Helping a South African Company Enter the UK Market

A South African company approached Pharmacy Consulting Ltd (PCL) to ask for help to identify key UK companies, using its unbiased UK market knowledge, which they would need to work with in order to launch their service in the UK.

They later asked PCL to obtain appointments with Director level contacts in as many of those suppliers as possible and to accompany them to those meetings to make the introductions and to offer support and advice.

The Pharmacy Consulting solution

As PCL’s reputation is based upon maintaining good working contacts with a variety of pharmacy market suppliers at senior level and never waste their time, PCL asked the customer to first host a visit from the senior PCL consultant in their home country. The objective here was for the senior consultant to both verify the claims made about the service being provided in South Africa and also to judge whether a similar service could/would work in the UK.

Once the above had been satisfactorily completed, PCL agreed to set up and host a series of meetings with UK suppliers that the customer needed to work with. No supplier refused to allow a meeting with PCL’s clients, and the meetings all proceeded smoothly.

Customer benefits

The customer was able to get to meet all the influential suppliers with whom they would need to work to launch their service in the UK, within a 2 week period. This meant that the MD from SA could come over to the UK for a defined and relatively short period. Even though the customer’s service was quite revolutionary for the UK market, the fact that PCL were able to reassure UK suppliers that this model truly worked in SA, played its part in gaining sufficient interest from UK suppliers to want to hear about the proposed new service.