Zepol is built on a core belief that our services can help companies around the world improve their international business decision making processes. To help ensure that our customers receive the information they need, we work hard to build long-term relationships with companies rather than rely on individual, anonymous transactions to drive our business. In a way, this is much harder to do than the alternative, but we truly believe that to grow a sustainable business, our users and the public must trust us as an essential information source for their international business.

The first part of building our relationships with customers is that we are up front and honest with what we can do to help them and how we will do so. Our founders have a philosophy to under promise and over deliver, which has guided every relationship we have with our users. We make sure we ask the questions to understand what is most important to our customers and answer questions honestly, because we don’t want to waste anyone’s time dancing around issues.

We then work extremely hard to make sure that our customers get the most out of their subscriptions because they have invested greatly in our company and we need to ensure that they receive a tangible return. This means providing our industry’s best customer service and training. Instead of providing general training to our customers, our trade data specialists work with every one of our new customers in a customized training session. Yes, this takes a lot of time, but it is hugely important to help users get the most out of their investment in Zepol.

Like we have mentioned before, subscribing with Zepol is the same as investing in our company. We say this because we drive our revenues back into the development of our tools. We constantly enhance our products and give these upgrades directly to our customers on a monthly or even weekly basis. This breakneck pace of innovation is great for our users, especially since we prioritize and develop all upgrades based directly on their feedback.

Finally, the last part of a relationship is a two-way conversation, as we are a service provider to the international trade industry; we talk to our customers and show them how to do new things. That is part of what makes our user base very unique. Not every company that tries our tools will subscribe to our services, but we have found the organizations that are driving innovation and the leaders in their industries keep subscribing. We think a big part of this is they want to learn new ways to use trade data, which by itself is just raw information, but great tools like TradeIQ and TradeView show the data in new ways that creates the knowledge needed to drive new decisions.

With the beginning of year, we all take a look at what we did in 2009 and evaluate what has worked and what has not for our businesses. For importers, this means putting actionable plans together to understand their markets and grow their businesses while cutting unneeded costs.

1. Look for more opportunities

With all that is required to run an importing business, it is often difficult to rise above the daily grind and look for ways to find growth opportunities. Importers that bring in a significant volume of containers have the advantage of economies of scale, and one easy way to organically grow is to find importers that ship smaller volumes. By finding these companies, you can make a profit while saving them money on product and transportation costs for smaller shipments.

2. Ensure compliance of my suppliers

Contracts are not complete once you have signed an agreement with a supplier. Importers need to be constantly tracking their suppliers’ compliance with the terms of the contract and the laws of the United States. This takes looking at all shipment records for a supplier, monitoring exclusive distribution clauses, and ensuring product classifications and labeling are correct. Successful monitoring results in fewer shipments detained by Customs and suppliers paying for broken terms.

3. Optimize the classification of my products

Product classification is highly important in many industries and the difference between one HTS code and another may mean thousands of dollars to your business. Defining your products correctly at the beginning of their life cycles will result in fewer holds by Customs and more effective tariff management. Looking at how competitors are currently assigning their products is one of the simple activities that can save time and money down the road.

4. See existing information in new ways

The old saying of “not seeing the forest through the trees” holds true for many importers. Often they are inundated with too much information to make effective, timely decisions. Looking at trends and market changes can be very difficult and time consuming when seeing only individual shipment records. However, when rolled up to higher level reports and from different sides of the information, the data transforms into actionable intelligence. Instead of spending of hours massaging existing reports to view this higher level, use a better tool that reveals this knowledge within the online application.

5. Monitor my competitors better

It seems like every year I hear importers tell me that they are going to do a better job of knowing what their competitors are doing. This often falls by the wayside as the year goes on, but making the resolution to set up easy tracking early on is the difference between the success and failure of a monitoring program. Use the tools at your disposal to set up saved searches and resolve to update your reports every week. This will allow you to move more quickly and react earlier to new product launches, pricing changes, and supply shifts.

With these five resolutions for 2010, importers can take the steps needed to improve their businesses. However, ensuring that you have the data needed to execute them is another matter. Zepol has made it easier to subscribe to our trade databases and improved our training to help you meet specific goals. Please take the time to set up a demonstration with one of our industry experts to learn more.

With 2009 coming to an end, we wanted to take a look back at everything that has happened in the last year and look forward to what 2010 will bring to Zepol, trade data, and international trade. There is no doubt that 2009 was tough on many importers, exporters, and the companies that service them, however many forward thinking organizations were able to see growth.

Zepol once again had a record year, expanding the companies that have chosen Zepol as their trade data provider because we offer the most innovative solution in the market. Instead of looking just for data, our customers have asked us to deliver trade information that can be used to create knowledge and drive highly important decisions for their international companies. We continued to answer this call in 2009 by creating several innovative enhancements; below are just some of the releases from our product team:

• Upgrade of TradeIQ usability features
• New subscription options
• Web Tool for trade data for every HTS Code
• Infrastructure enhancement

In addition, we brought the best U.S. Census trade data tool to the market in September, TradeView. This product now allows hundreds of users to have the most flexible access available to the U.S. trade statistics they need to analyze their markets, look for opportunities, and easily spot trends in trade.

In 2010, Zepol will make huge waves by providing unprecedented access to the most voracious users of the trade data we provide. This expanded access will make it possible for institutional users capitalize on the trade data tools that the top importers and transportation service providers have had access to since 2004. By working with our current customers and thought leaders across international markets, we look forward to bringing a ground breaking solution to the market.

Zepol will continue to develop relationships with the media and bloggers that need access to international trade information for which their readers thirst. As part of our mission to educate the world about international trade, we will bring regular trade data pieces to publications including: Logistics Today, the American Journal of Transportation, Cargo Business News, the National Provisioner, 3PLwire.com and many more.

We thank all of our current subscribers and look forward to working with more forward thinking trade professionals in 2010.

Amongst competitive and business intelligence professionals, one of the biggest problems they face is presenting their findings to stakeholders in their organizations. The Outward Insights Competitive Intelligence blog posted a great entry to this effect on September 28th, in which they discuss some of the methods that the professionals in this industry find most effective for showcasing their findings to others in their companies.

Outward Insights came to the conclusion that executive briefings are the most effective way to get executives to pay attention to and internalize the findings that CI professionals have spent time investigating and creating. These briefings are an important factor in getting the information needed to make decisions and strategies in the decision and strategy makers’ hands.

However, I think it raises a greater point that service providers in the CI community need to consider. Whether you are a business intelligence consultant or a competitive intelligence service provider like Zepol, how you present the information to your users is of great importance. Users should be able to visualize changes in their environments easily and within the user interface. For Zepol, this means providing trends and graphs of aggregate trade information that can easily be exported for the reports that CI professionals will eventually use for hand offs. Even in a face to face situation, stakeholders need quality information to take with them and cement the findings they heard.

If your company is evaluating competitive intelligence service providers, make sure the tools go beyond just searching and exporting data. This is just data and brings nothing to the stakeholders in your company without extensive analysis on the user’s part. Using next generation tools that expose trends and visualize what is happening in your market, turns the data into information, and exposes actionable intelligence that can help drive your company forward.