Development Program for Export Consultants in Ukraine, Cycle 2

The project is funded by the U.S. Department of State under the Emerging Donors Challenge Program Round Eight. And by the Estonian Centre for International Development.

The training program was developed by the Visionest Institute (former Marketingi Instituut) and the Entrepreneurship and Export Promotion Office of Ukraine.

“Development Program for Export Consultants in Ukraine, Cycle 2”. It is an intensive educational program for Ukrainian consultants from private and public sectors, which aims to improve the quality and availability of export consultancy services and to create or mobilize an existing network of national consultants.

• We also tracked sales growth of the participants and expenditure of the client network. Thus 17,6% made their first sales of the consulting services and 35,3% were selling consulting services before the Program but made more sales during the Program, 6% not succeeded in sales.
• Also, 58% of the participants expanded their client network, where 21,6% got new clients and 21,6% got preliminary agreements on cooperation, for 15% the program allowed to intensify cooperation with existing clients.
• 37% of participants have improved client relationships.
• We asked participants about whether they change the type of services that can be done for their clients and 20% added completely new types of services, 40% made existing services wider.
• 37% established new partnerships in export countries due to work with real clients during the Program.
• One of the main goals of the Project is to create an export consulting capacity all over Ukraine and to turn consultants work in consulting services. Thus, 27,5% of the participants mentioned that they plan to work as individual consultants and 6% plan to open a consulting company. 42% plan to continue developing an existing consulting company and 22% plan to consult in parallel with the main work. As a result – 96% of the participants will stay in consulting services further after the Program.
• Participants plan to increase their sales by an average of 500,000 UAH over the next 5 months following the program.

 

The participants of the educational program highly evaluated the qualification level of the trainers. Given that the maximum possible score is 10, the average score for all the speakers was 9.5 points.