I have a couple of things, actually.
I'll go back to your first point about the confusion. In the sales business, the challenge is not what you say, but what people hear. The other challenge is that people buy benefits, not features. We have the tendency to list the features and we have to translate those features into benefits. I buy something with a benefit to me. It's a personalized feature. That's the challenge in some of the sectors because you've got different features and different benefits that apply to different groups.
The majority of our business—what we get paid for and what we live off of—comes from Europe. We've been involved in business for 30-some years now in Europe. The challenge in Europe is understanding the marketplace. It's a bit complex. Using trade commissioners to delve into the nuances—not the specifics necessarily, but the nuances—is best done by just going knocking on doors, to be honest. You put in the shoe leather and find a couple of companies that maybe meet your thing. Go and learn. Go in without something you want to get across....
On the first number of trips I did to Europe, I was just learning. I didn't try to sell anything because I didn't know what they wanted to buy. I wanted to listen. I learned more with my ears open and my mouth closed. There's a time to do that. In Japan, it used to be that you didn't talk about business. It was rude to talk about business until they brought it up. There were a couple of trips to Japan when all we were talking about was the weather and all sorts of different things. It was easy to talk about weather in Japan.
Get to know the people and the nuances—not necessarily what's on the surface—because they're the people who have your cheque in their pocket. You want to know what turns their crank and what's important to them.
Are there any barriers to getting into a country? There may be. Europe has a far more in-depth understanding of the value of food than we tend to have in North America. You have to understand those nuances because they'll come back and bite you. In their minds, they're not nuances; they're absolute. Learn what those are and just talk to them. You just learn and listen.