Follow-Up
Twenty business cards and one notebook are not a pipeline. What converts them is a sequence with dates on it, run by the buyer.
Contents
By the time a buyer lands, the notebook holds forty names, half of them written in a hall with no signal and a conversation going on. Three weeks later the handwriting is unreadable, the card has a company name and no product, and the photograph of the booth is a wall of red carpet.
Two things cause this. The first is that a fair conversation is dense and unrecorded. The second is that a Chinese salesperson keeps a record of the buyer as well: your name, your market, the product you stopped at, the quantity you mentioned. The supplier's file is more complete than yours within a day.
The remedy is not more discipline at the fair. It is a fixed sequence afterwards, written down before the trip, with dates attached. Fourteen days is enough to sort twenty contacts into three groups: those who answer in numbers, those who answer in adjectives, and those who do not answer. That sorting is the work. The order comes later.
The first message goes out within a day of leaving Guangzhou, and it is short. Five lines, no attachment, no introduction of your company, no paragraph about the market.
Send it to the person who gave you the card, and put their company name in the subject line so it survives a shared inbox. If the card has a WeChat QR code and you scanned it at the booth, send the same message there. In practice WeChat gets answered faster than email, and email is the record. Send both.
A quotation is a document, not a price. The price is one field in it, and the field that is easiest to copy from a previous customer. The rest of the sheet is where a supplier shows whether the product has actually been costed.
Five fields decide whether two quotations can be compared at all. Unit price and the Incoterm it sits on. MOQ, and whether it applies per colour, per size or per order. Carton dimensions and units per carton, because that produces the cubic metres and the freight. Production lead time from deposit, not from order. Validity, in days.
A reply that gives a price and nothing else is a reply from a salesperson working from a price list. It is not useless: it tells you the supplier can be reached. It tells you nothing about whether the goods can be shipped for the number quoted.
Ask once more, in one sentence, for the missing fields. A supplier with a factory behind the booth will produce them. A trading company will produce them too, more slowly, because it has to ask someone. Neither answer is wrong. They are different businesses, and the difference matters when a production date slips.
Roughly a third of the contacts will not have answered by the end of the first week. Some of that is ordinary: the salesperson is on a stand for another eight days, the factory is running a phase deadline, the person who owns the quotation is travelling.
Some of it is not. A supplier who cannot answer a request for carton dimensions in seven days has told you what an urgent query will look like in the middle of production. The silence is not an insult, it is a sample of the process.
The second message is one paragraph and it changes the ask rather than repeating it. Instead of "did you receive my email", offer a smaller decision: a single carton specification, a photograph of the export carton with a tape measure against it, the name of the person who handles export documentation. Small requests get answered, and an answer confirms the channel works.
After that, let it go. Two rounds and a fortnight is a fair test. A buyer who spends a month chasing eight silent suppliers has spent the month not negotiating with the two who replied.
By day ten the field is small enough to work properly. Three suppliers, one product, one destination. Below three there is no comparison and no bargaining position. Above four the negotiation loses focus and every email gets slower.
Then send the same three questions to all three, in the same words, on the same day. Identical questions produce comparable answers, and comparable answers are the only basis for choosing.
Buyers often wait for a sample before discussing terms, which puts the entire negotiation behind a courier. Two things can move first, and both shorten the critical path.
The specification. Write down what the sample is supposed to prove: dimensions with tolerance, material and finish, colour against a reference, packaging, the label artwork. A sample sent against a verbal description proves that a factory can make something. A sample sent against a written specification proves that a factory can read.
The commercial frame. Deposit percentage, balance trigger, whether the balance is paid against a copy bill of lading or before shipment, who pays the sample courier, who pays for tooling and when it is amortised. None of this needs a sample in hand. All of it is easier to agree while the fair is still recent and the supplier is still counting the leads.
Then order the sample with a date on it and a statement of what a pass looks like. The second sample article in this series covers what to demand from the sample itself.
The sequence produces a file per supplier, and that file is the asset. Twenty contacts become a table with columns, not a pile of emails.
This table is what makes the next fair twice as productive. A buyer who arrives in April with twenty documented suppliers from October spends the fair looking for what is new instead of re-establishing what was already said.
Suppliers are busy after a fair and buyers are not, which is the whole advantage. A factory that has just collected four hundred leads will answer the buyer who is organised, because that buyer is the one whose email can be turned into a production order without further questions.
Pace is set by the calendar, not by urgency. State the date you will decide. State what you need in order to decide. Then decide on that date, even if the decision is to wait a season. Suppliers remember buyers who keep dates, and a buyer with a reputation for keeping dates gets quoted differently: fewer defensive margins, more realistic lead times.
Two weeks is not long. It is long enough to establish which of twenty exhibitors can quote, pack and document a shipment, and short enough that the answer still matters. The fair supplies the contacts. This fortnight converts them, or does not.
Q How soon after the Canton Fair should I contact a supplier?
Within one working day. The salesperson is still holding the conversation, the booth photographs are still on the phone, and your email arrives while it can be matched to a face. After a week you are one of four hundred names.
Q Should I follow up on WeChat or by email?
Both, with the same content. WeChat is answered faster and suits photographs of cartons; email is the record and the place where attachments survive. A supplier who only answers on WeChat is still a supplier, but keep the formal documents in email.
Q How many suppliers should I keep in the running?
Three. Below that there is no comparison and no negotiating position. Above four the correspondence slows down, questions get answered differently, and the comparison stops being like for like.
Q What if a supplier quotes a much lower price than the others?
Assume a different product until proven otherwise. Check the carton, the material thickness, the finish and what is excluded from the price. A forty percent gap is almost never a better factory; it is a lighter specification or a quotation that omits freight, packing or a component.
Q Is a quotation from the fair still valid a month later?
Treat it as indicative. Most fair prices carry a validity of fifteen to thirty days, and the exchange rate and material costs move. Ask for the validity in days and confirm the price in writing before you place a deposit.
Q Do I need to visit the factory after the fair?
Not for a first sample order, but before a container. A visit answers questions no document covers: how the line is organised, whether the packing area is separate, and whether the person who answers your emails is actually in the building.
Related pages
If two or three of them end up shipping in the same month, we can collect the cartons at one warehouse in Shenzhen or Guangzhou and send them as one consignment with one set of documents.
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