistics, finance and compliance meet. The same transaction looks different from each desk, and the book is written with all of them in the room.
About the author
Hugo Cramez is an economist and commercial consultant with more than twenty years in international B2B sales, most of it in textiles. He has built export markets from nothing, and advised listed industrial groups in Portugal and Italy on commercial strategy and M&A. He learned most of what is in this book the expensive way.
That experience was not built in a meeting room. It was built selling real products into real markets across Europe, the United States, Russia, Japan and the Middle East, negotiating with buyers in different cultures, structuring deals, and learning what separates a sale that closes from one that quietly disappears.
He founded Funny Number in 2016, an independent consultancy advising companies on internationalization, commercial strategy and sales execution. funnynumber.com
The Bulletproof Toolkit
Thirteen working documents that accompany the chapters. Selection sheets, checklists and worksheets built for use on a live transaction, not for reading. Free.