India Desk
A week of the right meetings, with counterparties we have qualified before you get on the plane.
Programme design, pre-qualification, scheduling, logistics, interpretation, attendance at every meeting, and the follow up that decides whether any of it was worth it.
A week in India with the wrong twelve meetings costs more than it looks. The flights and hotels are the smallest part. The expensive part is a senior team out of the business for a week, and the six months of goodwill lost by turning up unprepared.
The value is in who you meet and what happens afterwards, not in having gone.
The problem
Delegations organised around a destination rather than around a company tend to fill a calendar rather than build a pipeline, and everyone knows it by the third day.
The standard pattern is a generic delegation with a shared programme, meetings arranged by an organiser who does not know your product, and counterparties who attend out of courtesy to the organiser rather than interest in you.
Trade fairs have the opposite problem. Genuine interest, no filtering, and a stand that generates a hundred contacts of which four matter and nobody has time to find out which four.
What works is unglamorous. Fewer meetings, each one with a counterparty that has been checked and has confirmed genuine interest at decision maker level, briefed on your product before the meeting rather than in it.
And a follow up plan that starts the same week, because in India a relationship that goes quiet for a month after a first meeting is usually finished.
What we do
For a single visit, a recurring programme, or an inbound delegation coming the other way into Spain and Europe.
What the visit is actually for, which cities it needs to cover, and how many meetings a day is realistic given Indian traffic and distances. Usually fewer than clients first propose.
Candidates identified, checked on capacity and standing, and confirmed as genuinely interested at decision maker level before they go into your calendar.
Meetings booked and sequenced sensibly by geography, with hotels, ground transport, interpreters and the contingency that a full day in an Indian city requires.
A written brief on every counterparty, plus a short cultural and negotiation briefing so the first meeting is not spent learning how the room works.
We are in every meeting: context, language support where needed, reading the signals that a first time visitor will miss, and steering the conversation when it drifts.
A written debrief within days, an agreed action on each counterparty, and the follow up run from India in the weeks afterwards while the meeting is still warm.
Pre-arranged meetings around your stand or your visit, so the fair produces scheduled conversations rather than a bowl of business cards.
The same in reverse, for Indian companies visiting Spain and the EU: qualified buyers and partners, meetings scheduled and attended, from our Bilbao office.
How it runs
Six to eight weeks is the realistic lead time for a properly researched programme. Anything faster means taking whoever is available rather than whoever is right.
Product, price point, volumes and what a good outcome looks like, turned into a target list of the companies actually worth meeting.
Approach, screening and confirmation of genuine interest. Counterparties who are merely polite are removed at this stage rather than in your calendar.
The schedule built around geography and traffic, logistics booked, and your written briefing pack delivered before departure.
Every meeting attended with you, with notes taken and a short debrief at the end of each day rather than at the end of the week.
Written debrief, agreed next step per counterparty, and the chasing done from India while the conversation is still live.
Common questions
General guidance rather than advice on a particular matter. Requirements and timelines change, and sector rules vary.
Three or four in one city, fewer if they are spread across it. Distances and traffic in Indian cities are the constraint rather than the working day, and a schedule of six meetings produces four rushed ones and two apologies.
We would rather build a programme of twelve good meetings across four days than twenty that leave everyone exhausted.
Because we check before they go in the calendar: company standing, capacity relative to your volume, trade references, and confirmation of interest from the person who would actually decide rather than the person who replied.
A meeting arranged out of courtesy to an organiser is worse than no meeting, because it consumes a slot a real prospect could have had.
Usually not for language, since business English is widely spoken in Indian commerce. What is more often needed is commercial interpretation: what a qualified answer meant, what the silence meant, and whether the objection you did not hear was raised.
That is what we do in the room. Where a regional language genuinely helps, particularly in manufacturing or agricultural settings, we arrange it.
Yes, and it is one of the highest return versions of this work. We pre-arrange meetings with qualified counterparties around your stand and your available slots, so the fair produces scheduled conversations rather than random footfall.
A fixed fee for the programme, quoted against the number of cities, the number of qualified meetings and whether we attend throughout, with travel and logistics separate and booked at cost.
It is a small fraction of what the trip itself costs once senior time is counted, which is the argument for doing it properly rather than at all.
Yes. We are based in Bilbao and run the same programme in reverse into Spain and the wider EU: qualified buyers, importers and partners, meetings scheduled and attended, and follow up handled from Europe afterwards.
Sometimes it will, and that is a result too, provided you learn something from it. A properly run visit that ends with no viable counterparty tells you the segment, the price point or the product needs to change before you spend more.
That is a considerably cheaper answer than a distributor appointed because someone had already booked the flights.
Related
The search that produces the meetings, and the agreement that follows them.
Read more →Where a visit is one step in a wider entry rather than a standalone trip.
Read more →The briefing that makes the first meeting productive rather than exploratory.
Read more →Someone in India continuing the relationships after you fly home.
Read more →Write to us
The product, the volumes, the kind of counterparty and roughly when you can travel. We will come back with whether the programme is worth building and what it would realistically contain.
We answer from New Delhi and from Bilbao, so European clients are not waiting a day for a reply.
Onesto Management Consultancy
New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Bilbao